Booknotes

PROFESSOR BERNARD LEWIS, AUTHOR, "WHAT WENT WRONG?: WESTERN IMPACT AND MIDDLE EASTERN RESPONSE" Well, we just sort of grew naturally. It was not caused by recent events; the book was already in page proof on September the 11th. But anyone who followed the Middle East could see which way things were going. This started as a series of public lectures which I gave in Vienna and then I decided to expand it, recast it, add to it, and it turned into this book.

PROF. LEWIS: How shall I put it? Let me s--let me put it this way. Here you have in the Middle East a very ancient and a very great civilization, which for 1,000 years or so was in the very forefront of human endeavor. It was the richest, strongest, most powerful, most wealthy of--of all living societies. It was also on the cutting edge of science, technology, in virtually every field. And then suddenly, within a very short period, this society is eclipsed by--is—is overshadowed, outperformed in almost every respect by what they had hitherto regarded as the ignorant, barbarous infidels beyond the northwestern frontier, namely, Christian Europe.

Suddenly, instead of winning every war, they lost every war. They were beaten in battle again and again, they who had been accustomed to unending triumphs and victories. The defeats on the battlefield at the peripheries didn't matter so much. But when they were defeated at the very center and when the greatest of the Muslim powers, the Ottoman Empire, was forced by victorious enemies to surrender and sign a peace treaty, in effect, imposed by the enemy, that concentrated the mind wonderfully and began a debate. This was just over 300 years ago, in 1699, and the debate has been going on ever since.

It begins with the military. The question is asked at the time, `Hitherto, we have always defeated the infidels. Now the infidels are defeating us. Why? What did--what went wrong?' Then defeat in the battlefield was matched by defeat in the marketplace. Suddenly Western economies began to develop while theirs became stagnant, and so even things which they regarded as peculiarly their own were better done elsewhere. Then they found themselves outperformed politically, and they looked to the reasons for their relative failure compared with Western success, and they tried a number of things. They started with the military. They modernized their armies. They adopted Western wethod--methods, Western weapons, Western drill and so on. But it didn't help. They still lost war after war.

They decided that it must be the economy. So, they tried to industrialize, forced industrialization by the state, and that didn't work very well either. Then they decided that it must be the political systems of the West. The--the magic talisman of Western wealth and power was elected assemblies, something entirely alien to their experience. So they tried that. And none of it has worked, and this has been going on now for three centuries.

And it got worse and worse; not only were they outperformed by the West, they came to be dominated by the West, as most of the Islamic world, with very few exceptions, came under the rule of one or other of the great European imperial powers--Britain, France, Holland and Russia. And this--this is a debate which has been going on for three centuries and has been getting more and more ramified and all kinds of explanations have been offered. And what I try to do in this book is to look at some of the various explanations that have been offered against the background of the changes which have actually been taking place.

PROF. LEWIS: Oh, since I was an undergraduate, and that was...

PROF. LEWIS: In the University of London in the mid-1930's.

PROF. LEWIS: Idle curiosity. I was going to be a lawyer. It never occurred to me that one could actually earn a living by doing this sort of stuff. I was going to be a lawyer so I could take my BA in whatever amused me, and I did history and then I specialized in Middle Eastern history, and in order to do that better, I learned s--a couple of Middle Eastern languages.

PROF. LEWIS: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish.

PROF. LEWIS: S--well, I'm getting a little bit rusty in some of them. As I grow older, my fluency diminishes, but I can still read them.

PROF. LEWIS: Oh, yes. I've traveled extensively. And then between 1940 and 1945, I was on his majesty's service and that gave me an opportunity to see the modern Middle East. Until then, my interests have been mainly medieval, and this gave me a chance to make the acquaintance of the modern Middle East and travel around quite a lot. It gave me a somewhat different perspective.

PROF. LEWIS: That is right.

PROF. LEWIS: I went to Princeton in '74.

PROF. LEWIS: University of London.

PROF. LEWIS: The history of the Middle East.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, I'm very flattered, of course, by these remarks that you have quoted, and I would be more--or less than human if I didn't enjoy them. On the other hand, it isn't quite true to say `undisputed.' There are people who would disagree very strongly with these assessments of what I have accomplished, but let's not go into that.

