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Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West

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This is an excellent work of history. Correction: it is not so much a history - though it is historical through and through - as it is a particular interpretation of one very important aspect of world history: namely, the seemingly endless and seemingly inexplicable antagonism between West (the cultural region where individual and group rights, liberty and liberties, and specific "modern"/modernity-inflected social formations arose) and the East (the cultural region, roughly equivalent to the Arab world, where rights and democracy, let alone the individual, have been largely ignored). As Pagden tells this story, he touches on the important and nodal episodes, but he also adds his view of some of the incidental episodes. He provides an excellent historical overview, supplemented by a clever and diligent scholar's look at key moments, of both of these regions, and of their interrelationships. Obviously a lot has to be left out given the sheer number of centuries in question, but Pagden is hugely learned and so packs in all kinds of salient details. (His academic expertise is on the rise of modern Europe, and its "collision" with other parts of the globe.)

The book is long but thankfully he writes very clearly. He moves fluidly from Aeschylus and Alexander the Great, through the legacy of the "citizen" empire (Rome) and the rise of Muhammad, to the medieval Popes, through to Quesnay, Voltaire and Montesquieu and the Enlightenment, and finally on to the complex recent past and the present (Qutb, etc). He doesn't pull any punches: yes, the "orient" actually has been largely despotic, and yes, the West has often been -- for all of its successes and both its authentic good intentions as well as its exploitative acquisitiveness -- hypocritical and inept even when it has been well-meaning. Re: the latter, he discusses the question of liberal interventions, which he treats almost in a Burkean fashion: these are overly optimistic social engineering efforts, which often naively assume that the conditions for a genuinely valuable and important Western form of government (democracy) can be transplanted to places where the conditions that might nourish it are sadly foreign. He is also tough on Islam's apologists, past and present, rightly noting their own hypocrisy and almost perennial cruelty and anti-democratic impulses. He rightly chastises the leftists who celebrated the rise of Khomeini, pointing out that none had bothered to read his writings before celebrating his accession. And no less a figure than Edward Said -- author of a well regarded but simplistic (if not downright mendacious) tome on a part of the history of West and East -- comes in for some curt but devastating criticism. All in all, this is a grand, sweeping read. It's very much worth acquiring, especially if one is interested in the present and how we got here, but it's also a book one can give to a high school student or university student, e.g., one's nephew and niece, just so they can sample a work that does a fine job of making sense of a vastly complicated relationship. If they get through it, as one would hope, they'll be as shocked and disappointed as I am, and as Pagden is, to learn that in Turkey, Winnie-the-Pooh is no longer televised because the "Piglet" character is deemed offensive to Muslims. Don't laugh. Try to get a piggy-bank for your grandchild in a UK bank these days.

(I must add: reading the review of this book by a top 1000 reviewer - above - I came away thinking that he hasn't even read it. Pagden does in fact credit the Islamic world for many advances, and early on in his preface, he makes it very clear that when he speaks of "East" and "West", he's not talking about "unstable" "relative" geographical categories but cultural, social and political dispositions. Is that the sign of a "book maven": one says some banal and inaccurate things about a book?)

The problems with writing a book about the 2,500-year struggle between East and West are manifold: What is East? What is West? What is the essential struggle? And since it has lasted so long, how do you get it all in one volume? UCLA historian Anthony Pagden has made an audacious effort doing just that. In Pagden's view - echoing Kipling - East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.

According to the author, the struggle between East and West can be characterized as a contest between secular, liberal democracies in the West and religious, despotic societies in the East (the East referred to being primarily the Middle East). Pagden's story begins with the Greeks and the Persians. The Greeks in the 5th century AD were a democracy and the Persians under Darius and Xerxes were a classic oriental despotism. This marked the beginning of the struggle known variously as East vs West, Europe vs Asia, secular vs the sacred, etc. The book ends with America in Iraq basically fighting the same battle that has been fought for the last 2,500 years. In this history there is no progress, there is only eternal struggle.

Most people would disagree with this thesis and rightly so. This Manichean worldview seems a gross oversimplification at first glance. Greece, as well as the West as a whole, was not always liberal and secular; it had a long struggle with despotism itself and Christianity did not always see itself as separate from the state. Likewise, the East was not always illiberal and monolithically religious. Islam, for example, during its golden age in Spain was very tolerant of Christianity and Judaism. There is also much diversity within Islam today.

