This chain of thought/argument has bothered me for a long time. Im a history major but I focus mostly on American History. Though ive taken several additional courses to widen my understanding of the Middle East and its current troubles, it was focused on contemporary history. Thus not really providing enough information.
On to the argument:
I read this book which was given to me by a relative. This book, I quickly found out, was rather biased against Islam, from my perspective. However this guy is a 'known' arabist. One of his main positions (or atleast I think its of major importance) is that before the European Renaissance and Enlightenment the Middle East was way ahead of Europe in science and scholarly work etc. This I was aware of, he then claims that after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols, lead the then Islamic world to question itself why the hell that was possible to happen since they were the followers of an almighty god. According to this Arabist the consequences of this question lead the Islamic world to go "back to Islamic early core values etc". Pretty much Sharia law and very orthodox positions. This, according to the arabist, subsequently meant that (self)criticism of Islam or against islamic law was considered to be blashphemy and thus sentecable by death. Because all questions that were raised had to be answered through the Quran, the very act of 'science' was blasphemy. This lead to the fall of the then Islamic nations' science and scholarly work. Which according to him was back then close to what later was European Enlightenment. All in all he argues and concludes that the return to the "true" islamic faith, caused the downfall of knowledge etc in Islamic cultures and made them lose their advantage over Europe. He then argues that this is still the case because theyre in a constant loop that goes as mentioned before: "Why are we not the victors when we are Allah's followers; must be because we fail to follow the real faith; double down on sharia law oppressing society and all possibilities of progress." My question thus: Can someone provide me with less/unbiased positions on this matter? or maybe proof or disproof his positions.
I'm assuming the Arabist is Bernard Lewis? What Went Wrong perhaps? Ah damn, ninja edit, I saw that I was wrong.
As a warning this is kind of all over the place but it's a fun topic for me. So here we go:
I'm not sure that the path described or the events in question are necessarily wrong but there are aspects of it or conclusions about it that I would dispute.
So what we're trying to resolve is that 1. There does seem to have been an inward turn in Islam shortly after the Mongol invasions. 2. At some point in history, Europeans seem to be responsible for a scientific revolution that leaves European countries in a position of global hegemony.
I'll start with the second one first, which is to ask "at what point did Europeans reach a point of dominance?" "And what allowed them to do this?"
Answering when European countries achieved a position of material superiority is actually pretty hard to measure or document. It's made more complex by the fact that just saying "us in Europe" vs. "The Rest" ignores the incredible differences in material capabilities between nominally European nations, let alone non-European ones. Secondly, this approach usually comes down to "X beat Y in a war, therefore X is superior" which is just a really shitty way of thinking about history I think.
But even if we go that route, Europeans actually have a pretty mixed record against Muslim societies until pretty late in the day. You basically have only limited outposts and quite a lot of European losses in battles in places like India until we get to the 18th century. I would argue that it's not until the start of the 19th century that the core of the Arab world, the Ottoman Empire, appears to have been categorically surpassed militarily by Europeans who now had the force projection capability to challenge them in places like Egypt, where Napoleons army just smashes an Ottoman Mamluk army in 1798.
But even then, what does that mean exactly. Napoleons army smashed basically everyone in Europe too. The solution for all of Europe was to modernize to catch up.
Under an "Islam is inward" paradigm you would think that they'd enter that downward cycle. But actually both the Ottomans and the Egyptians under Muhammad Ali realized that crash modernization was utterly necessary. There wasn't much inwardness when Muhammad Ali reformed the Egyptian administration, industry, education, sought European technology, sought European advisers and so on.
Ultimately this had a mixed record but I'll come back to that because I want to go way back to when I asked why these developments like the scientific revolution ended up coming out of Europe but not the Islamic world.
I think it helps to look at some of them things that made that revolution possible and why they weren't present in the Islamic world.
First, going back to the Middle Ages in Europe, you have universities. Islam, prior to that, developed Madrasas (or Nizamiyyas, to remove ambiguity about the former word.) These were institutions of higher education like universities. They produced a scholarly class like universities. They engaged with ostensibly "secular" topics like universities. I think the big difference is that while at a Nizamiyya you might learn something "ostensibly" secular like law, which in Europe becomes a purely secular position, in Islamdom the concept of secular scholarship never really develops. Universities were and often still are religious but you can learn purely secular topics like mathematics. That never really happens with Nizamiyyas.