Why now, particularly? I think probably for two reasons. I've been writing about the Middle East for years and years and years and—and mainly in the form of books, or articles in learned journals. I did do an occasional newspaper article, first in England and then here, but not many. What suddenly catapulted me into this kind of prominence, I think, was two articles. One was an article which I published in The Atlantic Monthly in September '90, and the editors gave it the title The Roots of Muslim Rage. I was not happy with the title at the time--I complained to the editors--but I must admit that--and I do so publicly, that they were right and I was wrong. It was an appropriate title.

PROF. LEWIS: Nothing very special, it's just that I had been studying the Middle East for a long time. I had been observing current changes in mood. I had been reading current literature, and I have come to realize more and more that there was a growing hostility and more than hostility--rage is not an inappropriate word—towards the Western world in general and the United States in particular. And in this article, I tried to explain what were the sources of this resentment.

The second article was one which appeared in Foreign Affairs in '98. I read an article in an Arabic newspaper, published in London, giving the text of a proclamation by a man I had not previously heard of, called Osama bin Laden, containing the text of his declaration of war on the United States. I thought this was an interesting text, so I published an article analyzing it and translating parts of it. And it seems that when things happened and people were looking around for someone to consult, these two articles are what came up on their computers.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, there are various reasons, of course. There are people who disagree for scholarly reasons, because their assessment of this or that problem or event is different from mine. But mainly the people who disagree are those who regard the whole discipline of orientalist scholarship in which I grew up to be evil, to be a form of imperialism, a form of exploitation.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, you're not asking me to explain their view.

PROF. LEWIS: I don't identify myself. I don't always vote for the same party. I vote for the individual rather than the party.

PROF. LEWIS: I consider myself moderately conservative, but this wasn't always true. I have gradually moved towards the center and then slightly to the right, as is normal with the passing of the years.

PROF. LEWIS: I don't think so. I think obviously we are all influenced by our basic philosophies. But I'm still old-fashioned enough to believe that history consists of facts as attested by evidence. I realize this is no longer generally accepted nowadays, and evidence is unimportant, accuracy is unimportant. All that matters is narrative and the intention which inspires the narrative, but I don't share that view.

PROF. LEWIS: My point is that, in this country, there isn't a great deal of interest and, therefore, of knowledge of history, and the phrase `that's history' means something is unimportant and irrelevant to present concerns. It is dismissing history as such. And one is constantly astonished, and, I may say, appalled at the lack of knowledge of history, even among educated people. This is the more remarkable if one thinks that the universities of the United States are full of tenured historians. There must be tens of thousands of them turning out hundred weights of books, monographs and so on on history, all of very high quality--well, mostly of very high quality, and yet the--the ignoran--the general ignorance of history remains, and tested in a number of ways. You make an allusion to something that happened not so long ago, within my lifetime, even educated, well-informed people look blank. This is a major difference between the United States and these various cultures of the Middle East, where they have a very acute sense of history, a very keen awareness of the past.

Now I'm not saying that their perceptions of history are necessarily accurate. I mean, we all have our own particular slant to the—the way in which we view the past, but at least they know. I mean, for example, in the Iraq-Iran war, between 1980 and 1988, the war propaganda of both sides, of both the Iraqis and the Iranians, made frequent allusions to events of the seventh century. Now they didn't describe them or discuss them, they just alluded to them in passing, in the secure knowledge that their readers on both--their listeners and readers, on both sides, Iraqi and Iranian, would pick up these allusions and understand them. The allusions were to the advent of Islam, to the coming of Islam to Iran and the struggles between different factions in earlier Islam. They could allude to these in the sure knowledge that they would be understood.

When Osama bin Laden, in one of his recent pronouncements, said, `We have suffered this shame and humiliation for more than 80 years,' I haven't the slightest doubt that all his intended audience knew exactly what he was talking about. They didn't have to start scurrying around and looking up reference books and saying, `Eighty years? What happened 80 years ago?' Now we did that here; they didn't.

PROF. LEWIS: Eighty ye--well, slightly more than 80 years ago was the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was the last great Islamic empire. In 1918, along with its German and Austrian allies, the Ottoman Empire was defeated; not only defeated, but occupied, partitioned, its capital occupied, its sultan a prisoner and so on. This was seen as the ultimate point in the de--degradation and humiliation of the Islamic world.

