Product Description

The differences that divide West from East go deeper than politics, deeper than religion, argues Anthony Pagden. To understand this volatile relationship, and how it has played out over the centuries, we need to go back before the Crusades, before the birth of Islam, before the birth of Christianity, to the fifth century BCE. Europe was born out of Asia and for centuries the two shared a single history. But when the Persian emperor Xerxes tried to conquer Greece, a struggle began which has never ceased. This book tells the story of that long conflict. First Alexander the Great and then the Romans tried to unite Europe and Asia into a single civilization. With the conversion of the West to Christianity and much of the East to Islam, a bitter war broke out between two universal religions, each claiming world dominance. By the seventeenth century, with the decline of the Church, the contest had shifted from religion to philosophy: the West's scientific rationality in contrast to those sought ultimate guidance it in the words of God. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the disintegration of the great Muslim empires - the Ottoman, the Mughal, and the Safavid in Iran - and the increasing Western domination of the whole of Asia. The resultant attempt to mix Islam and Western modernism sparked off a struggle in the Islamic world between reformers and traditionalists which persists to this day. The wars between East and West have not only been the longest and most costly in human history, they have also formed the West's vision of itself as independent, free, secular, and now democratic. They have shaped, and continue to shape, the nature of the modern world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29886 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 576 pages

Review
There is much top admire in Pagden's book. His bredth of knowledge across two and a half millenia of Western (and to a great extent Eastern) history is impressive... As an intellectual history of Western views of the East, the book is exemplary. (Ian Garrick Mason. Spectator. )

'Worlds at War' offers some fine vignettes...witty, provocative conversation from a sage. (Economist )

Learned, fluent and thoroughly entertaining account. (Dominic Sandbrook. Telegraph Review. )

Synopsis
The differences that divide West from East go deeper than politics, deeper than religion, argues Anthony Pagden. To understand this volatile relationship, and how it has played out over the centuries, we need to go back before the Crusades, before the birth of Islam, before the birth of Christianity, to the fifth century BCE. Europe was born out of Asia and for centuries the two shared a single history. But when the Persian emperor Xerxes tried to conquer Greece, a struggle began which has never ceased. This book tells the story of that long conflict. First Alexander the Great and then the Romans tried to unite Europe and Asia into a single civilization. With the conversion of the West to Christianity and much of the East to Islam, a bitter war broke out between two universal religions, each claiming world dominance. By the seventeenth century, with the decline of the Church, the contest had shifted from religion to philosophy: the West's scientific rationality in contrast to those sought ultimate guidance it in the words of God.The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the disintegration of the great Muslim empires - the Ottoman, the Mughal, and the Safavid in Iran - and the increasing Western domination of the whole of Asia.

The resultant attempt to mix Islam and Western modernism sparked off a struggle in the Islamic world between reformers and traditionalists which persists to this day. The wars between East and West have not only been the longest and most costly in human history, they have also formed the West's vision of itself as independent, free, secular, and now democratic. They have shaped, and continue to shape, the nature of the modern world.

Customer Reviews

A Very Political History
The two worlds in question are West and East, where East means more or less Islamic civilization and its forbearers. Apparently, they inevitably collide, and they have been for centuries. This much is just a familiar retelling of the `clash of civilizations' tale that has become since Samuel Huntingdon first reinvigorated it several years ago. Prof. Pagden fleshes out the history of the conflict and adds a few twists of his own. His account has a fashionable anti-religious tang to it, and he traces the divide of east and west to the invasion of Greece by the Persian Xerxes (?!?).

Admittedly, I approached this book with some apprehension. I am not fond of the clash of civilizations account which I consider to be misleading if not down right false. The primary fault, though, seems to be more straightforward. Pagden writes his narrative over several millennia and continents, naturally covering areas of history in which he is not an expert. The results are disastrous: wherever Pagden strays outside his own area of expertise the book is replete with serious factual errors which lay a perilously weak foundation on which to build his ideological claims.

One example, chosen almost at random: Pagden introduces the historian "Megasthenes whom Alexander appointed satrap of Anachosia and Gedosia, [who] warned his readers, never believe anything you hear about the Indians, because they are people who have never been conquered - and in Greek eyes, an unconquered people were an unknown people" (p.97) However, Megasthenes was not really a historian, was never appointed satrap of anywhere, and most probably never met Alexander (he would have been very young or not yet born when Alexander died). Oh, and he never said what Pagden claims he said. By the way Megasthenes is most important (almost only) western source on ancient India.

Such errors are sadly common. Particularly offensive is the outdated and archaic portrayal of al-Ghazali as the man who ended rational free thought in the Islamic world. This was unacceptable a hundred years ago, and is even less acceptable now that his `Incoherence' is readily available in English.

Prof. Pagden's work is flawed, then, at the foundations. One is tempted to conclude that the ideology came first, borrowed from Huntingdon or Fox News or who knows where. And that the history was stretched to fit later. Perhaps I have been to harsh. Pagden's book is not all bad, and his factual claims are not always flawed. But I will be looking elsewhere.