Provoked by Bernard Lewis’s 2002 book What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East , Gerges argues against attributing the problems in the Middle East—particularly the failure of democratic politics—to cultural or civilizational factors. Instead, he locates the principal cause in U.S. foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War, and he uses the U.S.-backed coup against Iran’s nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 and the break with Egypt’s nationalist

Tag-uri: Islam