PROF. LEWIS: The allies; that's to say Britain, France and the United States.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, at its height, the Ottoman Empire extended from the suburbs of Vienna to the frontiers of Iran and the Persian Gulf in the East, across north Africa, as far as the frontiers of Morocco, and a large part of southeastern Europe. It was a very mighty power.

PROF. LEWIS: In a series of wars in which they were the losers. Sometimes they managed to rally--sometimes they managed to rally, but it was a slow and painful process, and the end result was that they were driven from one province after another and eventually lost control, even of their capital and their heartlands. Later, they were able to get out of that because of a remarkable man called Mustafa Kemal, later--later surnamed Ataturk, led a rising in occupied Anatolia, and was able to drive out the allied occupation forces and reassert Turkish independence. But this was not an Islamic victory. This was another Islamic defeat, because Kemal Ataturk was a secularist and a modernist and believed in separation between religion and the state. So that although this was in a s--from a Turkish national point of view, it compensated for the final defeat and destruction of the Ottoman Empire, from the Muslim point of view, it was a worsening of the situation because the Kemalists, having restored the independence of Turkey, proceeded to abolish the sultanate and the caliphate.

PROF. LEWIS: I feel reasonably sure that everybody in the Middle East at least, and probably elsewhere, too, knew what he was talking about.

PROF. LEWIS: The caliphate is the headship of Islam, and Islam is seen as a single community. We in the Western world tend to think of a nation subdivided into religions. There, it's rather a religion subdivided into nations. The basic identity is the religious identity. One is first a Muslim or whatever other religion it may be and then subdivided. Now these nation states in that part of the world are very new, very recent and many of them are creations of the Western imperialist powers, invented by Britain and France for the most part. But that doesn't mean to say that they are not ancient civilizations. They are very ancient civilizations, but they did not see themselves--they did not define themselves in national or territorial terms. They defined themselves by religious identity and political allegiance.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes, the rise of Islam.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, he's revered because he was the founder of re--this religion. He--he wrote them a book called the Koran, which...

PROF. LEWIS: According to Muslims, it is of divine authorship, divine, eternal and uncreated. It was revealed to Mohammed through the archangel Gabriel and he brought it to the Muslim people--to the people who became Muslims, I should say.

PROF. LEWIS: In Arabia, in Mecca and Medina. He was born in Mecca. He--this is, again, an interesting point. Life in Mecca became difficult for him and he was oppressed by the pagan rulers of Mecca. So he moved to Medina, where he imagined to build up his strength and eventually returned to Mecca. This theme of exile and return is a recurring theme in Muslim history.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes.

PROF. LEWIS: Oh, not very far apart.

PROF. LEWIS: No. Non-Muslims are not allowed to set foot in the hijjahs.

PROF. LEWIS: No, but it's a saying attributed to the prophet, that none--that there shall not be two religions in Arabia, and some take this as being limited to the hijjahs, some take it to apply to the whole of Arabia. But it--certainly in the hijjahs non-Muslims are not allowed to set foot.

PROF. LEWIS: In Arabia.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, it is not hijjahs, but it is still part of Arabia, and for a Muslim, not only Osama bin Laden, but for any Muslim, an--a non-Muslim military presence on the Arabian peninsula is, shall we say, troubling to say the very least, and for many, much worse than that. I mean, even in the greatest days of the British empire, the British empire nibbled around the edges of Arabia--Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Aden--but they took good care not to get involved in the mainland of the Arabian peninsula, because they realized that this would really stir up a hornet's nest.

PROF. LEWIS: I think the important difference between the prophet Mohammed and his predecessors is that he was successful during his lifetime. Moses, you will recall, was not allowed to enter the prof--promised land. He led his people through the wilderness, was not permitted to enter the promised land. Jesus was crucified. Mohammed did not suffer either of these disagreeable fates. It was not he that was put to death, but his enemies. He triumphed during his lifetime, so he created a state, first in Medina and then in Mecca, which he was able to conquer.

