Coming
Soon!
From Common Courage Press
Recent
Stories
June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
Musicians Unite Against Sweatshops
Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
It to Risk One's Life?
John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
Hot Stories
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
June
28, 2003
Scholarship or Sophistry?
Bernard
Lewis and the New Orientalism
By
M. SHAHID ALAM
It would appear from the fulsome praise heaped
by mainstream reviewers on Bernard Lewis's most recent and well-timed
book, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
(Oxford University Press, 2002), that the demand for Orientalism
has reached a new peak. America's search for new enemies that
began soon after the end of the Cold War very quickly resurrected
the ghost of an old, though now decrepit, enemy, Islam. Slowly
but surely, this revived the sagging fort1unes of Orientalism,
so that it speaks again with the treble voice of authority.
The mainstream reviewers describe Bernard
Lewis as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies," the
"father" of Islamic studies, "[a]rguably the West's
most distinguished scholar on the Middle East," and "[a]
Sage for the Age." It would appear that Lewis is still the
reigning monarch of Orientalism, as he was some twenty-five years
back when Edward Said, in his Orientalism, dissected and
exposed the intentions, modalities, deceptions, and imperialist
connections of this ideological enterprise. This Orientalist
tiger has not changed his stripes over the fifty-odd years that
he has been honing his skills. Now at the end of his long career-only
coincidentally, also the peak-he presents the summation, the
quintessence of his scholarship and wisdom on Islam and the Middle
East, gathered, compressed in the pages of this slim book that
sets out to explain what went wrong with Islamic history, and
that has so mesmerized reviewers on the right.
Who Is Bernard Lewis?
We will return to the book in a moment,
but before that, we need to step back some twenty-five years
and examine how Edward Said, in Orientalism, has described
this Orientalist tiger's stripes and his cunning ploys at concealment.
Edward Said gets to the nub of Lewis's Orientalist project when
he writes that his "work purports to be liberal objective
scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda
against his subject material." Lewis's work is "aggressively
ideological." He has dedicated his entire career, spanning
more than five decades, to a "project to debunk, to whittle
down, and to discredit the Arabs and Islam." Said writes:
The core of Lewis's ideology about Islam
is that it never changes, and his whole mission is to inform
conservative segments of the Jewish reading public, and anyone
else who cares to listen, that any political, historical, and
scholarly account of Muslims must begin and end with the fact
that Muslims are Muslims.
Although Lewis's objectives are ominous,
his methods are quite subtle; he prefers to work "by suggestion
and insinuation." In order to disarm his readers and win
their trust and admiration, he delivers frequent "sermons
on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real
historian." This is only a cover, a camouflage, for his
political propaganda. Once he is seated on his high Orientalist
perch, he goes about cleverly insinuating how Islam is deficient
in and opposed to universal values, which, of course, always
originate in the West. It is because of this deficiency in values
that Arabs have trouble accepting a democratic Israel-it is always
"democratic" Israel. Lewis can write "objectively"
about the Arab's "ingrained" opposition to Israel without
ever telling his readers that Israel is an imperialist creation,
and an expansionist, colonial-settler state that was founded
on terror, wars, and ethnic cleansing. Lewis's work on Islam
represents the "culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that
not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners."
Lewis's scholarly mask slips off rather
abruptly when he appears on television, a feat that he accomplishes
with predictable regularity. Once he is on the air, his polemical
self, the Orientalist crouching tiger, takes over, all his sermons
about objectivity forgotten, and then he does not shrink from
displaying his sneering contempt for the Arabs and Muslims more
generally, his blind partisanship for Israel, or his bristling
hostility toward Iran. One recent example will suffice here.
In a PBS interview broadcast on 16 April 2002, hosted by Charlie
Rose, he offered this gem: "Asking Arafat to give up terrorism
would be like asking Tiger to give up golf." That is a statement
whose malicious intent and vindictive meanness might have been
excusable if it came from an official Israeli spokesman.
After this background check, do we really
want to hear from this "sage" about "what went
wrong" with Islamic societies; why, after nearly a thousand
years of expansive power and world leadership in many branches
of the arts and sciences, they began to lose their élan,
their military advantage, and their creativity and, starting
in the nineteenth century, capitulated to their historical adversary,
the West? And, though Islamic societies have regained their political
independence, why has their economic and cultural decline proved
so difficult to reverse? Yet, although our stomachs turn at the
prospect, we must sample the gruel Lewis offers, taste it, and
analyze it, if only to identify the toxins that it contains and
that have poisoned far too many Western minds for more than fifty
years.
Where is the Context?
What went wrong with the Islamic societies?
