The Muslim Brotherhood prevails. The newly elected Egyptian president comes from their ranks. They rule in Tunisia. They control Gaza. They have gained in Morocco. In Syria and Jordan too, their time might come.

The Muslim Brotherhood prevails: those are weighty and, not long ago, unthinkable, unutterable words. The Brothers survived eighty years in the underground and the trenches, hounded, tortured, and killed, forced to compromise and bide their time. The fight between Islamism and Arab nationalism has been long, tortuous, and bloody. Might the end be near?

World War I and the ensuing European imperial ascent halted four centuries of Islamic Ottoman rule. With fits and starts, the next century would be that of Arab nationalism. To many, this was an alien, unnatural, inauthentic Western import—a deviation that begged to be rectified. Forced to adjust their views, the Islamists acknowledged the confines of the nation-state and irreligious rule. But their targets remained the nationalist leaders and their disfigured successors.

Last year, they helped topple the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt, the pale successors of the original nationalists. The Islamists had more worthy and dangerous adversaries in mind. They struck at Ben Ali and Mubarak, but the founding fathers—Habib Bourguiba and Gamal Abdel Nasser—were in their sights. They reckon they have corrected history. They have revived the era ofmusulmans sans frontières.

What will all this mean? The Islamists are loath either to share power achieved at high cost or to squander gains so patiently acquired. They must balance among their own restive rank-and-file, a nervous larger society, and an undecided international community. The temptation to strike fast pulls in one direction; the desire to reassure tugs in another. In general, they will prefer to eschew coercion, awaken the people to their dormant Islamic nature rather than foist it upon them. They will try to do it all: rule, enact social transformations incrementally, and be true to themselves without becoming a menace to others.

The Islamists propose a bargain. In exchange for economic aid and political support, they will not threaten what they believe are core Western interests: regional stability, Israel, the fight against terror, energy flow. No danger to Western security. No commercial war. The showdown with the Jewish state can wait. The focus will be on the slow, steady shaping of Islamic societies. The US and Europe may voice concern, even indignation at such a domestic makeover. But they’ll get over it. Just as they got over the austere fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia. Bartering—as in, we’ll take care of your needs, let us take care of ours—Islamists feel, will do the trick. Looking at history, who can blame them?

Mubarak was toppled in part because he was viewed as excessively subservient to the West, yet the Islamists who succeed him might offer the West a sweeter because more sustainable deal. They think they can get away with what he could not. Stripped of his nationalist mantle, Mubarak had little to fall back on; he was a naked autocrat. The Muslim Brothers by comparison have a much broader program—moral, social, cultural. Islamists feel they can still follow their convictions, even if they are not faithfully anti-Western. They can moderate, dilute, defer.

Unlike the close allies of the West they have replaced, Islamists are heard calling for NATO military intervention in Libya yesterday, Syria today, wherever they entertain the hope to take over tomorrow. One can use the distant infidels, who will not stay around for long, to jettison local infidels, who have hounded them for decades. Rejection of foreign interference, once a centerpiece of the post-independence outlook, is no longer the order of the day. It is castigated as counterrevolutionary.

What the US sought to obtain over decades through meddling and imposition, it might now obtain via acquiescence: Arab regimes that will not challenge Western interests. Little wonder that many in the region are persuaded that America was complicit in the Islamists’ rise, a quiet partner in what has been happening.

Everywhere, Israel faces the rise of Islam, of militancy, of radicalism. Former allies are gone; erstwhile foes reign supreme. But the Islamists have different and broader objectives. They wish to promote their Islamic project, which means consolidating their rule where they can, refraining from alienating the West, and avoiding perilous and precocious clashes with Israel. In this scheme, the presence of a Jewish state is and will remain intolerable, but it is probably the last piece of a larger puzzle that may never be fully assembled.

The quest to establish an independent, sovereign Palestinian state was never at the heart of the Islamist project. Hamas, the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, harbors grander, less territorially confined but also less immediately achievable designs. Despite Hamas’s circumlocutions and notwithstanding its political evolution, it never truly deviated from its original view—the Jewish state is illegitimate and all the land of historic Palestine is inherently Islamic. If the current balance of power is not in your favor, wait and do what you can to take care of the disparity. The rest is tactics.

