Muslims and Liberals

Middle East Policy
June 2002

While the United States has yet to bring the masterminds of the September 11, 2001, suicide attacks to justice, its attorney general has issued an indictment against their faith. “Islam is a religion,” said John Ashcroft, “in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.” (1) Ashcroft attacked Islam rather crudely, but he echoed the judgment of many Westerners about what is “wrong” with Islam and the Muslim world.

Christianity separates the church from the state, the argument goes, but Islam does not. Instead, it teaches Muslims to apply scripture to the real world. The Quran has references about Christian and Jewish hostility, and Osama bin Laden used them to recruit Al Qaeda members from Islamic schools. Nineteen of them attacked the United States with hijacked planes, killing 3,000 people. Can you believe that people are killing and dying in the name of God and religion?

Prodded by these analysts, the Bush administration tried to get Pakistan to purge the curricula of its Islamic schools. And Saudi school curricula have come under U.S. media attacks. The New York Times, for example, noted a caveat in a Saudi school textbook that says, “Muslims [should] be loyal to each other and to consider the infidels their enemy.” The newspaper argued that instructions of this kind were poisoning young Saudi minds with hatred for the West. And because “up to one third of every child’s schooling is on religious topics,” the Saudi school system was producing potential recruits for “Osama bin Laden or other extremists.” (2)

The argument that Islam has caused the many ills of Muslim societies was popularized by such Enlightenment thinkers as Montesquieu, Volney and Voltaire as much as by Christian polemicists through the ages. It has been elevated into truism by colonial-era Orientalists and many contemporary Western scholars, journalists and politicians. Few have argued the thesis more powerfully than Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton.

His latest book, What Went Wrong?, explains how Islam’s “mighty civilization has fallen so low,” as do several of his previous works, especially The Middle East and Islam and the West. His more than a dozen books and many articles are a treasure for students of Muslim history. His encyclopedic knowledge of Islamic history, power of reasoning and elegant writing have made him the doyen of Islamic historians in the West.

Two other things about his works need mention. One is his intellectual probity. He tells it as he sees it. Second, he sees Islam with a pair of Western eyes. While his integrity as a scholar and writer is notable, his vantage point is Western, with its strengths and limitations for a historian of Islam. I will argue this point below.

Sprinkled with titillating historical anecdotes, What Went Wrong? recounts how Islam became “the greatest military power” as well as “the foremost economic power” on earth. Europe used to be poor and backward, and only after becoming “a pupil and in a sense dependent on the Islamic world” did it begin to build the modern civilization. He quotes a sixteenth-century Austrian ambassador to the Ottoman Turkish capital of Istanbul as lamenting that Christendom was languishing in “public poverty, private luxury, impaired strength, broken spirit.” Had the Ottomans not been fighting with the Persians, observes the envoy, Christendom could have succumbed to Muslim might.

But then began, notes Lewis, the decline of the Ottoman Turkish empire and rise of Europe in military, economic and scientific fields. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the Europeans defeated the Turks in battle after battle and eventually threw them out of Europe (except Istanbul) by the end of World War I. Meanwhile, economic power and technological progress enabled European nations to conquer and colonize most of the Muslim world.

Lewis reminds us that Muslims have not recovered from their degradation now that European colonialists are gone, while Europe’s former east Asian and Pacific colonies are making impressive progress. The Muslims lag behind most of the rest of the world by “all 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.”

All this is true. But while Lewis’s analysis of the plight of the Muslim world is illuminating, his interpretation of its causes leaves much to be desired. What Went Wrong? tells us more about what has happened to the Muslim civilization than why it happened. And when he attempts to delve into the whys, he mostly relies on the traditional Orientalist analysis, which is often true but trite and incomplete. Lewis points to Muslims’ reluctance to acknowledge their failings and their proclivity to blame their adversity on scapegoats. In the mid-thirteenth century the Abbasid empire was crushed by the Mongols, who remained Muslims’ “favorite villains” for a long time. During Ottoman times, the Arabs were content to blame their backwardness on their Ottoman rulers. During the colonial era, all that went wrong in Muslim societies was attributed to European colonialism, and now Europeans’ “role as villains [has been] taken over by the United States.”

Islamists, he adds, are the most obscurantist of the lot. They blame “alien notions and practices” for all the ills of Muslim societies. Their stock argument: Muslims have “lost their former greatness” because they have strayed from the path of God.

