The Non-Secular Struggle for Modernity: Lessons from Christopher De Bellaigue's "The Islamic Enlightenment"

For nearly three hundred years, the West has been militarily and economically triumphant around the world with only a few exceptions.  It has enjoyed the fruits of past empires and advanced democratic and bureaucratic practices developed over those centuries.  And when we look back at our history, we feel a certain sense of pride in our progress from intellectual and financial poverty during the Middle Ages to our current heights today.

It can be easy for the West to look at places like the Middle East and ask, "Why can they get it together?  Why can't they be more like us?  Where is Islam's Reformation?  Or the Middle East's Enlightenment?"  It's ignorant and hubristic questions like these that make books like The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times by Christopher De Bellaigue so important.  They teach us that not only have places like the Middle East tried to modernize their countries, but that the West is sometimes to blame for their backwards steps.

Here are a few things I learned from reading The Islamic Enlightenment:

• Progress is not secular-  Being steeped in the history of Western progress, Americans can be deluded into thinking that progress just goes up, up, and up with no backward steps.  Hasn't it been nothing but progress since Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses onto the Wittenberg Cathedral doors?  People too often forget how the West has taken steps backwards throughout its history.  And while it's easy to point out the Middle East's backwards steps, the region has made huge progress from where it was when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798.  Turkey, for a time, could have been classified as a democracy, something that the Young Turks of the 19th century could only have dreamed about.  And despite its theocratic structure, much of Iran's government does have strong democratic elements and a new generation of citizens interested in expanding those elements at the 2009 Green Revolution showed.  And Egypt did experiment with democracy for a little bit during the Arab Spring before settling on the Muslim Brotherhood and then regressing back into a military dictatorship.  The point is, progress is never a straight arrow pointing upwards.  In the Middle East as well as the West, progress will never be a secular line pointing in the right direction, but always a non-linear process.

• Don't expect the Islamic world to mirror Western values and institutions- After the death of Mao Tse-Tung, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping is famous for having created an economy he called "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics."  And the Chinese economy, in spite of its reforms, still has many of its Chinese characteristics such as state-owned enterprises.  We should not expect it to become a truly Western-style free-market economy any time soon, nor should we expect Western-style democracies to magically spring up in the Middle East.  One of the main themes of this book is how the best political, philosophical, and literary minds of the Middle East struggled to adapt Western ideas and models to their Middle Eastern settings.  What should a Middle Eastern constitution look like?  What should the role of Islam be?  Is the capitalist market what's best for the region?  Or does it just hollow out the cultures of the region?  People struggled, and still struggle, with these questions.  We should not expect the Middle East to adopt Western democratic values wholesale.  Enforcing these values on them doesn't work very well either (see my next point below).  If anything, democratic expect progress in the Middle East to look more like Iran's theocratic-democracy.  In other words, democracy with Middle Eastern characteristics.

• The West has a magical way of screwing things up at the wrong moment- One other theme throughout this book is how reforms would start to take hold in the region only to be cut down at a critical moment.  Often it was the fault of conservative monarchs and their supporters, but oftentimes it was also the West who would screw things up.  Take the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century for example.  During this period, the Empire's finances were in disarray, catalogued in an ancient manner completely oblivious to the advances of Western finances.  Recognizing this, the Ottomans reached out to Western nations for training on how to modernize its finances.  And the West did, but at a cost.  The Ottoman Empire learned new financial practices, but the West burdened the Empire with such crippling debt that its chronic indebtedness was as much to blame for the Empire's fall as well as its military failures during World War I.  Of course, the most notorious example of this was the overthrow of Iran's democratic government under Mohammed Mossadegh by the CIA and MI6.  Not only did this strangle Iranian democracy in its craddle, it caused one of the worst blowbacks in America's history with the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Islamic Republic under Ruhollah Khomeini.  Now, just when America and Iran has just barely begun to restore their bond with each other with the passage of the Iran Nuclear Deal, now we've elected a president who openly disdains international agreements.  President Trump has already pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. Could he pull out of the Iranian Nuclear Deal as well?  

To say that the Middle East has made no progress is just historical ignorance and to expect the region to look like the West eventually is just Western triumphalist hubris.  The West should be ready to help whenever asked, but we should read books like this and remember how we've screwed things up in the past.  Perhaps then we can avoid making the mistakes in the future and allow Middle Eastern democracies room to breathe.

Thank you for reading this blog.  Next week I will try to do the impossible and finish Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.  I've been working my way through this book for months, but now it's time to finish it.  Don't forget, if you like this blog, please share it with others.  Until next week, keep on reading!