What went wrong western.., p.1
What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, page 1
What Went Wrong?
What Went Wrong?
Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
Bernard Lewis
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2002 by Bernard Lewis
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, Bernard.
What went wrong? : western impact and Middle Eastern
response / Bernard Lewis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-514420-1 1.
Middle East—History—1517- I. Title.
DS62.4.L488 2000
956´.015—dc21 2001036214
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Printing (last digit): 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Lessons of the Battlefield
Chapter 2
The Quest for Wealth and Power
Chapter 3
Social and Cultural Barriers
Chapter 4
Modernization and Social Equality
Chapter 5
Secularism and the Civil Society
Chapter 6
Time, Space, and Modernity
Chapter 7
Aspects of Cultural Change
Conclusion
Afterword
Notes
Index
Preface
This book was already in page proof when the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington took place on September 11, 2001. It does not therefore deal with them, nor with their immediate causes and after-effects. It is however related to these attacks, examining not what happened and what followed, but what went before—the longer sequence and larger pattern of events, ideas, and attitudes that preceded and in some measure produced them.
B.L.
Princeton, N.J.
October 15, 2001
Introduction
What went wrong? For a long time people in the Islamic world, especially but not exclusively in the Middle East, have been asking this question. The content and formulation of the question, provoked primarily by their encounter with the West, vary greatly according to the circumstances, extent, and duration of that encounter and the events that first made them conscious, by comparison, that all was not well in their own society. But whatever the form and manner of the question and of the answers that it evokes, there is no mistaking the growing anguish, the mounting urgency, and of late the seething anger with which both question and answers are expressed.
There is indeed good reason for questioning and concern, even for anger. For many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement. In the Muslims’ own perception, Islam itself was indeed coterminous with civilization, and beyond its borders there were only barbarians and infidels. This perception of self and other was enjoyed by most if not all other civilization—Greece, Rome, India, China, and one could add more recent examples.
In the era between the decline of antiquity and the dawn of modernity, that is, in the centuries designated in European history as medieval, the Islamic claim was not without justification. Muslims were of course aware that there were other, more or less civilized, societies on earth, in China, in India, in Christendom. But China was remote and little known; India was in process of subjugation and Islamization. Christendom had a certain special importance, in that it constituted the only serious rival to Islam as a world faith and a world power. But in the Muslim view, the faith was superseded by the final Islamic revelation, and the power was being steadily overcome by the greater, divinely guided power of Islam.
For most medieval Muslims, Christendom meant, primarily, the Byzantine Empire, which gradually became smaller and weaker until its final disappearance with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The remoter lands of Europe 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. For both the northern and the southern barbarians, their best hope was to be incorporated in the empire of the caliphs, and thus attain the benefits of religion and civilization.
For the first thousand years or so after the advent of Islam, this seemed not unlikely, and Muslims made repeated attempts to accomplish it. In the course of the seventh century, Muslim armies advancing from Arabia conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, all until then part of Christendom, and most of the new recruits to Islam, west of Iran and Arabia, were indeed converts from Christianity. In the eighth century, from their bases in North Africa, Arab Muslim forces, now joined by Berber converts, conquered Spain and Portugal and invaded France; in the ninth century they conquered Sicily and invaded the Italian mainland. In 846 C.E. a naval expedition from Sicily even entered the River Tiber, and Arab forces sacked Ostia and Rome. This provoked the first attempts to organize an effective Christian counterattack. A subsequent series of campaigns to recover the Holy Land, known as the Crusades, ended in failure and expulsion.
In Europe, Christian arms were more successful. By the end of the eleventh century the Muslims had been expelled from Sicily, and in 1492, almost eight centuries after the first Muslim landing in Spain, the long struggle for the reconquest ended in victory, opening the way to a Christian invasion of Africa and Asia. But meanwhile there were other Muslim threats to European Christendom. In the East, between 1237 and 1240 C.E., the Tatars of the Golden Horde conquered Russia; in 1252 the Khan of the Golden Horde and his people were converted to Islam. Russia, with much of Eastern Europe, was subject to Muslim rule, and it was not until the late fifteenth century that the Russians finally freed their country from what they called “the Tatar yoke.” In the meantime a third wave of Muslim attack had begun, that of the Ottoman Turks, who conquered Anatolia, captured the ancient Christian city of Constantinople, invaded and colonized the Balkan peninsula, and threatened the very heart of Europe, twice reaching as far as Vienna.
