August 22, 2012
www.thestar.com.my
Modern Lessons upon Disappointed Idealists
by Karim Raslan (08-21-12)
A recent book by an Asian spectator of Asian societies breathes new hold up in to some old(er) ideas.
I SPENT most of the 1990s presumably essay or reading about the Asian Values debate. It's tough to suppose now, yet in the years leading up to the 1997 monetary crisis, books by Pakistan's Muhammad Iqbal as well as Iran's Ali Shariati, not to mention the really own Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad as well as Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, were tip of my reading list.
So, it was with the degree of fear which you first picked up Pankaj Mishra's latest book: From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West as well as the Remaking of Asia. Fearing the repeat of those tiresome, discredited arguments, you turned the pages warily.
However, Pankaj's spritely comment of turn-of-the-century Asian intellectual hold up approaches the subject from an exactly some-more exciting vantage point. For the start, he starts with an comment of the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905 of the Russo-Japanese War.
Over the century ago, the outcome seemed the foregone conclusion. How could the Japanese presumably strike the perfect might of Imperial Russia? Everything seemed to foster the Europeans as they systematically subjugated the Asiatic world.
However, as well as roughly unbelievably, Admiral Togo's fleet was to emerge victorious. In the single fell swoop, Korea, Ma! nchuria as well as most of the western Pacific were to become an extension of Japanese energy setting in motion the series of events culminating with the nuclear attacks upon Hiroshima as well as Nagasaki 40 years later.
Nonetheless, Japan's victory was additionally to have an fast stroke intellectually across Asia galvanising the generation. Men such as the Iranian-born pan-Islamist Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani, Liang Qichao of China as well as the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the arch protagonists of Pankaj's book, had witnessed their civilisations continue the period of degrading defeats.
For them as well as others Sun Yat Sen, Ataturk (then well known as Mustapha Kemal) as well as Nehru Tsushima brought hope. It authorised them to suppose what their peoples were able of if they embarked (like the Japanese) upon the tour of political as well as economic transformation.
Interestingly, in an era long prior to the advent of mass democracy, all 3 group recognised which cordial (and maybe despotic) care was vicious in order to achieve governmental shift volatile sufficient to repel the Europeans.
Uttar Pradesh-born as well as Allahabad-trained Pankaj Mishra has constructed the 
remarkable book something which you were striving for back in the 90's yet never produced.
From the Ruins of Empire is radically an Eastern canon of political thought linking Indian, Chinese as well as Arab/Muslim total as well as ideas. Pankaj (right) reveals how their responses to the indignity of colonialism were to figure their future nation-states.
This heir of V.S. Naipaul's layer is in actuality really identical to his 3 selected subjects. Growing up upon the diet of the American critic Edmund Wilson, Pankaj is himself the firm follower in the energy of ideas as well as it's th! is joini ng to intellectualism (unlike Dr Mahathir as well as Anwar Ibrahim who trusted in raw power) which propels his narrative.
Moreover, as the world-class person arriving as well as essayist, Pankaj's writings have the sure contemporary resonance. He traces the skein of ideas, identical to the expansion of Wahhabism as well as the intermingling with specifically Egyptian experiences of Hassan al-Banna as well as Sayyid Qutb the process which was to lead to the quick globalisation of Wahhabi thought.
At the same time, Pankaj's contingent were conscious which the blind adoption of Western modes would rob Asia of the informative heritage as well as turn the Occident's vices in to the own.
Each of the group sought the "middle-path", job upon their societies to equip themselves with modern scholarship as well as thinking yet to reject the grosser aspects of Western modernity with greater informative confidence.
Sadly, all 3 group were to be grievously disappointed. Whilst they sought to find an acceptable compromise in between East as well as West, they were not to live to see any of their ideas come to fruition, on top of which their intransigence was to come during good personal cost.
Al-Afghani, arguably the father of political Islam, lived the hold up of constant re-invention. Dying in obscurity, this latter-day "Scarlet Pimpernel" was to charity his focus upon normal Muslim elites, most of whom abandoned his call for the pan-Islamic revival.
Liang, whose reformist activities made him the longed for man in Qing dynasty China, wound up the Confucian regressive arguing after the disillusioning outing to America which "the Chinese people contingency for right away accept authoritarian rule; they cannot enjoy freedom."
Even Tagore's calls for Asia to say the cultures was violently deserted by revolutionary-minded thinkers (including the immature Mao Zedong) during his lecture tours! of Chin a, the preface to the mortal Cultural Revolution.
Their failures are warnings for Asian leaders today. As Pankaj argues in his glorious Epilogue, China as well as India have right away unthinkingly paid for in to the gospels of globalised capitalism which "looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic fury as well as beating among hundreds of millions of have-nots."
Pankaj's book is as the result not some uncomplicated paean to "Asian values." He warns which you Asians should not gloat over the West's decline as well as the prosperity.
Rather, the disaster of the chosen to, in Pankaj's words, forge the "convincingly universalist response to Western ideas of politics as well as economy, even yet the latter seem increasingly febrile as well as dangerously unsuited in large parts of the world" condemns us to repeat the mistakes of the West.
This is the auspicious book which cannot be abandoned by Asia moving forward. How you instruct Pankaj had written it all those years ago. It would have saved me the lot of effort.
Read More @ Source More Barisan Nasional (BN) | Pakatan Rakyat (PR) | Sociopolitics Plus |
No comments:
Post a Comment