When this question is asked by our "doyen of Middle Eastern
studies," especially when it is asked right after the attacks
of 11 September, it is hard not to notice that this manner of
framing the problem of the eclipse of Islamic societies by the
West is loaded with biases, value judgments, and preconceptions,
and even contains its own answer. There are two sets of "wrongs"
in What Went Wrong? The first consists of "wrongs,"
deviations from what is just and good, that we confront in contemporary
Islamic societies. Lewis undoubtedly has in mind a whole slew
of problems, including the political, economic, and cultural
failings of the Islamic world. In addition, this question seeks
to discover deeper "wrongs," deviations from what is
just and good that are prior to and at the root of the present
"wrongs." Lewis is concerned primarily with this second
set of "wrongs."
The first problem one encounters in Lewis's
narrative of Middle Eastern decline is the absence of any context.
He seeks to create the impression that the failure of Islam to
catch up with the accelerating pace of changes in Western Europe
is a problem specific to this region; there is no attempt to
locate this problem in a global context. This exclusive Middle
Eastern focus reveals to all but the blinkered the mala fides
of What Went Wrong? Lewis cannot hide behind pious claims
that a historian's "loyalties may well influence his choice
of subject of research; they should not influence his treatment
of it." His exclusive focus on the decline of the Middle
East is not legitimate precisely because it is designed to-and
it unavoidably must-"influence his treatment of it."
Once Western Europe began to make the
transition from a feudal-agrarian to a capitalist-industrial
society, starting in the sixteenth century, the millennial balance
of power among the world's major civilizations shifted inexorably
in favor of Western Europe. A society that was shifting to a
capitalist-industrial base, capable of cumulative growth, commanded
greater social power than slow-growing societies still operating
on feudal-agrarian foundations. Under the circumstances, it was
unlikely that non-Western societies could simultaneously alter
the foundations of their societies while also fending off attacks
from Western states whose social power was expanding at an ever-increasing
rate. Even as these feudal-agrarian societies sought to reorganize
their economies and institutions, Western onslaughts against
them deepened, and this made their reorganization increasingly
difficult. It is scarcely surprising that the growing asymmetry
between the two sides eventually led to the eclipse, decline,
or subjugation of nearly all non-Western societies.
While Lewis studiously avoids any reference
to this disequalizing dynamic, another Western historian of Islam
not driven by a compulsion "to debunk, to whittle down,
and to discredit the Arabs and Islam" understood this tendency
quite well. I am referring here to Marshall Hodgson, whose The
Venture of Islam shows a deep and, for its time, rare understanding
of the interconnectedness, across space and time, amongst all
societies in the Eastern hemisphere. He understood very clearly
that the epochal changes under way in parts of Western Europe
between 1600 and 1800 were creating an altogether new order based
on markets, capital accumulation, and technological changes,
which acted upon each other to produce cumulative growth. Moreover,
this endowed the most powerful Western states with a degree of
social power that no one could resist. In his Venture of Islam,
Marshall Hodgson writes,
Hence, the Western Transmutation, once
it got well under way, could neither be paralleled independently
nor be borrowed wholesale. Yet it could not, in most cases, be
escaped. The millennial parity of social power broke down, with
results that were disastrous everywhere.
Clearly, Lewis's presentation of his
narrative of Middle Eastern decline without any context is a
ploy. His objective is to whittle down world history, to reduce
it to a primordial contest between two historical adversaries,
the West and Islam. This is historiography in the crusading mode,
one that purports to resume the Crusades-interrupted in the thirteenth
century-and carry them to their unfinished conclusion, the triumph
of the West or, conversely, the humiliation and defeat of Middle
Eastern Islam. Once this framework has been established, with
its exclusive focus on a failing Islamic civilization, it is
quite easy to cast the narrative of this decay as a uniquely
Islamic phenomenon, which must then be explained in terms of
specifically Islamic failures. Thus Lewis's agenda in What
Went Wrong? is to discover all that was and is "wrong"
with Islamic societies and to explain their decline and present
troubles in terms of these "wrongs."
If Lewis had an interest in exploring
the decline of the Middle East, he would be asking why the new,
more dynamic historical system that lay behind the rise of the
West had not emerged in the Middle East, India, China, Italy,
or Africa. If he had asked this question, it may have directed
him to the source and origins of Western hegemony. But Lewis
ducks this issue altogether. Instead, he takes the growing power
of the West-its advances in science and technology-as the starting
point of his narrative and concentrates on demonstrating why
the efforts of Islamic societies to catch up with the West were
both too little and too late. In other words, he seeks to explain
a generic phenomenon-the overthrow of agrarian societies before
the rise of a new historical system, based on capital, markets,
and technological change-as one that is specific to Islam and
is due to specifically Islamic "wrongs."
If one focuses only on the Middle Eastern
response to the Western challenge, it does appear to be too little
and too late. The Ottoman Empire, once the most powerful in the
Islamic world, had lost nearly all its European territories by
the end of the nineteenth century, and the remnants of its Arab
territories were lost after its defeat in the First World War.
