Restating the Obvious

Book Review XVI: Islam in History

ISLAM IN HISTORY: Ideas, People and Events in the Middle East, second, revised, expanded edition by Bernard Lewis. 487 pages. Open Court paperback, $24.95

We can only wish that people in responsible positions in the West had read and absorbed the points Bernard Lewis makes in “Islam in History.” He certainly tried.

Lewis is no ivory tower historian who writes recondite monographs for other ivory tower historians. Many of the essays collected here -- as well as his other, more recent collection “From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East” -- were published in various easily accessible, if high brow, venues, such as the New York Review of Books.

And they have been out for a while. The first edition of “Islam in History” was published in 1973. It received the attention due to a leading -- some would say, the leading -- Western scholar of Islam, but not the understanding. In the preface to this newer, revised and expanded but still rather elderly collection (1993), Lewis thanks those who helped him but, in his reserved but mordant style, adds, “I do not however feel obliged to defer to the judgments of those reviewers who in 1973 thought that I had underestimated ’the gains made by secularism in the Muslim world’ and that I had exaggerated the significance of Muslim movements in Iran.”

Touche. But with the experience of an additional 15 years, we can see that even Lewis was not pessimistic enough. And that the executors of history have learned nothing at all from Lewis’ half century of brilliant insights.

Not that I think they are all brilliant, a point I will expand later. But in a 1992 essay, Lewis  probed deeply into the question: Why do they hate us? That Muslims do hate the West and its values should hardly be debatable in 2008, although it still is debated. In 1992, Lewis was  bemused by the rally to Saddam by Muslims and  Western leftists. His core paragraph deserves to be quoted in full:

“But beyond all these (enthusiasms of Arabs for antidemocratic forces in Europe) there was and unfortunately still is a profound, pervasive, and passionate hatred of the West and all it represents, as  a world power, as an ideology, as a way of life, and that hatred is extended to embrace a wide range of local Westernizers and modernizers. It is a hatred so deep that it has led those who feel it to rally to any plausible enemy of the West -- even a racist like Hitler who despised Arabs, an atheist like Stalin who suppressed Islam, a gangster like Saddam Hussein who violated every rule of Arab decency and Islamic morality.”

Well, I don’t think much of “Arab decency,” but if George Bush had understood the arguments that underlie that paragraph, he would not still be making fatuous statements about Iraqi democracy. He might still have been justified in knocking off Saddam. Being the only man in history to depose a genocidal murderer from his throne, hale him into a court of law and see him convicted and hanged is no small achievement, and Muslims should thank him for it, but they don’t; but to also expect the rescued Muslims to embrace political liberty was expecting too much.

After long experience, we are entitled to ask, is Islam compatible with democracy or, as I prefer to phrase it because, as Lewis says, democracy is a slippery word, especially as used by Arabs, popular self-government? The answer appears to be no, and this is where I part ways with Professor Lewis.

His massive erudition does not always save him from making some odd mistakes. For example, he excludes Buddhism from the universalizing religions. Buddhism is, like Islam and Christianity, both salvationist and universalizing. It is not, however, monotheistic, which saves  it from being obnoxious to freedom.

Closer to the topic, he accepts Turkey as a democracy. It is, obviously, a disguised military dictatorship, although now in the crisis of Islam’s indifference -- or worse -- toward even pretend democracy. It is unlikely Turkey will still present itself as a democracy much longer.

In several essays, Lewis writes about the Islamic view that innovation is a sin. This helps explain the deep conservatism of Islamic societies, and the Young Turks are the exception that proves the rule.

In “The Guns of August,” Barbara Tuchman has a long passage on the curious indifference, even antagonism, of the Young Turks toward Anatolia’s long and, at times, brilliant history. “We like new things,” she quotes one of them as saying.

Yes, and the Young Turks abandoned Islam. The mass of the Turkish population has not, however, even after eight decades of experiencing the supposed benefits of new things. It would be difficult to find any Islamic political movement that likes new things, although Lewis astringently observes that some of the most reactionary -- like Khomeini -- blandly adopt Western forms when it suits them, like parliaments. When challenged, they are usually able to manufacture an Islamic justification, but there is, Lewis points out, no warrant in Islam for such a thing.

Lewis’s particular merit -- among many -- is his willingness to notice the obvious. This is especially appealing in the last, most currently impressive essay (the one I quoted from), “The Middle East Crisis in Historical Perspective.”  But it is a characteristic virtue. In “Behind the Rushdie Affair,” for example, Lewis manages to skewer not only Khomeini but a passel of Islamic jurisconsults for ignoring the very obvious violations of Islamic law in the fatwa.

This habit probably helps explain why Muslims and their apologists hate Lewis so much. This is strange, because Lewis, though not ignorant of Islam’s flaws, is overall an admirer of this ancient system that once reveled “in the glorious days when Muslims led mankind in the arts and sciences of civilization.”
 
The historical record, as I read it, does not show any such days, and at this point we are entitled to wonder whether the “ignorance, poverty and arbitrary rule” that Lewis identifies as Islam’s modern flaws are not actually its necessary outcomes. Suicidal martyrs are known in Christianity and in other societies, but they are a wasting asset in every society but Islam.

We have to wonder why.