From: H-LEVANT Editor
Subject: Cole on Lewis, _What Went Wrong?_
To: H-LEVANT@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Bernard Lewis. What Went Wrong: Western Impact and
Middle Eastern Response. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002. 172 pp. Index to 180. Hard covers, $23.
Reviewed by Juan R. I. Cole, Department of History,
University of Michigan
Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? is a very bad book
from a usually very good author. How a profoundly
learned and highly respected historian, whose career
spans some sixty years, could produce such a hodgepodge
of muddled thinking, inaccurate assertions and
one-sided punditry is a profound mystery. While I
cannot hope to resolve the puzzle, I can explain why I
come to this conclusion.
Lewis never defines his terms, and he paints with a
brush so broad that he may as well have brought a broom
to the easel. He begins by speaking of the "Islamic
world," and of "what went wrong" with it. He contrasts
this culture region to "the West," and implies that
things went right with the latter. But what does he
mean by the "Islamic world?" He seldom speaks of the
Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who form a very
substantial proportion of the whole. Malaysia and
Indonesia are never instanced. He seems to mean "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" (p. 6).
Here he makes it sound as though "Islam" was a single
unit with a unified military. Later, (p. 12) 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
Turkic raids down into India. Nor is it clear that
those Turks were motivated primarily by Islam
(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 Christian tribes. Finally, much of the advance of
Islam occurred quite peacefully, through Sufi
missionary work for example.
When discussing some European fears of the Ottomans
(p. 9), Lewis lets it slip that the Iranian Safavids
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 dichotomy in
the early modern period between the "West" and "Islam."
When speaking of Ottoman military weakness, Lewis
generally skips over the brilliant fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, when the Ottomans won wars in
Europe handily in part because they quickly took up
field artillery and their Janissary infantry was an
early adopter of the matchlock. Military historians do
not think central and western European armies began
having a technological and organizational advantage
over the Ottomans until after 1680. From Lewis's
account here one would have thought that the Ottomans
were all along somehow backward.
When Lewis does speak of the military advances of
the Europeans in the 18th century, he does not specify
what they were, and he does not say why the Ottomans
failed to adapt, merely noting the failure.
Comparative historians have long held that Western
Europe was innovative in warfare and technology in this
period because it consisted of many small states
constantly at war with one another. Many small states,
moreover, could not stifle innovation or impose
censorship effectively, since if only one broke ranks
the innovation could be introduced. Large empires such
as those of the Ottomans, the Mughals and the Qing
tended to be more complacent, simply because they faced
fewer powerful challenges. The Mughals never much
improved their casting of cannon over two centuries,
for instance, because it was perfectly serviceable
against the rebellious clans they faced. And the
regulatory power of these great empires was vast.
Lewis, by neglecting to discuss such social and
structural explanations, implicitly displaces the
question onto character or culture. The Ottomans were
hidebound, he implies, because Muslims look askance at
learning from the infidel. How such an explanation
could hold given the innovations adopted by the Ottoman
military in the sixteenth century is not clear.
Lewis repeats his often stated contrast between
curious Europeans who established chairs in Arabic and
tried to learn about the Orient, and remarkably
self-satisfied Muslims who did not interest themselves
in the outside world. In fact, the primary impetus for
the study of Arabic in Europe until the twentieth
century was that it helped in deciphering biblical
Hebrew, a matter of interest to European Christians for
internal reasons. Further, since al-Biruni learned
Sanskrit to write about India, Shahristani created an
encyclopedia of the world religions, and Qadi `Abd
al-Jabbar and many other Muslim theologians engaged at
length with Christian doctrine, Lewis cannot mean to
suggest that such a lack of curiosity was
characteristic of Islam or Muslims all along. He must
surely mean to say that after 1492 there was relatively
little such curiosity.
In fact, after that date the Spanish Inquisition
forcibly converted hundreds of thousands of Muslims in
Andalusia and ruthlessly executed the recalcitrant.
The Andalusians had been key transmitters of knowledge
between civilizations, and now they were gone. The
eminent medieval historian R. I. Moore has called
Europe in this period "the persecuting society." In
the age of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions the sort
of access Muslims would have needed to Europe for a
study program in Occidentalism was largely denied them.
(Lewis admits this briefly on p. 42 but elsewhere
keeps blaming Muslims for being unduly insular in this
regard!) They were confined to a few trading enclaves
in places like Venice, and even there a debate raged
about whether they should be allowed. In contrast,
Christian Europeans lived freely in Muslim lands.
Rather than blaming Muslims for knowing so little of
Europe in the age of the Inquisitions and the Wars of
Religion, one might well view that continent as
isolated from the rest of the world in that period by
its own paroxysms of religious intolerance. Lewis
notes abstract juridical reasoning by muftis about
whether a Muslim should live in a state ruled by
non-Muslims (the jurists said "no"), but does not take
into account realities on the ground. Real Muslims in
fact paid no attention to such strictures when living
under Christian rule in southern Spain before 1492.
Muslims also lived under Hindu and later British rule
in India despite what jurists may have said.
