Bernard Lewis's hyperbole

Submitted by Martin H. Katchen (United States), Feb 5, 2013 at 00:26

It is not easy to look at the world from the point of view of an observer of that historical era, dissociated from the perspective of hindsight. But I shall try.

A Muslim observer in Istanbul or even Esphahan or Agra in 1680 who knew the state of international relations would be unlikely to take Europeans particularly seriously due to their divisions and fights amongst themselves. Europe was still recovering from the Thirty Years War, which had cost Germany half of it's population. That is why the Ottomans felt safe in attacking Vienna in 1685.

Even in 1690, after Jan Sobieski, King of Poland had turned the tide against the Ottomans at Vienna, an Ottoman or a Safavid observer would be more nervous about the growing power of the Dzungar Galden Khan, who was mobilizing a large Mongol army in Central Asia that threatened Islam, unified Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism and a belief in the Dalai Lama. Only the death of Galden Khan and dissention amongst his sons, capitalized upon by the Manchu Chinese Chi'en Lung Emperor, and a smallpox epidemic which resulted in a genocidal war by the Chinese against the Dzungars in the early 18th Century put paid to the Dzungar threat. But for a while, Islam was undoubtedly worried about whether the Chi'en Lung Emperor would stop or whether he would send his forces against Persia, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, which he certainly could have had he chosen to. It was China that was the preeminent power in the world in terms of GDP and military force by the 1780s.

It was not until Napoleon came up with France's Levee en Masse and Grand Armee' and the other European nations were forced to match it that European nations came up with military forces that could actually conquer the Ottoman Empire and which the Ottomans actually feared. And it was the ease of Napoleon's 1798 invasion that proved to the Arab Wahabites (as well as to Muhammad Ali, the new Governor of Egypt, whom GK completely ignores) that the Ottomans were vulnerable.( Both Napoleon and the Tsar could have either taken down the Ottoman Empire by themselves, or as Napoleon suggested at Tilsit, partitioned the Empire in concert. ) But it was Muhammad Ali who put down the Wahabite Rebellion in the 1800s before he himself rebelled against the Ottomans and retained his new position as Khedive of Egypt after unsuccessfully attempting to wrest the Sultanate away from the Ottomans. The British and Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud come in a hundred years later around 1910.

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