At this point, the Ottoman Empire had been reduced to a rump
state in northern Anatolia, with the British and French occupying
Istanbul, the Greeks pushing to occupy central Anatolia, the
Armenians extending their boundaries in eastern Anatolia, and
the French pushing north in Silesia. Yet, after defeating the
Greeks, the French, and the Armenians, the victorious Turks managed
to establish in 1922 a new and modern Turkish nation-state over
Istanbul, Thrace, and all of Anatolia. The Iranians were more
successful in preserving their territories, though, like the
Ottomans, they too had lost control over their economic policies
in the first decades of the nineteenth century. However, if one
compares these outcomes with the fate suffered by other regions-barring
Japan, China, and Thailand, nearly all of Asia and Africa was
directly colonized by the Europeans-one has to conclude that
the results for the Middle East could have been worse.
Uncurious Ottomans
There is even less substance to Lewis's
claims about Middle Eastern inertia in the face of Western threats,
especially when we compare their responses to these threats with
the record of East Asian societies.
First, consider Lewis's charge that the
Muslims showed little curiosity about the West. He attributes
this failing to Muslim bigotry that frowned upon contacts with
the infidels. This is a curious charge against "a world
civilization" that Lewis admits was "polyethnic, multiracial,
international, one might even say intercontinental." It
also seems strange that the Ottomans, and other Middle Eastern
states before them, were quite happy to employ their Christian
and Jewish subjects-as high officials, diplomats, physicians,
and bankers-traded with the Europeans themselves, bought arms
and borrowed money from them, and yet, somehow, loathed learning
anything from the same infidels. In addition, Muslim philosophers,
historians and travelers have left several very valuable accounts
of non-Islamic societies. One of these, Al-Biruni's monumental
study of India, still remains without a rival for its encyclopedic
coverage, objectivity, and sympathy for its subject. Clearly,
Lewis has fallen prey to the Orientalist temptation: when something
demands a carefully researched explanation, an understanding
of material and social conditions, better pin it on some cultural
propensity.
Lewis is little aware how his book is
littered with contradictions. If the Muslims were not a little
curious about developments in the West, it is odd that the oldest
map of the Americas-which dates from 1513 and is the most accurate
map from the sixteenth century-was prepared by Piri Reis, a Turkish
admiral and cartographer. It would also appear that the number
of Muslims who had left accounts of their observations on Europe
were not such a rarity either. Lewis himself mentions no fewer
than ten names, nearly all of them Ottomans, spanning the period
from 1665 to 1840; and this is far an from exhaustive list. One
of them, Ratib Effendi, who was in Vienna from 1791 to 1792,
left a report that "ran to 245 manuscript folios, ten times
or more than ten times those of his predecessors, and it goes
into immense detail, primarily on military matters, but also,
to quite a considerable extent, on civil affairs." Diplomatic
contacts provide another indicator of the early growth of Ottoman
interest and involvement in the affairs of European states. Between
1703 and 1774, the Ottomans signed sixty-eight treaties or agreements
with sovereign, mostly European states. Since each treaty must
have involved at least one diplomatic exchange, the Ottomans
could hardly be accused of neglecting diplomatic contacts with
Europe.
According to Lewis, the Ottoman decision
not to challenge the Portuguese hegemony in the Indian Ocean
in the sixteenth century was a failure of vision. Despite some
early warnings from elder statesmen, the Ottomans did not anticipate
that the Portuguese incursion would translate some 250 years
later into a broader and more serious European challenge to their
power. As a result, they chose to concentrate their war efforts
on acquiring territory in Europe, which, Lewis claims, they saw
as "the principal battleground between Islam and Europe,
the rival faiths competing for enlightenment-and mastery-of the
world." It is of no interest to Lewis that the Ottomans,
departing from their own tradition of land warfare, had built
a powerful navy starting in the fifteenth century and created
a seaborne empire in the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea,
and the Red Sea. If the Ottomans chose to concentrate their resources
on land wars in Central Europe rather than challenge Portuguese
hegemony in the Indian Ocean, this was not the result of religious
zealotry. It reflected the balance of class interests in the
Ottoman political structure. In an empire that had traditionally
been land-based, the interests of the landowning classes prevailed
against commercial interests that looked to the Indian Ocean
for their livelihood. Although the decision not to contest the
Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century
was fateful, that policy was rational for the Ottomans.
A Military Decline?
Several Orientalists-Lewis amongst them-have
argued that the military decline of the Ottoman Empire became
irreversible after its second failed siege of Vienna in 1683,
or perhaps earlier, after its naval defeat at Lepanto in 1571.
In an earlier work, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, Lewis
declared that "[t]he Ottomans found it more and more difficult
to keep up with the rapidly advancing Western technological innovations,
and in the course of the eighteenth century the Ottoman Empire,
itself far ahead of the Islamic world, fell decisively behind
Europe in virtually all arts of war."
