Even Bernard Lewis

Even Bernard Lewis seems to get it wrong. Lewis talks about the Arab world longing for the great historic period of ascendancy of Arab Culture.

The Arab world talks about their great past.

The idea that the great Arab past ever existed and has any relationship to the contemporary Arab world is wrong.

Saladin, the highly revered Arab military hero only has a place in a fallacious history. Saladin’s army indeed drove the Crusaders out of Palestine. However, the Crusaders he drove out were the fourth generation of Christian descendents who had little or no military capability and nominal contact with Christian Europe. Saladin’s army would have been incapable of fending off the soon to arrive army of the Third Christian Crusade. That thankless task fell to the real military might of the Middle East, the Turks.

The great thinkers of the period were al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna and most importantly Averroes. (These are the Latinized names we know them by.)

These great men were part of an Islamic society made up of Moors, Berbers, Moroccans, Persians, Turks, Indians, Jews and Arabs. The great Islamic society, of which these men were part and from which they drew their heritage, was cosmopolitan and diverse for more than two centuries before them and after them. They were part of the great triumphal period of Islamic Culture that stretched from Spain to Indonesia.

Does any of that diversity exist in any Arab country today? Of course not. Arab societies are the most ethnically homogenous populations on the planet. There is no connection between the great diverse Islamic Cultural world of a thousand years ago and the ethnically pure societies of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad or anywhere else in the Arab world. It wasn’t Arab culture that deserves respect; it was pan-Islamic diversity that produced Islamic genius.

I must make one minor amendment to my point. Arab societies have had a great tradition of Arabic poetry, I’m told, several millennia old. Like most poetry, it is language bound and most of my readers, myself included, will never appreciate it.