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.

Going beyond the mimicry of externals, Westernization involves a change of thinking profound enough to shift the basic institutions and assumptions of social and political life. Westernization would replace autocracy and one-party rule with democracy and the rule of law; it would replace civil war and the secret police with power-sharing. Westernization means respect for the rights of others, in particular the acceptance of women on juridically equal terms with men. In a society in which the conduct of women is held to be the source of honor or shame for men, this latter reform is not merely an upturning of long-held values but a crude invasion of Muslim private life. In an aside, Lewis draws an analogy between soccer and parliamentary politics, both of which stem from the English genius for drawing up rules. The adoption of soccer in the Middle East is modernization. The adoption of parliamentary politics would be Westernization. In another inspired aside, he takes the plot of Verdi's Aida, commissioned by the khedive of Egypt in 1871, which turns on the choice tormenting the opera's hero between two women he loves. This would have been meaningless in the Egypt of the day, or in Saudi Arabia today, where the hero could have had both ladies legally.

"Following is bad enough", Lewis writes, but "limping in the rear is worse." In this crisis, a counter-reaction has long been building among Muslims, the essence of which is that everyone else is to blame for the plight in which they find themselves trapped, that they are innocent victims of malevolence or conspiracy. The most recent outsiders and unbelievers out to do down and destroy Islam wantonly are held to be Americans and Jews. In order to rationalize such a pointless ambition on the part of other people, they have to demonize the United States and Israel. The Islamic anger of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and the secular anger of Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat, are twin aspects of the process of modernizing without at the same time Westernizing. And what all this anger coincidentally achieves is another pretext for the Muslim world to turn on itself with violence. So we have a cycle, with violence producing conspiracy-mongering, and fear of conspiracy producing more frustration and violence. Left without redress, it is bound to end in a thousand and one Arabian nightmares.

What went wrong, then, in the last analysis, has been the inability of Islamic culture either to sustain itself or to evolve in the light of today's world. The political and social forms of Islam have long since decayed into bad and despotic government, injustice and corruption, inequality between the sexes, and the impossibility of innovation. The sole surviving defense of identity now seems to lie in the inner compulsion to recover honor by whatever means are at hand, and to avoid shame. Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the rest share the same vocabulary to denigrate Western-and especially American-"arrogance" and "haughtiness", and also to reject perceived "humiliation" and to insist on the assertion of their own dignity, if need be through terror and war. In his next short and invaluable book Lewis might examine the role that these values play in holding Muslim public and private life in a static grip apparently impervious to reform. People liberate themselves from feelings of shame and humiliation only through their own deeds; mere words of explanation and expiation, however rational, are to no avail.

In both its religious and its secular nationalist forms, Muslim rage looks to provide for some time to come an organizing principle for mobilizing against the United States and Western civilization in general. In short, we may be facing another variant of cold war, or worse. But there must be Muslims who will read Lewis and agree that catastrophe lies down this road. What is required is re-invention, and this in turn requires a philosopher, the equivalent of a Muslim Locke or Montesquieu, to provide new definitions of the role and purpose of Islam in the state and society, and so recover a properly-working Muslim identity in the contemporary context. There seem to be no such persons. In that case, Lewis concludes, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, or else some outside power might conquer the Muslim world once and for all. There are not enough civilizations for mankind to so heedlessly write off any one of them.

We should all hope, therefore, along with Professor Lewis, for the true victory of Islam-not against the West, but for itself.

David Pryce-Jones is a senior editor of National Review. His book, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, has just been reprinted by Ivan R. Dee.

Essay Types: Book Review