What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response

Citation

Richardson, J. (2004), "What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response", Foresight, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 57-58. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680410531552

Professor Lewis's little volume is more of a synthesis, most readably condensed, setting out to explain the quandary faced by the Arabo‐Muslim world over the ebb of a great civilization when face‐to‐face with rising cultures from elsewhere. His book was not inspired by the events of September 2001, however, and does not contain the comments found in Professor Charnay's work germane to the world of 2001‐2004. Yet his work is also concerned, despite its relative brevity, with “the longer sequence and larger pattern of events, ideas and attitudes that preceded and in some measure produced” the events of 11 September.

Here again we relive the dilemmas that plagued the Islamic world as the West's Middle Ages, Renaissance and (later) industrial revolution overtook the splendid achievements of the Arabo‐Muslim era that ended in about 1400. “The story is told in the Turkish chronicles of a Venetian war galley that was cast ashore in a storm and abandoned by its crew. Ottoman naval specialists examined the hulk, and found things that they thought it might be useful to adopt. But the religio‐legal question arose – is it allowed to do the same as the infidels?” The specialists found the reply among their own religious authorities: “… it is permissible to imitate the infidels in order to more effectively fight against them … Actually going to infidel countries to learn was an even more radical change” (p. 48). Yearnings such as these thus set the scene for the spectacular terrorism that the world has experienced since about 1980.

During the century just past (according to author Lewis) the average man of Islam realized, furthermore, that world primacy belonged to a West that had invaded “every aspect of his public and – more painfully – even his private life” (p. 168). Reciprocally the world of Islam is deprived of “freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and enquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny” (p. 177).

Whereas some would try simply to keep up, i.e. modernize the Arab‐Muslim world, by strenuous efforts in the economic, political and military spheres, impoverishment and corruption have remained immanent and, worse, insuperable. The profits from exploiting modernity (petroleum energy, for example) were not for the benefit of Islam's national or regional populaces. The gains acquired were for their leaderships, leaving most of the uneducated (often illiterate) populations by the socio‐economic wayside, unable to be employed at even the lowest levels of economic self‐support.

The question, then, “Who did this to us?” has led only to neurotic fantasies … Another question – “What did we do wrong?” – has led naturally to a second question: “How do we put it right?” At the close of his book, Bernard Lewis stresses that only “the peoples of the Middle East [can] abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor”, thereby remaking their region “a major center of civilization … the choice is their own”.