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Friday 5 December 2008

Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West

Through Western eyes

Ian Garrick Mason on the new book from Anthony Pagden

Even Pagden’s portrayal of military engagements suffers from this lack of balance. At the Battle of the Pyramids, Napoleon had roughly 25,000 troops — though Pagden doesn’t provide a figure for the French forces — while Murad Bey, depending on how you count and who you believe, had anywhere between 20,000 and 60,000. Outnumbered Napoleon may have been, but certainly not ‘vastly’ so. Pagden similarly claims that in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Israeli forces were ‘vastly outnumbered’ (again, no figures provided) — but in fact even during the initial attack the Arabs, husbanding their meagre resources for internal security purposes, managed to field barely 21,000 troops against the Israelis’ 30,000. ‘Vastly outnumbered’, or words like it, is a phrase applied to Western forces in virtually all of the battles that Pagden describes, implying that the East is incapable of mustering anything other than a horde of untrained, ill-disciplined, slavish troops. Indeed, the repetition of the claim is ironic, for though Pagden declares (at least twice) that ‘history in the Muslim imagination is always doomed to repeat itself’, as his own book proves the Occidental imagination is little different.

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