The importance of history for resisting the "imperialism of the mind"

"The decades of colonialism and postcolonial neo-imperialism have established another kind of hegemony over the Muslim world, which intellectuals such as Malek Bennabi and Ali Shari‘ati recognised long ago (and which was also discussed by non-Muslims such as Franz Fanon), but which is still un-noticed by most Muslims. This is a cultural and intellectual hegemony that takes different forms but has a single net effect: that of encouraging (if not forcing) people to think in terms defined by Western discourses, whatever subject they are thinking about...

"Winston Churchill, a proud imperialist himself, famously said that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind”; that unfortunately is where we are today."