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http://homepage.tinet.ie/~odyssey/Quotes/History/Bernard_Lewis.html

BERNARD LEWIS QUOTES

"We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of
issues and policies and the governments that pursue them... This is no less than
a clash of civilisations, the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of
an ancient rival against our Judaeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and
the worldwide expansion of both."

Bernard Lewis is professor emeritus at Princeton University and
acknowledged by many as the West's leading expert on the Middle East. Professor
Lewis is, almost incredibly, still writing excellent books in his mid-80s.

Islam is one of the world's great religions. It has given dignity and
meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught men of different races to
live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side
in reasonable tolerance. It has inspired a great civilisation in which others
besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievements,
enriched the whole world. But Islam, like other religions, has also known
periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence.
It is our misfortune that we have to confront part of the Muslim world while it
is going through such a period, and when most, though by no means all, of that
hatred is directed against us.

- from "The Crisis of Islam"

The question which people have been asking all the time is I think the wrong
question. The question people are asking is why do they hate us? That's the
wrong question. They've been hating us for a long time. In a sense, they've been
hating us for centuries, and it's very natural that they should. You have this
millennial rivalry between two world religions, and now, from their point of
view, the wrong one seems to be winning. And more generally, I mean, you can't
be rich, strong, successful and loved, particularly by those who are not rich,
not strong and not successful. So the hatred is something
almost axiomatic. The question which we should be asking is why do
they neither fear nor respect us?

What went wrong? For a long time people in the Islamic world, especially but not
exclusively in the Middle East, have been asking this question.

For centuries the world view and self-view of Muslims seemed well
grounded. Islam represented the greatest military power on earth - its armies,
at the very same time, were invading Europe and Africa, India and China. It was
the foremost economic power in the world, trading in a wide range of commodities
through a far-flung network of commerce and communications in
Asia, Europe, and Africa; importing slaves and gold from Africa, slaves and wool
from Europe, and exchanging a variety of foodstuffs, materials, and manufactures
with the civilized countries of Asia. It had achieved the highest level so far
in human history in the arts and sciences of civilization. Inheriting the
knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of
Greece, and of Persia, it added to them new and important innovations
from outside, such as use and manufacture of paper from China and decimal
positional numbering from India. It is difficult to imagine modern literature or
science without one or the other.

It was in the Islamic Middle East that Indian numbers were for the
first time incorporated in the inherited body of mathematical learning. From the
Middle East they were transmitted to the West, where they are still known as
Arabic numerals, honoring not those who invented them but those who first
brought them to Europe. To this rich inheritance scholars and scientists in the
Islamic world added an immensely important contribution through their own
observations, experiments, and ideas. In most of the arts and sciences of
civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil and in a sense a dependent of the
Islamic world, relying on Arabic versions even for many otherwise unknown Greek
works.

The impotence of the Islamic world confronted with Europe was brought
home in dramatic form in 1798, when a French expeditionary force commanded by a
young general called Napoleon Bonaparte invaded, occupied and governed Egypt.
The lesson was harsh and clear - even a small European force could invade one of
the heartlands of the Islamic empire and do so with impunity.

The second lesson came a few years later, when the French were forced
to leave - not by the Egyptians nor by their Turkish suzerains, but by a
squadron of the Royal Navy commanded by a young admiral called Horatio Nelson.
This lesson too was clear; not only could a European power come and act at will,
but only another European power could get them out.

When things go wrong in a society, in a way and to a degree that can
no longer be denied or concealed, there are various questions that one can ask.
A common one, particularly in continental Europe yesterday and in the Middle
East today, is: "Who did this to us?" The answer to a question thus formulated
is usually to place the blame on external or domestic scapegoats -
foreigners abroad or minorities at home. The Ottomans, faced with the
major crisis in their history, asked a different question: "What did we do
wrong?" The debate on these two questions began in Turkey immediately after the
signing of the Treaty of Carlowitz; it resumed with a new urgency after Küçük
Kaynarca. In a sense it is still going on today.

A question often asked by the memorialists was: 'Why is it that in
the past we were always able to catch up with the new devices of the infidels,
and now we are no longer able to do so?' Interestingly, for a long time they did
not ask why it was always the infidels who introduced the new devices.

