Introduction
The book of Lewis Bernard is all about the changes that Muslim land and people faced throughout the Islamic World. The changes that led Muslims to lose their empire and lagging behind the West in every field in which Muslims once were in command. Lewis Bernard is said to be linked with the study of Islamic civilization, therefore the book focuses on all the gaps that despite being acknowledged by the Muslims were unable to be filled in an attempt to bring their civilization back. Author’s main purpose behind this book is to identify all those obstructions that remain unable for the Islamic World to be alleviated and the dream of ruling once again throughout the world could not be fulfilled.
The method adopted by the author to measure the depth of the Muslim analysis with their perception determines the diagnosis of the Islamic World since its advent. In this context Muslims still question and analyze what really wasn’t right that made them suffer and lag behind the Barbarians, Jews and Christians. During the peak of the Muslim Empire, there was no nation comparable to the Muslims. Therefore it was their overconfidence that led them towards the threshold of destruction.
Summary
Bernard Lewis reviews the Muslims’ perception while examining the characteristics that made them realize they have lost the battlefield. The book is all about the failure of Muslims’ methods adopted in order to regain their strength towards the West, and the reaction aftermath realizing the failure. After realizing the scenario, Muslim modernizers worked in different aspects: They recognized their social, cultural and economic barriers, worked towards social equality, and worked towards secularizing the civil society. The efforts on the military level bought continuous disappointments for the Muslims.
Though Muslims were reluctant to explore Western thought, which was determined to walk around new fields to defeat Muslims through the confrontation of the sixteenth century, but they believed somehow that there was no political and cultural possibility for an enriching confrontation between a secular and a religious world vision: two ways of perception, thinking, acting, creating, and knowing.
Because Muslims believed that there is no military power greater than them on earth, in the 1500 era Military campaigns launched by the Muslims played very early a pre-eminent role in the caliphate, the sultanate, and all later so-called Islamic forms of government. The Ottoman Empire spread and expanded through Hungary, the Adriatic Sea, Transylvania and Moldavia. This presence ceased to expand at the beginning of the twentieth century when the Ottoman Empire, after a period of deterioration, finally expired. Ottoman Sultan, Egypt and Turks were the main players of military power.
Muslim armies being victorious in the battlefields acquired weapons through various means and trade exchanges. Military forces had not undergone any major structural changes till the seventeenth century, when Europe was busy in war on one side while Ottomans on the other. While Ottomans learned many new lessons after a continuous series of losses, they had now learned how to cope up with the new concepts through diplomacy and negotiation with the West. According to Bernard Lewis, “Western help was not limited to diplomacy. Military help, the supply of weapons, even the financing of purchases, were old and familiar, going back beyond the beginnings of the Ottoman state to the time of the Crusades” (Lewis, 2002, p. 17).
West was wise enough to compare the military methods adopted by the Muslims and Christians and realized that Muslim Ottomans and Persian armies were not able to produce significant results as they were supposed to produce. The reason was that they had sticked of using the traditional means of arms and weapons. After having umpteen wars between Turkey and Iran in 1730, remained unable to modernize the Turks, however on the other Europe had made progress in various aspects of economic and social life. In the eighteenth century, Europeans were considered as ‘experts’ in their respective fields, which made the East envy.
Hardly since the seventeen-century had the House of Osman placed on the throne a ruler who was so well-versed in politics and economics. The fact that a number of his policies ended in failure, or indeed were poorly conceived, does not detract from this observation. He first stopped the erosion of his own power by locking up, executing, or exiting the liberal faction. Second, he ended the bleeding of his troops in the Balkans by reluctantly signing the Treaty of Berlin.
The British, the French, the Russians, and the Austrians, as a result of the Treaty of Berlin, had all obtained Ottoman territory; thus, Ḥamid knew that he must seek out a new ally in Europe. Prussia had, since 1834, supplied officers to train Ottoman forces in standard European drill and weaponry. Not long after Ḥamid’s accession, General von der Goltz began the reorganization of the army. A number of young Turkish officers were also sent to Germany for advanced training. These amicable contacts eventually led to the visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1889, and the beginning of a close friendship with Germany resulting in the World War I alliance.
When the British and Germans eventually negotiated an agreement to terminate the railroad at Basra, the intentions of the Ottoman government, to thwart British imperialism in the Gulf, had been gravely set back. As these events were taking place, Ḥamid and his Grand Vizier Pasha, whose detailed memoirs are important for the period, were taking steps to preempt the Ottoman young men, so that their energies might be channelled into the service of the state. Despite spending millions of Liras for adopting Western-style Lycess, Muslim Empire remained unable to update their power.
