The West and the Middle East

Bernard Lewis

From Foreign Affairs, January/ February 1997

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Summary:  The Middle East has probably been debating Western modernity longer than anywhere else, as many try to become modern without becoming Western. Since the sixteenth century, when British ships and trading companies sailed in, the region has become all too aware of Western superiority on the battlefield and in the marketplace. Middle Easterners have busily adopted or rejected Western innovations, trying to catch up or blaming the West for their predicament, or both. Meanwhile, their glorious history and their forebears' contribution to Western civilization is often buried and forgotten. In every age the dominant civilization defines modernity and claims the credit. Once it was Islam, now it is the West.

Bernard Lewis is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His books include Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery and, most recently, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years.

IS MODERNITY WESTERN?

In 1593 an Ottoman historian, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English ambassador. He was not very interested in the ambassador, but he was much struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled. "A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul," he wrote. "It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns besides other weapons . . . It was a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded."

Why was this sophisticated Istanbul historian so interested in a ship coming from a barely heard of island at what was then the wrong end of Europe? Selaniki Mustafa Efendi's wonderment is not that difficult to understand if one recalls what was happening at the time. The Portuguese had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and were active in Eastern waters, to be followed not long after by the Dutch and the English. Portugal, one of the smallest and least populous of the nations of Western Europe, was able to establish a maritime and commercial paramountcy in South Asia which three great Muslim empires -- the Ottoman, the Persian, and the Mogul Empire in India -- were unable to prevent or reverse.

A hundred years later, as the seventeenth century drew to a close, the rulers of the Ottoman Empire -- the dominant power in the Middle East, the shield and sword of Islam pointing toward Europe -- were becoming aware of the countries beyond the northwest frontier as something other than an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief. For a century and a half, the Ottomans and their Christian enemies had been locked in bloody stalemate in Central Europe. This was broken by the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, which ended in failure and retreat. During that war, Ottoman forces for the first time suffered major reverses on the field of battle; the peace treaty of 1699 was the first a victorious enemy imposed on the Ottomans.

The West was now seen in a new light -- as a source of danger and therefore, possibly, of inspiration. Ottoman military commanders soon realized that there were some things they had to adopt, adapt, copy, borrow, beg, buy, or steal in order to keep up with Western armies; weapons, certainly, and perhaps some other devices. The first lessons of civilizational change are most effectively and perspicuously administered on the battlefield. The others follow somewhat later, and often in a more ambiguous form.

What were the Ottoman reformers and other Muslim Middle Eastern rulers who followed their example looking for? What elements of Western modernity did they accept, and to what extent? In the Middle East the debate about this process and the decisions the process requires has been going on for almost three centuries, probably longer than in any other part of the non-Western world.

In his book Among the Believers, V.S. Naipaul observes that many present-day ...

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