In The west and Islam Anthony Black sets out to compare political thought and practice in pre-modern Europe and the Islamic world. This he does with great efficiency and concision. Among the topics explored are the role of the caliph and how this differed from either that of the pope or emperor in the west, the absence of civil society in the Islamic world, the failure of Muslims to develop a theory of Wiederstandrecht and the anomalous status (from a western point of view) of Shari'a law. For the Islamic part of the story Black relies heavily on two relatively recent and outstanding books, first Patricia Crone's Medieval Islamic political thought (Edinburgh 2004) and, to a lesser extent, Michael Cook's Commanding right and forbidding wrong in Islamic thought (Cambridge 2000). Black is surely correct to argue that, while both the west and the Islamic world were heirs of Greek culture, Islamic thinkers stood in a much more distanced relationship and there was ‘really no awareness of what classical Greek culture had been’. The possible debt of Marsilius of Padua to Islamic thought was new to this reader. Yet, even so, doubts remain about Black's enterprise. Is like being compared with like? Clearly not, but is there even enough likeness to make comparisons useful? One of the problems is that, in general, Islamic philosophy did not enjoy anything like the status of western scholastic philosophy. Whereas the thought of Aristotle and indeed that of Ibn Rushd was taught at the universities of Paris, Bologna and elsewhere, philosophy was not on the syllabuses of the madrasas. Much of what passed for political thought in the Islamic world should really be classed as wisdom literature, theology or legal theory. Insofar as Arabic and Persian treatises on political thought existed, they were not much read. Moreover, in comparing western and Islamic theory and practice, it is the west that is taken as the template. So in the course of the book what we are presented with is a series of absences and failures on the part of the Islamic world. For example, when Black asks how it was that the Islamic world failed to develop a true feudalism and a landed aristocracy, it might be more useful to ask how it was that the west failed to develop government through military slave elites. Having accepted the western template, we end up with the ‘Triumph of the West’ (the triumph of democracy, the theory of political accountability, freedom of thought, the spirit of scientific enquiry and so on). Well, it is a triumph, but perhaps only a provisional one. On more particular points, I believe that Black's version of Ibn Khaldun, rather secular and quite exceptional in Islamic history, has wrenched him out of his essentially religious and legal context. The idea that sultans were caliphs in their own territories after 1258 is questionable. The Safavid Shi'i persecution of Sunnis in sixteenth-century Iran was not the first systematic religious persecution in the Islamic world. It was preceded by Saladin's persecution of the Shi'is in Egypt in the twelfth century. The suggestion that in the Muslim world ‘seafaring, especially over long distances, was not generally regarded as desirable’ is absurd, for it ignores Islam's vast maritime trade with India, Malaya and China. Sinbad had many non-fictional precursors and successors.