What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
 

Root Causes

By Stanley Kurtz
Policy Review, No 112
April & May 2002
Bernard Lewis

What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
Oxford University Press.
192 pages. $23.00

Why is america at war with Islamic terrorists? For those not persuaded that legitimate
grievances over American policies toward the Palestinians or Iraq are at the root of this
conflict, the question remains unanswered. If not legitimate anger at the United States,
what were the real causes of the attacks of September 11?

Under the direct or indirect influence of Princeton professor Bernard Lewis, the foremost
living historian of the Islamic Middle East, many commentators reply that the attacks of
September 11 were motivated by an impulse to scapegoat the West in general - and the United
States in particular - for the Middle East's own failure to modernize. In Lewis's long-held
view, put forward with especial thoroughness and clarity in his new book, What Went Wrong?
Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, the humiliating and increasingly obvious
failure of a once-great Islamic civilization to match the military, economic, political,
and cultural might of the West has had a troubling effect. Many Middle Easterners,
convinced that a turning from the pious ways of old is at the root of Muslim decline, have
simultaneously embraced Islamic fundamentalism and repudiated the West.

The obvious parallel (although Lewis never explicitly draws it) is to the rise of Nazism.
Whatever the legitimacy of German complaints about the Treaty of Versailles, Nazi ideology
was fundamentally a nativist response to the national humiliation of World War I and to the
traumatic economic failure of the depression. For Germans at the time, as for Muslim Middle
Easterners today, the Jews and the Western powers served as convenient scapegoats.

Yet if the West is being scapegoated for the Middle East's inability to modernize, we need
to understand the reasons for that failure. For the decline of Muslim society under the
pressure of modernization is the true cause of this war. Not coincidentally, Bernard Lewis'
s What Went Wrong? is a systematic attempt to describe and account for the crisis of Middle
Eastern modernity.

The publication of What Went Wrong? at so opportune a moment is a tribute to Lewis's
prescience. The book was in page proofs when the attacks on New York and Washington took
place - attacks that were ultimate outcomes of the forces that Lewis has been describing
and diagnosing for years. Even more than his prescience, however, What Went Wrong? is a
tribute to Lewis's persistence in the face of decades of demonization by the academic left.
This book seems welcome and timely today, but when Lewis wrote it, his insights - and even
his questions - were widely condemned as bigoted "Orientalism" by scholars of the Middle
East. The war has borne out Lewis's insights and confounded his foes, yet those blessedly
uninitiated in the ways of the contemporary academy might easily miss the drama of courage
and vindication embodied in the publication of this book at this time.

The field of "post-colonial studies" - the regnant academic paradigm for the study of
non-Western cultures - was founded in 1978 by Edward Said's book, Orientalism. That book
condemned virtually all existing literature and scholarship on the Middle East as a series
of disguised rationalizations for Western colonial ambition. Most of Said's Orientalism was
an elaborate tour of early, often highly distorted and bigoted attempts by Western
travelers to make sense of the Muslim Middle East. But the body of the book was simply a
setup for the all-important final chapter, which argued that even sophisticated
contemporary scholarly accounts of the Middle East were infected by the distortions,
biases, and imperial ambition so evident in the records of early Western travelers. The
culminating moment of that critical chapter was Edward Said's blistering critique of
Bernard Lewis.

Since the inception of post-colonial theory, then, Bernard Lewis has been its chief
villain. Lewis's longstanding interest in Muslim misconceptions about a modernizing Europe,
his insistence on stressing the relationship between Islam and contemporary Middle Eastern
terrorism, and his discussion of Muslim scapegoating of both Jews and Westerners were
marked out by Said 24 years ago as proof of the bigotry and bankruptcy of the field of
Middle Eastern studies itself.

Today, of course, Lewis appears to have been vindicated by events, while Said's repeated
condemnations of the West's preoccupation with Islamic terrorism are an embarrassment to
his supporters. If anything, it was America's inability to honestly name and diagnose the
terrorist threat - provoked in no small part by the chastisements of Said and his
followers - that made us let our guard down. Would that we had listened more closely to
Lewis.

Yet bernard lewis is far from the only one to ask, "What went wrong?" On the contrary,
despite Said's strictures against even posing such a question, Lewis's point of departure
is the longstanding preoccupation of Middle Easterners themselves with the loss of their
civilizational dominance to the West.

