A Scathing Review of Bernard Lewis' "What Went Wrong"

The way Muslim apologists speak of Bernard Lewis one might believe they think him the Devil incarnate. Famed anti-Orientalist Edward Said, for one, never missed an opportunity to execrate Lewis. Intrigued by all this calumny I picked up a copy of Lewis’ latest book, What Went Wrong, in which Lewis cursorily examines Islamic civilization, trying to tell us, well, what went wrong. I’d like to say I found out what it was, but I didn’t. Lewis never answered the question.

While he thoroughly details the historical problems Muslim societies have faced when confronting with the modern West, he doesn't dig past these surface phenomena to unearth the core of the problem. Essentially, Dr. Lewis spent some 160 typewritten pages saying, “I don’t know.” One wonders why he even bothered publishing the book.

The mystery deepens when it comes to Islam. He cavils at blaming Islam’s demise on the religion itself. Thus proclaims Lewis ever so piously, “…to blame Islam as such is usually hazardous, and rarely attempted. Nor is it very plausible.”

Really? Centuries of rot and decline over a region stretching from Morocco to Indonesia—all of which Dr. Lewis writes about in this very book—and the one thing each of these places has in common—Islam—is not to blame? And this is the guy Eddie Said loved to hate? You’d think he’d have loved him. Then again, maybe Ed was smarter than we gave him credit for. After all, what more could Dr. Said have wanted than a chief antagonist who cedes the major issue in advance?

Dr. Lewis’ excuses for Islam are so abject in their political correctness that they should make even Edward Said blush—perhaps he’s now blushing in Heaven. As if by rote, Lewis recites the shopworn, orthodox creed of nervous, ever-glancing-over-their-shoulders Orientalists: “For most of the Middle Ages,” he drones, “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.”

Behold, the old “Golden Age” dodge in all its shabby glory. Every writer feels compelled to add this nostalgic reference to a yesteryear when the wonderfully tolerant Muslim caliphs ran the show round about the year eight-hundred-and-something. If you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it a million times. And, of course, no criticism of Islam would be complete without some standard-issue tsk-tsking of Western Civilization and Christendom. Utterly unoriginal in his thought, Lewis dusts off all the tiresome, shopworn grievances against Christians and puts them on display: the crusades, the inquisitions, the theological disputes, etc, etc, etc, ad naseum.

His tiresome, anti-Christian litany bases itself on that age-old Enlightenment prejudice which holds that Western Civilization began with the Greeks, went into hiding once Constantine the Great took over, was then sheltered by kind Auntie Islam, and finally reappeared during the Renaissance in all its glory. In between Rome and the Renaissance nothing happened; it was a period of utter darkness and ignorance. Everyone has heard these things in one form or another, and most educated people accept it as God’s truth, so to speak.

But like most things educated people believe, it’s utter and complete hoakum. First, Islamic civilization was not as pacific and enlightened as Dr. Lewis and other apologists make out, and second, Christendom was not as benighted as they like to assume.

Let’s look at Christendom first. Even in Lewis’ book contrary facts pop up here and there to undermine his glib assumptions. He concedes that mechanical items like clocks, which remained beyond the ken of the “civilized” Islamics, were invented and exported by Europeans in the early fourteenth century. That’s the 1300s—almost two hundred years before the Renaissance began. Other medieval historians have written at length about the work done with watermills, lenses, pumps and gearing, all of which had been taking place since the time of Constantine. So even in the dark years of pre-Renaissance Christian rule, the West was making and using mechanical devices, and therefore experimentation and mechanical improvement were not products of the Modern Age. *

This is reflected also in the philosophy and theology of the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, it screwed up with Galileo, no excuses there, but it also created the university system that made Galileo who he was. Figures like Aquinas and Albert the Great (their silliness about unicorns and angels notwithstanding) adopted, revived and applied Aristotle’s empirically based thought, something Islam never did, despite its having almost every extant Aristotelian text in its sole possession for centuries. The effect of this was to create an epistemology that examined the relationships of physical phenomena based on cause and effect, and this led to what we now recognize as modernity.

In Islam, however, things were entirely the opposite. Instead of having to rebuild from the ruins of a fallen Roman civilization, as the West did, the Arab Irruption of the seventh century put Islam in control of two wholly formed empires: Persia and south Byzantium. When they conquered these areas, they effectively nullified several hundred years of law and tradition that had accrued under the previous regimes and had held back progress. With this drag now gone, the economies in these areas boomed, thus bringing about the “Golden Age” of Islam. Notice though, that no positive action of Islam itself made for this “Golden Age,” but rather a negative action, the removal of previous restrictions.

