The Closing of the Muslim Mind

Bernard Lewis has called his latest book What Went Wrong? And the implied askers of that question are not–as one could be forgiven for assuming after September 11–Westerners desperately curious about what has put elements of the Muslim world at murderous odds with Europe and America. Lewis’s askers are Muslims themselves, desperately curious to know why, after the medieval centuries in which Europe was “a pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world,” the roles were reversed. This is not an academic question. Since roughly the time of the Reformation, Islam has never recovered from the European challenge. Today, this region, so steeped in civilizational self-regard, finds itself, in relative terms, “poor, weak, and ignorant.”

A professor at Princeton University, Lewis has over six decades established the greatest and most varied career in Middle Eastern scholarship of our day, and he has long been fascinated by the subject of how a fading Islamic empire confronted a Europe on the rise. His latest book will not replace his masterwork on the subject, “The Muslim Discovery of Europe” (1982), but “What Went Wrong?” provides an accessible and gorgeously written introduction for those on whom it has recently dawned that Islam’s troubled relations with modernity now threaten a lot more than the Islamic world.

Muslims always viewed Christianity as a rival ideology, but not one to be taken too seriously. “The remoter lands of Europe,” Lewis writes, “were seen in much the same light as the remoter lands of Africa–as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn and little even to be imported, except slaves and raw materials.” And when Europe began to turn the tables, Muslims were slow to notice. The Christian reconquest of Spain, finalized in 1492, was seen by Muslims as merely a matter on the periphery of their empire–as was the less obvious but no less crucial encirclement of Islam by trading vessels and navies from Portugal and then Holland, which were coming to dominate the Indian Ocean and even the Red Sea. The rout of Islam’s armada at Lepanto in 1571 was a minor setback in military terms.

And Muslims could console themselves that they were winning victories in the center, most spectacularly at Constantinople in 1453. And yet something was missing, even at the height of Islamic conquest. As Kemal Ataturk noted in 1925, “That same might and power which, in defiance of a whole world, made Istanbul forever the property of the Turkish people was too weak to overcome the ill-omened resistance of the men of law and to receive in Turkey the printing press, which had been invented at about the same time.” As for the Europeans’ demonstrably superior weapons, Muslims thought they could simply imitate them. “For a long time,” Lewis remarks, “they did not ask why it was always the infidels who introduced the new devices.”

This fading world was admirable in many ways. Lewis has always been impressed by Islam’s relative tolerance. He illustrates it by invoking the oft-cited parallel between medieval Christendom’s bipolar struggle against Islam and the Cold War. Since the more tolerant of the two poles in such a struggle is likely to be the one that is attracting the political refugees, Lewis considers it worth noting that “in the twentieth century this movement was, overwhelmingly, from East to West; in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and even the seventeenth centuries, it was primarily from West to East.” He returns to this theme again and again, adding that “There is nothing in Islamic history to compare with the emancipation, acceptance, and integration of other-believers and non-believers in the West; but equally, there is nothing in Islamic history to compare with the Spanish expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Inquisition, the Auto da fe’s, the wars of religion, not to speak of more recent crimes of commission and acquiescence.”

WHAT’S MORE, until recent times, the egalitarianism that Muslims like to brag about was no myth. “It is probably true,” Lewis writes, “that even at the beginning of the nineteenth century a poor man of humble origin had a better chance of attaining to wealth, power, and dignity in the Islamic lands than in any of the states of Christian Europe, including post-Revolutionary France.”

It was, in a way, Islam’s misfortune that it constituted such a viable system. It was not used to failure. Christianity spent its first few centuries as a persecuted faith. Islam spent its first few centuries as custodian of one of the greatest conquering military movements in history. To quote an old proverb, the Muslim world is like a standing tent: “The tent is Islam, the pole is the ruler, the ropes and pegs are the people. None can thrive without the other.” It’s not just that Islam didn’t need foreign cultures; it’s that it couldn’t tolerate their introduction without endangering the whole civilization.

While Lewis never puts it so bluntly, it’s clear that a certain cultural chauvinism–more complete in Islam than in any other civilization–not only contributed to the region’s loss of pre-eminence, but also made the reality of it so hard to face. European universities had chairs of Arabic by the sixteenth century, but Muslims considered it demeaning to learn Western languages, and even in the nineteenth century, “literally nothing of European literature was available in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish: not Shakespeare, not Dante, nor any other European writer apart . . . from some historical works–and even those were few and limited.” Books in Persian were printed in Leiden in 1639, but Iran didn’t get its first printing press until the nineteenth century.

Something similar happened with science. Muslims not only brought from India the numerals we call “Arabic,” but invented experimentation, and the scientific method. They have contributed practical inventions as well, even in recent centuries: the incubator in Egypt, the smallpox vaccination in Turkey. But their contribution to science “compares poorly with that of other non-Western regions.” Their problem was that they tended to use and build from European science only where it served a clear practical purpose: the seventeenth-century treatment of syphilis, for instance.

This piecemeal approach has obtained in other fields as well. “They looked for the secret of Western success,” Lewis writes, “in those features of the West that were most distinctive, most different from anything in their own experience–and not tainted with Christianity.” It was in politics that this selective approach had its worst outcome. The French Revolution was a major influence, but also, eventually, nationalism, socialism, and National Socialism, whose baleful influence Lewis still sees at work in the Baathist governments of Iraq and Syria. The move to political modernization in Islam did not enhance freedom and autonomy, but strengthened states through modern approaches to enforcement, surveillance, propaganda, and the consequent depredations against civil society.

THE RESULTS are today readily apparent. Apart from fossil fuels, the exports from the Arab world amount to less than those from Finland. And Lewis considers that oil is “doomed, sooner or later, to be exhausted or superseded–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 puts the world economy at the mercy of a clique of capricious autocrats.”

Whether the Islamic world can get out of this mess depends on how it decides to engage the problem. Contemporary anti-Americanism is a successor ideology to attempts to blame the decline of Islam on the Mongol hordes who took it over in the thirteenth century, then on the Turks who ruled it for most of the modern age, then on the European colonial powers who ruled it for only a few decades and have been gone for half a century now. Unfortunately, Lewis thinks, the useful question, “What did we do wrong?” has been replaced by the self-destructive question, “Who did this to us?” Lewis is enough of a believer in the civilization Islam built to hold out hope. As soon as the Muslim world is able to ask the former question, he thinks, it stands a good chance of being able to make the Middle East, “in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization.” But not until then.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.