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November 29, 2004
A commentary on Lewis: Washington Monthly art
After some delay, some comments on this article. Let me note that this (despite the delay) is an off-the -cuff commentary. I have not bothered to research, etc. You may take this as my gut reaction based on relatively extensive but incomplete reading of Lewis. In particular I have not bothered with Lewis' newspaper comments etc. My overall sense is that this falls into the category of the (fallacious) search for the "true" fathers (and mothers) of the benighted misunderstanding of the region and Iraq that led to the failure that is Iraq. While Lewis may bear some part in this,
Bernard Lewis Revisited
What if Islam isn't an obstacle to democracy in the Middle East but the secret to achieving it?
By Michael Hirsh
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.hirsh.html
Let me preface my commentary by saying that it strikes me that the author is placing a bit much on Lewis' shoulders, even allowing for Lewis writing (I have not read them) silly articles for WSJ etc. I also note that I have read Lewis' academic and popular writings extensively, and as long time readers know, I rather like Lewis' historical works, as far as they go - although I always like to note that Lewis is the type of historian who is very much bound by a high culture 'formalism' by which I mean he takes the formal, normative versions of Islam (to take an example), and tends to ignore the less legalistic things that are harder to find in texts and high culture commentary; I think he under estimates popular Sufism for example. However, as I have noted in the past, even before reading this article which rather dovetailed with my own conclusions based on simply his works, Lewis does not understand the modern Arab world. He is a mediavalist by training, nature and knowledge, and both by learning and I think by nature, he simply does not grasp the colonial and post colonial world. I've observed this before, and find it interesting to see my observation seconded by others, who I was unaware had reached the same conclusions. I feel all warm and fuzzy.
This, by the way, is not a condemnation nor even a particularly biting criticism. I would very much expect that if in some alternate universe of say an Asia that played Europe's role in modern times, that if we had the case of some mythical Asian specialist focused on Medieval Europe speaking to why a (bizarro alternate universe) backwards (relatively) Europe was so, that this mythical specialist would make the same kinds of analytical errors. Seeing Islam or Asia or whatever through the lens of an epoch long gone, and not having training, engagement nor it would seem particularly deep understanding of modern events is bound to skew one's analysis.
Thus, before jumping into my annotations and commentary on this article, let me reiterate my opinion that Lewis, even his modern focused works, is a good scholar, and good observer and well worth reading. I also warn that his commentary on the region in its modern form is seriously skewed by his lack of understanding of the colonial and post colonial periods, but nevertheless contains valuable insights if one keeps in mind the issue of him seeing things through a medieval lens. I also note that I would never say the same about a Daniel Pipes, who I consider a loathsome if polite bigot and political opportunist trying in a shabby and farcical manner to recreate the life of his father the anti Communist.
Now, as to the article:
America's misreading of the Arab world—and our current misadventure in Iraq—may have really begun in 1950. That was the year a young University of London historian named Bernard Lewis visited Turkey for the first time. Lewis, who is today an imposing, white-haired sage known as the “doyen of Middle Eastern studies” in America (as a New York Times reviewer once called him), was then on a sabbatical. Granted access to the Imperial Ottoman archives—the first Westerner allowed in—Lewis recalled that he felt “rather like a child turned loose in a toy shop, or like an intruder in Ali Baba's cave.” But what Lewis saw happening outside his study window was just as exciting, he later wrote. There in Istanbul, in the heart of what once was a Muslim empire, a Western-style democracy was being born.
Well, first, I am not sure I would go to New York Times reporters for characterizations of academics. He's certainly a leading historian; one would wish that one not confuse the work of historians with current commentators, but let's leave that aside (as well as the somewhat dodgey characterization of Lewis as the first Westerner allowed in the archives, I may be wrong but I seriously doubt this is true).
The hero of this grand transformation was Kemal Ataturk. A generation before Lewis's visit to Turkey, Ataturk (the last name, which he adopted, means “father of all Turks”), had seized control of the dying Ottoman Sultanate. Intent on single-handedly shoving his country into the modern West—“For the people, despite the people,” he memorably declared—Ataturk imposed a puritanical secularism that abolished the caliphate, shuttered religious schools, and banned fezes, veils, and other icons of Islamic culture, even purging Turkish of its Arabic vocabulary. His People's Party had ruled autocratically since 1923. But in May 1950, after the passage of a new electoral law, it resoundingly lost the national elections to the nascent Democrat Party. The constitutional handover was an event “without precedent in the history of the country and the region,” as Lewis wrote in The Emergence of Modern Turkey, published in 1961, a year after the Turkish army first seized power. And it was Kemal Ataturk, Lewis noted at another point, who had “taken the first decisive steps in the acceptance of Western civilization.”
Father of the Turks, not all Turks, but leaving that aside, as well as the issue of Arabic vacab (Turkish retains quite a lot, although less than before), I note one thing:
The guys who do stuff like you are always quite seductive (and I am a Kemal Attaturk fan), but that does not mean they're the right model. Above all in the current historical circumstances. The Attaturk model worked more or less for Turkey at the time. But that time has passed, the dynamics are different, the history of failed secularism (even if it failed for reasons seperate from secularism per se) in the Arab world has at least partially posioned that well. Ignoring this reality and approaching the Middle East with the utterly backwards and wrongheaded idea that secularization is "new" to the region is simply going to lead to the kinds of clumsy failures and idiocies that we have seen in Iraq (and I hope you all recall the pious mouthings regarding the secularity of Iraqi society, and similar outdated blather. I also hope those who have read my commentary for a while recall my noting this was a badly outdated idea).
