The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [29]
Lewis’s position is unambiguous. The subtitle of his book, The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, is revealing. The people who abandoned Islamic civilization have not fully experienced the intrusive, painful but ultimately liberating process of modernization as their neighbors and rivals in the Christian West have. Lewis warns that a downward spiral of hatred and resentment, anger and self-pity, poverty and oppression can result from rejecting modernity, but he hopes that Muslims will use their talents and energy to achieve a common goal, so that one day Islamic nations may become an important civilization again.
In this respect Lewis is more optimistic than Pryce-Jones. Lewis demands that Muslims relinquish their most substantial values, the things they pass on to their children including the patriarchal family structure and the mind-set that is obsessed with honor and group self-image. But, as Pryce-Jones says, these are the very characteristics that define the tribe, precisely the attributes that make it such a tightly closed community. These tribal values, and the sense of identity that accompanies them, are so deeply ingrained that the people have become blind to their disastrous long-term effects. The total acceptance of these values is perpetuated by the endlessly repeated processes, that legitimized premodern concepts with texts from the Koran. The ideas and traditions of Muhammad’s tribal society are adopted straight into the industrial and urban society of today, without any consideration for their historical context.
The historian Karen Armstrong believes that in the past Muslims have successfully demonstrated they can separate reason from religion. After all, Muslims once had great philosophers and created a world civilization. She feels that the problem is not so much rooted in Muslims themselves, and their religion, as in the West’s attitude toward Muslim countries. Imperialism and the supremacy of the United States as a trading power have deprived Muslims of the opportunity to come to grips with their own problems.
Lewis is more skeptical. He agrees that from the nineteenth century onward the British and French came to dominate the Islamic people both politically and economically. This brought about some fundamental cultural changes, such as the migration to cities in the twentieth century. Neither does he dispute that this development transformed the lives of Muslims, in both a positive and a negative sense. He acknowledges that the Americans have strategic interests to protect in the region (securing the stability of their oil supply). Yet, according to Lewis, none of this is the real cause of the lack of progress in Islamic countries. Rather, these are the consequences, just as the Mongolian invasion during the thirteenth century was possible only because the Islamic empire was suffering from internal weakness at the time.
Both Lewis and Pryce-Jones believe that the main reason for the decline lies in the inability of Muslims to set up democratic institutions that safeguard the right to individual freedom, put the relative values of scientific knowledge and religious wisdom into perspective (scientific research is often brought to a halt when it is perceived as a threat to religious dogmas), and undo the social and psychological consequences of the subjugation of