Rating: 
Summary: What went wrong? Who did this to us?
Review: This is a brilliant book by a renowned expert, Bernard Lewis. He is a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. And, so it may surprise some readers to discover just how readable this, his most recent book, is. Although this was written prior to 9/11, it could not be timelier. This is a timely read if you want if know about the culture that expanded from its roots in Mecca and Medina to one that ruled the Mid East, northern Africa, Spain, and Portugal and finally knocked at the gates of Vienna, not once, but twice. It is a history that we are dealing with today. Bernard Lewis presents a compelling argument that as military failures occurred, one explanation that took root in the Islamic world was that God was displeased because Muslims were not leading lives in accordance with God’s wishes. Religious leaders became more powerful, and culture became more insulated. They seem to have been disinterested in Europe. This is a timely read, if you want to know about the culture that saw no rights for slaves, infidels, and women in the 7th century, and sees not need to change that stance even in the 21st century. This is a timely read if you want to understand just what questions are being asked and answered. Is the question “What went wrong?†or is it “Who did this to us?†One answer leads to taking corrective actions and implementing change, the other answer leads to blaming others. I think that Professor Lewis does address what went wrong. What he does not do is this… he does not present us with a solution of how to fix it. He does not tell us how we can survive together… or even if we can. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: I did find out what went wrong.
Review: Contrary to other reviews, I did find out what went wrong - A self-satisfied, successful culture progressed to the point of its own comfort only to be surpassed by the West in intellectual endeavors, scientific understanding, economic rewards, political power and cultural impact. The response was to not compete with the achievements of the West, but to retrench into "true Islamic" life. The hatred which resulted in the retrenchment is exacerbated by religious bigotry and racism fed by fundamentalist views of religion. What is shown to be true again in history is the lesson that the most cruel and despotic and dangerous person is that uneducated individual who has a gun, but no true ethic; who has a cause but who has no historical perspective; who wraps himself in religiosity, but,no matter how brutal or cruel or murderous his actions, believes that God is own his side. This is true with fundamentalist Muslims, Christians or Hindus. In the perspective of the current Middle East struggles, the lack of sophistication and fundamentalism prohibits the extremist from differentiating between murder and war; between martyrdom and suicide; and between and between the burga and modesty.
Rating: 
Summary: "What Went Wrong"-you still won't know
Review: I found this a very disapointing book. Perhaps I was spoiled by having recently read Milton Viorst's "Sandcastles" that goes over much of the same historical background, but in far greater depth. In any case, I found Mr. Lewis' book to be at best on the Jr High School level in his historical overviews. And then, dispite the teaser of the title, he never does get around to offering any real insights into the situation. The best I could say about this book is that for a reader with no background in the Middle East at all, it might at least provide a useful primer.
Rating: 
Summary: An "Instant Best Seller" effort, not his top level work
Review: I've enjoyed his previous books and respected his scholarship; however, this time around I think he's cobbled something together to hit a hot market. This is his post-WTC New Yorker article pumped up. The "What Went Wrong" in the title could be applied to his doing only part of the job on this subject. He seems to carefully avoid telling his American readers anything that might lead them to examine themselves, their country's policies, etc. In other words, he skilfully points his finger at Them most of the time, and thus avoids the possibility of being the target of any brickbats in an overheated time. He travels very, very safely over any ground that might upset Americans. Given his scholarly expertise this is a good book, but a "soft" one. A good scholar doing lightweight and very safe work.
