Islam: What Went Wrong

  Last week, I finished Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong? which came out soon after 9/11. I remember thinking at the time that he produced a book pretty damn fast, but it turns out this book was not written in response to 9/11: it had been in page proof when the attacks happened.

Nevertheless, I doubt it would have had much to say that would’ve been different, as 9/11 didn’t say much about Islam that observers of the religion hadn’t known for a while. Lewis chronicles – very lucidly and very engagingly, even if briefly – the history of Islamic Civilization’s decline.

He is emphatic that it is not something inherent in Islam that caused it, because otherwise Islamic Civilization would never have flourished as it did for most of Islam’s history. But he does compare Islamic and the growing Western Civilization and seems to say that Islamic Civlization didn’t necessarily decline – it simply stopped growing. Western Civilization outstripped it and then conquered it.

I’m tempted to put it this way: Islam expanded and prospered until it reached its level of incompetence and then flopped. It’s what happens to civilizations. But what’s more interesting is the three cultural reasons Lewis outlines in some detail:

The position of women, obviously, is the first. Islam is an egalitarian religion, except for three groups of people who are excluded from these principles of equality: women, unbelievers, and slaves. There was a way out of that unequality for both unbelievers and slaves, but none for women. Eventually Muslims, perceiving the differences between themselves and Europeans, realized that the status of women was one major difference between the two civilizations, but did not admit that liberating women would be modernity. Liberating women was instead seen as Westernization, which was unacceptable.

Technology was seen as modernity, and efforts were made to follow along with the West, but little effort was made to duplicate the institutional infrastructure that gave rise to technology. Hence, science – the second big cultural difference – never took root.

Lewis acknowledges that the Islamic world was instrumental in transmitting, and to a degree, developing, the scientific knowledge of the ancients to the modern Western world, and without the role of Islamic Civilization, we would have had to reinvent the wheel on many scientific fronts. He differentiates between how Muslims and the West see science (and this seems speculative to me): Muslims saw it as solving problems, not as enquiry for its own sake. Thus, they would adopt the solutions that the West developed using science, but not take that knowledge to new levels: It was solving one problem and that was enough.

An acquaintance of mine had another interesting theory with respect to why science and free thought have not flourished in Islamic peoples, and he does ascribe it directly to Islam: He connects the fact that Islam forbids bida’a (innovation) to Islam’s regression. Muslims don’t innovate because they have internalized the Islamic edict against veering from the path. I doubt this, mainly because Muslims have not refrained from much bida’a in the very areas where it is most frowned upon: religious practices.

The third cultural reason is Music. This is fun speculation, but I don’t really buy it. Briefly, Lewis analyzes the importance of music in Christian/Western culture and compares that to the virtual absence of music in Islamic culture, coming to the strange conclusion that the orchestra indicates social cooperation for unified ends and says something profound about Christian/Western success. Or something.

Two other factors are discussed in some detail: Military technology and secularism. Both are significant. Muslims were dominant until they could militarily defeat and conquer whom they chose (and did do so). Once their power was spread far and wide and they became complacent, their military prowess diminished. The Europeans, on the other hand, busily fighting amongst themselves, took warfare to new levels and expended a lot of resources into developing new weaponry. Muslims started losing battles and then wars; eventually, they lost their sovereignty to colonial conquerers.

The seeds for separation of church and state are in Christianity (“Render therefore to Cesar the things which are Cesar’s, and to God the things which are God’s.” Luke 20:25), but nothing similar is found in Islam – Islam is explicitly political, dominating both the public and private realms. This was and continues to be problematic.

Lewis does a good job of cataloguing these cultural and some historical factors that explain why Islam is in its current state. I was particularly struck by the analysis of how Muslim pride got in the way of modernization wherever modernization was translated as ‘Westernization.’ I know, from personal experience, just how profoundly true this modernization-westernization dichotomy is in the Muslim mind and how viscerally they object to it. And contrary to his own stated belief to the contrary, he is tracing these causes back to Islam: the status of women, the resistance to Westernization, the theocratic impulse, etc.

What Lewis does not do is give a comprehensive historical and cultural analysis of what went wrong. The Ottoman and Persian parts of Islamic Civilization take center stage – the conquered peoples of Asia are barely mentioned. I was surprised by the length of the book: it’s not even 200 pages, but this brevity (and the relatively scanty treatment of the subject) is partly explained by the fact that this is lectures and articles cobbled together.

I feel a little cheated. I wanted more. But Lewis is a great mind, his understanding of Islamic issues is deep and subtle; I’m out a dollar and a few hours of entertaining cultural and superficially historical analysis of an absorbing subject.

I would particularly recommend this book to Muslims; as I read it, I almost wanted to say it should be required reading for Muslims in schools. There are places where it seems Lewis is holding up a clear mirror. He also comes across as sympathetic; the treatment is gentle.