American Raj: Liberation or Domination? [Hardcover]

In 1993 Samuel P. Huntington turned conventional political wisdom on its head by arguing in a provocative essay that the secularized West and the fundamentalist Islamic world were destined to clash?a clash of civilizations.

At about the same time, veteran journalist and foreign policy expert Eric S. Margolis was arguing virtually the same point?but from a unique vantage point: inside and on the ground in the Muslim world itself.

American Raj: Liberation or Domination? is the culmination of all those years of feet-on-the-ground reporting and analysis?many of them spent actually fighting alongside mujahedeen?as well as a lifetime of insight into the complex reality of the way the Muslim world really operates. It is a masterful synthesis of experience and insight that answers the most pressing questions we in the West confront: Why does the Muslim world distrust us? Is the idea of a secular Muslim world?especially one based on the western model?realistic? Has ideology blinded Western powers to both political and historical reality? Is accommodation between these two ideological adversaries possible?

What can be done to prevent a clash of civilizations?

American Raj: Liberation or Domination? takes the reader behind the conventional headlines and into the thinking and world view of anti-Western Islamic radicals throughout the Muslim world, and identifies the historical, political and religious factors that have played such a huge role in generating Islamic hostility towards the West.

Employing the model of Britain’s imperialist hegemony in Asia, which culminated in the eighteenth-century Raj, Margolis explores in fascinating detail whether the West?and in particular the United States?risks a repetition of the Raj experience or whether we face an entirely new?and entirely unfamiliar?world order.