A fact is like a sack — it won’t stand till you’ve put something into it.”
– Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936): Six Characters in Search of an Author
Every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of facts. So does a historian looking back into the facts of history. So we must study the historian before we study the facts because his selection might determine what we might believe happened in history. Bernard Lewis, the prolific Princeton Orientalist, who is best known as the Middle East (West Asia and North Africa) specialist in America, has come with Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East (OUP, America, $24.95) — a follow-up to his earlier work, What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle East Response (2002), which coincided beautifully with the September 11 attacks. As he explained in his preface, the book was related to the attacks, “explaining not what happened and what followed, but what went wrong — the longer sequence and larger pattern of events, ideas, and attitudes that preceded and in some measure produced them”.
Mr Lewis does much the same here with a focus on the failure of Muslims to adapt their religion and tradition to present requirements, unlike their age-old Christian rivals who embraced modernity in its entirety. In this book, he has recycled his articles and lectures that feature “the clash of civilisations” between seemingly “incompatible entities” called Islam and the “West”. What Mr Lewis tells his audiences is this. Islam, conflated with the Arab-Muslim world, has no functioning democracy or successful industrial economies. Besides, Islam is not just a religion “but a complete system of identity, loyalty, and authority that provides Muslims with the most appealing and convincing answers to their problems”.
In the Western world, he says, the basic unit of human organisation is the nation which is subdivided in various ways, one of which is religion. Muslims, however, he says, tend to see not a nation subdivided into religious groups, but a religion subdivided into nations. There were historical reasons for this, one of which is that most of the nation states that make up the modern Middle East were relatively new creations, left over from British and French imperialism that followed the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. As a historian, Mr Lewis has drawn heavily from history to explain why the two cannot meet. But you need to read the nitty-gritty of his arguments and decide which are plausible.
What is central to his argument is this statement on democracy in the Middle East: “What is entirely lacking in the Middle Eastern political tradition is representation of what goes with it — the idea that people elect others to represent them, that these others meet in some sort of corporate body, and that the corporate body deliberates, conducts discussions, and most important of all, reaches decisions that have binding force… In Roman law and in most of the European systems derived from it or influenced by it, there is such a thing as a legal person, a corporation, an abstraction that nevertheless functions as a legal person.”
It is this absence, which he says is derived from Islamic Sharia law that has no concept of a legal personality, that goes to the heart of the “democratic deficit” of many Middle Eastern politics, where family, tribe or sects tend to subvert the authority of public institutions at the expense of civil society. Thus, real power gravitates towards the armed forces guided by the exigencies of military logic rather than the ebb and flow of democratic politics.
In the long run, forces that brought down the Mubarak regime and shook others in the region would have come to grips with the power of the military with its networks of properties and other vested interests. Ever since the Anglo-French stranglehold was weakened, the institutions of civil society have been corroded by the top-down military-industrial complex that has left little space for democratic structures. Mr Lewis rightly argues that democracy can only flourish if institutions that are accountable to civil society are allowed to develop; their absence in Muslim and Middle East societies has led to the present crisis. But, Tunisia, Egypt and other countries in the region have demonstrated that it is the internal forces, facilitated by globalised information technologies, that can bring about any meaningful change.
Mr Lewis, however, misses one important factor that has shaped the Middle East. This is the unique longevity and intensity of the western imperial grip on the region over the past century. From Morocco to Egypt, colonial control of North Africa was divided between France, Italy and Britain before the First World War, while the Gulf became a series of British protectorates. Formal decolonisation was accompanied by virtually uninterrupted sequence of imperial wars and interventions in the post-colonial period. It is this colonial experience that has shaped these societies and to a large extent stifled the growth of democratic institutions.