Bernard Lewis RIP – “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people”

Legal Insurrection
"His understanding of Islamism continues to shed light on the war against Jews and Christians: “Both the Saturday people and the Sunday people are now suffering the consequences”' 

"This 2006 profile at The Weekly Standard also provides good background, The Last Orientalist:

IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT the United States isn’t easy on its scholars and public intellectuals–that they are not accorded the prestige and respect that they are given in the Old World. This complaint, usually made by left-wingers struggling against the tide in the United States, isn’t totally without merit. A good literary scholar or classicist in the United States perhaps doesn’t quite have the same social cachet as would a similarly accomplished scholar at Oxford or the Sorbonne. But when scholars do make it in the United States–and there certainly seem to be vastly more European scholars hoping to make it in America than Americans trying to snag a sinecure in Europe–there is simply no comparison in the eminence, influence, and renown that they can achieve. Since arriving in the United States in 1974, the British historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis has become one of America’s–and thus the world’s–most famous academics." 

"For those of us seriously interested in the Middle East–and since 9/11 that has become a rather large crowd–Lewis, who will celebrate his 90th birthday on May 31, 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."  . . .