This thesis of an early and inexorable
decline has now been convincingly questioned. Jonathan Grant
has shown that the Ottomans occupied the third tier in the hierarchy
of military technology, behind innovators and exporters, at the
beginning of the fifteenth century; they could reproduce the
latest military technology with the help of foreign expertise
but they never graduated into export or introduced any significant
innovations. The Ottomans succeeded in maintaining this relative
position, through two waves of technology diffusion, until the
early nineteenth century. However, they failed to keep up with
the third wave of technology diffusion, based upon the technology
of the industrial revolution, that began in the mid-nineteenth
century. The Ottomans fell below their third-tier status only
toward the end of the nineteenth century, when they became totally
dependent on imported weaponry.
If we put together the evidence made
available by Lewis, it becomes clear that the Ottomans were not
slow in recognizing the institutional superiority enjoyed by
Europe's military. A debate about the causes of Ottoman weakness
began after the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, growing more intense
over time. A document from the early seventeenth century recognized
that "it was no longer sufficient, as in the past, to adopt
Western weapons. It was also necessary to adopt Western training,
structures, and tactics for their effective use." The Ottomans
began to dispatch special envoys to European capitals "with
instructions to observe and to learn and, more particularly,
to report on anything that might be useful to the Muslim state
in coping with its difficulties and confronting its enemies."
Several of these envoys wrote reports, occasionally quite extensive
and detailed, on their European visits, and these reports had
an important impact on thinking in Ottoman circles. The first
mathematical school for the military was founded in 1734, and
a second one followed in the 1770s.
While Ottoman military technology generally
kept pace with the advances in Europe, at least into the first
decades of the nineteenth century, it took the Ottomans longer
to introduce organizational changes in the military since they
ran into powerful social obstacles. As a result, the first serious
attempts at modernizing the army did not begin until the late
eighteenth century, during the reign of Selim III, who sought
to bypass the problems of reforming the existing military corps
by recruiting and training a new European-style army. Although,
by 1806, he had raised a modern army of nearly twenty-five thousand,
he had to abandon his efforts in the face of resistance from
the ulama and a Janissary rebellion. The task of modernizing
the Ottoman army was taken up again in 1826 after the Janissary
corps was disbanded, and in two years, the new Ottoman army included
seventy-five thousand regular troops. Simultaneously, the Ottomans
introduced reforms in the bureaucracy and also reformed land-tenure
policies with the objective of raising revenues.
And yet these efforts at modernizing
the Ottoman military-quite early by most standards-failed to
avert the progressive fragmentation and eventual demise of the
Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. One might join Hodgson
in thinking that this was inevitable, that agrarian societies
in Asia and Africa could not modernize fast enough in the face
of the ever increasing economic and military power of the modern
Western nation-states. But, perhaps, this assessment is too fatalistic;
and it is contradicted by the case of-among others-Russia, which
was spared colonization or subjection to open-door treaties.
A comparison of the two quickly reveals that the Ottomans' efforts
at modernization were undermined by several extraneous factors.
The Ottoman Empire, which straddled three continents, lacked
the compactness that might have made its territories more defensible.
What proved more fatal to the Ottoman Empire was the fact that
the Ottoman Turks, though they constituted its ethnic core, made
up less than a third of its population and occupied an even smaller
part of its territories. Once nationalism reared its head in
the nineteenth century, the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire
was well-nigh unavoidable. The Ottomans faced one insurrection
after another in the Balkans, each backed by some European power,
until the last of these territories had broken free in the early
decades of the twentieth century. Not only did these insurrections
reduce the revenues of the empire, but by diverting its attention
and resources to war, they delayed the modernization of the military
and economy. Eventually, during World War I, the Arab territories
of the empire were wrested away by the British and French, with
support from Arab nationalists.
The Egyptian program to modernize its
military, started in 1815 under the leadership of Muhammad Ali,
was more ambitious and more successful. It was part of an integrated
program of modernization and industrial development financed
through state ownership of lands, development of new export crops,
and state-owned monopolies over the marketing of the major agricultural
products. In 1831, Egypt's Europeanized army consisted of one
hundred thousand officers and men, and in 1833, having conquered
Syria, it was penetrating deep into Anatolia when its march was
halted by Russian naval intervention. When the Ottomans resumed
the Syrian war in 1839, the Egyptians routed the Ottoman forces
and were rapidly marching westward, poised to capture Istanbul
for Muhammad Ali. At this point, all the great European powers,
except France, intervened, forcing the Egyptians to withdraw,
give up their acquisitions in Syria and Arabia, reduce their
military force to eighteen thousand, and enforce the Anglo-Ottoman
Commercial Convention, which required the lowering of tariffs
to 3 percent and the dismantling of all state monopolies. By
depriving Egypt of its revenues and dramatically reducing the
military's demand for its manufactures, these measures abruptly
terminated the career of the earliest and most ambitious program
to build a modern, industrial society in the Periphery.
