Speaking about the Scandinavian model of the social welfare system, former Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan described it as inspired by and named after the ‘Umar Laws,’ due to its borrowing from the welfare state model established by the second caliph of Sunni Islam, Umar b. al-Khattab. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in his inaugural speech in parliament in 2014, described his ascendancy to power as marking an end to one thousand years of slavery – an explicit reference to the so-called ‘Muslim period’ in Indian history as a humiliating subjugation of Hindus. The US President, Donald Trump, projects himself as a powerful force against the ‘Establishment’ and an upholder of traditional American values. The Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, similarly vows to uphold traditional Italian values while assailing the atomization of society into dissoluble individual units.

What is common between these and many other instances of political rhetoric across the globe is the peculiarity of the moment, reminiscent of the interwar period, when competing groups – reeling under inflationary pressures and a psychology of defeat – aspired to a utopian future based on an idyllic vision of the past, but ended up creating a dystopian present. It is this yearning for authenticity that provides the moral language of political content in both moments – too distant and yet too close. Beyond the globality of the shared moment, what is also common is the political and moral language of decoloniality, appropriated by the right wing: enabling Trump to champion a crusade against crony capitalism; allowing Modi and his supporters to advocate for a Hindu rashtra as a decolonial project; painting Imran Khan as a decolonial thinker for locating a welfare state model in Islamic history as an alternative superior to Scandinavia; and positioning the Italian Prime Minister as a critic of atomized consumerist subjectivity reduced to abstraction. What is also common among these and similar political rhetorics emerging from countries like Turkey and Russia – not to mention across the European Union – is the claim to national identity grounded in civilizational terms. Whereas national claims to sovereignty were previously made through the framework of the nation-state, in the new political rhetoric, it is the master signifier of civilization that encapsulates the nation, to be protected from external and, more importantly, internal threats.

With a focus on South Asia, I explore in my talk the parallel trajectories of multiple civilizational discourses: the Nehruvian vision of India as a flowing stream enriched by diverse currents; the racial exclusivity of Savarkar’s core Hindutva identity, centered on the sacralized geographical entity of Bharat; and the Muslim nostalgia for empire as a civilization, which served as a mode of belonging and a claim to equality during colonial subjugation. My talk provides an analytical and historical overview of these various trends within civilizational discourse, with a focus on contemporary debates that explore the link between the right-wing weaponization of decoloniality and the rise of populist politics globally.

Biography
Born and raised in Lahore, Ali Usman Qasmi is a historian of modern South Asia and Islamic reform movements. He has published extensively in his area of expertise, including three monographs and three edited volumes. His most recent monograph is Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan (Stanford University Press, 2023), which won the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) Book Prize for 2024. Since 2012, Qasmi has taught history at LUMS’ School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Currently, Qasmi also serves as the Director of the Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature.