Life among the Anthros and Other Essays by Geertz Clifford; Inglis Fred;

Author:Geertz, Clifford; Inglis, Fred;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

What changed all this was the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution: the revival of Western learning and the decay of Arabic, Persian, Moorish, and Ottoman culture; the rationalization of Christian doctrine and the petrification of Islamic; the growing military and economic disparity between the technologically developed, “scientific” West and the traditional, backward, “handicraft” East. The opening of the sea routes to India and to the New World in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman halt before the gates of Vienna in the seventeenth, and the entry of Napoleon into Egypt at the end of the eighteenth were but so many stages in the long withdrawing roar of Islamic grandeur, the descent of the once great Muslim world of Avicenna and Ibn Khaldun, Saladin and Suleyman the Magnificent, into “a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating … in alien domination” and the radical xenophobia that has gone with it.

In What Went Wrong? this seesaw version of Christian-Muslim history—when the one is up, the other is down—is related in casual, restrained, almost regretful tones, punctuated with sly asides and dégagé observations; and that is, surely, the main reason, apart from the fortune of its spot-on timing, for the book’s extraordinary public reception. At a time when so much history writing has abandoned causal, storybook, “and then, and then …” narrative for postmodern nonlinearity, skepticism, relativism, flash, and indeterminacy, the classical grand récit, breathing the authority of received scholarship, measured tone, the long view, and plain fact, comes as something of a relief. At least someone knows.

But in The Crisis of Islam, written after September 11 (What Went Wrong? was written just before it; a brief postcript describing the attack as “the latest phase in a struggle that has been going on for more than fourteen centuries” was added upon publication), Lewis dramatically abandons this donnish and deliberate deep-view position for intense, and intensely contemporary, close-up polemic designed to arouse the West, and most especially the United States, to armed response. Mossadeq, Ba’athism, Suez, the Muslim Brotherhood, Wahhabism, the massacre at Hama, suicide bombers, Khomeini, the Taliban, the Islamic Salvation Front, Saddam, Osama—what was in the first work but implied and insinuated is here explicitly stated, sans nuance, sans reserve: Muslim rage at Muslim failure, “holy war and unholy terror,” has become a threat, not just eventually and to Christendom, but here and now and to the world as a whole: If the [Muslim fundamentalists] can persuade the world of Islam to accept their views and their leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Europe … is now home to a large and rapidly growing Muslim community, and many Europeans are beginning to see its presence as … a threat. Sooner or later, Al-Qa’ida and related groups will clash and the other groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam—Russia, China, India—who may prove less squeamish than the Americans [have] in using their power against Muslims and their sanctities.

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