Lewis faults the Ottomans and Egyptians
of the nineteenth century for seeking to build an effective military
response on the foundations of a modern industrial economy. He
thinks it odd that these countries "tried to catch up with
Europe by building factories, principally to equip and clothe
their armies." Apparently, Lewis is unaware that the Ottomans-and
especially Egypt-were breaking new ground in their efforts to
modernize their manufactures, a road that would soon be taken
by most European countries. Nearly every country that lagged
behind in the nineteenth century and was forced to catch up with
Britain, built its strategy around industrialization, and the
military in many of these countries formed an important initial
market for their nascent industries. Of course, Lewis had no
choice but to demean the military and industrial responses to
the Western threat. As we will see, he believes that the Ottomans
should have been working harder to remedy their cultural deficiencies,
such as their less-than-enthusiastic appreciation for European
harmonies.
Industrial Failure-But
Why?
Lewis declares that the industrialization
programs launched by the Ottomans and Egypt "failed, and
most of the early factories became derelict." These programs
were doomed from the outset because their promoters lacked a
proper regard for time, measurement, harmonies, secularism, and
women's rights-values upon which Western industrial success was
founded.
We must correct these jaundiced observations.
Far from being a failure, the Egyptian "program of industrialization
and military expansion," according to Immanuel Wallerstein
(Unthinking Social Science), "seriously undermined
the Ottoman Empire and almost established a powerful state in
the Middle East capable eventually of playing a major role in
the interstate system." Muhammad Ali's fiscal and economic
reforms, between 1805 and 1847, brought about a more than ninefold
increase in government revenues. At their height in the 1830s,
Egypt's state monopolies had made investments worth $12 million
and employed thirty thousand workers in a broad range of industries
that included foundries, textiles, paper, chemicals, shipyards,
glassware, and arsenals. By the early 1830s, Egyptian arsenals
and naval yards had acquired the ability to "produce appreciable
amounts of warships, guns and munitions," elevating Egypt
"to a major regional power." Naturally, these developments
in Egypt were raising concerns in British government circles.
A report submitted to the British foreign office in 1837 sounded
the right note: "A manufacturing country Egypt never can
become-or at least for ages." Three years later, when Istanbul
was within the grasp of Muhammad Ali's forces, a coalition of
European powers intervened to roll back his gains, downsize his
military, and dismantle his state monopolies. These measures
successfully reversed the Periphery's first industrial revolution.
The Ottomans launched an ambitious program
of industrialization in the early 1840s, but it had little chance
of success and was abandoned within a few years of its inauguration.
Since the early nineteenth century, the unequal treaties limited
the Ottomans to import tariffs under 3 percent, severely limiting
their ability to protect their manufactures or raise revenues
for investments in development projects. In 1838, the Anglo-Turkish
Commercial Convention forced them to dismantle all state monopolies,
dealing another blow to their fiscal autonomy. It speaks to the
determination of the Ottomans that they sought to launch an industrial
revolution despite their adverse fiscal circumstances. In the
decade starting in 1841, the Ottomans had set up, to the west
of Istanbul, a complex of state-owned industries that included
spinning and weaving mills, a foundry, steam-operated machine
works, and a boatyard for the construction of small steamships.
In the words of Edward Clark (International Journal of Middle
Eastern Studies, 1974): "In variety as well as in number,
in planning, in investment, and in attention given to internal
sources of raw materials these manufacturing enterprises far
surpassed the scope of all previous efforts and mark this period
as unique in Ottoman history." Several foreign observers
saw in the Istanbul industrial complex the potential to evolve
into "a Turkish Manchester and Leeds, a Turkish Birmingham
and Sheffield," all wrapped in one. In addition, other modern
industrial, mining, and agricultural projects were initiated
during the same period in several other parts of the Ottoman
Empire. But these grand projects could not be sustained for long.
Once the Crimean War started, the Ottomans were forced to borrow
heavily from foreign banks, and, strapped for funds, they abandoned
most of these industrial projects. Thus ended another bold experiment
in industrialization, early even by European standards, but whose
failure was linked to the loss of Ottoman fiscal sovereignty.
It's in Their Culture
The real culprit behind the political,
economic, and military failures of the Middle East over the past
half a millennium was their culture. Lewis identifies a whole
slew of problematic cultural traits, but two are singled out
for special attention: the mixing of religion and politics and
the unequal treatment of women, unbelievers, and slaves. Both,
according to Lewis, are Islamic flaws.