I can vouch for the last point. I was a young journalist with the Pakistan Observer newspaper during the 1967 Six-day War between the Arabs and Israelis. In a subsequent interview with the Pakistani Islamist leader Abul Ala Maududi, I asked how it was possible for a small Jewish state to defeat three Muslim countries including Egypt, the strongest Arab military power. Maududi asked if I had read the comments of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser boasting about being a descendant of the pharaohs. I said I had. “What happened to the pharaoh who fought the noble Musa [Moses], may Allah’s blessings be on him’?” asked the founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami party. “The pharaoh was defeated,” Maududi answered his own question. “So why are you surprised, my brother, that a descendant of the pharaohs has been defeated by the descendants of Musa, may Allah’s blessings be on him?” If Nasser were a good Muslim, he added, and had waged a “jihad in the name of Allah” instead of being a “socialist bragger who went to war in the name the pharaohs,” he would have prevailed. Similar arguments can still be heard from some Islamists, especially those of the older generations.

Muslims are not, however, the only people who look for scapegoats for their failings or adversities. Don’t many Americans dismiss Arab protests against their government’s hegemonic policies as a reflection of the jealousy of the poor and the weak’? Don’t Israelis routinely scorn European criticism of their repression of Palestinians as “antisemitism?”

Lewis points out that Muslims are held back by the autocracies and dictatorships that rule most of the Muslim world. In addition, he argues that because Islam does not separate religion from the state, Muslim societies are not secularizing, and that secularity has been a “principal cause of Western progress.” Then there is the Islamic tenet that prescribes women’s subordination to men, “depriving the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people.” Lewis argues these points cogently, supporting them with a wealth of data and anecdotes. But most of these arguments have been heard from other Western scholars, columnists and politicians through the ages. These critics, Lewis included, seem to forget that many Western nations prospered and some built mighty empires under autocratic rule. And Max Weber notwithstanding, many Western societies did not begin to secularize until after they were well on their way to economic development. “[T]he first great upsurges of capitalism,” as S.N. Eisenstadt points out, “occurred in pre-Reformation Catholic Europe–in Italy, Belgium, Germany.” (3)

Lewis stops short of telling Muslims what they should do, but says they have two options. One, they can follow the Islamists and set up a state based on a “real or imagined past.” The other is “secular democracy, best embodied in the Turkish Republic founded by Kemal Ataturk.”

The Islamist movement does not, of course, have a political model that would work in the modern world. We have seen that Iranian Islamists had to mold their revolution to fit the Western institutions of a written constitution, presidency, parliament, banks, news media and so on. Contrary to Lewis’s view, however, the political Islamists of the post-1980s generation seem quite open to the finest Western values such as democracy and scientific education. I think for all its shortcomings, the Islamist movement could, like the Great Awakening of eighteenth-century America, turn out eventually to be a catalyst for the regeneration of the Islamic civilization. Unlike other Islamic movements or schools of thought, the Islamists are inspired by the mission to regenerate their societies, and their goals and outlook are evolving through exposure to modernity as well as to other cultures.

The other option Lewis mentions–secularization–has long been prescribed for Muslim societies by many Western intellectuals and Muslim modernists. Since the Ataturk revolution in Turkey in the 1920s, they have been waiting anxiously to see if other Muslim societies are following in Ataturk’s footsteps. In The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis explains that revolution in depth and detail and has expressed admiration for it in many of his writings. He does so again in What Went Wrong?

As an Ottoman military officer at the turn of the twentieth century, Ataturk read Thomas Carlyle and perhaps other Enlightenment writers and convened to their view that Islam was the cause of the Turks’ economic decline and military defeats at the hands of secular European powers. After liberating Turkey from allied occupation in 1922, the father of the new nation-state replaced the Turks’ Islamic law (Sharia) with the Swiss civil code and Italian penal code, Arabic script with the Roman alphabet and the Ottoman Islamic cap (fez) with the European brimmed hat. He shut down Islamic schools, outlawed religious orders (tariqat), forbade women’s veils in government offices and banned prayer calls from minarets. He taught Turkish elites to dance European style, listen to European music and flaunt courtship in public as do the Europeans. Through these and other breathtaking measures he sought to “unite Turkey with Europe in reality and materially.” (4)

Ataturk became a hero in the West, as would Mikhail Gorbachev after the Soviet perestroika six decades later. After all, their programs acknowledged the superiority of Western political ideology over its rival creed of the time. But neither Ataturk’s revolution nor Gorbachev’s counter-revolution has delivered the promised utopia. (Unlike Ataturk, though, Gorbachev did not force an alien culture on an unwilling people but simply knocked down a decrepit political and economic structure.)

