Why the East remains at odds with the West

HAD “Storm From the East” been published a few years earlier, perhaps the United States would not have attacked Iraq. Of course that would presume that U.S. officials and ideologues who began that war would have read this invaluable handbook, a possibility author Milton Viorst makes all too clear would have been most unlikely.

Since the 8th century, Islam and Christianity have struggled for dominance in their parts of the globe. In Viorst’s view, the superior power of the Christian empires and nations over the last 10 or so centuries has brought not wisdom but arrogance. In the last two centuries in particular, the British, French and now Americans have treated the Arab world with disdain. Many in the Arab world have responded with furious resentment.

In “Storm From the East,” the longtime Middle East correspondent for the New Yorker and author of numerous books on the complexities of the region examines the fault line between the East and West and warns against expecting an early or easy conclusion to the long, long contest.

“One clear lesson of the centuries of struggle,” Viorst writes, “is that both these civilizations possess enormous inner strengths. For the West to imagine it can impose its values on the East is a huge miscalculation. For the East to imagine the zealotry of its warriors can intimidate the West is naive. Another lesson is that neither side has the power to choose the other’s course.... Notwithstanding its military superiority, unless the West accepts the East’s right to determine its own future, the bloodshed that currently marks the contest will continue.”

There you have, put precisely, the intellectual and moral divisions inherent in the Western view of the Islamic East. Do nations in the Middle East have the right to determine their future?

The United States and Britain have declared that installing Western-style democracy in Iraq was the desire of the whole world and good for the Iraqis. Viorst points out that in previous years the aims of Western imperialism were more practical and less grand. The West aimed to control for its use what was believed to be the world’s greatest pool of oil. It should surprise no one, he contends, if Arabs see in the drive to spread democracy in the sands of the East a similar if unspoken ambition.

Many Arab readers will not like being told, as Viorst does in “Storm From the East,” that the weaknesses of their civilization are “poverty, illiteracy, religiosity, chronic corruption and misrule.” Yet no impartial observer can fail to reach the same conclusion -- unless he, like so many angry Muslims today, rejects all self-examination in favor of blaming Western imperialism.

Offering faint hope for an Arab-generated solution to the situation in Iraq, Viorst mordantly concludes that “the alternative would be that history, taking note of the inexhaustible antagonism between Arab civilization and the West, remembers the Bush administration for pouring fuel upon the struggle.”

“Storm From the East” is one of the contemporary Modern Library Chronicles series of succinct authoritative yet pointed accounts of problems, questions and conditions that engage the modern reader.

Like the others, including Ian Buruma’s book “Inventing Japan: 1853-1964,” Alexander Stille’s “Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism” and Kevin Starr’s “California: A History,” Viorst’s is invaluable. His survey of the great struggle from the birth of Islam to the present day is both candid and steady.

Anthony Day is a former editor of The Times’ editorial pages.