Lewis was the architect of the Greater Middle East Project, which the USA was trying to implement for a while.
Bernard Lewis, an English-American historian, was born on May 31, 1916. He was educated at the University of London; He did his master's degree in History, with an emphasis on Middle Eastern History, and his doctorate in Islamic History. He learned Turkish during his studies at the University of Paris. He started teaching in 1938. He taught at the University of London until 1974, and at Princeton University from 1974 to 1986. His research interests were the Medieval Islamic World, today's Middle East, and the Ottoman Empire.
The US historian, known as the father of the US's Middle East policies during the Bush era, was also known for rejecting the Armenian genocide allegations against Turks and putting forward theses. He learned Turkish during his studies at the University of Paris.
In a speech he gave to the newspaper Le Monde in 1993, Lewis said that the killing of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915 was not a "genocide", but a "byproduct of the war". A court in Paris recognized this as a denial of the Armenian genocide and fined the historian a symbolic 1 franc.
Lewis claimed that the Armenian independence movements were the most serious threat to the Ottoman Empire when compared to the independence movements of other minorities. According to Lewis, the Turks were able, albeit reluctantly, to give up the Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Greek countries they had conquered because they eventually gave up on the distant provinces and brought the state's borders closer to "their own house". The Armenians, on the other hand, lived above the homeland of the Turks. Giving up this lump of land was not synonymous with shrinking the state, but with the disintegration of the state.
Lewis was writing about these sales in an old edition of his 1966 book, The Emeɾgence of Modeɾn Tuɾkey. Later he changed his mind. In the 2002 edition of the same book, he changed the last sentence from "1.5 million deaths of Armenians" to "more than 1 million Armenians and an unknown number of Turks died".
He died on May 19, 2018, at the age of 101.
Bernard Lewis read the Islamic world through the Arabic, Turkish and Persian he learned, and the West through his own (primary) sources in English and French. Therefore, he used the sources of the old period while considering the Islamic history, the Ottoman period, and the modern period. He saw the view of the Islamic world on its internal affairs and the outside world, and by reading European archives, he learned how the East was viewed from the West. Thus, Lewis became a researcher who held and managed the need for information between the same societies in the modern period, like a Jewish merchant who knew what could be bought and sold between the ports of Marseille and Venice and the ports of Izmir and Alexandria while navigating the Mediterranean ports in the sixteenth century.
Major research publications mapping the Islamic world, such as the Cambridge History of Islam, were conducted under his supervision. In this respect, he began to represent more than a typical Western orientalist.
Perhaps, thanks to the "neutrality" provided by his Jewish identity, Bernard Lewis was able to develop objective interpretations that could refute some of the prejudices about the Islamic world in the Christian West. For example, the Library of Alexandria Hz. He revealed that the claim that Muslims destroyed in the time of Umar is unfounded. In addition, while researching Ottoman history, when compared with European kingdoms, he showed that the Sultan's administration was not a dictatorship as in European countries, based on Ottoman and French archive information.
As a result of the deterioration of family life in Europe and the increase in the number of Muslims coming to the continent, "Islamized Islam or Islamized Europe?" Asking the question, Lewis defended the view that Europe has rapidly Islamized in recent years, but that Wahhabism, which spread with Saudi finance, created a radical community in Europe.
Bernard Lewis is known to be the first Western researcher to enter the Ottoman archives in 1950 when they were opened to foreign researchers. He wanted to understand the sixteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire was at its strongest, by reading the records in the Ottoman archives, and during his residence in Istanbul, he was visiting the archives.
Austrian orientalist Paul Wittek was an influential name in Lewis's learning of the Turkish language and history. Wittek, who was in Istanbul and Syria years before Lewis (during the First World War), fled from Europe to England years later and started to teach at the SOAS department of the University of London (Oriental and African Studies). Lewis would also complete his doctorate at SOAS in 1939 and start teaching there years after Wittek. Adnan Adıvar was the main hero of the depths of Turkish political life and the story of learning Turkish.
According to Lewis, Turkey had adopted to maintain its existence through religion-centered patriotism in the Ottoman period and secular nationalism in the Republican period. Lewis, who saw the Army's efforts to keep Turkey under its control through the National Security Council as positive in terms of developing democracy in the country, supported the view that the Army protected democracy by making a coup. Despite the fact that the army continued to hold power after the coup in other countries, the Turkish Army's stabilization after the intervention, withdrawing from politics and giving the environment back to political parties, was attributed to Turkey's NATO membership. Because the TAF was not asked to do politics, but to adjust the deteriorated politics.
Major Works: The Arabs in History (1950); The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961); The Assassins (1967); The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982); The Political Language of Islam (1988); Race and Slavery in the Middle East: a Historical Inquiry (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); A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of life, letters, and history (2000).