So you have a prophet, the founder of religion, who was also a statesman, who during his lifetime, became a head of state, which means that he promulgated and enforced laws, that he made peace and made war, and did all the other thing that is a head of state does, and those events formed part of the core of memories that Muslims all over the world share. This is the sacred history, the structural history of Muslims, and it is, therefore, political in a sense that Christianity never was and that Judaism has long ceased to be.

PROF. LEWIS: Oh, no. They make that point quite explicitly. For Muslims, Mohammed is not divine. He is a prophet, a prophet—the chosen, the last, the greatest prophet of God, but not more than a human being. This is very clearly stated in Muslim teachings. They also revere Jesus as a prophet, but they say that the Christians made a monstrous error in calling him the son of God. That, from a Muslim point of view is blasphemy.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, I wouldn't quite put it that way. Let me put it this way. The--most historians of the region agree that what we might call the modern history of the Middle East begins in 1798. In 1798, the process of defeat and withdrawal had already been going on for some time, but it was at the edges, so to speak.

In 1798, the French Republic sent an expeditionary force to Egypt, commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte. At that stage, he wasn't yet Napoleon, he wasn't yet emperor. He was simply General Bonaparte in the service of the republic. And General Bonaparte went to Egypt and taught the first appalling lesson, that even a small West European army could enter, conquer, occupy and govern one of the heartlands of the Islamic Middle East with impunity.

And the French stayed there for several years and their departure--their arrival was the first terrible lesson. Their departure was the second one. The departure of the French from Egypt was not achieved by the Egyptians, nor by their suzerains, the Turks. It was accomplished by a squadron of the British Royal Navy, commanded by a young admiral called Horatio Nelson. Now the second--the first lesson is the European power can come and do what they please. The second lesson is that only another European power can get them out.

And that began 200 years when the scenario was more or less the same, though the roles were played by different actors, when the Middle East was the more or less passive object of the rivalries and power plays of greater powers from outside the region. Sometimes it was Britain vs. France, sometimes it was Britain vs. Germany or vs. Russia. In the final phase, it was the United States vs. the Soviet Union, the two superpowers, still playing the same game that was initiated by Bonaparte and Nelson. But that was the end of it, because President Bush and Gorbachev ended what Bonaparte and Nelson had started. They ended this imperial rivalry over the Middle East because they both withdrew, the Soviets--the Russians, I should say, since the Soviet Union collapsed--the Russians because they couldn't; the Americans because they wouldn't. They didn't choose to. That is not the American way, the point I was trying to make in the National Review article.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, they didn't tell me what to write. They—they both asked me to write something about the current crisis and to deal with it in whatever way I chose, which I did.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, if they did, they didn't let me know about it.

PROF. LEWIS: I didn't have any complaints.

PROF. LEWIS: Had I written for--no, I hadn't.

PROF. LEWIS: No, when it comes to defining American interests, not when it comes to the Middle East. That's not the same thing. But one defining American interest in the Middle East, oil, a vital source of supply and I think probably in many respects, the main problem of the region, both for its people and for outsiders. And the other is Israel, the small country which is surrounded by hostile neighbors and in which clearly the United States has an interest. Yes, it seems to me that those are the only two...

PROF. LEWIS: ...major--yeah.

PROF. LEWIS: It was the mid--oh, well, it was earlier--in--in the 20th century. It came in various stages and--from the beginning of the century in Iran and then onwards. The development of oil made a tremendous difference in every respect, one of which I think is important and has not been generally mentioned. The kind of Islam that is represented by Osama bin Laden, this radical, extreme kind of Islam, did originate in Arabia and--as far back as the 18th century--and it would have remained in Arabia, had it not been for oil.

Let me explain what I mean. Imagine that some such group as the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation or one of th--one of those were suddenly to come into the possession of unlimited wealth and use that money to set up schools and colleges all over the world, promoting their particular version of Christianity. Then you get an idea of what has happened to Islam as a result of the enormous wealth that oil has brought to some people in Saudi Arabia. It has enabled them to set up schools and colleges all over the Muslim world, teaching their brand of Islam, this kind of fanatical, extremist version of Islam which has thus acquired a--a scope, an expanse--an expansion which it could never otherwise have had. Without oil money, this kind of Islam would have remained a fringe group in a marginal country.

