Drew Whitley’s Reviews > What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam & Modernity in the Middle East > Status Update

Bernard Lewis knows his stuff and generally has good analysis. His problem is that he’s smug, he likes to essentialize, and he implies that the things that “went wrong” were inevitable. He glosses over the efforts of the Arab renaissance and its intellectuals to reform the Ottoman Empire from within. Instead of seeing what went wrong there, he says it was doomed from the start!
Booooooooooo