Next in Europe you have the critical confluence of three things related to the culture of writing. 1. you have paper, 2. you have the printing press 3. you have a revolution in the understanding of core religious texts right around the same time these things are introduced.
In Islamdom, once you have cheap paper, combined with a culture that prefers the authority that comes from the hand-written word, the printing press is actively suppressed, and quite successfully. The first Arabic-language printing press would come ashore with Napoleon in 1798. The "inward turn" of religious scholarship means that while, sure, in Islam you don't have a mass civil slaughter like the 30 years war, but you also don't end up with someone like John Locke. There's no need. The Islamic system basically worked "good enough".
But one place where this argument falls apart I think is that Islam is hardly the only civilization that encountered foreign European influences and said "alright, none of that." The Chinese and the Japanese did the same thing.
I also think that while the cultural inward turn was real it would be very easy to exaggerate. I personally think it's better to think of European material and technical capabilities accelerating faster than elsewhere rather thinking of a "decline" into piety elsewhere. Not least because in the case of the Ottomans I just don't think there's any evidence for it.
Again, I would also emphasize that when confronted with their defeats at the hand of Napoleon, the solution for the Ottomans and the Egyptians was an attempt at crash modernization, not an inward turn.
So having discussed the second of my two points:
2 . At some point in history, Europeans seem to be responsible for a scientific revolution that leaves European countries in a position of global hegemony.
I want to return to my first:
- There does seem to have been an inward turn in Islam shortly after the Mongol invasions.
What was this inward turn and why did it happen? Well, contra the argument above I think the important thing to realize is that the groundwork for this inward turn was in place well before the Mongol conquests. Al-Ghazali is often attributed as being the epitome of this in his work "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" produced in the 11th century. And sure, Averroes gets in a great parting shot for the falsafa tradition in the 12th century with "The Incoherence of the Incoherence", but after that Ghazali's views just sort of win. Then you have post-mongol scholars like Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Qudamah who do represent a triumph of orthodoxy.
The process by which Islam goes from a period in the 10th century where the four Sunni schools of law are as a much at each others throats as they are with the Shia to a 14th century where orthodoxy reigns is, I won't say a mysterious process but it's not one that as far as I'm aware has any really conclusive explanations.
The one that I find to be convincing is that what the foundation of the Nizamiyyas did was privilege the scholarly classes with state backed benefits insofar as they basically agreed to cooperate. The result is that whatever you think of Islam's failure to develop a culture of scientific dissent when the enlightenment is happening in Europe, Islamdom also is not ripping itself apart in civil or religious conflict.
Europe I think stereotypically is often described as crucible, but that's not far off. Pax Ottomana was pretty good in comparison with the chaos in Europe, but not so much if your goal is to have a sort of social darwinian arms race that ultimately produces revolutionary France.
Anyways, I think I'm off topic, because I think the bigger leap in logic is that the reasoning here and of certain other Arabists (e.g. Bernard Lewis) is that they basically want you to make the conclusion that medieval orthodoxy and the post-Mongol inward turn is part and parcel with contemporary Islamist movements, which I think is where the "constant loop" comes in. We're supposed to imagine Bin Laden as a kind of 21st century Ghazali. Same phenomenon different tactics.
And that's...well it's bullshit. Modern Islamism is a reaction a very specific set of circumstances and ideologies, particularly colonialism and liberalism. Islamism responds to these in a distinctly modern way by doing things like (i.e. in the case of Muhammad Abduh) trying to reframe the virtues of modernism as classically Islamic, or (in the case of Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood) by trying to use the tools of modern state political structures (charities, free schools, political parties, clandestine cells) to supplant and overturn the values of the existing state, and so on. In Sayyid Qutb (and by extension, Bin Laden, ISIS, etc) the movement is a rejection of the modern world that could only ever exist with the modern world as a foil. "The Islamic State" in 2016 really, really does not run its state the way that medieval Islamic states were run.
I'm coming up on the character limit but I think it would be worth hammering home 19th-20th century examples where: "Why are we not the victors when we are Allah's followers; must be because we fail to follow the real faith; double down on sharia law oppressing society and all possibilities of progress." didn't happen:
So let's make a list, shall we? In really terribly non-chronological order
That being said, there's no denying that Islamism is having its day at the moment, but I don't think that's because of a seven century-long Islamo-Hegelian dialectic towards Sharia that kicked off with the Mongols.
edit: words
What is the book? That would considerably help answer this question, I believe.