Lewis argues that secularism constitutes
a great divide between Islam and the West: the West always had
it and Islamic societies never did. Secularism, as the separation
of church and state, "is, in a profound sense, Christian."
Its origins go back to Jesus-his injunction to give God and
Caesar, each, their due-and to the early history of the Christians
when, as a minority persecuted by the Roman state, they developed
the institutions of the Church with its "own laws and courts,
its own hierarchy and chain of authority." This was quite
unique, setting Europe apart from anything that went before and
from its competitors. In particular, the Muslims never created
an "institution corresponding to, or even remotely resembling,
the Church in Christendom."
These claims about a secular Christendom-an
oxymoron in itself-and a theocratic Islam are problematic. Lewis
rests his case upon two propositions. First, he contrasts the
presence of the Church in Christendom against its absence in
Islamic societies. Second, he works on the presumption that the
existence of a Church, a hierarchical religious organization
different from the state, necessarily implies a separation between
religion and political authority. For the most part, these claims
are contestable.
The existence of a Church in Christendom
is not in dispute, but the contention that there existed nothing
like it in Islamic societies is contradicted by history. The
Prophet and the first four Caliphs combined religious and mundane
authority in their persons. In addition, most Islamic thinkers
have maintained that the ideal Islamic state, modeled after the
state in Medina, must be guided by the Qur'an and the Prophet's
Sunnah. The Islamic practice in the centuries following the pious
Caliphs, however, departed quite sharply from the canonical model
as well as the theory.
In one of his numerous attempts at distortion,
Lewis asserts that the "pietists" retreated into "radical
opposition or quietist withdrawal" when they failed to impose
"ecclesiastical constraints on political and military authority."
This is only part of the picture. In the bigger picture, we find
that the pietists turned vigorously to scholarship. Starting
from a scratch, and independently of state authority and without
state funding, the early pietists developed the Islamic sciences,
which included the Traditions of the Prophet, biographies of
the Prophet and his companions, Arabic grammar, and theology.
Most significantly, these pious scholars elaborated several competing
systems of Islamic laws-regulating every aspect of individual,
social, and business life-on the premise that legislative authority
was vested in the consensus of the pious scholars-or, in the
case of Shi'ites, in the rulings of the imams. The state had
executive powers but it possessed no legislative authority. In
effect, Islam had evolved not only separate political and religious
institutions, but separate executive and legislative powers as
well. It was the pious scholars-with their competing schools
of jurisprudence-who constituted the informal legislatures of
Islam, long before these institutions had evolved in Europe.
Lewis's second proposition-that separation
between religion and political authority flows from the presence
of a Church-is equally dubious. There can be no separation between
religion and political authority if religion is organized into
a Church with power over the lives of people. If the Church itself
commands power, ipso facto, it becomes a rival of the state.
It follows that the Church can and will exercise its power directly
to regulate the religious, economic, and social affairs of the
community, and indirectly by using the state for its own ends.
Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman state,
the Church progressively increased its power: it used the power
of the state to eliminate or marginalize all competing religions;
it gained the exclusive right to define all religious dogma and
rituals; it acquired properties, privileges, and exclusive control
over education; it expanded its legislative control over different
spheres of society. In time, since the Church and state recruited
their higher personnel from the same classes, they also developed
an identity of class interests. In other words, although they
remained organizationally distinct, the Church and the state
mixed religion and politics.
One expects that a separation of religion
and political authority would produce a measure of tolerance.
Yet, the adoption of Christianity as its official creed led the
Roman state, hitherto tolerant of all religious communities,
to inaugurate a regime of growing intolerance toward other religions,
and even toward any dissent within Christianity. As Daniel Schowalter
(Oxford History of the Biblical World) says, "By
the end of the fourth century, both anti-pagan and anti-Jewish
legislation would serve as licenses for the increasing number
of acts of vandalism and violent destruction directed against
pagan and Jewish places of worship carried out by Christian mobs,
often at the instigation of the local clergy." Although
the practice of Judaism was not banned, by the end of the fourth
century C.E., a variety of decrees prohibited conversion to Judaism,
Jewish ownership of non-Jewish slaves, and marriage between Jews
and Christians, and Jews were excluded from most imperial offices.
In dogma, theology, legislation, and practice, the Church and
state crafted a regime that suppressed paganism and marginalized
all other non-Christian forms of worship.
According to Lewis, modernization in
Islamic societies was set back by a second set of cultural barriers-namely,
the inferior status of unbelievers, slaves, and, especially,
women. It is not that these groups labored under stricter restraints
than their counterparts in Europe, but that their unequal status
was "sacrosanct" in that they "were seen as part
of the structure of Islam, buttressed by revelation, by the precept
and practice of the Prophet, and by the classical and scriptural
history of the Islamic community." As a result, these three
inequalities have endured; they were not challenged even by the
radical Islamic movements that arose from time to time to protest
social and economic inequalities.
