Why does Pakistan struggle with governance, despite waves of reforms, new policies, and countless “visions” and “roadmaps”? A recent talk between civil servant and scholar Tariq Awan and Nadeem ul Haque (see Haque Economics Podcast: Why Bureaucracy Refuses to Reform & Modernize?) adds fresh clarity to this question — and aligns in striking ways with arguments I made in an earlier piece, Impact of Colonial Heritage on Economic Policy in Pakistan Together, the two perspectives paint a coherent story of why we are stuck and what it will take to get unstuck.
This post provides an efficient summary of both analyses. If you want the full details, you’ll find links at the end.
W.H. McNeill’s The Rise of the West offered a sweeping, triumphalist narrative of Western superiority—and became a celebrated classic. But in a rare act of intellectual humility and moral courage, McNeill revisited the book twenty-five years later and quietly disowned its core assumptions. His retrospective essay reveals the hard-won wisdom of a lifetime: a recognition that history, as it is often told, serves not just truth—but power. This post draws out the critical and unfamiliar lessons from that reflection—lessons that challenge the dominant narratives most of us absorbed through our formal education.
Gems of wisdom can be extracted from a lifetime of learning. It’s not easy to disown your most celebrated work—especially when it has brought fame, admiration, and near-canonical status. But twenty-five years after publishing The Rise of the West, W.H. McNeill did just that. In a remarkable retrospective (“The Rise of the West” after Twenty Five Years), he was able to identify the triumphalist Eurocentrism at the heart of his classic. To revise a worldview you once taught the world takes not just insight, but integrity. It means allowing new knowledge, life experience, and emerging truths to unsettle deeply held beliefs. Few are willing to do this. But those who are—like McNeill—offer us a rare gift: the chance to learn, in a few pages, what it took them a lifetime to understand.
Historical narratives are instruments of power. In his reflective essay, McNeill recognized that The Rise of the West had portrayed Europe’s global rise as the natural culmination of human progress. But with time, he saw this not as a neutral observation, but as a deep structural bias—one that framed non-Western civilizations as supporting actors in a Western drama. He came to see his book, in his own words, as “an expression of the postwar imperial mood in the United States,” shaped by a “form of intellectual imperialism” that unconsciously mirrored American hegemony. The story he once told was not merely inaccurate—it helped legitimate global domination. [see: The Deadliest Weapon: Fabricated History]
Empire does not just conquer land—it colonizes minds. Power cannot survive on coercion alone; it must persuade, moralize, and justify. Eurocentric history played this role. It taught colonized peoples to view their subjugation as progress, and taught Western publics to see conquest as benevolence. The myth of the civilizing mission masked genocide, plunder, and forced cultural erasure. These stories became the moral architecture of empire—without them, domination could not endure.[See: Creating Islamic Alternatives to Eurocentrism, Seeing Through Empire: The Lies That Blind Us ]
Orientalism is not a lens—it is a worldview born of conquest. As Edward Said argued, imperial expansion created a superiority complex in the West, which distorted its view of the East into caricature. The knowledge produced about “the Orient” was shaped not by understanding, but by the needs of control. This epistemic dominance seeped into every discipline—from history to anthropology—and made alternative ways of knowing seem backward or invalid. [See Orientalism]
Global conquest also created an inferiority complex that still haunts the colonized world. When a civilization loses control over its own narratives, it loses faith in its own voice. Even today, many societies struggle to reclaim their precolonial intellectual traditions—not because those traditions are inadequate, but because conquest has severed the psychological and cultural pathways to them. Reconnecting with these roots is not nostalgic—it is necessary for any real development.[see: A Deep Seated Inferiority Complex]
Universities are not just centers of learning—they are engines of ideological reproduction. As Julie Reuben has shown, the modern research university systematically sidelined moral and religious inquiry in favor of supposedly objective, value-neutral science. But as she writes, “By the early twentieth century, moral and religious knowledge no longer defined the highest reaches of intellectual life. Science did.” This shift made it easier for institutions to present dominant narratives as natural and apolitical—when in fact, they served the needs of empire. Those who affirmed the dominant order advanced; those who challenged it were filtered out.[see Marginalization of Morality in Modern Education]
Prominence in academia is often the reward for ideological alignment—not intellectual merit. McNeill became a celebrated figure because his narrative reinforced the self-image of the West. In contrast, brilliant historians like L.S. Stavrianos and Marshall Hodgson, who refused to glorify the West, remained marginal. Their erasure was not a scholarly judgment—it was a political one. The academy does not merely record truth; it curates legitimacy.[see: Is Science Western in Origin?
