Free The Shaping of the Modern Middle East by Bernard Lewis Page A

was the lawyer. In the old days, law was holy law, a branch of religious learning, and the only lawyers were the ulema. Legal and constitutional reform, the creation of modern laws and of courts to administer them, brought into existence a new class of secular advocates, who played a great role in the new political life and in the application of new political ideas and methods.

    The journalists and lawyers, like the new-style officers and officials, required a new type of education in place of the traditional religious and literary learning of the past. Their pabulum was Western languages and literature, history, geography, and law, to which were later added economics and politics. Most of these subjects were new and strange; they were, however, familiar in that they were all literary in form, capable of being learned from books or lectures and then memorized. They could thus be assimilated into traditional methods of education, relying chiefly on the authority of the teacher and the memory of the student.
    The practical and physical sciences, however, were another matter. The once great Muslim tradition of scientific inquiry and experiment had long since atrophied and died, leaving a society strongly resistant to the scientific spirit. In the words of a Turkish historian of science, "The scientific current broke against the dykes of literature and jurisprudence."' No less serious an impediment was the deep-rooted social attitude toward power, work, and status that often makes the Middle Easterner, even today, a bold and resourceful driver but a reluctant and unpredictable mechanic. Medicine, engineering, and other useful sciences were taught at the very first military schools; scientific treatises were among the first Western works translated into Turkish and Arabic, but many medical graduates preferred to become administrators rather than soil their hands with patients, and the scientific schools remained alien and exotic growths in need of constant care and renewed graftings from the West. There was no real development of original scientific work, such as occurred in Japan, China, or India, and each generation of students had to draw again from the sources in the West, which had meanwhile itself been making immense progress. The result was that the disparity in scientific knowledge, technological capacity, and therefore of military power between the Middle East and the advanced countries of the West is greater now than it was two hundred years ago, when the whole process of Westernization began. This disparity was maintained and, indeed, aggravated by the reluctance or inability to make the social and cultural changes that are necessary to sustain a modern state of the Western type. The military consequences of this disparity were dramatically illustrated in the Gulf War of 1991.

    From time to time, Middle Eastern thinkers have put the question: What is the result of all this Westernization? It is a question that we of the West may well ask ourselves, too. It is our complacent habit in the Western world to make ourselves the model of virtue and progress. To be like us is to be good; to be unlike us is to be bad. To become more like us is to improve; to become less like us is to deteriorate. It is not necessarily so. When civilizations clash, there is one that prevails and one that is shattered. Idealists and ideologues may talk glibly of "a marriage of the best elements" from both sides, but the usual result of such an encounter is a cohabitation of the worst.
    The impact of the West in the Middle East has brought great benefits and will surely bring others-in wealth and comfort, knowledge and artifacts, and the opening of new ways that were previously shut. These are good roads, though it is not always certain where they lead.
    Westernization-the work of Westerners and still more of Wes- ternizers-has also brought changes of doubtful merit. One of these is the political disintegration and fragmentation of the region.