Or as I have quoted a business colleague before, "Don't be fooled just because he speaks good English."
Today, that epiphany—Lewis's Kemalist vision of a secularized, Westernized Arab democracy that casts off the medieval shackles of Islam and enters modernity at last—remains the core of George W. Bush's faltering vision in Iraq. As his other rationales for war fall away, Bush has only democratic transformation to point to as a casus belli in order to justify one of the costliest foreign adventures in American history. And even now Bush, having handed over faux sovereignty to the Iraqis and while beating a pell-mell retreat under fire, does not want to settle for some watered-down or Islamicized version of democracy. His administration's official goal is still dictated by the “Lewis Doctrine,” as The Wall Street Journal called it: a Westernized polity, reconstituted and imposed from above like Kemal's Turkey, that is to become a bulwark of security for America and a model for the region.
I find it moderately unfair to place this on Lewis' shoulders. He no doubt is a contibutor, but I hardly think the vision of an... Atturkization of the Arab world really derives from him. He may have helped legitimate it, although given what I know about Wolfowitz and his cohort (and recall, I do know some of them include Wolfie - although hardly well I add) I very much doubt this is key to their decision process.
Rather, it strikes me the vision derives naturally from navel gazing, a poor level of knowledge of the Islamic world even among the well-educated, a certain and natural presumption that being 'just like us' or better 'just like our self vision of what we are' is obviously the way another, weaker or defeated culture has to go for success.
Of course the concept of a Western polity with imposed democracy as a workable model quite simply ignores colonial and post-colonial history (and post Great War Turkish history); not perhaps surprising if one gets the sense that the people speaking to this kind of model know literally nothing about the secularizing and even top down attempts at democracy in much of the Arab world starting from the 1920s forward, and the failures of the same. A lot of commentators seem to think this is the first time this has been tried.... But then far too many commentators in the United States seem to think the entire region is best characterized by Saudi Arabia.
Iraq, of course, does not seem to be heading in that direction. Quite the contrary: Iraq is passing from a secular to an increasingly radicalized and Islamicized society, and should it actually turn into a functioning polity, it is one for the present defined more by bullets than by ballots. All of which raises some important questions. What if the mistakes made in Iraq were not merely tactical missteps but stem from a fundamental misreading of the Arab mindset? What if, in other words, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies got it all wrong?
Again, it strikes me the author is making Lewis carry too much water, and if Lewis, as is I think the case, fails to understand transformations in the Islamic world since 1800 and above all since 1900, that hardly means he gets it all wrong. I suppose he 'got it all wrong' in regards to Iraq, presuming he wrote as claimed, but it is an unfair statement in its sweeping nature.
Lewis's basic premise, put forward in a series of articles, talks, and bestselling books, is that the West—what used to be known as Christendom—is now in the last stages of a centuries-old struggle for dominance and prestige with Islamic civilization. (Lewis coined the term “clash of civilizations,” using it in a 1990 essay titled “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” and Samuel Huntington admits he picked it up from him.) Osama bin Laden, Lewis thought, must be viewed in this millennial construct as the last gasp of a losing cause, brazenly mocking the cowardice of the “Crusaders.” Bin Laden's view of America as a “paper tiger” reflects a lack of respect for American power throughout the Arab world. And if we Americans, who trace our civilizational lineage back to the Crusaders, flagged now, we would only invite future attacks. Bin Laden was, in this view, less an aberrant extremist than a mainstream expression of Muslim frustration, welling up from the anti-Western nature of Islam. “I have no doubt that September 11 was the opening salvo of the final battle,” Lewis told me in an interview last spring. Hence the only real answer to 9/11 was a decisive show of American strength in the Arab world; the only way forward, a Kemalist conquest of hearts and minds. And the most obvious place to seize the offensive and end the age-old struggle was in the heart of the Arab world, in Iraq.
Well, let me first confess I have never read his old essay, "The Roots of Muslim Rage", which puts me at a disadvantage.
Now, I grant in the context of the reporting above, very clearly Lewis' call regarding the structure of the al-Qaeda - West battle gets things wrong in a number of ways. Certainly the concept of "decisive show of strength" gets things very wrong - although it was parrotted around quite along among American conservative circles rather mindlessly.His buying into the concept of a Kemalist transformation of Iraq, presuming the interviewer understood him right simply reflects the degree to which, as I have observed in the past, that Lewis simply does not understand the modern Islamic world, seeing it through the eyes of the Classical one. The success of Kemalism was the success of native Turkish nationalism. No one who understands nationalism and the Arab region's history would think that an outside invader would pull off what an insider like Attaturk had a bloody hard time doing, and that in the context of an Islamic world where the shock of the colonial intrusion was leading many to turn to secularism - not an Arab or Islamic world that about a century later has already experienced a failure of secularism (for reasons I would suggest largely exogenous to secularism per se, but endogenous to the manner in which it was executed in the Arab world).