Fig. I-1 The Bosphorus with the Castles of Europe and Asia by Thomas Allum
At the peak of Islamic power, there was only one civilization that was comparable in the level, quality, and variety of achievement; that was of course China. But Chinese civilization remained essentially local, limited to one region, East Asia, and to one racial group. It was exported to some degree, but only to neighboring and kindred peoples. Islam in contrast created a world civilization, polyethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental.
For centuries the world view and self-view of Muslims seemed well grounded. Islam represented the greatest military power on earth—its armies, at the very same time, were invading Europe and Africa, India and China. It was the foremost economic power in the world, trading in a wide range of commodities through a far-flung network of commerce and communications in Asia, Europe, and Africa; importing slaves and gold from Africa, slaves and wool from Europe, and exchanging a variety of foodstuffs, materials, and manufactures with the civilized countries of Asia. It had achieved the highest level so far in human history in the arts and sciences of civilization. Inheriting the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece and of Persia,* it added to them several important innovations from outside, such as the use and manufacture of paper from China and decimal positional numbering from India. It is difficult to imagine modern literature or science without the one or the other. It was in the Islamic Middle East that Indian numbers were for the first time incorporated in the inherited body of mathematical learning. From the Middle East they were transmitted to the West, where they are still known as Arabic numerals, honoring not those who invented them but those who first brought them to Europe. To this rich inheritance scholars and scientists in the Islamic world added an immensely important contribution through their own observations, experiments, and ideas. In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world, relying on Arabic versions even for many otherwise unknown Greek works.
And then, suddenly, the relationship changed. Even before the Renaissance, Europeans were beginning to make significant progress in the civilized arts. With the advent of the New Learning, they advanced by leaps and bounds, leaving the scientific and technological and eventually the cultural heritage of the Islamic world far behind them.
Usually the lessons of history are most perspicuously and unequivocally taught on the battlefield, but there may be some delay before the lesson is understood and applied. In Christendom the final defeat of the Moors in Spain in 1492 and the liberation of Russia from the rule of the Islamized Tatars were understandably seen as decisive victories. Like the Spaniards and Portuguese, the Russians too pursued their former masters into their homelands, but with far greater and more enduring success. With the conquest of Astrakhan in 1554, the Russians reached the shores of the Caspian Sea; in the following century, they reached the northern shore of the Black Sea, thus beginning the long process of conquest and colonization that incorporated vast Muslim lands in the Russian Empire.
But in the heartlands of Islam, these happenings on the remote frontiers of civilization seemed less important and were in any case overshadowed in Muslim eyes by such central and vastly more important victories as the ignominious eviction of the Crusaders from the Levant in the thirteenth century, the capture of Constantinople in 1453, and the triumphant march of the Turkish forces through the Balkans toward the surviving Christian imperial city of Vienna, in what seemed to be an irresistible advance of Islam and defeat of Christendom.
The Ottoman sultan, like his peer and rival the Holy Roman Emperor, was not without political rivals and sectarian challengers within his own religious world. Of the two, the sultan was the more successful in dealing with these challenges. At the turn of the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, the Ottomans had two Muslim neighbors. The older of the two was the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, with its capital in Cairo, ruling over all Syria and Palestine and, more important, over the holy places of Islam in western Arabia. The other was Persia, newly united by a new dynasty, with a new religious militancy. The founder of the dynasty, Shāh Ismā‘Īl Safavī (reigned 1501–1524), a Turkish-speaking Shi‘ite from Azerbaijan, brought all the lands of Iran under a single ruler for the first time since the Arab conquest in the seventh century. A religious leader as well as—perhaps more than—a political and military ruler, he made Shi‘ism the official religion of the state, and thus differentiated the Muslim realm of Iran sharply from its Sunni neighbors on both sides; to the East, in Central Asia and India, and to the West, in the Ottoman Empire.