With the crumbling of the language barrier direct observation of the
West was now possible, and an increased recognition and more intimate awareness
of European wealth and strength. The question now was more specific - what is
the source of this wealth and strength, the talisman of western success?
Traditional answers to such a question would have been in religious
terms. All problems are so to speak ultimately religious, and all
final answers are therefore religious. The final answers given by traditional
writers to the older formulation of the question were always 'let us go back to
our roots, to the good old ways, to the true faith, to the word of God.' With
that of course there was always the assumption that if things are
going badly, we are being punished by God for having abandoned the
true path. That argument loses cogency when it is the infidels who are
benefiting from the change.

Middle Easterners found it difficult to consider what we might call
civilizational or cultural answers to this question. To preach a return to
authentic, pristine Islam was one thing; to seek the answer in Christian ways or
ideas was another - and, according to the notions of the time, self-evidently
absurd. Muslims were accustomed to regard Christianity as an earlier, corrupted
version of the true faith of which Islam was the final
perfection. One does not go forward by going backward.

There must therefore be some circumstance other than religion or
culture, which is part of religion, to account for the otherwise unaccountable
superiority achieved by the Western world.

For the whole of the 19th and most of the 20th century the search for
the hidden talisman concentrated on two aspects of the West - economics and
politics, or to put it differently, wealth and power.

Unlike the rising powers of Asia, most of which started from a lower
economic base than the Middle East, the countries in the region still lag behind
in investment, job creation, productivity, and therefore in exports and incomes.
According to a World Bank estimate, the total exports of the Arab world other
than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, a country of five
million inhabitants.

For a long time, 'freedom' and 'independence' were used as virtually
synonymous terms. More recent experience has demonstrated that they are very
different, and may even, in certain situations, be mutually exclusive.

The West European empires, by the very nature of the culture, the
institutions, even the languages that they brought with them and imposed on
their colonial subjects, demonstrated the ultimate incompatibility of democracy
and empire, and sealed the doom of their own dominion. They taught their
subjects English, French and Dutch because they needed clerks in their
offices and counting houses. But once these subjects had mastered a
Western European language, as did increasing numbers of Muslims in
Western-dominated Asia and Africa, they found a new world open to them, full of
new and dangerous ideas such as political freedom and national sovereignty and
responsible government by the consent of the governed. These ideas powerfully
affected the subjects and masters of the Western empires, making the one
unwilling to accept, the other, to impose, an old-style autocratic domination.

"The main reason for our backwardness as compared with the West is the way we
treat our women; thereby depriving ourselves of the energies and talents of half
the population."
- Nama Kamal, 1868

In a series of speeches delivered in the early Twenties, Kemal Ataturk, the
founder of the Turkish Republic, argued eloquently for the full emancipation of
women in the Turkish state and society. Our most urgent pressing task, he
repeatedly told his people, is to catch up with the modern world. We shall not
catch up with the modern world if we only modernize half the population.

Westerners tend naturally to assume that the emancipation of women is
part of liberalization, and that women will consequently fare better in liberal
than in autocratic regimes. Such an assumption would be false, and often the
reverse is true.

For men to wear Western clothes, it would seem, is modernization; for women to
wear them is Westernization, to be welcomed or punished accordingly.

They were willing enough to accept the products of infidel science in
warfare and medicine, where they could make the difference between victory and
defeat, between life and death, between life and death. But the underlying
philosophy and the sociopolitical context of these scientific achievements
proved more difficult to accept or even to recognize.

Secularism in the modern political meaning - the idea that religion
and political authority, church and state are different and can or should be
separated - is, in a profound sense, Christian.

The term 'secularism' appears to have been first used in English
toward the middle of the 19th century, with a primarily ideological meaning. As
first used, it denoted the doctrine that morality should be based on rational
considerations regarding human well-being in this world, to the exclusion of
considerations relating to God or the afterlife.

