No doubt you’ve read the latest book by Bernard Lewis, said a friend. No doubt I haven’t, replied I. And who the devil is Bernard Lewis anyhow that I would’ve doubtlessly read his latest oeuvre? Big guy in Middle Eastern studies, I was told. The biggest name, in fact. The Cleveland E. Dodge professor of Neareastern Studies emeritus at Princeton University. Often a guest speaker at the National Press Club. Also at the august Middle East Institute in Washington. The doyen of experts on the region.
Truth be told, I’m not altogether fond of so-called experts on the Middle East, much less their doyen. Or of people who who use a word like doyen in everyday conversation. So I ignored my friend’s advice to fork out $23 plus tax in order to buy and read this book. Read Bernard Lewis, persisted my friend at a later encounter, and you’ll form an opinion about where these experts’ heads are at on the issue of the Middle East. So I did, and I have.
For those of you philistines out there who have not been reading the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Republic and the New Whatchomacallit lately, the new book by Bernard Lewis, “What Went Wrong,” is not only on the best-seller lists but, as they say in intellectually tuned-in circles, is “talked about.” I just finished reading this alleged opus and what first came to mind was not what the author’s conclusions were about our part of the world, but how, to paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith’s observation about economists, “if you were to put Middle East experts end to end, it would be a good thing.” Underlying the whole argument of “What Went Wrong” is the contention that in modern history the conflict between the West and the Arab world is the struggle, on the one hand, between the West’s “freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny,” and, on the other, Arab countries that “had become poor, weak and ignorant,” countries that are “no longer even the first among followers, but falling even further in the lengthening line of eager and more successful Westernizers, notably in East Asia.” Gosh, me too.
I always thought the world was divided into two kinds of people, those who think the world is divided into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. So you feel that I’m quoting selectively or flippantly. But Lewis, given his penchant for generalizations, sets himself up for that kind of attribution. Consider his antiquated, 50s-style characterization of Israel: “The survival of the state, outnumbered, surrounded and outgunned by neighbors who reject its very right to exist, may depend on its largely Western-derived qualitative edge.” Israel surrounded and outgunned? Guess this man lives on a distant planet somewhere. And Israel will prevail because of its “Western-style” edge? Blatant Eurocentrism, you see, is in fashion in the US today.
To be fair to Lewis, nowhere in his slim volume of 160 pages does he deny or belittle the fact that Arab civilization was at one time in the forefront of human achievement. But Arabs? By George, these folk have been notorious throughout their history, we are told, for blaming others for whatever misfortune had befallen them. Must be the Arab mind. “For a long time,” Lewis writes, “the Mongols were the favorite villains.” After that, “Arabs could lay the blame for their troubles on the Turks who ruled them for centuries.” Then came French and British imperialism. Then finally “their role as villains was taken over by the United States.”
None of these jerks, in “What Went Wrong,” was seen in reality as a plausible culprit. Arabs have no one to blame but themselves for these misfortunes. But the most egregious aspect of Arab culture, it would seem, is expressed in its new-found anti-Semitism. For Arabs, continues Lewis, albeit sarcastically, “it was bad enough to be defeated by the great imperial powers of the West, but to suffer the same fate at the hands of a contemptible gang of Jews was an intolerable humiliation.” Ouch. That was hitting below the belt. And what do you know! Even professors at Princeton University are not above aiming for the cheap, sarcastic shot these days.
Since Sept. 11, books on the Middle East, on Islam and on the Arab-Israeli conflict have been comming off the conveyor belt, as it were, cheaper by the dozen, all purporting to prove that our part of the world is a hotbed of terrorism, that our faith is “incompatible with democracy,” and that in our conflict with Zionism, the Palestinians are the aggressors. Why do they hate us so much? Why do Americans prefer to have such a convoluted image of our polity and our culture? Yes, the question works from both sides of the podium, from either end of the steno notebook.
Consider, in this regard, Bernard Lewis’s assessment of the “Arab status quo,” which is Latin for “the mess that Arabs are in.” Not only is his view of the Arab future glum, but in a hilarious leap of fancy, with which he concludes this crassly Eurocentric, ethnocentric and, heck, ya, egocentric book, he writes: “If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from the downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination, perhaps from a new Europe reverting to old ways, perhaps from a resurgent Russia, perhaps from some new, expanding superpower in the East.”
Dear me! Will someone get this man a valium? Recommend a therapist? Bernard, my man, calm down. If you want to know what went wrong in the Arab world — and yes, we’re the first to admit it, a lot has gone wrong there — don’t go to American experts, or their putative doyen, for answers. Always drink upstream from the herd.
