Bernard Lewis
March 7th, 2009I have been reading “What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam And Modernity In The Middle East” by Bernard Lewis, an eminent western scholar of Islam, also author of the universally acclaimed “The Crisis Of Islam.” The jacket reads: ” For 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 was seen as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn or to fear And then everything changed. The West won victory after victory, first on the battlefield and then in the marketplace., Lewis examines the anguished reaction of the Islamic world as it tried to make sense of how it had been overtaken, overshadowed and dominated by the West. Lewis shows how the Middle East turned it’s attention to understanding European weaponry, industry, government, education and culture. He also describes how some Middle Easterners fastened blame on a series of scapegoats, while others asked not “Who did this to us?” but rather “Where did we go wrong?”
This book is urgent and accessible for anyone from the West also wanting to understand “What Went Wrong?”