''What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East '' is a book by
Bernard Lewis released in January 2002, shortly after the
September 11 terrorist attack
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial ...
, but written shortly before. The nucleus of this book appeared as an article published in ''
The Atlantic Monthly'' in January 2002.
The book's thesis is that throughout recent history, specifically beginning with the failure of the second
Ottoman siege of Vienna Sieges of Vienna may refer to:
* Siege of Vienna (1239)
* Siege of Vienna (1276)
* Siege of Vienna (1287)
* Siege of Vienna (1477), unsuccessful Hungarian attempt during the Austro–Hungarian War.
*Siege of Vienna (1485), Hungarian victory during ...
in 1683, the
Islamic world
The terms Muslim world and Islamic world commonly refer to the Islamic community, which is also known as the Ummah. This consists of all those who adhere to the religious beliefs and laws of Islam or to societies in which Islam is practiced. In ...
has failed to
modernize
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and a partial reading of Max Weber, ...
or to keep pace with the Western world in a variety of respects, and that this failure has been seen by many within the Islamic world as having allowed Western powers to acquire a disastrous position of dominance over those regions.
See also
*
Islam and modernity
References
External links
The original article (Abstract plus first two paragraphs)Description
by the Oxford University Press
What Is Wrong with ''What Went Wrong?''
by Adam Sabra, associate professor of Middle East history at the University of Georgia
Book review
by M. Shahid Alam, professor of economics at Northeastern University (A more complete version of this essay, with footnotes and references, has appeared in ''Studies in Contemporary Islam'' 4 (2002), 1:51-78)
* Ismail Küpeli
''Was ging schief beim 'Untergang des Morgenlandes'?''
''Eine exemplarische Sichtung der Geschichtsdarstellung von Bernard Lewis''. München, 2007, (Critical book about "What Went Wrong" in German)
''Booknotes'' interview with Lewis on ''What Went Wrong?'', December 30, 2001.
Books by Bernard Lewis
2002 non-fiction books
History books about Islam
The Atlantic (magazine) articles
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