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What Went Wrong: Western
Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard
Lewis
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- Hardcover: 192 pages ;
Dimensions (in inches): 0.84 x 8.57 x 5.79
- Publisher: Oxford University
Press; (December 2001)
- ISBN: 0195144201
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Book
Description
For many centuries, the world of Islam was
in the forefront of human achievement--the foremost military
and economic power in the world, the leader in the arts and
sciences of civilization.
Christian
Europe, a remote land beyond its northwestern frontier, was
seen as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which
there was nothing to learn or to fear.
And then
everything changed, as the previously despised West won
victory after victory, first in the battlefield and the
marketplace, then in almost every aspect of public and even
private life.
In this
intriguing volume, Bernard Lewis examines the anguished
reaction of the Islamic world as it tried to understand why
things had changed--how they had been overtaken, overshadowed,
and to an increasing extent dominated by the West.
Lewis
provides a fascinating portrait of a culture in turmoil. He
shows how the Middle East turned its attention to
understanding European weaponry and military tactics, commerce
and industry, government and diplomacy, education and
culture.
Lewis
highlights the striking differences between the Western and
Middle Eastern cultures from the 18th to the 20th centuries
through thought-provoking comparisons of such things as
Christianity and Islam, music and the arts, the position of
women, secularism and the civil society, the clock and the
calendar.
Hailed in
The New York Times Book Review as ""the doyen of
Middle Eastern studies,"" Bernard Lewis is one of
the West's foremost authorities on Islamic history and
culture. In this striking volume, he offers an incisive look
at the historical relationship between the Middle East and
Europe.
From the Back
Cover
"Only a scholar of Bernard Lewis's
quality could produce the sweep and depth of this fascinating
analysis. He gives meaning to history, and illumination and
challenge to the question he poses. He brings a clear and lively
style to this beautifully written book."--George P. Shultz
"A compelling book. One of our most distinguished
historians throws a flood-light on that cruel divide between the
West and the societies of Islam. Learned and urgent at the same
time."--Fouad Ajami, The Johns Hopkins University
"Muslim loss of civilizational leadership and retreat
from modernity is at the center of global history over the last
five hundred years and remains at this very time a major factor
in international conflicts and diplomatic quarrels. What went
wrong? Indeed.
Muslims often have the feeling that history has somehow
betrayed them, and on no comparable issue is the historian's
potential contribution more important--the more so because the
subject is plagued by ideological commitments, partisan blather,
and the constraints of political correctness.
People have shunned the topic for all the wrong reasons.
All the more reason to be grateful for Bernard Lewis's
interventions. No one knows better the languages and motivations
of the players, and no one is more reliable in the objectivity
of his judgments."--David Landes, Harvard University
Newsweek
"Arguably the West's most
distinguished scholar on the Middle East."
The New
York Times Book Review, January 27, 2002
"Lewis has done us all--Muslim and
non-Muslim alike--a remarkable service"
Business
Week, January 28, 2002
"A timely and provocative
contribution to the current raging debate about the tensions
between the West and the Islamic world."
The
Baltimore Sun, January 13, 2002
"An excitingly knowledgeable antidote
to today's natural sense of befuddlement."
Wall Street
Journal, January 11, 2002
"Replete with the exceptional
historical insight that one has come to expect from the
world's foremost Islamic scholar."
Bernard
Lewis is the West's greatest historian and interpreter of the
Near East. Books such as The
Middle East and The Arabs in History are required
reading for anybody who hopes to understand the region and its
people.
Now Lewis
offers What Went Wrong?, a concise and timely survey of
how Islamic civilization fell from worldwide leadership in
almost every frontier of human knowledge five or six centuries
ago to a "poor, weak, and ignorant" backwater that
is today dominated by "shabby tyrannies ... modern only
in their apparatus of repression and terror."
He offers no
easy answers, but does provide an engaging chronicle of the
Arab encounter with Europe in all its military, economic, and
cultural dimensions. The most dramatic reversal, he says, may
have occurred in the sciences: "Those who had been
disciples now became teachers; those who had been masters
became pupils, often reluctant and resentful
pupils."
Today's Arab
governments have blamed their plight on any number of external
culprits, from Western imperialism to the Jews.
Lewis believes
they must instead commit to putting their own houses in order:
"If the peoples of Middle East continue on their present
path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole
region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of
hate and spite, rage and self-pity, [and] poverty and
oppression."
Anybody who
wants to understand the historical backdrop to September 11
would do well to look for it on these pages. --John Miller
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