NM's blog

It is possible to give many instances of how the rule of colonial difference—of representing the “other” as inferior and radically different, and hence incorrigibly inferior—can be employed in situations that are not, in the strict terms of political history, colonial.  These instances come up not only in relations between countries or nations, but even within populations that the modern institutions of power presume to have normalized into a body of citizens endowed with equal and nonarbitrary rights. Indeed, invoking such differences are, we might say, commonplaces in the politics of discrimination, and hence also in the many contemporary struggles for identity. This reason makes it necessary to study the specific history of the colonial state, because it reveals what is only hidden in the universal history of the modern regime of power. —Partha Chatterjee,  The Nation and Fragments,  1993, pp. 34-35

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