Reviewed by Robert Irwin

Sunday, January 27, 2002; Page BW05

WHAT WENT WRONG?
Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
By Bernard Lewis
Oxford Univ. 180 pp. $23

There are many people who think that what went wrong for the Middle East was the West, but this is not Bernard Lewis's view of the matter. Lewis, who is an emeritus professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, has written several important studies of the medieval Arab world, and he is intensely aware of the sophistication, wealth and liveliness of medieval Arab culture. Not only did the Arabs preserve much of the classical Greek heritage in philosophy and mathematics; they also went on to make important advances in those fields, as well as in astronomy and medicine.

At some point, however, perhaps as early as the 11th century, a narrowing of intellectual horizons seems to have taken place. There were no more translations from the Greek. Technology stagnated -- and, though Muslims continued to travel widely in Asia and Africa and to maintain a keen interest in the territories to the south and east of the Islamic heartlands, they were oddly incurious about crucial intellectual and technical developments that were taking place in Christian Europe.

For a long time, Muslim weakness and stagnation were not recognized for what they were. The loss of Granada and of what was left of Muslim Spain in 1492, tragic though it was, could be dismissed as a local and temporary reverse. Elsewhere, Muslim empires continued to expand, and the armies of the Ottoman sultan several times threatened Vienna. Only toward the end of the 17th century did it become apparent that a turning point had been reached, as the Ottoman sultanate faced defeat after defeat and, under the pressure of those defeats, began to cede territories mostly inhabited by Muslims to the Christian powers.

Lewis, who has also written a great deal about the Turks in the early modern and modern periods, is unstinting in his praise of the clear-eyed analysis and programs for reform that were then produced by Turkish statesmen and intellectuals. However, even the most astute advocates of reform tended to put forward programs for adopting Western military and industrial innovations more quickly, rather than a program for making the Ottoman sultanate itself a center of innovation.

Moreover, to see a problem does not necessarily mean that one is able to do anything very much about it, and, from the 18th century onward, the Turks, their Arab subjects and their Persian neighbors were on a downward slide. In part, the growing wealth of Europe was due to its colonization of America, as well as its easy maritime access to markets in Asia and Africa. In the wake of World War I, the Ottoman sultanate was dismantled.

Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt were among the Arab successor states that were formed from its dismemberment, though these territories did not achieve full independence until the British and French withdrawal from the Middle East after the end of World War II. Arab achievements since then have been on the whole unimpressive. As Lewis notes, according to a World Bank report, "the total exports of the Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, a country of five million inhabitants." Moreover, though some countries go through the charade of rigged elections, there is not a single fully democratic regime in the Arab world.

What went wrong, then? Lewis's analysis is subtle and he does not single out any single factor, but many of the checks and brakes on the Middle East's further intellectual and technical development can be traced to religion. Pious Muslim reformers tended to think in terms of restoring things to the way they were in Arabia in the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. Reform then meant rejecting innovation rather than seeking it out.

The way religious and political powers were, theoretically at least, combined in the office of the Caliph, the comprehensive scope of the Shari'a (a religiously based legal code) and the absence of a separate Islamic "Church" all seem to have militated against the development of a civil society, based on secular, democratic values.

Failures, backwardness and poverty in the East have bred resentment and envy of the power, wealth and triumphalism of the West, which is all part of the background to Sept. 11 (though Lewis does not actually mention that atrocity, nor does he seek to explore its immediate causes).

Lewis's book is lucidly argued and richly supported by telling quotations, and I find his arguments persuasive, but I would be likely to do so, for I am a product of the Western culture that the Middle East finds so difficult to deal with. But what would a member of al Qaeda make of What Went Wrong?, always supposing that he could be induced to open the book at all, which is not likely, for Lewis is well known as a staunch defender of Israel's interests, as well as an occasional adviser to the State Department.

I imagine that the (admittedly hypothetical and improbable) Islamicist reader would reply that the question has been badly posed. It is the Americans and Europeans who should ask themselves what has gone wrong with the West, where superior technology and wealth go hand in hand with arrogance, oppression, corruption, pornography, loose sexual morals, rising street crime and the leisured pursuit of trivia. As for the Middle East, most of its problems arise from continued Western intervention in the region.

Lewis is a persuasive chronicler of Muslim resistance to change and modernity, but that is only part of the story. •

Robert Irwin is the author of "Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature," as well as of several novels, the most recent of which is "Satan Wants Me."