The absence of a native secularism in Islam, and the widespread Muslim rejection
of an imported secularism inspired by Christian example, may be attributed to
certain profound differences of belief and experience in the two cultures. The
first, and in many ways the most profound difference, from which all others
follow, can be seen in the contrasting foundation myths - and I use this
expression without intending any disrespect - of Islam, Christianity, and
Judaism. The children of Israel fled from bondage, and wandered for 40 years in
the wilderness before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land. Their
leader Moses had only a glimpse, and was not himself permitted to enter. Jesus
was humiliated and crucified, and his followers suffered persecution and
martyrdom for centuries, before they were finally able to win over the ruler,
and to adapt the state, its language, and its institutions to their purpose.
Muhammad achieved victory and triumph in his own lifetime.

He conquered his promised land, and created his own state, of which
he himself was supreme sovereign. As such, he promulgated laws, dispensed
justice, levied taxes, raised armies, made war, and made peace. In a word, he
ruled, and the story of his decisions and actions as ruler is sanctified in
Muslim scripture and amplified in Muslim tradition.

In the more generally accepted interpretation of the term 'civil
society', civil is opposed, not to religious or to military authority, but to
authority as such. In this sense, the civil society is that part of society,
between the family and the state, in which the mainsprings of association,
initiative, and action are voluntary, determined by opinion or interest or
other personal choice, and distinct from - though they may be influenced by -
the loyalty owed by birth and the obedience imposed by force.

The practice of team sports like football and basketball and the rest
is purely Western, mostly English in origin. It was the English who invented
football and its analogue - parliamentary politics. There are remarkable
resemblances between the two and both obviously come from the same national
genius. The adoption of competitive team games has so far been more successful
in the Middle East than the adoption of parliamentary government.

In every era of human history, modernity, or some equivalent term has
meant the ways, norms, and standards of the dominant and expanding civilization.
Every dominant civilization has imposed its own modernity in its prime. Modern
Western civilization is the first to embrace the whole planet. Today, for the
time being, the dominant civilization is Western, and Western standards
therefore define modernity.

Western civilization incorporates many previous modernities - that is
to say, it is enriched by the contributions and influences of other cultures
that preceded it in leadership. It will itself bequeath a Western cultural
legacy to other cultures yet to come.

In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear in
the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that things had indeed
gone badly wrong. Compared with its millennial rival, Christendom, the world of
Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant. In the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the primacy and therefore the dominance of the West was
clear for all to see, invading the Muslim in every aspect of his public and -
more painfully - even his private life.

Particularly the second half of the century brought further humiliations - the
awareness that they were no longer even the first among the followers, but were
falling ever further back in the lengthening line of eager and more successful
Westernizers, notably in East Asia. The rise of Japan had been an encouragement,
but also a reproach.

'Who did this to us?' is of course a common human response when
things are going badly.

The attempt to transfer the guilt to America has won considerable
support, but remains unconvincing. Anglo-French rule and American influence,
like the Mongol invasions, were a consequence, not a cause, of the inner
weakness of Middle-Eastern states and societies.

With rare exceptions, where hostile stereotypes of the Jew existed in
Islamic tradition, they tended to be contemptuous and dismissive rather than
suspicious and obsessive. This made the events of 1948 - the failure of five
Arab states and armies to prevent half a million Jews from establishing a state
in the debris of the British Mandate for Palestine - all the more of a
shock. As some writers at the time observed, ot was bad enough to be defeated by
the great imperial powers of the West; to suffer the same fate at the hands of a
contemptible gang of Jews was an intolerable humiliation. Anti-Semitism and its
demonized picture of the Jew as a scheming, evil monster provided a
soothing answer.

Some of the solutions that once commanded passionate support have been
discarded. The two dominant movements in the 20th century were socialism and
nationalism. Both have been discredited, the first by its failure, the second by
its success and consequent exposure as ineffective.

The question 'Who did this to us?' has led only to neurotic fantasies
and conspiracy theories. The other question - 'What did we do wrong?' - has led
naturally to a second question: 'How do we put it right?' In that question, and
in the various answers that are being found, lie the best hopes for the future.

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 a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and
oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination.

THE CRISIS OF ISLAM

Imagine if the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nation obtained total control of
Texas and had at its disposal all the oil revenues, and used this money to
establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over Christendom
peddling their particular brand of Christianity. This is what the Saudis have
done with Wahhabism. The oil money has enabled them to spread this fanatical,
destructive form of Islam all over the Muslim world and among Muslims in the
west. Without oil and the creation of the Saudi kingdom, Wahhabism would have
remained a lunatic fringe in a marginal country.

