Princeton University Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis is the West's foremost living historian of the Islamic Middle East. His article, "The Roots of Moslem Rage," which was published in The Atlantic Monthly in the early 1990s was so influential that it inspired Samuel Huntington to write his book The Clash of Civilizations which we've been hearing so much about (and experiencing, some would say) since September 11, 2002 (see review by James R. Elwood in the June 1999 issue of the "Freedom Network News" (#56)).

     Fortunately for Lewis and his publisher, this book, What Went Wrong? was written right before 9/11 (which led to a tremendous increase in interest in relations between the West and the Middle East) and published right afterwards. Most of it is based upon lectures which Lewis gave in Vienna in 1999, and the rest upon previous lectures by him. Reading it is like attending a lecture series by one of the world's most knowledgeable, clear, and articulate experts on Middle Eastern history.

     The subject of What Went Wrong? is the paradox of how the Muslim Middle East was once the most advanced civilization in the world, and how it is now one of the most backward. As Lewis puts it:

"For centuries the world view and self-view of Muslims seemed well-grounded. Islam represented the greatest military power on earth - its armies at the same time were invading Europe and Africa, India and China. It was the foremost economic power in the world, trading in a wide range of commodities through a far-flung network of commerce and communications in Asia, Europe, and Africa, importing slaves and gold from Africa, slaves and wool from Europe, and exchanging a variety of foodstuffs, materials, and manufactures with the civilized countries of Asia. It had achieved the highest level so far in human history in the arts and sciences of civilization. Inheriting the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece and of Persia, it added to them new and important innovations from outside, such as the use and manufacture of paper from China and decimal positional numbering from India. It is difficult to imagine modern literature or science without one or the other. It was in the Islamic Middle East that Indian numbers were for the first time incorporated into the inherited body of mathematical learning. From the Middle East they were transmitted to the West, where they are still known as Arabic numerals, honoring not those who invented them but those who first brought them to Europe. To this rich inheritance scholars and scientists in the Islamic world added an immensely important contribution through their own observations, experiments, and ideas. In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world, relying on Arabic versions even for many otherwise unknown Greek works.
     "And then, suddenly, the relationship changed. Even before the Renaissance, Europeans were beginning to make significant progress in the civilized arts. With the advent of the New Learning, they advanced by leaps and bounds, leaving the scientific and technological and eventually the cultural heritage of the Islamic world far behind them."

     The paradox extends to other areas, too. Islam was once far more tolerant of Jews and Christians than Christendom was of Jews or "heretical" Christian sects. Now, compared to most of the Islamic world, the West is a model of toleration, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and protection of religious minorities.

     So, as the book's title asks, "What Went Wrong?" Lewis does an excellent job of covering how people have tried to answer this question, and showing why some of the answers are false. The false explanation which goes back the furthest in history blames it on the Mongols:

"For a long time, the Mongols were the favorite villains, and the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century were blamed for the destruction of both Muslim power and Islamic civilization, and for what was seen as the ensuing weakness and stagnation. But after a while historians, Muslims and others, pointed to two flaws in this argument. The first was that some of the greatest cultural achievements of the Muslim peoples, notably in Iran, came after, not before, the Mongol invasions. The second, more difficult to accept but nevertheless undeniable, was that the Mongols overthrew an empire that was already fatally weakened - indeed, it is difficult to see how the once-mighty empire of the caliphs would otherwise have succumbed to a horde of nomadic horsemen riding across the steppes from East Asia."

     The rise of nationalism led Muslims to blame Western imperialism for their decline. However, if Middle Eastern decline began before the Mongol invasion, then it certainly began before Western imperial-ism affected the Middle East, and the Middle East has continued to lag behind long after its decolonization by the European powers.

     To those who blame Islam itself for Middle Eastern decline, Lewis asks the question:

"... if Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three, and this when Muslims were much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than they are now?"

     Islamic fundamentalists answer that Middle Eastern decline is caused by a falling away from authentic Islam, while modernists argue that it is caused by the retention of old ways, not their abandonment, especially the dogmatic dominance of the Islamic clergy.

     Unfortunately, Lewis is better at describing all the competing explanations for Middle Eastern decline and refuting some of them than he is at showing which explanations he considers correct. Of the correct ones he mentions, three of them strike me as being most convincing. The first is the lack of separation of religion and state in Islam. In comparison to Judaism and Christianity, Moses only got to see the Promised Land, but didn't get to live in it. Jesus was persecuted and crucified by the Roman state, and Christianity had to resist further Roman persecution for centuries, developing its own institution, the Church, in parallel and opposition to the State. Muhammed, on the other hand, was a successful conqueror and ruler in his own right:

"Muhammad achieved victory and triumph in his own lifetime. He conquered his promised land, and created his own state, of which he himself was supreme sovereign. As such, he promulgated laws, dispensed justice, levied taxes, raised armies, made war, and made peace. In a word, he ruled, and the story of his decisions and actions as ruler is sanctified in Muslim scripture and amplified in Muslim tradition."

