With the ending of global strategic confrontation between superpowers,
those in the Middle East must adjust to a new reality: to accept final
responsibility for their own affairs, to make and recognize their
mistakes, and to accept the consequences. In The End of Modern History
in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis discusses the future of the region in
this new, postimperialist era. For each and every country and for the
region as a whole, he explains, there is a range of alternative futures:
at one end, cooperation and progress; at the other, a vicious circle of
poverty and ignorance.
The author examines in detail the issues most critical to the region's
future. He describes oil as the current, most important export to the
outside world from the Middle East but warns that technology will
eventually make it obsolete, leaving those who depend solely on oil
revenues with a bleak future. The three factors that could most help
transform the Middle East, according to Lewis, are Turkey, Israel, and
women. He also argues that there is enough in the traditional culture of
Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of the Muslim peoples on
the other to provide the basis for an advance toward freedom in the true
sense of that word and to achieve the social, cultural, and scientific
changes necessary to bring the Middle East into line with the developed
countries of both West and East.