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Summary: Start here...
Review: If you are interested in trying to find a legitimate and intelligent point of view about the complex history of the most important conflict facing the world - and particularly the West -today, you have got to start with Bernard Lewis. First of all, Mr. Lewis is probably the foremost Mid-East scholar writing in English today. His knowledge extends to having read all his bibliographic source material in their original Arabic. He is not relying on imperfect translations. His analyses are not polemical in nature but judicious and calmly reasoned. Rather than overt and biased accusations, he gives a very succinct and lucid view of the origins and effects of the contacts made between Islam and the West from the 8th Century to the 20th Century. There are parts of this book which perhaps rely a bit too much on the reader's familiarity with history in general (hence the four stars). But all in all, I learned a great deal about the sources of frustration in the Arab world, the beginnings of the deep envy leading to outright hatred of the West and its centuries of superiority over the Middle-East which has increased since the decline of that once-great civilization and its near extinction with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. In this book there is no excusing the Arab/Islamist societies for their atrocities, just a very even-tempered - and necessarily brief - sketch of the fundamental differences and their historic origins which moved these two societies - Arab/Persian/Turk and Western European - into the adversarial positions they have today. If you read Bernard Lewis first, then you can feel more confident when you read something which is more overtly polemical, like Michael Ledeen's The Terror Masters (which I will be reviewing in the next few days). Don't fear this book. You will be rewarded with the knowledge that you have been forearmed with enough information to make up your own minds and take a position in any discussion about this very difficult and emotional subject.
Rating: 
Summary: What went wrong with this book?
Review: Mr. Lewis provides no answer to the question 'What went wrong'. None. Not even some guesses. Book is filled with mildly interested anecdotes of Turkish history. Save your money for something else.
Rating: 
Summary: Convincing Analysis
Review: Bernard Lewis does an excellent job of interpreting the decline of Muslim civilization through the lens of history. Every point is illustrated using specific examples, usually with firsthand accounts from European travelers to the Middle East, Persia and Turkey or Muslim travelers to Europe. The author has clearly done a tremendous amount of research on the subject. The divide between the West and the Arab/Muslim world has gotten to be so personal, especially after September 11, that many refuse to objectively assess its origins. That is why I found this book to be so refreshing and eye opening. Unfortunately, the people for whom this book would be most useful, namely the citizens of failing Middle Eastern states, will probably never even here about it. As the author explains, it is much easier to blame others than to ask yourself "what went wrong."
Rating: 
Summary: He Doesn't Know
Review: I trust Lewis' credentials, but he does not answer the question in "What Went Wrong." After a couple hundred pages, I get the impression that it had something to do with the Ottoman Empire. After all, for 400 years Constantinople made no effort to decentralize its absolute authority over Middle East colonies, nor to develop their economies. I guess after centuries of lassitude and imperialist interference, the former intellectual glories of Arabia were buried. But what about since 1917? Russia, Japan, and America all rose to become new world powers; the Arabs did not. Lewis does not supply a credible explanation for this. If you read Patai's "The Arab Mind" you get the impression that it's due to some inbred fault of Arabs not to accept responsibilty for their condition nor to take appropriate steps. The real reason for what went wrong probably has more to do with location, population sparsity, and unenlightened autocracy. Mostly, the same conditions that exist today.
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Summary: Steps up to the plate..
Review: I've just bought this and haven't read it yet.
So why this review?
The author steps up to a plate that few would occupy, asking questions that need to be answered. However, before I or anyone else reads this book, I recommend a brief but comprehensive course in Middle-Eastern history written by one who was not only there but shaped and witnessed the beginnings of September 11: T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (OK, you are already at Amazon.com..what is so hard about buying it too.). Read and understand Lawrence (its tough, but don't cheat and see Lawrence of Arabia; the movie missed the analysis in the book). Pay careful attention to the Sykes-Piquot agreement that Lawrence witnessed - and subsequently almost got court-martialled by Allenby for criticizing. That agreement was ratified in 1922..on September 11th. Something bin Laden muttered about the 80 year struggle? Now read on.. Once you are done come back and tackle Lewis' questions. This viewpoint is just my suggestion. This is a democracy, so to ignore me completely or hold opposing opinions is a right enshrined in our society..which leads neatly into Lewis' work.. ..enjoy your freedom to read and think.