The Turkish Republic, heir to the once mighty Ottoman empire, remains poor, unhappy and is frowned on in the West, as does Russia, heir to the once mighty Soviet empire. Instead of being part of Europe “in reality and materially,” Turkey is estranged from it “in reality and materially.” The Turks have been consistently rebuffed in their plea for membership in the European Union, as have the Russians in theirs for equal membership in the G-8. And the Turks have, additionally, become estranged from the Muslim world, which views their secular elites as turncoats.

Muslims are finding out, as are Russians, that a society’s political institutions grow better in its own soil, albeit with nourishment from the best borrowed additives they can absorb. Muslim societies need the nurturing of freedom and democracy, left out of the Ataturk model, but these can have meaning for them only in the context of social justice, kinship and community, which are the glue that holds Muslim societies together. And if Muslims secularize, they will do so more through cross-cultural interaction than through legal strictures or purges in the curricula of religious schools. Ataturk tried both unsuccessfully. It should be noted that secularism eluded the Holy Roman Empire, Calvin’s Genera and Puritan New England despite Jesus’s precept about keeping Caesar’s business separate from God’s.

Social and political change are like pregnancy; every woman has to go through it on her own, suffer its pain and savor its joys. Physicians, nurses and therapists are useful during the process, but they had better not try to precipitate the childbirth. The world can wait a little longer to see if Muslim societies can overcome their intellectual, economic and cultural deficiencies. As a religion, Islam today is the world’s largest (considering Protestantism and Catholicism separate faiths) and perhaps its most dynamic. As a civilization, it flourished, aged, declined and is struggling to revive. It has just come out of the era of colonial suppression and is struggling to ditch the stifling stranglehold of autocracies, often supported by Western governments (oops! scapegoating the West!). Civilizational change does not occur in election cycles.

Islam has an inner vitality that many other religions do not. Those who suggest that Islam is the cause of the decline of the Muslim civilization forget that it was the cause of the birth and growth of that civilization. The excitement of a new faith and the mission to share it with the rest of mankind is what sent poor and backward Arab, Turkic and Berber nomads into conquering lands and building mighty and prosperous empires. In spite of their illiteracy, prejudices, subordination of women and other disabilities (which need, of course, to be rectified), they triumphed over the contemporary world’s most advanced societies, such as the Byzantines and Persians.

Missions that catch the imagination, rather than cultural sophistication, have spurred the growth of civilizations. The primary mission that set Europeans off on global conquests was not really the desire to dominate other peoples or plunder their resources, although they did both. It was their passion to conquer nature and its secrets, aroused by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which plunged them into scientific and technological pursuits and sent them scouting around the world.

Ernest Gellner was not far from the truth when he said the English “acquired their empire in a state of absence of mind and … lost the empire with a similar lack of attention.” (5) Civilizations have life cycles. Some have died (Egyptian, Aztec). Some have rebounded after a decline (Japanese, Chinese). Some are struggling to rejuvenate after exhaustion (Indian, Islamic). The Western civilization, whose ascendancy was signaled by the rout of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683, is still growing, though it appears to be slowing down. Its European node has apparently begun to fatigue.

A word about nodes of civilizations. Some civilizations have had more than one political and cultural center, each following its own life cycle. Islam had five major nodes: the Abbasid (750-1258) in southwest Asia; the Moorish (711-1492) in Spain and Sicily; the Ottoman (1281-1918) spanning Europe, Asia and Africa; the Safavid (1501 -1736) in Iran; and the Mughal (1526-1858) in the Indian subcontinent. These political and cultural realms rose and peaked at different times. In all of them except Spain, Islam endures as a faith although Muslim political and economic life lacks vitality. The Moorish “civilization” (as it is often called) has disappeared, however.

Determining the number of nodes in Western civilization requires a decision about its origins. Some of my philosopher friends say it began with the School of Athens or Hellenistic civilization. Well, Hellenism is long dead, and Socrates or Aristotle is rarely discussed outside college classrooms. Samuel Huntington, among others, traces the beginnings of the Western civilization to the “eighth and ninth centuries,” when Western Christianity began to take a distinct civilizational shape. (6) Some scholars tend to disagree. They say the Enlightenment has so dramatically changed the West’s culture and outlook that today’s liberal North Atlantic democracies cannot be considered an extension of the old Christian Europe. If there are church-going Christians in the contemporary West, they argue, so were there lots of agnostics and atheists in the Holy Roman Empire. It is the dominant culture and Weltanschauung that define the character and identity of a civilization. They point out that the character, not just of Western societies, but of Western Christianity has also changed beyond recognition since the French and American revolutions.

