If nothing else, the struggle between East and West has a distinguished pedigree. In “Worlds at War” the British historian Anthony Pagden traces the seemingly endless series of misunderstandings and armed conflicts between “an ever-shifting West and equally amorphous East” to the time of myth, when Paris abducted Helen, provoking the Trojan War.
With the passage of centuries, boundaries shifted, tribes and peoples replaced one another, new religions appeared, empires rose and fell. Yet a remarkably constant theme asserted itself: the irreconcilable differences between two competing views of the world, memorably expressed by Herodotus in his history of the struggles between the Greeks and the Persians, which pivoted not on politics but on “an understanding of what it was to be and to live like a human being.”
The Greeks subscribed, broadly, to “an individualistic view of humanity.” The Persians displayed courage and ferocity on the battlefield but as a society, Mr. Pagden writes, paraphrasing Herodotus, they were “craven, slavish, reverential and parochial, incapable of individual initiative, a horde rather than a people.”
The Western mission, defined by Alexander the Great, was to civilize the known world through conquest, a project later taken up by Rome, by the Crusaders, by Napoleon, by the imperial powers in the 19th century and, some might argue, by the United States in the 21st century. In Islam the East discovered its own universal mission and set about subjugating the West, propelled, to borrow Cicero’s words about Rome, by its “wise grasp of a single truth.”
Having set the stage with great deliberation, Mr. Pagden takes a majestic stroll through the centuries, covering broad swaths of very familiar history fluently, gracefully and always entertainingly, but in the end he delivers a lot less than he promises. Like an overproduced Hollywood epic, the drama unfolds with strong starring roles, lavish costumes and beautifully photographed scenery; when the credits finally roll, though, the audience is left wondering what, exactly, all the fuss was about.
Mr. Pagden, the author of “Peoples and Empires” and “European Encounters With the New World,” embeds a few basic points about Eastern and Western political cultures in a great mass of historical material, then appends a polemical coda arguing against the idea that Western beliefs about freedom, democracy and secularism can ever be transplanted to the Middle East. He is shrewd, urbane and consistently engaging, but the ratio of effort expended to results achieved seems badly askew.
One of Mr. Pagden’s more arresting observations deals with the Crusades, and the drastic differences in historical memory between West and East. When a writer like Sayyid Qutb, an ideological founding father of radical Islam, referred to “the Crusader spirit that all Westerners carry in their blood,” the characterization seems far-fetched and arcane to most Westerners.
Not to Muslims. “The present is linked to the past by a continuous and still unfulfilled narrative, the story of the struggle against the ‘Infidel’ for the ultimate Muslim conquest of the entire world,” Mr. Pagden writes.
The civilizing missions of the West come in for acerbic commentary, notably Napoleon’s misbegotten Egyptian campaign, which Mr. Pagden cites as a dress rehearsal for later disasters, right up to the present. Napoleon arrived with his fleet at Alexandria, flamboyantly proclaiming a new era of civil rights and human dignity, and keen to show how the principles of revolutionary France dovetailed with the teachings of the Koran. The experiment failed.
As for Napoleon’s expressed reverence for Islam’s holiest text, a member of the Divan, or Imperial Council, in Cairo wrote, “To respect the Koran means to glorify it, and one glorifies it only by believing in what it contains.”
For their part, the French marveled at the indolence and backwardness of the Egyptians. They brought back to the West an image of the Muslim East as “a land rotting in despotic lethargy, constrained by a simple and savage religion that denied half of its peoples their humanity and in so doing prevented any possibility of progress and enlightenment.”
Two centuries later Mr. Pagden sees little prospect of progress or enlightenment, not as long as religion determines the shape of civil society in the Islamic world. Like the Greeks and the Persians, the countries of the West and the Islamic East stare unblinking across a great divide, their notions of citizenship and political life irrevocably opposed.
“The society of Islam is ultimately based not upon human volition or upon contract but upon divine decree,” Mr. Pagden writes. “In the societies of the West, by contrast, every aspect of life has been conceived as a question of human choice.” Never the twain shall meet.
Mr. Pagden is scathing about the idea that moderate voices might prevail, since the very notion of moderation appeals primarily to one side in the argument. “Who says that tolerance, dialogue and understanding are virtues?” he asks. “The answer is invariably: secular Westerners.”
So here we are, after 2,500 years, back in the same place. On one side stand the liberal democracies of the West, convinced that their Enlightenment values and political ideas apply to all peoples everywhere. On the other side, a restless and aggrieved Islamic world defines itself as a vast community of faith, its members convinced that their beliefs, too, are universal. It may take another 2,500 years to sort this out.
