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The whole article is interesting but below is the section as it relates to Armenians in particular:
Perhaps most concerning in the realm of dhimmitude have been Lewis’ inexplicably evolved views on the jihad genocide of the Armenians. His renowned The Emergence of Modern Turkey,* originally published in 1962 (reissued in 1968 and 2002), includes these characterizations of the mass killings of the Armenians by the Turks in 1894-96, 1909, and 1915:
(1894-96, p. 202) The Armenian participants mindful of the massacres of 1894-96, were anxious to seek the intervention of the European powers as a guarantee of effective reforms in the Ottoman Empire [in the 20th century].
(1909, p. 216) With suspicious simultaneity a wave of outbreaks spread across Anatolia. Particularly bad were the events of the Adana district, which culminated in the massacre of thousands of Armenians…While Europe was appalled by Turkish brutality, Muslim opinion was shocked by what seemed to them the insolence of the Armenians and the hypocrisy of Christian Europe. The Turks were, however, well aware of the painful effects produced by these massacres in Europe, which had not yet forgotten the horrors of the Hamidian repression [i.e, the 1894-96 massacres]
(1915, p. 356) Now a desperate struggle between them [i.e., the Turks and Armenians] began, a struggle between two nations for the possession of a single homeland, that ended with the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished.
Thus when Lewis wrote his authoritative history of modern Turkey, he understood, and made explicit, that the Armenians had been massacred under successive Ottoman governments in 1894-96, and 1909. Moreover, he maintains that the Armenians were subjected in 1915 to a “holocaust”, during which 1.5 million “perished”. By 1985, however, Lewis was the most prominent signatory on a petition to the US Congress protesting the effort to make April 24 – the date the Armenians commemorate the victims of the genocide – a nationwide Armenian-American memorial day, which would include the mention of man’s inhumanity to man. Both this petition drive and a simultaneous high profile media advertisement campaign were financed by the Committee of the Turkish Association. Vryonis* has raised, unabashedly, the appropriate questions and accompanying concerns regarding Lewis’ actions:
When was Professor Lewis expressing an objective opinion: when he wrote the book [i.e., The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 1962/68 versions], or when he signed the political ad? To phrase it more bluntly, what shall we believe? Certainly, the data available to him in the writing of the book were sufficiently clear and convincing for him to proceed to these three clear and unequivocal statements [i.e., describing the 1894-96, and 1909 events as massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, and the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks as a holocaust]. What had changed? The subject had entered the sphere of politics, and Prof. Lewis, along with so many other signers of the ad, had decided to take sides where their economic, professional, personal, and emotional interests lay: with the Turkish government, and not with history.*
Furthermore, during the past decade, as Yair Auron has observed, when Lewis was requested,*
*…to make available the academic research published in recent years, which, in his professional opinion, constitute the basis for the change from his original position to his new position that there was no state-planned or administered genocide/mass murder of the Armenians…Lewis did not respond to this demand, even though he noted that letters to him and his reply would be published.
*Auron’s final assessment is apt:
*Lewis’ stature [has] provided a lofty cover for the Turkish national agenda of obfuscating academic research on the Armenian Genocide.
Lewis’ wildly fluctuating opinions aside, a consensus among bona fide genocide scholars has emerged which is consistent with Richard Rubenstein’s conclusion from 1975, that the 1915 Turkish massacre of the Armenians was,*
*…the first full-fledged attempt by a modern state to practice disciplined, methodically organized genocide
And Bat Ye’or reminds us why the Armenian genocide was a jihad genocide*committed against a non-Muslim people “violating” the ancient dhimma, a “…breach…[which] restored to the umma [the Muslim community] its initial right to kill the subjugated minority [the dhimmis], [and] seize their property…”. Moreover, the massacres,
were perpetrated solely by Muslims and they alone profited from the booty: the victims’ property, houses, and lands granted to the muhajirun, and the allocation to them of women, and child slaves. The elimination of male children over the age of twelve was in accordance with the commandments of the jihad and conformed to the age fixed for the payment of the jizya. The four stages of the liquidation – deportation, enslavement, forced conversion, and massacre – reproduced the historic conditions of the jihad carried out in the dar-al-harb from the seventh century on. Chronicles from a variety of sources, by Muslim authors in particular, give detailed descriptions of the organized massacres or deportation of captives, whose sufferings in forced marches behind the armies paralleled the Armenian experience in the twentieth century.
Bernard Lewis possesses an enormous fund of knowledge regarding Islamic civilization accrued over a distinguished career of more than six decades of serious scholarship. A gifted linguist, non-fiction prose writer, and teacher, Lewis shares his understanding of Muslim societies in both written and oral presentations, with singular economy and eloquence. These are extraordinary attributes for which Lewis richly deserves the accolades lavished upon him in the recent spate of 90th birthday homages. And even Lewis’ detractors cannot deny his deep seated affection and genuine concern for the Muslim world. For example, Ian Buruma sees Lewis’ cheerleading role in relation to the war in Iraq as a manifestation of this phenomenon:
…perhaps he loves it too much. It is a common phenomenon among Western students of the Orient to fall in love with a civilization….* His beloved civilization is sick. And what would be more heartwarming to an old Orientalist than to see the greatest Western democracy cure the benighted Muslim?
But Lewis’ remarkable contributions are diminished by a yawning gap in his understanding of dhimmitude, including an apparent unwillingness to even acknowledge this uniquely Islamic institution. His myriad works and addresses are largely devoid of the concerns for the dhimmis—past (here, and here) present (here), and ominously, future (here)—Lewis freely expresses for their Muslim overlords. This critical limitation and its implications must also be recognized by all those for whom Lewis remains an iconic source of information, and advice.
* Note: The 2002 edition of The Emergence of Modern Turkey, p. 356, reads:
Now a desperate struggle between them [i.e., the Turks and Armenians] began, a struggle between two nations for the possession of a single homeland, that ended with the terrible slaughter of 1915, when, according to estimates, more than a million Armenians perished, as well as an unknown number of Turks.
In this revised text, “slaughter” replaces “holocaust”, the estimate of the Armenians who “perished” is changed from 1.5 million to “according to estimates, more than a million”, and a concluding remark is added referring to the “unknown number of Turks” who also perished in the putative struggle for possession of a single homeland. Peter Balakian makes these germane observations (from, The Burning Tigris, New York, 2003, p. 432, note 25):
…without any substantiation, Lewis dispense of the Armenian Genocide in a couple of sentences, calling it a ‘a struggle between two nations for the possession of a single homeland’. Lewis never explains how an unarmed, Christian ethnic minority in the Ottoman Empire could be fairly called a ‘nation’, that could engage in a ‘struggle’ with a world power (the Ottoman Empire) for a single homeland. In a recent interview, There Was No Genocide: Interview with Prof. Bernard Lewis, by Dalia Karpel, Ha’aretz (Jerusalem, January 23, 1998), Lewis asserts that the massacres of the Armenians were not the result ‘of a deliberate preconceived decision of the Turkish government’. These evasions are aimed at trivializing the Armenian Genocide.
Andrew Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad.
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