Professor Anthony Pagden's Worlds At War examines critical points in history when East and West came together as well as clashed. Pagden's book reads like a fast-paced novel as it brings to life some of the most fascinating moments encountered between giants of two major civilizations: the battle between Greece's Alexander the Great and Persia's Xerxes; the tumultuous romance between Marc Antony and Cleopatra; and self-described "Orientalist" Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt; to name a few. What becomes clear through Pagden's storytelling, is that the fundamental differences between East and West continue today because both sides see a mandatory need to uphold what both view as moral duty: to adhere to the laws that govern their own societies.

BOOKZONE: You credit your wife, Giulia Sissa, for providing you with the inspiration for your book. She had seen a photograph in The New York Times of a group of Iranians prostrate in prayer and noted that it was this very act that had baffled the Greeks about the ancient Persians. She then suggested that you write a book about the perpetual enmity between Europe and Asia. Your book spans a tremendous amount of historical periods, from the battles between the Greeks and the Persians; to the birth of the Roman Empire and Christianity; to the beginnings of Islam; to Napoleon in Egypt. How did you go about conducting your research for this book?

PAGDEN: I started at the beginning and worked through to the end! There is a more complicated answer: my area of expertise is really in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. I also know a certain amount about the ancient world because much of my previous work has been concerned with the connections between antiquity and modernity. I began with the ancient world because the inspiration came from Giulia, (who is also a professor in this department and in classics). We had been reading Herodotus, who is the main historian in this period, together, and the phrase "perpetual enmity," which I had intended to be the title of the book -- is Herodotus' phrase. It was Herodotus who first asked the the question: why were the Persians and the Greeks locked in perpetual combat. I had also been very struck much earlier by a remark made by the English liberal philosopher, John Stuart Mill, in the 19th century. The Battle of Marathon, one of the crucial battles fought between the Greeks and the Persians was seen as one of the turning points in the war in the Greek's favor. Mill said that it was a more important event in British history than the Battle of Hastings, which as you know is the battle with the Normans who conquered Britain. Had the Greeks lost, all that we know today of Greek - and subsequently all Western - culture would had been snuffed out. So, the idea that there was a continuity that ran from the Greek world to what was in his case, the 19th century, was something that people in the 19th century assumed to be the case. So I really began with these two, the beginning and the end as it were, and I filled-in bits in between. I became very interested in the process of this, with Napoleon's quixotic expedition to Egypt, partly because it's a very good story and I like telling stories, and partly because it has always been taken to be a crucial turning point in the relationship between Europe and the West and Asia and the beginnings of, as it were, Egyptian modernity.

BOOKZONE: You had also studied Arabic and Persian at Oxford.

PAGDEN: My interest in the region and of all the relationships between Europe begun in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate at Oxford and studied Arabic and Persian then. I later switched to history because my original intention was to study the relationship between the Iranians and the Portuguese in the 17th century. My interest in that world has been maintained ever since and actually, Turkey has always been my main area of interest.

BOOKZONE: According to your book, Europe (the West), through myth, wars, and geography, has origins in Asia (the East), and Christianity actually owes much of its religious rituals and history to Asia as well. You make an interesting point that the split between East and West is actually metaphorical, having evolved from early attempts for people to describe their place in their world and their geographical relationships to each other. Are we any closer to putting together more accurate definitions of our geography or are old terminologies here to stay?

PAGDEN: Well, I would never say that things cannot change. They have to. But these ones have been around a long time. I'm also very glad that you picked up on that point because a lot of reviewers failed to notice it. Although the narrative in the book is carried on in what is a substantial amount of military history -- simple stories of conflicts between East and West -- I did try to stress that this sense of perpetual enmity is, as Herodotus himself actually says, one that's based upon a series of images and myths, some of which are true, but some of which are patently false and confusing and conflicting. There is a fault line between Europe and Asia but it's a fault line that's very difficult to describe with any precision. And the borders between the two have always been extremely fluid; you can take almost any period in the history of this conflict, including the present one, and you will find that there are substantial Asian elements in Europe and substantial Western or European elements in Asia. Incidentally, I use the word "Asia" throughout the book in the classical sense. We tend to use [the word] Asia today to mean the Far East; in antiquity it was always used to mean the Near and Middle East; the lands West of the Himalayas. The notion of the relationship to Asia is a very delicate and complex one and it is, as I point out in the book, largely a Western construction. No one in the East thought of themselves as belonging to the East. They did have a conception of "the West," but usually referred to it as the lands of the Franks - the lands of the French - or, as the lands of the Christians. They didn't think of it as having any distinct geographical identity. Nevertheless, it's true that when the Ottoman Empire began to play a more predominant role, as the dominant political force in what is called the East, and although they are constantly at war with Europe, they borrow a great deal from Europe. In that conflict, a very carefully elaborated image of East versus West [was created] on both sides of the border. I think now, today, the distinctions are dissolving. I'm not sure they're dissolving in a very positive way. They seem to be dissolving into conflicts of religion and religious identity. As European and Western ways become more and more permeated - there are larger and larger Muslim populations settling in Europe, for instance and not all of these are by any means hostile to the West - the ancient fault line is beginning to disappear. I said at the end of the book that the division is still where it was 2,500 years ago which I now think, upon reflection, is something of an exaggeration. I meant simply that there still is a conceptual understanding [of a division] in certain areas and probably much more than most people in certain university circles would wish to believe, between Muslims and non-Muslims, of whatever origin, but not that there is an impossible barrier between these two sides.

