Introduction

Over the past years, there has been an extraordinary interest in the critiques of the "West" voiced by non-Western intellectuals and public leaders. This special section offers a historicizing scholarly intervention into the boom of literature on the question of "Eastern" critiques of the West, based on the concern that an ahistorical approach to this topic has aided and continues to aid in the reproduction of Orientalist knowledge categories of East versus West. As the question of the West has been an omnipresent topic for the intellectual histories of Asian societies since the mid-nineteenth century from Turkey and Iran to China and Japan, there is a need to examine its historical trajectory, political connotations, and intellectual legacy. What were the shared global characteristics of anti-Western ideas in the non-Western world? What are the connections between the critique of global modernity, visions of world order, and the rejection of Westernization in the name of authentic cultural traditions? What lessons can be learned from the history of anti-Western critiques in various Asian societies for postcolonial attempts to overcome the limitations of Orientalist categories of knowledge and for the contemporary politics of East-West polarization in world affairs?

The geographical scope of the articles is focused on Turkey, Japan, and Iran, as they were the three major Asian nations that remained nominally independent of Western colonial hegemony. This focus on three independent nations of Asia does not intend to deny the interventions or political and cultural power of Western empires in Turkey, Iran, and Japan. It rather aims to offer the opportunity to distinguish the question of intellectual strategies of anticolonial resistance from the long tradition of imagining a universal West and criticizing this imagined unity in the name of an Eastern, Islamic, or Asian alternative. The examples from Turkey, Iran, and Japan also help to underline that neither Orientalism nor the critiques of the West should be reduced to simply being an intellectual power apparatus for imperially managing the Orient or challenging the Occident. On the contrary, the agency, universal claims, and global consciousness of Turkish, Iranian, and Japanese intellectuals are shared themes of the following historical studies, emphasizing the role of non-Western intellectuals in refashioning Eurocentric knowledge categories for varied political ends, most unanticipated by the original progenitors of these ideas. In other words, while this collection of essays does take colonial power relations very seriously in analyzing both Orientalism and anti-Western Occidentalism, it looks beyond colonialism to understand the shared traits and long-lasting legacy of our knowledge categories about civilizational, religious, and national identities.

The global history perspective of this set of articles is intended to offer a historical and comparative correction to other recent writings on the topic of anti-Western critiques, which tend to emphasize an Islamic exceptionalism, attributing contemporary Muslim critiques of the West to the "conflictual" history of the Islamic and Christian civilizations or to the failure of modernization efforts in several Muslim majority areas. Thus, the two articles on Japanese anti-Westernism, as this special section suggests, are crucial to understanding the global nature of the Iranian and Turkish cases as well. The existence of a rich and diverse tradition of anti-Western critiques in Japan and elsewhere in non-Muslim parts of Asia, in societies that were highly modern and capitalist, indicates that the critiques of the West cannot be reduced to a clash of civilization dynamics shaped by primordial identities of Islam and Christianity or to perceived failures in the modernization process. Thus, comparison and historicization are two of the ways in which the contributors capture a non-Orientalist understanding of the critiques of the West discussed in these articles. The essays propose a model that would neither reduce anti-Western critiques to a derivation of the "anticolonial mind" nor explain them as conservative, and possibly religious, reactions to global modernity. Our focus on the transnational aspects of anti-Western critiques, without reducing them to a Western challenge–Eastern response framework, also encourages us to see the contradictory and self-Orientalizing ideas of Iranian, Turkish, and Japanese intellectuals' engagement with the omnipresent idea of...