What Went Wrong?
By all standards of the modern world”economic development,
literacy, scientific achievement”Muslim civilization, once a
mighty enterprise, has fallen low. Many in the Middle East blame
a variety of outside forces. But underlying much of the Muslim
world's travail may be a simple lack of freedom
by Bernard Lewis
.....
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n the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear
that things had gone badly wrong in the Middle East”and,
indeed, in all the lands of Islam. Compared with Christendom, its
rival for more than a millennium, the world of Islam had become
poor, weak, and ignorant. The primacy and therefore the
dominance of the West was clear for all to see, invading every
aspect of the Muslim's public and even”more painfully”his
private life.
Muslim modernizers”by reform or revolution”concentrated
their efforts in three main areas: military, economic, and political.
The results achieved were, to say the least, disappointing. The
quest for victory by updated armies brought a series of humiliating
defeats. The quest for prosperity through development brought in
some countries impoverished and corrupt economies in recurring
need of external aid, in others an unhealthy dependence on a
single resource”oil. And even this was discovered, extracted, and
put to use by Western ingenuity and industry, and is doomed,
sooner or later, to be exhausted, or, more probably, superseded, as
the international community grows weary of a fuel that pollutes
the land, the sea, and the air wherever it is used or transported,
and that puts the world economy at the mercy of a clique of
capricious autocrats. Worst of all are the political results: the long
quest for freedom has left a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging
from traditional autocracies to dictatorships that are modern only
in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.
Many remedies were tried”weapons and factories, schools and
parliaments”but none achieved the desired result. Here and there
they brought some alleviation and, to limited elements of the
population, some benefit. But they failed to remedy or even to halt
the increasing imbalance between Islam and the Western world.
There was worse to come. It was bad enough for Muslims to feel
poor and weak after centuries of being rich and strong, to lose the
position of leadership that they had come to regard as their right,
and to be reduced to the role of followers of the West. But the
twentieth century, particularly the second half, brought further
humiliation”the awareness that they were no longer even the first
among followers but were falling back in a lengthening line of
eager and more successful Westernizers, notably in East Asia. The
rise of Japan had been an encouragement but also a reproach. The
later rise of other Asian economic powers brought only reproach.
The proud heirs of ancient civilizations had gotten used to hiring
Western firms to carry out tasks of which their own contractors
and technicians were apparently incapable. Now Middle Eastern
rulers and businessmen found themselves inviting contractors and
technicians from Korea”only recently emerged from Japanese
colonial rule”to perform these tasks. Following is bad enough;
limping in the rear is far worse. By all the standards that matter in
the modern world”economic development and job creation,
literacy, educational and scientific achievement, political freedom
and respect for human rights”what was once a mighty
civilization has indeed fallen low.
"Who did this to us?" is of course a common human response
when things are going badly, and many in the Middle East, past
and present, have asked this question. They have found several
different answers. It is usually easier and always more satisfying
to blame others for one's misfortunes. For a long time the Mongols
were the favorite villains. 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 Islam, 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 hard 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”itself an import from Europe”produced
new perceptions. Arabs could lay the blame for their troubles on
the Turks, who had ruled them for many centuries. Turks could
lay the blame for the stagnation of their civilization on the dead
weight of the Arab past, in which the creative energies of the
Turkish people were caught and immobilized. Persians could lay
the blame for the loss of their ancient glories on Arabs, Turks, and
Mongols impartially.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries British and French
paramountcy in much of the Arab world produced a new and
more plausible scapegoat”Western imperialism. In the Middle
East there have been good reasons for such blame. Western
political domination, economic penetration, and”longest,
deepest, and most insidious of all”cultural influence changed the
face of the region and transformed the lives of its people, turning
them in new directions, arousing new hopes and fears, creating
new dangers and new expectations without precedent in their
cultural past.
But the Anglo-French interlude was comparatively brief, and
ended half a century ago; Islam's change for the worse began long
before and continued unabated afterward. Inevitably, the role of
the British and the French as villains was taken over by the United
States, along with other aspects of Western leadership. The
attempt to transfer the guilt to America has won considerable
support but, for similar reasons, remains unconvincing. Anglo-
French rule and American influence, like the Mongol invasions,
were a consequence, not a cause, of the inner weakness of Middle
Eastern states and societies. Some observers, both inside and
outside the region, have pointed to differences in the post-colonial
development of former British possessions”for example,
between Aden, in the Middle East, and Singapore or Hong Kong;
or between the various lands that once made up the British
Empire in India.
Another European contribution to this debate is anti-Semitism,
and blaming "the Jews" for all that goes wrong. Jews in traditional
Islamic societies experienced the normal constraints and
occasional hazards of minority status. Until the rise and spread of
Western tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
they were better off under Muslim than under Christian rule in
most significant respects. With rare exceptions, where hostile
stereotypes of the Jew existed in the Islamic tradition, Islamic
societies tended to be contemptuous and dismissive rather than
suspicious and obsessive. This made the events of 1948”the
failure to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel”all the
more of a shock. As some writers observed at the time, it was
humiliating 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 intolerable. Anti-Semitism and its image of the
Jew as a scheming, evil monster provided a soothing antidote.
The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle
East occurred among Christian minorities, and can usually be
traced back to European originals. They had limited impact;
during the Dreyfus trial in France, for example, when a Jewish
officer was unjustly accused and condemned by a hostile court,
Muslim comments usually favored the persecuted Jew against his
Christian persecutors. But the poison continued to spread, and
starting in 1933, Nazi Germany and its various agencies made a
concerted and on the whole remarkably successful effort to
promote European-style anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The
struggle for Palestine greatly facilitated the acceptance of the anti-
Semitic interpretation of history, and led some to attribute all evil
in the Middle East”and, indeed, in the world”to secret Jewish
plots. This interpretation has pervaded much of the public
discourse in the region, including that seen in education, the
media, and even entertainment.
