Bernard Lewis reconsidered.

I once heard a professor describe Bernard Lewis as a man "who knows everything and debates nothing" ("Bernard Lewis Revisited" by Michael Hirsh, November). U.S. miscalculation in Iraq is a result of hubris given intellectual legitimacy and cover by Lewis and his acolyte Fouad Ajami. When professors at the pinnacle of academe pursue a political agenda at the expense of pedagogy, we all suffer the consequences.

Scheherazade Jafar

Greenwich, Conn.

Thank you. This article is a vindication for peace and a way to build bridges. I am a spiritual Muslim woman who belongs to a progressive branch of Islam. The article has helped me articulate what I have felt for some time and hope that America is soul-searching and understands that there is more "nuance" to the present conflicts than Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Charles Krauthammer, and others would have us believe. I cringed at the amount of fear that has been spread about the Middle East and Muslims by these so-called "scholars." Karen Armstrong was the only ray of light for Muslims who sought a more nuanced, moderate view of Muslims and the conflict.

Nadia Akbarali

Toronto, Canada

Hirsh's important article contrasts Western approaches to the Middle East as expounded by several academics. I agree that Bernard Lewis is a poor candidate for the honorary title of "doyen" of Middle Eastern Studies. As mentioned in the article, he is really an "Ottoman" expert and a medievalist, two specialties that just barely qualify one to speak on the contemporary Islamic Arab world.

The late Edward Said often alluded to these weaknesses when critiquing Lewis's work. It is important to be aware of Lewis's Ottoman bent because what is not often remembered is that while the Ottomans (i.e. the Turks) were Muslim, they ruled the Arab world as imperialists to a Far greater extent and with more brutality than the British or the French. And they were roundly despised by the native Arab population.

But just because it is easy to discredit Lewis's theories and castigate his influence on American neoconservatives doesn't mean that the other side--the "Arabists"--are correct in their assessment of the Iraqi and the larger Arab Islamic world. To believe, for example, that "there has never been a Muslim umma, or community," as Professor Fawaz Gerges contends, or that "there is a better case for Islamo-Christian civilization" as Professor Bulliet concludes, is to misunderstand the dimensions and dynamics at work in the Arab Islamic world.

As a long-time resident of the Arab world, I believe both narratives are seriously flawed. They have not considered a third alternative, which any Western resident of the Middle East will tell you is a much more likely outcome: that there really is no solution to the dysfunctional quagmire that the Middle East has always been.

A. D. Arregui

Dharan, Saudi Arabia