tejek,
re:I don't know Lewis
Bernard Lewis, 85 year old professor emeritus at Princeton University, is the universally acknowledged dean of Middle East studies in the West, so it is only fitting and proper that we turn to him to tell us "what went wrong" in the Islamic world to breed the hatred and violence that was so horrifically brought home to the United States on September 11th. The fascinating case he makes here is that the early success of Islam has actually been a bane rather than a blessing, retarding the development of the Muslim Middle East and resulting in a particularly anxious reaction to the rise to world dominance of the West.
Mr. Lewis begins, as he is always careful to do, by calling our attention to the preeminence that the Islamic world once enjoyed. He pays homage to the civilization they created and justifies the enormous pride they took in their achievements :
For centuries the world view and self-view of Muslims seemed well grounded. Islam represented the greatest military power
on earth--its armies, at the very same time, were invading Europe and Africa, India and China. It was the foremost economic
power in the world, trading in a wide range of commodities through a far-flung network of commerce and communications in
Asia, Europe, and Africa; importing slaves and gold from Africa, slaves and wool from Europe, and exchanging a variety of
foodstuffs, materials, and manufactures with the civilized countries of Asia. It had achieved the highest level so far in human
history in the arts and sciences of civilization. Inheriting the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece, and
of Persia, it added to them new and important innovations from outside, such as use and manufacture of paper from China
and decimal positional numbering from India. It is difficult to imagine modern literature or science without one or the other.
It was in the Islamic Middle East that Indian numbers were for the first time incorporated in the inherited body of mathematical
learning. From the Middle East they were transmitted to the West, where they are still known as Arabic numerals, honoring not
those who invented them but those who first brought them to Europe. To this rich inheritance scholars and scientists in the Islamic
world added an immensely important contribution through their own observations, experiments, and ideas. In most of the arts
and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world, relying on Arabic
versions even for many otherwise unknown Greek works.
But he also notes that even before the Renaissance, the West had begun to progress rapidly and soon caught up, then passed, and eventually came to dominate--militarily, economically and culturally--the Islamic world. Thus :
In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that
things had indeed gone badly wrong. Compared with its millennial rival, Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor,
weak, and ignorant. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the primacy and therefore the dominance of the West
was clear for all to see, invading the Muslim in every aspect of his public and--more painfully-even his private life.
This provides the conceptual framework within which we must seek to understand the anti-Western, and particularly anti-American, animus that seems to have become the defining feature of much of Middle Eastern culture. Obviously, from a Muslim perspective, something went terribly wrong. In an analysis that has profound implications for the future, Mr. Lewis traces the causes of this decline to the very roots of the Islamic past.
In its simplest terms, Mr. Lewis's argument is that the success of Muhammad in establishing not merely the Muslim religion, but also a state dominated by that faith, served to create a society that is totalitarian by its very nature, bound by rules and strictures that make it too static to adapt and compete with a West where Christianity, in contrast, does not demand control over the political and economic spheres. The problem is to be found at the very foundations of the respective faiths :
The absence of a native secularism in Islam, and the widespread Muslim rejection of an imported secularism inspired by
Christian example, may be attributed to certain profound differences of belief and experience in the two cultures.
The first, and in many ways the most profound difference, from which all others follow, can be seen in the contrasting
foundation myths--and I use this expression without intending any disrespect--of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The
children of Israel fled from bondage, and wandered for 40 years in the wilderness before they were permitted to enter
the Promised Land. Their leader Moses had only a glimpse, and was not himself permitted to enter. Jesus was humiliated
and crucified, and his followers suffered persecution and martyrdom for centuries, before they were finally able to win over
the ruler, and to adapt the state, its language, and its institutions to their purpose. Muhammad achieved victory and triumph
in his own lifetime. He conquered his promised land, and created his own state, of which he himself was supreme sovereign.
As such, he promulgated laws, dispensed justice, levied taxes, raised armies, made war, and made peace. In a word, he
ruled, and the story of his decisions and actions as ruler is sanctified in Muslim scripture and amplified in Muslim tradition.
In a sense, Judaism and Christianity had the concept of the secular state forced upon them by circumstance from their very beginnings, whereas in Islam the eventual separation of church and state will mark a tremendous departure from the system established by the Prophet. Where Christian theologians like St. Augustine developed complex theories to explain and justify the secular state, Muslim thinkers never even had to face the dilemma. Little wonder then that modern Muslims are so reluctant to take this necessary step.
There is another important effect to consider, of the failure to separate church and state in the Islamic world. The faith itself has become implicated in the decline of Islam relative to the West. For quite some time, the Muslim Middle East, which still boasted the expansive Ottoman Empire, was able to more or less ignore the developments in the West, but finally in the 1800s when Western texts began to be translated into Turkish, they had to take notice :
With the crumbling of the language barrier direct observation of the West was now possible, and an increased recognition and
more intimate awareness of European wealth and strength. The question now was more specific--what is the source of this wealth
and strength, the talisman of western success? Traditional answers to such a question would have been in religious terms. All
problems are so to speak ultimately religious, and all final answers are therefore religious. The final answers given by traditional
writers to the older formulation of the question were always 'let us go back to our roots, to the good old ways, to the true faith,
to the word of God.' With that of course there was always the assumption that if things are going badly, we are being punished
by God for having abandoned the true path. That argument loses cogency when it is the infidels who are benefiting from the change.