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Summary: Bernard Lewis needs to Retire
Review: I cannot believe that the Amazon reviewer calls Bernard Lewis the West's greatest historian. Academics in the West (of which I am one) particularly Europe, consider Lewis to be bigoted, reductionist, and completely mired in tired old Orientalist triumphal cliches. He makes huge generalizations about cultures from Nigeria to the Soviet Union, portrays "Islam" as one monolithic thing in a way that he would never do about Christianity, and cannot accept that any culture -- even a peaceful, democratic culture -- other than his own has any value or validity. If you want more knowledge about Islam and Modernity, try any of John Esposito's books (he's a religion prof at Georgetown and director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding). If you want to know how Islam is reduced to a cliche in the Western media, try "Covering Islam" by Edward Said. Don't read writings like this one, that come from a "colonizer's" point of view -- i.e., they're inferior, they need to drop their own culture and adopt ours and be ruled by us.
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Summary: How the West Won
Review: What Went Wrong? At the turn of the first millenium, Europe was still in the midst of the Dark Ages. The Roman World was gone. And in the European medeival world little was being developed in science, art or literature. But in the Near East civilization, flourished. The Arab/Muslim world was developing astronomy, mathematics, science. Muslim military achievement far surpassed that of Western Europe. The European crusades were failures. But the Muslim jihads were not. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Moors conquered Spain and Portugal and invaded France and Sicily. In 1453 Constatinople fell, and with it, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. By 1539, Ottoman armies were laying siege to Vienna. By all appearances, it was to be an Islamic millenium. But by the year 2000, the combined gross national products of the Middle Eastern Arab nations did not equal that of Finland. What happened? Or from the Muslim perspective: "What went wrong? Who did this to us?" Bernard Lewis doesn't answer this question directly. He lays out the facts and lets the reader figure it out. Some possible reasons: The Mongol invasions, the failure to remain true to the basic tenets of Mohammedism, inbreeding, a lack of mineral resources, the desertification of the fertile crescent. What I took from the book is that the answer is cultural. Western Civilization is smarter and superior because our culture is based on 2 millennia of searching for the truth in science, philosophy, mathematics and politics, beginning in Greece. Our culture supports debate and dissent, and out of that comes the best art, science and industry. And our soldiers -- beginning with the 300 Spartans under Leonidas at the pass at Thermopylae -- have historically held the thin red line against numerically superior enemies from the East. It's not just discipline -- the Mongols and the Muslims had that. It is the intelligent, democratic discipline of armies comprised of citizen-soldiers and political and economic organizations where everyone has a voice.
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Summary: A succinct, compelling and readable delineation
Review: Professor Lewis of Princeton University is a world-renown authority on the history of the Middle East and the author of many books on the subject. Here he expands on lectures given at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna in 1999 to explore and answer the question of why the preeminent culture in the world during the Middle Ages has become the laggard culture of modern times. Lewis' point of departure for the lectures can perhaps be taken from page 152: "By all the 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." (p. 152) The question of course is why? Lewis' answer points not to Western imperialism nor the much earlier Mongol invasions, believing them to be "a consequence, not a cause, of the inner weakness of Middle-Eastern states and societies." He notes, first that "the greatest achievements of the Muslim peoples, notably in Iran, came after, not before, the Mongol invasions." Then he points to the "postimperial development of former British possessions...Singapore and Hong Kong...the various lands that once made up the British Empire in India," success stories that cause us to wonder why the Middle East did not recover as well. (pp. 152-152) Lewis makes no clear unequivocal statement about who and/or what is to blame, but it is not Islam itself, he believes, although much of the evidence he presents certainly suggests that some characteristics of Islam are indeed part of the cause, in particular the inability of the Muslim mind to find a way to separate the secular from the religious. Lewis notes that nowhere in the Qu'ran is there anything like the Biblical injunction to "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." (p. 97) He adds, "The idea that...any part of human life is in any sense outside the scope of religious law and jurisdiction is alien to Muslim thought." A contributing factor in Lewis' view is the imperfect and selective adoption of Western ways, especially the rise of Western-style nation states with autocratic rulers. He hints that shari'a law itself may also be a factor, writing, "There is [in Islam]...no distinction between cannon law and civil law, between the law of the church and the law of the state, crucial in Christian history." (p. 100) In the "Conclusion" Lewis writes, "For others, the main culprit is Muslim sexism, and the relegation of women to an inferior position in society, thus depriving the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people." He notes that still others point very interestingly to "the depredations of the goat that, by stripping the bark off trees and tearing up grass by the roots, turned once fertile lands into deserts." Or to, "the exhaustion of precious metals, coinciding with the discovery and exploitation by Europe of the resources of the new world." In this connection he asks, "Why did the discoverers of America sail from Spain and not a Muslim Atlantic port, where such voyages were indeed attempted in earlier times? (pp. 156-157) For Muslims themselves there is the "blame game" which increasingly points to the Jews and the Americans as the cause of all their troubles. Lewis notes, "For the governments, at once oppressive and ineffectual, that rule much of the Middle East, this game serves a useful, indeed an essential purpose--to explain the poverty that they have failed to alleviate and to justify the tyranny that they have intensified. In this way they seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects against other, outer targets." (p. 159) In this regard, Lewis points to "the events of 1948--the failure of five Arab states and armies to prevent half a million Jews from establishing a state in the debris of the British Mandate for Palestine" as a shock. He adds, "it was bad enough to be defeated by the great imperial powers of the West; to suffer the same fate at the hands of...Jews was an intolerable humiliation." (p. 154) The situation in the Middle East today is one of sadness and irony: the profits from all those oil riches go not to the people but to the ruling elites while the oil itself is used to power the economies of the west and far east. Meanwhile, the poor get poorer and more desperate to find a target for their frustration. Eventually, I suspect they will realize that blaming the Jews and the West for their troubles is fruitless and they must take a look at themselves and especially their dictatorial, theocratic, monarchical rulers for a solution. The day is coming when the great economies of the world will finally give up their oil addiction. It is too bad that the money from that oil is not now going toward training and educating the people of the Middle East in preparation for that time.
