virus: Another (shorter) Essay by the Doyan of Islamic Studies

From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 22:22:29 MDT


                         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sooner or later, to be exhausted, or, more probably, superseded, as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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