PROF. LEWIS: Indirectly, yes. Yes, indirectly we are.

PROF. LEWIS: No, they use far more Middle Eastern oil.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes. Yes, I think so.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, because they ha--the Western Hemisphere's sources of oil.

PROF. LEWIS: And then it develops very rapidly. And, of course, it suddenly transforms these rather simple pastoral economies with an injection of immense wealth. It has a very disruptive effect, and on the whole, I should say that oil has been a curse to the Arab world.

PROF. LEWIS: Precisely this reason. You know, there's this old American dictum: no taxation without representation. What is sometimes overlooked is that the converse is also true: no representation without taxation. And with our revenues, they didn't need taxes; therefore, they didn't need assemblies to levy taxes. And they were made independent of public opinion in their own countries with this untold wealth accruing from oil revenues. This greatly strengthened the power of autocratic governments, far greater than it had ever been in the past. Now if traditional Islamic government is authoritarian, but it is not dictatorial or despotic, it is governed under certain rules and so on. In modern times, the power of the author--the power of the ruler has been vastly augmented by these huge revenues so that he doesn't need public support or public approval of his taxes. It has also been increased by all kinds of modern devices for surveillance and repression so that any tin pot dictator today wields far greater powers than were ever wielded by Suleyman the Magnificent or Harun al-Rashid or any of the legendary rulers of the Islamic past.

PROF. LEWIS: Either they'll run out of it, or it will be superseded by some other source of energy.

PROF. LEWIS: I hope so.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, there are various projects that I hear of, deriving energy from wind and water and the sea waves and so on. But these are technical questions on which I wouldn't be competent to …

PROF. LEWIS: Well, oil is so easy and so entrenched.

PROF. LEWIS: Yeah. I am surprised at that, yes. I would have thought that this is a good moment for seeking--trying to develop other sources of energy which would make us less dependent on this dangerous and unstable region. I think also that while the oil has been a nuisance to us, I think it has been a curse to them.

PROF. LEWIS: For the reason I mentioned before. It has pr--it has strengthened--many ways reinforced autocratic government. It has made government more oppressive and more effectively oppressive than it had been in the past. It has inhibited the development of other forms of gainful economic effort. I mean, the--by all the normal indicators, the economic performance record of the Middle East is abysmal. The--whether you look at GNP, GDP, per capita figures, job creation and so on, they--they come really low on the international lists. One of the reasons for that is oil money, which made it unnecessary to seek gainful employment to develop industries, to develop other forms of activity.

PROF. LEWIS: '74, yes.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, Princeton made me an offer I couldn't refuse...

PROF. LEWIS: ...and you'll get the expression, which ….

PROF. LEWIS: Oh, yes. And I had been to this country many times as a visitor. First time I set foot in the United States was in 1954, when I came on a lecture tour around the country. Then the following year, I went to UCLA as a visiting professor, and after that, a number of short appointments, including two in Princeton, one at the university and one at the Institute for Advanced Study. And then in '74, I moved over entirely.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes, of course. You bring me on to delicate ground. Let me generalize it, not refer to those two specific universities, but to the l--university education generally in both countries. Because I have some idea of the universities besides the two with which I was particularly connected. I would say, putting it briefly, and therefore with some measure of oversimplification, that undergraduate education is better in England than graduate education is better here. So that students who do a first degree here and a higher degree in England managed to get the worst of both worlds. I would never do that.

PROF. LEWIS: Oh, a little more there, but I don't think it was a big difference. It rather depended on the news; I mean, at Princeton, for example, and I suppose the same is true in other universities. In 1991, there was an upsurge in enrollment in Middle Eastern courses, which then died away again. There's an upsurge now, of course.

PROF. LEWIS: No, I'm emeritus.

PROF. LEWIS: Since '86.

PROF. LEWIS: I'm more than surprised. I'm astonished.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes.

PROF. LEWIS: They--they wanted--well, I think they want to talk to me. What's even more remarkable, they want to listen to me.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, I really shouldn't discuss that.

PROF. LEWIS: People in various branches of government, let me put it that way.

PROF. LEWIS: If by s--political front, you mean Republicans or Democrats...