An argument sometimes adduced is that the cause of the changed
relationship between East and West is not a Middle Eastern
decline but a Western upsurge”the discoveries and the scientific,
technological, industrial, and political revolutions that
transformed the West and vastly increased its wealth and power.
But this is merely to restate the question: Why did the discoverers
of America sail from Spain rather than from a Muslim Atlantic
port, out of which such voyages were indeed attempted in earlier
times? Why did the great scientific breakthrough occur in Europe
and not, as one might reasonably have expected, in the richer,
more advanced, and in most respects more enlightened realm of
Islam?
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more sophisticated form of the blame game finds its targets
inside, rather than outside, Islamic society. One such target is
religion”for some, specifically Islam. But to blame Islam as such
is usually hazardous and not often attempted. Nor is it very
plausible. For most of the Middle Ages it was neither the older
cultures of the Orient nor the newer cultures of the West that were
the major centers of civilization and progress but the world of
Islam. There old sciences were recovered and developed and new
sciences were created; there new industries were born and
manufactures and commerce were expanded to a level without
precedent. There, too, governments and societies achieved a
freedom of thought and expression that led persecuted Jews and
even dissident Christians to flee Christendom for refuge in Islam.
In comparison with modern ideals, and even with modern practice
in the more advanced democracies, the medieval Islamic world
offered only limited freedom, but that was vastly more than was
offered by any of its predecessors, its contemporaries, or most of
its successors.
The point has often been made: 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? Some have posed the question in
a different form”not "What has Islam done to the Muslims?" but
"What have the Muslims done to Islam?"”and have answered by
laying the blame on specific teachers and doctrines and groups.
For those known nowadays as Islamists or fundamentalists, the
failures and shortcomings of modern Islamic lands afflict those
lands because they adopted alien notions and practices. They fell
away from authentic Islam and thus lost their former greatness.
Those known as modernists or reformers take the opposite view,
seeing the cause of this loss not in the abandonment but in the
retention of old ways, and especially in the inflexibility and
ubiquity of the Islamic clergy, who, they say, are responsible for
the persistence of beliefs and practices that might have been
creative and progressive a thousand years ago but are neither
today. The modernists' usual tactic is not to denounce religion as
such, still less Islam in particular, but to level their criticism
against fanaticism. It is to fanaticism”and more particularly to
fanatical religious authorities”that they attribute the stifling of
the once great Islamic scientific movement and, more generally,
of the freedom of thought and expression.
A more common approach to this theme has been to discuss a
specific problem: the place of religion and of its professional
exponents in the political order. In this view a principal cause of
Western progress is the separation of Church and State and the
creation of a civil society governed by secular laws. Another
approach has been to view the main culprit as the relegation of
women to an inferior position in Muslim society, which deprives
the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people and
entrusts the other half's crucial early years of upbringing to
illiterate and downtrodden mothers. The products of such an
education, it has been said, are likely to grow up either arrogant or
submissive, and unfit for a free, open society. However one
evaluates the views of secularists and feminists, their success or
failure will be a major factor in shaping the Middle Eastern
future.
Some solutions that once commanded passionate support have
been discarded. The two dominant movements in the twentieth
century were socialism and nationalism. Both have been
discredited”the first by its failure, the second by its success and
consequent exposure as ineffective. Freedom, interpreted to mean
national independence, was seen as the great talisman that would
bring all other benefits. The overwhelming majority of Muslims
now live in independent states, but this has brought no solutions to
their problems. National socialism, the bastard offspring of both
ideologies, persists in a few states that have preserved the Nazi-
Fascist style of dictatorial government and indoctrination through
a vast security apparatus and a single all-powerful party. These
regimes have failed every test except survival, and have brought
none of the promised benefits. If anything, their infrastructures are
even more antiquated than those of other Muslim states, their
armed forces designed primarily for terror and repression.
At present two answers to the question of what went wrong
command widespread support in the Middle East, each with its
own diagnosis and corresponding prescription. One attributes all
evil to the abandonment of the divine heritage of Islam and
advocates return to a real or imagined past. That is the way of the
Iranian revolution and of the so-called fundamentalist movements
and regimes in various Muslim countries. The other condemns the
past and advocates secular democracy, best embodied in the
Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923 by Kemal Atatürk.
For the oppressive but ineffectual governments that rule much of
the Middle East, finding targets to blame 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 introduced.
They seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects
toward other, outside targets.
But growing numbers of Middle Easterners are adopting a more
self-critical approach. The question "Who did this to us?" has led
only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. And the
question "What did we do wrong?" has led naturally to a second
question: "How do we put it right?" In that question, and in the
various answers that are being found, lie the best hopes for the
future.
During the past few weeks the worldwide exposure given to the
views and actions of Osama bin Laden and his hosts the Taliban
has provided a new and vivid insight into the eclipse of what was
once the greatest, most advanced, and most open civilization in
human history.
To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of
Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom”freedom of
the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and
inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and
pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male
oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny”that underlies so
many of the troubles of the Muslim world. But the road to
democracy, as the Western experience amply demonstrates, is
long and hard, full of pitfalls and obstacles.
If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path,
the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region,
and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and
spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating
sooner or later in yet another alien domination”perhaps from a
new Europe reverting to old ways, perhaps from a resurgent
Russia, perhaps from some expanding superpower in the East. But
if they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their
differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a
common creative endeavor, they can once again make the Middle
East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle
Ages, a major center of civilization. For the time being, the choice
is theirs.
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