BABYLON, 22 June 2003 — Driving down to the ruins of this ancient city, I kept humming that frontier-America ditty that begins, “California, here we come/Right back where I started from.’’ Only I replaced “California’’ with “Babylonia.’’ This is, after all, the place where it all began, and it is the place to think about how it all came crashing down.
Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, deserves to be called the Cradle of Civilization. The first cities were here, starting with Ur, just to the south. Indeed, the very name “Iraq’’ is a derivation of Ur. This fertile crescent gave the world the first writing, the first literature, the first laws, the first prayers, the first songs. I got a chill just thinking about all that history — even though it was 126 degrees in the shade.
And so the question: How could this place, which led the evolution of mankind up from subsistence to civilization, fall so far? Alas, Babylon. The mother of civilizations gave birth to the mother of all slow-motion catastrophes. And so Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is now helpless and prostrate, easily defeated and occupied by the United States, an upstart of a country that didn’t exist until a couple hundred years ago.
But by the beginnings of America, the decline of the Arabs had already been going on for centuries. The people of Iraq could still plausibly claim to be the world’s leaders as late as the 13th century. Those were the glory days of the grand union of the Muslim Ummah, the Muslim world. And the capital was Baghdad — just 60 miles north of here — which was called the Surat al-Dunya, the “Navel of the Universe.’’ It was the seat of empire, but it was also home to scientists, poets, artists and mathematicians, as in, Arabic numerals. Then came disaster. The Mongols stormed and sacked the city in 1258; the Horde killed, Arabs say, a million people, including, undeniably, the flower of Islamic civilization.
Of course, the Europeans had their calamities, too. In the 14th century, the Black Death carried away a third of the continent’s population. But what was it about the Europeans that enabled them to overcome adversities, that enabled them to rise into the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Industrialization, Post-Industrialization — even as the Arabs stagnated?
That was the question I took with me to Iraq: How did the people who give us civilization keep so little for themselves? After all, if the intellectual and technological trend lines of 5,000 years ago had continued on a straight path, the people here would be ruling the world. Babylon or Baghdad would be what New York or Washington is now — the metropolis of power and riches, lord of the globe. But instead, according to a recent UN report, Iraq and other Arab states are clustered toward the bottom of almost every international ranking, from economic growth to literacy to life expectancy.
And so I’ve been asking Iraqis: How did this happen? How did you go from first in the world to almost last?
This is a subject of much debate and scholarship in the United States, as America engages the Arab world in such a profound manner. The answers I heard back home made sense to me. One answer was that the Arab Muslims had failed to separate religion and state, and so the theocrats were powerful enough to squash free inquiry and its handmaidens, science and technology. By contrast, in the West, the churches were restrained from restraining progress at the time of Galileo in the early 17th century.
But how do Iraqis answer that question for themselves? And what are they saying, at least the ones I’ve been talking to?
Some said that the Arabs fell behind because they were attacked by the Christians during the Crusades. Yes, that’s true. But the Arabs ultimately repelled the Crusaders and, besides, they never got anywhere near Iraq.
The Iraqis also argued that they were hurt because they were colonized by the West. Yes, that’s also true enough. The British and French planted their flags in this region in the 19th century. But what made that colonization possible? How was it that the Europeans became armed with such wonder-weapons as the revolver, the machine gun and the steamboat and thus were invincible to the Arabs, who couldn’t keep up?
Other Iraqis said that the Arabs were betrayed. By whom? By the Jews, they said, long before the creation of Israel. I knew that such conspiracy-theorizing could not be undone in a single conversation — or maybe even a single lifetime.
I often heard that the Arabs declined because they had fallen away from Islam. This is a common thought among fundamentalists of all religions — that the people suffer when they lack true faith. It might be recalled that the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson declared that 9/11 had been visited upon the United States because America had lost sight of the Bible’s preaching.
So far, at least, none of the Iraqis I’ve talked to has been willing to come to grips with my question — or, more precisely, given me an answer that I really agree with. They don’t have to make me happy, or course, but if they don’t grapple with the problems of development they will stay poor and weak.
Psychologists have a phrase that could be applied to the current Iraqi mindset: “External locus of control.’’ That’s the syndrome of people who believe that they have no personal accountability — that all their misfortunes are the result of the actions of others. The result is passivity and fatalism, the sapping of the sense that one’s own actions can make life better. And where there’s no will, there’s no way.
This is a deep problem for Iraq, of course. But now it’s America’s problem, too. Americans believe that healthy economies produce healthy democracies, and there are all sorts of plans for strengthening the economy of Iraq. But despotism has poisoned the well in Iraq for a long time and the residue will affect the chances that democracy will grow. As Americans launch their grand project of Iraqi uplift, they might pause here, in the dry ruins of Babylon. And we might realize that the first don’t always stay first, and that great empires have fallen on this very spot.
