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Generations
I
went looking for a concise explanation of the evolution of the relationship between
the Western World and the Middle East, and
chose What
Went Wrong by noted historian Bernard Lewis. I was not disappointed with
this ponderous book, but for most readers, receiving the explanation with be tedious and plodding. Completed just prior to 9/11, What Went
Wrong isn’t influenced by that major event, but the event itself can be
better understood by those who read What Went
Wrong. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the concluding chapter
(pp. 151-155):
In
the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that
things had indeed gone badly wrong. Compared with its millennial rival,
Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant. In the
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the primacy and therefore
the dominance of the West was clear for all to see, invading the Muslim in
every aspect of his public and—more painfully—even his private life.
Modemizers—by reform or
revolution—concentrated their efforts in three main areas: military,
economic, and political. The results achieved were, to say the least,
disappointing. The quest for victory by updated armies brought a series of
humiliating defeats. The quest for prosperity through development brought, in
some countries, impoverished and corrupt economies in recurring need of
external aid, in others an unhealthy dependence on a single resource—fossil
fuels. And even these were discovered, extracted, and put to use by Western
ingenuity and industry, and 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superseded—probably superseded, as the international community grows weary of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. Worst of all is the political result: The long quest
for freedom has left a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from traditional
autocracies to new-style dictatorships, modem only in their apparatus of
repression and indoctrination.
Many remedies have been tried—weapons
and factories, schools and parliaments—but none achieved the desired result.
Here and there they brought some alleviation, and even—to limited elements of
the population—some benefit. But they failed to remedy or even to halt the
deteriorating imbalance between Islam and the Western world.
There was worse to come. It was bad
enough for Muslims to feel weak and poor after centuries of being rich and
strong, to lose the leadership that they had come to regard as their right,
and to be reduced to the role of followers of the West. The twentieth
century, particularly the second half, brought further humiliations—the
awareness that they were no longer even the first among the followers, but
were falling ever further back in the lengthening line of eager and more
successful Westernizers, notably in East Asia. The
rise of Japan
had been an encouragement, but also a reproach. The later rise of the other
new Asian economic powers brought only reproach. The proud heirs of ancient
civilizations had got used to hiring Western firms to carry out tasks that
their own contractors and technicians were apparently not capable of doing.
Now they found themselves inviting contractors and technicians from Korea—only
recently emerged from Japanese colonial rule—to perform these same tasks.
Following is bad enough; limping in the rear is far worse. By all the
standards that matter in the modern world—economic development and job
creation, literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political
freedom and respect for human rights—what was once a mighty civilization has
indeed fallen low.
"Who did this to us?" is of
course a common human response when things are going badly, and there have
been indeed many in the Middle East, past and present, who have asked this
question. They found several different answers. It is usually easier and
always more satisfying to blame others for one's misfortunes. For a long
time, the Mongols were the favorite villains, and the Mongol invasions of the
thirteenth century were blamed for the destruction of both Muslim power and
Islamic civilization, and for what was seen as the ensuing weakness and
stagnation. But after a while historians, Muslims and others, pointed to two
flaws in this argument. The first was that some of the greatest cultural
achievements of the Muslim peoples, notably in, Iran, came
after, not before, the Mongol invasions. The second, more difficult to accept
but nevertheless undeniable, was that the Mongols overthrew an empire that
was already fatally weakened—indeed, it is difficult to see how the once
mighty empire of the caliphs would otherwise have succumbed to a horde of
nomadic horsemen riding across the steppes from East Asia.
The rise of nationalism—itself an import
from Europe—produced new perceptions. Arabs
could lay the blame for their troubles on the Turks who had ruled them for
many centuries.' Turks could blame the stagnation of their civilization on
the dead weight of the Arab past in which the creative energies of the
Turkish people were caught and immobilized. Persians could blame the loss of
their ancient glories on Arabs, Turks, and Mongols impartially.
The period of French and British paramountcy in much of the Arab world in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries produced a new and more plausible scapegoat—Western
imperialism. In the Middle East, there have
been good reasons for such blame. Western political domination, economic
penetration, and—longest, deepest, and most insidious of all—cultural
influence, had changed the face of the region and transformed the lives of
its people, turning them in new directions, arousing new hopes and fears,
creating new dangers and new expectations equally without precedent in their
own cultural past.