BOOKZONE: As you mentioned, Herodotus has noted that slaves will only fight half-heartedly in a war because they are fighting on behalf of another's cause, while free men will fight wholeheartedly because they are fighting for themselves. It was interesting to read about how the notion of citizenship in ancient Greece and Rome was an early form of rights, enabling citizens not only with the means for debate but also the means for defense against potential injustice. These two Western notions: self-governance and personal freedom are both admired and reviled by non-western societies. In a recent essay (Newsweek, March 9, 2009), Fareed Zakaria wrote that Islamists "do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women." Do you have any thoughts on this?

PAGDEN: Well, I agree with him entirely on the second point. I think that one of themes of the book -- one of the themes of the struggle - is a struggle between this conception of what it is to be a free person -- what it is to be a member of the state -- in the West, and what it is to be a member of a state in the East. This is one of the reasons why I started with Greece and not with Islam. I wanted to emphasize that this didn't begin as a struggle between religions. It began as a struggle between the conception of individual freedom versus collective slavery. This was the view that the Greeks had of the Persians. They greatly admired the Persians in all sorts of ways: they knew them to be wealthy; they knew them to be sophisticated; they knew them as master craftsmen; and so on. If they despised them they did so only for wearing trousers into battle! The images put forth in that hideous film, 300, are grotesque; this is not the image that the Greeks had of the Persians at all. What they saw in Persian society was the conception of the absolute rule of one person. This goes back to my wife's reflection of the Proskynesis, the bowing before the monarch, which so offended Greek sensibilities. Now of course, the Muslims in the image from The New York Times were bowing before God. This is where the transition comes in; the notion that exists in the West is that the political sphere is secular and independent of the will of any single individual. This has always been observed in practice, of course. Europe was under the rule of monarchs who believed that they derived their power from God for a very long time; but even then there still existed the idea, which they inherited from the ancient Greeks and even the Romans, that sovereign authority -- the right to make laws -- derived from broader consensus, a broader notion of citizenship. In the 17th and 18th centuries, this notion -- that sovereign power comes from below not from above -- became dominant and has remained dominant. We live under a secularized legal system. This is another point I wanted to stress: that the laws we have are laws made by human beings and they are laws that are changeable and flexible. The laws that govern Islam, if we take them literally, are laws that are supposedly made by God; they do not change and are inflexible. This is the point that Zakaria seems to be making: that there is no possibility under a traditionalist Islamic system in creating a world which will meet the aspirations of anybody who isn't in fact, a member of the clergy. Although strict, 'fundamentalist' Islamic regimes do have an attraction that shouldn't be ignored -- an attraction that I think was overlooked by the Shah of Iran in the 1960s-70s to his cost, and has been ignored in Palestine to the benefit of Hamas -- Islamic organizations often provide something the state is unable to provide: a form of welfare and protection. This may appear more desirable than the kind of freedom of action and thought that a traditional Western-style of government would like to provide. There's going to come a point, however, where mere sustenance is not sufficient. And for many groups, women, for instance, -- and we all know what the position for women is under Islamic societies -- a truly Islamic society doesn't even provide welfare or protection.

BOOKZONE: You point out a major difference between Western and Eastern beliefs; that it is the Western practice of the separation between church and state that the East - essentially Islam - cannot accept. It is this fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam that ultimately divides them. The Western tradition goes all the way back to ancient Greece with Alexander the Great; ancient Rome with Marc Antony; and Byzantium with Constantine; all of whom not only tolerated religious and cultural differences, but adhered to man-made laws, unlike Islam, which abides strictly to Shar'ia law; that which is interpreted to be the sacred expression of God. There has been some recent instances in the news of Shar'ia law being interpreted for modern situations, for example, the recent "eye for an eye" ruling against an Iranian man who blinded and disfigured a woman with acid. Is this as an Eastern step toward a more Western sense of justice?

PAGDEN: I think the answer is no. Christianity, not as it is in the Gospels but Christianity as it has been manifested in all of the various, official churches, was more liberal and secularizing only because Christ himself had insisted upon the separation between church and state. Christianity was also divided in ways that Islam was not. The battle between Christian factions, which throughout the Early-Modern period was very fierce, led to the ultimate triumph of the secular. You can still be a Christian and insist upon the independence of the law. That's the point. Not everyone does, as we know. But even the most fundamentalist of Christians would find it hard to substitute the law of God for those of Caesar. For on thing, the New Testament does not contain much in the way of law. The response on the part of liberals in the East, who still want to uphold the basic principles of Islam, while adopting some kind of Westernization, is to dig around in the Qur'an to find examples of things that look faintly Western. This seems to be misguided on two fronts: first, the Qur'an is an extremely difficult document to interpret as is the Bible; almost anything can be extracted from it in support of one side or the other. The second is that it seems to me very bizarre for people in the twenty-first century to resort to the authority of a text that was supposedly delivered by a God. This kind of reasoning simply has no place in the modern world, and has not had since at least the seventeenth century. Bizarre and ultimately fruitless. You can push it in a Westward direction - push it towards the kind of systems of justice that exist in the West but you can never push it over the threshold between the sacred and the secular. For instance, the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century reformed the political and its legal system to the point where it was compelled to abandon the Shar'ia, while still remaining a Muslim state. Inevitably this was considered to be heretical, and in the end contributed to the final collapse of the Empire. But the architects of that reform knew that unless they made that pass, they were never going to get the kind of modern Western-style state they wanted. Of course, today, the majority of Muslim states are ruled according to some version of Western law. The only way would be to go would be the way that Turkey and Tunisia have gone which is to simply say, "This will no longer work as a system of law and government for a modern state." Whenever you start interpreting a text, you simply end up with any number of conflicting interpretations. You've got to liberate the whole legal system from its embeddedness in a code which is sacred and unchanging..

Professor Anthony Pagden recommends After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin. He is currently working on a history of the Enlightenment, focusing on the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Pagden says, "The book talks about the spread of cosmopolitanism - the idea that human beings belong to one society - and the expanding interest in Europe with the rest of the world."