Book Review: What Went Wrong?

Book Review: What Went Wrong?

“Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response,” New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. This book was written by Bernard Lewis in 2002 and is considered as a secondary source.

'What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response' is a concise and timely survey of how Islamic civilization fell from worldwide leadership in almost every frontier of human knowledge five or six centuries ago to a "poor, weak, and ignorant" backwater that is today dominated by "shabby tyrannies ... modern only in their apparatus of repression and terror." This book is a very interesting account of the Muslim rule and how they came to power. Lewis has provided the readers with an excellent in-depth analysis of that era.

Lewis begins his book as a reminder that during the first thousand years after the rise of Islam, when Europe was plunged into darkness of the Middle Ages, the Muslim world was a powerful multi-ethnic, multicultural, intercontinental civilization, which flourished trade, science and art. Unsurpassed military strength enabled them to expand the boundaries of the impact on all continents, adjacent to its cradle - the Arabian Peninsula. Islam spread and stuck in Asia and North Africa. In the history of much of Europe, including Slavic Russia, the Balkans, Spain, Portugal, part of France, Sicily, were also long periods of Muslim. Muslims have made successful forays into the eternal city of Rome - a symbol of Western civilization, and even old Vienna twice suffered a long siege of the Muslim.

It would be a mistake to think that the Muslim invaders at that time were a dark barbaric force. On the contrary, they had the most developed economy, connected with the world wide and extensive distribution network. The Muslim civilization had cultural heritage of the ancient Middle East, Persia and Greece, while adopting the most important modern innovation, above all - the production and use of paper from China and decimal positional number system of India. No less significant were the contribution of Muslims to science, especially in cartography, geography, geometry and astronomy. In particular, they developed a precise and elegant method for the determination of space and time.

According to Lewis, the chief obstacle to the revival of the Islamic world at the present stage is the failure of the principle of separation of church and state. Historically, the fusion of religious and state authority comes from the prophet Mohammed, which, unlike the Jewish and Christian teachers, was a successful conqueror and ruler of his promised land. The tradition of merging church and state leads to a strong centralization of power and prevents the development of individual freedom. As a result, all attempts to import Western - constitutional, parliamentary - a form of government as long as that cause severe environmental resistance. To one of the unpleasant consequences of European influence is, according to Lewis, antisemitism and the Arab perception of Jews as the perpetrators of all ...