Rating: 
Summary: What Lewis Knows
Review: I read somewhere that you should read about 20 books a year. I'm not going to make that quota but if I have only read one book this year then I'm glad it's Lewis' chilling account of the decline and fall of Muslem civilization. In clear, precise prose Lewis explains the reasons behind the current lag in prosperity between the west and Muslem countries. (As best as I remember it the reasons are (1)closed societies, (2)lack of opportunity for women, and (3)Muslem views about art.) To say I learned a lot from reading this book would be an understatement. Like many people, I was not aware of the tremendous contributions Muslem civilizations made to scientific and cultural advances in the west. I was also not aware of the disdain that Muslem civilations had for non-Muslem culture. Taken together, these two facts helps me better understand the anger and shame that fuels much of the conflict in the Middle East and the war in Afganistan. That understanding alone is worth the price of the book. Lewis wisely refrain from giving advice about what went wrong with Muslem societies. His book looks backward and traces the rise and fall of this once great civilization. Lewis points out that at one time Muslems were more tolerant of Jews than were their Christian contempories. He also accurately charts when the decline began. (Again, as nearly as I can remember, around the time of Western exploration and exploitation of the new world. The Muslem disdain for infidels made them lose out on this opportunity at new riches.) Lewis also points out that middle eastern societies realized that they were lagging behind and hastily began to study western institutions in an attempt to duplicate their successes. Not, as Lewis points out, an attempt to bring western institutions into their culture, but simply an attempt to understand and replicate
within the constraints of their own cultures. Of course, this reasoning has failed spectacularly. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants an informed discussion of Muslem civilations. However, this book is only a starting point and not an ending. Serious thought and reflection on the middle east is up to the informed individual. As Lewis writes in his last sentence in the book, if Muslems want to change their society it is up to them. And if informed discussion about the middle east is what the reader is after, it is up to the individual to seek it out. I would say begin with "What Went Wrong".
Rating: 
Summary: Wrong question, no answer!
Review: Bernard Lewis's earlier book, "The Muslim Discovery Of Europe",was wonderful, a revelation of what can be learned by examining history from an unfamiliar point of view. The current book, "What Went Wrong?", adds nothing to the former. Based on three lectures delivered in German, the new book repeatedly promises insights in one chapter which it forgets to deliver in the next. In short, it's poorly organized. A more serious objection, however, is that Professor Lewis directs almost all his attention to the achievements and failures of the governing classes and the intellectual elites of the Middle East, whom he seems to hold responsible for the stagnation of Islam. Meanwhile, he shows rather little awareness of "what went right" in Europe during the 1400 years since the first Muslim expansion. His own previous work revealed the extent to which the Golden Age of Islam was dependent on inheritances from the Roman Empire, and on the productivity of Greek Christians, Jews, Visigoths, and others who lived under Muslim domination. Since the perceived decline of Islam more or less begins with the final assimilation or suppression of those subject cultures, perhaps things were never as "right" as they seemed. Likewise, the Dark Ages of Europe were not as abject as Lewis's interpretation would have them. At the time of the Domesday Boke, for instance, in the rude north of 11th Century England, there were more water-powered MACHINES than in all the realms of Islam. In terms of labor efficiency, Europe had outpaced Islam by 950 AD. Any profound comparison of the histories of Islam and Europe must begin at the base of the social pyramid, not at the tip. In Europe, the "learning" of bookish monastics, based on classical authority, proved in the long wrong far less important than the "learning" of miners, sailors, metal-workers, and masons. Islam had its share of the learned elite, but where were its artisan-inventors like Gutenburg and self-taught engineers like Galileo? Asking the wrong questions, Lewis is unable to offer even a plausible hypothesis to account for the successes of Europe and the failures of Islam.