PROF. LEWIS: Mostly what you want to know.

PROF. LEWIS: Oh, some of them do. There are people that are very well informed about the Middle East.

PROF. LEWIS: There are others that are remarkably ill-informed.

PROF. LEWIS: No, I haven't been to those departments.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, if you look at the published statements, you would think that the Israel/Palestine question is of primary importance. Certainly, it is important, but I don't think it's of primary importance. It is given importance because it is the only grievance that can be freely and safely expressed in Arab countries. Other grievances against the policies and behavior of their rulers cannot be expressed and--that and also anti-Americanism--anti-Israel, anti-American. These are the two safety valves for letting it out.

Now why do I think that's exaggerated? Because if you look at bin Laden's earliest statements, his first major grievance is the American presence on the holy soil of Arabia, infidel soldiers on the heartland of Islam. The second grievance is using that place as a base from which to attack Iraq. Iraq is not holy from a Muslim point of view, but for half a millennium, it was the seat of the Khalifate, the greatest and most glorious period of Islamic history. And only in third place does he mention Jerusalem, not Palestine, just Jerusalem. I think that is an honest statement of his priorities and a fairly general one. Since then, he has learned different tactics. And nowadays, he gives more emphasis to Palestine, knowing that this will raise support for him in Europe and some other places.

PROF. LEWIS: A long time ago, yes.

PROF. LEWIS: I don't think it will help very much, quite honestly. It was a different type of movement, different inspiration. (Clears his throat) Excuse me.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, in the first place, the assassins were, in a sense, a very marginal movement. They were from the Ismaili sect, which is a branch of the Shia sect, which means from the point of view of the generality of Muslims, they were a heresy of a heresy, not very far from what you might call mainstream Islam. The second difference is in their tactics. This was what I think is nowadays called targeted assassination. The assassins set out with a definite person in mind. The person was normally a ruler, a military commander or a religious dignitary. These are the three because they believed that the removal of this person would further their cause.

Now their cause was nothing less than taking over the Islamic world. And in this, I may say there is a resemblance between them and the modern ones, the aim to get rid of what they regarded as the apostates and usurpers who were ruling Islam and establishing what they regarded as an authentic Islamic regime, which of course most Muslims would not accept as such. In that respect, there is a resemblance because these people also have as their main target their own rulers. The—the fight against the West is, in that sense, incidental to their main aim, first to drive out the Westerners, which they regarded until a couple of weeks ago as competitively easy. They may be changing their mind on that now, but th--the main task ….

Now the main difference between the assassins then and terrorists now is that there was no collateral damage. The assassins set out on a mission to kill a person. He killed that person and made no attempt to escape. The assassins made almost a sacrament of the assassination. They only use knives. There were other ways of killing people, even in the Middle Ages. They never used missiles of any sort, no bows and arrows, no crossbows, no catapults. They never used poison and so on. This was a quite different approach to that of the modern terrorist who is prepared to destroy thousands or tens of thousands of people entirely at random. This is a 20th century innovation...

PROF. LEWIS: ...not part of Islam.

PROF. LEWIS: More than that, actually.

PROF. LEWIS: About 20.

PROF. LEWIS: Most.

PROF. LEWIS: Oh, my next one, naturally. It's always the next one.

PROF. LEWIS: As a--as a general survey of my own books, I would recommend that one, yes. It does try to cover the history of the region from the rise of Christianity to the present day.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, the kind of wishy-washy policies that have been followed in the past and just won't work and the question which people have been asking all the time is I think the wrong question. The question people are asking is why do they hate us? That's the wrong question. They've been hating us for a long time. In a sense, they've been hating us for centuries, and it's very natural that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems to be winning. And more generally, I mean, you can't be rich, strong, successful and loved, particularly by those who are not rich, not strong and not successful. So the hatred is something almost axiomatic. The question which we should be asking is why do they neither fear nor respect us? And this is what comes out very clearly in the writings of Osama bin Laden. And in the past, there were always rival powers. If they were unhappy with the Americans, they could turn to the Russians. If they were unhappy with the British, they could turn to the Germans. Can't do that anymore.

