The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years
by Bernard Lewis
Scribner. 433 pp. $30.00

This “brief history of the last 2,000 years,” by the 20th century’s preeminent historian of the Islamic world, is written with its author’s customary wit and gravity, sympathy and objectivity, breadth and precision. As in all his many works, Bernard Lewis is here neither an old-fashioned chronicler nor a with-it historical revisionist but rather a master distiller, one who combines a phenomenal range of knowledge with a humane temperament and a powerfully synthesizing mind.

In 400 pages, drawing upon a full palette of primary material from every imaginable source, The Middle East traces the political, economic, religious, social, cultural, and technological currents that flowed across a broad swath of territory from Morocco to the Central Asian steppes. Today’s Middle East, in Lewis’s telling, emerged from a great clash between two ancient civilizations—Persia and Byzantium. Centuries of struggle left both of these vulnerable to a third force—Islam—which burst onto the scene in the 7th century C.E. from a remote corner of Arabia. For the next 1,000 years, Islam steadily grew, swallowing up Persia, enfeebling Byzantium, becoming the basis of a powerful civilization itself, and then, exhausted and under pressure from the West, contracting over the next 400 years.

In evaluating Islam’s spectacular rise, Lewis underscores the simplicity and effectiveness of the five “positive obligations” by which adherents of the faith were and are bound. Among them is jihad. This word translates literally as “striving,” as in the Quran’s “striving in the path of God.” But as Lewis shows, in Islam’s holy texts it is interpreted primarily in martial terms—with profound historical consequences:

Between the Muslim state and its infidel neighbors there was a perpetual and obligatory state of war which would only end with the inevitable triumph of the true faith over unbelief and the entry of the whole world into the house of Islam.

While this suggests a creed that was uniform over time and place, Lewis emphasizes that Islam was and remains anything but static. Rather, he notes, it is a living faith that, at least in the pre-modern period, found a way to accommodate the customs and contributions of peoples it conquered or was conquered by. Although jihad was essential to Islam’s territorial expansion, the ability to assimilate and absorb was no less important in the religion’s remarkable success, with Jewish and Christian minorities playing a special role as conveyors of innovation. When the ability to absorb declined, so, as a direct consequence, did Islamic civilization itself.

Lewis thus traces the downfall of the Muslim world’s power and prestige to the accession of conservative dynasts who attempted to seal the faith off from change—spurning even such technological achievements of the Europeans as the printing press, and thereby causing the cultural-political-military balance of power to tilt away from Islam. In the end, a civilization committed to “an obligatory state of war” was forced to rely for its political survival on the sufferance of an imperial Europe committed to a very different ethos. And this dependence, as Lewis shows, created in turn a seething and still unappeased resentment of the West.

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Resentment of a superior West is one of the reasons Lewis is hardly cheerful about the future of the Middle East. Though he strikes a note of cautious optimism with regard to the half-century of Arab-Israeli conflict, he also reminds us that that conflict is just one of many in the wider Middle East, a place that today is “more dangerous” than ever before.

One thing that has added to the danger and created a climate of uncertainty is the changing internal role played by national armies. Whereas in some countries (e.g., Turkey) the military has bolstered the forces of democracy, elsewhere (as in Sudan) military elites have been encouraging the most aggressive sort of religious fundamentalism. Another element is that where-as Islam was once laid low by its refusal to accept modern technology, today modern technology, including arms and communications equipment, is widely dispersed. “The pettiest of modern dictators has greater control,” Lewis writes, “than even the mightiest of Arab caliphs, Persian shahs, and Turkish sultans.”

In the end, Lewis concludes, a question mark hangs over the Middle East. The Soviet collapse has led to the emergence of an entire constellation of new states in the Caucasus and Central Asia, some wedged between Turkey and Iran, with regional consequences that cannot be foreseen. (One key subtheme of Lewis’s historical account is the longstanding triangular struggle for paramountcy within the Middle East among Turkey, Persia, and the Arabs.) At the same time, however, the end of the cold war has diminished the entire area’s strategic importance. Though outside powers will undoubtedly continue to intervene whenever their energy supplies are put at risk, they will not, as in the heyday of European imperialism, attempt to impose their will and their way of life. The Islamic countries of the region may thus, for the first time in centuries, be left to solve their internal problems on their own.

And how will they solve them? Will they, Lewis asks, “unite for peace,” “unite for jihad,” or “go the way of Yugoslavia and Somalia” and disintegrate? Historians are not called upon to be prophets, but this magisterial tour of 2,000 years, nothing if not realistic, suggests a parlous future for a region cursed with more than its share of authoritarian regimes.

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During different phases of his long professional life—he is now over eighty—Bernard Lewis has been subjected to criticism of one stripe or another. Most egregiously of all, he has been accused, by Edward Said and others, of “Orientalism,” which they define as a professional condescension toward Muslims but by which they really appear to mean a failure to advocate their various causes, whether Islamic revivalism or Palestinian nationalism. In The Middle East, as in the immensely rich chain of essays and books on every facet of Islamic history that has preceded and led up to it, Lewis demonstrates once again that he does indeed fail the test of ideological advocacy—but also that the cause of frank and dispassionate scholarship, as well as of vivid historical writing, has had in our day no steadier or more exemplary champion.

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