The responsibility of intellectuals

One might say that the fact that Norman Tebbit has crawled out from whatever hole he was hiding in to mutter a few words about Islam that could so easily have been scripted by Kilroy does not deserve very much attention. "The Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years." It is rather too easy, I think, to attribute views like this to plain ignorance. Of course, it is profoundly ignorant, but the expression of this sort of view is only possible when widely-respected "intellectuals" work hard to back them up with some "evidence." In the case of the "backward" nature of Islam, Bernard Lewis has done a lot to make this sort of nonsense sound more respectable.
Now, in one sense, serious people should not allow themselves to be detained by such idiotic arguments (whether Lewis dresses them up with impressive-sounding words, or Norman Tebbit expresses them in something that barely constitutes a sentence). But in another, it's important not to allow views like those of Lewis to become popularised without being challenged. Social scientists need to take their tasks seriously in order to avoid either being made "irrelevant" by ideologues of reaction (New Labour, the neoconservatives etc.) or being subordinated to the sort of populist rubbish (Lewis) that makes the climate right for idiots like Tebbit to sound vaguely reasonable when they come out with such trash.