When Napoleon Bonaparte led his army into Egypt in 1798, he hadmore than military conquest on his mind. Along with 30,000 soldiers, hisentourage included what amounted to a mobile university, complete witheconomists and poets, architects and astronomers, a balloonist, and abaritone from the Paris Opera. They carried with them a library of athousand books, featuring Montesquieu and Rousseau, Montaigne andVoltaire, and other classics of the Western canon.

Archetypes of West and East: Napoleon and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the former shah of Iran.

Almost two centuries later, in 1971, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the shahof Iran, held a lavish, weeklong fete for foreign dignitaries on thegrounds of an ancient Persian palace. Over peacock stuffed with foiegras and 25,000 bottles of Champagne, he declared himself heir to thegreat Achaemenid kings Darius and Xerxes. The claimed price tag: $200million.

For Anthony Pagden, a professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, the shah and Napoleonare archetypes, respectively, of East and West, each seeing himself asheir to a glorious civilization. But as Pagden points out, each man alsohad his own fascinating ambiguities. The Swiss-educated shah was ahighly secular supporter of modernization (and the Champagne for hisparty came from Maxim’s of Paris). Napoleon proclaimed to the Egyptiansthat he revered the Prophet Muhammad and “the glorious Koran,” if onlyto win over the local clerics.

Pagden has a keen eye for thestriking detail (a helpful attribute for someone plowing through 2,500years of history in 12 chapters), and “Worlds at War,” like Pagden’searlier work “Peoples and Empires,” is bold, panoramic and highlyreadable, at times a page turner.

Through a combination oflegend, anecdote and evocative writing, Pagden brings alive the ancientGreco-Persian wars, the rise of Islam and the conquest of Constantinopleby the Ottoman emperor Mehmed II. And he turns what might otherwise bedry history about the Investiture Controversy of the 11th century intoalmost a thriller, with an “outmaneuvered” Henry IV standing outside thecastle of Canossa “in a hair shirt and robes of a penitent, barefoot onthe ice for three days,” seeking an audience with Pope Gregory VII, whohad excommunicated him. Having obtained Gregory’s forgiveness, Henrypromptly “descended on Rome with an army.” Gregory called on the Normansto defend him, and they defeated Henry. But unfortunately they “sackedthe city themselves,” causing the Pope “to flee south, where he died offever in Salerno.”

But if “Worlds at War” is hard to put down,it’s also hard to pin down; almost to the end, its thesis is somethingof a moving target. For starters, Pagden casts his book as anexploration of the “perpetual enmity,” as Herodotus called it, betweenEast and West. Yet he excludes from his account China, Japan and therest of the Far East and, for the most part, India. So his “East”consists almost entirely of Islamic societies: Persia/Iran, the OttomanEmpire/Turkey, Egypt and today’s Arab world.

Moreover, Pagden isfrequently cagey about whether he thinks fundamental differencesactually exist between East and West. In his preface, he says theEast-West division is “often illusory, always metaphorical.” Elsewhere,he suggests that the West is in many ways rooted in the East. (“Like somuch else that became a defining part of the Western world,”Christianity had also “begun in the East”; Christ was “a typical Easternholy man,” and “the slain god, the virgin birth, the incarnation” ofChristianity were “more Asian still.”) When he does draw out culturaldifferences, some of them stereotypical, Pagden tends to distancehimself through attribution. He cites Herodotus for the contrast betweenAsian slavishness and Western individuality and love of freedom; ErnestRenan for Islam’s hostility to science; Montesquieu and Hegel for“Oriental despotism.”

In the end, however, “Worlds at War” isanother book about the clash between the Enlightenment and religion, andits central target is Islam, which, Pagden argues, is incompatible withthe Western principle of separation between church and state. The“fundamental theological difference between Islam and Christianity,” hetells us, lies in “the association between religion and the law.” UnlikeChristianity, Islam supports “the complete identification of thesecular realm with the sacred and the corresponding elevation of theruler.” Christianity recognizes both the Kingdom of Heaven and thegovernments of earth. In Islam, by contrast, “there can be only onelaw”: the Shariah, which is God’s law and thus “eternal” and“unchanging.” According to Pagden, the history of Islam is unified “by acontinuous and still unfulfilled narrative, the story of the struggleagainst the ‘Infidel’ for the ultimate Muslim conquest of the entireworld.”

In Pagden’s Islam there is an odd echo of the Islamoffered by the bearded mullahs who espouse violence from their mosquesor caves. Indeed, Pagden quotes Osama bin Ladenat length for the view that the greatest crime of the United States —for which 9/11 was punishment — was that “you separate religion fromyour politics, contradicting the pure nature which affirms AbsoluteAuthority to the Lord your Creator.” Pagden adds that “most Muslimtheologians and jurists would have to agree” with bin Laden.

Suchpassages are bound to infuriate many, including those Muslims who seethemselves as reaffirming a well-rooted Islamic tradition of diversityin opinion against a rising trend of rigid fanaticism. Pagden tends totreat Islam as a monolith; at one point he describes Islam asintellectually “simple.” Given Islam’s long and variegated history, notto mention its abstruse jurisprudence, many will disagree. It’s a goodbet that “Worlds at War” will appeal more to admirers of Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the clash of civilizations, which Pagden calls “a crude but useful phrase,” than to fans of Edward Said’s book “Orientalism.”

Tobe fair, Pagden also tends to treat Christianity monolithically(although more favorably). For example, some historians of the churchwill surely take issue with Pagden’s assertion that Christianityseparated the secular from the sacred, emphasizing “the ultimate freedomof the individual.” How exactly do the crusades and the Inquisition fitinto this picture, not to mention the many Christian doctrines ofpredestination?

The real value of “Worlds at War” may lie in asecondary theme: the West’s long, tragicomic history of trying tocivilize and modernize the East. In the first century B.C., Octavian’sdefeat of Antony and Egypt was portrayed by the Romans as the triumph of“a free and virtuous West” over “a tyrannical and corrupt East.” Almost2,000 years later, in 1920, Shiites and Sunnis were killing each otherin Mesopotamia, British officers were dying, and The Times of Londonwrote, “How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vainendeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensiveadministration which they never asked for and do not want?”

Andthen there was Napoleon. The most ambitious of Western conquerors inthat region, he set about to impress the Egyptians with a demonstrationof French technology: an elaborate launching of his hot air balloon,painted in red, white and blue. Unfortunately, it crashed and burst intoflames. The Egyptians, no doubt, were shocked and awed.