Now this has served not only to concentrate their minds wonderfully in one direction, but also to encourage them. Because as they see it, they destroyed the Soviet Union through the long struggle in Afghanistan, and finally the Russians were driven out of Afghanistan by people like Osama bin Laden; as they see it, to such devastating effect, al--that the Soviet Union itself collapsed. They saw this as stage one of the major victory. They regarded the Soviet Union as by far the most--the more dangerous of the two superpowers. They were really scared of them. They were always much more careful in doing anything which might offend them or even saying anything which might offend them.

Having, as they see it, destroyed the Soviet Union, they reckoned that dealing with the United States would be comparatively easy. And this comes again and again in Osama bin Laden's writings and statements. He says, for example, `The Americans are paper tigers. They've grown soft. Hit them and they'll run.' And then the same litany's always repeated--Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia. There is a belief which, to any American, would appear absolutely preposterous. What happened in Somalia was an attempt to establish an imperial American domination over that country and this was foiled by the brave Somali people who stood up to defend their independence. I mean, there's obviously a gross travesty on both sides of what happened. But that is how Osama bin Laden sees it. And he saw this as evidence of weakness and softness and was encouraged to go on with that. I think that during the last couple of weeks, they may be changing their minds on that point.

PROF. LEWIS: I don't think it matters. I mean, these things do not accept major changes. I don't think so, anyway. But then I must point out my specialization is the Middle East, not the Middle West, so these are matters on which I wouldn't claim any competence.

PROF. LEWIS: I don't think so. This doesn't come up very often in the--in the literature.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, by get tough, I mean continue the good work that was started in Afghanistan and deal with some of the other countries or groups, terrorists--terrorist groups and countries that help them. The alternative, get out, is find a substitute for oil so that the Middle East no longer matters. Leave them to their own devices. It seem...

PROF. LEWIS: That, I have no idea. These, it seems to me, are the two alternatives.

PROF. LEWIS: I think it's get tough rather than get out.

PROF. LEWIS: I prefer it to getting out without good reason, yes. I mean, to stay around and be bullied and insulted is not a good idea.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, you can divide the whole Middle East basically into three regions. You have those countries which are ruled by governments, that we regard as friends and allies. In those countries, the populations for the most part are bitterly anti-American, notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And as they used to say in Moscow, `It's no acci--no accident that the great majority of the hijackers come from those countries.'

PROF. LEWIS: Because those populations are anti-American, and they are anti-American because they regard their governments as American puppets carrying out American purposes. Second group are the countries where the government's are anti-American, such as Iran and Iraq and Syria. In those countries, as far as we know, the people are very pro-American. There were remarkable demonstrations in Iran, for example, after September the 11th, when thousands of people went out into the streets to express in a kind of vigil, to express their sympathy and their horror at what happened. This was nothing sponsored by the government. On the contrary, they tried to prevent it.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes. If you have a very unpopular government and that unpopular government tells you that America is bad, you will automatically assume that America must be good. They see America as a possible hope of liberation. And I'm told that recent events in Afghanistan have caused great excitement in Iran for hope that the same thing might happen to them. I'm told that after seeing the scenes of rejoicing in Afghanistan and being liberated from the Taliban, that that would look like a funeral compared with what the Iranians and the Iraqis would do if they were liberated of their present rulers.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes.

PROF. LEWIS: The desire for freedom is, I think, very natural. Now constitutional democracy is a Western idea, and freedom in that--as a political metaphor is a Western idea. But the Islamic world has its own syn--system of political ideals and ideas. And for them, what matters--the--the criterion of a good government is justice. And to a large extent by justice, they mean many of the same things that we in the West mean by freedom: government under law, government that is itself limited and responsible. And that is conspicuously lacking. And people talk of the Middle East as a region of age-old autocracy, in a sense, true. But the autocracies of the past were much more limited than those of the present day.

And may I just finish what I was saying before, the--the--the—the three regions--pro-American regimes, anti-American populations, anti-American regimes, pro-American populations, Iraq, Iran. The third group where go--both the government and the people are friendly to the United States and that's just two countries--the two which are democracies where the governments are elected by the people and can be thrown out by the people--Turkey and Israel.