Lewis creates a problematic West/Islam dichotomy
virtually everywhere. When he comes to Bonaparte's
invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the expulsion of the
French in 1801, he says that "the French were forced to
leave-not by the Egyptians nor by their Turkish
Suzerains, but by a squadron of the Royal Navy . . ."
In fact, the Egyptian populace revolted more than once
against French rule, and the British and the Ottomans
allied to expel the French from Egypt. While the role
of the British navy was pivotal, significant Ottoman
land forces at Akka and in Egypt also fought crucial
battles that helped convince the French to surrender.
A joint British-Ottoman military alliance to expel the
French, however, complicates the story he wants to
tell. The Ottomans are reduced to the burghers of
Hamelin, forced to call upon a British pied piper who
would rid them of the French rats. In fact, the
British needed the Ottoman alliance against the French
to protect their Indian routes as much as the Ottomans
needed the British.
In discussing nineteenth-century Muslim responses
to the new superiority of Europe, Lewis says that they
could not consider science and philosophy the secret of
success because they reduced philosophy to the
handmaiden of theology. Yet, it is the hallmark of the
thought of the Egyptian Rifa`ah al-Tahtawi (1801-1873)
that he views European advances in "practical
philosophy" to be the major reason for their
flourishing civilization. Similar views were held by
Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. It is unaccountable
that Lewis does not know this. Lewis goes on to
discuss attempts to found factories in the Middle East,
and simply says "the effort failed, and most of the
early factories became derelict" (p. 47). He maintains
that these efforts were largely aimed at equipping
armies. While it is true that the Egyptian textile
industries ultimately failed, at their height they
employed some 40,000 workers and were involved in
rather more than making uniforms. Later silk factories
in Lebanon were also highly successful for a period of
thirty or forty years. Debate rages as to why early
attempts at industrialization failed in the Middle East
in the long run. Some blame the restrictions European
powers placed on tariffs in the treaties of 1838 and
1840, while others point to Egypt's lack of coal for
energy, and of trained mechanics who could perform
maintenance on the imported machines. Middle Eastern
silk industries fell behind Europe in part because
Pasteur invented a way of quarantining healthy
silkworms against diseased ones, while Lebanese and
Iranian worms suffered from such outbreaks. Lewis here
as elsewhere attempts no explanation, simply noting the
failure of industrialization in the region.
He then adds that "later attempts to catch up with
the Industrial Revolution fared little better" (p. 47),
linking the present-day with the 1840s without any
segue. In fact, the 1960s and after witnessed
extensive industrialization in the Middle East. The
decade of the 1960s saw a substantial rise in living
standards for Egyptians, after a wage stagnation
1910-1950. Everywhere in the region industry now makes
up a significant part of local economies, which are no
longer primarily agricultural. Light textiles have
been a relative success story in Turkey and even in
Pakistan. There are real problems with the economies
of the Middle East, but to say that the development
efforts of the past fifty years have been no more
successful than those of the nineteenth century is
frankly bizarre. That the rise of Israel put pressure
on Arab budgets, when a different sort of neighbor
might have allowed them to invest the money in more
fruitful areas than the military, is never considered.
Among the biggest problems for Middle Eastern economies
have been high rates of population growth, which Lewis
does not even mention. That is, Pakistan's economy has
grown a respectable 5 percent per annum or so in the
past twenty years, rather better than Hindu India's 3
percent, but the population growth rate is so great
that the per capita increase remains small in both
countries. Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim country,
has done even better than Pakistan economically, and
does not have a similar population problem. Lewis does
not mention Muslim countries like Malaysia. He is not
writing analytical history here, with a view to
explaining particular problems by isolating independent
variables. He is writing moral history, which is
tautological. He seems to insist on erasing any
successes they have had, and to imply that the Muslims
have failed because they are failures.
The supercilious air of the bemused put-down
suffuses this book. Lewis tells us that it is "sadly
appropriate" that the first telegraph sent from the
Middle East to the outside world concerned a military
event, the fall of Sebastopol. He adds, with drop-dead
timing, that "it is also sadly appropriate in that it
was inaccurate; it hadn't yet fallen" (p. 51). What
sort of history writing is this? The clear implication
is that the important news about the Middle East has
for some time been military. The other clear
implication is that the military news coming out of the
region is full of falsehoods. The use of clever asides
to create such a latticework of calumny has more in
common with the techniques of propaganda than with
academic history. Has Europe witnessed fewer wars
than the Middle East in the past two centuries? Surely
the comparative death toll from wars is about 100 to
one in that period in Europe's favor. Even the Crimean
War, the butt of the joke, was primarily a European
conflict in which France and Britain objected to
Russia's aggressive invasion of the Principalities
(Romania) and riposted with Ottoman help in Russia's
Crimea. As for the inaccuracy, it was more premature
than false. It is not clear that Middle Eastern wars
generate more lies and propaganda than other wars, in
any case. Truth is the first casualty of war, the
saying goes. It does not specify "Middle Eastern war."
Lewis virtually ignores European colonization of
the modern Middle East. He alleges (p. 153) that it
was "comparatively brief and ended half a century ago."
