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CounterPunch
September
14 / 15, 2002
The
Warped World of Bernard Lewis
They Can't Tell Time
and They Don't Like Music
by Anis Shivani
Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.
By Bernard Lewis.
Oxford University Press. 180 pages. $23.
Bernard Lewis, leading Orientalist and Professor
Emeritus at Princeton, has been in great demand by the American
media for his expert opinion since 9/11. Lewis was the one who
originally coined the odious term, "clash of civilizations,"
in his supercilious Atlantic Monthly article of September 1990,
"The Roots of Muslim Rage." This article appeared after
the fall of the Berlin Wall and preparatory to identifying the
new enemy. In that article, Lewis rejects all the obvious explanations--failures
of American policy, for instance--and looks for "something
deeper" that "makes every problem insoluble,"
without identifying what that something deeper could be. He dismisses
imperialism as an explanation for "rage" and "humiliation,"
suggesting that anti-imperialism has a religious connotation.
He asserts that Muslims hate the United States, despite the United
States never having "ruled any Muslim population,"
ignoring the tentacles of the vast unseen empire. He remarks
how various strategies of adapting Western ideas and influences
have all failed--without offering any explanation why, or even
pausing to reflect on it--and then moves on, without a logical
transition, to how this has now become a mode of "hostility
and rejection."
In a sense, the present book is a false
advertisement for filling this unspoken gap, but it builds on
nothing but generalities such as the uniquely explosive nature
of Muslim rage. To Charlie Rose, Lewis recently said that asking
Arafat to give up terrorism is like asking Tiger Woods to give
up golf, that Bush was right to paint Iran and Iraq as part of
the axis of evil, and that Saddam Hussein will use weapons of
mass destruction if he gets them. To NPR's Robert Siegel, Lewis
made the claim that Muslims are finding it difficult to engage
in the question of what went wrong and why because of lack of
free discussion (we should relieve them of that responsibility).
RAND analyst Laurent Murawiec recommended on July 10 to the Defense
Policy Board that we should take over Saudi Arabian oil fields
and assets, because their oil wealth funds extremism around the
world--essentially, because we don't agree with their worldview.
To Brian Lamb, Lewis rehearsed a mostly similar argument: "get
tough" with them. The academic veneer comes off sometimes.
In books like The Arabs in History (1950),
The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), Semites and Anti-Semites
(1986), The Jews of Islam (1984), and Islam and the West (1993)
Lewis has catalogued what he sees as the incurable pathologies
of the Islamic world in its suspended state of humiliation. In
his new book, Lewis opens his account of "what went wrong"
with the beginning of Ottoman military setbacks in the sixteenth
and later centuries. Lewis's interpretation of Islam is heavily
Ottomancentric, hardly dealing with the substance of South Asian,
Southeast Asian, Central Asian, Persian or North African civilization,
and yet he extrapolates to the whole world of Islam through all
of time. Muslim intellect dictated narrow imitations in military
and other practical Western innovations, without understanding
the cultural substance behind these advances.
After the Ottoman defeat at the second
siege of Vienna, and the subsequent signing of the Treaty of
Carlowitz, the Ottomans learned only that they had to acquire
Western weaponry, and "resort to that strange art we call
diplomacy, by which they tried, through political means, to modify,
or even to reduce the results of the military outcome."
Being stronger than European military powers for some considerable
time, of course the Ottomans had little need to resort to diplomatic
maneuvers. But Lewis's approach is to take some Muslim attitude
that was a product of their economic, military, and political
supremacy, and generalize that there is some deficiency of mind
that would not allow them to want to learn. It took a good couple
of centuries for Muslims to understand how far behind the West
they had fallen; the thread running through the book is that
Muslims picked up their lessons from Western modernity too little
and too late. In Lewis's account, after the Reformation and Renaissance
all the lending has to be in one direction only, from West to
East. Muslims extracted only the superficial, it never penetrated
deep within their psyche, and besides, it didn't fit in with
their culture. The implication is that this process of borrowing
is futile in the end. They'll never quite get it.
Lewis's view is that for centuries Muslims
have felt humiliated, and at the same time not known what to
do about it. Therefore, when they ask the question, What went
wrong?, they often really mean, Who do we blame? It has ever
been so and ever will be so. The Ottomans may have asked "What
did we do wrong?" and thus given the impression of introspection,
but really their mind was not capable of grasping the extent
of change (Westernization) that needed to be undergone. So the
answer often boiled down to a return to pure Islam. That is what
afflicted the Middle East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and that is what afflicts it now. The Muslim mind is unchanging
in its reaction to the West.
