‘What Went Wrong?” That was the explosive title of a December 2001
book by historian Bernard Lewis about the decline of the Muslim world.
Already at the printer when 9/11 struck, the book rocketed the professor
to widespread public attention, and its central question gripped
Americans for a decade.
Now, all of a sudden, there’s a new question on American minds: What Might Go Right?
To find out, I made a pilgrimage to the
professor’s bungalow in Princeton, N.J., where he’s lived since 1974
when he joined Princeton’s faculty from London’s School of Oriental and
African Studies.
Two months shy of his 95th birthday,
Mr. Lewis has been writing history books since before World War II. By
1950, he was already a leading scholar of the Arab world, and after
9/11, the vice president and the Pentagon’s top brass summoned him to
Washington for his wisdom.
“I think that the tyrannies are
doomed,” Mr. Lewis says as we sit by the windows in his library, teeming
with thousands of books in the dozen or so languages he’s mastered.
“The real question is what will come instead.”
For Americans who have watched
protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Bahrain and now Syria stand
up against their regimes, it has been difficult not to be intoxicated by
this revolutionary moment. Mr. Lewis is “delighted” …