The French ruled Algeria 1830 to 1962. The British
were in what is now Bangladesh from 1757 to 1947.
While the British only formally ruled Egypt 1882 to
1922, it was already making and breaking its rulers in
the 1870s, and continued to play a heavy-handed role in
Egyptian politics and in the Suez Canal until 1956.
Radical Islamism was first provoked to terrorism in
Egypt precisely by the arrogance of British power
there, beginning a genealogy of violence that leads
through Ayman al-Zawahiri directly to September 11,
2001. In a marvelous bit of misdirection, Lewis
praises the "Chamber of Deputies" that British colonial
administrators allowed to the Egyptians, which was
merely an ineffectual debating society. He neglects to
inform the reader that in 1880-1881 a popular Egyptian
movement arose that imposed on the dictatorial Ottoman
governor a real parliament with the purview of
budgetary oversight, and that in 1882 the British
invaded to overthrow this democratic experiment and put
the autocratic Khedive back on his throne as their
puppet. In any case, Franco-British involvement in
the Middle East was not "brief." If we include
various forms of economic imperialism with actual
colonization, the period would be even longer.
Nor is the length of European rule the only
important factor. How deeply did they affect the local
economy and society? The French powerfully shaped
Algeria in ways that certainly contribute to its
current travails, including substantial expropriation
of land from owners and peasants and the creation of a
comprador bourgeoisie. While one certainly cheers the
British for giving refuge in Palestine to Jews fleeing
Hitler, it would have been nobler yet to admit them to
the British Isles rather than saddling a small, poor
peasant country with 500,000 immigrants hungry to make
the place their own. Nor was it a good idea, having
created such a situation, to simply leave and let the
two populations fight it out. The British exit from
South Asia was similarly botched, leaving us with the
Kashmir dispute as a nuclear flashpoint. Lewis's
attempt to virtually erase two centuries of European
imperialism and all its long-term consequences with a
wave of the hand is breathtaking. Nor did all
significant decolonization end half a century ago. The
French did not leave Algeria until 1962, and the
British did not leave the Persian Gulf until 1969.
Lewis repeats the tired saw (p. 62) that there was
widespread support in the Middle East for fascism in
the 1930s. That some urban groups admired Mussolini in
particular is true, but they were hardly "widespread,"
and not all of them were Muslim. Young Egypt, a minor
fascist-inspired party, had its analogue in the
Phalange Party of some Maronite Christians in Lebanon,
and later on in the Stern Gang and other Revisionist
Zionist movements. Israel Gershoni has shown that
Egyptian mainstream intellectuals roundly condemned
fascism in the 1930s. Moreover, since the vast
majority of Middle Easterners at the time were
illiterate peasants, and the transistor radio had not
yet been invented, the likelihood is that most of them
had never heard of fascism or Mussolini, much less
leaning toward them. Lewis alleges that "Muslims
developed no secularist movement of their own" (p.
103). It is difficult to understand what this could
possibly mean. Obviously, if he is referring to
believing Muslims, they would not be secularists. If
he means persons of Muslim background, then the
secularist wing of Iran's National Front in the 1940s
and 1950s was developed by Muslims; the secularist
policies of Muhammad Reza Pahlevi were developed by his
circle of Muslim technocrats; Turkey's secularist
movement was developed and promoted by Muslims; and
although the Baath Party was initially the brainchild
of Christian Arabs, its secularist ideology was taken
up with alacrity by Syrian and Iraqi Muslims in large
numbers. Nor is it true that a separation of religion
and state never occurred in Islam, in contrast to
Christianity. Ira Lapidus dates such a separation from
the classical period of Islamic civilization.
A final question has to do with Europe, the
explicit contrast for the Muslim Middle East in this
book. Why does he think things "went right" in the
West? I should have thought that the slaughter of
World War I, the rise of fascism and communism, the 61
million butchered in World War II, the savage European
repression of anticolonial movements in places like
Vietnam and Algeria, and the hundreds of millions held
hostage by the Cold War nuclear doctrine of "mutually
assured destruction"-that all this might have raised at
least a few eyebrows among emeriti historians looking
for things that went wrong. It is true that the East
Asian and European economies have flourished in the
past 50 years under a Pax Americana, but this
development hardly seems intrinsic to the West as a
whole. Political and economic instability relentlessly
stalked Europe in the first half of the twentieth
century, and it was divided against itself in a bitter
ideological battle for much of the second half. That
is, even the Western European efflorescence of recent
decades took place against the backdrop of a deadly
Cold War that could have wiped us all out in an
instant. In contrast to the massive death toll racked
up by Europeans in the past century, Muslim powers in
the second half of the twentieth century have probably
killed only a little more than a million persons in war
(mainly in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s). The Middle
East has its problems and Muslims have theirs. Lewis's
analytical views of what those problems are, why they
have come about, and how to resolve them, would have
been most welcome, given his vast erudition. Instead,
he has chosen to play a different role in this book.
Reprinted with permission from Global Dialogue, vol. 4,
no. 4, Autumn 2002.
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