The Palestinian question has been the preserve of the Palestinian national movement. As of the late 1980s, its declared goal became a sovereign state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Alternatives, whether interim or temporary, have been flatly rejected. The Islamists’ plan may be more ambitious and grandiose but more flexible and elastic. For them, a diminutive, amputated state, hemmed in by Israel, dependent on its goodwill, predicated on its recognition, and entailing an end to the conflict, is not worth fighting for.

They can live with a range of transient arrangements: an interim agreement; a long-term truce, or hudna; a possible West Bank confederation with Jordan, with Gaza moving toward Egypt. All will advance the further Islamization of Palestinian society. All permit Hamas to turn to its social, cultural, and religious agenda, its true calling. All allow Hamas to maintain the conflict with Israel without having to wage it. None violates Hamas’s core tenets. It can put its ultimate goal on hold. Someday, the time for Palestine, for Jerusalem may come. Not now.

In the age of Arab Islamism, Israel may find Hamas’s purported intransigence more malleable than Fatah’s ostensible moderation. Israel fears the Islamic awakening. But the more immediate threat could be to the Palestinian national movement. There is no energy left in the independence project; associated with the old politics and long-worn-out leaderships, it has expended itself. Fatah and thePLO will have no place in the new world. The two-state solution is no one’s primary concern. It might expire not because of violence, settlements, or America’s inexpert role. It might perish of indifference.

An Islamist era that picks up where the Ottoman Empire left off, the shutting down of the nationalist interlude, is far from preordained. The Brotherhood flourished in opposition largely because it remained secretive, displayed patience, and ensured internal obedience. It built up influence through years of quiet labor and struggle. Once Islamists compete for power, many of their assets become obsolete. They must move openly because politics are more transparent, adjust quickly because of fast-paced change, and cope with diversity within their ranks because the system has become more plural.

Tunisia’s ruling Islamists must make a choice regarding Islam’s place in the new constitution; if they opt for a more moderate outcome, they will infuriate the Salafists, fail to reassure the non-Islamists, and befuddle countless of their own. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood faces attacks from secularists for injecting too much religion into public life and from Salafists for not injecting enough. Members split to join more moderate expressions of Islamism or more rigorous ones. The Brotherhood’s emphasis on free-market economics and the middle class does not play well to the underprivileged.

The new Islamist language, insofar as it emphasizes freedom, democracy, elections, and human rights, earns praise in the West but skepticism from critics. These might only be words but words can matter; they can take on a life of their own, force policy changes, make it difficult to renege. At that point, the Brotherhood can become the party it says it is, and then what will remain of its Islamism? Or it can persist as the movement it has been, and then what will remain of its pragmatism? Historically a tightly regimented transnational organization, the Brotherhood no longer speaks with one voice inside a country any more than it does across borders. As power beckons, each branch has different, often competing, political priorities and concerns.

Islamists also face the dilemmas of foreign policy. Egypt’s new assertiveness, its attempt at a more independent diplomacy, could put it at odds with the West. Its apparent decision to suspend its anti-Western and anti-Israeli positions risks alienating its public. Many Egyptians crave more than a Mubarak ornamented with Koranic verses.

Islamists prospered in opposition because they could blame others; they could suffer in power because others will blame them. Dilute their domestic and foreign agenda, and they may well lose their rank-and-file; pursue it and they will alienate non-Islamists and the West. Postpone the struggle against Israel, and their rhetoric will appear disconnected from their policy; wage it, and their policy will appear dangerous to their new allies in the West. If they explain that their moderation is tactical, they will expose themselves; stay silent and they will confuse the base. There are only so many contradictions they can simultaneously straddle in this Olympian balancing act. The power of political Islam flowed chiefly from not exercising it. Its recent successes could signal the eve of its decline. How much simpler was life on the other side.

Amid chaos and uncertainty, the Islamists alone offer a familiar, authentic vision for the future. They might fail or falter, but who will pick up the mantle? Liberal forces have a weak lineage, slim popular support, and hardly any organizational weight. Remnants of the old regime are familiar with the ways of power yet they seem drained and exhausted. If instability spreads, if economic distress deepens, they could benefit from a wave of nostalgia. But they face long odds, bereft of an argument other than that things used to be bad, but now are worse.