Even though one may not agree with the author's view of the endless struggle between East and West, this book is very informative and very engaging. It tells more about the myths of East and West that inform the historical actors down through history. The so-called civilizing missions of Alexander in India, Napoleon in Egypt, Mehmed the Great in Constantinople, and Americans in Iraq are instances of one civilization trying to convince another of its superior values.

Therein lies the dilemma of Pagden's project. He does not see moral equivalence, for he comes down squarely on the side of secularism and liberal values, as he should. The West, unfortunately, is not always about those things alone; it is, in the eyes of the East, also about imperialism and military conquest. The East, for its part, does not reject Western values; it rejects the West imposing those values, or rather, it wants its own version of those values. In the end we have something much more complex than a standoff between two sets of universal values. There are grey areas on both sides and their boundaries were always shifting.

That being said, Worlds at War is still very good at explaining how these competing worldviews inevitably and inexorably lead to war.

This study of the combative relationship between the West (secular, individualistic, progressive) and the East (intolerant and hidebound) might seem to be yet another entry into the triumphalist school of history: The West Beat The Rest Because Its The Best. However, those who actually read the book will recognize that Anthony Pagden has produced a remarkable work which traces and reassesses anew a centuries long struggle.

By the East Pagden means what most now call the Middle East and Central Asia. Beginning with the struggle between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire, Pagden then covers the empires of Alexander and of Rome, the rise of Christianity and Islam, and the resultant struggles between the two monotheistic religions. Some of Pagden's most ascerbic comments come at the expense of monotheism, whose adherents' tendencies to see the world in black and white he considers to be the root of most of our troubles. Fortunately he resists the temptation to sneer at the followers of those religions, reserving his scorn for those popes, caliphs, and other religious "leaders" who abused their power and wasted the lives of their communicants. Inevitably Pagden must finish his work with an examination of the troubles between the West and the Islamic Middle East in the twentieth century, and he provides an excellent history of that ongoing dispute, ending with some penetrating analyses of the mistakes both East and West have made over the years.

Pagden writes well, with a good eye for an illuminating anecdote. I wish a few more maps had been included to help locate some of the more obscure locales he mentions, but overall this is a fine work which I really enjoyed.

This book seems to have inspired some axe-grinding, mostly dealing with the church/state issue. It would be nice to get that issue out of the way up front, so we can get a better idea of the book's overall merit as a history. First of all, Mr. Pagden does not hide his presuppositions under a cloak of pretended objectivity. He makes it clear from the outset that he is coming from a classically liberal perspective on the religious issues. Briefly put, he thinks that a secular, democratic society is better than the alternatives and that theocracy is among the worst forms of government. Since Islam has had less success at forming the secular, democratic, and liberal sort of polity than most European societies, he finds European governments preferable to Islamic ones. And he believes that an underlying conflict between absolutism in the East and individual liberty in the West can be traced back for two and a half millennia, to the ancient conflict between Greece and Persia. This book is not an anti-religious screed, however; the author's personal views appear only intermittently and he is scornful of foolery committed in the cause of secularism as well.

The thesis here is not really that new; it it based in a view of history that can be found in Edith Hamilton's book "The Greek Way," published in 1930. The question is, how well has he substantiated the theory that such a conflict between Western liberalism and Eastern absolutism can be traced across the past 2500 years?

I think the answer is, pretty well, but unevenly. I felt there was a need for a more detailed explanation of why Western absolute monarchy and religiously-based intolerance gave way to democracy when it seemed as entrenched as Eastern absolutism. It also seemed there were a few puzzling omissions when we got to more recent times.

One thing I appreciated was how Mr. Pagden tries to show us how the issues go beyond the political into the cultural and societal. The history he describes largely involves misunderstanding and prejudice by both Eastern and Western commentators and rulers. There were a few nice tidbits of historical oddity along the way. One is Herodotus's account of the debate in the court of Darius the Great over whether the Persians should adopt popular government or monarchy. Monarchy won out, of course, and though Herodotus may have invented the story as a slur on ancient Persian despotism, the story is fascinating all the same. Another interesting tale concerns Napoleon's attempt to cast himself as a Muslim and an enemy of Christianity in order to ingratiate himself with the Egyptians after he invaded that country. Needless to say, this backfired, Muslims being notoriously unreceptive to anti-religious sentiment even when directed at other Monotheisms. The account of utter cynicism and ulterior motives by the British in helping create the State of Israel is also fascinating.

