Bernard Lewis again

I'm back to Bernard Lewis again with his The Crisis of Islam. (Please forgive me if I don't stick in links to Amazon--I get most of my books out of the library. Three cheers for the South Central Library System of Wisconsin!) This is Lewis' first book since September 11 (What Went Wrong went to the printers before that date, though it was published after).

The book is an expansion of an article for The New Yorker in which he brings to bear his understanding of Middle Eastern history to explain why bin Ladin's views of the world are so popular. Earlier works have been more generic: this one is focussed on how the attitudes in the Moslem Middle East, and to some extent elsewhere, developed the form they have.

He reviews the nature and purpose of jihad, the shock of not just stopped in advance but losing ground, the shock of losing control of all but the most sacred lands in Islam to colonial powers, the shock of losing the Caliphate (felt even in Indonesia according to another source), and the failure of almost every attempt to create their own governments. The Arab response has essentially been to assume that

• We have been betrayed and tricked by the West. The solution is to oppose any Western solutions and ideas, which merely seduce us from the true path. All Westerners are liars, especially the newspapers. The great Satan (seducer/trickster) is the United States.
• We have not been holy enough (following Qtub and Wahabbi), and so God is punishing us. The solution is to be holier in following God's law, with no exceptions.
• We have been betrayed and tricked by false Moslem leaders. The solution is to consider them infidels, especially if they work with the West.
• The Jews are behind all our troubles.

The self-deception and hunger for conspiracy theories of the "secular" Arab population make it hard to communicate with them, and the Qtub/Wahabbist influenced religious Arabs don't want to hear us at all. Terrorism is an old tool in the Middle East, but the confluence of Khomeini's interpretations of Shiism and the exigencies of the Iran-Iraq war (in which Iran used volunteers to run through mine fields in advance of their soldiers), together with the demand for more effective terrorist attacks against Israel, formed the cult the suicide bomber. This is novel in Islam, but attracts very little condemnation.

As usual, Bernard Lewis is knowledgeable and clear, and gets my thumbs-up. If there is one flaw in his analysis, I think it lies in his treatment of the centrality of the Arab/Israeli conflict in Moslem thought. I am not convinced that the reasons are purely political and historical--this doesn't seem to give it enough force in non-Arab regions. I think we should look to Bat Ye'or for another part of the answer: It is because Israel is Jewish that it is such an affront. Israel is not a Western colony, and not a followup to the Crusades, but a revolt by the oldest group of those given a Divine revelation against the "Seal of the Prophets" (TM). It is felt as a betrayal, since the Jews were nominally given respect and protection and "their place" in the world (see Bat Ye'or for how this worked out in practice).