That leaves an assortment of nationalists, anti-imperialists, old-fashioned leftists, and Nasserites. Theirs was the sole legitimate ideology in the Arab world, invoked by those who fought colonialism and by those who replaced the colonial powers. Similar ideas have been invoked too, unwittingly but unmistakably, by the demonstrators and protesters of these past months who spoke of dignity, independence, and social justice, and thus borrowed from the same ideological lexicon as those they eventually ousted.

This non-Islamist, “progressive” outlook has roots, appeal, and foot soldiers; it lacks organization and resources and has suffered from having been so thoroughly tainted and corrupted by generations that ruled in its name. Can it reinvent itself? If the Muslim Brotherhood plays down people’s nationalist feelings, if it ignores their aspirations to social justice, if it fails to govern effectively, an opening might arise. The more nationalist, progressive worldview could yet stage a comeback.

A video makes the rounds. Nasser regales the crowd with the story of his encounter with the then head of the Muslim Brotherhood, who asks him to compel women to be veiled. The Egyptian leader replies: Does your daughter wear a veil? No. If you can’t control her, how do you expect me to control tens of millions of Egyptian women? He laughs and the crowd laughs with him. It is the early 1950s, over half a century ago. Today, one senses wistfulness for such humor and such bravado. History does not move forward.

Was the last century an aberrant deviation from the Arab world’s inherent Islamic trajectory? Is today’s Islamist rebirth a fleeting, anomalous throwback to a long-outmoded past? Which is the detour, which is the natural path?

Interview with Aljazeera

In the prologue to his new book From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, award-winning author and essayist Pankaj Mishra writes:

“The West has seen Asia through the narrow perspective of its own strategic and economic interests, leaving unexamined – and unimagined – the collective experiences and subjectivities of Asian peoples… [This book] does not seek to replace a Euro-centric or West-centric perspective with an equally problematic Asia-centric one. Rather, it seeks to open up multiple perspectives on the past and the present, convinced that the assumptions of Western power – increasingly untenable – are no longer a reliable vantage point and may even be dangerously misleading”.

Focusing on the trajectories of two itinerant thinkers and activists, the Persian Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) and the Chinese Liang Qichao (1873-1929) – as well as various other Asian intellectuals and leaders – Mishra gracefully challenges the West-centric narrative, positing that “the central event of the last century for the majority of the world’s population was the intellectual and political awakening of Asia and its emergence from the ruins of both Asian and European empires”.

This thesis enables crucial and otherwise inaccessible insights into contemporary history, including phenomena ranging from the formation of al-Qaeda to the rise of China.

I had the opportunity to converse with Mishra by email about his book, the transcript of which interview appears below.

As for the potential fertility of present-day imperial ruins, populations accustomed to deflecting the “uncivilised” charge onto non-Westerners would do well to reflect on obvious parallels between, for example, the currentbehaviour of the US military abroad and Mishra’s description of Napoleon-era French soldiers, who “while suppressing the first of the Egyptian revolts against their occupation, stormed the al-Azhar mosque, tethered their horses to the prayer niches, trampled the Qurans under their boots, drank wine until they were helpless and then urinated on the floor”.

Belen Fernandez: You explain at the start of From the Ruins of Empire:

“The form of this book – part historical essay and part intellectual biography – is primarily motivated by the conviction that the lines of history converge in individual lives, even though the latter have their own shape and momentum. The early men of modern Asia it describes travelled and wrote prolifically, restlessly assessing their own and other societies, pondering the corruption of power, the decay of community, the loss of political legitimacy and the temptations of the West. Their passionate enquiries appear in retrospect as a single thread, weaving seemingly disparate events and regions into a single web of meaning.”

You’ve discussed your own intellectual formation and travels in previous writings, such as your bookTemptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond. What convergence of events and experiences compelled you to embark on From the Ruins of Empire?

Pankaj Mishra: Many things over the last decade. I’ll speak only about two here. The first was surely my visit to the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir in 2000, where I witnessed a military occupation by a nation-state, India, that claimed the moral prestige of secularism but was actually oppressively Hindu majoritarian in all significant ways – that’s how it was perceived by Kashmiris who had long belonged to a cosmopolitan and syncretic culture.

