WHAT WENT WRONG. Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response Bernard Lewis, Phoenix Books, London, 2002. Paperback, 200 pages, £6.99. ISBN 0-75381-675-X

In the Middle Ages, the Islamic world was the centre of civilisation and progress. As the title asks: what went wrong? Why was America discovered by a voyager from the Christian West, not by a Muslim? Why did the scientific breakthroughs occur in Europe and not in the Islamic world – which was richer and mostly more enlightened at the time?
    Blame for this decline has been put on the invading Mongols, the rule of the Ottoman Turks, the later Anglo-French interlude or the latest Western political and economic penetration. Furthermore, this resentment is now coupled with anti-semitism. But Professor Lewis shows that the reason is internal, Middle-Eastern technology and science simply stopped developing: clocks were not made until the seventeenth century; there were no printing presses in Turkey until 1729 and even this first press published only seventeen books before it was closed down in 1742; there was little use of wheeled vehicles. Ideas too were stifled: there was no distinction between ‘God and Caesar’; no knowledge of, or equivalent of, the Reformation or Renaissance, and the importance of the Virgin Mary worship in the West allowed women to contribute to social advance whereas in the Middle East they were, and generally still are, subject to male dominance
    Military reverses forced the Islamic world to look west in order to improve its armies: after 1683 with their defeat at Vienna, Islam was a retreating force. Lewis omits the importance of the defeat at Malta in 1565 but points to the humiliating treaty with Russia in 1774 as factors in the awareness of decline.
    Lewis suggests that the success or failure in the Middle East of both secular and feminist movements will be a vital factor in determining how its future is shaped. He concludes that underlying the majority of the Islamic world’s problems is primarily the lack of freedom: ‘freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny.’
    Perhaps this is why so much of the Islamic world – with a few notable exceptions – is so hostile to Freemasonry and its explicit call for political liberty and religious tolerance.
    Michael Baigent