The National Interest
Spring 2002

Arabian Nightmares

by David Pryce-Jones

 

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but these efforts to catch up were yet again based on an incomplete intellectual analysis. What has happened to most Muslim societies, as Lewis unfolds it, is modernization without Westernization. The sense of these two abstract nouns must be carefully distinguished. Modernization in the Muslim world has resulted in national armies, all ranks equipped with European-style uniforms and weaponry, and such other features as high-rise buildings and oil wells and paved roads and flyovers—in short, the outward appearances that are to be observed in any non-Muslim country. The novel and the theater and film-making are cultural forms successfully transplanted across the cultural divide, as are clocks and timetables and calendars. Voltaire at his estate of Ferney, it turns out, had men making watches for the Turkish market. But also in the package of imports are filing systems, computers, surveillance devices and other instruments of the tyrannical government which is the curse of the Muslim world at present. For the unfortunate man and woman in the Muslim street, modernization has no necessary connection with such integral features of the West as freedom, civil rights or equality of opportunity. . . .