Lewis's claims are problematic for several
reasons. The first problem is their lack of historicity. Implicitly,
Lewis bases his case on a reading of European history that inverts
causation between economic development and social equality. He
would have us believe that Europeans developed because their
flexible legal systems moved faster to create a more egalitarian
society, a necessary basis for rapid progress. This shows a curious
indifference to chronology. While Europe was establishing its
global capitalist empire it was conducting the Inquisition, expelling
the Moors and Jews from Spain, waging unending religious wars,
burning witches at the stake, and granted few legal rights to
women. In addition, they were creating in the Americas economic
systems based on slavery that would be abolished only after the
1860s. In Russia, serfdom remained the basis of the economy at
least until the 1860s. The equality Lewis speaks of began to
arrive in slow increments at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and it was a byproduct of economic development, not
its precursor.
Lewis's claims about inequalities in
Muslim societies lack historicity on another score. It is a bit
surprising that "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies,"
who has spent more than fifty years studying the history of the
region, is unaware of at least a few challenges to the alleged
inferior status of women or unbelievers. In the early centuries
of Islam, there were at least three groups-the Kharijis, the
Qarmatians and the Sufis-that did not accept the legal interpretations
of the four traditional schools of Islamic law as sacrosanct.
Instead, they looked for inspiration to the Qur'anic precepts
on the moral and spiritual equality of men and women, claiming
that the early applications of these precepts were time-bound.
The Kharijis and Qarmatians rejected concubinage and child marriage,
and the Qarmatians went further in rejecting polygamy and the
veil. In a similar spirit, the Sufis welcomed women travelers
on the spiritual path, permitting women "to give a central
place in their lives to their spiritual vocation." In sixteenth-century
India, the Mughal emperor Akbar abolished the jizyah (the
poll tax imposed by Islamic law on all non-Muslims), banned child
marriage, and repealed a law that forced Islam on prisoners of
war.
The "most profound single difference"
between Islam and the West, however, concerns the status of women.
In particular, Lewis argues that Islam permits polygamy and concubinage
and that the Christian Churches prohibit it. Once again, Lewis
is exaggerating the differences. In nearly all societies, not
excluding the Western, men of wealth and power have always had
access to multiple sexual partners, although within different
legal frameworks. Islam gave equal rights to all the free sexual
partners of men as well as to their children. The West, driven
by a concern for primogeniture, adopted an opposite solution
by vesting all the rights in a man's primary sexual partner and
her offspring. All the other sexual partners-a man's mistresses-and
their children had no legal rights. Arguably, Europe's mistresses
might think that the Islamic practice favored women.
It would appear from Lewis's emphasis
on polygamy and concubinage that they were very common in Islamic
societies. In fact, both were quite rare outside the ruling class.
Among others, this is attested by European visitors to eighteenth-century
Aleppo and nineteenth-century Cairo. A study of documents relating
to two thousands estates in seventeenth-century Turkey could
identify only twenty cases of polygamy. Keeping concubines was
most likely even rarer.
Lewis quotes from the reports of Muslim
visitors who were startled to see European men curtsying to women
in public places; this is supposed to validate the "striking
contrasts" in women's status in Europe and Islam. Once the
bowing and curtsying are done, we need to compare the property
rights enjoyed by women in Europe and Islam, a quite reliable
index of the social power of women inside the household and outside.
In this matter, too, it is the Muslim women who had the advantage
until quite recently. Unlike her European counterpart, a married
Muslim woman could own property, and she enjoyed exclusive rights
to income from her property as well as the wages she earned.
In Britain, the most advanced country in Europe, married women
did not acquire the right to own property until 1882.
The ownership of property gave Muslim
women a measure of social power that was not available to women
in Europe. A Muslim woman of independent means had a stronger
hand in marriage: she could initiate a divorce or craft a marriage
contract that prevented her husband from taking another wife.
Muslim women often engaged in trading activities, buying and
selling property, lending money, or renting out stores. They
created waqfs, charitable foundations financed by earnings
from property, which they also administered. A small number of
women distinguished themselves as scholars of the religious sciences.
According to one report from the early nineteenth century, women
attended al-Azhar, the leading university in the Islamic world.
Ahmed concludes, on the basis of such evidence, that Muslim "women
were not, after all, the passive creatures, wholly without material
resources or legal rights, that the Western world once imagined
them to be."
What Went Wrong?
In an earlier era, before the Zionists
developed a proprietary interest in Palestine, the least bigoted
voices in the field of Oriental studies were often those of European
Jews. Ironically, Lewis himself has written that these pro-Islamic
Jews "were among the first who attempted to present Islam
to European readers as Muslims themselves see it and to stress,
to recognize, and indeed sometimes to romanticize the merits
and achievements of Muslim civilization in its great days."
