What
Is Wrong with What Went Wrong?
Adam Sabra
(Adam Sabra teaches Middle East history at
Western Michigan University.)
August 2003
It is no exaggeration to say that Bernard Lewis
is the most influential writer on Middle Eastern history and politics
in the United States today. Not only has he authored more than
two dozen books on the Middle East, he trained large numbers of
two subsequent generations of historians of the region. Lewis
is a public figure of the first order, publishing widely read
articles on Middle Eastern politics. He is perhaps the only scholar
of the Middle East to be well-known outside the field -- most
academics would be hard pressed to name another historian of the
Middle East or the Islamic world, excepting colleagues at their
own university. This is ironic, since, as we will see, his interpretation
of Islamic history is essentialist and ahistorical. Furthermore,
Lewis is greatly respected in US policymaking circles. His opinions
on policy matters have been sought by governments run by both
major American political parties, and
by all reports have been especially heeded by the administration
of George W. Bush. An August 29 op-ed by Lewis in the Wall
Street Journal concisely states positions which are articles
of faith for the Bush administration's neo-conservatives -- notably
that the problems of post-war Iraq are caused by anti-American
fascist or Islamist forces seeking to defeat Western Christendom,
and that the Westernized former banker Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi
National Congress are the best candidates to govern a stable Iraq
in the future.
Lewis's public exposure reached new heights in
the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. With the appearance
of What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response,
published by Oxford University Press in 2002, his readership extended
much more widely than before beyond the circles of academics,
intellectuals and policymakers who specialize in the Middle East
to reach the general public. To some degree, this was a matter
of luck. At the time of the attacks, Lewis was in the final stages
of adapting a series of lectures he gave in Vienna in 1999. A
German translation appeared in 2001, and when Lewis came to publish
a revised English version of the three lectures, he tacked on
material drawn from four previous articles and conference papers,
published over the 1980s and 1990s. Since, as Lewis himself tells
us, What Went Wrong? was already in proofs when the September 11 attacks
occurred, the book "does not deal with them, nor with their
immediate causes and after-effects."
Why then did the book acquire such enormous popularity?
At the time of this writing, Amazon.com listed What Went Wrong? as one of the most popular books in the world -- at
least insofar as Amazon sales figures are indicative of such things.
The book is number 19 in Italy, number 13 in Denmark and number
nine in Savannah, Georgia. It is read at the neo-conservative
bastion the University of Chicago (number 17) and at the post-modernist
center New York University (number 19), not to mention at the
Louisiana State University campuses (number five). Eager to take
advantage of what is clearly a worldwide phenomenon, Lewis published
a paperback edition with Harper Perennial Library in January 2003,
under the revised title What Went Wrong? The Clash Between
Islam and Modernity in the Middle East.
In order to understand what went right for Lewis,
at least in the world of commercial publishing, one must examine
how it is that an ignorant public, eager for information that
might help it to make sense of the events of September 11, found
answers in this book. Interestingly, although Lewis disavows any
direct connection between September 11 and the events discussed
in the book, he claims that "it is however related to these
attacks, examining not what happened and what followed, but what
went before -- the larger sequence and larger pattern of events,
ideas and attitudes that preceded and in some measure produced
them."
This last sentence, quoted from the preface of
the first edition, is typical of Lewis's style of argument. Although
much of the book deals with the history of the late Ottoman Empire,
and the attempts of the Ottoman state to stave off collapse, Lewis
insists that connections, however indirect, can be drawn between
these events and the September 11 attacks. Exactly what these
connections are, Lewis never tells the reader, who is left to
reach his or her own conclusions. Yet the title of the paperback
edition gives us a clue: there is a conflict between Islam and
modernity, and it is this conflict which is in some way responsible
for the hijackings and mass murders in New York and Washington.
