[Daughters_of_Ataturk] In memoriam Geoffrey Lewis

Times Obituary for Geoffrey Lewis

 

From The Times  February 20, 2008    Professor Geoffrey Lewis  Scholar who introduced Turkish studies to Oxford and worked tirelessly   to foster friendship between Britain and Turkey    Professor Geoffrey Lewis, who was the prime mover in introducing   Turkish studies at Oxford and whose 1953 Turkish primer is still the   classic   introduction to the language, took up Turkish only "as a hobby" on   the advice of his Latin tutor. It was to change his life.     He was reading classics at St John's College when his studies were    interrupted by the war, during which he served in the RAF as a radar   operator from 1940 to 1945, mainly in Egypt and Libya. He pursued his   new   hobby whenever possible while in the Middle East.     On his return to Oxford after the war, he took the advice of Sir   Hamilton Gibb and read Arabic and Persian, being awarded first-class   honours   in 1947. There was no one to supervise a thesis in Turkish, and he   therefore chose to do his doctorate in Islamic philosophy.     In 1950 he successfully submitted a thesis on the so-called Theology of   Aristotle, which formed the backbone of his Plotiniana Arabica,   published in 1959. His Turkish studies had continued apace, and in   1950 he   was appointed university lecturer in Turkish at Oxford. He became in   turn   senior lecturer in Islamic studies, senior lecturer in Turkish, and   finally Professor of Turkish. He was first elected to a Fellowship at   St   Antony's College, Oxford, in 1961, where he later served as  sub-warden   and senior tutor. He retired in 1987.     He taught the whole range of the Turkish syllabus from the Orkhon   inscriptions to modern Turkish poetry. He was also fully at home in   the main   Turkic languages and, when required, taught Azeri, Chaghatay, Kazakh   and Uzbek. He was a remarkably good teacher in whom a thorough grasp   of   his subject, ease of manner, and a fine sense of humour made a happy   combination. Those who studied under him remember him with admiration   and   affection.     In addition to his teaching at Oxford, in 1959-60 he inaugurated and   directed the bilingual humanities course at Robert College in   Istanbul, a   course designed to give engineering undergraduates a background in the   history and traditions of Eastern and Western thought. He continued to   act as Visiting Professor of Humanities at Robert College from 1960 to   1968. He was always much in demand both in Turkey and abroad and   remembered with affection his spells  as Visiting Professor at   Princeton   (1970-71, 1974); UCLA (1975); as a Leverhulme professor in Turkey   (1984),   and as Gunnar Jarring lecturer in Stockholm (2002).     Lewis maintained an active interest in a wide variety of subjects   within the Islamic field, particularly in philosophy and science,   culminating in the publication in 1973 of Albucasis on Surgery and   Instruments,   written jointly with Dr Martin Spink. He was also a fine Koranic   scholar. However, his main academic interests lay in Turkish language   and   literature and current affairs in Turkey. His first publication in   this   field was Teach Yourself Turkish (1953, revised 1989), still the   classic   introduction to the language. This was followed by Modern Turkey   (1955).   Books like this are now taken for granted, but it was the first book   in English written by a scholar who knew Turkish and Turkey. In it   Lewis   made clear his sympathy for, and admiration of Kemal Atat??s reforms,    though he was the first to agree that much yet remained to be done.   The   book appeared in several editions, with the 1978 reprint having been   almost completely rewritten to keep up with the times.     More books followed, but his magnum opus was his Turkish Grammar, first   published by the Oxford University Press in 1967 and revised several   times. His final work was The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic   Success (1999, Turkish edition 2003). There were also numerous   articles.     Geoffrey Lewis was born in 1920 and educated at University College   School, in North London, before going up to Oxford. He was chiefly   responsible for the establishment of Turkish studies at Oxford, this   culminating in 1964 with the acceptance of Turkish as a main subject   of study in   the Honour School of Oriental Studies. This was achieved despite   vociferous opposition orchestrated by two die-hard conservatives from   the   Queen's College.     