Mishra begins with Japan’s destruction of the Russian Navy at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. It was the first time a Western power had been defeated by an Asiatic power in a major battle since the Middle Ages. The news was applauded as far afield as India by Gandhi and America by W.E.B. DuBois as a blow against white colonial power. Mishra goes on to survey a wide breadth of the story of colonialism in Asia, its reversals, and its remnants. He tells the forgotten biography of Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghnai, a man who influenced the revolution in Iran, the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, modern salafists, other pan-Islamists and pan-Arab nationalists alike. He was the first scholar who saw Islam and the West as diametrically opposed, preceding Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” by decades. He called out Islamic rulers, from the Caliph of the Ottoman Empire to the Shah of Iran, for their retrograde ways. He also called out western powers for their hypocrisy in extolling liberty and freedom at home, while behaving as despots above the law abroad. He was convinced Islam needed its own Reformation (and that he was Islam’s answer to Luther). At times, he preached the need for tolerance, the need for Muslim/Hindu unity, and the virtues of science and modern learning. At the same time, he decried mimicry of the West, which would lead to false admiration of and dominance by colonial powers.
Mishra also shines a light on China through the lens of Liang Qichao. Liang was from the Confucian scholar tradition and at first only a modest reformer, who wanted to reinvigorate the Manchu Dynasty. By the end, however, he became a fervent anti-Manchu, while still sensing that the Chinese peasantry was not ready for western democracy. His democracy was not individualist, but aligned with a common good for all. In his years exiled in Japan he had become impressed with the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s efforts to modernize, selectively westernize, and build an identity as a collective nation-state. Foremost, he argued that the accumulation and centralization of capital was the only defense China had against the encroachments of the West.
In India, Rabindranath Tagore was similarly skeptical of wholesale westernization. He worried that uncritical mimicry would lead to the dehumanization of the soul. He extolled a return to Indian peasant ways and towards the spirituality of the ancient East. But he also dismissed the caste system and other mysticisms of Hinduism. He believed self-regeneration began in the simple village life. Tagore thought the ideas of the Western enlightenment, individualism, and the glory of the nation would lead to man devoid of his inner worth. He felt the West, itself, was becoming subsumed by its own materialism and cautioned countries like Japan and China with trying to catch up to western wealth and status on the West’s own terms. Visiting New York, he conceded, “the age belongs to the West and humanity must be grateful to you for your science, [but] you have exploited those who are helpless and humiliated those who are unfortunate with this gift.”
Mishra ends by describing Turkey as an example that in many ways has succeeded in modernizing with its own blend of Islamic culture and westernization. Ataturk brutally suppressed Islamic tendencies for a time, eliminating the Caliphate, forbidding the headscarf, and replacing Arabic with the Turkish language, but a current of Islam was always bubbling below the surface, particularly in the heartland of Anatolia. Erdogan and the AKP have successfully harnessed this nascent sentiment. The West would do well to embrace Turkey as a full-fledged member of its community rather than to look on it as a second-class uncouth brother unfit for a seat at the grownup table, like the West treated Meiji Japan.
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