But the Anglo-French interlude was
comparatively brief and ended half a century ago; the change for the worse
began long before their arrival and continued unabated after their departure.
Inevitably, their role as villains was taken over by the United States,
along with other aspects of the leadership of the West. The attempt to
transfer the guilt to America
has won considerable support, but for similar reasons remains unconvincing.
Anglo-French rule and American influence, like the Mongol invasions, were a
consequence, not a cause, of the inner weakness of Middle-Eastern states and
societies. Some observers, both inside and outside the region, have pointed
to the differences in the postimperial development
of former British possessions—for example, between Aden
in the Middle East and such places as Singapore
and Hong Kong; or between the various lands that once made up the British
Empire in India.
Another European contribution to this
debate is anti-Semitism, and blaming "the Jews" for all that goes
wrong. Jews in traditional Islamic societies experienced the normal
constraints and occasional hazards of minority status. In most significant
respects, they were better off under Muslim than under Christian rule, until
the rise and spread of Western tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
With rare exceptions, where hostile
stereotypes of the Jew existed in the Islamic tradition, they tended to be
contemptuous and dismissive rather than suspicious and obsessive. This made
the events of 1948—the failure of five Arab states and armies to prevent half
a million Jews from establishing a state in the debris of the British Mandate
for Palestine—all the more of a shock. As some writers at the time observed,
it was bad enough to be defeated by the great imperial powers of the West; to
suffer the same fate at the hands of a contemptible gang of Jews was an
intolerable humiliation. Anti-Semitism and its demonized picture of the Jew
as a scheming, evil monster provided a soothing answer.
The earliest specifically anti-Semitic
statements in the Middle East occurred among
the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced back to European
originals. They had limited impact, and at the time for example of the
Dreyfus trial in France, when a Jewish officer was unjustly accused and
condemned by a hostile court, Muslim comments usually favored the persecuted
Jew against his Christian persecutors. But the poison continued to spread,
and from 1933 Nazi Germany and its various agencies made a concerted and on
the whole remarkably successful effort to promote and disseminate European
style anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The struggle for Palestine
greatly facilitated the acceptance of the anti-Semitic interpretation of
history, and led some to blame all evil in the Middle
East and indeed in the world on secret Jewish plots. This
interpretation has pervaded much of the public discourse in the region,
including education, the media, and even entertainment.
Another view of the Jewish component,
based in reality rather than fantasy, may be more instructive. The modern
Israeli state and society were built by Jews who came from Christendom and
Islam; that is, on the one hand from Europe and the Americas, on the other from the Middle East
and North Africa. Judaism, or more broadly Jewishness, is a religion in the fullest sense—a system
of belief and worship, a morality and a way of life, a complex of social and
cultural values and habits. But until comparatively recent times Jews had no
political role, and even in recent times that role is limited to a few
countries. There is therefore no specifically Jewish political and societal
culture or tradition. Ancient memories are too remote, recent experience too
brief, to provide them. Between the destruction of the ancient Jewish kingdom
and the creation of the modern Jewish republic, Jews were a part—one might
say a subculture—of the larger societies in which they live, and even their
communal organizations and usages inevitably reflected the structures and
usages of those societies. For the last 14 centuries, the overwhelming
majority of Jews lived in either the Christian or Islamic
world, and were in many respects a component in both civilizations.
Inevitably, the Jews who created Israel brought with them many of
the political and societal standards and values, the habits and attitudes of
the countries from which they came: on the one hand, what we have become
accustomed to call the Judaeo-Chrisrian tradition,
on the other, what we may with equal justification call the Judaeo-lslamic tradition.
In present-day Israel these
two traditions meet and, with increasing frequency, collide. Their collisions
are variously expressed, in communal, religious, ethnic, even party-political
terms. But in many of their encounters what we see is a clash between
Christendom and Islam, oddly represented by their former Jewish minorities,
who reflect, as it were in miniature, both the strengths and the weaknesses
of the two civilizations of which they had been part. The conflict,
coexistence, or combination of these two traditions within a single small
state, with a shared religion and a common citizenship and allegiance, should
prove illuminating. For Israel,
this issue may have an existential significance, since the survival of the
state, surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned by neighbors who reject its very
right to exist, may depend on its largely Western-derived qualitative edge.
Readers will come away from What Went
Wrong with a greater understanding of the past, and more questions and
concerns about the future.
Steve
Hopkins, January 22, 2004
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