Bernard Lewis, a prolific Middle East scholar whose insights on Islam illuminated debates on the region's conflicts, has died. He was 101.
Lewis died Saturday at an assisted living facility in Vorhees Township, New Jersey. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him "one of the great scholars of Islam and the Middle East in our time."
"Conflict between them was inevitable." Well into his 80s, Lewis rocketed unto best-seller lists and became an in-demand television commentator with an aptly-timed volume completed just before the 9/11 attacks, "What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East."
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said of Lewis in 2006: "You simply cannot find a greater authority on Middle Eastern history." And in a statement Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Lewis "a true scholar and a great man" who "was a hard-nosed defender of democracies around the world."
Decades of discord between Lewis and Said bubbled into an epically highbrow throw-down in The New York Review of Books in 1982, with the Palestinian-American Said citing his nemesis as having an "extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong" and accusing him of "suppressing or distorting the truth."