For Lewis, Muslims have always suffered
from a fatal lack of curiosity about the West. Yes, they traveled
to Western lands, but when they did so they had a condescending
attitude toward the infidels. In contrast, visitors from the
West have a long tradition of engaging in fruitful comparison
of cultures:
Western captives in the East who escaped
or were ransomed and returned home produced a considerable literature
telling of their adventures, of the lands they had seen and the
people they had met in the mysterious Orient. Middle Eastern
captives in the West who found their way home for the most part
remained silent, nor was there any great interest in the few
accounts that survived. The Occident remained even more mysterious
than the Orient, and it aroused no equivalent curiosity. The
different mutual perceptions were vividly expressed in their
attitudes to each other's languages. The study of Eastern languages
was intensively pursued in the European universities and elsewhere
by scholars who came to be known as Orientalists, on the analogy
of Hellenists and Latinists. Until a comparatively recent date,
there were no Occidentalists in the Orient.
That is the crux of the matter. Muslims
were unwilling to learn European languages, and by extension,
European literature and arts. This makes them incapable of realizing
freedom and democracy even when they embark on political reform,
introducing parliaments and elections and such, and incapable
of achieving gender equality, despite legal reforms aimed to
do that. Here is the great flaw in Muslim civilization since
the rise of the West: they have not produced great Occidentalist
scholars. This is no minor point. It seeps into all of Lewis's
analysis.
For every one of the inadequacies of
learning that Lewis points out, he notes that in the eighteenth
or nineteenth or twentieth centuries the pace picked up quite
a bit; in many instances he implies that the process of adaptation
went as far and as fast as it could have gone. And yet this was
never enough, for reasons that Lewis doesn't care to explain.
His constant refrain is: They weren't in the game at the time
the West was undertaking some new innovation: time clocks or
polyphonous music or whatever; they came to it late, not knowing
the full importance of the innovation; eventually, they recognized
how important it was, and engaged in a mad-cap effort to make
themselves change; but this never worked in the end, because
. . .Well, we never get the "because." The "because"
would have to deal with the whole realm of actual Western and
Islamic political, cultural, and economic interaction during
the last four centuries, and actual Islamic attempts at modernization,
industrialization, and liberalism--such messy business as colonialism
and neocolonialism. This is outside Lewis's frame of analysis.
He would rather rely on obscure Ottoman texts with which he is
exclusively comfortable.
We learn that in the beginning the Ottomans
(Muslims) may not have been so interested in sending envoys to
Europe. But "in the eighteenth century the situation changed
dramatically. Great numbers of such special envoys were now sent,
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."
Lewis acknowledges that by the late eighteenth century, the Ottoman
state was vigorously pursuing the importation of Western experts
in the new practical sciences, instead of relying on earlier
"adventurers," but we do not learn why this was not
enough. Lewis opens the book with a panoramic, exciting look
at Ottoman military dominance, to get our pulse going: What an
exalted empire it used to be, and how deep the fall is compared
to the ascendancy! Soon we're stranded in the shoals of not knowing
what brought it about and how to fix it; the book is an extended
meditation on how when something goes wrong not all the experts
can put it together. Again and again the Muslims suffer defeat,
and this permanently scars them, leaves traces of humiliation
that make the whole process of adaptation in later centuries
nearly impossible:
The impotence of the Islamic world confronted
with Europe was brought home in dramatic form in 1798, when a
French expeditionary force commanded by a young general called
Napoleon Bonaparte invaded, occupied, and governed Egypt. The
lesson was harsh and clear--even a small European force could
invade one of the heartlands of the Islamic empire and do so
with impunity.
Can any civilization recover from such
trauma? What can be the cure for such impotence?
For Lewis, Muslims have focused on acquiring
the superficial trappings of "wealth and power." This
is explained by a persistent streak of incuriosity about the
Westerner: "Muslims in general had little desire or incentive
to venture into Christian Europe, and indeed the doctors of the
Holy Law for the most part prohibited such journeys, except for
a specific and limited purpose." When the Ottomans did "adopt
the European practice of continuous diplomacy through resident
missions" they had a hard time doing so, because unlike
their European counterparts residing in Eastern lands they did
not have a tradition of language scholarship. We already know
Lewis's next move. He'll admit that Muslims did in fact make
serious changes in this practice. So we learn that the Turks
"made a determined effort to learn new languages and master
new crafts" and did so "with astonishing speed and
success," and later threw themselves whole-heartedly into
"sending students to study in Western countries."
Not that this new openness did any good.
