“Shaped by political considerations, and then driven by geopolitical urgencies, Khomeinism was always a hybrid: the beneficiary of an ideological account of… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Thus, the intellectual cottage industry about Islam and Islamism that is sent into overdrive after every terrorist attack rarely lingers on the… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Christianity and Islam are concerned with the idea of justice, which can turn into political justice, social justice, economical justice, and so… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Quoting the Slavophile Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (‘To destroy a people, you must sever their roots’), Awlaki claimed that Muslims ‘are suffering… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“There was actually little talk about Islam from the first generation of leaders in Muslim countries. They had distinguished themselves as anti-imperialist… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Nationalism has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness: the unexpectedly rowdy anticlimax, in a densely populated… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don't like, and I don't… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up and gave… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Voltaire was soon turned, with Catherine’s encouragement, into a patron saint for the secular Russian aristocracy. Voltairianism, vaguely signifying rationalism, scepticism and reformism, became… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Today, the belief in progress, necessary for life in a Godless universe, can no longer be sustained, except, perhaps, in the Silicon Valley mansions… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from the outside. — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I don't think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life was full… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
“Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.” — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