A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
For Lewis, the conflict between Islam and modernity
is a conflict between cultures, Islamic and Western, and within
a culture, Muslim modernists versus those who would drag the Muslim
world back to the Middle Ages. The latter two options are represented
by the modern states of Turkey and Iran, respectively. Turkey
represents the way forward into secular democracy, while Iran
attributes "all evil to the abandonment of the divine heritage
of Islam" and "advocates a return to a real or imagined
past." As for the rest of the Islamic Middle East (i. e.,
the Arab world), it must choose one path or the other. The majority
of people in the Muslim world -- those Muslims who live outside
the Middle East -- do not figure in Lewis's argument.
For Lewis, secularism is "in a profound sense,
Christian." Although he is unable to decide whether the separation
of church and state in Western Christianity originated in the
Roman persecutions of the early Christians, or as a result of
the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
(he neglects to mention the political influence of the medieval
church), he clearly regards the Western tradition as the polar
opposite of the Islamic tradition in that the latter is characterized
by a total fusion of religion and state. Pious opposition to the
caliphate, as the Muslim polity was known after Muhammad's death,
can be attributed to a desire for a more perfect theocracy, not
opposition to theocracy. Interestingly, Lewis's argument about
the nature of religious and political authority in Western Christian
and Islamic societies is not restricted to Christians and Muslims.
Jews, a minority in both civilizations, took on the characteristics
of their host civilizations. Thus, the struggle in Israel over
the definition of a Jewish state is attributed by Lewis to the
clash between European (Christianized) and Middle Eastern (Islamicized)
Jews. While What Went Wrong? presents this struggle between secular modernity and
medieval theocracy as internal to Islam, Lewis has recently joined
the neo-conservative chorus of support for Western intervention
in the Muslim world to push Muslim societies in the right direction
(apparently he is confident that intervention is not necessary
to maintain European Jewish ascendancy in Israel).
Lewis and the policymakers are taking a huge gamble.
They believe that a combination of military intervention and diplomatic
pressure can determine the course of an entire civilization. Whether
this gamble will pay off, or whether it will blow up in the faces
of the US and its allies, is something only time will tell. For
the moment, however, it is important to examine the argument put
forward by Lewis to explain the history of the modern Middle East
and justify the new US policies. This can be done in two ways:
by examining the validity of Lewis's argument about the relationship
between religion and politics in the Islamic tradition, and by
asking what he has left out of his rather selective presentation.
A RELIGION WITHOUT HISTORY
For all the historical anecdotes which Lewis includes
in his book, his approach to Islamic civilization is strangely
ahistorical. For Lewis, the unity of religion and state in Islam
originates in Muhammad himself, since he was both political and
religious leader of the fledgling Muslim community (umma). Here Lewis, like many of the modern Islamists, accepts
the idea that later Muslim institutions were already prefigured
in the practice of the Prophet, an assertion of dubious historicity
for which Lewis provides no evidence. For the Islamists, the state
established by Muhammad provides the model against which the "Islamicness"
of any subsequent Muslim society is to be judged. Those societies
which most closely resemble or imitate this ahistorical ideal
are considered properly Islamic, while the others are seen as
in need of reform or revolution. For the less compromising of
the Islamists, there can be no historical development or accommodation
to local culture when it comes to God's eternal plan for society.
While Lewis does not attribute Islamic political
ideals to God, he shows a similar lack of interest in the manifest
variety of Islamic societies which have developed across time
and space. Lewis considers the relationship between religion and
state to have been determined from the beginning, and not as a
result of subsequent historical developments. He pays no attention
to the fact that Muslim polities have produced very different
political systems over the centuries, in large part due to developments
within Islamic political institutions and the interaction of these
institutions with different cultures and historical circumstances.
For example, although he recognizes that Ayatollah Khomeini's
theory that the jurists should rule a Shiite state in the place
of the Messiah is a deviation from Imami Shiite tradition, he
never explains what has inspired this change in attitude, or why
some Shiite scholars have embraced it while others have maintained
their traditional distance from political power. For Lewis, what
counts is the clash of Islam and the West, not internal developments
within the Islamic world, unless those developments somehow can
be shown to enact the collision with external forces.
