What Went Wrong, by Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis is one of the great Middle Eastern scholars of our day, and, with his name on it, and with such a hot topic—the West versus the Middle East--this book was of course a New York Times bestseller. Why, then, was it so dissatisfying?

This is not to say that it was really bad: it did contain some interesting points about history, both medieval and modern. The central question of the book is in the title: for many years Islam was the world’s greatest civilization, enlightened, powerful, advanced. Then, seemingly suddenly, the West arose and today, Islamic countries lag far behind their Western counterparts and, perhaps even more embarrassingly, behind some of their East Asian counterparts. So what went wrong? What caused this change?

That is the question Lewis puts to us, the reader, and the question he purports to answer; yet, I didn’t find any real, solid analysis of said question in the book. This is a sufficient survey of the history of cultural change, to be sure, but for the most part it’s missing that extra clincher of a real answer; instead, Lewis puts forward theory after theory and points out their weaknesses—it can’t just be economics, it can’t just be culture, it can’t just be the Jews, it can’t just be religion--yet never shows us a real answer of strength. I can understand his reasons for this—he is a scholar, after all, not a political figure, and may wish to refrain from giving his own opinion, instead displaying the opinions of those less dispassionate—but it makes the book, as a whole, rather disappointing. Lewis certainly has some very insightful points—contrasting some of the basic tenets of Christianity versus those of Islam, for example, with respect to secularism and the clergy, or orthodoxy and heresy—but I felt this book was primarily a “throwaway,” a concession, on Lewis’s part, to writing popular scholarship to improve his renown, but without any real effort to make it a quality piece of writing or scholarship. His information repeated itself, his anecdotes seemed almost more chatty than weighty or insightful, and, perhaps most irritatingly, he often made references to interesting things, such as certain Frenchmen taking concubines with “disastrous results” without then elucidating further. This felt like a book that could have been, and maybe even was, written in a real scholar’s sleep. Next time, Lewis, wake up and give us an answer.