What gains were made by Islam itself are also suspect. I quote here a rather unintentionally revealing passage about the “Golden Age” from another Muslim apologist, Karen Armstrong, “Building on the learning of the past, which had thus become available to them, Muslim scholars [under the Abbasids] made more scientific discoveries during this time than in the whole of previously recorded history. Industry and commerce also flourished, and the elite lived in refinement and luxury. But it was difficult to see how this regime was in any way Islamic.”[Emphasis mine]

When Dr. Armstrong says the Golden Age was not Islamic, she means it was inegalitarian. Hopelessly blinkered by liberal mores, she and others like her fail to see exactly how profound her quote truly is, for it’s only in societies that recognize hierarchies that true advancement occurs. But Islam, as Dr. Lewis also notes, is first and foremost a religion of equality. Therefore, those societies boasting of the greatest technical, economic and cultural advances are preordained to be the most un-Islamic. Islam’s much-touted scientific advances occurred despite Islam, not because of it.

This tendency began to take its toll once the Islamic religion settled in and consolidated its new empire. As with all governments, the Islamic empire began issuing its own restrictive ordinances and carrying out its own slaughters and persecutions—things people like Lewis and Armstrong ignore or trivialize with clichéd tu quoques.

The decline further accelerated in the eleventh century when a man named Al-Ghazali came along. A highly influential theologian, Al-Ghazali was something of a Muslim St. Augustine and his influence cannot be overstressed. So important is this man that he is at times referred to as the greatest Muslim after Mohammed. Al-Ghazali comprehensively attacked and condemned the Islamic philosophy and science of the Golden Age as un-Islamic. Indeed, he was right: most of the philosophies floating around at the time were un-Islamic—they denied divine creation and the immortality of the soul, and they celebrated hierarchical societies.

Ghazali’s arguments effectively made any rational philosophy based on a religion wholly committed to mystical revelation impossible. He placed so much emphasis on the divine role in nature that he even wound up denying the reality of cause and effect. If something happens in the world, Al-Ghazali argued, it isn’t because of natural, repeatable and discoverable laws, but because God willed it, and he might will otherwise tomorrow. Today the rock falls, but who knows what God will do the next day? It might go sideways, or even upwards.

Ghazali’s is a faith-based science taken to ridiculous extremes. But ridiculousness has never been much of an obstacle to believing Muslims. They accepted Ghazali’s arguments, and Islamic philosophy and science died.

Rather strange, as it goes a long way towards explaining what went wrong. Surely Lewis, a man conversant in Middle Eastern languages and theology, is aware of what I’ve written here, yet he makes no mention of it. As far as What Went Wrong? is concerned, history began in the sixteenth century with the Ottoman decline. There is not one paragraph, line or clause dedicated to Al-Ghazali, nor is there any serious examination of the cherished assumptions of the Islamic “Golden Age,” where, we are to believe, things were “going right.” Instead we are treated to nothing more than a sad tour of the past few centuries, and most of that is confined to the Ottoman Empire. The final result leaves the reader only marginally better informed than before he read the book.

These strange lacunae say nothing good about Lewis. That he omitted these facts can only mean that he is either an extremely sloppy thinker or that he’s hiding something, perhaps even from himself. Knowing his reputation, I think it’s the latter. A Jew and a staunch supporter of Israel, Dr. Lewis wants to believe that an accommodation can be reached between modernity and Islam. He knows that if such an accommodation is impossible or extremely difficult, then Israel’s position and long-term survival is quite bleak. Consequently, his writing reeks of forlorn and desperate hope. Rather than squarely confronting the danger, he sticks his head in the ground like the proverbial ostrich.

No doubt this same desperation also drives him to take lazy kicks at Christendom. If Christendom can be shown to have been worse—i.e. less tolerant and less egalitarian—at one time than the Muslim World, then perhaps there’s still hope for Islam to modernize. Never mind that there’s not even a hint of logical necessity in this implicit syllogism.

Perhaps a few decades ago no one would have much cared about these omissions, but today Dr. Lewis’ position is absolutely inexcusable. At the moment the world is caught up in a civilizational war, of which he, along with Samuel Huntington, is an intellectual godfather. False hope and illusions are deadly, especially when a historian of his caliber and reputation propounds them. One Edward Said in the debate was quite enough.