Indeed, Lewis shows little interest in the entire
period that falls between the early Abbasid caliphate of the eighth
and ninth centuries and the late Ottoman period of the eighteenth
century, which directly precedes the European colonization of
the Middle East. Thus, he has nothing to say about the changes
in political culture and institutions that occurred in this long
period. At the beginning of it, the caliphal rule over the Islamic
world was legitimized not by law, but by the caliphs' claim to
be members of the Prophet's family (ahl al-bayt).
This was as true of the Abbasids as it was of the Alids, the succeeding
dynasty, since the two groups represented rival branches of the
same extended family tree. Despite some efforts to the contrary,
the caliphs never succeeded in controlling the development of
Islamic theology or law. Their most famous attempt to intervene
in these matters occurred during the debate over the nature of
the Quran, and here they suffered an unmitigated defeat at the
hands of the religious scholars (ulama).
In an apparent attempt to bolster the caliphs' claim to interpret
the Quran, the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma'mun tried to force government
office-holders to accept the doctrine that the Quran had been
created in time and was therefore not an eternal attribute of
God. The eventual failure of this policy signaled the victory
of the religious scholars over the caliphs in the struggle over
who would determine correct theological doctrine. Since, however,
the religious scholars disagreed about so many aspects of theology
and law, what emerged was a range of opinions, not a universally
accepted orthodoxy. During this period, a dizzying variety of
theological, legal and philosophical ideas competed for influence
among the scholars, each idea having its own partisans. Far from
being absolute, religious doctrine in the Islamic world was highly
fluid and hotly debated.
POLITICS AND THE SACRED
A turning point came during the Buyid period (945-1055),
when a group of Shiite soldiers established a dynasty that reduced
the Sunni caliphs to symbolic figures. It was at this time that
Sunni and Shiite Islam as we know them formulated their doctrines
in the highly competitive atmosphere of Baghdad's scholarly circles.
The leaders of the Imami Shiite community composed their authoritative
works on hadith (the sayings
of the Prophet and the Imams, whom Shiites view as Muhammad's
legitimate successors as heads of the umma), law and theology. The Imami community also developed a series of rituals
and commemorations designed to reinforce their belief in the right
of the descendants of Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law,
to rule the Muslim world. While other Shiite communities, such
as the Ismailis, continued to struggle to overthrow the Abbasids,
the Imamis focused on building their community and waiting for
the return of the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam who they expected to
appear at the end of time.
Meanwhile, the decline of Abbasid authority and
the dismemberment of the Abbasid state gave further impetus to
the rise of law as the basis of Sunni Islam. Increasingly, it
was the lawyers, now organized into four major schools, who filled
the ideological gap left by the dissipation of the caliphal writ.
Although this development reduced the field of competing doctrines
somewhat, uniformity was never achieved, even within the major
sects. There continued to be multiple schools of law and theology,
and furthermore, political authority in the Muslim world was increasingly
separated from religious authority. The next 500 years saw a series
of military, tribal and even slave regimes rise to claim control
over the Middle East, but even the most successful of them, the
Mamluk sultanate, never succeeded in imposing Sunnism on all of
its subjects. True, these dynasties presented their adherence
to Islamic law as the basis of their legitimacy, but this did
not change the fact that politics in the Islamic world was increasingly
seen as a secular activity.
Indeed, the Ottomans, who succeeded the Mamluks
in ruling what is now called the Middle East (excepting Morocco
and Iran), were quite explicit in issuing secular edicts (qanuns)
which were tailored to the local conditions and traditions of
their highly diverse subjects, who included many Christians and
Jews. Although the Ottomans presented themselves as adherents
to Sunnism, many of their subjects were sympathetic to the family
of the Prophet, especially to the descendants of his daughter
Fatima and her husband Ali. Although these were the same persons
venerated by the Shiites, this presented no problem for the Ottomans
until the rise of the explicitly Shiite Safavids in Iran. The
subsequent wars between the two powers forced the Turcoman tribesmen
to choose one side or another, but even the descendants of those
who chose the Ottoman side continue to be known as Alevis today.
