Lewis apparently confuses the practice of rulers consulting with advisers with democratic government. In fact, authoritarian governments were always the rule in the Islamic world, and there was no remotely democratic government until the establishment of modern secular Turkey in the 1920s -- and that society may not be long for this world.
This is now the second time Bernard Lewis has attributed a feature of modern Islamic culture to European influence. He did it at the beginning of the year with antisemitism, and now with authoritarianism. In the case of antisemitism, he never dealt with the virulent antisemitism of the Qur'an (see, for example, this IslamOnline article) or Islamic tradition. In this present case, he likewises glosses over centuries of Islamic history -- history that he more than anyone else has opened for modern Westerners -- to make an ahistorical and inaccurate claim.
Whenever we have run material critical of Bernard Lewis in the past, people have written in saying, "How dare you criticize Bernard Lewis? Your scholarship will never amount to a hundredth of what he has done," and the like. And to that I say: Granted. Bernard Lewis is hundreds of times greater than I am. He is a world-class historian and scholar. His achievements are undeniable. But with all respect, he is not infallible, and one need not have any more credentials than the facts of the case in order to question his conclusions. And here, as with Islamic antisemitism, the facts of the case are not with Bernard Lewis, and all his lifetime achievement does not change that.
Here, Andrew Bostom points us toward some earlier scholars who are well aware of those facts, and whose conclusions differed sharply from that of Lewis. "Another 'Just So' Story?," by Andrew G. Bostom in The American Thinker:
Speaking at a December 10-11, 2007 Rome Conference entitled, "Fighting for Democracy in the Islamic World," renowned historian Bernard Lewis intoned,"The authoritarianism present in the Middle East region is not part of the Arab and Muslim tradition, but it has been imported from Europe...."Lewis, according to the account of his lecture in Adnkronos International, then offered as putatively convincing support for his thesis the non-sequitur observation that during the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan (presumably, in the course of making decisions) consulted all the dignitaries, and when he ascended the throne he would greet the crowds, uttering "Allah is greater than you are."
This ahistorical contention, accompanied by an equally vacuous example of Ottoman era "proof," seems like a desynchronized "Spy Versus Spy" Mad Magazine segment with Lewis playing the role of both "Department of Joke and Dagger" agents, simultaneously, when juxtaposed to Lewis' own entry on hurriyya-Arabic for freedom-which appears in the venerable Encyclopedia of Islam.
Hurriyya and the uniquely Western concept of freedom are completely at odds. Hurriyya "freedom" - as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the lionized "Greatest Sufi Master", expressed it - "being perfect slavery." And this conception is not merely confined to the Sufis' perhaps metaphorical understanding of the relationship between Allah the "master" and his human "slaves."
The late American scholar of Islam, Franz Rosenthal (d. 2003), who wrote the first part of the Encyclopedia of Islam entry on hurriyya, analyzed its larger context in Muslim society. He notes the historical absence of hurriyya as "...a fundamental political concept that could have served as a rallying cry for great causes."
An individual Muslim, "...was expected to consider subordination of his own freedom to the beliefs, morality and customs of the group as the only proper course of behavior..."
Thus politically, Rosenthal concludes,
"...the individual was not expected to exercise any free choice as to how he wished to be governed...In general, ...governmental authority admitted of no participation of the individual as such, who therefore did not possess any real freedom vis a vis it."[...]
A decade later (in 1950), G.H. Bousquet (d. 1978), one of the most widely acclaimed 20th century scholars of Islamic Law, confirmed Pribichevich's conclusions, unfettered by our current mind numbing, politically correct cultural relativism, which appears to have afflicted even Mr. Lewis:
"Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of fiqh [jurisprudence], to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer... the study of Muhammadan Law (dry and forbidding though it may appear)... is of great importance to the world of today."And Ibn Warraq, in a brilliant, dispassionate contemporary analysis, has described 14 characteristics of "Ur Fascism" as enumerated by Umberto Eco, analyzing their potential relationship to the major determinants of Islamic governance and aspirations, through the present. He adduces salient examples which reflect the key attributes discussed by Eco: the unique institution of jihad war; the establishment of a Caliphate under "Allah's vicegerent on earth," the Caliph-ruled by Islamic Law, i.e., Shari'a, a rigid system of subservience and sacralized discrimination against non-Muslims and Muslim women, devoid of basic freedoms of conscience, and expression.
Read it all.
Posted at December 17, 2007 10:35 AM