What Went Wrong? Book Review
The book What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis is a historical summary of a short question about a very big problem. The author searches throughout the history of Islam's centuries-long relations with Europe to account for the disappearance of Islamic hegemony and self-confidence. The book identifies particular historical markers that could signify where things were turning south. The Islamic world, which once was the leader in wealth, arts and sciences, has fallen behind. How can a blooming and dominating world culture now be surpassed not only by the West, but most of the world? This is the problem that is the subject of this book. While it also entails the present situation with a direct reference to the 911 attacks, the author never actually answers his questions directly but gives a subtle examination that seems to be an attitudinal problem of Middle-Eastern Muslim countries via the West while avoiding the role of socio-economic factors or the influence of western colonialism in his explanations.As we read in the book, he describes Islam was once a proud and ancient civilization. It acclaimed the dignity and accomplishment of centuries of cultural sophistication. Indeed, it encompassed across a vast region of the globe where
The first is Muslims' treatment of women, emphasis on wearing the veil even though he never mentions that many women in Muslim nations wear veil as a personnel preference and not because they are forced to wear the veil. Such events should be accounted into his book to be serious spheres of influence to the formation of Muslim mind-set toward the West. a multiplicity of ethnic and regional cultures flourished during the Ottoman rule. He describes how the lessons of the battlefield were mostly negative for Muslims, despite their hesitant attempts to use Western techniques and that Muslims floundered when they sought to turn the tide while seeking wealth and political power by taking the Western approach. He concludes with a survey of the Muslims perusing the blame game by endlessly looking for the answer to the question, "Who did this to us?" He explains it is even reached to the length that even Muslims are being accounted into such a question. created a world civilization, polytechnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental" (Lewis, p. How and why are these political Islamist groups having growing influence in the Mid-east if that is the case?As final note, the book What Went Wrong? is useful if you want a brief introduction to the history and culture of the Ottoman Empire and the attitude of Muslims towards the West as time goes by. In Chapter three, he gives three examples of social and cultural obstacles. He also writes about the relations between religion and the state had such a differing history in Islam that modern Western notions such as separation of church and state, for example, also failed to provide Muslims with strategies for change. In the other hand, the French Revolution offered an opportunity to Muslims looking for answers in the West. Lewis explains how Islamic "social and cultural barriers" prevented Muslims from fully engaging with the powers of modernization so adversely threatening them. His examination of what went wrong and can be summarized by him writing that economic development and job creation, literacy, educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights which was once in the hands of a mighty Islamic civilization had indeed fallen low on all the standards that matter in the modern world (Lewis, p.
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