The argument reminds me of John Ashcroft. He prays in the office and declares at Bob Jones University: “We don’t have a king; we only have Jesus.” But he does not understand, as we have noted, why people die for what they believe (sometimes wrongly) to be God’s cause. There is a world of difference between his Weltanschauung and that of the Christians who died in droves for their faith before Christianity became the state religion in Europe under Constantine, and those who joined the Crusades, the expedition of Joan of Arc or the battles of the Thirty Years War.

In any case, I would settle for Huntington’s birth certificate for Western civilization, recognizing Charlemagne, rather than Constantine or Socrates, as its progenitor. In this setting, Western civilization appears to have two nodes: West European (including Australia and New Zealand) and American (including Canada).

The two wings are evolving at different rhythms. Western Europe has settled into an economic and cultural plateau with low rates of economic growth, shrinking population and military dependence on America. American society, it seems, is at a crossroads. Some of its key elements–the economy, science and technology and manpower-demonstrate its stamina. Other indices seem to betray its maturity or fatigue. The latter include the shrinkage of the core (European American) population group, corrosion of social and family values, political and business corruption, and loss of martial spirit, as reflected in, among other things, the fear of casualties and dependence on proxy fighters in warfare.

Lewis wrote in a 1997 article that Western civilization, like others before it, is going to yield to some other “dominant civilization.” (7) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is now worried that American society is ill danger of unraveling from cultural pluralism. (8) Huntington warns that universalization of Western values could precipitate a civilizational clash and “lead to defeat of the West.” (9) And the title of Pat Buchanan’s latest book–The Death of the West.’ How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil our Country and Civilization–encapsulates his concern and that of a whole host of other conservative intellectuals. (10)

One historian of civilizations has a timetable for the demise of Western civilization. Carroll Quigley predicts that it “will surely pass out of existence … perhaps before A.D. 2500.” (11) It is useful to recall George Orwell’s prediction about society degenerating into authoritarianism in 1984. Well, we in America made it through 1984 with an elected president and Congress and a free press (whatever their intrinsic worth) and need to take these apocalyptic forecasts with a grain of salt. But suppose Quigley’s foreboding came true, and in 2501 a historian set about finding out “what went wrong” with the West. He would probably browse through the works of Schlesinger, Huntington and Buchanan and conclude that Americans and Europeans brought it all on themselves. If only they had made more babies, done their own work themselves instead of relying on immigrants, and had not tangled with the “axis of evil” and other wicked foreign regimes, they would have done just fine.

We know, however, that the creeping “malaise” (President Carter might have spoken a bit too soon) of Western societies is the inevitable outcome of their maturation. People are having fewer children to maintain a good living standard, which entails dependence on the work of immigrants, who are fostering pluralism. And the expansion of Western economies is making the West more and more dependent on foreign resources and markets and resort to hegemonism and conflicts.

Our historian of 2501 would be right to point to population shrinkage, pluralism and foreign wars as the main causes of the West’s demise, as is Lewis when he cites Islamism, dictatorships and subordination of women, and so forth, as the causes of the travails of the Islamic civilization. So would be the physician who reports that his 92-year-old patient died of anemia and a bad cold. The main thing that is “wrong” with the Islamic civilization is its age. Its major “nodes” lasted an average of six centuries, longer than the Hellenistic or Roman civilizations and double the age of the modern West (counting from the Ottoman debacle at Vienna).

Striking, indeed, is the decline of the Islamic civilization. But so is Muslim youths’ struggle for its renewal. Some great societies, as we noted, could not overcome degeneracy; others have bounced back. Can the Muslims Make It? Just a suggestion for the title of Professor Lewis’s next book.

(1) Dan Eggen, “Ashcroft invokes religion in U.S. war on terrorism,” The Washington Post, February 20, 2002.

(2) Neil MacFarquhar, “Anti-Western and extremist views pervade Saudi schools,” The New York Times, October 19, 2001.

(3) S.N. Eisenstadt, “The Protestant ethic thesis in an analytical and comparative framework” The Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A Comparative View, S.N. Eisenstadt, ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 4.

(4) Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey. (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 82.

(5) Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1983, pp. 42-43.

(6) Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of the Worm Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 50.

(7) Bernard Lewis, “The West and the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 1997, p. 130.

(8) Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 66-67, 123.

(9) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 311.

(10) Patrick Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002), pp. 3, 10.

(11) Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979), pp. 127, 164-66.

Mustafa Malik Journalism fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States