Now, the issue of lack of respect of American power is not entirely a false one, but it is one easy to exagerate. Certainly there has been the paper tiger argument, but in my experience this has, with the exception of among a few wild eyed radicals, a bravado argument, not one people actually believe. Rather, in my experience, the conspiratorial, "Americans and Israelis (as one) as all powerful" story has always been rather stronger. The ability of US forces to crush any given Arab army I doubt has ever been in doubt. The ability of the American forces to occupy an Arab country and defeat insugents - a la Somalia is another matter - but that is not an image problem that destroying Arab armies addresses, and in fact the analysis is correct - such engagements are losing engagements, in my opinion the Iraqi situation is almost certainly a case of a losing engagement.
This way of thinking had the remarkable virtue of appealing powerfully to both the hard-power enthusiasts in the administration, principally Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, who came into office thinking that the soft Clinton years had made America an easy target and who yearned to send a post-9/11 message of strength; and to neoconservatives from the first Bush administration such as Paul Wolfowitz, who were looking for excuses to complete their unfinished business with Saddam from 1991 and saw 9/11 as the ultimate refutation of the “realist” response to the first Gulf War. Leaving Saddam in power in '91, betraying the Shiites, and handing Kuwait back to its corrupt rulers had been classic realism: Stability was all. But it turned out that the Arab world wasn't stable, it was seething. No longer could the Arabs be an exception to the rule of post-Cold War democratic transformation, merely a global gas station. The Arabs had to change too, fundamentally, just as Lewis (and Ataturk) had said. But change had to be shoved down their throats—Arab tribal culture understood only force and was too resistant to change, Lewis thought—and it had to happen quickly. This, in turn, required leaving behind Islam's anti-modern obsessions.
Emphasis Added.
I don't believe that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al needed Lewis for this, and frankly had Lewis been in another camp, they would have reached the same conclusions. He falls, taking the above characterizations as given, into the useful academic fools category. I note that I had a convo with Wolfowitz himself many years ago; I've referred to it quite often - not something of any real meaning, but it does strike me that Wolfowitz had already travelled down this road - Lewis' potential reflections could only have given him some back patting - Wolfowitz was and is not the sort of fellow who changes opinions quickly or easily.
Leaving that aside, the underlined section is of particular interest. It is a common conciet, and I think wrong. Not wrong in its entirity, for there is that aspect of Arab society, a certain percentage that requires a bit of head knocking, and there are certainly in modern Islamic movements strong anti-modern 'obsessions.' The question though is are these the main points to address, and even if so, how?
Iraq and its poster villain, Saddam Hussein, offered a unique opportunity for achieving this transformation in one bold stroke (remember “shock and awe”?) while regaining the offensive against the terrorists. So, it was no surprise that in the critical months of 2002 and 2003, while the Bush administration shunned deep thinking and banned State Department Arabists from its councils of power, Bernard Lewis was persona grata, delivering spine-stiffening lectures to Cheney over dinner in undisclosed locations. Abandoning his former scholarly caution, Lewis was among the earliest prominent voices after September 11 to press for a confrontation with Saddam, doing so in a series of op-ed pieces in The Wall Street Journal with titles like “A War of Resolve” and “Time for Toppling.” An official who sat in on some of the Lewis-Cheney discussions recalled, “His view was: 'Get on with it. Don't dither.'” Animated by such grandiose concepts, and like Lewis quite certain they were right, the strategists of the Bush administration in the end thought it unnecessary to prove there were operational links between Saddam and al Qaeda. These were good “bureaucratic” reasons for selling the war to the public, to use Wolfowitz's words, but the real links were deeper: America was taking on a sick civilization, one that it had to beat into submission. Bin Laden's supposedly broad Muslim base, and Saddam's recalcitrance to the West, were part of the same pathology.
Emphasis added.
Well, okay, first very clearly the concept of a sick Islamic civilization is harldy Lewis' alone - I can see where he would argue such given his writings. It is hard in fact not to admit that benchmarked against its own past, modern Arab-Islamic civilization is... not healthy. The old tolerance, confidence is badly damaged. But that has been the case for decades.
To the extent Lewis made the argument for transformational violence (again I note Wolfowitz appeared to believe in this years back), to remake the culture, then this is grave, and foolish.
I return however to my general sense that at best Lewis served as an echo for what these types already believed. Taking the next paragraph, does anyone think that even had Lewis been in opposition, that Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld et al would not have seized upon secular Turkey as a model for what they wanted to see?
The administration's vision of postwar Iraq was also fundamentally Lewisian, which is to say Kemalist. Paul Wolfowitz repeatedly invoked secular, democratic Turkey as a “useful model for others in the Muslim world,” as the deputy secretary of defense termed it in December 2002 on the eve of a trip to lay the groundwork for what he thought would be a friendly Turkey's role as a staging ground for the Iraq war. Another key Pentagon neocon and old friend of Lewis's, Harold Rhode, told associates a year ago that “we need an accelerated Turkish model” for Iraq, according to a source who talked with him. (Lewis dedicated a 2003 book, The Crisis of Islam, to Rhode whom “I got to know when he was studying Ottoman registers,” Lewis told me.) And such men thought that Ahmad Chalabi—also a protégé of Lewis's—might make a fine latter-day Ataturk—strong, secular, pro-Western, and friendly towards Israel. L. Paul Bremer III, the former U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, was not himself a Chalabite, but he too embraced a top-down Kemalist approach to Iraq's resurrection. The role of the Islamic community, meanwhile, was consistently marginalized in the administration's planning. U.S. officials saw Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most prestigious figure in the country, as a clueless medieval relic. Even though military intelligence officers were acutely aware of Sistani's importance—having gathered information on him for more than a year before the invasion—Bremer and his Pentagon overseers initially sidelined the cleric, defying his calls for early elections.