Rating: 
Summary: An Interesting Book But It Does Not Show What Went Wrong
Review: Bernard Lewis is a noted scholar of the Islamic world with a number of important works on Islam, its culture and its history to his credit. Like many others (the book has been a best seller), I purchased "What Went Wrong" hoping to find out more about what darkness in the heart of Islamic society could give rise to the events of September 11. Given this goal I was somewhat disappointed. To be sure, the book, although largely in the nature of a survey, still contained a wealth of information about the history of Islamic culture and society. Yet it is not a discussion of "what went wrong" in the Islamic world. Indeed, it hardly touches on the Islamic world in the 20th Century when Arab nationalism, European imperialism and the growth of radical Islamic fundamentalism clashed so severely. Lewis does touch briefly on these issues but this book is more about the encounters between the Islamic world, and Christendom that began in the Medieval period and the effect this had on Islamic development. Lewis describes a Medieval Islamic world consisting of three peoples, the Ottoman Turks, The Arabs and the Persians (later known as Iranians). During the Medieval period and thereafter, the Islamic world was dominated by the Turks. Lewis describes an Islamic world contemptuous of the West militarily, culturally and religiously. At the height of its power, in the late 15th Century, the Islamic world completely destroyed the secular power of the Eastern Orthodox Church, converted large numbers of Eastern Europeans in the Balkans to Islam. Slowly but surely, however, the forces of the Christian World pushed the Ottomans back to the borders they held until their fall after WWI. Lewis chronicles Islamic efforts to modernize scientifically and militarily without really modernizing in terms of thought, philosophy and political culture. What this leads to is an Islamic world which, despite intermittent attempts to incorporate Western scientific advances and innovations in military tactics, remained largely impervious to Western influence. So the portrait of Islam is of a society frozen in place. Highly progressive and advanced by the standards of the 15th century, the Islamic world failed to develop in the manner of the West and, thus,, failed to incorporate the changes necessary for a civilization to truly advance. Lewis is a somewhat dry but scholarly writer who does a good job of describing the differences between various aspects of the Western and Islamic societies. Since this book is about the Islamic world, this is where he concentrates his descriptions. Thus, we learn a great deal of detail about the political structure of the Ottoman Empire and its relationship to the Islamic religion but little about why secularism failed to take root in the East as it did in the west. In my view, the advance of Western civilization can be summed up concisely as follows: Unlike in the Islamic world, in the Western Christian world, the secular rulers, never accepted (despite rhetoric to the contrary) the primacy of the Church of Rome , even over the local bishopries, let alone over secular affairs. The struggle between Church and State in Western Europe, ultimately led to the emergence of powerful secular nation states, namely England, France, Spain and the Netherlands, as well as the strong German and Italian principalities. The relative weakness of Rome would ultimately lead to the protestant reformation and then to the European enlightenment. This revolution in political, scientific and philosophical thought was opposed by the Roman Church but its triumph made possible the development of the truly liberal modern society that characterizes the Western World today. Why this did not happen in the Islamic world is obviously a complicated question that Lewis does not answer in this book. For those looking for a relatively simple rundown of the ways in which the Islamic world and Christian world differed over the past six hundred years, this book provides a good overview. For those looking to find out "What Went Wrong" this is not the book that will answer this question.
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Summary: Definitely worth reading!
Review: In this book, another in the series of a dozen or so written by Lewis about the dar al-Islam - and the second one that I've read - he discusses the Muslims' search for an answer(s) to the disparity in vitality, growth, and influence between the West and Islam. He discusses the interaction between the two cultures and the Muslims' gradual awareness, beginning in the 1600s, that they were being eclipsed by the West and the seeming inability to turn that around.
He provides comparative insight into the differences between the two cultures - a gap that so far seems unbridgeable, especially today. One particular insight is the Middle Eastern concept that the converse of tyranny is not liberty (as it is in the West), but is justice (pg. 54). Another insight I gained is that they did not completely ignore the West, notwithstanding that in their arrogance most Middle Easterners saw little to be gained by traveling to or otherwise studying the West. Ironically, much of the observation and discussion of Western ways, institutions, etc., fueled the internal struggle between religious conservatism and a desire to maintain (or return to) authentic Islam on the one hand, and a gradual shift towards secularism on the other. That struggle, in both aspects, continues today.
Going back to this growing awareness since the 1600s, it took a long while before Muslims realized the question existed. Their inborn pride and deep belief in the correctness of Islam made them insular. They were willing to conquer, but early on were not particularly interested in learning about those they didn't conquer - at least not when it came to Europeans.
This begs the question of the extent to which this still obtains today. Does this account for the apparent miscalculations of Western (US) response to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? In any event, to say the West and Islam have different worldviews is a vast understatement.
One of the fundamental differences has been, and to some extent remains, the role of women (pp. 69-73). "From a traditional point of view, the emancipation of women - specifically, allowing them to reveal their faces, their arms, and their legs, and to mingle socially in the school or the workplace with men - is an incitement to immorality and promiscuity, and a deadly blow to the very heart of Islamic society, the Muslim family and home" (pg. 70). This issue highlights the difference between modernization and Westernization (pg. 73).