A major exception was the Arab and Turkish heartlands of the Ottoman Empire. There are a number of reasons why the Ottomans were able to hold the Europeans at bay. Perhaps the most important factor was the deep rivalry between Britain and Russia over Persian and Ottoman territories. There were also forbidding deserts and mountains in the Ottoman interior, and a people prepared to fight to their deaths.
At mid-century, as we have noted, Russia’s advances into the Balkans had been slowed, as they came up against large Muslim populations and the threat of British intervention. Indeed, France and Britain had become so alarmed at the prospect of a Russian presence on the Mediterranean that they joined with the Ottomans to fight the Crimean War, 1853-55. This abrupt halt to Russia’s advance had given the Ottomans a chance to modernize their armed forces, largely through German and British help.
With the first European expansion in Asia, European culture started flourishing, from education to military programs, everything was in French. This situation angered the Islamic powers, and when in 1978 a French general Napoleon Bonaparte came to power to govern Egypt, the Islamic empire sensed their vulnerability. The French Revolution imposed secularism as a political and philosophical alternative to the regime controlled by the Church.
Universal suffrage became the source of authority, in the place of a Revelation interpreted and applied by the authorized spiritual authorities. Louis XVI was executed to symbolize the death of the sacred monarchy and the rise of secular authority. On the other hand, when Khomeini came to power, he wanted to judge and execute the Shah as a symbol of the death of the secular and the reappearance of the sacred Imam.
In the Christian world, and especially in the area of eastern Europe to which European Karaites were almost totally confined before recent individual migrations to the west, to be a Jew was a curse, a tragedy, a cause for the annihilation of a group. Under the Nazis, the Turkish, non-Semitic ethnic origin of the Karaites, supported by their use of the Turkic Karaimic language, was used to show conclusively that they were not Jewish in an ethnic or racial sense, no matter what religious similarities might exist with Judaism.
By now, Muslims had clearly understood the inadequate military failures, and in order to overcome the embarrassment the Sultans now started forming new-style regiments which were in accordance with the Western style military uniforms. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire had grown relatively weaker in relation to a handful of European imperial powers. In a broad sense, the Islamic-Ottoman state had become a pawn of the British in its competition with imperial Russia.
Critical Analysis
Although Islamic teachings according to Bernard Lewis were the ideal in order to eradicate social and cultural barriers, every one possessed its own right, and the structure of Islam successfully eradicated social and economical inequalities based on caste or creed but there were some aspects in which traditional Muslims lacked. Like it was perceived by them impossible to abolish slavery, similarly after spending decades in power, the Muslim rulers were unable to think out of their boundaries. The best example of this is the role of their weak militaries. They never bothered to update them, equip them or train them up with the best possible arms and ammunitions. The slave trade which was on its peak in the Ottoman Empire and was never thought of to be alleviated by the then Muslim rulers.
The demographic statistics, while they should be of interest to those who espouse the principle of self-determination, were in fact of no importance in deciding political realities in the Balkans. The Balkan Wars settled the issue of who would rule and populate Ottoman Europe, not by a concept of majority rule, but by force of arms. Treaties drawn up in the Spring of 1912 decided the ultimate fate of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. The First Balkan War (1912-13) was a much quicker defeat than the Ottomans had suffered in 1877-78. Outnumbered by two to one, still at war with Italy in Libya, denied the use of sea lanes by the Greek fleet, and hampered by Sultan’s lack of military preparedness, the Ottoman Empire was easily defeated
In their effect on the Muslim peasantry and Muslim city dwellers of the Balkans, the Balkan Wars were very similar to the Russo Turkish War of 1877-78. In both wars, murder, rape, and pillage drove Turks and other Muslims out of their homes and into what remained of the Ottoman Empire. In both wars, the end result was a great diminution of the Muslim population a diminution caused by murder, starvation, disease, and migration and the creation of majority Christian states.
There were also differences between the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. The earlier war had been guided by one hand, that of Russia, which had one single-minded intent the creation of a great Bulgarian state in the Balkans, a Slavic state denuded of Muslims and a bulwark for Russian interests in the region. By 1912, Russian affection for Bulgaria had cooled, and the hand of the Tsar was not seen in the Balkan Wars. Instead, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria each fought its own war against the Ottomans. The only real unity among the Balkan allies in the First Balkan War lay in the choice of an opponent.