In other parts of the Muslim world, Sunnism has been compatible
with reverence for the family of Muhammad (supposedly a Shiite
doctrine), while many Sufis (the mystics of Islam, some of whom
are venerated as saints in most of the Muslim world) have combined
Islamic with Christian or "pagan" practices. For example,
Muslim and Christian peasants in Egypt commonly attend one another's
saint festivals, while Muslims and Hindus in India often venerate
some of the same holy men. In short, religious doctrine and practice
in the Muslim world have continued to be fluid and frequently
syncretic. These factors, which influence the way in which Islam
is practiced by hundreds of millions of Muslims, receive no attention
in Lewis's oversimplified account. Again, it is notable that Lewis
devotes no space to Muslim traditions in countries like India,
Malaysia or Indonesia, where religious norms are quite different
from those in the Middle East.
ISLAM, THE ANTI-WEST
Time and again, Lewis resorts to Islamic law (shari`a) as his source and explanation for Muslim political
attitudes, paying little attention to the context in which shari`a was, or was not, applied. Thus, Lewis introduces the
concept of the caliphate, but has little to say about the political
and religious institutions that developed after the caliphate
lost its power to rule the Muslim world. While the complex relationship
between the power of the sultans and the religious authority of
the ulama does not reproduce the Western separation between church
and state, it does show that pre-modern Muslims were quite pragmatic
about the real, profane origins of political power in medieval
Muslim societies. While the ulama
attempted to persuade the sultans to rule their states in accordance
with Islamic law, it was a separate group of bureaucrats, the
kuttab, who actually administered the financial and diplomatic
affairs of medieval Muslim states in most cases, frequently without
reference to religious law. While courts applied Islamic law to
private transactions, this practice differed from one region to
another and one time to another. Lewis recognizes that Islamic
law was not immutable, but presents this fact as an example of
hypocrisy, saying that changes were "always suitably disguised."
What many modern scholars have seen as the flexible character
of Islamic legal practice, Lewis sees as a utopian ideal of divine,
unchanging law, occasionally counteracted by a wink and a nod.
All of this feeds into what we might call Lewis's
"totalitarianism complex." For Lewis, the essential
characteristic of Islamic religious and political thinking is
that it is totalitarian in character. Indeed, Lewis has long believed
that this aspect of Islam makes it ripe for the picking by other
totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and communism. In a 1953
lecture to British policymakers, Lewis claimed to investigate
"what factors or qualities are there in the Islamic tradition,
or in the present state of Islamic society and opinion, which
might prepare the intellectually and politically active groups
in society to embrace Communist principles and methods of government,
and the rest to accept them?" Among
those qualities is what he called the "anti-Western motif,"
whereby communists and Muslims share a common hostility towards
the Western powers and the "Western way of life, Western
institutions and ideas." In his lecture, Lewis rejected the
idea that these feelings might be connected to the process of
decolonization, because "even the removal of one or another
grievance cannot bring more than a local and temporary alleviation"
to this anti-Western hatred. Although the Soviet Union too was
imperialist, in Lewis's view this fact escaped the notice of Muslims.
This was, of course, prior to the era of the Afghan and Chechen
wars, but not so long before the "Arab cold war" in
which Saudi Arabia allied itself with the US against self-described
"socialist" states such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq.
Lewis went on to describe the "autocratic"
political tradition of the medieval Islamic world, with an emphasis
on Sunni quietism. Persons accustomed to "such doctrines,"
which emphasize the obligation to obey the ruler, even if he is
unjust, are supposed to prepare the Muslim believer to accept
"Communist disregard of political liberty and human rights"
with equanimity. This is especially true since communism could
offer an alternative to "ineptitude, corruption and cynicism."
Lewis invokes the theory of Oriental despotism to argue that members
of these societies are prone to accepting the nationalization
of the economy.
It may seem unfair to hold Lewis to things he
said 50 years ago. Nonetheless, the ideas expressed in that lecture
have recurred in Lewis's writings ever since. While he no longer
asserts that communism is a danger, he continues to argue that
the existing regimes in the Middle East are a combination of socialist
and fascist styles of government, which perpetuate their existence
by blaming all of their problems on foreigners, principally Jews
and Americans. These problems can only be addressed when Middle
Eastern peoples cease blaming others and work to resolve their
problems, presumably by adopting the Western values that they
are so predisposed to hate.
