Conscripts of Western Civilization

The West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world, and an unending politicisation of power. Becoming Western has meant becoming transformed according to these things, albeit in a variety of historical circumstances and with varying degrees of thoroughness. For conscripts of Western civilization this transformation implies that some desires have been forcibly eliminated—even violently—and others put in their place. The modern state, invented in Europe, is the universal condition of that transformation—and of its 'higher truth'.

— Talal Asad, Conscripts of Western Civilization, 1992, quoted in Joseph Massad's Islam in Liberalism, 2015, pp. 251-2