That’s when I began to wonder why many Asian nation-states had turned out to be often more violent than the European empires in Asia they had replaced. And that was when I began to wonder – and this is a major theme in the book – if the political and economic models Asians had adopted from the West in their struggle for self-determination and dignity were disastrously unsuitable.

The other thing that influenced me was the post-9/11 political climate in the West. How such a wide range of politicians, policymakers, journalists and columnists could re-embrace the delusions of empire – those you thought had been effectively shattered by decolonisation 50-60 years ago; how they could bring themselves to believe that the Afghans and the Iraqis were just longing to suck on the big sticks proffered to them by American soldiers, as [decorated New York Times foreign affairs columnist]Thomas Friedman inimitably recommended… I realised too that the post-colonial version of history I had grown up with – one that celebrated the nation-state’s emergence from foreign rule – was deeply defective and left out a lot of things.

All this was just staggering to me, and people like myself who share a reflexive suspicion of armed imperialists claiming to be missionaries.

So neither the neo-imperialist nor the post-colonial accounts of the world seemed accurate. Both had suppressed or neglected a whole range of ideas and personalities in the Asian realm, and I felt that it was time to look at them again, to see what they had to say to us.

BF: Last year, you reviewed Niall Ferguson’s Civilisation: The West and the Rest for the London Review of Books. This elicited a protracted tantrum from Ferguson, comprising libel accusations and a lawsuit threat.

How does the substance of your new book challenge the worldview of pseudo-scholars like Ferguson, who – as you point out - defined himself in 2003 as “a fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang”, and endorsed neo-con Max Boot’s assessment that the US should endeavour to replicate in Asia “the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets”?

PM: I did not aim this book at the jodhpur-loving neo-imperialists or their arguments in favour of a renewed Western imperium. I have no interest in engaging with such absurd ideas, and, as we have seen in recent days, the pith-helmet fetishists can do a pretty good job of discrediting themselves.

I certainly didn’t want to get into a discussion about whether Western imperialism had its good side – the Asian thinkers and writers in my book share the simple assumption that a system that sanctifies large-scale violence, exploitation, slavery and racism is reprehensible, undesirable and, finally, unsustainable.

Most importantly, neo-imperialism has now exposed itself as strategically as well as morally bankrupt. It retains the potential to plunge the world into a terrible conflagration – an assault on Iran might provide the spark – but it cannot preserve American interests in a multi-polar world; it can only damage them beyond repair.

BF: There is a tendency, among members of the Western foreign policy establishment and intelligentsia, to reduce international phenomena to simplistic and ahistorical rhetoric and concepts – e.g. 9/11 = Muslims hate our freedom.

Were they to acquire a spontaneous interest in the matter, what might these characters learn from a study of al-Afghani, Liang and other late Asian thinkers that would better position them to interpret contemporary Islamic terrorism, the Arab Spring, the rise of China?

(The US ambassador to Afghanistan would presumably at least be spared further donations of $25,000 to the restoration of al-Afghani’s grave, which as you explain in the book occurred as a result of a fleeting post-9/11 conviction that the man represented an exemplary moderate, liberal and West-compatible Islam. You object: “The mercurial and brilliant al-Afghani was anything but this bland figment of sanguine imagination.”) 

One of the problems with these pseudo-culturalist and quasi-psychological accounts and binaries – these barbarians hate our freedoms etc, liberalism versus Islamofascism – is that they are unaware of their own long history.PM: Yes, a lot of money could be saved, and spent on worthwhile programmes in both the West and in Afghanistan, if the simple moral equations – mini-skirts versus Taliban beards – were replaced with an engagement with the history of the West in Asia, and the no less tormented history of post-colonial Asia.

Asians who felt the sharp edges of Western “values” such as liberalism-and there are many such figures in my book – knew very well these ideological tricks: foreigners justifying their brutal domination and racial humiliation of Asian peoples by pointing to their supposedly higher values of “civilisation”.

This is of course only one of the many things that Western policymakers could learn through reflecting on al-Afghani and Liang.

However, the most important and very simple lesson there for American and European commentators who for a long time have assumed that everyone in the world is just waiting to become like them is this: how Asians have conceived over the last century and a half of their place in the world dominated by a small minority of white men.

This is what my book seeks to describe. In this basic quest for dignity and equality and release from humiliation – so obvious yet so rarely discussed – are grounded all the events that you speak of, whether the Arab Spring or the rise of China.

