Pankaj Mishra Quote

Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader’s fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, ‘the first decisive steps in the acceptance of Western civilization’. Nevertheless, Lewis as well as Atatürk was working with an ideal of civilization originally posited by salon intellectuals in the eighteenth century, and reworked by various modernizers of the twentieth century.

Pankaj Mishra

Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader’s fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, ‘the first decisive steps in the acceptance of Western civilization’. Nevertheless, Lewis as well as Atatürk was working with an ideal of civilization originally posited by salon intellectuals in the eighteenth century, and reworked by various modernizers of the twentieth century.

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About Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra (born 9 February 1969) is an Indian essayist, novelist, and socialist. His non-fiction works include Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, along with From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours, and he has published two novels. He is a Bloomberg opinion columnist, and prolific contributor to other periodicals such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. His writings have led to a number of controversies, including disputes with Salil Tripathi, Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson. He was awarded the Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction in 2014.