What Went Wrong?
Excerpt from Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002)
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Bernard Lewis is a British-American historian in Near East Studies from Princeton University. The book What Went Wrong? seeks to address the reasons for the decline of This book was near publication before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 on the United States. Lewis states in his preface, that this book "is however related to these attacks, examining...what went before—the longer sequence and larger pattern of events, ideas, and attitudes that preceded and in some measure produced them." This sub-title for this book was rebranded as "The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East" in 2003.
What went wrong? For a long time people in the Islamic world...have been asking this question. ... provoked primarily by their encounter with the West. ... For many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement. ...
And then, suddenly, the relationship changed. Even before the Renaissance, Europeans were beginning to make significant progress in the civilized arts...leaving the scientific and technological and eventually the cultural heritage of the Islamic world far behind them. ...
The Muslims for a long time remained unaware of this. ...the Renaissance, the Reformation, the technological revolution passed virtually unnoticed in the lands of Islam, where they were still inclined to dismiss the [West] as benighted barbarians...
The changing attitudes of East and West in the development and acceptance of scientific knowledge...may be seen in the fate of the great observatory... built in...Istanbul...[by] Taqī al-Dīn, a major figure in Muslim scientific history and the author of several books on astronomy, optics, and mechanical clocks. ... After a career as a jurist and theologian he went to Istanbul, where in 1571 he was appointed munejjim-bashi, astronomer (and astrologer) in chief to the Sultan Selim II. A few years later he persuaded the new Sultan Murad III to allow him to build an observatory, comparable in its technical equipment and its specialist personnel with that of his celebrated contemporary, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. But there the comparison ends. Tycho Brahe’s observatory and the work accomplished in it opened the way to a vast new development of astronomical science. Taqī al-Dīn’s observatory was razed to the ground by a squad of Janissaries, by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti [Islamic Jurist]. This observatory had many predecessors in the lands of Islam; it had no successors until the age of modernization.
The relationship between Christendom and Islam in the sciences was now reversed. ...
Original publication cover, 2002; in publication process during 9/11/2001
1st Perennial Edition, 2003; published after 9/11/2001 and during the American invastion of Afghanistan and Iraq
1st Perennial Edition, hardback, 2003
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