What Went Wrong?
...use, of the weakness of Middles Easter states and societies”(p.153), and therefore the retreat of the West did not bring revitalization. The Quest for Wealth and Power In a society accustomed to despise the infidel barbarians, the idea of studying under infidel teachers was inconceivable. However, Lewis tell us, Islamic scholars (ulema) and Religious authorities had held that it was permissible to learn form the infidel only in order to fight them more effectively. Eventually Muslims began asking: Why is it always the West that introduces military innovations, we must go beyond adopting military technology and adopt that which underlay it: the sources of the West’s wealth and strength. “The question now was more specific-what is the source of this wealth and strength, the talisman of Western success?”(p.45). Clearly Muslims thought, Islamic nations were superior to Western nations in philosophy and religion, for the Islamic revelation superseded the Christian revelation. So the secret of the West’s strength must lie outside those fields, in economics and politics (wealth and power). Lewis’s discussion of Islam’s attempt to adopt Western political and economic practices lacks one important observation, as do most other discussions of the same subject. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Islamic peoples and states adopted from the West the doctrines of nationalism and socialism. When these failed, many Muslims felt that they had tried “adopting Western ways,” and it was time again to look to their own Islamic heritage. What needs to be said is that nationalism and socialism are actually the antithesis of the rationality and individualism that form the essence of Western civilization. Yet the Middle East’s attempts to learn form the West nationalism and socialism seemed to work no better than the adoption of military technology. In politics, it was difficult for Muslims to grasp certain Western concepts. Under Islam, Lewis believes, the opposite of tyranny is not freedom but justice. That is, the tyrant is contrasted with a legitimate ruler who dispenses justice according to God’s law. Apart from its distinction between tyrannical rulings and just rulings, Islamic political theory also distinguishes between a bad leader who rules without consultation and a good leader who rules only after consulting with others. In economics, too, Muslims seem never to have discovered the West’s secret. The economy and industry, was seen as the prime source of wealth and therefore ultimately of military effectiveness. Essentially, countries in the Middle East undertook “five-year” plans that involved building factories. The effort failed, and most of the early factories became derelict”(p.47). “The difference between Middle Eastern and Western economic approaches can be seen even in their distinctive forms of corruption, from which neither society is exempt. In the West, one makes money in the market, and uses it to buy or influence power. In the East, one seizes power, and uses it to make money. Morally there is no difference between the two, but their impact on the economy and on the politics is very different. (p.63) Social and Cultural Barriers The hypothesis that used science to explain the difference fit the facts better, in Muslim eyes. The Islamic world had achieved its greatest splendor when it had been the world leader in science. Now the infidels led in science, and that is why their civilization was superior. “Increasing numbers of European scientific books were translated, often with prefaces insisting on the importance of science for progress”(p.78). Their enterprise and openness enable them to add much that was new form the science and technique of India and China (pp. 78-79). But, Lewis tells us; the underlying social and cultural foundations of science were not and still are not accepted. (p.81). A principal reason may be that the intellectuals who became the strongest advocates of reason were, simultaneously, strong spokesmen for the intellectual opposition between science and religion. And one must add to that: Islam’s difficulty in conceding that any activity lies outside its purview. Traditionally, Muslims had said that the Islamic world achieved it greatest splendor when it had been closer to the true faith. But that argument could not explain why splendor had now passed to the infidels. The hypothesis that used science to explain the difference fit the facts better, in Muslim eyes. The Islamic world had achieved its greatest splendor when it had been the world leader in science. Now the infidels led in science, and that is why their civilization was superior. Modernization and Social Equality A movement for the reform and renovation of the Islamic way of life emerged beginning in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. An extremely small segment of the Muslim intelligentsia that had gained and acquaintance with “Western” life initiated this phenomenon, mad the almost inevitable comparison between the general progress and power of Western “Christian” nations and the decadent condition of Muslim life. The slave, the woman and the unbeliever were subject to strictly enforced legal, as well as social, disabilities, affecting them in almost every aspect of their daily lives. “According to Islamic law and tradition, there were three groups of people who did not benefit from the general Muslim principle of legal and religious quality-unbelievers, slaves and women. The women were obviously in one significant respect the worst-placed of the three” (p.67). The slave and unbelievers would be easier to recognize as Muslim only if they decided to embrace the Islamic faith; however, woman would never achieve the recognition due to their sex. “The emancipation of women by modernizing rulers was one of the main grievances of the radical fundamentalists, and the reversal of this trend is in the forefront of their agenda.” “The emancipation of women is Westernization; both for traditional conservatives and radical fundamentalists it is neither necessary nor useful but noxious, a betrayal of true Islamic values.”(p. 73). These disabilities were seen as an inherent part of the structure of Islam, buttressed by revelation, by the precept and practice of the Prophet, and by the classical and scriptural history of the Islamic community. (p.84). Secularism and the Civil Society “Secularism in the modern political meaning-the idea that religion and political authority, church and state are difference, and can or should be separated-is, Christian.” “Given the many ways in which a devout commitment to Islam blocked modernization in the Middle East, one might ask: Why did the Islamic world not separate religion form the rest of life, as the Christian world has? To understand, says Lewis, which the deepest traditions of Christianity recall a time when religion stood outside of the state, the Roman Empire. When Jesus said in Matthew 22:21, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s,” he provided a basis for that separation. Later Christians, reflecting on these facts, were not inclined to give the state great power over their lives. As a result, Christians developed a distinctive institution-the church, with its own laws and courts, its own hierarchy and chain of authority”(p.98). Therefore developing a relationship of cooperation, confrontation and conflict between Christianity and the state. By contrast, Lewis writes: “Muhammad was, so to speak, his on Constantine. In the religiously conceived polity that he founded and headed at Medina, the Prophet and his successors confronted the realities of the state and, before very long, of a vast and spreading empire. At no time did they create any institution corresponding to, or even remotely resembling, the church in Christendom”(pp. 98-99). There is only a single law, the Shari’a, accepted by Muslims as of divine origin and regulating all aspects of human life. Because there is no religious authority in Islam. Lewis says one might go so far as to say there is no such thing as orthodoxy and heresy. ‘Even the major division within Islam, between Sunnis and Shi’a, arose over an historical conflict about the political leadership of the community, not over any question of doctrine”(p.100). Beyond that internal division, there is a distinction between belief and unbelief, Muslim and infidel. But, as is the case with many religions, Islamic society offered a rather tolerant place to the unbeliever. The West, which most definitely did have a concept of heresy, discovered through its wars of religion and benefits of toleration. “After centuries of bloody strife and persecution, growing numbers of Christians finally concluded that only by depriving the state of the power to interfere in the affairs of the church, could they achieve any tolerable coexistence between people of differing faiths and creeds”(p.103). Muslims, in addition to lacking such traditions, also did not encounter the problem of internal religious warfare on the same magnitude as Christians and “therefore required no such answer” as secularization and tolerance (p.104). Time, Space, and Modernity & Aspects of Culture Change Middle Eastern technology and science ceased to develop when Western Europe was most t rapidly advancing. For example, by pointing to the tardy adoption of public clocks in the Islamic world. The mechanical clock was invented in the West in the 1300s and appeared first on monastic buildings (to regulate worship) and then on town halls (to regulate city life). It took two centuries for the mechanical clock to enter the Middle East, and then it came only as an imported item, so that maintenance and repair remained severe problems. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that the first public clock in Istanbul was installed on the grounds of the Dolmabache Palace”(p.125). “Cultural change is Westernization; part of modernization, no doubt, but not, accord...