Muslims don't have a word for freedom in their language (we're
told in the familiar disparagement of Orientals), since their
brains must be hard-wired to think in terms of liberty and justice
as the converse of tyranny, not freedom. Despite superficial
adaptations--constitutional government, nationalism, secularism,
socialism--nothing really disrupts the continuity of the unsolvable
questions. Lewis tells us that "words meaning 'free' and
'freedom,' in a political sense, occur occasionally in eighteenth-century
Middle-Eastern writings, always in a European context."
At first Muslims were "cautious and conservative" in
extracting European ideas of freedom for their own condition,
but--we're familiar by now with Lewis's backtracking--soon young
Muslims were attracted to "more radical interpretations
of freedom." The Young Turks were remarkable even for the
usage of "young," a most European trait.
The Ottomans form constitutional government
in the late eighteenth century, but the experiment fails. The
Egyptians form constitutional government in the same period with
the same results, followed by Persia and Turkey in the early
twentieth century, but Lewis never tell us why. Simply, "Both
[Persian and Turkish constitutional revolutions] began with hope
and enthusiasm. Both ended, after brief intervals, in even more
despotic regimes, ruling even more impoverished and enfeebled
countries." Meanwhile, the European imperial project was
doomed from the start because in order to maintain their empire
they had to train the new subjects in their languages--English,
French, and Dutch--which meant that new and dangerous ideas about
freedom and representation would infect the subject peoples as
well. Subsequently, the independence movements were led by Westernized
intellectuals, although by now the hopes associated with independence
have vanished.
So here are some additional confusions:
Muslims did enthusiastically, after early reluctance, learn European
languages, which led to decolonization, but ultimately the learning
of languages, and along with them Western ideas of freedom, did
no good, leading to new forms of tyranny. Why? Lewis has nothing
to say about that. About socialism, Lewis says, "various
types of socialisms, sometimes called Arab socialism, sometimes
called scientific socialism, were adopted. They ended in disastrous
failure, in ruination maintained by tyranny." Lewis does
offer a sort of explanation: "The difference between Middle
Eastern and Western economic approaches can be seen even in their
distinctive forms of corruption, from 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." Tell that to the Ken Lays and
Bernie Ebbers of America, who influence (buy? seize?) the political
process to make money. What this Orientalist reduction does is
avoid responsibility for rational analysis of what went wrong.
We're moving closer and closer to mysticism, essentialist racial
difference, phenomena irreducible to social facts. Lewis is not
one to give up after having come so far along this trail, however.
"The mystery of Western success was still not solved"--one
wonders, for Lewis himself, or for the Muslims he is supposedly
writing about? "Could there be something more than modernizing
the armed forces, the state that commanded them, and the economy
that fed, supplied, and equipped them? In a word, something more
than modernity?" Ah, what could that something other be?
Since there is something more fundamental
than military, economic, and political power, it's best for Muslims
not to focus on the visible aspects of power. Lewis extracts
from reports of Ottoman visitors to Europe, in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, to focus on three civilizational differences:
"women, science, and music." Lewis relates the astonishment
of Ottoman travelers (weren't we told that Muslims don't like
to travel and aren't curious?) Evliya Celebi and Valid Efendi
at the courtesies granted women in Europe. Since the Muslim world
has been in permanent suspension once the West's better mores
superseded it, "the outcome of that struggle [over women's
rights] is still far from clear." Lewis says that for fundamentalists
like Khomeini women's emancipation is "a deadly blow to
the very heart of Islamic society," but that "the battle
continues." They'll go on figuring out for ever what should
be obvious. Immediately though, he starts talking about Namik
Kemal, Qasim Amin, Kemal Ataturk and other reformers who made
women's emancipation a central project. Lewis offers no analysis
of the nature of reforms that have actually occurred in the last
century and a half, where they fell short and why. But he does
accord a great deal of influence to the adoption of Western dress
among Muslim men, particularly the Turkish military, as an outward
acknowledgment of--we're not quite told what--Western superiority?
Lewis grants that the status of slaves,
women, and unbelievers was better in the Muslim world than in
medieval Europe, all three categories of people having certain
legal rights which Europe didn't grant until much later. As early
as the first half of the eighteenth century, legal reforms were
enacted by the Ottomans to remove the remaining differences among
different religions, by abolishing the jizya (poll-tax) and the
ban on non-Muslims bearing arms. We learn of some resistance
by the ulema to these radical reforms, but the fact that the
Ottoman rulers felt confident enough to embark on a program of
radical egalitarianism indicates that the ulema were marginalized.
