Born to middle-class Jewish parents in London, Lewis became attracted to languages and history from an early age. While preparing for his bar mitzvah ceremony at the age of eleven or twelve, the young Bernard, fascinated by a new language, and especially a new script, discovered an interest in Hebrew. He subsequently moved on to studying Aramaic and then Arabic, and later still, Latin, Greek, Persian, and Turkish. As with foreign languages, Lewis's interest in history was stirred thanks to the bar mitzvah ceremony, during which he received as a gift a book on Jewish history. [2]

He graduated in 1936 from the then School of Oriental Studies (SOAS, now School of Oriental and African Studies) at the University of London with a B.A. in History with special reference to the Near and Middle East, and obtaining his Ph.D. three years later, also from SOAS, specializing in the History of Islam. [3] Lewis also studied law, going part of the way toward becoming a barrister, but returned to study Middle Eastern history. He undertook post-graduate studies at the University of Paris, where he studied with Louis Massignon and earned the "Diplפme des ֹtudes Sיmitiques" in 1937. [1] He returned to SOAS in 1938 as an assistant lecturer in Islamic History.

During the Second World War, Lewis served in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps in 1940-41, before being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war he returned to SOAS, and in 1949 he was appointed to the new chair in Near and Middle Eastern History at the age of 33.[4]

In 1974, Lewis accepted a joint position at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, also located in Princeton, New Jersey. The terms of his appointment were such that Lewis taught only one semester per year, and being free from administrative responsibilities, he could devote more time to research than previously. Consequently, Lewis's arrival at Princeton marked the beginning of the most prolific period in his research career during which he published numerous books and articles based on the previously accumulated materials.[5] In addition, it was in the U.S. that Lewis became a public intellectual. Upon his retirement from Princeton in 1986, Lewis served at Cornell University until 1990.[1]

Lewis has been a naturalized citizen of the United States since 1982. He married Ruth Hיlטne Oppenhejm in 1947 with whom he had a daughter and a son before the marriage was dissolved in 1974.[1]

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Research
Martin Kramer claims Lewis as "the most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East", whose authority extends beyond the academe to the general public. He is the pioneer of the social and economic history of the Middle East and is famous for his extensive research of the Ottoman archives.[1]

Bernard Lewis began his research career with the study of medieval Arab, especially Syrian, history.[1] His first article, dedicated to professional guilds of medieval Islam, had been widely regarded as the most authoritative work on the subject for about thirty years.[6]

However, after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Arab countries no longer admitted scholars of Jewish origin to conduct archival and field research there. Therefore, Lewis switched to the study of the Ottoman Empire, while continuing to research Arab history through the Ottoman archives,[1] which had only recently been opened to Western researchers. A series of articles that Lewis published over the next several years revolutionized the history of the Middle East by giving a broad picture of the Islamic society, including its government, economy, and demographics.[6]

Contrary to the position that the backwardness of Muslim lands is a result of Western colonialism, Lewis argues that the decline of the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim countries was largely self-inflicted. Their failure to keep up with the West stemmed from their cultural arrogance, which was a barrier to creative borrowing. Lewis analyzes the causes and consequences of the Muslim inflexibility in his work Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982).[1]

Revulsed at the Soviet and Arab attempts to delegitimize Israel as a racist country, Lewis wrote a study of anti-Semitism Semites and Anti-Semites (1986).[1]

In addition to his scholarly works, Lewis wrote several influential books accessible to the general public: The Arabs in History (1950), The Middle East and the West (1964), and The Middle East (1995).[1] In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the interest in Lewis's work surged, especially his 1990 essay The Roots of Muslim Rage. Two of his books were published after 9/11: What Went Wrong? (written before the attacks) and The Crisis of Islam.

