THOUGH THE world and the Middle East, as well as intellectual and journalistic life, have evolved dramatically since this debate, whose backdrop was the final decade of the Cold War, the core issue of how one culture and civilization should regard another, and how all of us, as individuals, should report on and analyze cultures and civilizations different than our own, has become more urgent than ever. Globalization and the erasure of distance through technology have brought us all into a form of thrilling and yet uncomfortable proximity. This renders the disagreement between Lewis and Said of signal importance. Just consider that the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 thesis on The Clash of Civilizations actually borrowed the term from Lewis’ “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” which appeared in The Atlantic in September 1990. Though Lewis used the phrase in a somewhat different context, the connection with Huntington’s famous thesis is not incidental, since what Lewis and Said were really arguing about was, to repeat, the ability or inability of one civilization to comprehend another nearby.

The fact that it was a very different world in 1982 only further demonstrates the clairvoyance manifested unintentionally by both men in the course of intellectually assaulting one another. As a young freelance foreign correspondent in Greece covering the Near East and the Balkans in the 1980s, the world of journalism that I experienced was one of Americans and Europeans holding forth in print about the Arab world and Israel. The idea that Jews could not be expected to report objectively about Israel still held currency among journalists back then. Arabs could work as stringers in the Middle East bureaus of major publications but, though it was never openly stated, with few exceptions they were thought to lack the emotional distance of staff correspondents. Interpreting the Middle East was the province of Westerners who were neither Jewish nor Muslim. Indeed, the ideal situation was to write, report, and provide analysis about countries and peoples with which one had no emotional or personal links whatsoever. For to have any kind of a stake in any particular place could be professionally disqualifying. Foreign correspondents often had a familiarity with other languages: such as French or German, but rarely with Arabic. Rather than true area expertise, an Olympian degree of distance and objectivity was sought. Of course, the idea that merely being from the West burdened one with a viewpoint and cultural baggage all its own was rarely realized, or even considered.

In this world of Western observers of the Middle East during the Cold War, groups such as the State Department Arabists (about whom I wrote a book) were truly caught in the middle. Mainly Protestants who spoke Arabic, they were thought of by those like Said as diplomats-cum-imperialists, and by many others, especially the pro-Israel community, as having gone native with the culture that they were supposed to be analyzing and reporting on. Neither the Arabs nor the Washington policy community wholly trusted them.

This entire world has been rendered sepia-toned by the globalization that followed the end of the Cold War, which, by dramatically enlarging middle classes nearly everywhere and the air links between them, to say nothing of connecting everyone with digital platforms, has plunged the West and the Arab worlds both into the cross currents of multiple civilizations. Of course, the Arab encounter with the West began in earnest in the late eighteenth century with Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt. But attrition of the same adds up to big change. Thus, it is the very magnitude of this intermingling at the higher levels of the socioeconomic pyramid that has been so critical, fostered as it has been by technology. The consequence is a whole new generation of Arabs and Africans who are middle-class, extremely well educated, and filtering steadily into the ranks of the global elite, and thus into the ranks of journalism and policy studies.

For example, recently in Ethiopia, I befriended a young man who was multilingual, an expert on the politics of his country, and about to go to graduate school at a top university in England. When I asked what he would be studying there, he replied “Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa,” in order to further enhance his expertise and gain the academic credentials necessary to become a formidable area specialist on his own country. The developing world is full of such people whose knowledge base, however circumscribed geographically, completely overwhelms that of the Cold War-era European and American generalists, whose area of expertise was wide but thin, and thus given to the category of generalizations Said abhorred.

This new generation of experts is more analytically demanding than the old one. In such a professional environment, subjective observations about national cultures, even positive observations, rarely make it through editorial filters without substantial back-up. The exception is the work of anthropologists, who build cultural models out of particulars from the ground up. Nevertheless, the evidence for avoiding subjective generalizations is increasingly everywhere, in all the serious newspapers, magazines, and other public fora, where writers and experts from the countries themselves are now featured. Anecdotes can be instructive in this regard. The New York Times leads the way. For example, critical, even dire, reports about Middle Eastern and African countries are common, but more so than ever they are being written—and in a very precise manner—by local inhabitants. Sa’eed Husaini, an expert on Nigerian politics and a researcher at the University of Lagos, recently published a rather long, comprehensive, and devastating account of Nigeria as a failing state in the New York Times. Declan Walsh, the supremely accomplished foreign correspondent for the New York Times, in his book The Nine Lives of Pakistan, specifically warns against “orientalist” thinking and “orientalism” in describing the Pashtun ethnic group. That he feels the need to state this, despite his sensitive and understanding portrayal of the Pashtuns, underscores the growing extent of Edward Said’s intimidating influence over the span of the decades. A New York Times review of a recent book about the Amur River separating Russia and China by the famed British travel writer Colin Thubron warms to the subject by condemning Thubron—with a nod to Said—for Thubron’s romantic generalizations about Arabs written well more than a half-century before in the 1960s.

Truly, we inhabit Said’s world now. Though one has to wonder whether postcolonial thinking, with its denunciatory references to imperialism and racism, is but a phase that will dissipate somewhat as the distance between the present and the end of European empires lengthens in the coming decades. Keep in mind that empires have been the political rule for humanity for thousands of years, so we are still immediately in the shadow of them. This makes natural the current obsession.

If Edward Said rules the roost, then Bernard Lewis is a relic, like the old and gracious foreign correspondents I used to know in the 1980s. It is tragic that Lewis had his reputation tarnished by the Iraq War (which I, too, mistakenly supported). While Lewis’ influential support for finding a way to remove Saddam fits nicely with Said’s profile of him as the very personification of imperialism, it is also true that Lewis’ long and intimate association with the Arab world and its language—rather than make him cynical—gave him hope for liberal change. Saddam was not merely a dictator. He was a Stalinist tyrant and Lewis may have felt the opportunity to topple him just too good to pass up. And all this transpired in Lewis’ ninth decade of life.

To fairly judge Lewis we need to realize that, like postcolonialism itself perhaps, he represents a chapter in the accumulation and interpretation of knowledge that was already ending by the time Said set his sights on him. But that does not make his vast and learned experience of the Arab world—in addition to the Turkish and Persian ones whose languages he also knew—any less valuable. To judge Lewis we need to recognize not only what has come after him but what came before him. For the younger Lewis helped shake-up the world of scholarship just as Said would do much later.

LEWIS WAS the original modern historian of the Middle East, having devolved from that original orientalist and Victorian-era traveler in the Near East, Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was also fabulously multilingual. The likes of Burton gave way to the likes of Lewis, who gave way to the likes of Said. It is all part of an evolutionary process. It was Burton in 1885, working at his desk in Trieste, who translated into English from Arabic The Thousand Nights and a Night. Burton along with Lewis were among the principal targets of Said in Orientalism, who accused Burton in so many words of determinism and essentialism. And yet not to be able to generalize immobilizes discussion and analysis. “When people think seriously, they think abstractly,” writes Huntington; “they conjure up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories, paradigms,” without which intellectual life simply cannot advance. In particular, Burton’s translation of the Nights helped bring the genius of Arab-Persian-Indian literature and civilization to Europe, a giant step in constructing the cultural bridge we call cosmopolitanism—thus making Burton’s translation, after a fashion, a much earlier phase of Said’s own work. Before there can be understandings, there must be misunderstandings, which are the natural outgrowth of first contact.