There was a time when the world was different from the way it is today. When it was Christian Europe that was the backwater and Dar-al-Islam that was the ascendent power in the world. Then over the course of a few centuries or less, the world was turned upside down. The previously dominant and vibrant Muslim world was falling behind the West in every measurable respect. Western scientists were making discoveries in areas that Islamic scientists didn?t even bother to explore. Western philosophers were asserting theories that would lead to the idea of univeral human rights while the world of Islam made second-class citizens of women, slaves, and the dhimmi. At some point, somewhere, some Muslim must have asked himself the question expressed in Bernard Lewis?s book, What Went Wrong ?
Over the course of 160 pages, Lewis, an emeritus Professor of Near East Studies at Princeton, covers a broad scope of the history of European interaction with the Islamic world and shows, how, slowly but surely, the supposedly infidel West eclipsed the Islamic world in nearly every respect. While he never does reach an emphatic conclusion, there are a number of factors that Lewis cites which clearly contributed to the inability of the Middle East to follow through on the advances it made in the remarkable period that culiminated with the fall of Constantinople.
Chief among these, it seems, was the lack of any separation in the Islamc world of a separation between the secular/political world and the religious world. More than one historian has remarked that Europe benefited from the fact that, unlike the Eastern Roman Empire or virtually any Empire that had ever existed, there was clear distinction between religious authority (in the pre-Reformation world personified by the Pope) and political authority. Islam never had any such distinction. Muhammed was both a religious and political leader, and the Caliphs that followed served much the same role. One result of this is that there was no counterweight to the authority of the state, which claimed to rule pursuant to the authority of Allah.
Though it was published in late 2001, Lewis wrote this book well before the fatal events of September 11th. Nonetheless, his conclusion that something has gone very wrong with the Muslim world is even more true today.