At a time when most Orientalists took Muhammad for a scheming
imposter, equated Islam with fanaticism, thought that the Qur'an
was a crude and incoherent text, and believed that the Arabs
were incapable of abstract thought, a growing number of Jewish
scholars often took opposite positions. They accepted the sincerity
of Muhammad's mission, described Arabs as "Jews on horseback"
and Islam as an evolving faith that was more democratic than
other religions, and debunked Orientalist claims about a static
Islam and a dynamic West. It would appear that these Jews were
anti-Orientalists long before Edward Said.
These contrarian positions had a variety
of motives behind them. Even as the Jews began to enter the European
mainstream, starting in the nineteenth century, they were still
outsiders, having only recently emerged from the confinement
of ghettos, and it would be scarcely surprising if they were
seeking to maintain their distinctiveness by emphasizing and
identifying with the achievements of another Semitic people,
the Arabs. In celebrating Arab civilization, these Jewish scholars
were perhaps sending a non-too-subtle message to the Europeans
that their civilization was not unique, that Arab achievements
often excelled theirs, and that Europeans were building upon
Islamic achievements in science and philosophy. In addition,
Jewish scholars' discussions of religious and racial tolerance
in Islamic societies, toward Jews in particular, may have offered
hope that such tolerance was attainable in Europe too. The discussions
may also have been an invitation to Europeans to incorporate
religious and racial tolerance in their standards of civilization.
Yet the vigor of this early anti-Orientalism
of Jewish scholars would not last; it would not survive the logic
of the Zionist movement as it sought to create a Jewish state
in Palestine. Such a state could only emerge as a child of Western
imperialist powers, and it could only come into existence by
displacing the greater part of the Palestinian population, by
incorporating them into an apartheid state, or through some combination
of the two. In addition, once created, Israel could only survive
as a military, expansionist, and hegemonic state, constantly
at war with its neighbors. In other words, as the Zionist project
gathered momentum it was inevitable that the European Jews' attraction
for Islam was not going to endure. In fact, it would be replaced
by a bitter contest, one in which the Jews, as junior partners
of the imperialist powers, would seek to deepen the Orientalist
project in the service of Western power. Bernard Lewis played
a leading part in this Jewish reorientation. In the words of
Martin Kramer, Bernard Lewis "came to personify the post-war
shift from a sympathetic to a critical posture."
Ironically, this shift occurred when
many Orientalists had begun to shed their Christian prejudice
against Islam, even making amends for the excesses of their forebears.
Another factor aiding this shift toward a less polemical Orientalism
was the entry of a growing number of Arabs, both Muslim and Christian,
into the field of Middle Eastern studies. The most visible upshot
of these divergent trends was a polarization of the field of
Middle Eastern studies into two opposing camps. One camp, consisting
mostly of Christians and Muslims, has sought to bring greater
objectivity to their study of Islam and Islamic societies. They
make an effort to locate Islamic societies in their historical
context, arguing that Islamic responses to Western challenges
have been diverse and evolving over time, and they do not derive
from an innate hostility to the West or some unchanging Islamic
mindset. The second camp, now led mostly by Jews, has reverted
to Orientalism's original mission of subordinating knowledge
to Western power, now filtered through the prism of Zionist interests.
This Zionist Orientalism has assiduously sought to paint Islam
and Islamic societies as innately hostile to the West, modernism,
democracy, tolerance, scientific advance, and women's rights.
This Zionist camp has been led for more
than fifty years by Bernard Lewis, who has enjoyed an intimate
relationship with power that would be the envy of the most distinguished
Orientalists of an earlier generation. He has been strongly supported
by a contingent of able lieutenants, whose ranks have included
the likes of Elie Kedourie, David Pryce-Jones, Raphael Patai,
Daniel Pipes, and Martin Kramer. There are many foot soldiers,
too, who have provided distinguished service to this new Orientalism.
And no compendium of these foot soldiers would be complete without
the names of Thomas Friedman, Martin Peretz, Norman Podhoretz,
Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, and Judith Miller.
In my mind's eye, I try to visualize
an encounter between this distinguished crowd and some of their
eminent predecessors, like Hienrich Heine, Abraham Geiger, Gustav
Weil, Franz Rosenthal, and the great Ignaz Goldziher. What would
these pro-Islamic Jews have to say to their descendants, whose
scholarship demeans and denigrates the societies they study?
Would Geiger and Goldziher embrace Lewis and Kedourie, or would
they be repelled by the latter's new brand of Zionist Orientalism?
M. Shahid Alam
is Professor of Economics at Northeastern University. A more
complete version of this essay, with footnotes and references,
has appeared in Studies in Contemporary Islam 4 (2002),
1:51-78. He may be reached at m.alam@neu.edu.
Visit his webpage at http://msalam.net.
© M. Shahid Alam
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|