"The American Revolution was fought not by Native American nationalists but by
British settlers, and, far from being a victory against colonialism, it
represented colonialism's ultimate triumph – the English in North America
succeeded in colonizing the land so thoroughly that they no longer needed the
support of the mother country.

The Soviet Union played a significant role in procuring the majority
by which the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to establish a Jewish
state in Palestine, and then gave Israel immediate dejure recognition. The
United States, however, gave only de-facto recognition. More important, the
American government maintained a partial arms embargo on Israel, while
Czechoslovakia, at Moscow's direction, immediately sent a supply of weaponry,
which enabled the new state to survive the attempts to strangle it at birth. As
late as the war of 1967, Israel still re lied for its arms on European, mainly
French, suppliers, not on the United States.

Today, it is often forgotten that the strategic relationship between
the United States and Israel was a consequence, not a cause, of Soviet
penetration.

There is some justice in one charge that is frequently levelled
against the United States: Middle Easterners increasingly complain that the
United States judges them by different and lower standards than it does
Europeans and Americans, both in what is expected of them and in what they may
expect–in terms of their financial well being and their political freedom. They
assert that Western spokesmen repeatedly overlook or even defend actions and
support rulers that they would not tolerate in their own countries.

If bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and
his leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for
America. Sooner or later, Al Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other
neighbors of Islam – Russia, China, India – who may prove less squeamish than
the Americans in using their power against Muslims and their sanctities. If bin
Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future
awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam."

- from "The Revolt of Islam", an article in the New Yorker magazine

"Resentment of America as the sole surviving superpower, capable of
unilateral political or military action when and where it chooses, is normal
enough, and is not limited to the Middle East. There as elsewhere, the fear and
envy of America are based less on American actions than on a kind of
projection-the expectation that America will act as they themselves would act if
they possessed America's power.

Generally speaking, popular good will towards the United States is in
inverse proportion to the policies of their governments. In countries like Saudi
Arabia and Egypt, with governments seen as American allies, the popular mood is
violently anti-American, and it is surely significant that the
majority of known hijackers and terrorists come from these countries. In Iran
and Iraq, with governments seen as anti-American, public opinion is
pro-American.

In time, the advance of science and technology, which first made oil
necessary, will make it obsolete, and replace it with cleaner, cheaper, and more
accessible sources of energy. When that happens, oil wealth will no longer be
available to sustain tyranny at home and finance terror abroad, and the outside
world will no doubt view the struggles and upheavals of the Middle
East with the same calm detachment - or as some might put it, callous
indifference - as it now views the civil wars in Somalia and Sierra Leone.

The range of American policy options in the region is being reduced
to two alternatives, both disagreeable: Get tough or get out."

- from "American Imperialism", National Review.

"Most of North America's borders are straight lines. That's
understandable because they were drawn with pencils and rulers on
maps. The borders of Europe are different. They are not straight
lines. They are the result of a thousand years of struggle."

"You know, there's this old American dictum: no taxation without
representation. What is sometimes overlooked is that the
converse is also true: no representation without taxation. And with
our revenues, they didn't need taxes; therefore, they didn't need assemblies to
levy taxes. And they were made independent of public opinion in their own
countries with this untold wealth accruing from oil revenues. This greatly
strengthened the power of autocratic governments, far greater than it had ever
been in the past. Now if traditional Islamic government is authoritarian, but it
is not dictatorial or despotic, it is governed under certain rules and
so on.

In modern times, the power of the ruler has been vastly augmented by
these huge revenues so that he doesn't need public support or public approval of
his taxes. It has also been increased by all kinds of modern devices for
surveillance and repression so that any tin pot dictator today wields far
greater powers than were ever wielded by Suleyman the Magnificent or
Harun al-Rashid or any of the legendary rulers of the Islamic past."

"Tolerance is, of course, an extremely intolerant idea, because it
means 'I am the boss: I will allow you some, though not all, of the rights I
enjoy as long as you behave yourself according to standards that I shall
determine.' That, I think, is a fair definition of religious tolerance as it is
normally understood and applied."

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