Indeed, Lewis quotes a contemporary American observer noting
with astonishment the strong role of women in the constitutional
revolution of 1906-1911 in Iran, and the lack of resistance by
the ulema. Then what went wrong after that? Noting that there
is no equivalent to Christian priesthood in Islam, Lewis fails
to develop the reasons why secularism and civil society have
not made deeper inroads in Islamic society. Lewis probably fails
to do this because as an Orientalist his eyes are firmly set
on the past, not on the present or future.
As for science, Lewis quotes Ottoman
officials of the early eighteenth century approving the widespread
literacy and practical application of science in Europe, and
notes the influence of materialism and positivism on Turkish
thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century. But there
is no analysis of the failure. He simply says, "And yet,
despite all these efforts, and despite the foundation of schools
and faculties of sciences in almost all the new universities,
the incorporation of modern science--or should one say Western
science?--was lamentably slow." No word why. Lewis must
maintain the veneer of compassionate, genteel Westerner dispassionately
observing a society held back, permanently paralyzed; and so
he must acknowledge past greatness (he places the glories all
in the past, making nostalgia a form of patronization): Muslims
were great at preserving and transmitting ancient science, and
they even developed experimental science. "And then, approximately
from the end of the Middle Ages, there was a dramatic change."
In the Muslim world, "independent inquiry" came to
an end, while it took off in Western Europe.
By now Lewis is scraping the bottom of
the barrel for explanations, having rejected investigating any
of the obvious ones. In Kipling's Kim, the narrator observes,
"All hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals."
And this is what Lewis's final analysis boils down to. Muslims
have never had an accurate measurement of time and space. Of
course, here too Lewis will first indict universally, then acknowledge
serious and systematic efforts to achieve precision in time and
space measurement, but conclude that it doesn't matter anyway.
He quotes the "English Arabist Edward William Lane"
remarking about his travels in Egypt between 1833 and 1835 that
"of the measures and weights used in Egypt . . .[he was]
not able to give an exact account." Then the retraction:
"[Medieval Muslims] added new knowledge achieved by their
own experiments and researches, notably in cartography, geography,
geometry, and astronomy. The last-named in particular involved
delicate and precise calculations of both time and space."
Why these high-level scientific investigations
failed to penetrate popular culture--if that is even the question
to ask--is not explained. So how about some folkloric evidence
from the lowest strata of contemporary Muslim society instead?
Lewis says that peasants today will tell you that the distance
between two villages is "one cigarette," meaning that
it will take as long as the time it takes to finish a cigarette.
Lewis implies that the use of clocks and watches is still a bit
of a curiosity in the Middle East, and people are barely getting
used to them. How does this square with his statement that "From
early times, Muslim scholars and scientists devoted considerable
efforts to determining and tabulating the correct times and direction
of prayer. At one level, this was done by simple observation;
at another by the devising of instruments and the preparation
of tables"; and also that "[b]y the sixteenth century,
European clocks and watches were widely used in the Middle East."
So which is it? Creators of observatories
were writing treatises on clocks, there were guilds of clockmakers
and watchmakers, and by the eighteenth century, clocks and watches
were commonly in private possession. The only flaw Lewis can
find is that there weren't public clocks, but even this was addressed
in the nineteenth century. Reading glasses and telescopes were
also quickly appreciated by Muslims. Lewis's Orientalist generalization
doesn't match with his own historical evidence. We're told that
"as well as time, Western influence also affected the measurement,
perception, and use of space." In a treatise devoted to
explaining "what went wrong" we've now devolved to
a bland statement of Western influence on Islamic adaptation,
Lewis now seems to abandon the idea that
there may be some fatal flaw of mentality disallowing Muslims
to accurately perceive time and space. So he goes on that "Western
perceptions -and measurement--of time and space also had an impact
on art and music." Western influence is clear in art and
architecture. The one irreducible thing the Muslims can't seem
to get, however, is "polyphony, by harmony or counterpoint,"
which is the essence of team sports, parliamentary politics,
and distinctive literary forms like the novel and theater: "all
these involve some degree of harmonization." It turns out
that the real absence is "polyphony, in whatever form, [which]
requires exact synchronization." Although the Islamic texts
seem to be obsessed by the passage of time, it is a different
sort of conception--it is really the "duration of time"
that preoccupies Muslims. Philosophical discussions "on
the nature of time . . .are of little relevance at the present
day." The "clock and the timetable, the calendar and
the program" are of the very essence of modernity. Lewis
says that by now these have been thoroughly integrated in the
Middle East, but still there is some doubt about the "making
and keeping of appointments." So finally we have the explanation
for the ills of the Muslim world: They can't show up on time!