A few thoughts on this paragraph:
I think calling Chalabi a protege of Lewis is abusive in the extreme.
Second, the top down "Kemalist" approach hardly seems terribly Kemalist in re what I saw of the CPA: this strikes me as false analogy insofar as the top down approach was natural to such an occupation and seemed a lot more driven by models derived from Japan and the Second World War (the death trap of American thinking, the shining moment that American leaders just do not understand as not being generally relevant to their interactions with the Rest of The World excluding Europe - that Third World Nationalism is not the same framework as old European conflicts) than by any supposed Kemalist program.
Again, I think Hirsch is unfairly making Lewis - no doubt someone who did pimp the Kemalist model to some extent - carry the water for an approach that in reality probably had very little indeed to do with his academic mumblings. The marginalization of Sistani, for example, came as much from US hostility to "Islamic clerics" without any intellectual reflection as anything.
Perhaps Lewis provided some intellectual veneer for this, but I do not see any of the above as in reality having much to do with him, at all.
Looking for love in all the wrong places
Lewis has long had detractors in the scholarly world, although his most ardent enemies have tended to be literary mavericks like the late Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, a long screed against the cavalier treatment of Islam in Western literature. And especially after 9/11, Bulliet and other mainstream Arabists who had urged a softer, more nuanced view of Islam found themselves harassed into silence. Lewisites such as Martin Kramer, author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (a fierce post-9/11 attack on Bulliet) and other prominent scholars such as Robert Wood of the University of Chicago, suggested that most academic Arabists were apologists for Islamic radicalism. But now, emboldened by the Bush administration's self-made quagmire in Iraq, the Arabists are launching a counterattack. They charge that Lewis's whole analysis missed the mark, beginning with his overarching construct, the great struggle between Islam and Christendom. These scholars argue that Lewis has slept through most of modern Arab history. Entangled in medieval texts, Lewis's view ignores too much and confusingly conflates old Ottoman with modern Arab history. “He projects from the Ottoman experience onto the Middle East. But after the Ottoman Empire was disbanded, a link was severed with the rest of Arab world,” says Nader Hashemi, a University of Toronto scholar who is working on another anti-Lewis book. In other words, Istanbul and the caliphate were no longer the center of things. Turkey under Ataturk went in one direction, the Arabs, who were colonized, in another. Lewis, says Hashemi, “tries to interpret the problem of political development by trying to project a line back to medieval and early Islamic history. In the process, he totally ignores the impact of the British and French colonialists, and the repressive rule of many post-colonial leaders. He misses the break” with the past.
A few thoughts on this.
First, again Hirsch unfairly plays a slight of hand in associating Lewis with the movement to silence the critics, the Pipesian approach if I may. I have never read anything to suggest Lewis is part of that, or approves. Perhaps he does, but I doubt it. This strikes me as an unfair smear. Attack Pipes, Kramer etc, but calling Kramer a Lewisite is abusive and sloppy in my opinion.
Second, of course, let us lay aside Ed Said. I have little use for him. He was a literature professor and crafter of Agitprop - the kernel of a critique he had in Orinetalism was ridden into the ground (which is to say his observations on Orientalism had a core of truth that he blew up into polemic) - oddly I dislike him for reasons that have nothing to do with why he normally gets critiqued (Israel), in fact I think criticisms of him in re Israel etc. are the more off base ones.
Third, the last underlined section really comes closest to my view of Lewis, although one can overmake the "break with the past" argument. Historical connexions are important and the roots run deep in the Middle East, but on the other hand the manner in which Lewis erects classical meanings, etc. as The True Ones is a grave error (and oddly, it occurs to me, plays into the Salafi game).
At least until the Iraq war, most present-day Arabs didn't think in the stark clash-of-civilization terms Lewis prefers. Bin Laden likes to vilify Western Crusaders, but until relatively recently, he was still seen by much of the Arab establishment as a marginal figure. To most Arabs before 9/11, the Crusades were history as ancient as they are to us in the West. Modern Arab anger and frustration is, in fact, less than a hundred years old. As bin Laden knows very well, this anger is a function not of Islam's humiliation at the Treaty of Carlowitz of 1699—the sort of long-ago defeat that Lewis highlights in his bestselling What Went Wrong—but of much more recent developments. These include the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement by which the British and French agreed to divvy up the Arabic-speaking countries after World War I; the subsequent creation, by the Europeans, of corrupt, kleptocratic tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan; the endemic poverty and underdevelopment that resulted for most of the 20th century; the U.N.-imposed creation of Israel in 1948; and finally, in recent decades, American support for the bleak status quo.
This is singularly among the most important paragraphs in the piece - and a pity that Hirsch had to waste so much verbiage smearing Lewis with a responsibility he bears at best indirectly. At best.
