Islam's Wrong Turns. - "What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response" - book review

What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, by Bernard Lewis (Oxford, 192 pp., $23)

When it comes to Islamic studies, Bernard Lewis is the father of us all. With brilliance, integrity, and extraordinary mastery of languages and sources, he has led the way for Jewish and Christian investigators seeking to understand the Muslim world. He has, it is true, been brutally attacked -- most notably by the charlatan Edward Said. Said's Orientalism, a ridiculous imposture from its first page to its last, is now a standard text in Anglo-American universities, but reads like the product of a rather dense college student who has just discovered Marxism; there can be no more telling condemnation of the present state of the American academy than the ascendancy of Said.

Lewis's What Went Wrong? is receiving a great deal of attention in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, which were a dramatic expression of the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. This conflict is seen by many as a product of the gap between Western prosperity and stability and Islamic backwardness. Lewis's book, however, does not concentrate on analyzing why Islamic civilization ended up in a series of 20th-century disasters. Rather, it reviews how Islamic commentators observed and attempted to explain the decline of their global culture as it occurred, and, particularly, whom they chose to blame.

With his outstanding knowledge of the Ottomans -- the caliphate that theologically guided the world's Sunni Muslims for half a millennium -- Lewis works through the decline of that empire. He shows how the sultans attempted to contend with the progress of the Christian West as the latter went from strength to strength, drawing on the invigorating changes that swept aside the European past: advances in technology, the transformation of public institutions, the rise of individual freedom and responsibility, and the arrival of the slippery concept of modernity. The decay of the caliphate spurred unfortunate flights into narcissism instead of fruitful dialogues with the West. (Although Lewis neglects to address it, I believe the worst such refuge was the "Islamic Reformation" represented by Wahhabism. This puritan, separatist, supremacist, and terrorist cult emerged from the wastelands of central Arabia in the 18th century, and formed the basis of the modern Saudi regime, in all its considerable evil.)

As Lewis shows, many Muslims have chosen to ascribe the historical fate of the Islamic global community to the malign action of foreign powers, above all to European imperialism and, later, Zionism and the U.S. These arguments draw analogies from the Mongol destruction, a millennium ago, of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.

With the influence of European-style nationalism in the Middle East, Turks, Arabs, and Persians could also start condemning each other: The Turks were assailed for their own imperialism and the Arabs for the "dead weight of their past" (in Lewis's phrase), while the Persians complained about their marginalization by Mongols, Turks, Arabs, and, later, the Western powers.

But Lewis rejects a claim that has become, in the wake of September 11, extremely widespread among Westerners: that Islam itself is the problem. He writes: "If Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three?" Joined with the theological reproach to the Islamic world is the charge that Islamic civilization has failed because it has rejected secularism; Lewis seems to echo this latter charge when he points to the modern Turkish republic as a model for Muslim renewal. But he misses a cue when he discusses the argument that "the cause of the changed relationship between East and West is not a Middle-Eastern decline but a Western upsurge -- the discoveries, the scientific movement, the technological, industrial, and political revolutions that transformed the West and vastly increased its wealth and power." He asks, but does not answer, the following question: "Why did the discoverers of America sail from Spain and not a Muslim Atlantic port, where such voyages were indeed attempted in earlier times?"

To me, at least, the reply seems obvious: With the Turkish seizure of Constantinople in 1453, the Atlantic Christian powers had a considerable incentive to find a direct sea route to the Indies. For the Muslims, who then exercised decisive control over the land routes as well as maritime commerce between North Africa, Arabia, and the Indies, no such stimulus existed.

A fruitful avenue of inquiry, in my view, would compare the history of the Ottoman Empire to that of Spain and its New World possessions. Like Spain, the Ottomans had neither a Reformation, nor an Enlightenment, nor a successful bourgeois revolution; neither Spain nor the Ottomans embraced secularism until extremely late. Both empires ended up choking to death on their excessive riches; having reached a pinnacle of wealth and influence in the 16th century, they both remained there, psychologically as well as socially, and experienced a serious decline in the 18th and 19th centuries.