Rating:
Summary: What Went Wrong - food for thought, not pre-digested burger
Review: ..."The book is just a re-hashing of some lectures". Yes, indeed it feels that way, by slightly disjointed manner in which chapters follow each other. But Lewis never hides it! On contrary, he puts it right up front in the book. And what's wrong with well-edited and prepared lectures, that are , by the way, very good? "He doesn't answer the question he poses". Well... Dear fellow readers, we are looking at a subject of two mighty, over-millenium-old cultures in conflict. If someone expected easy answers to that - they were mistaken. I took this book for what it is - food for thought (a lot of it, to be sure). Read more, and more, and more; talk to other people; think. Then the answers may start coming to you. "Lewis is a mouthpiece of Turkish government". Unless Lewis uses some code language in his book, that makes many innocent- (or informative-) looking words and phrases take an entirely new meaning - I did not notice _any_ of that. He seems to be objective and fair, dedicating a great deal of time to discussing how those same Turks (represented by Ottoman Empire in those days) played large role in Muslim world's losing contest to the West. After answering these - I feel I've got nothing more to add...Four stars instead of five - this collection of lectures is several notches down from being brilliant enough to rank equal with a well-conceived and executed book.
Rating: 
Summary: Ludicrous Title
Review: This book, as others have noted, is a compendium of pleasant lectures issued by the publisher to capitalize on 9/11-mania. It doesn't come close to answering the question posed by the title (I wonder if Lewis played any role in choosing it). The book is a good introduction to the Arab world of the Middle Ages and the Ottoman Empire (two distinct topics). Unfortunately the work trails off at the beginning of the 20th century, and that's the period people must confront if they're going to develop intelligent questions to a subject which has no pat answers. Turkey (the modern day successor of the Ottoman Empire, which is mostly what Lewis' book is about), today, is clearly on the road to modernity, it's a member of NATO, a candidate for the EU, the culture is secular, educated, and politically sophisticated. If the roots of Islamic inferiority go back deep into history then Turkey today should be the mess it's clearly not. What made the Arab world different? Lewis' preoccupation with distant history gives him no space to examine events of the 20th century, and this was when striking differences emerged. Turkey was never occupied by European powers. The Arab world was. Turkey had a strong and popular nationalist leader who pulled that country into the modern age. Leaders in the Arab world who had similar aspirations were exiled, tossed in jail, overthrown, killed, or otherwise undermined by Western powers for decades. During the Cold War the West concluded that a strong Turkey was desirable as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Israel served that role in the Middle East. And so on. To read Lewis one would never guess that the Ottoman Empire conquored the Arab world and governed it as a subject power, or that Europeans tried to colonize the coast of north Africa and this involved the movement of millions of people, or that every country in the Middle East today was essentially created by the British and French as colonies and mandates after WW1 to further their imperial interests, and so on. Surely some of these facts are relevant to the question, "What went wrong". Lewis never meant for this book to be his definitive treatment of the problem and yet his earlier books suffer from similar flaws. His popularity seems to come from his belief that the US and Europe played no role in creating the modern Arab world. That might comfort some but such myopia is part of what went wrong. Lastly, the argument that the Islamic world can't develop verges on bigotry. Societal development, under the best circumstances, takes generations. The Arab world has been in the game for a very short time. Those who think, as Lewis seems to, that such societies can't develop should consider that people said exactly the same thing about China, Japan, even Germany, one or two centuries ago (and how does one explain Turkey?).