First, on the Crusader front, one of the odder items in is Lewis' own work one should take away the understanding that the Arab - Islamic world almost did not notice the Crusades. The Mongols, etc. had in many ways a larger impact, the Crusades, hardly being this lively memory, are new rhetoric created out of Western discourse more than anything - something idiots rambling about how "they" have not forgotten the Crusades get utterly wrong.
Second, the last underlined and especially bolded section strikes me as the most important. Now as phrased it puts all the blame on the West. That is false. An exageration. It's empty to deny the very real and reprehensible role the West has had in reinforcing the Vampire Regimes in the Middle East and yes, a status quo that is bleak and hopeless for the average Mohammed on the street. To put the whole weight of responsibility on the West, however, is utterly wrong. The framework of say the Egyptian Vampire State has largely stayed the same since Nasser (well... in gross), regardless of whether the West supported the State or not. The abusive habits of rule are drawing on local habits, history and tradition every bit as much as the results of Western interference.
Yet as Bulliet writes, over the longer reach of history, Islam and the West have been far more culturally integrated than most people realized; there is a far better case for “Islamo-Christian civilization” than there is for the clash of civilizations. “There are two narratives here,” says Fawaz Gerges, an intellectual ally of Bulliet's at Sarah Lawrence University. “One is Bernard Lewis. But the other narrative is that in historical terms, there have been so many inter-alliances between world of Islam and the West. There has never been a Muslim umma, or community, except for 23 years during the time of Mohammed. Except in the theoretical minds of the jihadists, the Muslim world was always split. Many Muslim leaders even allied themselves with the Crusaders.”
I believe they overstate the contrast between themselves and Lewis here. At least the greater body of Lewis.
Today, progress in the Arab world will not come by secularizing it from above (Bulliet's chapter dealing with Chalabi is called “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places”) but by rediscovering this more tolerant Islam, which actually predates radicalism and, contra Ataturk, is an ineluctable part of Arab self-identity that must be accommodated. For centuries, Bulliet argues, comparative stability prevailed in the Islamic world not (as Lewis maintains) because of the Ottomans' success, but because Islam was playing its traditional role of constraining tyranny. “The collectivity of religious scholars acted at least theoretically as a countervailing force against tyranny. You had the implicit notion that if Islam is pushed out of the public sphere, tyranny will increase, and if that happens, people will look to Islam to redress the tyranny.” This began to play out during the period that Lewis hails as the modernization era of the 19th century, when Western legal structures and armies were created. “What Lewis never talks about is the concomitant removal of Islam from the center of public life, the devalidation of Islamic education and Islamic law, the marginalization of Islamic scholars,” Bulliet told me. Instead of modernization, what ensued was what Muslim clerics had long feared, tyranny that conforms precisely with some theories of Islamic political development, notes Bulliet. What the Arab world should have seen was “not an increase in modernization so much as an increase in tyranny. By the 1960s, that prophecy was fulfilled. You had dictatorships in most of the Islamic world.” Egypt's Gamel Nasser, Syria's Hafez Assad, and others came in the guise of Arab nationalists, but they were nothing more than tyrants.
Well, it is hard to say Bulliet is wrong on the reality of what secularism has meant in the Arab world. However, the "traditional role" in restraining tyranny - something Lewis mentions in some of his writing - was not robust enough historically to meet what we would call modern requirements.
Nor do I think that Bulliet's characterization of the Muslim religious figures opposition to modernity to be very convincing.
Nevertheless, I do agree that in order to advance modernity, tolerance, pluralism, and general progress in the Arab Islamic world, it has to occur in a framework that will work now. Pure secularization has been badly damaged. One can quibble as to how and why, but the reality is pure secularism is now a brand so badly damaged that the product will not sell. And forcing it will simply produce the opposite response of what one needs.
So the alternative is to look rather to a "Liberal" Islam - I fully believe it is possible, although right now it is minoritarian - a sort of Christian Democratic framework perhaps. In any case, admitting Islamic politics, rather than baring it out of fear.
Yet there was no longer a legitimate force to oppose this trend. In the place of traditional Islamic learning—which had once allowed, even encouraged, science and advancement—there was nothing. The old religious authorities had been hounded out of public life, back into the mosque. The Caliphate was dead; when Ataturk destroyed it in Turkey, he also removed it from the rest of the Islamic world. Into that vacuum roared a fundamentalist reaction led by brilliant but aberrant amateurs like Egypt's Sayyid Qutb, the founding philosopher of Ayman Zawahiri's brand of Islamic radicalism who was hanged by al-Nasser, and later, Osama bin Laden, who grew up infected by the Saudis' extreme version of Wahhabism. Even the creator of Wahhabism, the 18th-century thinker Mohammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, was outside the mainstream, notorious for vandalizing shrines and “denounced” by theologians across the Islamic world in his time for his “doctrinal mediocrity and illegitimacy,” as the scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb writes in another new book that rebuts Lewis, Islam and its Discontents.
The first underlined is just stupid. The 19th century reforms came well after, sadly, Islamic learning had fallen into almost complete decadence and often into obscurantism. The characterization of Qutb is a bit bizarre as well.
