Reading Note: Pankaj Mishras From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia is essential reading for anyone trying to understand much of the ferment, especially in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and China, working its way through todays world. Much of the book offers intellectual biographies of three men trying to think their way through the disaster of late nineteenth and early twentieth century imperialism and colonialism: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao, and Rabinath Tagore. Modernization has been a slow process and has confused nearly everyone caught up in it: one can see the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber as prime examples of working through that confusion. Less well known is the working through by intelelctuals caught up not only in the modernizing process but also by the unsettling imapcts of imperialism and colonialism--too often conceptualized as westernization. I knew little of these three seminal figures and of their impact. Although the book too often reveals its biases, Mishra is very useful in understanding both the movitations and the goals of movements as scattered as Turkeys AKP and Gülen, the Muslim Brothers and various jihadists, Hindu nationalism, and the reappearance of Confucianism to undergird the ruling party in China. Read this book.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:03:48 +0000
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