It may be that this whole conflict is just too big to cover in a single book. Toward the end, the book has a sort of rushed feel. The Twentieth Century issues seem slighted. There is almost no mention of the role of Nazism in the nurturance of Arab nationalism. The role of the oil companies in Middle Eastern politics is treated in a cursory fashion. The Algerian War, a watershed conflict in Muslim relations with the West, goes almost unmentioned. Pagden spends more time on philosophical disputes of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries than these more recent issues.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book in general and did learn some interesting facts about its topic, the struggle between East and West. I found it a good general history of this conflict.

The author is the epitome of fairness and his narrative of 2500 years of East-West conflict is well worth reading. At times his narrative seems to wander off track a bit as he pursues the theme of east-west conflict but for the most part he manages to produce a comprehensive yet coherent work of history.

Pagden offers the obligatory critique of Western hubris and the standard condemnation of the Crusades but he never loses sight of the fact that the totalitarian nature of Islam is the primary reason that states whose elites continue insist that all must "submit" have such sad histories of economic and political failure. He even has the nerve to dismiss the pop-psych rantings of Edward Said, the darling of the aging left. Not many do.

The work is thoroughly documented and the prose flows. What more could we want - short of another Sam Huntington.

Anthony Pagden's "Worlds at War" was a book I was really looking forward to reading. It sat on my wish list for months and when I saw it just sitting there at my local library I greedily snatched it up and considered myself lucky to even have found it checked in.

Thank goodness I did not waste my money buying it.

I suppose the problem with a book of this nature is that it is bound to disappoint - some things will be "too" highlighted, some left out. Even worse for this book, niggling factual errors crop up that bother the careful reader and throw into doubt the validity of the more complicated interpretations of the work as a whole.

Positives:

The book is quite readable and you must give a tip of the hat to anyone who undertakes such a large and sweeping history.

Negatives:

The anti-religious comments taint large sections of the book: "...nor have I made any attempt...to disguise the fact that I believe the myths perpetrated by all monotheistic religions - all religions indeed- have caused more lasting harm to the human race that any other set of beliefs..." (p. xix) In my opinion, his anti-religious bias does immeasurable harm to this history because holders of religious belief are held in disdain. This is a history full of religious beliefs, perhaps even based on it. Viewing all of those beliefs as despicable and marginalizing them leads to some of the more simplistic interpretations noted in other reviews of this book.

-The author comments that in this book Christianity "seems to fare slightly better than Islam in this story..." (p. xix) but I really doubt that. At least he spent several pages on the life of Muhammad and the early history of Islam. He doesn't even bother to tell about the life of Jesus (not even a "supposed" version) or a history of St. Paul (whom he refers to in passing several times, but the uninformed reader is left, well, uninformed.) Imagine, a history of the West without even a page devoted to the beginnings of Christianity. The closest we get to an outline of Christ is a brief comparison to Mithraism (pp. 130-1). Christians are often slighted, such as on page 519 when he opines that Christians would like to make Shari'a law for the United States if only they could figure out how.

-Judaism fares even worse. It is rarely mentioned. Even then it has inaccuracies, such as on pages 151-2 when he notes, incorrectly that Moses was only given 10 laws. A passing glance through the book of Deuteronomy would tell the most casual of reader that dozens and dozens of laws were given to Moses.

-The Persian-Roman conflicts. I was looking forward to learning more about the Persian empire(s) that fought Rome to a standstill. Usually in this type of history there is just one paragraph that tells you little more than I've already mentioned - that the Persians fought the Romans to a standstill and an accomodation was made. He includes a fancier explanation, but it is still just the one paragraph. (pp. 175-6) I was hoping for much more - especially since this accounts for roughly 500 years of the 2,500 years of conflict that is discussed in the book.

--Refers to the year 1098 as being a part of the "ninth-century". (p. 231)

-Luther's teachings are misstated at times. "Mankind did not need to labor to win God's favor, as the Church had always maintained; it could be vindicated by faith alone. To be justified in the eyes of God, one had only to believe and lead a true and godly life." (p. 297) The part about leading a true and godly life would be the same as laboring to win God's favor. It is not Luther's theology. He stated the godly life would proceed from one's faith, it would not, in and of itself, do anything to get one into heaven.

-On page 74 there is a reference to "brothels in Pompey" (p.74). Pompey was one of Julius Caesar's rivals. Pompeii is the standard spelling for the city he is referring to.

-On page 249 he refers to the Afghan War of 1991. 2001, perhaps?

