What Went Wrong Bernard Lewis

Middle Eastern countries, especially Iraq, are often portrayed as overly religious, backward, and violent. Their image in the world has been clouded by the intergroup hostility that has existed between Muslim and Christian societies for centuries. In his review of Bernard Lewis’s book, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Professor Aslam Syed points out a commonly accepted Western narrative of the origins of this hostility. This narrative states that the ancient Muslim world was once an epicenter for intellectual thought and discovery. However, the Middle East “missed” the European Renaissance and Reformation and rejected ensuing technological advancement because it altogether dismissed “the denizens of the lands beyond
When speaking of the current conflict in Middle Eastern nations, Dr. Ghassan Salamé asserts that the Islamists of today seek to restore “-a highly idealized old order of things” (22), and that their actions are “driven in part by an alienation from the present world system, in which they consider the Muslim world’s position as unjustly marginal in light of Islam’s past glories.” (22). The key assumption that both Dr. Syed and Dr. Salamé both address but fail to state outright, and that underpins the entire European narrative of the Middle East, is the assumption that the core values of the Middle East and the West are too incompatible to overcome and absolutely cannot exist in close proximity to one another without violence. This assumption is directly challenged by both Martin Amis’s short story, “In the Palace of the End” and Yasmina Khadra’s novel, The Sirens of Baghdad. Both stories transcend the narrative of inevitable conflict between European and Middle Eastern values by exemplifying the human capability for empathy in spite of religious, political, and cultural
In the novel, the Iraqi main characters struggle with their perceived adversary, the West. This conflict is explained by yet another psychological theory, the contact hypothesis. The contact hypothesis states that “direct, positive contact between members of different groups has the potential to reduce intergroup hostility and aggression under the right circumstances…Yet negative contact experience may actually increase intergroup hostility and even provoke intergroup aggression.” (“Psychological Factors” 794). The multiple misunderstandings between U.S. soldiers and the villagers of Kafr Karam, such as the bombing of a wedding, ultimately lead to the characters fighting as rebels and the narrator’s eventual commitment to an act of