Rating:
Summary: "Must read" for anyone, post - September 11
Review: Other current books on "The Middle East" are too long, and are short on substance. This book reverses that -- only 161 pages of text, and they are packed. Of the several books which I myself have read since the events of "September 11", I recommend this -- far more than any of the others -- as a "must read" for anyone with any concerns about all of that. Read something on security, something on terrorism, something on the latest thinking on 3rd world development, something on civil rights, and this book... Lewis offers one of the most cogent remedies I have seen for the current general Middle East situation, one applicable outside the Middle East as well: "Secularism in the Christian world was an attempt to resolve the long and destructive struggle of church and state. Separation, adopted in the American and French Revolutions and elsewhere after that, was designed to prevent two things: the use of religion by the state to reinforce and extend its authority; and the use of the state power by the clergy to impose their doctrines and rules on others. This is a problem long seen as purely Christian, not relevant to Muslims or for that matter to Jews, for whom a similar problem has arisen in Israel. Looking at the contemporary Middle East, both Muslim and Jewish, one must ask whether this is still true -- or whether Muslims and Jews may perhaps have caught a Christian disease and might therefore consider a Christian remedy." pp. 115-116 History and politics and social attitudes and then some are covered, in this little book. The format is an extension of a lecture series which Lewis delivered in Vienna in 1999 -- and so the text is entirely free of the emotive and hysterical hyperbole which characterizes so much that has been written "since 9/11". The seven short chapters consider themes such as "The Lessons of the Battlefield", "Social and Cultural Barriers", "Modernization and Social Equality", and "Secularism and the Civil Society". A great variety is covered in the short space -- antique clocks and watches, different methods of dating and measurement and their effects. The distance a man could walk in an hour was the Arabic "marhala", Lewis says, making me wonder whether that might not be the derivation of our medieval and modern term "march" -- as in "the Spanish march" or "the troops marched" -- as vs. or maybe in addition to my Webster's "L. marcus, a hammer"... Lewis is, as always, careful with his personal views. The book's "Conclusion", rather than being a prescription for action, more usefully is a listing of all of the various scapegoats and solutions currently under consideration regarding the problems of the Middle Eastern world. Anyone can -- and nowadays ought -- to read that and get something from it, regardless of what their own personal view is, and regardless of what they believe Lewis' own to be. The "Conclusion" chapter greatly broadens both the understanding and the debate. As does the rest of this book. The history is fascinating, and Lewis' facility with words makes it come alive. His scholarship adds to this -- as for example in a poignant quotation from the memoirs of a Viennese ambassador to the Sublime Port, who tried desperately to keep his hosts from awakening him too early -- "I dealt with this annoyance by forbidding the Turks to disturb me in future... I explained to them that I had clocks... they arrived in the early morning, and, waking my valet, begged him to go and ask me 'what the fingers of my timepiece said'..." Middle Easterners will find Lewis condescending. His enemies will find him infuriating. His favorite phrase, "of course", appears on nearly every page. His intimidating erudition, and stories like the one above, will rile sensitivities. But those sensitivities should be shelved, now, and Lewis read, by anyone -- Middle Eastern or other -- who wishes to search for some solutions to the current mess there. Lewis offers many, and is very careful and even cagey about disguising which among them are the ones which he himself favors. Except for freedom: Lewis' passages about that, in this text, are eloquent to the point of meriting memorization -- for example, "To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom -- freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny -- that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world." And except for secularization, and the separation of church and state... Lewis is emphatic on this subject, as originally noted here -- a lesson which needs refreshing in some nations outside of the Middle East as well.