Lewis wonderfully sums up the worldview of Islam as Muslims look out at the rest of the world when, describing an Egyptian historian's reaction to Egyptian Christians at the time of Napoleon, he says they acted generally "in a way that in his eyes was a reversal of the proper order of things as established by the law of God" (pg. 90). Extending this to the whole of the Muslim world is a generalization, to be sure, and surely has many exceptions, but it is an apt generalization nonetheless and bespeaks an arrogance that rivals the West's. "Muslims were accustomed to regard Christianity as an earlier, corrupted version of the true faith of which Islam was the final perfection" (pp. 45-46). "The idea that any group of persons, any kind of activities, any part of human life is in any sense outside the scope of religious law and jurisdiction is alien to Muslim thought" (pg. 100). Thus it's easy to see the fundamental conflict with Christianity, which at its core embraces secularism (pg. 96). It is amazing to me that Islam and Christianity could both derive from Judaism yet evolve in separate, so easily antagonistic directions.
What causes this animosity? What went wrong? Lewis describes a variety of possible reasons, but doesn't come down conclusively on any one or combination of them. Reading this and other books about Islam since 9/11, I'm starting to stitch together my own conclusions. I think the animosity stems from a combination of a clash of values and the ascendancy of the West at Islam's expense. That is, many, likely the majority of, Muslims feel their way of life is threatened by their perception of a Godless West, epitomized by the United States. This is in deep contrast to a sense of superiority on the part of Islam vis-à-vis Judaism and Christianity, fueled by an overarching arrogance and pride, especially among Arabs. Finally, there is Islam's inherent conservatism versus the pace of political and technological change extant today, and the resultant impact on Muslim society. This combination is an explosive mixture.
Lewis believes there is still time for Islam to reverse its decline and recapture its past vitality, but it must do so itself. His tone is not hopeful.
This is another outstanding read by Bernard Lewis, heartily recommended.
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Summary: LEWIS OPENS IMPORTANT DEBATE
Review: Bernard Lewis is the dean of Orientalists, a species that, once maligned by ignorants such as Edward Said, is now back as an important element in the so-called " dialogue of civilisations."
More importantly, Lewis is one of the few Western experts on Islamic world who have managed to stay out of the postmodernist vogue.
Lewis does not shy away from subjecting the Islamic world to pertinent criticism- a sharp contrast with apologists such as John Esposito and Roy Mottahedeh who try to explain, and explain away,Islam's ugliest aspects in the name of " respecting the other."
Lewis's new book is based on a series of lectures and is written in a chatty language that makes it more accessible to a wider readership.
The only criticisms I can think of are two. First, Lewis has unnecessarily confined himself to the arbitrary borders of the geographical Middle East. He has focused primarily on the Ottoman Empire and Persia, ignoring the rich and eventful encounter between the West and Islam in such regions as the Caucasus, Crimea and Central Asia which, though not the heartland of Islam, played a crucial cultural role in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
My second criticism is that Lewis has left out the Turkish, Persian and Arab thinkers of the late 20th century, people who created the modern literature of the Islamic world and raised the issue of Islam's relations with a largely Western-made world in serious, rather than polemical, terms.
Thus Lewis leaves one side of the story untold.
Those interested could read the works of people like Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh,Mirza Agha Khan Kermani, Ahmad Kasravi, Taha Hussein, Talebov, and Muhammad Iqbal. Among more recent Muslim authors I can recommend the Egyptian Fouad Zakarria, the Iranian Amir Taheri, the Syrian Bassam Tibi and the Iraqi Kenan Makiyah among others. Some of their books are available in a number of Western languages, including English. They can help round up the important debate that Lewis offers us. A READER IN BRITAIN
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Summary: A great start, lacks only more detail
Review: The opening chapters of this book document the rise and fall of Islam as a political/military entity. It goes without saying that there's not much in the way of a pacifist tradition within Islam, it began as a religion of the sword, and for its first thousand years of existence it waged a relentless war of aggression against its neighbors, from the originally Christian Mediterranean states in the 7th century, through its invasion of Spain and Portugal and right up till a mere three centuries ago, when the Ottoman Empire was attempting to conquer Vienna in the heart of Europe. Only in the past 300 years has the Islamic world suffered a series of military defeats and general decline Vis a Vis the West. The bulk of this book is devoted to studying the nature of this decline. Actually, it wasn't decline so much as failure to progress. Back in the depths of Medieval times, Europe was at a disadvantage in almost every aspect of civilization when compared to the Muslim world; it was poorer, less literate, and behind in both military prowess and scientific knowledge. However, as the 2nd Millennium progressed, the Islamic world stayed mostly the same while the Christian West experienced dramatic changes brought on by the Protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution spawned by the likes of Galileo and Isaac Newton, vastly increased trade, exploration, and conquest, and the emergence of new political ideas in Europe and America. What had been the Arab world's chief asset, namely long-term stability, became a liability in the form of stagnation. The author, an expert in Islamic studies, gives us a short and very readable account of the West's achieving geopolitical, and more importantly, intellectual supremacy over the Islamic