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Instead, Lewis describes a period of almost a millennium—from the early ascendancy of the conquering religion Muhammad founded to the late eighteenth century, when a series of defeats signaled the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the triumph of the West—during which Islam was the dominant world civilization: dominant militarily, dominant economically, but also the most advanced by almost every measure, having "achieved the highest level so far in human history in the arts and sciences." In comparison, Lewis says, Europe for much of this period "was still a relatively primitive place with little to offer." In Muslim eyes, the best hope for the "barabarians" of Europe "was to be incorporated in the empire of the caliphs, and thus attain the benefits of religion and civilization."
And indeed, in "the first thousand years or so after the advent of Islam, this seemed not unlikely." Lewis particularly emphasizes Islam's character as the first "universal" civilization. Christianity's reach, he says, was much more modest:
For more than a thousand years, Islam provided the only universally acceptable set of rules and principles for the regulation of public life and social life. Even during the period of maximum European influence, in the countries ruled or dominated by European imperial powers as well as those that remained independent, Islamic political notions and attitudes remained a profound and pervasive influence.
This isn't the way the story was told in History of Western Civ! Now Lewis may be guilty of a little exaggeration here. And the feel-good histories we've all been bombarded with over the last few months, assuring us that Islam is a Great Civilization, have made it harder to attend to his story. But once into the book, the reader will immediately sense the difference between such propaganda and Lewis's deeply learned yet marvelously accessible and persuasive account.
If we have any hope of understanding the various viewpoints represented in the Islamic world today, we have to be able to enter imaginatively into this sense of a disastrous fall from a great eminence. For most Westerners, the golden age of Islam is not even a historical datum, let alone a fundamental truth they feel in their bones. Many in fact regard the cultures of the Middle East and of Islam globally with unconscious condescension. But for hundreds of millions of Muslims, the current order of things, with the West clearly superior, is a terrible anomaly.
So what did go wrong? A typical bestseller would provide the answer with bullet points. Lewis's approach is quite different. Again, he tells the story from within the Islamic world, recounting the evolving answers proposed by Muslims over a period of two centuries. No definitive diagnosis emerges but rather a range of answers.
For example, some within the Islamic world saw that the role of women was one crucial difference between Islam and the West, which might account in part for the latter's superiority in the modern era. Such was the view of the reformist leader of Turkey, Kemal Ataturk. Yet many contemporary Islamists—most notoriously the Taliban—see the emancipation of women as the most conspicuous evidence of Western decadence. (In a lecture and conversation at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., in May of this year, Lewis himself gave considerable weight to the crippling effect of traditionalist Islamic beliefs concerning women.)
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