The Lewises had a wide  range of friends and were generous with their   hospitality. They kept open house for Turkish scholars visiting this   country and for anyone who sought knowledge of Turkey. For the Turks   who   found themselves in hospital in Oxford or, rather more rarely, were   detained by the Oxfordshire police, they willingly acted as   interpreters.     Lewis was much in demand to serve on bodies outside Oxford, and he was   unstinting of his time. He gave much service to the British-Turkish   Mixed (Cultural) Commission of which he was a member from 1975 to   1995. He   was particularly fond of the Anglo-Turkish Society, of which he was   vice-president from 1972 to 2003 and president from 2003 until his   death;   of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, which he helped to   found and of which he was president, 1981-83; and of the E.J.W. Gibb   Memorial Trust, which publishes works on Arabic, Persian and Turkish.   His   last public appearance was at the trust's launch  last month for a new   translation of the Koran, which it had just published.     Away from the public eye, Lewis advised a succession of British and   Turkish diplomats on ways to further the cause of friendship between   the   two countries.     Over the years the Turkish Government showed its appreciation of   Lewis's work by awarding him a Certificate of Merit in 1973, the   Exceptional   Service Plaque of the Foreign Ministry in 1991 and finally the   historic   Order of Merit of the Turkish Republic in 1998. In the same year he   was appointed CMG.     He visited Turkey whenever possible. The visits started in 1947, when   he spent six months in Turkey to bring his knowledge of Turkish up to   a   standard that was acceptable to himself, and continued until his final   visit to Ankara in 2007 when he lectured for the British Council on   the   problems of language reform. His contributions to Turkish studies were   widely recognised in Turkey, and he was elected a  corresponding member   of the Turkish Language Society as early as 1953. Later manifestations   of this esteem included honorary doctorates from Boaziçi University   in 1986 and Turkey's oldest university, Istanbul University, in 1992.   In   this country he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1979   and an honorary Fellow of St John's College, Oxford in 2000.     Lewis's academic work combined the best of the classically trained   philologist with a sense of the importance of literary style, and   displayed   a range of interests and accomplishments that few could match. His   scholarship, driven by a love of learning that owed much to his Jewish   background, was informed by great analytic skills and by lucid   exposition,   and he had a style of learning that combined erudition with wit,   sympathy and an old-fashioned breadth of education. Study and research   were   both his work and his recreation, and he had the humility of the   scholar who knows that  there is always the yet undiscovered. He said   that he   regarded the existence of language as proof of the existence of God -   "We could never have done it on our own."     In July 1941 he married Raphaela Rhoda Bale Seideman (Raff), his   childhood sweetheart (who was to publish her own ground-breaking   Everyday   Life in Ottoman Turkey in 1971). She and their daughter predeceased   him,   and he is survived by his son.       Professor Geoffrey Lewis, CMG, scholar of the Turkish language and   culture, was born on June 19, 1920. He died on February 12, 2008, aged   87.        

Sema Karaoglu, Founder               Meltem Birkegren, Director
www.DofA.org

www.wearetheturks.org
Daughters of Atatürk is proud to promote Turkish Heritage across the globe. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk shaped the legacy we proudly inherited.
His integrity and dynamism and vision constantly inspires us. We are thankful to him for walking the untrodden path, achieving the unimaginable dream, living the eternal vision. We are the Turks, we are the future of Turkey.

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Sema Karaoglu, Founder               Meltem Birkegren, Director
www.DofA.org
www.wearetheturks.org

Daughters of Atatürk is proud to promote Turkish Heritage across the globe. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk shaped the legacy we proudly inherited.
His integrity and dynamism and vision constantly inspires us. We are thankful to him for walking the untrodden path, achieving the unimaginable dream, living the eternal vision. We are the Turks, we are the future of Turkey.

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