Lewis tells audience of difficult choices facing Islamic world

"I'm right, you're wrong."

In these few words of mock sincerity, Bernard Lewis, renowned University professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies, introduced his latest book, "What Went Wrong," to a packed audience of students, faculty and colleagues assembled in Dodds Auditorium on Thursday.

While the line is more generally associated with playground taunts than the ideologies of the major organized religions, Lewis suggested that it expresses, if crudely, what he regards as the fundamental barrier between the Western world of Christianity and Eastern world of Islam.

He distilled the basic conflict to a struggle over which faith defines modernization, emphasizing that the clash arises not so much from differences, but rather from strong similarities.

Unlike other religions, which tend to not have the inclination to spread their practices, Lewis said both Islam and Christianity are steeped in a more aggressive tradition.

In the spirit of "saved or damned," he said, each has historically regarded its own followers as the only true believers and all outsiders as infidels that must be converted.

The primary objective for investigating Islamic history, Lewis said, is to examine the reasons why the East has been unable to compete with Western dominance over the last few centuries.

Ever since the Islamic Empire's initial decline, Lewis said Muslims have been divided between two considerations: "What can we blame?" and "Who can we blame?"

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Regarding the former question as more historically pertinent, Lewis identified several interdependent factors, ranging from philosophical abstractions to more distinct issues involving gender and culture.

In the years before, there was such a fierce movement against Western culture, many Islamic leaders adopted the perspective that the Middle East, and the rest of the world, had "contracted the Christian disease and should try the Christian remedy."

This conformist attitude led to such measures as adopting European military tactics and industry, which proved ineffective in regenerating the region.

Lewis attributes the Islamic world's failure to regain power to the ambivalence within Middle Eastern psychology. One example has been the intense controversy over the secondary status of women.

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But Lewis said the function of women is significant not only for the debate it has inspired but also for its implications on the general society.

The supremacy of the Muslim man within the household — the unit Lewis regards as a metaphor for the basic structure of a society — reflects a rigidity that is very unreceptive to the West. Western democracy requires a much greater degree of adaptability, he said.

Democracy and the Islamic tradition are fundamentally incongruent, Lewis concluded, and a choice between the two is, therefore, ultimately necessary: fanaticism vs. modernization.

"The future of the Middle East will depend on which of them prevails," he said.