Middle Easterners found it difficult to consider what we might call civilizational or cultural answers to this question. To preach a
return to authentic, pristine Islam was one thing; to seek the answer in Christian ways or ideas was another--and, according to the
notions of the time, self-evidently absurd. Muslims were accustomed to regard Christianity as an earlier, corrupted version of
the true faith of which Islam was the final perfection. One does not go forward by going backward. There must therefore be
some circumstance other than religion or culture, which is part of religion, to account for the otherwise unaccountable superiority
achieved by the Western world.
This can not have been other than shocking to the Islamic world, this sudden realization that the infidels were outdistancing the faithful. As Mr. Lewis writes, there have been many attempts to explain away this turn of events, many of them centered around conspiracy theories, but several hundred years on, and with the nations of Asia too having surpassed the Middle East in terms of economic development, such theories are no longer tenable.
So we are arrived at the present moment and it seems inarguable that the Islamic world does find itself in dire straits, falling further and further behind the West. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it seems, because many Muslim states are able to paper over their real weakness thanks to their enormous oil revenues. Remove this source of state income and just imagine how awful the economic situation would be in the Middle East. In her book Islam : A Short History, religious scholar Karen Armstrong explains where Muslims find purpose in their lives and religion :
In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Koran, gave them a historical mission. Their chief
duty was to create a just community in which all members, even the most weak and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect.
The experience of building such a society and living in it would give them intimations of the divine, because they would be living
in accordance with God's will. A Muslim had to redeem history, and that meant that state affairs were not a distraction from
spirituality but the stuff of religion itself. The political well-being of the Muslim community was a matter of supreme importance.
Like any religious ideal, it was almost impossibly difficult to implement in the flawed and tragic conditions of history, but after
each failure Muslims had to get up and begin again.
Mr. Lewis, though he does a terrific job of explaining what has happened to disrupt the well-being of the Muslim community, does not really offer solutions to the current crisis. But how, we must ask, can Islam begin again?
If the analysis Mr. Lewis presents is accurate--and one would note, we've yet to hear a better explanation of what went wrong--then Islam is faced with only three possibilities :
(1) Islam can retreat into isolation and try to ignore the rest of the world--sort of the North Korea option.
(2) Islam can fight the rest of the world and try to return humankind to a kind of pre-modern status, plunge us backward
toward the point where we were when Islam was briefly regnant.
or,
(3) Islam can submit itself, at least partially, to the process of secularization, which will be rapidly abetted by the forces
of globalization, and undergo a radical Reformation.
The first option seems unrealistic based on what we know of human beings. If nothing else, the Islamic world is too geographically widespread to really isolate itself and too dependent on oil revenues to withdraw completely. The second is foolhardy, because the West will inevitably win this struggle and may then simply force option three upon a defeated and depopulated Islamic world.
That leaves the third option, certainly the most desirable from our perspective, but one which requires a series of steps which will be truly wrenching, and which have only previously occurred in the Islamic world when a pro-Western dictator controlled the countries involved and secularized against the will of the people (Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Iran under the Shah, laying the ground work for today's Iran which is at least groping towards some kind of secularization). This process--which can hopefully be done more democratically than in those prior instances and which we could think of as an Islamic Reformation--will involve decoupling the Muslim faith and clerisy from the political state and from the economy. It will mean that government will not always act in accord with Islamic tradition, and may not even make a pretense of trying to maintain some of those traditions. It will require the acceptance of less economic equality (egalitarianism is central to Islamic economic teachings), in exchange for greater wealth and rising living standards in the entire society. It will entail making women full participants in Islamic society. It will require accepting the existence of Israel, but will guarantee the creation of a Palestinian state. Most of all, it will require acceptance of the idea that Islam itself will decline somewhat in popularity, and in its centrality to society, and that it will suffer some significant doctrinal alterations, all of which has happened to Judaism and Christianity in the West. In turn, the culture will display certain inevitable signs of moral degradation as people are freed from strict observance of Islamic law. It is unfortunate but true that as people's material wants are sated, their spiritual needs seem to change, and their willingness to follow strict moral codes deteriorates.
However, one would like to think that the Islamic states could actually improve upon the Western example in this regard. Many Muslims are justifiably repelled by much of Western culture, particularly : the sex, drugs, and violence; the disintegration of families; and the overemphasis on individuals at the expense of a coherent and cohesive society. But they now have a unique opportunity to learn from our mistakes and to try to avoid the worst of these problems. Imagine, for instance, if a Muslim nation adopted a constitution which at the same time that it reduced the control of Islamic law over the purely political and economic spheres, enunciated that it was the intention of the state to still vindicate the most important ethical and moral precepts of the faith in the social sphere. Where the American Constitution has a Bill of Rights that declares certain individual liberties to be beyond the control of the state and the society; an Islamic constitution might, in addition, contain explicit provisions that protect certain Islamic practices and moral decrees from interference by the state. Such an innovation might enable these states to combine greater freedoms with higher purpose, to free up the energies, imaginations, and productive capacities of their peoples, while also keeping them focused on working toward achieving a morally and spiritually centered society. In the end, such a regime might enable them to more fully realize the kind of just community which their faith demands of them, one which creates material wealth more efficiently than does their current system, but which retains its unique Islamic character. If they could accomplish this bold vision, Islam, which seven hundred years ago led the West toward the Enlightenment, might again blaze a trail toward a brighter future for all mankind. In this book, Bernard Lewis has ably described what has gone wrong in the Islamic world; it is long past time for them, and us, to start addressing these problems. |