* This should not be read as a condemnation of the Renaissance or the Modern Age. Both were immeasurable boons to mankind. My point is that neither of these movements spontaneously emerged from thin air. They were firmly grounded in and arose from the age that preceded them, and to casually disconnect these epochs into self-contained units, as all too many modern scholars like Lewis do, is both irresponsible and wrong.

I'm not so sure, I read What Went Wrong and came away with a similar sense that Lewis elided anything in the religion itself as a potential reason Islam has been stuck somewhere between the seventh century and the (first) millenium. Especially given the work of Ba'at Yeor, with whom Lewis is undoubtedly familiar, it seems harder and harder to argue for a Molsem (I refuse to use the new spelling, I'd really rather write Mahometan, the more tradtional spelling) golden age of scientific and philosophical achievement. Even the vaunted 'arabic' numerals and algebra seem to be Indian in origin rather than Islamic.

Intrigued by all this calumny I picked up a copy of Lewis' latest book, What Went Wrong, in which Lewis cursorily examines Islamic civilization, trying to tell us, well, what went wrong. I'd like to say I found out what it was, but I didn't. Lewis never answered the question.

While he thoroughly details the historical problems Muslim societies have faced when confronting with the modern West, he doesn't dig past these surface phenomena to unearth the core of the problem.

I am left wondering if the author of this piece has an understanding of the difference between the words "thoroughly" and "cursorily".

Derek Copold

Editor

I'm in my early 30s, married and work during the day as a mechanical engineer in Houston, contracting my services to only the most evil of oil companies. No faint-hearted do-badders, please. By night I indulge in even nastier anti-social habits, like studying philosophy at the University of St. Thomas. I would prefer to make my living writing, but am prevented from doing so by an incurable addiction to eating and sleeping under a roof.

Bernard Lewis
Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; The Emergence of Modern Turkey; The Arabs in History; and What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, among other books.

Lewis is internationally recognized as one of our era’s greatest historians of the Middle East. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Indonesian.

Boy it's hard to decide to has a better handle on the middle east and Islam A 30ish year old mechanical engineer who studies philosophy in his spare time or an 80(?) year old who's devoted his life to studying and writeing about this...I just don't know who's correct.

"What Went Wrong" was the first book I read after 9/11, in an attempt to educate myself about Islam, and although I had not much frame of reference, Lewis seemed to equivocate when it came to any definitive judgment about his subject. In the last chapter, he goes through a list of external influences to attempt to explain what went wrong, then states that "A more sophisticated form of the blame game finds its target in religion, for some, specifically Islam. But to blame Islam as such is usually hazardous and rarely attempted. Nor is it very plausible." From there, he launches into an argument that the past golden age of Islam is proof that Islam itself is not to blame, but rather that specific teachers, doctrines and groups, i.e. "fundamentalists" are the culprit(s).

Ibn Warraq refutes Lewis on that point, in the following excerpt from "Why I Am Not a Muslim:"

“In an important article, ‘Islam and Liberal Democracy,’ Bernard Lewis explains very well why liberal democracy never developed in Islam. Like many scholars of Islam, Lewis deplores the use of the term ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ as being inappropriate. I agree. I have already pointed out that, unlike Protestants, who have moved away from the literal interpretation of the Bible, Muslims – all Muslims – still take the Koran literally. Hence, in my view, there is no difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. Islam is deeply embedded in every Muslim society, and ‘fundamentalism’ is simply the excess of the culture.”

“Lewis himself tells us that the Islamic fundamentalists intend to ‘govern by Islamic rules if they gain power.’ The Islamic fundamentalists will apply Islam – the Islam of Islamic law, and all that it entails. Lewis also tells us that “their creed and political program are not compatible with liberal democracy.’ I also agree. But now we see immediately why Lewis and Islamic apologists, in fact, find this term, ‘Islamic fundamentalist,’ so convenient, while at the same time deploring it. It is an extremely useful and face-saving device for those unable to confront the fact that Islam itself, and not just something we call ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’ is incompatible with democracy. To repeat, Lewis himself says the Islamic fundamentalists will apply ‘Islamic rules.’ Now if their creed is incompatible with democracy, then these ‘Islamic rules’ themselves must be incompatible with democracy. Thus the term ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ enables apologists to set up a specious distinction, a distinction without any justification.”

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