The Politics of Conceptualizing Islam and the West

Abstract

n the last three years, a large number of books have been published, all trying to answer the now-classic post–September 11 question: Why do they,“the Muslims,”dislike or hate “us”?—with the “us” variously defined as the United States, the West, or the modern world. Scholarly and nonscholarly curiosity on this topic is not limited to the history of al-Qaeda and a small network of fundamentalist terrorists but also tries to explain why untold numbers of Muslim intellectuals have critical, and even hostile, opinions of the United States and Western civilization. Are critiques of the “West” peculiar to the Muslim world? Are they a reflection of a simple discontent with the international order or a conservative rejection of Western-originated, universal modernity? How should Western intellectuals and leaders respond to the Muslim critiques of modernity, the international order, and Western civilization? Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, though completed before the events of September 11, 2001, examines “the longer sequence and larger pattern of events, ideas, and attitudes that preceded and in some measure produced them.” Appearing at a fortuitous moment, the book not only became a bestseller but soon also a favorite of Washington policy circles. Lewis’s approach takes the exceptionalist view that the content of the “Muslim revolt against the West” is shaped by the centuries-long conflict between Islamic and Christian civilizations. According to Lewis, as Christian civilization came to produce and embody modernity in the last three hundred years, Muslim civilization first rejected modernity due to its Christian nature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then tried to emulate this Christian modernity after realizing that this was the only method for survival against the expansion of Western modernity. Lewis also implies that MusThe Politics of Conceptualizing Islam and the West