A clash of cultures which down the centuries rumbles
Western and Eastern civilisations represent two different and ultimately incompatible cultures which have never seen eye-to-eye, argues Quentin de la Bédoyère
23 May 2008

'If one seeks a cardinal date for the Renaissance, one might choose 1204 when the Crusades arrived'

Worlds at War: The 2,500 Year War between East and West by Anthony Pagden, OUP £20

'Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," sang Kipling. And that might serve as a refrain for Anthony Pagden's scholarly and compendious account of the relationship between the East and West from the Persian invasion of Greece right up to the, almost, present day.

They clashed of course, interpenetrated from time to time, but they never met in any true sense. For Pagden's recurrent theme is that we are looking at two different, and ultimately incompatible, cultures.

There is an intriguing question: the Islamic culture which followed the conquest of Spain was undoubtedly more scholarly, more scientifically advanced and, in many ways, more open than the crude Gothic culture it replaced. Why did it not build on this manifest advantage to establish itself as the leading culture of the known world?

Ernest Renan (not noticeably friendly to Christianity) claimed that, although its leading lights were Muslim and spoke Arabic, they had inherited, and maintained for a time, a deeper tradition from the golden period of Persian culture. With the death of Averoës "Arab philosophy lost its last representative".

The general question of why eastern cultures stagnated has often been asked. In the 18th century the Enlightenment, building on the Renaissance, moved western culture into a new phase. Various reasons why this did not happen in the East have been proposed, and some of these may well have been identified as contributing factors. But at the heart, it appears to Pagden, lay the difference between power from the top or power from the people: despotism versus democracy.

Pagden demonstrates this most forcibly with regard to China - another culture which was once in the lead over western civilisation. The point is the stronger because despotism in China was benign. Its people were content to be ruled from on high, enabling them to live in harmony. But it was a passive harmony infused by the spirit of Confucianism. So nothing very much happened. On the other side of the world, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment was a turmoil of argument, dispute and war and cruelty. But out of it came a modern, and quite different, world.

Naturally Pagden devotes a good deal of analysis to Islam. You can take your view as to whether Islam is benign. But his point is that the objective of Islam (the word itself means "submission") is to be faithful to the Koran, and to the Hadith (the sayings of Mohammed as written down by his disciples). When the religious and secular objective of life is fidelity to documents written over a millennium ago, progress is neither possible nor desirable. All change is change for the worse.

Of course there are many shades of Islam and, at different times and places, it has shown a tolerance of others which might well make us ashamed. But the central core is the Koran, always drawing Islam back to its essential foundations. We might well prefer to believe that the bulk of Islamic peoples at heart yearn after freedom and democracy, but this is a western assumption. Indeed, one can think of cases where the introduction of democracy would lead to a more theocratic state, and one with more authority since it would have been chosen by the people.

There is an important issue for us to consider here. While Pagden distinguishes between Islam and Christianity, it is clear that he feels that we, too, do not escape from the sheet anchor of conservatism. We have our written word, rather older than the Koran, doctrines which we regard as unchangeable, and a tradition which is snail-like in its capacity for development. There is an inevitable tension between fidelity to the fundamentals and a deepening understanding of the truth. The deepening of that understanding requires our willingness to tolerate a wider range of views, and far better communication through which the witness of the faith of the whole community plays a much fuller part. This does not add up to democracy but, in Pagden's terms, Catholicism is structurally a despotic religion and so we must be very aware that we are vulnerable to the dangers of despotism.

In this long tale there are many interesting things. I pick just two as appetisers. It was the Fourth Crusade in the 13th century which sacked Constantinople, and held it for nearly 60 years. Its decayed remnants were teetering, and its scholars fled, before the Ottoman empire captured it in 1453. If one seeks a cardinal date for the Renaissance one might do better to choose 1204, when the Crusaders arrived.

Alternatively, the appearance of classical texts, albeit in unreliable translations from the Arabic, in the 11th century could perhaps be chosen, or the provision of more accurate translations in the 13th century which "Thomas Aquinas would use to transform the entire theological and philosophical landscape of Europe".

In 1853 Tsar Nicholas I described the failing Ottoman empire as "a sick man", and so it remained the sick man of Europe until the Great War when, by sad miscalculation of the outcome, it threw in its lot with the Germans. The result was a secular Turkey, and a carve-up of the Middle East by the victors, setting the initial configuration of the Middle East, whose subsequent evolution is one of the most intractable problems we face today. By the way, Pagden is no fan of Lawrence of Arabia, whom he sees as a self-promoting braggart with an overblown reputation.

The book is well-written and readable. Pagden's contentions are well argued, although he is undoubtedly inclined against the conservatism of religion. My criticism is that its breadth of scope, and fund of information, is so deep, that it could form the complete background to a university course. My five pages of notes, jotted as I read, sell it short. I would have liked more and better maps, and good chronologies. Pagden's brain may be able to hold all this information. If so, it is considerably larger than mine.