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Summary: Insights into the Decline of Islamic Civilization
Review: Lewis crams a lot of useful and insightful information into this 160 pg. book but he also makes some glaring omissions. I do not recall his discussing terrorism but one can still gain insight into the motivation of terrorists from reading this book. I am puzzled that he does not mention the role of oil in 20th Century Middle Eastern history nor does he bother to explain why he omits such a discussion. In a later discussion of culture, he gives a distorted view of the influence of Western music. Basically hwe says there has been very little. The small exceptions he lists are the classical musician Donizetti and a brief mention at the end that rock may have some future influence. In fact, Rai music, which goes back to at least the 1920s in Algeria, was greatly influenced by American jazz and blues and a more contemporary version that emerged in the 1980s featured amplified blues and rock and contemporary dance beats mixed with Middle Eastern sounds. Ofra Haza of Yemen and later Israel and other stars have also incorporated contemporary Western dance beats and electrified and synthesized sounds. Ali Hassan Kuban of Egypt has worked with hip hop artists and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan of Pakistan has incorporated many Western sounds into his Qawwali religious music. Sudanese Muslim musicians have incorporated reggae, other Middle Eastern musicians have recorded with members of the Rolling Stones in the 1960s and Led Zeppelin in the 1990s. There have been other incorporations of contemporary jazz and some classical music. I could go on but the point has been made.
Lewis makes interesting observations about how Islam was perceived by its followers as a perfection of Judaism and Christianity and, as such, followers were blind to the philosophical underpinnings of Western scientific advances from the Renaissance till the present day. This is because they assumed that philosophy was a mere adjunct of theology and they were certain that they had a superior theology. In addition, in the early years of Islam, Muslim scientists made advances over the West and also introduced the idea of experimentation as a tool of scientific inquiry. The West, however, would later advance the concept of the scientific method. It seems though that many of the ideas of these Middle Eastern thinkers were not widely disseminated and by the time of the Renaissance, many ideas had no influence at all until they were later picked up by Westerners--for example the idea of the circulation of blood developed by Ibn al-Nafis in the 13th Century, picked up by Servetus (burned at the stake by Calvin) in the early 16th and finally advanced and spread by William Harvey in the early 17th Century. One reason why such ideas were not spread in the Middle East was the notion that printing was somehow blasphemous--a little printing was done in the 17th and a great deal more by the 19thCentury but the damage had already been done. In the 20th Century, the Middle East has witnessed further humiliation. As Asia has emerged economically, etc. The Middle East has fallen further back in relation to other nations. There has been a tendency to blame others going back to the Mongol invasion of the 13th Century. In the first half of the 20th Century, Britain and France were seen as the culprits and since then the Americans have emerged as the chief scapegoat which is not to say that Western and American imperialism have not been real factors in Middle Eastern history. Antisemitism did not emerge as a serious problem there until 1933 when Hitler made a concerted effort to spread his poisonous ideas to the Middle East. Subsequent history involving Israel has only exacerbated the problem.
The lack of a concept of separation of Church and State has also been a problem. Religious controversies in Christianity resulted in centuries of prolonged warfare which finally led to the realization of the need to separate Church and State. Islam has been relativley free of theological disagreements and the major division between Sunnis and Shiites involves a civil issue of Mohammed's descendants and who should inhereit political power. In addition, Mohammed was successful in spreading Islam in his lifetime and was also able to establish a powerful political state with himself at the helm. Thus religion and the state went together naturally. In contrast, Moses wandered in the desert for 40 yrs. and never entered the Promised Land; Christ died on the Cross and Christians were a weak and persecuted sect for the next few hundred years. Christ also said "Render onto God what is God's and onto Caesar what is Caesar's" Thus it is easier for these 2 religions to reconcile separation of Church and State.
Lewis also observes that the rise of Women's Rights has not only been slower in the Middle East but paradoxically, it has advanced further in the most oppressive regimes and less in more tolerant nations such as Egypt. The Modern state has also taken away rights, power, and influence that womenonce held informally. Muslim women have historically been allowed to have property and used it to create institutions through charity such as soup lines and even colleges. Now the state has taken over these institutions. There is a great deal more of interest in this book but space limits further discussion. What Went Wrong is recommended reading.
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