For a long time, it is true, the threat from the West was ignored. Throughout the Middle
Ages, the Islamic Near East was the mightiest military, economic, political, scientific,
and cultural power in the world. The majesty of the Islamic empire seemed to confirm the
Prophet's claim to have completed and surpassed the messages of Judaism and Christianity.
The infidels of Europe, it was thought, could have nothing of significance to teach
Muslims. How much less could they represent a threat? ("Infidels," of course, was a common
Muslim term of reference for European Christians.)

The early signs of Europe's rise were therefore ignored. Secure in their assumption of
superiority, Muslim diplomats never bothered either to learn European languages or to post
permanent ambassadors in European countries. Few Muslims traveled in the West, and no
significant accounts were left by those who did. The scientific advances of the Renaissance
thus remained completely unknown. When the rise of Western power finally necessitated
extended ambassadorial visits, the scientific discoveries of the West were dismissed as
trivial and uninteresting. Even as Muslim armies grew accustomed to the need to adopt the
latest innovations in Western weaponry, no one asked why it was infidels, rather than
Muslims, who were coming up with the new devices. Nor did the rise of the West's colonial
empire in Asia, with the challenge this posed to Middle Eastern domination of world trade,
raise concern.

A long, scattered, and seemingly insignificant series of Muslim military setbacks could be
ignored or dismissed until 1698, when the Treaty of Carlowitz ratified the first serious
territorial losses to the European infidels. After that, as the West continued to make
inroads on the territories of the Ottoman Empire - most dramatically with the conquest of
Egypt by Napoleon in 1798 - the question of "what went wrong" took on urgency for Muslims
themselves.

The initial response was an effort to go beyond the mere adoption of weaponry by mastering
European military training and tactics. This failed to turn back the Western challenge, but
the importation of European military instructors and education in European languages and
science represented both an enormous blow to Muslim pride and the introduction of a
critical channel of alternative cultural influence.

At first, these influences were kept at bay by the Ottoman technique of employing members
of the Empire's Greek Christian minority as translators and diplomats in dealings with the
West. (The Ottoman Empire included much of what is now Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, the
Balkans, Moldova, and Georgia.) The Ottoman Empire's tolerance for its many minority
communities - and the high degree of self-government granted them - were among its greatest
strengths. Nowadays we're used to seeing migrations from East to West, but in the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, immigrants flowed freely from Europe to
live in the tolerant and prosperous lands of the Ottomans. Eventually, however, European
ideas of personal liberty and national independence provoked revolts in the Ottoman Empire'
s Christian lands. With this, it became evident that there was more to the rise of the West
than military knowledge alone. The secrets of the Western state, as well as the source of
its growing economic power, would have to be unraveled.

Yet here, as before, the attempt to master the techniques of the West ended in failure. The
young Ottoman elites tried to cultivate a version of Western patriotism as a way of binding
together the diverse populations of the empire in allegiance to the sultan. But the effect
of Western nationalism's focus on ethnic and linguistic identity was to divide and disrupt
this culturally heterogeneous empire, not to unify it. The Ottomans also tried to catch up
with Europe by building factories to equip and clothe their army, but the effort failed and
the factories were abandoned, perhaps because Muslims regarded such work as the demeaning
province of the Christian and Jewish minorities.

The move toward modernization did create a class of professionals - journalists, lawyers,
and professors - who represented a secular alternative to the doctors of the holy law. Yet,
oddly, the rise of these professionals, and the newspapers, telegraphs, and other modern
means of communication upon which they depended, seemed only to strengthen the autocratic
powers of the center. When independence from colonial rule finally came, it brought with it
no political freedom. Despite British and French attempts to create indigenous
constitutional and parliamentary regimes in their own image, all of these failed after
independence. If anything, Soviet domination in the Muslim regions of its empire, along
with fascist models from Italy and Germany, were the only reasonably successful political
imports from the West.