-There is a complete failure to mention the clash between Communism, Fascism and the East. The Ba'ath Party was influenced by the Fascist movements. Afghanistan was nominally Communist when the USSR invaded it to support the floundering government in 1979. He expounds on the murderous history of religious movements but blows off the terrible history of secular movements like Communism with one really long sentence (pp. 533-4) that fails to address the issue or the scope of their own murderous pasts.

-"Soviet Block"? (p. 526). The standard spelling is bloc, not block.

-On page 526 it is claimed that East Germany "took the first steps that would eventually bring down the Communist regimes of eastern Europe." (p. 526) Funny, I remember it being Poland with Lech Walesa and Solidarity being the first. The Wall came down only when Hungary and other countries had already lowered their barriers and made East Germany's Communist rulers irrelevant.

Final thought: Buy something else. Perhaps more specific histories rather than a more general, biased one that demonstrates little respect for the religious traditions of the peoples involved.

I found this book a fascinating exploration of the long history of conflict between East and West, and the way the powers in charge of each sphere (whether Greek, Trojan, Roman, Persian, Christian, Muslim, French, Ottoman, British, or Arabic) have often seen themselves as inheritors of all the earlier struggles. Of course, it should be noted right away that by "The East", Pagden generally means the near and middle east, the lands from Asia Minor to the region that's modern Iran -- China, India, and Japan don't figure into the book at all. In fact, his focus is really more on the development of the West and its experience with the East than the reverse.

It should also be noted that Pagden has a strong bias towards liberal, secular, democratic values, which he feels are the essence of Western culture (he states as much in the forward). Religion, both Christianity and Islam, are portrayed in a dim light, as institutional obstacles to reason, human rights, and progress. Not that I don't largely agree with this assessment, but some readers might take offense. Still, he seems to be fair-minded about it, giving Muslim societies credit for brief periods of learning and relative tolerance, and indicting the modern West for its more counterproductive forays into the Middle East, which understandably stoked the fires of Muslim distrust and resentment. Indeed, the final chapter warns, convincingly, of continued bloody conflict between an uncompromising pan-Islamic worldview, whose adherents have enjoyed few of the fruits of the West and see little of their value, and countries like the US, whose leaders naively assume that their own democratic attitudes are universally held, and fail to account for a divide with deep historic roots.

However, I don't want to place too much emphasis on modern politics, which take a back seat to the fact that this is a comprehensive, well-researched history, outlining many episodes over 2,500 years that I was only dimly aware of (e.g. Napoleon's adventures in Egypt), and pulling them into a readable, continuous narrative. Especially interesting was reading of the ways in which the West's often-skewed perception of the East as an "other" to strive against has nonetheless shaped its own attitudes towards freedom, tolerance, and science.

What attracted me first to this book was ... its title. It is global by its name, historical by its content, and has lots of room for social and political observations. Books with such titles rarely leave the reader uninvolved, though the reaction is usually positive or negative depending on the subject matter, the book's quality, and the reader's predisposition.

Overall, my experience with Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West was very positive, but with some caveats. The author was able to put the whole history of East/West relations (2.5 millenniums, from the 5th century B.C. through the present) in the limited space of 576 pages. Such a "condensed" approach of vast subject matter often results in quite dry reading (like an encyclopedia). But here, this was not the case. Despite the huge volume of historical material, the book remains very readable: the style is lucid, ironic, and occasionally spliced with anecdotal evidence.

In dealing with East/West relations, Pagden focuses on two major issues: democratic vs. authoritarian rule, and secular vs. theocratic. He traces history as a conflict between the individual liberty of the West and absolutism of the East, without masking his sympathy for the former. It is up to you, the reader, to agree or disagree with the author's ideological framework and his presentation of facts ( See Amazon's Book Reviews ). My major fascination with this book was the way it presented established events in a different light.

Pagden writes about familiar events - world history as we know it. Familiar in this context means from the Western point of view. (This is why many history books are so similar; they rehash the same events from the same perspective). This book is an exception. Despite the author's liberal perspective, he presents a surprisingly balanced view. The book is at its best where it discuses well known events (such as Xerxes invasion of Greece, Alexander the Great's eastern campaigns, the fall of Constantinople, Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, etc.) from both an Eastern and Western perspective. Though the Western view is quite familiar to us, the Eastern perspective is often unexpected and revealing. The book also includes periods of history that are not very familiar to Western readers, such as life in Spain under the Moors, Arabic and non-Arabic influences in Islam, Orientalism, etc. This book fills the vacuum. The author's erudition and intimate familiarity with Eastern sources on known (and not so known) events, provides an essential compliment to traditionally Western interpretations.

