What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, page 17
“Who did this to us?” is of course a common human response when things are going badly, and there have been indeed many in the Middle East, past and present, who have asked this question. They 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, 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—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.1 Turks could blame 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 blame the loss of their ancient glories on Arabs, Turks, and Mongols impartially.
The period of French and British paramountcy in much of the Arab world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 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, had 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 equally without precedent in their own cultural past.
But the Anglo-French interlude was comparatively brief and ended half a century ago; the change for the worse began long before their arrival and continued unabated after their departure. Inevitably, their role as villains was taken over by the United States, along with other aspects of the leadership of the West. 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 the differences in the postimperial development of former British possessions—for example, between Aden in the Middle East and such places as Singapore and 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. In most significant respects, they were better off under Muslim than under Christian rule, until the rise and spread of Western tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
With rare exceptions, where hostile stereotypes of the Jew existed in the Islamic tradition, they tended to be contemptuous and dismissive rather than suspicious and obsessive. This made the events of 1948—the failure of five Arab states and armies to prevent half a million Jews from establishing a state in the debris of the British Mandate for Palestine—all the more of a shock. As some writers at the time observed, it was bad 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 an intolerable humiliation. Anti-Semitism and its demonized picture of the Jew as a scheming, evil monster provided a soothing answer.
The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East occurred among the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced back to European originals. They had limited impact, and at the time for example of the Dreyfus trial in France, 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 from 1933 Nazi Germany and its various agencies made a concerted and on the whole remarkably successful effort to promote and disseminate 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 blame all evil in the Middle East and indeed in the world on secret Jewish plots. This interpretation has pervaded much of the public discourse in the region, including education, the media, and even entertainment.
Another view of the Jewish component, based in reality rather than fantasy, may be more instructive. The modern Israeli state and society were built by Jews who came from Christendom and Islam; that is, on the one hand from Europe and the Americas, on the other from the Middle East and North Africa. Judaism, or more broadly Jewishness, is a religion in the fullest sense—a system of belief and worship, a morality and a way of life, a complex of social and cultural values and habits. But until comparatively recent times Jews had no political role, and even in recent times that role is limited to a few countries. There is therefore no specifically Jewish political and societal culture or tradition. Ancient memories are too remote, recent experience too brief, to provide them. Between the destruction of the ancient Jewish kingdom and the creation of the modern Jewish republic, Jews were a part—one might say a subculture—of the larger societies in which they live, and even their communal organizations and usages inevitably reflected the structures and usages of those societies. For the last 14 centuries, the overwhelming majority of Jews lived in either the Christian or Islamic world, and were in many respects a component in both civilizations. Inevitably, the Jews who created Israel brought with them many of the political and societal standards and values, the habits and attitudes of the countries from which they came: on the one hand, what we have become accustomed to call the Judaeo-Christian tradition, on the other, what we may with equal justification call the Judaeo-Islamic tradition.
In present-day Israel these two traditions meet and, with increasing frequency, collide. Their collisions are variously expressed, in communal, religious, ethnic, even party-political terms. But in many of their encounters what we see is a clash between Christendom and Islam, oddly represented by their former Jewish minorities, who reflect, as it were in miniature, both the strengths and the weaknesses of the two civilizations of which they had been part. The conflict, coexistence, or combination of these two traditions within a single small state, with a shared religion and a common citizenship and allegiance, should prove illuminating. For Israel, this issue may have an existential significance, since the survival of the state, surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned by neighbors who reject its very right to exist, may depend on its largely Western-derived qualitative edge.
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, the scientific movement, the technological, industrial, and political revolutions that transformed the West and vastly increased its wealth and power. But these comparisons do not answer the questions; they merely restate it—Why did the discoverers of America sail from Spain and not a Muslim Atlantic port, where such voyages were indeed attempted in earlier times?2 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?
A more sophisticated form of the blame game finds its targets inside, rather than outside the society. One such target is religion, for some specifically Islam. But to blame Islam as such is usually hazardous, and rarely 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 in the middle. It was there that old sciences were recovered and developed and new sciences created; there that new industries were born and manufactures and commerce expanded to a level previously without precedent. It was there, too, that governments and societies achieved a degree of freedom of thought and expression that led persecuted Jews and even dissident Christians to flee for refuge from Christendom to Islam. The medieval Islamic world offered only limited freedom in comparison with modern ideals and even with modern practice in the more advanced democracies, but it offered vastly more freedom than any of its predecessors, its contemporaries and 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 indeed 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 nowadays known as Islamists or fundamentalists, the failures and shortcomings of the modern Islamic lands afflicted them 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, and see 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. These, 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. Their 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 freedom of thought and expression.3
A more usual approach to this theme is to discuss not religion in general, but a specific problem: the place of religion and of its professional exponents in the political order. For these, a principal cause of Western progress is the separation of church and state and the creation of a civil society governed by secular laws. For others, the main culprit is Muslim sexism, and the relegation of women to an inferior position in society, thus depriving the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people, and entrusting the crucial early years of the upbringing of the other half to illiterate and downtrodden mothers. The products of such an education, it was said, are likely to grow up either arrogant or submissive, and unfit for a free, open society. However one evaluates their views, the success or failure of secularists and feminists will be a major factor in shaping the Middle-Eastern future.
