Photos: flash90 Lior Mizrachi Bernard Lewis archives

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n September 11 2001 Bernard Lewis was 85 years old and 11 years past “retirement.”

As three commercial airliners crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on the orders of Osama bin Laden Lewis’s What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East was in galleys almost ready for press. It became a major best seller.

With the publication the next year of The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror Lewis had two number-one best sellers on the New York Times nonfiction list — one in hardcover and one in paperback.

“My historical studies suddenly became relevant” he writes in his 2012 memoir Notes on a Century. He was interviewed endlessly and was invited to Washington D.C. to educate politicians and to lecture at think tanks.

Even more than his vast erudition and capacious memory it is his unparalleled ability to fit things together that has made Lewis one of the best-known public intellectuals of our time. It is not the historian’s task to predict the future according to Lewis. “He can discern trends. He can look at what has been happening and what is happening and see change developing. From this he can formulate I will not say predictions but possibilities alternative possibilities.” Long before 9/11 Bernard Lewis had been doing that as well as anyone in the world.

In 1976 he published an article in Commentary “The Return of Islam” that broke with the prevailing orthodoxy that the Middle East was rapidly headed toward a future of secular revolutionary movements. The standard American college textbook on the Middle East at that time bore the title The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East.

That year Anwar Sadat was firmly in control in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood was under his thumb; the Shah of Iran was still ensconced on his throne; and Osama bin Laden had just graduated an elite high school where he wore a blazer and tie. Sadat’s assassination by the Muslim Brotherhood the Shah’s overthrow by the Ayatollah Khomeini Hezbollah’s bombing of a US Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon killing 241 servicemen and 9/11 were all in the future.

Yet Lewis urged “modern Western man... unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central place to religion in his own affairs [and thus] unable to conceive that any other peoples or any other place could have done so” to pay heed to what those living in the Middle East were saying and writing all of which pointed to a “surge in religious passion” and to the continued universality and centrality of Islam as the primary element of personal identity.

Lewis did not specifically predict the Islamic Revolution but he had already read Ayatollah Khomeini’s The Islamic State in the original Persian by the time Khomeini took power and was quick to disabuse all those who imagined that he would put Iran on a path of greater freedom than it had traveled under the Shah.

In “The Roots of Muslim Rage” published in the Atlantic in 1990 he devoted a section to the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West represented by the United States three years before Samuel Huntington made the phrase famous with all due attribution. (Lewis had actually first used the term in a 1957 panel at Johns Hopkins University.)

“Islam from its inception is a religion of power and in the Muslim world view it is right and proper that power should be wielded by Muslims and Muslims alone... That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of G-d and nature” Lewis had explained in “The Return of Islam.” And thus it was natural that the “growing awareness of the heirs of an old proud and long dominant civilization of being overtaken overborne and overwhelmed by those they regarded as their inferiors ” should give rise to rage.

With US vice president Dick Cheney in 2003. Lewis’s detractors have accused him based on that relationship of being an architect of the Second Iraq War a charge he hotly denies