Of course, all these revelations may be found in specialized academic publications (and much more). But Pagden's ability to write a readable book, of modest size, addressing such a range of subjects, is a huge achievement. Therefore, I wholeheartedly recommend this book. A word of caution: though this book is written for the general reader, it should not be used as an introduction to world history.

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History is always written from perspective and this topic, more than most, is at the risk of bias. The subject is epochal East vs West antagonism and it's 'at least' 2500 year progression. Pagden says he's of no religion. Christian's will wince at times as I'm sure the Muslim reader will. Pagden is rather uniquely steeped in the East/West history and may be one of a handful that might be considered `adequately unbiased'to write in this perspective. Pagden has a disdain of the trepidations and machinations of political man working on behalf of God, in equal measure East & West, but, the theological is not far from the enduring politics.

Pagden begins from the earliest historical evidence ... the Trojan War ... earlier in pre-history; the conflict may be in fact be another 2500 years older. East & West do not get along and never have. This is a reader's digest that helps to pick up on the fine `silver threads'.

The first half of Worlds at War provides the necessary and interesting backdrop to the conflict ... Greeks sparing with Persians, Persians beating Greeks, Greeks conquering the East, Rome conquering Greece, Persians re-conquering land lost to Greeks, #1 power Rome stalemating #2 power Parthia, Muslims blitzkrieg Christians out of their failing Roman Empire with drives into Europe as deep as France, Christians retaliate and beat back Muslims in the western Europe but fail at the Crusades in the east, the Ottoman machine makes another Muslim run into the European heartland, the Ottoman's are slowly and recently run out of Europe, and here we are.

Pagden describes the continuous 2500 year war punctuated only by intensities. Pagden pays close attention to the periods of high and low intensity in the sine wave nature of the conflict. Diplomacy has merely provided the necessary time to regroup and birth new combatants for the next period of conflagration.

The second half of the book digs deeper into the current story with its interesting roots in Napoleon's conquests in Egypt, followed by extraordinarily complex political experiments and intrigue, WW1, more experiments and intrigue, WW2, then through 2007. The closer you get to present, the more your own bias and understanding are tested by Pagden.

The East vs West has been redefined most recently by the East from Christian or Jew vs Muslim into secular West vs Islam. Removing Christianity or Judaism from the equation has done an increasingly secular agnostic/atheist West no favor in the struggle. The secular East attempts to be flexible but Islam cannot change. The recent moderate/secular Muslim political experiments in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Algeria, etc have or are failing in the ascending and undeniable return to the historical roots of Islamic worldview ... the faithful cannot, tolerate challenges to the Quran or Sharia and remain Muslim... Allah must and will be carried to the globe through conquest of land and peoples.

The book is a must read for the greater understanding of the whole story. Propagandized vignettes of, "the bad Crusaders, bad Israelis, bad Palestinians, etc" , do not do justice to the magnitude and image that Pagden offers.

Other once great civilizations (China, Russia, Japan, India, etc) have embraced the minimum changes required to accommodate one another in the modern world and in their own ways. The Islamic world cannot embrace change in this East vs West struggle. There is no good news here. The reader rises and falls on the crests of the conflicts historical sine waves of intensity. This reader concludes that the intensity is again nearing a peak. The reader begins to understand that no solution on the table is workable and we are without recourse to the historical struggle.

Worlds At War chronicles 2500 years of political and ideological conflict between the Middle East and the European West. The book is written for the general reader, and focuses on two major issues: democracy vs. authoritarianism, and secularism vs. theocracy.

The book's first 150 pages cover 1100 years of classical antiquity and Christianity in the West, from about 500 BC to 600 AD. This is the weaker part of the book; although competently done, this material has been covered very thoroughly by many other books. There are a few muddles, as on p. 42 where Pagden writes that the ancient Greeks thought the seat of intelligence was in the brain (actually the Greeks, like other ancient peoples, thought it was in the heart).

The next 150 pages take the story from the birth of Islam around 600 AD to the capture of Constantinople in 1453, followed by short chapters on the Protestant Reformation (16th - 17th century) and Orientalism (18th century).

The last three chapters (200 pages) deal with the modern history of the Middle East, (19th century to 2007): Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, European colonialism, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, world war and statehood, nationalism, and terrorism. These final chapters succeed in condensing a lot of history in an understandable way, and are among the better rapid-run-throughs of the subject.

A book like this can't substitute for other classic treatments like Albert Hourani's "A History Of The Arab Peoples," but still delivers enough information to be worth reading through.