Some have sought the causes of this painful asymmetry in a variety of factors—the exhaustion of precious metals, coinciding with the discovery and exploitation by Europe of the resources of the new world; inbreeding, due to the prevalence of cousin marriage, especially in the countryside; the depredations of the goat that, by stripping the bark off trees and tearing up grass by the roots, turned once fertile lands into deserts. Others point to the disuse of wheeled vehicles in the pre-modern Middle East, variously explained as a cause or as a symptom of what went wrong.4 Familiar in antiquity, they became rare in the medieval centuries, and remained so until they were reintroduced under European influence or rule. Western travelers in the Middle East note their absence; Middle-Eastern travelers in the West note their presence.
In a sense, this was a symptom of a bigger problem. A cart is large and, for a peasant, relatively costly. It is difficult to conceal and easy to requisition. At a time and place where neither law nor custom restricted the powers of even local authorities, visible and mobile assets were a poor investment.5 The same fear of predatory authority—or neighbors—may be seen in the structure of traditional houses and quarters: the high, windowless walls, the almost hidden entrances in narrow alleyways, the careful avoidance of any visible sign of wealth. This much is clear—the advent of paved roads and wheeled vehicles in modern times brought no alleviation of the larger problems.
Some of the 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 independence, was seen as the great talisman that would bring all other benefits. The overwhelming majority of Muslims now live in independent states, which have brought no solutions to their problems. The bastard off-spring of both ideologies, national socialism, still survives in a few states that have preserved the Nazi Fascist style of dictatorial government and indoctrination, the one through a vast and ubiquitous security apparatus, the other through a single all-powerful party. These regimes too have failed every test except survival, and have brought none of the promised benefits. If anything, their infrastructures are even more antiquated than the others, their armed forces designed primarily for terror and repression.
At the present day two answers to this question command widespread support in the region, each with its own diagnosis of what is wrong, and the corresponding prescription for its cure. The one, attributing all evil to the abandonment of the divine heritage of Islam, advocates a 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 other Muslim countries. The other way is that of secular democracy, best embodied in the Turkish Republic founded by Kemal Atatürk.
Meanwhile the blame game—the Turks, the Mongols, the imperialists, the Jews, the Americans—continues, and shows little sign of abating. For the governments, at once oppressive and ineffectual, that rule much of the Middle East, this game 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 intensified. In this way they seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects against other, outer targets.
But for growing numbers of Middle Easterners it is giving way to a more self-critical approach. The question “Who did this to us?” has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other 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.
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 new, expanding superpower in the East. If they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor, then 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 their own.
Afterword
The core of this book was a series of three public lectures given at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna in September 1999 and published by them, in German translation, under the title Kultur and Modernisierung im Nahen Osten, in 2001. The Vienna lectures, extensively recast and re-written, constitute the basis of Chapters 1–3. Later chapters include passages from other previous publications: an article published in the Revue de Métaphysique, 1995, and three contributions—the first to the International Congress of Historical Sciences, Madrid (1992), the second and third to colloquia held in Strasbourg (1980) and Castel Gandolfo (1998). All three were published in the proceedings of these meetings. My thanks are due to the organizers of these various events for giving me the opportunity to formulate my views and put them before an informed audience. I would also like to express my thanks to my editor, Ms. Susan Ferber, for many constructive suggestions; to Mr. Eli Alshech, a graduate student at Princeton, for help of various kinds in the processes of research and exposition, and, once again, to my assistant Ms. Annamarie Cerminaro, for the care and skill with which she tended my manuscript from the first drafts to the final published version.
Bernard Lewis,
2001
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. See Abdulhak Adnan, La Science chez les Turcs ottomans (Paris: 1939), pp. 87, 98–9.
2. The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople 1554–1562, translated from the Latin by Edward Seymour Forster (Oxford: 1927), p. 112.
3. The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. J. Craigie, vol. i (Edinburgh: 1955), pp. 197 ff.
