Shuja Alhaq

Peter Blickle’s alternative vision of early modern German history may well be known. But as a prelude to an alternative vision of modernity, or Germanic conception of modernity, it is rather less explored. If his alternative vision of early modern German history is embodied chiefly in his well-known works like the Revolution of 1525 and Communal Reformation, the connecting link to Germanic modernity is provided by his Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal. Our overarching transdiciplinary endeavour in this exercise is to explore the nature or meaning of his vision of early German modernity and then to examine the development of German path to modernity that, due largely to extraneous conditions determined by what Hobsbawm called the ‘dual revolution’, was lost into oblivion. The need for such endeavour arises from clear indications that the triumphant Franco-British model of modernity founded on the centrality of Capital and its centralizing nation-state is unravelling, leaving the way wide open to excavate and reconstruct the socio-historic possibilities in Germanic past suppressed by the reigning model of history, society and nature.

The immediate significance of this research proposal derives from the rise of populism and its triumph in the US. This is a massive fact of history, for it marks, in simple words, the end of capitalist or liberal democracy as the dominant political system of the West which the rest of the world was hitherto deemed to aspire. This development determines the core question of our times as to why and how did this happen? It therefore forms the nexus of all research in historical and social sciences since on its correct interpretation and, at the same time, articulation of an alternative vision of modernity rests the fate of civilization on our planet. It is to this end that this exercise is directed.

Liu died just a while before the Charlottesville storm broke out and turned the issue of the monuments of the past red hot in America, bringing the question on to our attention as to who are really these people whom we venerate in our streets, squares, state buildings and sometimes even in our homes and hearts.

One could have used the word modern or Western civilization in place of modernity. But this is basically a report on the changing fortunes of the intellectual premises of modern civilization that started taking shape in Europe after the seventeenth century.

This paper, as the title suggests, relates to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, being a sequel to the foreign domination of China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Here it is argued that China, as the hub of the global industrial civilization, can only lead the march towards a new order of equality, of person and worth, social justice, and freedom, an emancipatory experience of life, or life as an emancipating, liberating experience, by freeing itself from the structures and strictures of Western modernity which continue to obfuscate a deeper view of her much elongated past. Only through establishing the connection with her past the huge reservoirs of energy buried in it will be opened up and unleash the Chinese people as free agents and active participants in the realization of the colossal project of social engineering that the British Industrial Revolution commenced just over two centuries ago.

‘What has gone wrong with the world?’ is an oft-repeated question these days, somewhere in whispers, leaving you alarmed, somewhere so loudly you feel excited and extremely agitated - in the academy, in the media, at workplaces, in the streets, and households. Marx once said that “mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve.” But if the problem happens to be felt on such a large scale, it means that consensus has broken down on the fundamentals around which our society evolved. This crisis of consensus throws the field open for a new battle of ideas to commence. Here we fire our first shots. The nature of shooting in such battles is assumed to be known. In general it means freedom of thought. What is it from which thought seeks its freedom is yet to be known. And what is the immediate goal of this exercise? This is to bring the six guys around the table of their own will.

This exercise evolves in the context of the seismic shift in the centre of power taking place on our planet from the West to the East, with the latter seeking to establish itself as the hub of the emerging global industrial civilization. However, the problems and challenges as well as widely shared anxieties and uncertainties arising from the plantation and adaptation of industrial way of life to the vast soil where, following man’s transition from the primordial nomadic to sedentary, agrarian mode of life, the first civilizations came into being some five to six millennia ago, are not the only imperative driving this exercise. Taking into account also the crises of economic, intellectual, and moral nature with which modern industrial civilization has intermittently suffered since its inception in Great Britain around two and half centuries ago, we propose a complex of hypotheses, or ensembles of ideas, towards its reformation and future evolution not only in the East, but also in the West and the world at large.

We humans, as the highest form of life on the blue planet, have a history of about 3.8 billion years. That makes the recovery of the whole memory a formidable, if not frightening, exercise in the archeology of knowledge.  Until we are somewhere close to it, we might never be sure who we are, where have we come from, and where are we going, the perennial questions humankind has struggled with since the earliest times. But since there is no end to what we can know, what matters in the end is not how much we know of our past but how we understand, or the method, intellectual tools or concepts, or the perspective by which we interpret what we know. The significance of this endeavour, of correctly interpreting the past, is evident in that it enables us to correctly envision the path that leads from the present to the future.

The crux of my talk today is that in view of the fact that the overwhelmingly large majority of Pakistani people are ill-prepared to side with any party in the present war, the only way to defeat this war and win peace is through the construction of the Third Perspective, emerging from a critique of the two perspectives of the warring parties, this being pre-eminently the historical task of the social scientists of Pakistan and of the Islamic world in particular, and of the non-Western world in general.

The unforeseen products or consequences of modernity have been a matter of central concern in modern scholarship especially since the first world war in the early last century.  But to mention among them modern religious extremism especially pronounced in the Islamic world might seem going against the self-evident and therefore an obviously absurd hypothesis, for modernity, in the given consensus, is perceived as a movement of thought and social practice rising in opposition to the religious worldview. However, that it was a consequence following inevitably from the founding premises of modernity is hoped to become apparent as this exercise questions some of the fundamental assumptions about the nature of religion, on the one hand, and the social, cultural structure of the past, or of the premodern civilizations, on the other, on which the edifice of modernity is founded.

The unforeseen products or consequences of modernity have been a matter of central concern in modern scholarship especially since the first world war in the early last century.  But to mention among them modern religious extremism especially pronounced in the Islamic world might seem going against the self-evident and therefore an obviously absurd hypothesis, for modernity, in the given consensus, is perceived as a movement of thought and social practice rising in opposition to the religious worldview. However, that it was a consequence following inevitably from the founding premises of modernity is hoped to become apparent as this exercise questions some of the fundamental assumptions about the nature of religion, on the one hand, and the social, cultural structure of the past, or of the premodern civilizations, on the other, on which the edifice of modernity is founded.