Do we now see why the Muslim world is in such trouble? It's because
they believe:
Why hurry? Why do injury to the sweetness
of living? Here, everybody is late. The only thing is to join
them. He who arrives at the appointed hour risks wasting his
time, and that, after all, is not funny. Therefore, not too much
precision. Strict exactitude has minor advantages, but is very
inconvenient. It lacks suppleness, it lacks fantasy, it lacks
cheerfulness, even dignity.
Lewis is not done yet. Muslims never
bothered to translate ancient literature, only works of science,
history, and philosophy. "Medieval Islam was an intensely
historical-minded society, and produced a vast, rich, and varied
historical literature." The problem is that they weren't
as interested in Western history as Lewis would like them to
have been. He did say that theater requires polyphony, strict
harmonization--we thought the Muslims didn't have that--yet he
goes on to describe widespread commitment to theater. The same
for printing--Muslims quickly adopted this innovation. Muslims
translated books like Robinson Crusoe, but this one can be explained
away by its similarity to a previous Arabic model. "Sport
was not unknown of course," but perhaps due to lack of the
polyphonous instinct, team sports were rare:
It was the English who invented football
and its analogue--parliamentary politics. There are remarkable
resemblances between the two and both obviously come from the
same national genius. The adoption of competitive team games
has so far been more successful in the Middle East than the adoption
of parliamentary government.
Lewis says that "dining--as distinct
from merely eating--is another Western 'cultural' influence."
For anyone who knows anything about Islamic culture, this is
a laughable assertion. The only reason to say this seems to be
to imply that Muslims are barbaric to the extent that they only
know how to eat and not dine. Western verbal culture has been
thoroughly assimilated by now, although Lewis wonders how that
could have been since it is the hardest thing to assimilate.
The alleged rejection of Western music--it "falls on deaf
ears" in the Middle East--perhaps exercises Lewis more than
any single aberration. But this is a demonstrably false proposition.
They do care about "pop music and rock music" but "it
is too early to say what this may portend." Perhaps after
recolonization of the Middle Eastern oil fields there may be
time enough to know what this portends. In short, they can try
to copy the forms, but they can never get the content as we who
relish football and parliamentary politics as if they were natural
to us can. It is an inherent sickness, whatever it is.
So let's drop this pretense of investigating
the causes of civilizational decline altogether, and focus on
how upset and enraged and emotionally unbalanced they feel because
the West has invaded "the Muslim in every aspect of his
public and--more painfully--even his private life." All
this would be funny, if it weren't so dangerous. Muslims are
in a state of infantile humiliation: "The twentieth century,
particularly the second half, brought [brought how? through divine
agency? through Western imperialism?] further humiliations--the
awareness that they were no longer even the first among the followers,
but were falling ever further back in the lengthening line of
eager and more successful Westernizers, notably in East Asia."
Quite aside from the fact that part of the consciousness of the
East Asian project has been to modernize but not Westernize to
the extent possible, Lewis wants to insinuate how Muslims are
no longer in any frame of mind solid enough to investigate the
true causes of their decline. Their humiliation leads to rage.
Rage leads to such abominations as terrorism. And that requires
the West to overtly step in again, recolonize--Lewis indeed ends
on this precise note.
This is the template according to which
Americans are being prepared for a final onslaught against those
foolish enough to think that there could be an alternative to
the American model. All previous Muslim attempts to modernize
have only increased the power of the state to tyrannize; the
conclusion is that we should take away their power and leave
them pauperized.
Anis Shivani studied economics at Harvard, and is the
author of two novels, The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist.
He welcomes comments at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
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September
12, 2002
Paul de Rooij
A Glossary
of Occupation
James C.
Faris
Riefenstahl
at 100:
The Fascist Aesthetic
Gary Leupp
Presidential
Honesty on Iraq
Tarif Abboushi
A Conversation
with My Arab-American Self
Ron Jacobs
Shelter
from the Storm
Rick Giombetti
Paxil
and Addiction
Krystal Kyer
From NAFTA
to CAFTA
Another Rotten Trade Deal
John Jonik
Overcome
in Philly
September
11, 2002
Anis Shivani
How to
Survive in Ashcroft's America
Pierre Tristam
Abusing
the Sorrows of 9/11
David Krieger
Resisting
Bush's
"Relentless War"
Jerre Skog
9/11 One
Year Later:
Remember the Others, Too
Dave Marsh
Illegal
Music?
A Sampler's Delight
Norm Dixon
How the
Warmongers Have Exploited 9/11
September
7 / 8, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim
and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
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Threat"
Gary Leupp
Who's Afraid
of Iraq?
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