>>February 17, 2002
What Went Wrong?
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Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
Bernard Lewis
Oxford University Press, 180 pages, $23
Reviewed by Carlin Romano
As every sharp student of civilization knows, much depends on dinner. If only the man sitting next to Osama bin Laden at his notorious videotaped post-mortem had been the great Near Eastern studies scholar Bernard Lewis – not another hate-filled Saudi ideologue – perhaps the al-Qaida ringmaster would now be rethinking his career choice.
You say the notion of supreme theocratic leaders, such as Iran's Ayatollah Khameini, is a Christian implant that violates traditional Islam?
That Islam's historic stance toward infidels is to show greater tolerance than Christianity offered heretics?
That Islamic civilization's decline by almost all modern measures – industrial output, artistic achievement, political freedom – should be blamed on dubious late-developing features of Islam?
Well, one can dream. Most likely, Lewis – whose scholarly controversies with Edward Said over orientalism made him a household name among intellectuals in the 1980s – would have ended up part of the after-dinner entertainment.
The bad guys have never laid a hand on him, however, permitting Lewis to repackage his erudition into this compact exploration of Islam's decline, completed before Sept. 11 and so timely only in its implications.
"For many centuries," Lewis writes in his introduction, "the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement." By the medieval era, it "achieved the highest level so far in human history in the arts and sciences," and offered a culture "polyethnic, multiracial, international." By comparison, "medieval Europe was a pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world. ...
"And then, suddenly," Lewis says, "the relationship changed." Europe, as it approached the Renaissance, advanced "by leaps and bounds, leaving the scientific and technological and eventually the cultural heritage of the Islamic world far behind."
Today, Lewis reports, "the countries in the region still lag behind in investment, job creation, productivity, and therefore in exports and incomes. According to a World Bank estimate, the total exports of the Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, a country of five million inhabitants."
In "What Went Wrong?" Lewis presents scholarly answers to the title question while ruminating on clashing cultural characteristics of Islam and the West.
One traditional cause put forth is that Islam remained "inclined to dismiss the denizens of the lands beyond the Western frontier as benighted barbarians, much inferior even to the more sophisticated Asian infidels to the east." Because of that disdain, rooted in the belief that Westerners had "nothing of any value to contribute," the Islamic world failed to learn from Western scientific achievement or to emulate Western curiosity.
Over centuries, for instance, while Western powers "maintained offices, then consulates, and eventually embassies in the East," the Ottoman Empire, swayed by Muslim jurists hostile to the idea of Muslims living in an infidel state, did not reciprocate, leaving them on the short end of the knowledge exchange.
A second reason ventured for Islam's decline is its failure to disentangle religion and the state. In Islam, from the beginning, "The state was the church and the church was the state, and God was head of both." Christendom, by contrast, began with Jesus' admonition to distinguish between God and Caesar. While it took centuries for ascendant Christendom to return to that teaching, many historians think "the principal cause of Western progress is the separation of church and state."
To Lewis' mind, Islam compounded religion's interference with politics by also violating its own tenets. "The actions and utterances of the Prophet," he writes, "the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit."
But just as the Islamic Middle East proved "reluctant" to accept European science, after which "independent inquiry virtually came to an end," Islam could not keep to the egalitarianism of its own sacred text. States became dynastic, as with Saudi Arabia and its Western-imposed royal family.
In some states, such as Iran, Lewis sees this as ironic blasphemy: "If the rulers of the Islamic Republic but knew it, what they are doing is Christianizing Islam in an institutional sense, though not of course in any religious sense. They have already endowed Iran with the functional equivalents of a pontificate, a college of cardinals, a bench of bishops, and, especially, an inquisition, all previously alien to Islam."
The sad result, Lewis notes, is that the Middle East today is riddled with regimes "that have failed every test except survival." But he's not done. Causes of Islamic decline, it appears, are as numerous as Saudi princes.
Some who ponder the subject, Lewis writes, believe "the main culprit is ... relegation of women to an inferior position in society." It has the result of "depriving the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people, and entrusting the crucial early years of the upbringing of the other half to illiterate and downtrodden mothers. The products of such an education ... are likely to grow up either arrogant or submissive, and unfit for a free, open society."
Historians being historians, the causes go on and on: "(T)he exhaustion of precious metals, coinciding with the discovery and exploitation by Europe of the resources of the new world; inbreeding, due to the prevalence of cousin marriage, especially in the countryside; the depredations of the goat that, by stripping the bark off trees and tearing up grass by the roots, turned once fertile lands into desert."
Finally, there is the all-too-human tendency to blame others. The most notable example is modern Arabic anti-Semitism, which Lewis, like many scholars, sees as a foreign implant that grew rapidly when the Nazi effort to "disseminate European-style anti-Semitism in the Arab world" found ready listeners among Muslims eager for scapegoats.
All of this, Lewis remarks, suggests that the right question to ask today is not, "What has Islam done to the Muslims?" but "What have the Muslims done to Islam?"
He ends with a warning.
"If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination; perhaps from a new Europe reverting to old ways, perhaps from a resurgent Russia, perhaps from some new expanding superpower in the East."
It's a sobering picture, delivered with persuasive detail and respect. Bernard Lewis comes not to bury Islam, but to praise what it once was – and might be again.
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