What Went Wrong
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response is a book by Bernard Lewis released in January 2002, shortly after the September 11 terrorist attack, but written shortly before. The nucleus of this book appeared as an article published in The Atlantic Monthly in January 2002.
The book's thesis is that throughout recent history, specifically beginning with the failure of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, the Islamic world has failed to modernize or to keep pace with the Western world in a variety of respects, and that this failure has been seen by many within the Islamic world as having allowed Western powers to acquire a disastrous position of dominance over those regions.
Blurb
For centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement--the foremost military and economic power in the world, the leader in the arts and sciences of civilization. Christian Europe was seen as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn or to fear. And then everything changed. The West won victory after victory, first on the battlefield and then in the marketplace. In this volume, Bernard Lewis, a renowned authority on Islamic affairs, examines the anguished reaction of the Islamic world as it tried to make sense of how it had been overtaken, overshadowed, and dominated by the West. In a fascinating portrait of a culture in turmoil, Lewis shows how the Middle East turned its attention to understanding European weaponry, industry, government, education, and culture. In this landmark volume, an authority on the Middle East examines the anguished reaction of the Islamic world as it tries to understand why things have changed, how they have been overtaken, overshadowed, and to an increasing extent dominated by the West. 15 illustrations. Map.
Table of contents
Preface to the hardcover edition
Introduction
Chap. 1. The lessons of the battlefield
Chap. 2. The quest for wealth and power
Chap. 3. Social and cultural barriers
Chap. 4. Modernization and social equality
Chap. 5. Secularism and the civil society
Chap. 6. Time, space, and modernity
Chap. 7. Aspects of cultural change
Conclusion
Author's note
Afterword
Notes
Index.
See also