PROF. LEWIS: Moving in the direction of democracy? Well, in a paradoxical way, I would say Iran is moving in that direction. They do have elections of a sort, it's true, under a whole series of constraints. Nevertheless, it has been possible in Iran for the electorate, the people in general, to express an opinion. It's indirect, it's ineffectual, but it's not unimportant because of that. And what you have, in effect, now in Iran is two governments: an elected government, which has no power, and a rule government which was never elected and is not answerable. And that sets up tensions, which may well lead to the development of more democratic institutions. Among other countries, no. I don't see the movement as being rather in the opposite direction.

PROF. LEWIS: When you say the media, you're talking about an enormous number...

PROF. LEWIS: ...of great varie--a great variety of newspapers and radio and television services. Very, very mixed I would say, very mixed; on the whole, not very good.

PROF. LEWIS: Shortwave radio.

PROF. LEWIS: Whatever I can get.

PROF. LEWIS: Because then I can get, first of all, direct news straight from the source and hear the different points of view and the different versions of things. What bothers me about much that we get here is its triviality.

PROF. LEWIS: No, I'd rather not.

PROF. LEWIS: Yes.

PROF. LEWIS: No, that was a ver--very poor text. And I--I don't think I would have been able to understand that, except odd bits here and there...

PROF. LEWIS: ...not--not enough to follow the argument.

PROF. LEWIS: Day-to-day detail and a lot of small things, which are not even mentioned in--in the media. And--and...

PROF. LEWIS: Oh, yes. There are a number of them. And also the European stations which broadcast to the Middle East, and they're often quite interesting, too. I find NPR pretty useful, I must say.

PROF. LEWIS: Well, I can't pick out just one thing and say that was the cause of it because it's not only a question of what went wrong with them, it's a question of what went wrong with us. I mean, why did the West manage to advance while they fell back? So these are two questions, not one. And I think that there are many different causes. And one of them, for example, is Atlantic shipping. Countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean, like England and Holland and France and Portugal, had to build bigger, stronger ships, ships that could face the Atlantic. These could carry more guns and were, therefore, more effective in war. And they could carry cargoes greater distances, more cheaply, more safely and, therefore, more effective in peace.

So that in both respects, they outdid the shipping of the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, which simply didn't need to be as big and as strong and as maneuverable. I think that's a very important element in the change which took place when Atlantic fleets come into Eastern waters. Even a small country like Portugal or Holland can build a great empire in the East, defying all the mighty Eastern empires. And I think obviously there are many elements in that, but Atlantic vessels is part of it.

Another is the development of science. Now that is really a restatement of the question rather than an answer to the question because in the Middle Ages, they were in the forefront of science, and they continued to be for a little while after, but gradually they fell behind while the West advanced. Some people would say that the difference is the Reformation. Christendom went through a reformation and a Counter-Reformation. Islam has not done that yet, and some would argue that that is a factor.

Personally, I think that one of the major factors is the difference in the treatment of women. And this was off--difference--the treatment of women was often commented on by travelers both ways. Middle Eastern travelers to Europe talking with horror and disgust of the absurd freedom and deference accorded to women in this society. Visitors from the West to the Middle East talk with ill concealed envy of the privileges of the Muslim male dealing with his womenfolk. But it isn't until a comparatively late stage that people suggest that this might have something to do with the civilizational difference. And for me, the first and strongest case is that put by a Turkish writer called Nama Kamal in an article published in 1868. I quote it in there, in which he says that the main reason he says for our backwardness in 1868--the word backwardness was still permitted. He said, `The main reason for our backwardness as compared with the West is the way we treat our women; thereby depriving ourselves of the energies and talents of half the population.'

He uses a couple of striking metaphors. He says, `We treat women, at best, like jewels or musical instruments.' And then he goes on to talk about the damage that this does to the society. And he ends by saying how society, compared to the West, is like a human body that is paralyzed on one side. And Ataturk took up the same point in the early '20s when he founded and became first president of the Turkish Republic. We began with a campaign for women's rights, an unlikely advocate, an Ottoman ...(unintelligible) general campaigning for women's rights. But he put his case very clearly and simply. He said, `Our task now is to catch up with the modern world. We will not catch up with the modern world if we only modernize half the population.' I think he had a point. The Taliban might take note of that.

PROF. LEWIS: Thank you.