The fate of Balkan Muslims was affected by the confusion of allied plans. In 1877-78, the Russians had implemented an efficient plan to force Muslims to migrate. In the Balkan Wars, each of the victors also wished to see an end to the Muslim presence in the lands they had conquered. They were, however, neither well-organized nor capable of unified action in gaining their goal. Rather than driving the Muslims out of the Balkans, they often drove them from the territory conquered by one Christian country into the territory conquered by another, and sometimes back again. The effect on the Muslims was, if anything, worse than in the Russo Turkish War of 1877-78. Mortality among them was greater than it had been in 1878.
The critical aspect is that despite so many wars, Muslims never felt the need to be united against the Western powers. That is the point from where their downfall started. World War I served as the zenith for providing the Muslims and Armenians of the Ottoman East opportunity to start a war once again, the war which the Muslims and Western World had been waiting for a hundred years.
In the last decades of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman social and political fabric began to exhibit signs of fatigue, and the empire entered a long period of standstill, followed by decline. It needs to be emphasized, however, that post-1580 Ottoman history cannot be regarded simply as one long, monotonous process of disintegration. The general curve of decline was punctuated by extended periods of stability, recovery, and even temporary ascent. Osman II (1618-22), Murad IV (1623-40), the famous grand vezirs of the Koprulu family (second half of the seventeenth century), and other Ottoman rulers made numerous attempts, many of them temporarily successful, to rejuvenate, reform, and change various sectors of the body politic. Consequently, the Ottoman state remained a great imperial power until the end of the seventeenth century.
Only after 1683, with the failure of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna and the retreat that followed, did it become apparent that the balance of power had shifted against the Ottomans. Still, the Ottoman Empire continued to offer a determined resistance to its two major enemies, Austria and Russia, for another century. The nadir of Ottoman military weakness was reached only at the end of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth. At that time, also the internal disintegration of the state had approached a critical point and the central government lost effective control over many of its provinces. The lot of Ottoman Jewry was always closely interwoven with that of the Ottoman state. Where Ottoman fortunes declined, so did those of its Jewish population.
The decline of great powers has almost always been the outcome of a complex and interrelated web of causes, which do not lend themselves to easy unravelling and analysis. The Ottoman Empire was no exception. If, however, one has to start somewhere, the military aspect seems appropriate, because Ottoman economic and social dynamism appears to have been for a long time predicated on conquest and territorial expansion. It was a paradox of history, experienced by other great powers as well, that the Ottomans’ very military successes and great territorial conquests confronted them with ever more difficult problems of logistics and military strategy. As distances between frontiers increased, the mobilization and deployment of forces became more difficult and costly.
In the course of the sixteenth century, almost everywhere the Ottomans came face to face with more determined and powerful enemies: Austria, Poland, and Russia in central and eastern Europe; Spain and Venice in the Mediterranean; Portugal in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean; and Iran in the east. The Ottoman capture of Cyprus (1571) and the definitive re-conquest of Tunis (1574) marked the end of the era of great territorial expansion. Although Ottoman military victories and new conquests continued well into the seventeenth century, the pace had slowed down considerably. The wars had become more difficult and costly, imposing an ever-increasing burden on the treasury and the economy.
Hence the Muslim Power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had resulted in the emergence of a vast administrative-military establishment, which, in the new circumstances, became an additional burden on the economy. As the great expansion slowed down and opportunities for career-advancement became more limited, this establishment also appears to have become gradually more conservative and resistant to change, at a time when change and innovation were needed more than ever before, to cope with the economic and technological advances of the West and their variegated ramifications.
Conclusion
From the authoritarian to the impotent, the Muslims have seen every stage of their rule and are still unable to make out where they went wrong! Till today they are unable to consider the major facts behind their downfall, which are no other than lack of unity and being arrogant in their decisions, particularly those concerning wars.
On one hand Muslims were facing harsh external pressures which required them to be united, but they didn’t, on the other the diminishing resources taught them to confront every challenge but through wisdom and unity, but they never learnt lessons, as they never learned to learn lessons from fate. The end of the wars decided against the Muslim Empire, Muslim communities in an area as large as all of Western Europe had been diminished or destroyed. Turkish communities that once used to rule had been forced out. It was among one of history’s great tragedies that had occurred.
Reference
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle East Response. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.