So Muslim attempts to adopt and adapt Western models in the military, economic, and
political realms ended in failure. For Lewis, this suggests that something deeper was at
work than a simple inability to import the "secrets" of Western success. The Muslim
approach to the question of "what went wrong" had been to single out and imitate some
distinctive characteristic of Western life - its military techniques, its factories, its
political structures. Yet this strategy deliberately avoided deeper cultural issues. Was
there something fundamental about the way of life or thinking in Muslim lands - perhaps
even something deriving from Islam itself - that made the successful adoption of Western
political structures or techno-economic practices problematic? In a Muslim world long
convinced of its cultural superiority - and reeling even from its limited attempts to
master the secrets of the West - these were unaskable questions. (Not coincidentally, these
cultural questions are of the sort that Edward Said's post-colonial theory not only
prohibits but also stamps as evidence of contemptible bigotry.)

Lewis identifies three fundamental cultural barriers to the success of the Muslim world's
attempts to modernize. The first is the place of women, which Lewis marks out as "probably
the most profound single difference" between the Islamic world and the West. Although Lewis
himself remains formally noncommittal, he quotes with apparent approval those who argue
that the relegation of Muslim women to an inferior position in society "deprives the
Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people," thereby also preventing
these women from instilling in their children the mores of a free and open society.

The second cultural barrier to Muslim modernization is, according to Lewis, the absence of
separation between religion and the state. This cultural difference, says Lewis, was
written into the foundations of Islam and Christianity themselves. Jesus, after all, was
put to death by the state, and for hundreds of years after, Christianity developed in the
face of Roman persecution. Muhammad, in contrast, achieved victory in his own lifetime,
creating a state in which he himself was the supreme sovereign. Perhaps more important,
centuries of Christian dominance in Europe were followed by a series of religious wars
which virtually compelled Christian society to secularize the state, simply to escape from
never-ending rounds of religious persecution and conflict. Muslim society fell under no
such compulsion.

The third cultural barrier to modernization cited by Lewis can be characterized as
resistance to the "systematic" quality of modernity. Lewis frames the point metaphorically,
by saying that the Muslim world has adopted the "words" of various Western cultural
innovations while nonetheless failing to master the "music." Muslim society, for example,
quickly grasped the advantages of Western timepieces, importing clocks and watches in
significant numbers. Yet Muslim attitudes toward time itself changed little, as the
precision, coordination, and punctuality demanded by modern life remain little valued in
many parts of the Muslim world.

Lewis himself is reluctant to venture an open opinion about all this, but it seems fairly
clear from his presentation that he is a "Kemalist." Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern
Turkey, set his country on a course of radical secularization in the conviction that
Islamic religion and culture are ultimately incompatible with modernity. For Lewis, the
fundamental choice facing the Muslim world is between the secularist Ataturk, on the one
hand, and Khomeini on the other. Lewis's preference is easy enough to decipher.

If there is a weakness in What Went Wrong?, it is Lewis's slight attention to the
organization of Islamic society. Lewis, of course, is an historian, not a social scientist.
Yet no attempt to make sense of the troubled encounter between modernity and the Middle
East can afford to ignore the characteristic structures of Muslim social life. A brief
sociological detour will therefore allow us to make sense of Lewis's findings in a new way.

Muslim society, classically, is tribal society. Muhammad's achievement was to meld the
desert tribes of Arabia into an irresistible force for the spread of Islam. To this day, in
fact, tribal identity remains politically relevant, not only in the arid territories of
Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, but even in settled Muslim states like Iraq. This is a
distinctive characteristic of social life in the Middle East. Historically, it is unusual
for states and tribes to coexist for long within a single territory, and rare as well for
tribal peoples to found dynasties (as they have throughout Muslim history). In Europe, for
example, the German, Celtic, and Gothic tribes that overran a collapsing Roman Empire
quickly lost their tribal identities. The same fate awaited the great tribal dynasties that
conquered ancient China. But in the Middle East, tribal identity persists.

Middle Eastern tribes are organized into what anthropologists call "segmentary lineage
systems." Simply put, segmentary lineages allow a society to operate strictly on the basis
of kinship ties, without the need for a central government. If a man is attacked, for
example, he'll be defended not by police, but by members of his lineage, who will be pitted
against the lineage-mates of his foe. And what if a man is attacked by one of his own
lineage mates? In that case, his lineage will simply break apart (segment), and those most
closely related to him will be opposed to those most closely related to his attacker. The
system works through an almost infinite capacity for either segmentation or unity. Tribes
can easily be split by internal disputes, yet can just as easily combine in the face of an
alien enemy.