So unless you grant that people have conceived of their own fates, made their own trysts with destiny, without regard for what the West wants or how the West sees itself and judges non-Western peoples, you’ll always be a little bewildered by everything that happens in the world today, and will end up falling for simple, self-flattering notions like “they must hate our freedoms”.

The book addresses this massive incompatibility of historical memory and self-perceptions between the West and Asia.

BF: You write: “Globalisation, it is clear, does not lead to a flat world marked by increasing integration, standardisation and cosmopolitan openness, despite the wishful thinking of some commentators.”

You then detail some of its pernicious effects in contemporary India, such as that “failed crops and spiralling debt drove more than a hundred thousand farmers to suicide in the past decade”, a phenomenon that has much to do with free trade and World Bank structural adjustment policies favouring global corporations like Monsanto.

How is it that, in the face of centuries worth of evidence soundly obliterating the possibility that free trade is a catalyst for general prosperity, the discoverer of the flat world [i.e. Thomas Friedman] has turned his discovery into a runaway bestseller, in which he imparts statistics such as that “any Indian villager” will confirm the need for enhanced globalisation?

PM: Every age has its false prophets, its pied-pipers, but what does it say about our own age that its most famous global sage should be a flat-worlder? The history recounted in my book makes it clear that the “free market” was the creation of powerful nation states in Western Europe and then America that had accumulated several advantages over other countries, largely through imperial conquest, and that this allegedly free market was imposed upon Asian peoples with the help of gunboats (and local elites or compradors).

So the coercion and profound inequality inherent in this practice of “free trade”, or the fact that it made a small transnational elite – foreign businessmen and their local collaborators – rich and impoverished many others, have always been obvious.There is of course a great deal of continuity in the Western discourse of free markets: from the British merchants who lobbied for an assault on China in the late 1830s to Woodrow Wilson saying we must “batten” down the doors of countries that do not practice free trade to Friedman who wrote that the invisible hand must necessarily conceal an “invisible fist” or it won’t work.

Why do so many people fall for grandiose moral claims – the ludicrous notion, for instance, that the free market is all about removing poverty?

I think to answer that one has to examine, in addition to individual trajectories of journalists like Friedman, the synergies that developed between politicians, businessmen, academics and journalists in recent decades: how each of these figures came to boost the other, how policymaking and opinion-making came to be complementary, how intellectuals came to be professionalised, Davos-ed and Aspen-ised and ended up whispering advice to power, and how defective but profit-maximising knowledge was produced and then widely disseminated.

BF: In the section of your book on Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in East Asia, we learn: “For Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, perhaps the most comprehensive nineteenth-century Bengali critic of the West, the innate human capacity for love had stopped, in Europe, at the door of the nation-state”.

What is the state of love in the world in 2012?

PM: Our capacity for uncritical love has been expended recklessly in recent years on the free market rather than the nation-state. This was the false god we were instructed to worship during the era of globalisation and most of us duly obliged, even the least resourceful and economically underprivileged peoples, dazzled by our new goods and gadgets, the routinely updated models of mobile phones etc.

In 2012, after four years of a crisis caused by rampant greed and which nobody knows how to end, we can see more clearly how a tiny minority has enriched itself, leaving many others feeling cheated, and exposed to deprivation and suffering. Their anger and frustration is prone to violent eruptions – we already see this happening in places like India and China, not to mention Greece and Spain.

BF: During a visit to Persia and Iraq in 1932, Tagore observed:

“[T]he men, women and children done to death there meet their fate by a decree from the stratosphere of British imperialism – which finds it easy to shower death because of its distance from its individual victims. So dim and insignificant do those unskilled in the modern arts of killing appear to those who glory in such skill!”

Can a study of Asian intellectuals help combat the empire-sustaining notion of a dehumanised “Other”?

PM: There is a lot more where that passage came from about the sacredness of the sky, the imaginative and philosophical meaning it has had for centuries to earth-bound humans.

The reason why I chose Tagore, who is not a systematic thinker or ideological system-builder and is better described as a poet and seer, was precisely these bits of writing – necessarily naïve and un-ideological and therefore so cognisant of modern horrors. Only someone with a rooted relationship with the world and a profound sense of the past could see the increasingly impersonal and brutal form of violence unleashed by “rational” men.

