Summary

“Losing My Religion: Islam, Secularism and Revolution” is the fourth chapter of Age of Anger. In it, Mishra once more introduces the “vision of the ‘human project’” (122) of modernization and development which took a hold of the world in the late eighteenth century, reminding the reader that newly-decolonized states struggled with ‘catching up’ to the West while many intellectuals questioned the validity of the argument that modernization along the lines of European and American ideals was necessarily optimal. Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet, and Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamist, are among the diverse thinkers of the decolonized world who railed against the Western model of development. By the 1970s, many countries designated as ‘Third World’ countries were showing signs that Western prescriptions for economic development and democratic development were not working according to plan.

In fact, writers such...