For a while, he and his successors, the shahs of the Safavid line, challenged the claim of the Ottoman sultans to both political supremacy and religious leadership. The Ottoman Sultan Selim I, known as “the Grim,” who reigned from 1512 to 1520, launched military campaigns against both neighbors. He achieved a substantial but incomplete success against the Shah, a total and final victory over the Mamluk sultan of Egypt. Egypt and its dependencies were incorporated in the Ottoman realms; Persia remained a separate, rival, and for the most part hostile state. Busbecq, the imperial ambassador in Istanbul, went so far as to say that it was only the threat from Persia that saved Europe from imminent conquest by the Turks. “On [the Turks’] side are the resources of a mighty empire, strength unimpaired, habituation to victory, endurance of toil, unity, discipline, frugality, and watchfulness. On our side is public poverty, private luxury, impaired strength, broken spirit, lack of endurance and training; the soldiers are insubordinate, the officers avaricious; there is contempt for discipline; licence, recklessness, drunkenness, and debauchery are rife; and worst of all, the enemy is accustomed to victory, and we to defeat. Can we doubt what the result will be? Persia alone interposes in our favour; for the enemy, as he hastens to attack, must keep an eye on this menace in his rear. But Persia is only delaying our fate; it cannot save us. When the Turks have settled with Persia, they will fly at our throats supported by the might of the whole East; how unprepared we are I dare not say!”2 There have been more recent Western observers who spoke of the Soviet Union and China in similar terms, and proved equally mistaken.
Busbecq’s fears, as it turned out, were unjustified. The Ottomans and the Persians continued to fight each other until the nineteenth century, by which time they no longer constituted a threat to anyone but their own subjects. At the time, the idea of a possible anti-Ottoman alliance between Christendom and Persia was occasionally mooted, but to little effect. In 1523, Shāh Ismā‘īl, still smarting after his defeat, sent a letter to the Emperor Charles V expressing surprise that the European powers were fighting each other instead of joining forces against the Ottomans. The appeal fell on deaf ears and the emperor did not send a reply to Shāh Ismā‘īl until 1529, by which time the shah had been dead for five years.
Figure I-2
Wall painting in Isfahan, showing European visitors. From the Chihil Sutun (Forty Columns) pavilions in Isfahan, late sixteenth century, rebuilt 1706.
For the time being, Persia was immobilized, and under Selim’s successor, Süleyman the Magnificent (reigned 1520–1566), the Ottomans were able to embark on a new phase of expansion in Europe. The great battle of Mohacs in Hungary, in August 1526, gave the Turks a decisive victory, and opened the way to the first siege of Vienna in 1529. The failure to capture Vienna on that occasion was seen on both sides as a delay, not a defeat, and opened a long struggle for mastery in the heart of Europe.
Here and there the Christian powers managed to achieve some successes, and one notable victory, the great naval battle of Lepanto, in the Gulf of Patras in Greece, in 1571. In Europe, indeed, this was acclaimed as a major triumph. All Christendom exulted in this victory, and King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, was even moved to compose a long and ecstatic poem in celebration.3 The Turkish archives preserve the report of the Kapudan Pasha, the senior officer commanding the fleet, whose account of the battle of Lepanto is just two lines: “The fleet of the divinely guided Empire encountered the fleet of the wretched infidels, and the will of Allah turned the other way.”4 As a military report, this may be somewhat lacking in detail, but not in frankness. In Ottoman histories, the battle is known simply as Singin, a Turkish word meaning a rout or crushing defeat.
But how much difference did Lepanto make? The answer must be very little. If we look at the larger question of naval power, let alone the far more important question of military power in the region, Lepanto was no more than a minor setback for the Ottomans, quickly made good. The situation is well-reflected in a conversation reported by an Ottoman chronicler, who tells us that when Sultan Selim II asked the Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha about the cost of rebuilding the fleet after its destruction at Lepanto, the Vizier replied: “The might and wealth of our Empire are such, that if we desired to equip the entire fleet with silver anchors, silken rigging, and satin sails, we could do it.”5 This is obviously a poetic exaggeration, but a fairly accurate reflection of the real significance of Lepanto—a great shot in the arm in the West, a minor ripple in the East. The major threat remained. In the seventeenth century, there were still Turkish pashas ruling in Budapest and Belgrade, and Barbary Corsairs from North Africa were raiding the coasts of England and Ireland and even, in 1627, Iceland, bringing back human booty for sale in the slave-markets of Algiers.
