"What Went Wrong"

Well another report on my reading. I will comment tomorrow on a good way to embarrass yourself in Florida: Hint-- Ask for your senior citizen discount. It gives all the retail clerks a great belly-laugh. If your are 66 years old and all the clerks are calling you "Sonny" you should probably be forewarned.

Bernard Lewis, “What Went Wrong? (The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in he Middle East)”, Oxford University Press (2002), 165 Pgs
Although “What Went Wrong” was published after 9/11/01 it was at the publishers when the Towers fell so the presentation does not have that influence on it. The author, Bernard Lewis, is considered the foremost authority on this subject matter. If that is so, I am disappointed as I did not get a convincing answer supported by facts as to “What Went Wrong”. Lewis gives a series of plausible answers but I do not feel they are adequately supported even though they are have a strong intuitive appeal . The most convincing answer is the Islamic society’s treatment of women resulting in one/half of the population with little or no education but with the responsibility of raising the children in this pit of ignorance. Another, is the Muslim perception that there is no human legislative power and there is only one law for the believers—the Holy Law of God, promulgated by revelation. This law can be amplified and interpreted by tradition and reasoning but it cannot be changed. Imagine our constitution without avenues to amend it (FDR would probably still be president).

I believe another is the failure of the Islamic nations to separate religion from the state. This has only happened in Turkey and they seem to have the best chance at modernization. Though few states, other than France and the United States, accepted a formal constitutional separation of religion and the state, most of the non-Islamic world observe it in practice.

At present two answers to the question of what went wrong command widespread support in the Middle East. One attributes all evil to the abandonment of the divine heritage of Islam and advocates return to a real or imagined past. That is the way of the Iranian revolution and of the so-called fundamentalist movements and regimes in various Muslim countries like Afghanistan. The other condemns the past and advocates secular democracy, best embodied in the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923 by Kemal Atatürk. But the book does not adequately document the proponents of this second answer, other than Turkey. Also, after the colonial powers left the Middle East, democratic institutions rapidly ceased to exist.

Pg. 31: The relative weakness of the major Islamic powers was revealed by the 1798 Napoleonic French invasion of Egypt with a relatively small force. Furthermore, when the French were forced to leave a few years later it was not by the Egyptians nor by the Turkish Ottomans but by a squadron of the Royal Navy commanded by Horatio Nelson. Or, jump forward to 1948 when five Islamic nations could not topple the newly formed state of Israel.

Pg. 60: By 1920, it seemed that the triumph of Europe over Islam was complete. In Afghanistan and inner Arabia and a few other places difficult of access and offering no attraction, independent Muslim rulers maintained the old ways. Otherwise, new rulers and new ways, introduced or imitated from Europe, prevailed everywhere. Even in the former Russian empire, Moscow was reasserting its control over the former, briefly liberated Muslim dominions of the tsars. The once great Ottoman Empire was defeated and occupied, its Muslim provinces parceled out among the victorious powers. Persia, though technically neutral, had been overrun by British and Russian forces. The rest of the Muslim world was incorporated in one or other of the great European empires. It seemed that the long struggle between Islam and Christendom, between the Islamic empires and Europe, had ended in a decisive victory for the West.

Pg. 62: In the areas that the British and French ruled, they created constitutional and parliamentary regimes in their own image—British-style constitutional monarchies and French-style republics. None of them worked very well, and with independence, almost all of them were discredited and overthrown. (Yet, this is what Bush believes will work in the area; particularly the French model of a republic based on democratically elected governments??).

Pg. 63: The difference between Middle Eastern and Western economic approaches can be seen even in their distinctive forms of corruption, form which neither society is exempt. In the West, one makes money in the market, and uses it to buy or influence power. In the East, one seizes power, and uses it to make money. Morally there is no difference between the two, but their impact on the economy and on the polity is very different.

Pg. 96: Secularism in the modern political meaning—the idea that religion and political authority, church and state are different, and can or should be separated—is, in a profound sense, Christian. Its origins may be traced in the teachings of Christ, confirmed by the experience of the first Christians; its later development was shaped and, in a sense, imposed by the subsequent history of Christendom. The persecutions endured by the early church made it clear that a separation between the two was possible; the persecutions inflicted by later churches persuaded many Christians that such a separation was necessary.

Pg. 99: Such terms as clergy or ecclesiastic cannot properly be applied to Muslim men of religion. Islam recognizes no ordination, no sacraments, no priestly mediation between the believer and God. The so-called clergyman is perceived as a teacher, a guide, a scholar in theology and law, but not as a priest. There is no distinction between the law of the church and the law of the state, crucial in Christian history. There is only a single law, the sharia, accepted by Muslims as of divine origin and regulating all aspects of human life: civil, commercial, criminal, constitutional, as well as matters more specifically concerned with religion in the limited, Christian sense of that word.

Pg. 156: The point has often been made—if Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three, and this when Muslims were much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than they are now? Of course the fundamentalist answer that the cause is the Muslim nations adoption of alien notions and practices. All this must be purged.

If I really wanted an answer to all this I would go to Detroit. Detroit has a very large Islamic community and they all live in the same area: Dearborn. I just wonder how they are accepting our pluralistic society and how they are educating their children, particularly the females. Anyone know?? Anyone know of an article dealing with our Islamic populations?