It’s April, so I must be reading another Bernard Lewis Book. The first Lewis Book I read—The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 years—had proven essential background reading on my first trip to Israel and Jordan in 2000; it was anything but brief, but Bernard Lewis was one for wry understatement, I reckoned. Then came What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, What Went Wrong? still smells of an especially mellifluous SPF 50+ cream.which I read in Jamaica last year. This year, he has just come out with The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror; I picked it up instinctively at Hedengrens Hedengrens is one of the best bookstores I know; how many New York bookstores carry the entire range of the Penguin Classics?
 
Unlike the Republican Guard, winter is making a surprising last stand, with snow and freezing temperatures after a week of near-room temperatures.and have just read it this past weekend in a cabin on the Stockholm Archipelago.

These three books form something of a progression, and as such they deserve some comment. Each successive book is a Cliffs Notes of the preceding, it turns out. Each is about the same physical size, but the font size keeps on growing, and so they get less substantive. His latest book is positively slight, and I finished it in a matter of hours. The footnotes are shorter than those of many a SAIS paper that I wrote (and that is saying something), but I’ve come to suspect that this book is aimed at people who don’t look up footnotes in the first place.

I’m sure he’d hate it if I suggested that at the age of 86, he’s not up to something really fresh. Perhaps he’d hate it even more if I mused that he’s just doing it for the money. More kindly, he probably just relented after incessant hounding from his publishers to write something explicitly in response to September 11. The problem is, Bernard Lewis is the world’s pre-eminent authority on Middle Eastern Studies; he is so good that he already wrote the definitive book on the root causes of 9/11 before 9/11 happened: What Went Wrong was in page proof on September 11, 2001. What’s more, Lewis turned out to be right about a great many things that he predicted way back in 1990 in a seminal series of articles in The Atlantic Monthly.

In an afterword to Crisis, Lewis writes:

The nucleus of this book was an article published in The New Yorker in November 2001. In bringing it up to date and developing it from a long article to a short book, I have adapted a few passages from previous publications, especially some articles published in Foreign Affairs and The Atlantic Monthly. The rest is new.

The internet is a blessed thing: you can read both The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly articles for free—only the Foreign Affairs articles you’d have to pay for, if you didn’t already photocopy them in your local library. So how much is new?

Skimming the online offerings, I immediately recognized great chunks of what I had just read. Just one example: on page 53 of Crisis:

In 1593 an Ottoman official who also served as a chronicler of current events, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English Ambassador. He does not appear to have been much interested in the ambassador, but he was struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled: “A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul,” he wrote. “It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns besides other weapons . . . It was a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded.”

The 1997 Foreign Affairs article:

In 1593 an Ottoman historian, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English ambassador. He was not very interested in the ambassador, but he was much struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled. “A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul,” he wrote. “It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns besides other weapons . . . It was a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded.”

There is a lot more like this. Virtually every chapter starts verbatim from a previously published article. And where it does not, he distills notions that were covered amply in his more expansive books. Crisis is basically a cut-and-paste job.

This much is new, however: A rundown of quality-of-life numbers extracted from World Bank documents that seem straight out of a research assistant’s to-do list. The eagerness to prove the point (that Muslim countries are poor) builds up to a bizzare comparison:

The comparative figures on the performance of Muslim countries, as reflected in these statistics, are devastating. In the listing of economies by gross domestic product, the highest ranking Muslim majority country is Turkey, with 64 million inhabitants, in twenty-third place, between Austria and and Denmark, with about 5 million each. [. . .] In a listing of industrial output, the highest ranking Muslim country is Saudi Arabia, number twenty-one, followed by Indonesia, tied with Austria and Belgium in twenty-second place, and Turkey, tied with Norway in twenty-seventh place. [. . .] In a listing by life expectancy, the first Arab state is Kuwait, in thirty-second place, following Denmark and followed by Cuba.

Leave aside for a moment that Austria has a population of over 8 million. 8,169,929 in July, 2002, according to the CIA’s World Factbook “estimate”.How exactly is a life expectancy similar to that of Denmark “devastating”? Surely not because Denmark is a small country? Placing 32nd out of over 180 countries One assumes 180 countries. Data is sourced only to “indicators from the United Nations, the World Bank, and other authorities.”still means sitting well into the the top 20th percentile of the world.

Muslim countries may be badly off, but we know at least this much from reading Lewis’s latest: Kuwaiti life expectancy is doing just fine.

So avoid Crisis. Read What Went Wrong? instead—it’s a true scholarly work that focuses on the problem at hand without insulting your intelligence.

I can’t let this subject go, however, without first lamenting the truly horrid subtitles being brandished by books these days. How does Holy War and Unholy Terror exactly elucidate anything, beside apprising us of some editor’s unholy capacity for alliteration? Tellingly, the original subtitle for What Went Wrong? did not survive the transition from hardcover to paperback: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response became The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. Peddling clashes, are we? How about What Went Wrong? The Clash between Clarity and Sales in Publishing.