Muhammad's achievement was to unify the tribes of Arabia under the banner of Islam, in the
process replicating and extending to Islam itself the tribal ethos of militance and pride.
By creating a kind of tribal feud between all of Islam and the outside world of infidels,
Muhammad was able to launch a successful military campaign that unified and deployed the
existing tribal structure against the enemy. In later battles against the Byzantine and
Sasanian empires, tribal regiments united by bonds of kinship maintained a cohesion that
state-employed mercenary armies could not. The Muslims swept the field.

Lewis rightly points out that Muhammad's religious empire set a pattern for the unification
of "church and state" in Islam. Yet the theocracy established by Muhammad and his immediate
successors (the "rightly guided" caliphs) did not last long. Instead, there came a critical
development in Muslim history, albeit one of which Lewis makes little mention in this book.
In order to hold together a growing but fractious empire, the rulers of the Umayyad
caliphate were forced to make a series of compromises in pure Islamic principle.
Authoritarian rule by hereditary succession began to replace the egalitarian and
consultative practices of Muhammad and the rightly guided caliphs. Some rebelled against
this fall from pure Islam, but most accepted the tainted necessities of power. The upshot
of the change, however, was that the caliphate lost its religious quality. The state was
tolerated now, but entering into its service came to be seen as unworthy of a true Muslim.
"Church and state" were still united in the ulema, the doctors of the holy law who
interpreted and applied the religious regulations that governed social life. And the dream
of a righteous ruler on the model of Muhammad and his immediate successors was preserved.
Yet for the rest of Muslim history, there arose a profound separation between the governing
political regime and society itself. The arbitrary power of government was accepted as a
necessary evil, but government itself was devalued and avoided.

The profound separation between the state and society that has long characterized Islamic
civilization would never have been possible without the persistence of the tribes. The old
image of the "oriental despot" is misleading. The early caliphs and the later Ottoman
sultans ruled their empires lightly. Essentially, they arbitrated or mediated disputes
between subject tribes, which because of their self-sustaining organization were largely
left to govern themselves.

This state/society distinction, together with the tribal structure upon which it depends,
explains much about the story that Bernard Lewis tells in What Went Wrong? To this day,
Middle Eastern nations embody the state/society distinction. The populace submits in
resignation to what it views as arbitrary and barely legitimate government while organizing
its own daily activities around extended tribal and kinship networks and the practice of
Islam. Democracy requires a layer of "civil society" - associational networks that stand
between the individual and the state. But the social "work" that is accomplished in Western
society through voluntary associations of freely choosing individuals is done in Middle
Eastern society by extended networks of family and kin.

Europe saw a long period of development in which local feudal interdependencies and
traditional family and kinship networks were gradually eroded while their functions were
taken over by the modern bureaucratic state and the growing capitalist economy. This
process, which helped to precipitate modern individuals out of ancient communal structures,
has never occurred in the Middle East, where extended tribal and kinship networks continue
to do the fundamental work of society, even in large modern cities like Cairo.

This persistence of traditional kinship ties, and the consequent absence of "spiritually
modern" individuals, helps explain not only the failure of Middle Eastern democracy, but
the region's economic problems as well. Young people and their families in modern Muslim
cities still spend years accumulating the massive amounts of money needed to finance the
wedding ceremonies and gift exchanges at the heart of the kinship system. These funds are
managed by the kin networks themselves, and so are kept out of banks and freed from
taxation. Not only do kinship obligations draw money out of the modern economy, but they
inhibit entrepreneurship and feed the endemic corruption that undermines the bureaucracy -
even as they simultaneously provide the surest security against poverty and the
helplessness of aging.

The traditionalist ethos of kin-based societies has always been alien to the systematic
conception of time that characterizes individualist modernity. Americans have taken their
modern conception of time to the point where collective family dinners now take second
place to every individual family member's personal schedule. In a kin-based society, on the
other hand, it's understood that a request from some relation, however distant, always
trumps your personal schedule. It isn't simply a question of valuing the emotional rewards
of personal ties (although it includes that). Requests from relatives are simply how things
get done in kin-based societies, whereas precise coordination of individual schedules is
how things are accomplished in ours.