Speaking truth to power is not a performance—it is a direct challenge to power’s foundations. When we dismantle the moral stories that make exploitation seem necessary, we threaten the very structures that depend on them. That is why dissent is punished, why alternative histories are buried, and why intellectual courage is so rare.[see: History As the Mother of Social Science]
We are living in a moment when cracks in the global order are creating space for truth. McNeill’s retrospective became possible only as Western hegemony began to falter. Today, we stand at a similar threshold. As old certainties crumble, we have a rare opportunity to reexamine the narratives that built them—and to imagine something better.[see Rebuilding Islamic Societies
Reshaping the world begins with reshaping the story. In a recent post, I’ve reflected on some of the concrete steps we can take to challenge dominant narratives and recover more truthful ones: How Capitalism Shapes Our World—and How We Can Reshape It. That work is not only possible—it is urgent.
“Until lions get their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunters.” — African Proverb
{bit.ly/AZrln} History is written by the victors. Power is the ability to construct and spread self-glorifying narratives, erasing alternative worldviews, demonizing the vanquished, and suppressing dangerous knowledge. While this is easy to see for political history, modern social science is a far more powerful fabrication of power—it borrows the prestige of the physical sciences to propagate Eurocentric ways of seeing the world.
To see through the illusions, sustained by the prestige of modern social science, we must trace its historical roots and uncover how it was created. This is the aim of our project: to rebuild the social sciences on radically different foundations, drawing from the insights of Ibn Khaldun.
Modern social science is built on a hidden framework — one that seeks to apply universal laws to human societies, as if they were mechanical systems rather than complex historical entities shaped by power and culture. But what if this approach itself is fundamentally flawed?
In this chapter, we turn to Ibn Khaldun, one of the greatest thinkers of history, who offered a radically different approach to studying societies. Unlike modern economists and sociologists, who search for timeless mathematical models, Ibn Khaldun saw civilizations as organic, rising and falling in cycles based on social cohesion, political power, and economic structures. His method, which he called Uloom ul Umran, focuses not on abstract theories but on understanding how real societies change over time.
Modern social sciences have largely ignored or marginalized the historical methodology of Ibn Khaldun. Since the early 20th century, economics textbooks exposit a methodology that claims universal applicability across time and space, like physics. This chapter lays the groundwork for rethinking social science—not as a search for universal laws but as an exploration of the forces that shape civilizations, the narratives that sustain them, and the knowledge they produce.
Chapter 2: Studying Social Change—From the Roman Empire to Christendom
If knowledge is shaped by power, then history is not just remembered—it is rewritten. Those who rise to power do not simply impose their rule; they also reshape the past to justify their dominance. Nowhere is this clearer than in the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christendom.
For centuries, Rome stood as one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world. Yet, when it collapsed, its legacy was not preserved as a golden age—it was reframed as a corrupt and decadent empire that had to be destroyed for a new order to emerge. The Christian Church, now in control, rewrote Rome’s history to position itself as its true heir. Knowledge that did not fit this new narrative was discarded or erased.
This pattern of historical erasure repeated itself centuries later with the Renaissance, often described as Europe’s intellectual rebirth. Yet this framing conceals the reality that much of the knowledge that fueled the Renaissance came from outside Europe—especially from the Islamic world, which had preserved, expanded, and transformed classical learning. However, because European power dictated the writing of history, these contributions were erased, and the Renaissance was rebranded as a purely European achievement.
By looking at these moments of transition, we uncover a deeper truth: history is not just about what is remembered, but about what is forgotten. If past civilizations could not see how their own master narratives shaped their thinking, how can we be sure that we are not also trapped within a carefully crafted illusion?
Looking Ahead: Historical Origins of Modernity
If the past has taught us anything, it is that knowledge is not neutral—it is produced through struggle. The transition from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to secular modernity reshaped how nearly all of humanity understands history, philosophy, and social science. Through the spread of Western education, Eurocentric assumptions became embedded into curricula across the world, defining how we see progress, reason, and civilization itself.
What happens when we begin to challenge this framework? What ideas have been erased that are still worth retrieving? These are the questions I will explore in later chapters of this textbook. Join the mailing list at bit.ly/AZIEML to get monthly email updates about this forthcoming textbook. The homepage for the textbook is at bit.ly/3gie
An Islamic WorldView 