Rating:
Summary: provides useful information
Review: What went wrong provides a short history of the the development of the Middle East and Europe looking at things like civil society, industrializatin and modernity. The book looks at how the two regions developed differently in mainy aspects but if fairly short though and doesn't quite go into the depth it should like not mentioning the Ottaman influence in easter Europe or the European influence during imperialism and the defeat of the Ottaman empire in World War I. Overall, it provides a brief introduction into a much larger topic.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting background but missing analysis
Review: I agree with the reviewers who said the book is disjointed and fails to attempt to answer the question it asks. For someone like me who has very little knowledge of the Ottoman Empire (in fact, I realize that although I've been hearing and using that term all my life, I'm not really certain what it was), the book gives some interesting history. It also provides some good background on Islam, both religious and political. Surprisingly, subjects seem to come in and out of the book repeatedly. Islam's reaction to Western music and clothing is spoken of throughout the book. But otherwise, it's a good, clean, although in many ways superficial history. My biggest problem with the book was the almost complete lack of analysis. Perhaps the title meant to tell us that Lewis was only asking quetions and not attempting to provide answers. But I would like to know his thoughts on why Islamic society did not "advance" (to use a dangerous term). For example, the book speaks about Islamic repression of women, but doesn't make much effort to explain why Islam has failed to develop even a rudimentary concept of women's right. He suggests that Christianity's respect for women's rights stemmed from the reverence of Mary, but that seems a shallow answer. He even implies (although I don't think it's intentional), that the West is to blame for Islam's failure in this area because the West did not press for reforms in the treatment of women when it pressed for the abolition of slavery. (A very interesting point, however.) Lewis did raise some good starting points (at least for someone like me, who has little background in the field). First, the recognition that Christianity (and Judiasm) began separately from the State (Roman) meant that there was always an interplay of the religious with the politic. Perhaps that separation prevented the Church from exerting too much intellectual domination. On the other hand, I thought the most interesting theme -- repeated throughout the book -- was Islam's disinterest in the West. It's easy to shrug it off as arrogance. But when I think that Islam was so successful militarily from the onset, it's not surprising. The United States, as the dominant power for the last 50 years, has certainly lost it's interest in other cultures (not the academics, of course, but the people). Americans as a whole see no need to learn other languages, because any "right thinking foreigner" will learn English. Perhaps similar attitudes stifled Islam's interest. Also, Islam's initial success and domination could have bred complacency, whereas the West's initial set-backs against Islam and persistent fighting among each other stimilated the need to research and development of science and military. I don't know, just some thoughts. I'd like to what Lewis thinks are the answers to the questions he raised.
Rating: 
Summary: Misleading Title
Review: Much of what we dislike about about standard high school history classes is found here. I kept hoping for explanations of the decline, only to be buried by more names, dates and medieval middle eastern minutae.
Rating:
Summary: This Book Went Wrong
Review: Bernard Lewis used to be a lecturer at Soas University of London when I was studying there. He always seemed to me to be less intersted in the subject he was teaching than pushing some overt agenda. This book is a testimony that it is nothing more than a money making venture on the back of the horrific events which occured to the shock of the world on september 11. Don't read this book, Lewis repeats stuff from older works and makes no clear conclusion. He should understand in a university essay that would be a fail!!
Rating:
Summary: The octogenarian forgot about 90% of the Muslim world
Review: This book certainly went wrong. It was an edited collection of bunch of lectures Lewis has given over the past decade or so -- he only tells you that at the end of the book -- and it failed miserably at describing what went wrong. First, he barely describes "what went right" - you'll really need to know that so you can contextualize things and ascertain how things might be able to go right once again. Secondly, he focuses too much on the Ottoman Empire, perhaps because that's his area of focus. So this book should have just been on the Ottomans, because he ignored Muslim India, Indonesia, Central Asia, and discussed the Arab world minimaly. Third, Lewis appears completely unaware of comtemporary developments in the Islamic world..debates on the compatibility of Islam and democracy, the revival of Islamic philosophy in the US, Iran, Pakistan, the revival of the Islamic renaissance person (e.g. Doctorate in Islamic studies + expertice in medicine, political science, philosophy, etc). Certainly the Muslim world is not a static place...you'll find dramatic changes have occured over the past 5 years even. Positive ones in fact. The problem with our dialogue with the Muslim world is that we only tell them what they did wrong and they only tell us what we did wrong. I think we need to switch roles. We see this happening already, both sides are being critical of themselves, but Lewis, a man in his 80's, reflects the old school of thought (which has influenced our disasterous Middle East policy). It's glaring to see how some of the "reforms" Lewis cites as positives were imposed by folks like the British. Now let's see, would we in the USA like certain measures if Germany imposed them on us by the threat or use of force? Certainly Muslims can't only blame the West for their problems. They need to stop having a rhetoric of blame and start having a rhetoric of responsibility. Anyway, I bought this book, but I had enough background knowledge on the topic to see where Lewis went wrong. So I suggest you might try and purchase John Esposito's "Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam", Richard Bulliet's "Islam: The View from the Edge", and Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom's, "Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power" + the documentary "Islam: Empire of Faith" on VHS and DVD.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I guess I didn't read the title carefully. Technically the book says "what" went wrong, e.g. the Arabs and Turks lost a lot of battles despite how hard they tried to adapt. What I really wanted to know is "Why it went wrong." Why did western civilization florish while Arab civilization disintegrated? The book does nothing to answer this question.
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