The state/society di-chotomy, and its basis in the Muslim kinship system, also explains one
of the paradoxes at the core of What Went Wrong? How, Lewis asks, could the Islamic world
have offered relative freedom, tolerance, and even prominence to minorities in medieval
times while failing so dramatically to grant freedom to its people today? The answer is
that the tolerance for minorities that characterized traditional Islamic empires was a
function of the separation between the regime and the state. The Ottomans (and Muslim
rulers before them) granted considerable leeway to their Christian and Jewish subjects
precisely because the sultans were accustomed to serving as mere mediators between
essentially self-governing Muslim tribes. But modern democracy is based on individualist
values and on social structures that are alien to kin-based societies, so freedom and
tolerance, in the modern sense of those words, remain elusive in the Muslim world.

Even the failure to achieve a Western-style separation between church and state can be seen
as a function of the tribal and kin-based character of Muslim society. After Christianity's
triumph in the West, it took the religious wars of the sixteenth century to definitively
ratify such separation. Lewis rightly notes that because the Muslim world was spared such
wars, a comparable separation never took root. But why did the West experience its
religious wars to begin with? It was precisely the slow dissolution of the West's feudal
and kinship structures that drove the rise of individualist Protestantism, thereby
provoking a series of wars between Protestants and Catholics. So the Western separation of
church and state is ultimately a product of our gradual evolution toward a non-kin-based,
individualist society.

The salience and persistence of veiling among Muslims is also a function of the particular
characteristics of the Middle Eastern kinship system. The details need not detain us, but
suffice it to say that only in the Middle East do lineages ensure their solidarity by
encouraging men to marry their own lineage-mates. Ideally, Muslim men are to marry their
cousins (their father's brother's daughter), and this practice of cousin marriage lends
tremendous force to the drive to shelter close female relatives, since in doing so men are
effectively safeguarding their own future marriage partners.

I think Lewis goes a bit far in attributing the failure of Muslim modernization to veiling.
Even today, few Japanese women work after becoming mothers, yet the home-bound state of
half of Japan's population has not prevented that country's economy from fully modernizing.
But Japanese women are highly educated, and Lewis is correct to say that insofar as the
impulse to "protect" Muslim women prevents them from gaining an education, traditional
practice acts as a brake on modernization.

In broad terms, there is nothing about Muslim society's resistance to modernity that
distinguishes it from other traditional societies (many of which have had their own
difficulties with modernization). But Muslim society does seem to represent the extreme of
a type. Segmentary lineage systems are designed to operate as self-sustaining tribal
societies, entirely independent of government. And of all possible solutions to the problem
of lineage solidarity posed by marriage, Muslim cousin marriage is the most "involuted" -
the one that tends, both morally and practically, to seal off families and lineages from
outside influences and alliances. So the reason Muslim society seems more resistant than
many others to modernization may be that its fundamental social structure is a kind of
expression, on a grand scale, of a closed and self-sustaining kin-based society.

The self-sustaining tribal structure that enabled Muhammad to quickly conquer the world -
and that allowed his successors to knit together a loosely governed empire with minimal
effort - turns out to be uniquely problematic in relation to modernization. And from the
rise of Europe to the present moment, the transformed tribal ethos of militance and pride
that governs Islam has set up a powerful barrier even to recognition of this problem. In a
modern setting, the result has been cultural decline, nativist reaction, and a literal
clash of civilizations.

What, then, does all of this say about the "Kemalist" option apparently favored by Bernard
Lewis? If the fundamental principles by which Muslim society is organized are profoundly
incompatible with modernity, a total break with tradition might seem to be in order. But,
of course, the very centrality of kin-based structures to Muslim society makes such a break
very hard to sustain (as Turkey's Kemalists have discovered of late). Japan presents a
model in which the traditional ethos of family solidarity becomes an engine of economic
progress rather than a barrier. But Japan's family system is considerably less closed and
self-sustaining than that in the Middle East. So knowing "what went wrong" in the Middle
East imparts at least as much sobriety and pessimism as wisdom and hope. Nonetheless, we
have no choice but to take the measure of the underlying problem, win this war, and
afterwards take up the challenge of helping to set things right.