I can’t do better than quote some of Tagore’s own writings from this trip to the Middle East, which are particularly relevant to our Age of the Drone:

“There is a British Air Force station at Baghdad. The Christian chaplain of that force gave me the news that they were daily bombing some Arab villages. Old men, women and children were being killed indiscriminately from the upper regions of British Imperialism; it was easy to kill them because the principle of Imperialism obscures the individual. Christ has recognised men as the sons of God; but to the Christian chaplain of the Air Force the Father along with his Son have grown unreal, they can no longer be discerned from the altitude of Imperialism… Besides, the desert-dwellers can be killed so easily from the air and their powers of retaliation are so inadequate that the reality of their death too grows dim. For this reason, armed men of the West are very prone today to forget the humanity of those who have not yet learnt their scientific methods of homicide.”

Of course – and this was the horrific scenario Tagore was warning against – many more people have now figured out the “scientific methods of homicide” and the terrorists of the East showed on 9/11 how easy it is to kill thousands from the air.

BF: Was there anything that surprised you during your research for the book?

PM: Mostly, how little I knew about my subject. Particularly, these pre-colonial cosmopolitan worlds of Asia – when people, ideas, religions, goods, travelled vast distances. These worlds were shattered by Western imperialists, but the first generation of Asian thinker I describe still had a good memory of it, and drew upon this long experience in their criticisms of Western models of politics and economy.

BF: Why is the book’s epilogue titled “An ambiguous revenge”?

PM: Well, precisely because the rise of Asia and its assertion of dignity and equality before the long-dominant West, means nothing if Asian countries like India and China and Indonesia follow the same script: conquest, exploitation, an instrumental attitude towards nature, dispossession and the worldwide scramble for resources that produced vicious conflicts in the last centuries.

The model of the imperial nation-state that made a few Western countries so uniquely powerful and prosperous can only spell political and environmental disaster on a gigantic scale if populous countries like India and China adopt it. But that is what we are looking at in the new century.

Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, AlterNet and many other publications.

From: The Daily Beast

The op-ed pages of major newspapers are littered with the bylines of formerly great journalists. Too often the sinecure of punditry causes writers to become enervated in their thinking, lazy in their prose. Tom Friedman—now a frequent subject of parody for his repeated quoting of foreign taxi drivers, his muddled metaphors, his bizarre neologisms—is a prime example of a once fine foreign correspondent gone to seed.

For that reason, I’ve had mixed feelings observing the rise of Pankaj Mishra in recent years. The Indian-born Mishra is among the best literary critics writing in English today, as well as a distinguished cultural historian and novelist. I’d read him on anything. But lately he’s strayed near the pundit zone, writing political op-eds for outlets like The Guardian andBloomberg View. To be sure, he acquits himself as well as anyone in the field. He’s a consistently sharp and independent thinker, unafraid, for example, to criticize the Indian government’s authoritarian tendencies and highlight the ways in which its economic boom has bypassed whole sectors of its population. But the road to membership in the technocratic elite is paved with this sort of well-remunerated pontificating, and one hopes that success doesn’t diminish, as The New York Timesrecently described it, Mishra’s “sometimes ferocious instinct for the jugular.

At first glance, Mishra’s latest book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, is a sign of his commitment to the concerns that he’s addressed throughout his career. The book is a survey of Asian intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and their role in pan-Asian, pan-Islamic, and anti-colonial movements. And it begins with a shot: the spectacular Japanese naval victory over Russia at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, which electrified Asians and Africans living under the yoke of colonialism and, in Mishra’s view, inaugurated “the recessional of the West” that continues to this day.

That the West is in some form of decline isn’t much in dispute. But Mishra advances the discussion by arguing that the West’s moral decline traces back a century, through two world wars, a horrific legacy of colonialism, and a failure to treat non-Western nations as equal partners. This moral decline matters, he claims, because it reflects how Western liberal democracy may not be suited to these societies. Instead, these nations have looked to other models—in earlier generations, Meiji Japan and post-Ottoman Turkey, and, more recently, quasi-Islamist Turkey and China’s one-party, hypercapitalist state. Given the West’s recent history of economic instability and military intervention in the Muslim world, this search for other models of development—ones that, for example, acknowledge the centrality of Islam in some cultures—takes on particular significance