world. The meaning of the title "What Went Wrong" is clear; it is an explanation of how the Muslim Middle East squandered its military, economic, and intellectual advantage over the once impoverished Christian West. He does not assign any one factor to account for this, but rather investigates the relentless advance of the West in the technology of war, and more importantly, the spread of a scientific and secular set of ideas across Western societies. Implied in the author's case is the notion that conflict and even open warfare between competing ideas ultimately strengthened Western Civilization. Horrific as they were, the battles between Catholic and Protestant Christians in time gave birth to the notion of religious tolerance, and more importantly, the establishment of secular governments in which religion is largely relegated to the private and personal sphere. In contrast, no such dramatic changes ever occurred in Islamic countries. Islam recognizes no separation of power in which religion guides peoples' moral actions while a representative civil government handles such practical matters as creating laws and administering justice. The Koran governs all; it sets forth the laws and, more importantly, the basic ideas upon which its followers are to live their lives. It makes no allowance for human progress; instead it assumes that everything mankind needs to know about how to live their lives has already been written in the Holy texts. There are some minor nits to pick with this book, most notably its shortness. I, for one, would have liked to been given a more in-depth account of the formative years of Islam. Just as with Christianity in the 1st century, something quite important happened in the mid 7th century which created the Islamic religion and contributed to its rapid spread. But the author devotes only a few pages to Islam's early years, then spends most of the book relating how the Christian West left the Muslim world far behind in the past few centuries. But, that complaint aside, this book is a valuable contribution to the effort to understand the atmosphere of inferiority and rage that seems to exist in the current day Middle Eastern world.
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Summary: Are We Our Brother's Keeper, or Not?
Review:
The essence of this book that captured my attention was not the impact of the West on the Middle East, but rather the divergent manner in which the West separated religion from business and government, while the Middle East generally did not. I would point readers toward two other books: Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, in Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power, has done a fine job of looking at the differing manner in which Malaysia on the one hand, and Pakistan on the other, utilized Islam as a means of legitimizing the state. In the end, both states had to control their fanatics.
The other book, by Howard Bloom, Global Brain: the Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, adds value to the very educated efforts of Bernard Lewis in this volume, because it points out that culturate training kills half the brain by the time one is an adult. This is serious stuff, to wit: if religion and culture can embed in an entire region the makings for a sustained collapse of social and economic measures needed to achieve stability and a minimalist quality of life for the population, is it safe for us to stand back? Are we to leave them to their own devices? What must we do to ensure that we *share* some common brain concepts and what will it take for both their educational system and ours to "build for peace" from grade one? These are complex issues, even more challenging that the more tangible issues of intervention in the face of epidemics, gang wars, genocide, and so on. Certainly we cannot intervene with force nor confront our Islamic brothers, but we must ask ourselves: at what point should we consider substantial investments in both Islamic studies and socio-economic, even ideo-cultural and techno-demographic assistance, to the nations of Islam? Are they our brother, or not? If we are to respect the universal declaration of human rights, and acknowledge that human suffering is justification for intervention, ideally peaceful intervention, then at what point do we create a national capability for responding to these needs in a manner that is both appropriate to the tangible challenge and consistent with the religious challenge? In my view, this book is most valuable for outlining the depths of the challenge of modernization in a deeply religious region, and rather than ending on a note of "on your own heads be it," I wonder if we might not better ask, "what do we need to do differently to find a middle road toward modernization, one that can be accepted within the strictures of Islam?"
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Summary: Too Brief But Very Informative
Review: A timely little volume, but Lewis is forced due to space constraints to offer no more than a precis of the arguments he develops at greater length and in greater detail in his recent (1995) The Middle East. This is a compendium of lectures recently delivered in England and material presented in articles the author has elsewhere published, and its focus is on why, after centuries of supremacy, the world of Islam has fallen behind the West in terms of cultural development. The principal shortcoming of this book is its brevity, which requires the reader to approach it with a working knowledge of the basic history of Islam and especially the Ottoman Empire already in hand. Brevity also constrains Lewis somewhat from developing his arguments, hence one occasionally gets a rather broad-brush statement which is not developed into an argument at all, but left to stand on Lewis's formidable, but personal, authority. It is, in that sense, more a distillation of Lewis's theses than a comprehensive presentation. This edition was in proof at the time of the 11 September attack on the World Trade Center, hence is in no sense reactive to that tragic event. It is, however, an illuminating and intriguing explanation of motive of the principal actors of that event and those to follow.
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