The New York Times Bernard Lewis Asks 'What Went Wrong?' Between Islam and the West
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"On the whole, the varied societies of our planet are marching, however briskly or reluctantly, in lock step with an America of laissez-faire economics, cultural pluralism and political democracy. This was and is a heady stew, and one that took Western Europe and North America four or five generations to absorb. To expect Argentina or Indonesia or China or Ukraine to swallow such changes in a far shorter time is probably asking too much. No wonder we hear the creakings and crashings of the structures of the post-1945 world order all around us.

But in the Middle East the difficulties present not just another case of traditional societies having to come to terms with the forces of modernization. The unvarnished truth is that the tensions there are of a different order of magnitude."

redux [01.03.01]
NPR: All Things Considered What Went Wrong?

"In the summer of 1683, the Ottoman Turks laid siege to Vienna, Austria, but were repelled and later defeated by an alliance of Christian European states. Historian Bernard Lewis calls that defeat a turning point for Islam -- and the beginning of centuries of culture clashes between Europe and the Middle East.

Lewis, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, explores the decline of Islamic culture in a new book, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response . The central premise of the book is likely to stir fierce debate, because it describes an Islamic world trying to catch up with the Western world for 400 years."

redux [10.31.01]
Lingua Franca Why the West?

"The issue that has occupied macrohistorians over the past generation can be stated quite succinctly: Why Europe? Why did a relatively small and backward periphery on the western fringes of the Eurasian continent burst onto the world scene in the sixteenth century and by the nineteenth century become a dominant force in almost all corners of the earth? Until recently, two responses have dominated. The first is that something unique in the European past lay behind its eventual economic development and power. This something unique is often seen as a universal good - such as reason, freedom, or individualism - that first developed in Europe but ultimately relates, or should relate, to all human beings."

"The second response is that there was nothing particularly special about Europe until at least 1500, and probably not until 1800. In this view, Europe's rise to dominance was due not to any exceptional qualities but to its ability to seize vast amounts of gold and silver in the New World and create other forms of wealth through colonial trade."

redux [10.05.01]
The American Prospect Terror and Liberalism

"The pattern of war in the twentieth century, the pattern that long ago became old and familiar, was established in the aftermath of World War I. For a hundred years before that war, the Western countries had indulged in a comforting sentiment of historical optimism, serene in the conviction that rationality and order were steadily progressing and would go on doing so into the future, and modernity was going to be good. Even the crimes and massacres committed by the Western imperialists in distant places could be pictured as part of the greater landscape of worldwide progress, or at any rate could be kept out of sight. But World War I was an outbreak of something other than rationality and order, and the outbreak took place in the heart of civilized Europe. That was a shock. And a series of extremely powerful movements rapidly arose, each of which rested on the idea that the premises of liberal rationalism and modernity had turned out to be a lie and that modernity in its conventional Western version was a horror."

The Nation Against Rationalization

"Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon."

The New York Review of Books Notes on Prejudice

"Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be & do - & that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: & need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree."

"The only cure is understanding how other societies - in space or time - live: and that it is possible to lead lives different from one's own, & yet to be fully human, worthy of love, respect or at least curiosity. Jesus, Socrates, John Hus of Bohemia, the great chemist Lavoisier, socialists and liberals (as well as conservatives) in Russia, Jews in Germany, all perished at the hands of "infallible" ideologues: intuitive certainty is no substitute for carefully tested empirical knowledge based on observation and experiment and free discussion between men: the first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas & free minds."