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CAN ISLAMIC LANDS END THE BLAME GAME AND MAKE A FUTURE THEMSELVES? Bernard Lewis examines the question.
See also Will the West & Islam Learn to Live Together? An Exploratory Essay Edward W. Said slammed the views on Islam expressed by Bernard Lewis
10 February
2002; last modified 11 July 2004 Richard P. Richter
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Bernard Lewis. WHAT WENT WRONG? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Not many weeks after 11 September 2001, The New Yorker ran an article on the history of Islam. It obviously aimed at readers who had a crying need to catch up quickly. What in the world was going on to bring such violence to our shores? The author striving to enlighten us was Bernard Lewis, professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University. As it happened, Lewis had already finished a book-length treatment of the Middle East's historical dilemma. It was in production when the planes hit the towers.
This is one of those precious books that are small (6"x9", 159 pages of text) and make a big mark on your mind. I read it after completing the big book edited by John L. Esposito, the Oxford History of Islam. Where the Oxford work sprawled across the huge panorama of Islamic development from the seventh century to the present, Lewis in this book focused on the question that, by his finding, has long dogged people in the Islamic world.
What went wrong with Islam's place in the world after it encountered the West?
Lewis searches through the history of Islam's centuries-long relations with Europe to account for the disappearance of Islamic hegemony and self-confidence.
He identifies specific historical markers that could signify where things were turning south: the success of Spain in driving Muslims from the Iberian peninsula in 1492; the failure of the Ottomans to take Vienna in 1683; Napoleon's swift occupation of Egypt in 1798.
The root problem that emerges from his examination, however, seems to be attitudinal.
Islam was a proud and ancient civilization. It bore the dignity and accomplishment of centuries of cultural sophistication. It laid claim to a belief system that could support a universal human civilization. Indeed, it held sway across a vast region of the globe where a multiplicity of ethnic and regional cultures flourished. The breadth of its sway made it in a peculiar way cosmopolitan. "Islam...created a world civilization, polyethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental." (6) In commerce, in the arts and sciences, in mathematics, in military strength, Islam in the Middle Ages was supreme over Europe and China.
The attitude of Muslims was that of unquestioned self-certainty. At first the Islamic world simply ignored the material advances of a still-primitive Europe. Muslims refused to believe that a society so inferior to theirs could make products or engage in commerce that would rival anything of Islamic provenance. This stiff-necked disdain of progress outside the Islamic world persisted even after Muslims recognized the seriousness of the exuberant emergence of Europe. Muslims were not disposed to engage with non-Muslims in anything like an equal exchange. The echoes of that disdain, based on cultural pride, still resonate in the dialogue that has descended on us since 11 September 2001.
In the course of history, their attitude toward themselves and others prevented Muslims from adopting Western military and other technological modernization until it was too late. When Muslims finally tried Western ways of governing and conducting business, Lewis makes it clear that their cultural attitudes inhibited effective adaptations that might have enabled Muslims to compete with the West.
Lewis shows how "the lessons of the battlefield" were mostly negative for Muslims, despite their reluctant attempts to use Western techniques. He shows that Muslims floundered when they sought to turn the tide by seeking wealth and political power the modern Western way.
He shows how Islamic "social and cultural barriers" prevented Muslims from fully engaging with the powers of modernization so adversely threatening them. Muslims' treatment of women, their resistance to practicing Western science, and their failure to understand Western music are Lewis's three examples of social and cultural impasse. Cultural pride, a lingering reluctance to engage, again looms in Lewis's examples to account for the failure of Islam to confront the modernizing forces loose in the world.
Lewis further examines Islam's difficulties in changing its treatment of slaves, women, and unbelievers. Western notions of social equality and civil rights took root in Islamic culture like seeds falling on hard rock. Relations between religion and the state had such a differing history in Islam that modern Western notions--separation of church and state, for example--also failed to provide Muslims with strategies that would help them right what went wrong.
Interestingly, the French Revolution offered some promise to Muslims looking for answers in the West. It was more acceptable to them precisely because it disavowed Christianity. (104)
In an insightful chapter on "time, space, and modernity," Lewis shows how Muslims fell behind the West because they did not think of time and space in the modern way. For example, the five-prayer day rather than the twelve-hour clock structured the way Muslims dealt with time.
Summing up his examination of what went wrong and why, Lewis says:
By all standards that matter in the modern world--economic development and job creation, literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights--what was once a mighty civilization has indeed fallen low. (152)
He concludes with a survey of the "blame game" pursued by Muslims. They have endlessly looked for the answer to the question, "Who did this to us?" They have blamed just about everyone imaginable, including Muslims themselves. Osama bin Laden blames the Saudis for their cooperation with the West. His stripe of radical Islamism, with which we now engage in worldwide struggle, believe that things went wrong when Islamic lands "adopted alien notions and practices." (156) (The reverse internal blame game pins the tail on the mullahs who insisted on retaining old ways, making Islam incapable of adapting to change.)
Lewis does not see the blame game abating. America, of course, has had the dubious historical privilege of replacing the rest of the West as the main culprit. The attacks of 11 September 2001 added an exclamation point to that.
Writing before that date, Lewis acknowledges that growing numbers in the Middle East are shifting from the neurotic, self-destructive blame game to new questions: "What did we do wrong?" "How do we put it right?" His final sentence lays out the best hope for Muslims:
If they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor, then they can once again make the Middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization. (159)
The choice resides within Islam, not with the West, Lewis says.
The Bush war on Islam-based terror expands. The Palestinians and the Israelis continue killing one another daily. Want and hate continue to characterize Muslim life. The demonization of Americans continues to flourish.
How hard it is to imagine a positive and vital Middle East civilization coming to flourish in the world. How hard it is to envision a non-hostile Middle East living in mutual respect and mutual accord with the West and the rest of the non-Muslim world. Our war on terrorists will not bring it about (though the war is doubtless a prerequisite). Our help with material resources will not bring it about (though they will meet short-term needs). It will only come about, as Lewis says, through the will of Muslims to transcend the blame game and seek ways of putting things right for themselves. This will be the work of decades to come.
