Bernard Lewis’s career bridged British colonial intelligence and American imperial policy

Evidence

Among those who have made careers out of glorifying Western civilization and lamenting its vulnerability to the threat of Islam, no one could outdo Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, who began his career in the intelligence corps of the British army and ended it as a consultant to the Pentagon—thus linking British colonialism and American imperialism in the span of a single life. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 81

Categorization

• CANDY: The intelligence-corps-to-Pentagon biographical arc is a compact, tweetable data point on how Orientalism persists across empires.
• XREF: Relates to the reader’s broader interest in how intellectual authority crosses imperial formations — echoes the Home Boy/fetishized insider-outsider dynamics.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 81