What Went Wrong? : The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East

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Summary: racist
Review: Most of this book focuses on how muslims must be mad because their civilization has been defeated by the West. This is a kind of racist argument with little logical tought involved.

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Summary: What Went Wrong with this book!! What was Lewis thinking?
Review: I beg to disagree with what Lewis is asking of the Islamic World. Especially when it is asked right after the attacks of 11 September, it is hard not to notice that this manner of framing the problem of the eclipse of Islamic societies by the West is loaded with biases, value judgments, and preconceptions. I found that Lewis never defines his terms, and he paints with a brush so broad the subject of Islam. He begins by speaking of the Islamic World and of "What Went Wrong" with it. He contrasts this culture region to that of the West and implies that things went right with the latter. But what does Lewis mean by the Islamic World? He seldom speaks of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who form a very large substantial proportion of the Islamic World. Malaysia and Indonesia are never instanced, which contrary to popular belief have the largest Muslim population in the entire world. He seems to strictly be talking about the Muslim Middle East, but if so he would have been better advised to say so. With regard to the Middle East, what does he mean by the question "What Went Wrong?" Does he mean to ask about economic underdevelopment? About lack of democracy? About a failure to contribute to scientific and technological advances? About ethnocentrism? All of these themes are mentioned in passing, but none is formulated as a research design. If "What Went Wrong" was mainly economic, political and scientific, then why pose the question with regard to a religious category? Lewis straightforwardly says that Islam in and of itself cannot be blamed for what went wrong (whatever that was). Since Islam is not the independent variable in his explanation, why make the Islamic World the unit of analysis? Discerning exactly what Lewis is attempting to explain, and what he thinks the variables are that might explain it, is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. Lewis has a tendency to lump things under a broad rubric together that are actually diverse and perhaps not much related to one another. Speaking of classical Islam, presumably about 632-1258, Lewis says that the armies of Islam at the very same time were invading Europe and Africa, India and China. Here he makes it sound as though Islam was a single unit with a unified military. Later, he actually speaks of the Crusaders' successes impressing Muslim war departments, as if medieval institutions were so reified. In fact, Moroccan Berbers fighting in Spain are highly unlikely even to have known about the Turkish raids down into India. Nor is it clear that those Turks were motivated primarily by Islam, since pastoralists have been invading India from Central Asia for millennia. Moreover, tribal alliances across religious boundaries bring into question the firmness of the military boundaries suggested by speaking of Islam. Even the early Ottoman conquests in Anatolia were accomplished in part through alliances with Christians. Finally, much of the advance of Islam occurred quite peacefully, through Sufi missionary work for example. When discussing some European fears of the Ottomans, Lewis lets it slip that the Iranian Shah Ismail Safavi sought alliances with the Europeans against their Ottoman enemies. Lewis does not tell us that the Ottomans also made Protestant alliances in the Balkans against Catholic powers. Since Europeans were fighting amongst themselves, and Muslim powers were fighting amongst themselves, and each was willing to make tactical alliances across religious boundaries, it is not clear what is gained by setting up a division in the early modern period between the West and Islam. If Lewis had an interest in exploring the decline of the Middle East, he would be asking why the new, more dynamic historical system that lay behind the rise of the West had not emerged in the Middle East, India, China, Italy, or Africa. If he had asked this question, it may have directed him to the source and origins of Western supremacy. But Lewis ducks this issue altogether. Instead, he takes the growing power of the West as the starting point of his narrative and concentrates on demonstrating why the efforts of Islamic societies to catch up with the West were both too little and too late.

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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," causing 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 a contemptible gang of Jews was an intolerable humiliation." (p. 154)

The situation in the Middle East today is one of 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.

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Summary: Questioning the Descent of the Arab World
Review: Bernard Lewis is one of the pre-emminent scholars of the Middle East. He is a traditional scholar of immense erudition and learning who has spent a lifetime studying the Arab Middle East and Islam. The attacks of 9/11 and the American response have provoked millions to simply ask: why? What has gone so wrong in the Middle East to create thousands of suicide bombers and conspirators who spend years planning cataclysmic attacks on America and the liberal West? Why has Islam, which once advanced science and learning, turned away from modernity in favor of the fever swamps of conspiracy and a fantasy world of a new caliphate? In this modest book, Bernard Lewis uses his knowledge to deliver a trenchant analysis of the true state of the Islamic world.

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Summary: An elegant examination of the decline of a civilization
Review: Lewis as always is learned,and elegant. The reading is pure pleasure at least on the aesthetic level. The difficult story of the decline of a civilization, and its failure to meet the challenges of the modern world is told here with human sympathy and intelligent irony. How Islam fell behind the Christian West, and how it was passed by without even knowing it at times is the major theme of this work . What the reader comes to understand as it draws to its close is that the backwardness of this world has become structural and deeply embedded in it. And that therefore the violence and terror which the US woke up to on 9/11 is not about to suddenly pass from the world. The resentment and frustration of the Islamic world are powerful forces pushing it to continual confrontation with the West. Lewis provides insight into the scientific, technical failings of a civilization too deeply devoted to its own insular focus on its own holy texts. He does not give the sense that the democratization of this world is about to soon come about, or that the problems created by its general attitude are soon to go away.