Spanning two and a half millennia, Anthony Pagden's mesmerizing
"Worlds at War "delves deep into the roots of the "clash of
civilizations" between East and West that has always been a battle
over ideas, and whose issues have never been more urgent.
"Worlds At War" begins in the ancient world, where Greece saw its
fight against the Persian Empire as one between freedom and
slavery, between monarchy and democracy, between individuality and
the worship of men as gods. Here, richly rendered, are the crucial
battle of Marathon, considered the turning point of Greek and
European history; the heroic attempt by the Greeks to turn the
Persians back at Thermopylae; and Salamis, one of the greatest
naval battles of all time, which put an end to the Persian threat
forever.
From there Pagden's story sweeps to Rome, which created the modern
concepts of citizenship and the rule of law. Rome's leaders
believed those they conquered to be free, while the various peoples
of the East persisted in seeing their subjects as property. Pagden
dramatizes the birth of Christianity in the East and its use in the
West as an instrument of government, setting the stage for what
would become, and has remained, a global battle of the secular
against the sacred. Then Islam, at first ridiculed in Christian
Europe, drives Pope Urban II to launch the Crusades, which
transform the relationship between East and West into one of
competing religious beliefs.
Modern times bring a first world war, which among its many murky
aims seeks to redesign the Muslim world by force. In our own era,
Muslims now find themselves in unwelcoming Western societies, while
the West seeks to enforce democracy and its own secular
valuesthrough occupation in the East. Pagden ends on a cautionary
note, warning that terrorism and war will continue as long as
sacred and secular remain confused in the minds of so many.
Eye-opening and compulsively readable, Worlds at War is a stunning
work of history and a triumph of modern scholarship. It is bound to
become the definitive work on the reasons behind the age-old and
still escalating struggle that, more than any other, has come to
define the modern world-a book for anyone seeking to know why "we
came to be the way we are."
"From the Hardcover edition."
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