In this light, it is clear that Lewis regards
the contemporary Islamic movements as the latest installment in
a series of totalitarian ideologies to dominate the Middle East,
easily planted in the fertile ground of Islamic theocracy. As
such, the Islamic world constitutes the anti-West, the perennial
opponent to Western values of democracy and individual liberty.
As Lewis must know, this is a very old trope in Western thought.
Its origins can be found in the horror felt by the ancient Greeks
towards Persian imperialism, and it was resurrected during the
early modern period by the Venetians who used the Ottoman Empire
as an ideological foil to their own republican system of government. The Enlightenment made further use of
this idea in its struggle for freedom of individual conscience.
Interestingly, the idea of the despotic East reemerged during
the Cold War, when theories of totalitarianism which had been
constructed to explain similarities between the regimes of Hitler
and Stalin were married to this traditional Orientalist trope.
The most famous of these works was Karl Wittfogel's Oriental
Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power,
which applied these "insights" to communist China. It
is no coincidence that Lewis referred to Wittfogel in his lecture
on "Communism and Islam."
ONLY CULTURE MATTERS
The advantage of this
Manichean view of the world is that it is self-justifying. If
the US, the West and Israel stand for democracy and individual
liberties against totalitarianism (fascist, communist or Islamic),
then their struggle is inherently just. This is not merely a struggle
between civilizations, but for civilization against totalitarian
barbarism. Naturally, the defenders of democracy are entitled
to use force to achieve these ends, and the loss of life on both
sides is to be blamed on those who threaten the Western way of
life. The West should encourage Muslims to adopt its values, Lewis
writes, but "the choice is their own." That is, the
burden is upon them to demonstrate their fitness to participate
in international society, and the West will render judgment in
accordance with its own criteria.
This attitude relieves the West of any sense of
responsibility for current conditions in the Islamic world or
elsewhere ("the blame game" as Lewis calls it), whether
for imperialism, capitalism, short-sighted Western support for
repressive regimes in the region or anything else. In his view,
the disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people and destabilization
of the Middle East result purely from the unwillingness of Arabs
and Muslims to face facts and look beyond grievances. Lewis has
no patience for the idea that at least some of these grievances
may be well-founded. Nor does he consider the possibility that
the Arab and Muslim states, like any other states, may have their
own geopolitical interests which differ from those of the US.
For Lewis, opposition to US policy in the Middle East is ideological,
rather than political, in character. Until such time as the Muslim world makes the correct ideological
choice, the West may have no choice but to vigorously confront
its enemies. As Lewis writes in the Wall Street Journal,
speaking of instability in Iraq and friction with Iran, "the
worst of all options is the line of submissiveness, which can
only strengthen the perception of American weakness." That
perception was the impetus for the September 11 attacks, and US-led
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have just begun to dispel it.
In his history as well,
Lewis believes that he can explain the development of the modern
Middle East entirely through the lenses of ideology and Islamic
tradition. He makes no effort to compare the Middle East to other
parts of the world using economic, demographic or other indicators.
The past 50 years have witnessed an important rapprochement between
history and the social sciences, which has transformed history
as a discipline. Yet Lewis continues to write literary, anecdotal
history as if such developments had never taken place. Indeed,
he has expressed contempt for such efforts to integrate Middle
Eastern history into the mainstream of the historical profession.
In his 1976 essay, "The Return of Islam," published
in Commentary, he scoffs
at those modern journalists who insist on interpreting the Islamic
world using Western political concepts like right and left, or
progressive and conservative, arguing that, "Modern Western
man, being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central
place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to
conceive that any other peoples in any other place could have
done so, and was therefore impelled to devise other explanations
of what seemed to him only superficial phenomena."
It is one thing to argue that culture matters.
It is quite another to argue that it is all that matters. That
such an antiquated view of history could appeal to so many in
the policymaking world in the United States indicates just how
fully they are committed to a cataclysmic conflict with the Islamic
world. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that such a conflict
is exactly what Bernard Lewis and his disciples desire, and that
they just may succeed in provoking it.
