Arabian Nightmares

Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University, 2002), 180 pp., $23.

THERE IS a story; perhaps apocryphal, about a scholar who wrote a book of a million words on his subject. Asked why it had to be so long, this scholar replied that he did not have the time to write a shorter book. At rather regular intervals, Bernard Lewis publishes short books on one or another aspect of Islam, its history, and its cultural or political expressions in all periods up to the present. Each the fruit of a lifetime of scholarship, the books in this sequence have a character and a wisdom all their own. The tone is dispassionate though often sprightly, the argument authoritative, the supporting detail fresh, absorbing, and taken from an immense range of original sources. Lewis is master of the major languages of the Middle East and Europe. Now in his mid-eighties, he is the most emeritus of professors, an orientalist in the best sense of that great tradition. They don't come like that anymore.

The long-drawn process in which the Christian West and the world of Islam discovered one another is a favorite theme of his. He has clarified complex interactions arising from war and peace, examining the range of perceptions and misperceptions, prejudices and stereotypes, and of course borrowings and accommodations that have come into play and which govern today's fraught and unequal relationship between the West and Islam. How these two very different civilizations will come to terms that satisfy the demands and values of them both is now one of the world's more urgent questions.

In the historic days of its glory; Islam was the more dominant of the two. Muslim scholars preserved the learning of the classical world, and built on it; Lewis speaks of "their enterprise and their openness." Muslim armies conquered at all points of the compass. Why, Lewis asks, did the discoverers of America sail from Spain and not a Muslim Atlantic port as might have been expected? Machiavelli and Guiccardini both feared that the Ottoman Turks were destined to occupy Italy. Writing in the 1550s, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor to Ottoman Turkey, sounded a modern note of doom. The West displayed public poverty, license and debauchery, while the Ottomans had unity and discipline. Worse, "the enemy is accustomed to victory, and we to defeat." A prototype of the 20th-century Cold War was waged as the West defended itself against the threat of further Muslim encroachments in eastern Europe and the Balkans. In the 17th century, as Lewis records, raiding parties from North Africa were still seizing slaves from England and Ireland, and even from Iceland.

Western nations won this early cold war convincingly. Over two centuries, Russia, Britain and France, and finally Holland, Spain and Italy, pushed the Muslims back and carved empires out for themselves at the expense of the Islamic world, conquering and absorbing Muslim states from northwest Africa to the East Indies. By the end of the 19th century, the two surviving Muslim powers, Ottoman Turkey and pre-Pahlavi Iran, were wrecks in need of re-invention. Only these two countries and such remote, inhospitable parts of the Muslim world as inner Arabia and Afghanistan, remained free from occupation by a foreign and Christian power. Contrary to Busbecq's prediction, it was the Muslims who became accustomed to defeat, and the West to victory.

For Muslims, public acknowledgement that their civilization had failed was inescapable. The world was no longer rightfully ordered, as it had been in so many previous centuries, and the shame of it cut painfully deep. Theirs is what anthropologists call a shame society, in which acquisition of honor and the converse, avoidance of shame, are the keys to motivation. These values serve to distort reality by imposing false heroism and equally false self-denigration. Muslims everywhere duly came to despise their own impotence in the face of unbelievers. The internalization of this emotion remains today the continuing cause of Muslim rage.

In one country after another, nationalist movements formed with the aim of ousting foreign occupiers and recovering self-respect and independence. As a result of the world wars, and the accompanying loss of power and moral authority, the European empires all collapsed. Seemingly, the world of Islam had won a reprieve, a second chance to prosper as a civilization of its own. Instead of freedom, however, independence has brought Muslim countries a series of unrelieved wars against neighbors of all denominations (Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and African animists); and also a series of unrelieved aggressions and civil wars among Muslims. Worst of all, independence has brought the rule of the autocrat and the secret police, injustice, corruption and torture. The barbarity is worse than what went before, and there is no civilization worthy of the name: No high culture, no serious art, no remotely modern medicine, no world-class scientific research, but instead the general frustration of the creative energies of millions of lively and intelligent people. Something has all too evidently gone wrong.