Western impact caused Middle East political formlessness and instability

Evidence

The change brought great benefits and will no doubt bring others in the course of time; but it would be a piece of myopic self-conceit on our part to deny that it has also done great damage and is the chief cause of the political and social formlessness, instability, and irresponsibility that bedevil the public life of the Middle East. In our own day the crisis has come to a head, and the anger that it engenders is directed outward, against the West—the millennial adversary and also the place in which these devastating changes had their origin. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1193

Categorization

• XREF: Lewis here concedes a causal role for the West in Middle Eastern instability — a nuance that complicates simplistic readings of him as pure apologist. ‘Millennial adversary’ invokes deep-time religious framing worth unpacking. — connects to: Post-Uprisings Western intervention aimed to replace pan-Arab ideology with neoliberal liberal democracy. — Youssef Cherif, Neo-pan-Arabism: a renewed contract of…, 54; Conditions driving empire and neoliberal failure remain, producing a ‘second Arab spring’; Imposing Western political categories distorts understanding of Middle Eastern loyalties (+3 more)
• QUESTION: What is ‘the change’ the paragraph references — modernization/Western contact? The antecedent is off-page; the causal claim is central to his overall argument though.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 1193