     This lack of separation of religion and state led to less separation of powers between religious and secular authorities, and thus a greater centralization of power in comparison to Western Christendom. As the great 19th-century classical-liberal historian Lord Acton argued, it was the separation of Church and State that contributed greatly to the gradual development of individual freedom in the West. This process has never taken place in the Middle East. There were attempts to import Western forms of constitutional, parliamentary government, but they never took hold due to cultural resistance. Lewis describes one amusing experiment in Middle Eastern constitutional reform:

"The Young Ottomans were obviously influenced by the Italian liberal patriot Giuseppe Massini's Young Italy and Young Europe; they agitated for a constitution and a parliament, with the inevitable result that in 1867 their leaders went into exile, mostly to London and Paris. They returned in 1870, and in 1876, with the help of some pressure from the European powers, they were able to persuade the sultan to proclaim a brand new constitution, providing for a parliament, with a nominated senate and a popularly-elected chamber.
     "This constitution, which owed much to the example of the Belgian constitution and more to that of the Prussian constitutional enactment of 1850, was far from libertarian. Even so, it was too much. Two elections were held, the first in March 1877, the second, after a forced dissolution, in December of the same year. The first Ottoman parliament sat for two sessions, of about five months in all. Nevertheless, the elected members showed considerable vigor, and no doubt for that reason on February 14, 1878 the sultan, exercising his sultanic prerogative, summarily dismissed parliament. It did not meet again for 30 years."

     The second convincing explanation is the influence of socialism in the Middle East. Unfortunately, socialism, in either its Fascist, Nazi, Soviet, or post-Soviet forms, seems to have met with less cultural resistance in the Middle East than libertarianism - at least, amongst its rulers. As Lewis writes:

"During the 1930s, Italy and then, far more, Germany offered new ideological and political models, with the added attraction of being opposed to the Western powers. These won widespread support, and even after their military defeat in World War II, they continued to serve as unavowed models in both ideology and statecraft.
     "But not for the economy. The victory of the Soviet Union in 1945 suggested a different solution - a return to the econo-mic explanation of Western success, but with a socialist shortcut. State control of the economy was imposed in several countries. Various types of socialism, sometimes called Arab socialism, sometimes called scientific socialism, were adopted. They ended in disastrous failure, in ruination maintained by tyranny. Most people in the region have by now decided that socialism – or at least their experience of it – is neither Arab nor scientific.
     "Socialism by that name has generally been abandoned, but the high level of state involvement in the economy, which long preceded the adoption of socialism, has long survived its abandonment; it continues to inhibit economic growth. The difference between Middle Eastern and Western economic approaches can be seen even in their distinctive forms of corruption, from which neither society is exempt. In the West, one makes money in the market, and uses it to buy or influence power. In the East, one seizes power, and uses it to make money."

     The final convincing explanation for the paradox is that it was precisely the Islamic Middle East's having a relatively more advanced civilization to begin with that helped insulate it against learning anything new from the outside world, especially since Christianity was considered to be one of the inferior precursors subsumed by Islam. Foreign languages were not studied much by Moslems, since Arabic was the native language of many of them, and was spoken, at least as a second language, throughout most of the Islamic world. Without literacy in foreign languages, study of foreign literature, history, and science was quite difficult. So, while the West was making great strides in navigation, weapons, science, and technology, the Islamic Middle East was either unaware of these things or thought of them as the trivia of a more backwards infidel civilization – until the Moslem world met with repeated, decisive, strategic military defeats at the hands of Western armies and navies. That didn't happen until the late 18th century, with the Treaty of Carlowitz, Austria, in 1699. As Lewis notes:

"The Treaty of Carlowitz has a special importance in the history of the Ottoman Empire, and even, more broadly, in the history of the Islamic World, as the first peace signed by a defeated Ottoman Empire with victorious Christian adversaries.
     "In a global perspective, this was not entirely new. There had been previous defeats of Islam by Christendom: the loss of Spain and Portugal, the rise of Russia, and the growing European presence in South and Southeast Asia. But few observers at that time, Muslim or Western, could command a global perspective. In the perspective of the Muslim heartlands in the Middle East, these events were remote and peripheral, barely affecting the balance of power between the Islamic and Christian worlds in the long struggle that had been going on between them since the advent of Islam in the seventh century and the irruption of the Muslim armies from Arabia into the then Christian lands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and, for a while, Southern Europe"

     So, the Moslem Middle East ignored the progress that was being made in Western Christendom, thanks to the competition between Church and State, until the West reached the point where it could militarily defeat the Ottoman Empire. At that point, the Moslem world realized that it had to try to imitate the West in order to try to catch up with it, but Moslem culture resisted the secularism and decentralization of power that had led to the rise of the West.

     Socialism has failed to enable the Middle East to catch up with the West, militarily, economically, or culturally.

     Islamic fundamentalism has not only failed to do the same, but to some extent doesn't even promise catch-up with the West. It is based upon rejection of the West, and only accepts some degree of modernization to the extent it is thought necessary for the elimination of Western influence from the Middle East. Classical liberal reforms were attempted in the late 19th century, but were unable to overcome the barrier of theocratic rule. What the Middle East needs is a return to that kind of reform, along with a rejection of autocrats who claim divine sanction for their rule. We owe Bernard Lewis a great debt of gratitude for helping us to see this more clearly.