...has attained a stature in the field and with the general reading public unrivaled by any historian, living or dead, of the Middle East and Islam. His range of writings—from the pre—Islamic period, through Islam's classical and medieval ages and its premodern 'gunpowder' empires, to today's Muslim nation—states—is simply unparalleled by any other scholar, even from the golden age of Islamic studies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the field's terrifyingly erudite, multilingual European founding fathers—the much despised 'orientalists'—bestrode the earth. Lewis is the last and greatest of the orientalists...

In 1945, for example, Lewis was not in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine; today, he is, seeing Israel as one of the things that has gone more right than wrong in the region.

The war against terror and the quest for freedom are inextricably linked, and neither can succeed without the other. The struggle is no longer limited to one or two countries, as some Westerners still manage to believe. It has acquired first a regional then a global dimension, with profound consequences for all of us. . . . If freedom fails and terror triumphs, the peoples of Islam will be the first and greatest victims. They will not be alone, and many others will suffer with them.

...there is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in the formation or conduct of government—to political freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which underlies the development of political thought in the West. While conservative reformers talked of freedom under law, and some Muslim rulers even experimented with councils and assemblies government was in fact becoming more and not less arbitrary...

During the period of British and French domination, individual freedom was never much of an issue. Though often limited and sometimes suspended, it was on the whole more extensive and better protected than either before or after. [emphasis added]

In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.

The dhimma on the whole worked well. The non—Muslims managed to thrive under Muslim rule, and even to make significant contributions to Islamic civilization. The restrictions were not onerous, and were usually less severe in practice than in theory. As long as the non—Muslim communities accepted and conformed to the status of tolerated subordination assigned to them, they were not troubled. The rare outbreaks of repression or violence directed against them are almost always the consequence of a feeling that they have failed to keep their place and honor their part of the covenant. The usual cause was the undue success of Christians or Jews in penetrating to positions of power and influence which Muslims regarded as rightly theirs. The position of the non—Muslims deteriorated during and after the Crusades and the Mongol invasions, partly because of the general heightening of religious loyalties and rivalries, partly because of the well—grounded suspicion that they were collaborating with the enemies of Islam.

...a great humanist and contemporary of the French Revolution, Wilhelm von Humboldt, defined as the best state one which is least felt and restricts itself to one task only: protection, protection against attack from outside and oppression from within...in general, taxation [by the Muslim government] was merciless, and a very large section of the population must have lived permanently at the starvation level. From many Geniza   letters one gets the impression that the poor were concerned more with getting money for the payment of their taxes than for food and clothing, for failure of payment usually induced cruel punishment... the Muslim state was quite the opposite of the ideals propagated by Wilhelm von Humboldt or the principles embedded in the constitution of the United States. An Islamic state was part of or coincided with dar al—Islam, the House of Islam. Its treasury was mal al—muslumin, the money of the Muslims. Christians and Jews were not citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were outsiders under the protection of the Muslim state, a status characterized by the term dhimma, for which protection they had to pay a poll tax specific to them. They were also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and humiliating laws...As it lies in the very nature of such restrictions, soon additional humiliations were added, and before the second century of Islam was out, a complete body of legislation in this matter was in existence...In times and places in which they became too oppressive they lead to the dwindling or even complete extinction of the minorities.

..These examples are intended to indicate the general character of a system of oppression, sanctioned by contempt and justified by the principle of inequality between Muslims and dhimmis...Singled out as objects of hatred and contempt by visible signs of discrimination, they were progressively decimated during periods of massacres, forced conversions, and banishments. Sometimes it was the prosperity they had achieved through their labor or ability that aroused jealousy; oppressed and stripped of all their goods, the dhimmi often emigrated.'

...in many places and at many periods [through] the nineteenth century, observers have described the wearing of discriminatory clothing, the rejection of dhimmi testimony, the prohibitions concerning places of worship and the riding of animals, as well as fiscal charges— particularly the protection charges levied by nomad chiefs— and the payment of the jizya...Not only was the dhimma imposed almost continuously, for one finds it being applied in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire...and in Persia, the Maghreb, and Yemen in the early twentieth century, but other additional abuses, not written into the laws, became absorbed into custom, such as the devshirme, the degrading corvees (as hangmen or gravediggers), the abduction of Jewish orphans (Yemen), the compulsory removal of footware (Morocco, Yemen), and other humiliations...The recording in multiple sources of eye—witness accounts, concerning unvarying regulations affecting the Peoples of the Book, perpetuated over the centuries from one end of the dar al—Islam to the other...proves sufficiently their entrenchment in customs.

Thus it is not surprising that in a letter (personal communication) dated April 7, 1977 hand written to Bat Ye'or and her historian husband, referring to their earliest (French and English) writings (see for examples, Les Juifs en Egypte Geneva: Editions de l'Avenir, 1971, and this; this; this; and this), Goitein wrote,

I do not think our opinions on the history of the dhimmi differ widely. It is merely a difference of emphasis

The role played by the Balkan Christian boys recruited into the Ottoman service through the devshirme is well known. Great numbers of them entered the Ottoman military and bureaucratic apparatus, which for a while came to be dominated by these new recruits to the Ottoman state and the Muslim faith. This ascendancy of Balkan Europeans into the Ottoman power structure did not pass unnoticed, and there are many complaints from other elements, sometimes from the Caucasian slaves who were their main competitors, and more vocally from the old and free Muslims, who felt slighted by the preference given to the newly converted slaves

...in discussing the devshirme we are dealing with the large numbers of Christians who, in spite of the material advantages offered by conversion to Islam, chose to remain members of a religious society which was denied first class citizenship. Therefore the proposition advanced by some historians, that the Christians welcomed the devshirme as it opened up wonderful opportunities for their children, is inconsistent with the fact that these Christians had not chosen to become Muslims in the first instance but had remained Christians...there is abundant testimony to the very active dislike with which they viewed the taking of their children. One would expect such sentiments given the strong nature of the family bond and given also the strong attachment to Christianity of those who had not apostacized to Islam...First of all the Ottomans capitalized on the general Christian fear of losing their children and used offers of devshirme exemption in negotiations for surrender of Christian lands. Such exemptions were included in the surrender terms granted to Jannina, Galata, the Morea, Chios, etc...Christians who engaged in specialized activities which were important to the Ottoman state were likewise exempt from the tax on their children by way of recognition of the importance of their labors for the empire...Exemption from this tribute was considered a privilege and not a penalty...

...there are other documents wherein their [i.e., the Christians] dislike is much more explicitly apparent. These include a series of Ottoman documents dealing with the specific situations wherein the devshirmes themselves have escaped from the officials responsible for collecting them...A firman...in 1601 [regarding the devshirme] provided  the [Ottoman] officials with stern measures of enforcement,  a fact which would seem to suggest that parents were not always disposed to part with their sons.

'..to enforce the command of the known and holy fetva [fatwa] of Seyhul [Shaikh]— Islam. In accordance with this whenever some one of the infidel parents or some other should oppose the giving up of his son for the Janissaries, he is immediately hanged from his door—sill, his blood being deemed unworthy.'

(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.

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.*

 ...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.

 Lewis' stature [has] provided a lofty cover for the Turkish national agenda of obfuscating academic research on the Armenian Genocide.

 ...the first full—fledged attempt by a modern state to practice disciplined, methodically organized genocide

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.

...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?

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.

...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.