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Views and influence on contemporary politics
In the mid-1960s, Lewis emerged as a commentator on the issues of the modern Middle East, and his analysis of Arab-Israeli conflict and the rise of militant Islam brought him publicity and aroused significant controversy. Lewis's policy advice has particular weight thanks to his scholarly authority.[6] U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney remarked: "...in this new century, his wisdom is sought daily by policymakers, diplomats, fellow academics, and the news media."[7]

A harsh critic of the Soviet Union, Lewis continues the liberal tradition in Islamic historical studies. Although his early Marxist views had a bearing on his first book The Origins of Ismailism, Lewis subsequently discarded Marxism. His later works are a reaction against the left-wing current of Third-worldism, which came to exercise significant influence over Middle Eastern studies.[1]

Lewis advocates closer Western ties with Israel and Turkey, which he saw especially important in light of the extension of the Soviet influence in the Middle East. Modern Turkey holds a special place in Lewis's view of the region due to the country's efforts to become a part of the West.[1]

Lewis views Christendom and Islam as civilizations that have been in perpetual collision ever since the advent of Islam in the 7th century. In a seminal essay The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990), he saw the struggle between the West and Islam gathering strength. It was in that essay that he coined the phrase "clash of civilizations", which received prominence in the eponymous book by Samuel P. Huntington.[8]

In 1998, Lewis read in a London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi a declaration of war on the United States by Osama bin Laden, a person of whom Lewis had never heard before. Recognizing in bin Laden's language the ideology of jihad, Lewis wrote an essay A License to Kill in which he warned about the danger presented by the holy warrior.[8]

On August 8, 2006 Lewis published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal asserting that traditional deterrence will not work in any conflict with Iran, and that Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmedinejad may be planning an attack on Israel for August 22nd 2006.[9] Ahmadinejad had said that Iran will respond "by the last days of Mordad", the 5th month of the Persian calendar.[10] "August 22 just happens to be the end of [that] month." [11] Lewis mentions Rajab 27 (which falls on the last day of Mordad in the Persian calendar year of 1385) as the night of Mi'raj and Mohammad's purported flight to Jerusalem. In Shi'a Iran Rajab 27 is not recognized as the night of Mi'raj but is the day of first calling or Mab'as. [1]

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Criticism and controversies
The neutrality of this section is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

Lewis is known for his literary sparrings with Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary theorist, who criticized Orientalist scholarship, claiming Lewis's work to be a prime example of Orientalism, in his 1978 book Orientalism. Said asserted that Westerners are inherently prejudiced in their studies of Islam and the Middle East unless they share the political goals of the people they study and that Orientalism was a form of racism and a tool of imperialist domination. Rejecting the view that only Muslims and their political sympathizers can objectively write about Islam, Lewis responded that Orientalism developed as a facet of European humanism, independently of the European imperial expansion. [1] Other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Albert Hourani, and William Montgomery Watt, also maintained that Said's disregard for all the evidence that contradicted his narrative made Orientalism a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.[12]

In a November 1993 Le Monde interview, Lewis said that the Ottoman Turks’ killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 was not "genocide", but the "brutal byproduct of war".[13] Lewis meant that it was not part of a plan to exterminate the entire Armenian race - not that it was justified or that it did not happen. A Parisian court interpreted his remarks as a denial of the Armenian Genocide and fined him one franc. [14][15]

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Books
The Origins of Ismailism (1940)
The Arabs in History (1950)
The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961)
Istanbul and the Civilizations of the Ottoman Empire (1963)
The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (1967)
The Cambridge History of Islam (2 vols. 1970, revised 4 vols. 1978, editor with Peter Malcolm Holt and Ann K.S. Lambton)
Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the capture of Constantinople (1974, editor)
Race and Color in Islam (1979)
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (1982, editor with Benjamin Braude)
The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982)
The Jews of Islam (1984)
Semites and Anti-Semites (1986)
History — Remembered, Recovered, Invented (1987)
Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (1987)
The Political Language of Islam (1988)
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an Historical Enquiry (1990)
Islam and the West (1993)
Islam in History (1993)
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (1994)
Cultures in Conflict (1994)
The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (1995)
The Future of the Middle East (1997)
The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (1998)
Uno Sguardo dal Medioriente, Di Renzo Editore, Roma, 1999
A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History (2000)
Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (2001)
The Muslim Discovery of Europe (2001)
What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002)
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003)
From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (2004)