The item on the Caliphate is obscure to me, it almost seems as if Hirsch is mourning the abolition, suggesting Ataturk made an error.
Wahhabism's fast growth in the late 20th century was also a purely modern phenomenon, a function of Saudi petrodollars underwriting Wahhabist mosques and clerics throughout the Arab world (and elsewhere, including America). Indeed, the elites in Egypt and other Arab countries still tend to mock the Saudis as déclassés Bedouins who would have stayed that way if it were not for oil. “It's as if Jimmy Swaggert had come into hundreds of billions of dollars and taken over the church,” one Arab official told me. The hellish culmination of this modern trend occurred in the mountains of Afghanistan in the 1980s and '90s, when extremist Wahhabism, in the person of bin Laden, was married to Qutb's Egyptian Islamism, in the person of Zawahiri, who became bin Laden's deputy.
Fair comment.
Critics were right to see the bin Laden phenomenon as a reaction against corrupt tyrannies like Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's, and ultimately against American support for those regimes. They were wrong to conclude that it was a mainstream phenomenon welling up from the anti-modern character of Islam, or that the only immediate solution lay in Western-style democracy. It was, instead, a reaction that came out of an Islam misshapen by modern political developments, many of them emanating from Western influences, outright invasion by British, French, and Italian colonialists, and finally the U.S.-Soviet clash that helped create the mujahadeen jihad in Afghanistan.
I think this statement is not wholly incorrect, but again it lays rather too much at the feet of recent events, one could incorrectly get the image that things were just peachy in the Islamic world before the Europeans trooped in, rather than a more balanced view that it was the decadence and rising obscurantism in the Islamic world (in essence the closing of the Islamic world from the better parts of its own past) that allowed such to happen.
Academic probation
Today, even as the administration's case for invading Iraq has all but collapsed, Bernard Lewis's public image has remained largely intact. While his neocon protégés fight for their reputations and their jobs, Lewis's latest book, a collection of essays called From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, received mostly respectful reviews last spring and summer. Yet events on the ground seem to be bearing out some of the academic criticisms of Lewis made by Bulliet and others. Indeed, they suggest that what is happening is the opposite of what Lewis predicted.
Again, I think it more than a bit abusive to call the NeoCons his proteges.
Skipping over some text to this
Bremer once promised to ban Islamic strictures on family law and women's rights, and the interim constitution that he pushed through the Governing Council in March affirms that Islam is only one of the foundations of the state. But Sistani has dismissed the constitution as a transition democracy, and Iraq's political future is now largely out of American hands (though the U.S. military may continue to play a stabilizing role in order to squelch any move toward civil war). “I think the best-case scenario for Iraq is that they hold these parliamentary elections, and you get some kind of representative government dominated by religious parties,” says University of Michigan scholar Juan Cole. Even Fouad Ajami, one of Lewis's longtime intellectual allies and like him an avowed Kemalist, concluded last spring in a New York Times op-ed piece: “Let's face it: Iraq is not going to be America's showcase in the Arab-Muslim world … We expected a fairly secular society in Iraq (I myself wrote in that vein at the time). Yet it turned out that the radical faith—among the Sunnis as well as the Shiites—rose to fill the void left by the collapse of the old despotism.”
If there is one thing thing that I thought daft, was the bizarre insistence in so many quarters that Iraq was a secular society, as if nothing had changed since 1970 or 1980.
All the signs were there that Iraq had slid into a less and less secular mode, that the Sadaamist secularism was nothing but a facade. I believe I said as much on the SDMB in the run up to the war and immediately after.
Turkey hunt
Today, the anti-Lewisites argue, the only hope is that a better, more benign form of Islam fights its way back in the hands of respected clerics like Sistani, overcoming the aberrant strains of the Osama bin Ladens and the Abu Mousab al-Zarqawis. Whatever emerges in Iraq and the Arab world will be, for a long time to come, Islamic. And it will remain, for a long time, anti-American, beginning with the likelihood that any new Iraqi government is going to give the boot to U.S. troops as soon as it possibly can. (That same CPA poll showed that 92 percent of Iraqis see the Americans as occupiers, not liberators, and 86 percent now want U.S. soldiers out, either “immediately” or after the 2005 election.) America may simply have to endure an unpleasant Islamist middle stage—and Arabs may have to experience its failure, as the Iranians have—before modernity finally overtakes Iraq and the Arab world. “Railing against Islam as a barrier to democracy and modern progress cannot make it go away so long as tyranny is a fact of life for most Muslims,” Bulliet writes. “Finding ways of wedding [Islam's traditional] protective role with modern democratic and economic institutions is a challenge that has not yet been met.”
The underlined is the most important statement. I think the Iranian experience has to be tasted by large numbers before people are cured of the disease.
No one, even Bush's Democratic critics, seems to fully comprehend this. Sens. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) have introduced legislation that would create secular alternatives to madrassas, without realizing that this won't fly in the Arab world: All one can hope for are more moderate madrassas, because Islam is still seen broadly as a legitimating force. “What happens if the road to what could broadly be called democracy lies through Islamic revolution?” says Wood of the University of Chicago. The best hope, some of these scholars say, is that after a generation or so, the “Islamic” tag in Arab religious parties becomes rather anodyne, reminiscent of what happened to Christian democratic parties in Europe.
