Non-European reform outcomes can index distinct traditions rather than failed modernization

Evidence

My interest, however, is not in speculating about an old motive (resistance) but about new institutional and discursive spaces (themselves not immutably fixed) that make different kinds of knowledge, action, and desire possible. That the results of these changes were not exactly European has also long been recognized, but there are two ways of looking at this outcome: either (as the majority of historians have claimed) as evidence of “a failure to modernize properly,” or (and this is just beginning to be proposed) as expressions of different experiences rooted in part in traditions other than those to which the European-inspired reforms belonged, and in part in contradictory European representations of European modernity. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1038

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallel to Cooper: both authors read ‘difference from the West’ as evidence of alternative articulation, not developmental deficit — the vaulted bridge. — connects to: Modernization theory pathologized non-Western societies as internally deficient — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 248; Modernization theory located blockage to progress inside non-Western societies
• SEED: Article angle: how the ‘failure to modernize properly’ framing operates across Asad’s shari’a historiography and Cooper’s account of Christian law riding within supposedly secular policy.