‘The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives’
By Naoíse Mac Sweeney
Dutton, 448 pages

The medieval Arab scholar Al-Kindi is the focal point of this argument against the “grand narrative of Western civilization,” and against the thesis advanced by Samuel Huntington in his influential and controversial “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order” (2011). 

A professor of classical archeology at the University of Vienna, Naoíse Mac Sweeney treats Al-Kindi as a thinker who disputed the notion of an East/West divide, demonstrating in his writing that Greco-Roman writers were an honored and influential part of Arab learning and that the Greeks and Romans derived a good deal of their knowledge from Persia and other places in a world that did not define itself by continents, races, or cultures. 

Instead of merely analyzing Al-Kindi’s work, Ms. Mac Sweeney portrays him as the odd man out, alienating his fellow scholars but also winning some over to his heterodox arguments. I’m a little surprised, given Ms. Mac Sweeney’s penchant for biography, that she does not make more of Al-Kindi’s rebarbative personality, a key feature of his inclination to abjure Arab chauvinism.

Ms. Mac Sweeney is quite aware that her biographical subjects, including familiar ones like Herodotus, Francis Bacon, and William Ewart Gladstone, and the less well known Tullia D’Arragona, Safiya Sultan, and Njinga of Angola, reflect her own biases, based on a desire to show that Western identity and whiteness are not singularly responsible for the progress of world civilization.

Ms. Mac Sweeney’s argument is intricate and ideological, but then she contends that no account of world history is separable from the ideology of the person who authors it. Certain facts, however, as far as she is concerned, have been established — most notably that “Western civilization” is a construct mainly created by Francis Bacon and others at times when their nations have sought to exert their cultural, political, and intellectual superiority.

Sometimes her argument wobbles. It is difficult, for one, to grasp her distinction between Renaissance artists and thinkers who believed they were rediscovering the significance of the classical (Greco-Roman) world and her view that they were inventing that world to suit their own esthetic and moral purposes. Her main point, though, is that there has been no continuous classical heritage — at least not until figures like Bacon and Gladstone said there was.

Gladstone, in Ms. Mac Sweeney’s account, is eager to show the eternal and abiding superiority of the West and the imperial mission to civilize the world. That he sometimes had doubts about that mission, especially in his rivalry with Benjamin Disraeli, seems to be conveniently avoided. 

Gladstone is important to Ms. Mac Sweeney because as the son of a slaveholder, he benefited from the trafficking in human property, becoming a member of Parliament in his early 20s and prime minister of England four times. Her compelling portrait of him nonetheless suffers from biographical malpractice. Like nearly all her subjects, Gladstone is the victim of what Boswell called the biographer’s presumption — that is, the tendency to assert more than can be proved.

So it is that Ms. Mac Sweeney is sure that Gladstone “must have” felt this or that, and her inferences about, say, guilt feelings over slavery, may be right, but she presents those feelings as virtually self-evident, which they are not.

Ms. Mac Sweeney is on sounder ground in her acute biography of Edward Said. She believes his “Orientalism” (1978) is a great, if greatly flawed, book, which showed how the West has maligned the East. The trouble with Said, in her view, is that he accepted the myth that the West was the product of a continuous development of its own progressive ideas. Consequently, he did not see the interplay between cultures that is the burden of her book.  

Her biography of Said is ironic and complex, given his own education and background in the Middle East and in this country, which she sensitively presents. Because Said wrote autobiographically, it is possible for Ms. Mac Sweeney to present a convincing case for his strengths and limitations. That she cannot do so for all her figures is, in part, because of a paucity of evidence and her inclination to affirm what she cannot possibly know.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography.”