The underlined in particular is just stupid and daft.
Secular alternatives to Medrasat? Do these people have a clue? Madre de dios.
Never mind I know they don't.
This may already be happening slowly in Turkey, where the parliament is dominated by the majority Islamic Justice and Development Party. The JDP leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan—who was once banned from public service after reciting a poem that said “the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers”—has shown an impressive degree of pragmatism in governing. But again, Turkey is a unique case, made so by Kemal and his secular, military-enforced coup back in the '20s. If Erdogan still secretly wants to re-Islamicize Turkey, he can only go so far in an environment in which the nation's powerful military twitches at every sign of incipient religiosity. Erdogan is also under unique pressure to secularize as Turkey bids to enter the European Union, which is not a card that moderate Arab secularists can hold up to win over their own populations.
The poem was a Kemalist one, actually, and ironically.
Resolving the tension between Islam and politics will require a long, long process of change. As Bulliet writes, Christendom struggled for hundreds of years to come to terms with the role of religion in civil society. Even in America, separation of church and state “was not originally a cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution,” and Americans are still fighting among themselves over the issue today.
Precisely, and in that context expecting the Islamic world to be more secular than the West may be in fact (it is easier to see the religious roots from the outside) - at the least, to get there from outside pressure is daft. Carrots, not sticks.
In our talk last spring, Lewis was still arguing that Iraq would follow the secular path he had laid out for it. He voiced the line that has become a favorite of Wolfowitz's, that the neocons are the most forthright champions of Arab progress, and that the Arabists of the State Department who identified with the idea of “Arab exceptionalism” are merely exhibitng veiled racism. This is the straight neocon party line, of course: If you deny that secular democracy is the destiny of every people, you are guilty of cultural snobbery. But somehow Lewis's disdain for Islam, with its hagiographic invocation of Ataturk, managed to creep into our conversation. Threaded throughout Lewis's thinking, despite his protests to the contrary, is a Kemalist conviction that Islam is fundamentally anti-modern. In his 1996 book The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, for example, Lewis stresses the Koran's profession of the “finality and perfection of the Muslim revelation.” Even though Islamic authorities have created laws and regulations beyond the strict word of the Koran in order to deal with the needs of the moment, “the making of new law, though common and widespread, was always disguised, almost furtive, and there was therefore no room for legislative councils or assemblies such as formed the starting-point of European democracy,” he writes. In other words, Islam is an obstacle. “The Islamic world is now at beginning of 15th century,” Lewis told me. “The Western world is at the beginning of the 21st century.” He quickly added: “That doesn't mean [the West] is more advanced, it means it's gone through more.” Following that timeline, Lewis suggested that the Islamic world is today “on the verge of its Reformation”—a necessary divorce between religion and politics that Lewis believes has been too long in coming. This view has become conventional wisdom in Washington, resonating not only with the neocons but also with the modernization theorists who have long dominated American campuses. Yet behind this view, say scholars like Bulliet, lies a fundamental rejection of Arabs' historical identity. The reason for that, Bulliet believes, resides in the inordinate influence that Lewis's historical studies of the Ottomans retain over his thinking—and by his 1950 visit to Turkey. Bulliet notes that as late as 2002, in the preface to the third edition of The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis “talked about the incredible sense of exhilaration it felt for someone of his generation, shaped by the great war against fascism and the emerging Cold War, to see the face of the modern Middle East emerge in Turkey.” As a model, Bulliet argues, Turkey “was as vivid a vision for him 50 years later as it was at the time.”
The underlined highlights a complex argument. It rather strikes me that the manner in which the NeoCons have framed things in regards to State and experts is both abusive and incorrect. I do not know many regional specialists (properly speaking) who believed democracy was impossible - rather one has to understand how hard it is to get there (to democracy) from here (faux democracy and disguised autocracy). Knowing how hard a trip is allows one to prepare properly for it - merely hand waving and abusing those who point out that the march across the desert requires quite a lot of water and supplies will not make the trip a success.
But again, Turkey's experience after the Ottoman empire's dissolution was no longer especially relevant to what was happening in the Arab world. Ataturk, in fact, was not only not an Arab, but his approach to modernity was also most deeply influenced by the fascism of the period (Mussolini was still a much-admired model in the 1920s). And Lewis never developed a feel for what modern Arabs were thinking, especially after he began to adopt strong pro-Israel views in the 1970s. “This is a person who does not like the people he is purporting to have expertise about,” says Bulliet. “He doesn't respect them, he considers them to be good and worthy only to the degree they follow a Western path.”
I think Bulliet is overdoing it here.
The other item in this statement is the somewhat sly ... smear if you will of Ataturk by association with Mussolini. True enough in a sense on a factual basis, but doesn't tell us anything of utility in the context of the discussion (Mussolini of the 1920s not being the same deal as the 1940s, for example), and seems largely to be intended as part of Hirsch's attack on Ataturk because of the association in Hirsch's storyline with the NeoCons.
