From: Ali Abunimah
To: atc@npr.org
Subject: Bernard Lewis and the true price of a cup of coffee

January 4, 2002

Dear NPR News,

Bernard Lewis proposed, in an interview with Robert Siegel on All Things Considered for January 3, 2002, that the "Islamic World" once the leader in every field of human endeavor took a back seat to "the West" some time in the eighteenth century and began a period of economic, political and social decay from which it has yet to emerge. "What went wrong" with the Muslim world, he asks.MO< Mr. Lewis, the father of the "clash of civilizations" thesis gives us a good example of the kind of flawed and amoral reasoning he uses to reach his smug conclusions. He uses the example of a cup of coffee. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Mr. BERNARD LEWIS (Author, "What Went Wrong?"): Coffee came originally from Ethiopia. It was brought to the Middle East, it became very popular in the Middle East and the West first imported it from the Middle East. Sugar came from Iran, possibly, ultimately from India. That, too, became well known in the Middle East long before it was known in Europe. So that coffee and sugar were two important items among Middle Eastern exports to the Western world. Then things changed around. The Europeans learned how to grow both sugar and coffee in their plantations, and to do so more efficiently and, therefore, more cheaply than in the Middle East. So that by the 18th century, if a Turk or an Arab indulged in that familiar delight, a cup of sweet coffee, the probability was that the coffee came from Java or South America and the sugar from the West Indies. Only the hot water was local. And in the 19th century, even that ceased to be true, as European companies took over most of the public utilities.

SIEGEL: There's an implication there that some capacity for innovation--and you write about it...

Mr. LEWIS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SIEGEL: ...in terms of science--some capacity for innovation simply wasn't there in that part of the world.

LEWIS: It had been there, but it was lost or even suppressed. The Islamic society of the Middle East had been in its prime, undoubtedly the most advanced, the most creative, the most inventive on all the frontiers of knowledge in every significant field of human endeavor. They had led in science and technology, in commerce, in astronomy, chemistry, physics, you name it. And then suddenly, they just stopped and began to fall more and more behind the previously barbarous West.

Yet Lewis leaves out a few small details about the "previously barbarous West." What was the great innovation that Europeans came up with so that Arabs and others could enjoy cheap coffee and sugar? It was of course the lethal and lucrative combination of aggressive colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. Europeans did not invent slavery, which had been practiced all over the world for millennia, including in Africa and the Middle East, but one of their 'contributions to civilization,' so to speak, was to systematize it and industrialize it on an enormous and unprecedented scale. The European slave trade began in 1502 with the colonization of the Atlantic islands off Africa by the Portuguese who pioneered the slave-plantation system, which with the assistance of other Europeans spread from there to most of northern and southern America and the West Indies. This system lasted almost four hundred years, almost destroying the native peoples of America and decimating the Black population of Africa.

With the kind of detail that Lewis' broad brush approach allows him to avoid, Tukufu Zuberi describes the genesis of the kind of innovations that Lewis so much admires, and lords over us as evidence of "Western" genius and civilization. Following their successful colonization of the Atlantic islands, and importation of slaves, Zuberi explains that "it did not take long for the Portuguese to transport their experience in the islands off the coast of West Africa to their new American colonies. They brought sugar experts from the Madeira and Sao Tome plantations. This effort resulted in the first slave plantation system in the Americas and quickly outpaced the Atlantic islands in the production of sugar." By the seventeenth century, with its plantations spread across Brazil, Portugal "had a prize place in the New World market." The Dutch, "deeply involved in the European slave trade as sugar producers and traders in enslaved Africans" surpassed even the Portuguese. (See "Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie," by Tukufu Zuberi, University of Minnesota Press, 2001)

It is thus that Europeans managed to produce coffee and especially sugar so much more cheaply in gold (but dearly in human life) than the Middle East. For Lewis this is not worth mentioning, and it does not seem to interfere with his notion of a more enlightened "West."

In fact Lewis specifically attempted to delegitimize any effort to look beyond purely internal explanations for Islamic/Arab "decay" towards relationships of power and the history of colonialism as playing the "blame game" and nursing "neuroses."

Lewis talked glibly throughout the interview of "their civilization" and "ours" as if the world can be neatly divided into monolithic and static blocks whose interactions are limited to gladiatorial confrontations where actual human interactions and the formation of complex identities that straddle and defy such reductive categories simply do not exist. And it is only by drawing such simplistic caricatures--too broad to be of any analytical or explanatory use that he can come up with a satisfying story of Islamic decadence and Western ascendancy.

Behind his meaningless monoliths, Lewis hides all the frustrating and wonderful complexity of the world. It is easy to tell a story of astonishing decline in the "West" if one wants to. One need only look at Great Britain. How is it that a country that brought us the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the industrial revolution, trade unions, technical innovations in every field, parliamentary democracy and so much more, and ruled two thirds of the world in an empire over which the sun never set, ended up by the 1970s as a tiny struggling, ungovernable island, a basket-case poorer than Italy, whose intellectuals and scientists fled its impoverished universities in droves, and with no greater strategic importance than as an American aircraft carrier? How is it that the country that invented railways two-hundred years ago, simply cannot operate a modern railway today?

For an even greater story of decline one need only look at the Spanish and Portuguese empires.

As for ascendancy, one could ask how it is that so many of the excelling scientists and graduate students in American universities (in some fields most) come from Asian countries such as India, Korea Iran, Pakistan and China. At the very least, these facts hint at a more complex world in which interaction and exchange is more the norm than the "clash" so beloved of Mr. Lewis and other ideologues of "western" superiority.

Mr. Lewis' intellectual integrity was not bolstered by his assertion that there is no free discussion of any of the issues he raises in any Muslim country "except Turkey."

What is this freedom to enquire into the past that exists in Turkey? Is it the fact that anyone who even speaks about Kurdish rights or history is jailed or persecuted for "terrorism" and "separatism"? Is it that in Turkey, where Lewis lauds the state of women's rights, one of the few elected women deputies in parliament was denied her seat, stripped of her citizenship and exiled because she chose to wear a headscarf? Is it the same Turkey where people are tortured and imprisoned for even daring to mention the events in Armenia in 1915, let alone examine them freely? Is it the same country where the "Law to Protect Ataturk" makes it illegal for journalists and citizens to examine or criticize almost any aspect of the republic's founding or political system? According to the CPJ, dozens of Turkish journalists are in jail for raising precisely the kinds of questions that Lewis claims are freely debated.

None of this is surprising as Mr. Lewis has long been a defender of the Turkish state, and a spirited denier of the Armenian genocide.

It is through excesses such as these that Mr. Lewis' reputation as a scholar has declined significantly in recent years. Among the unfortunate side effects of the tragedy of September 11 is that he has suddenly found himself with a new and eager audience among fawning journalists and a new platform from which to spout such ideological drivel.

Yours,

Ali Abunimah
http://www.abunimah.org