What Went Wrong
Sometimes a cup of coffee represents no more than a refreshment. Other times, coffee fills up more than a little cup of irony. In 1000 AD, an Arab would indulge in a cup of sweetened coffee from Ethiopia. Islamic culture introduced coffee to the world. Without its discovery, there would be no Starbucks and Seattle would be much more laid back.
By the eighteenth century, Europeans had found they could grow the "devils drink" more cheaply in its colonies than could be produced in Ethiopia. In What Went Wrong? eminent Middle Eastern authority Bernard Lewis, points out that by the eighteenth century a typical Turk or Arab would sip coffee that was imported from Dutch Java or Spanish America. For Lewis, coffee represents a metaphor for the decline in the dominance of the Islamic world. This decline and its impact on the western world is the theme of Lewis's book.
If one visited the world at the beginning of the second millennium, the case could easily be made that the Islamic World was the most powerful, dynamic, advanced and progressive culture on the planet. The Islamic World extended into Europe from both the east and the west, controlled all of Saharan Africa and the east coast of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, east into Asia. Much of ancient Greek knowledge had been assimilated and new insights were learned in contact with the Chinese civilization.
The Islamic culture was self-confident and thus was, for its time, tolerant of other ideas and faiths. Although they would not accept attempts at proselytization, Christians were permitted and Jews prospered and occupied positions of prominence.
The Islamic powers had reason to be confident. They dominated the world militarily, eventually expelling Crusaders from Europe.
Somewhere around the time of the European Renaissance, it became apparent even to Muslims that something was changing. European science and technology was improving, largely due to imperatives of trade and exploration of the New World. The Reformation in Europe alleviated the hegemony of thought, with an emphasis on individualism.
Gradually, Europeans pushed back the geographic limits of the Islamic World, largely expelling it from Europe. As the military superiority of the West improved, Muslims found it essential to adopt Western military weapons and tactics, but felt no real necessity to incorporate large elements of Western culture. Much of the Islamic World believed it could modernize without Westernizing. Ultimately, even these efforts failed.
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