As much as I respect Bernard Lewis, I think his comment was hyperbole. Certainly history refutes him.

Submitted by GK (United States), Feb 3, 2013 at 23:39

Dr. Pipes

Bernard Lewis was a far-sighted Cassandra long before anyone focused on his issues of concern. But regarding the Ottomans being "taken by surprise", I think his assessment is part historical and part hyperbole. First, since the Reconquista, Europeans began asserting a posture against the Ottomans. When the Ottomans failed to conquer Vienna under the generalship of Suleyman in 1529, and then defeated (in 1683) by the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans had to be aware that the Europeans were their able competitors.

I think that we International Affairs wonks need to focus more on how Wahhabism came to dominate Sunni Islam than on whether or not the fall of Ottoman-led Islam was a surprise. By 1740, Sheik Abdul Wahhab was revolutionizing Islam from Mecca and Jeddah. The British saw that by co-opting Abdul Wahhab's incendiary Fiqh, they could weaken Ottoman influence on the Red Sea and in Jeddah and Mecca. The Saud family was eventually empowered, and through British diplomacy that the House of Saud and the British developed lasting alliances. After Wahhab's death in 1787, the House of Saud saw major opportunities for expansion, and the Europeans would play a significant role in the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, and the rise of Wahabbism.

By the 1790's the Europeans knocking at the door of all Ottoman North Africa. The Treaty of Tripoli was the first treaty concluded between the United States of America and Tripolitania, signed at Tripoli on November 4, 1796, submitted to the Senate by President John Adams, ratified unanimously on June 7, 1797 and signed by Adams on June 10, 1797. In 1798, Napoleon landed his troops in Ottoman Egypt, quickly overran the Nile Delta and advanced into Syria. The British defeated the French armies but the incursion of a European power into the theological heart of the Ottoman Empire caused a focus on defense of Anatolia proper. This gave Emir Abdul Aziz of Najd who had succeeded his father Emir Muhammed ibn Saud captured Karbala in Iraq in 1802. He followed up this victory with the capture of Mecca in 1803, bringing a major portion of Arabia, extending from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, under Saudi control.

Sheik Abdul Wahhab outlined his vision of Islam cleansed of the accretions that had been adopted over the centuries. Wahhab's fiqh took issue with every Muslim and kafir who held a different theology. It was a return to the bad-old days of Al-Mohad Spain, but this time with British assistance. However, the Ottomans fight the Wahhabis for more than a decade and ultimately lost hegemony over the region only after the Ottoman allies, the Germans, lost WWI. This then allowed Saudi sovereignty to solidify over Arabia, and led to the eventual sunsetting of the Ottoman fiqh and the ascendance of the Wahhabi fiqh.

As, we know now, however, the dedicated Wahhabists can stand no other digression from their strict orthodoxy. Shiite, or Sufi or kafir … all are equally guilty of blasphemy and deserving of the ultimate penalty. And it is how this theological and philosophical shift took place in the 20^th Century that is one of the most poorly understood dynamics in Middle Eastern affairs today. And with it, the decline of Muslim charitable support for secularist imams and fiqh, and the rise of Muslim charitable support for Islamist imams and fiqh wherever Saudi and Wahabbi/salafist influence can penetrate.

I would also like to propose a different angle on your comment about Muslims laboring under Saudi and other influences. Very certainly, I agree, "It's also distressing to see how non-Muslim individuals and institutions, particularly those on the left, indulge Islamist misbehavior." You say that corporations, nonprofits, and government institutions are, "…working with the Islamists, helping promote the Islamist agenda." And that, "The American left and the Islamists agree on what they dislike—conservatives—and, despite their profound differences, they cooperate." I believe that the West's liberals are potential allies in helping moderate Muslims and non-Islamists to understand the repression and harm that Salafist Islamism can do to personal liberties and to everything that liberal society has strived for over the past 300 or more years. And that liberals who believe in personal liberty need to work to free the moderate Muslim world from the unfree Fiqh promoted by the Wahabbist cause.

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