Bernard Lewis |
Today (May 31) is Bernard Lewis’s 100th birthday. Called “the most influential postward historian of Islam and the Middle East” by his former student Martin Kramer, Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes writes that that reading Lewis’s book The Arabs in History in 1969, “launched my career. Over the next 47 years, Lewis continued to exert a profound influence on my studies.” Pipes’s op-ed on Lewis, “Bernard Lewis and Me,” appears today at Israel Hayom (see this version for extra links), and is also part of an NRO Symposium titled “Bernard Lewis at 100: An Appreciation.” The latter contains entries by Victor Davis Hanson, Jay Nordlinger, and David Price-Jones, among others.
Others who have written in his honor for this special day include Harold Rhode, who co-authored an op-ed in il Giornale, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, who wrote an essay for the Weekly Standard. Additional essays will appear in the coming weeks.