The neoconservative transformationalists of the Bush administration, though informed by far less scholarship than Lewis, seemed to adopt his dismissive attitude toward the peculiar demands of Arab and Islamic culture. And now they are paying for it. The downward spiral of the U.S. occupation into bloodshed and incompetence wasn't just a matter of too few troops or other breakdowns in planning, though those were clearly part of it. In fact, the great American transformation machine never really understood much about Arab culture, and it didn't bother to try. The occupation authorities, taking a paternalistic top-down approach, certainly did not comprehend the role of Islam, which is one reason why Bremer and Co. were so late in recognizing the power of the Sistani phenomenon. The occupation also failed because of its inability to comprehend and make use of tribal complexities, to understand “how to get the garbage collected, and know who's married to who,” as Wood says. Before the war, Pentagon officials, seeking to justify their low-cost approach to nation-building, liked to talk about how much more sophisticated and educated the Iraqis were than Afghans, how they would quickly resurrect their country. Those officials obviously didn't mean what they said or act on it. In the end, they couldn't bring themselves to trust the Iraqis, and the soldiers at their command rounded up thousands of “hajis” indiscriminately, treating one and all as potential Saddam henchmen or terrorists (as I witnessed myself when, on assignment for Newsweek, I joined U.S. troops on raids in the Sunni Triangle last January).
True, but the underlined sins seem to be very particularly American, and the Moshe Dayan article I linked to in re Viet Nam raises almost identical observations.
Americans, if I may be somewhat overbroad, are too full of their own exceptionalism as a general rule, to think long and clealry about other models very well. America is a great model, but one that is hard to reproduce, in fact in many ways impossible given the unique genesis.
There remains a deeper issue: Did Lewis's misconceptions lead the Bush administration to make a terrible strategic error? Despite the horrors of 9/11, did they transform the bin Laden threat into something grander than it really was? If the “show of strength” in Iraq was wrong-headed, as the Lewis critics say, then Americans must contemplate the terrible idea that they squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives and limbs on the wrong war. If Bernard Lewis's view of the Arab problem was in error, then America missed a chance to round up and destroy a threat—al Qaeda—that in reality existed only on the sick margins of the Islamic world.
No, their own misconceptions did.
Putting this on Lewis is abusive in the extreme.
It is too soon to throw all of Lewis's Kemalist ideas on the ash-heap of history. Even his academic rivals concede that much of his early scholarship is impressive; some like Michigan's Cole suggest that Lewis lost his way only in his later years when he got pulled into present-day politics, especially the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and began grafting his medieval insights onto the modern Arab mindset. And whether the ultimate cause is modern or not, the Arab world is a dysfunctional society, one that requires fundamental reform. “The Arab Development Report” issued in the spring of 2002 by the U.N. Development Programme, harshly laid out the failings of Arab societies. Calling them “rich, but not developed,” the report detailed the deficits of democracy and women's rights that have been favorite targets of the American neoconservatives. The report noted that the Arab world suffers from a lower rate of Internet connectivity than even sub-Saharan Africa, and that education is so backward and isolated that the entire Arab world translates only one-fifth of the books that Greece does. Some scholars also agree that in the longest of long runs, the ultimate vision of Lewis—and the neocons—will prove to be right. Perhaps in the long run, you can't Islamicize democracy, and so Islam is simply standing in the way.
Lewis' scholarship, not just his early scholarship is impressive. His commentary on the modern Islamic world however, is wrong headed on many points.
Iran is the best real-world test of this hypothesis right now. A quarter century after the Khomeini revolution, Iran seems to be stuck in some indeterminate middle state. The forces of bottom-up secular democratic reform and top-down mullah control may be stalemated simply because there is no common ground whatsoever between their contending visions. That's one reason the Kemalist approach had its merits, Fouad Ajami argued in a recent appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think Ataturk understood that if you fall through Islam, you fall through a trap door. And in fact, I think the journey out of Islam that Ataturk did was brilliant. And to the extent that the Muslim world now has forgotten this. . .they will pay dearly for it.”
Eh, Ajami.
But there is no Ataturk in Iraq (though of course Chalabi, and perhaps Allawi, would still love to play that role). For now, Sistani remains the most prestigious figure in the country, the only true kingmaker. Suspicions remain in the Bush administration that Sistani's long-term goal is to get the Americans out and the Koran in—in other words, to create another mullah state as in Iran. But those who know Sistani well say he is much smarter than that. Born in Iran—he moved to Iraq in the early 1950s, around the time Lewis saw the light—Sistani has experienced up close the failures of the Shiite mullah state next door. He and the other Shiites have also suffered the pointy end of Sunni Arab nationalism, having been oppressed under Saddam for decades, and they will never sanction a return to that. So Sistani knows the last, best alternative may be some kind of hybrid, a moderately religious, Shiite-dominated democracy, brokered and blessed by him and conceived with a nuanced federalism that will give the Kurds, Sunnis and others their due. But also a regime that, somewhat like the Iranian mullahs, uses its distinctive Islamic character, and concomitant anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, as ideological glue. For the Americans who went hopefully to war in Iraq, that option is pretty much all that's left on the table—something even Bernard Lewis may someday have to acknowledge.
In the end this long attack on Lewis strikes me as unbalanced and unfair. There are surely criticisms to be made, but Hirsch tries to lay far, far too much weight on Lewis - really bizarrely so. I have ask, was it personal?
Posted by The Lounsbury at November 29, 2004 09:48 AM
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Aug-Dec 2004
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