Expert Discusses Middle East’s Problems

The Middle East must focus on fixing its problems rather than blaming them on other countries, said historian Bernard Lewis yesterday night at the Kennedy School of Government’s ARCO Forum.

More than 250 people crowded the hall to listen to Lewis, a professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton.

For years a leading academic on the Middle East, Lewis won a wider audience for his expertise after Sept. 11.

And he found himself on best-seller lists across the country with What Went Wrong, a book that looks at how the Middle East has responded to increasing Western dominance over the past several centuries.

Though he did not specify what he felt the region’s problems are, Lewis said the area’s misplaced focus on culpability has caused its fall as a leader in the international arena.

“To claim the depressed state of Islam is a result of [any particular country or policy] is an absurdity,” Lewis said.

Lewis said the Middle East must choose one of two options—modernization and secularism or a return to tradition. He said both were plausible options.

He pointed to Turkey and Iran as examples. Turkey, he said, is pursuing policies of secularism and modernization, in an attempt to emulate Western success.

In contrast, he said, Iran has chosen traditionalism, returning to Islam and creating the “functional equivalent of a papacy.”

“Time will show which of them will succeed,” Lewis said.

But Lewis cautioned that if the region chooses to emulate the West, it must overcome cultural barriers.

A difference in fundamental values makes it difficult to simply transfer Western concepts into an Islamic context, he said.

For example, he said, Arabic has no word for secularism because Islam has no concept of the separation of church and state. But this idea is a fundamental principle of the West.

“The separation of church and state is a Christian answer to a Christian dilemma,” Lewis said.

He also drew a parallel between religious differences and political differences.

Islam is incompatible with Christianity and Judaism, he said, just as Middle Eastern political theory differs from Western theory.

“In Western thought, the converse of tyranny is freedom. In Muslim thought, the converse of tyranny is justice,” Lewis said.

One audience member criticized Lewis, saying that placing sole responsibility on the Middle East neglected to take into account the detrimental effects of various Western policies toward the region.

But Lewis dismissed this point as “nonsense.”

According to Lewis, blaming others for the condition of the Middle East leads to a pointless spiral of conspiracy theories.

The talk, a 2002 Gustav Pollock Lecture in Research and Government, was co-sponsored by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Institute of Politics.