by Bernard Lewis

About the author: Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of near eastern studies at Princeton University and the author of numerous books, including The Arabs in History, Islam and the West, and What Went Wrong": Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.

In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear that things had gone badly wrong in the Middle East—and, indeed, in all the lands of Islam. Compared with Christendom, its rival for more than a millennium, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant. The primacy and therefore the dominance of the West was clear for all to see, invading every aspect of the Muslim’s public and even—more painfully—private life.

Muslim modernizers—by reform...