– Hisham Matar describes the comfort of art museums 

– Tanweer Fazal inspects the grisly symbolism of a cauliflower patch

– Branko Milanovic on America's decline and the multipolar world

Hisham Matar

How do you look at a painting? Is there a method? Do you take notes? Does your gaze wander?

I usually look at one painting at a time. I keep returning to it, week after week, standing in front of it for some 20 minutes or so. When I lose interest, I move to another picture. This now usually takes somewhere between three months to a year or two. I am looking at other things in that time, of course, but only in passing. The picture I am returning to becomes a location in my days. Like the best conversations, it is neither premeditated nor is it an instrumental or transactional encounter. I am simply attending to my curiosities and what gives me pleasure. Pleasure is a big part of it. As the Arab saying goes: I water my eyes with their sight.

What is your first memory of paying this kind of attention to a painting?

It started when I was 19. I had just lost my father. He was kidnapped and forcefully disappeared. The museum was free and warm and I felt safely anonymous in it. I liked art but didn’t know how to look at it. I felt overwhelmed by the number of pictures. So I devised this strategy of looking at one picture at a time and went to it every day during my lunch break. Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus was one of the first. It bloomed a flower in my chest. Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian was another, but that picture disturbingly coincided with my life, as I went to it, I found out much later from my diary, on the exact morning of the prison massacre in which, most likely, my father perished. 

And all along, I was falling for the works of the old Sienese masters, such as Duccio’s The Healing of the Man Born Blind. It bewildered and fascinated me, and 25 years later, I went to Siena and spent a month looking and, as it feels with those pictures, being looked into by Duccio and his giant apprentices: Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti brothers, Giovani di Paolo, etc... Something happened there, between me, the pictures and the city, which I attempted to capture in a book.

What happens to this kind of looking in a culture as extravagantly visual as ours? How, for instance, do you preserve that quality of attention for yourself, even as you (like the rest of us) are bombarded with images every minute, via television, billboards, social media and other sources?

This is one of the most important questions of our age, because so much depends on the quality of attention we pay. And it is connected to questions of justice. If you intend to cause someone harm, best to pay them no attention, or pay them a violent and scrutinising sort of attention. And although we are today unprecedentedly given to distraction, I don’t think it has ever been easy to look at a painting.

So much goes into these master works, so much life and time and ideas, that their demand for our attention is often extravagant. But that’s the appeal, at least for me. They demand a lot, but they give more. When I said they were generous, I meant it in both senses of the word; that they lavish us with their gifts, but also generate in us so much emotion and thought. Some of these pieces have become, over the years, locations as known and dear to me as my grandfather’s house, or the Tripoli and Cairo street corners where I used to loiter with my friends.

Tanweer Fazal

Cadavers are as good a fertiliser as any. In October 1989, in the village of Logain in southeastern Bihar, the senior bureaucrat A.K. Singh came upon a cauliflower field that looked healthier than the surrounding farmland. Twenty-five days earlier, Hindu mobs had murdered 116 Muslims in Logain and neighboring Chanderi, and then interred their corpses in a mass grave, over which they planted vegetables. An unexpectedly bounteous harvest tipped Singh off to the crime, which might have otherwise stayed buried.

The massacre in Logain was part of a larger pogrom. For two months in 1989, Hindu mobs – led, as ever by the black shirts of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and abetted, as ever, by communal policemen – rampaged through some 200 villages around the town of Bhagalpur, doing what they do so well. Some 1,200 people, most of them Muslim, were killed; more than 40,000 were chased into makeshift relief camps.

Thirty-five years later, Ashok Singhal has felt moved to commemorate this history. Posting the photograph to X after the state election results were announced, Singhal added the caption: “Bihar approves [sic] Gobi [cauliflower] farming.” It would be naïve to take offense at his post, which has been too credulously analyzed in the mainstream Indian media. (Sample headline in the Hindustan Times: “Why has Assam minister's ‘gobi farming’ post on Bihar sparked backlash?”) After all, humiliating – and vilifying, threatening and physically attacking – Muslims is generally understood to be the fastest way of rising up the political ranks in Narendra Modi’s India.

I have never shared the romantic notion that India was once a just and secular country, led by progressive politicians like Jawaharlal Nehru, and that Modi miraculously transformed into a fascist ethnocracy. Bhagalpur and a number of crimes like it – Nellie in 1983, Punjab in 1984, the list is long – happened under four decades of uninterrupted Congress rule. But I will concede that something has changed.

Under the Congress, scholars like myself could highlight the gap between the Indian state’s secular claims and its fascist actions. We could point out that Congress leaders promised to bring the perpetrators of Bhagalpur to account – and then scuttled their own enquiry. That gap has closed. The BJP's politicians no longer feel the need to pay lip service to secularism or even to upholding the rule of law. What men like Singhal have understood is that Hindu supremacism has become the Indian state’s official ideology.

Branko Milanović

Is there something about the Balkan or Eastern European experience that generates particular insights into our current multipolar moment?

Growing up, it was the specific Yugoslav experience of Non-Alignment which changed me. I was in elementary school in the 1960s – the peak of Non-Alignment – when I became deeply interested in what you might call “the rest of the world,” the world of Ahmed Ben Bella, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah and others. So a lot of my thinking, at least my interest in political and intellectual traditions outside the western liberal canon, can be traced to those formative moments.

More spectacular was the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992. It was an enormous shock because we had to reinvent ourselves, redefine our identities overnight. I had no Serbian identity, and didn’t know anything about Serbian history. You suddenly find yourself asking: “Who the hell am I?” So this story about the “End of History”, of triumphant liberalism and multi-ethnicity, didn’t really fit with witnessing the breakup of a country along ethnic lines.

After I joined the research department of the World Bank in the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time working in Russia. That’s actually when I stopped reading the mainstream media because what it published at that time about the post-Soviet world was beyond risible. I was in Moscow when “shock therapy” was pulling society apart. You had impoverished professionals on the streets desperately trying to sell things to make some money, and then you read the New York Times proclaim: “Freedom works!” It instilled an unshakable scepticism in this liberal narrative about capitalism, markets and progress. 

You’ve not read any mainstream media since the 90s?

I’ve certainly not gone near the New York Times in about 20 years.

Your new book, The Great Global Transformation, makes a compelling case that the US is in relative decline. But American political culture seems remarkably resistant to processing this development. We get denial (“China will collapse”), nostalgia (MAGA) or threat inflation (“new Cold War”), but rarely sober acceptance of a multipolar world. Why has it been so difficult for the US to come to terms with what your data shows?

It’s due to a view of the world acquired after the Second World War, when American elites came to see the US as a power that battles all kinds of dictatorships – the “arsenal of democracy,” “the indispensable nation” (to quote Madeleine Albright).

It is important, though, to note that US elites did not entertain the same view prior to 1941, and certainly not prior to the First World War. The US then behaved very much in accordance with what one expects from a regional power. It controlled the Dominican Republic and Cuba, colonised the Philippines, and took large chunks of territory from Mexico – but did not exhibit a worldwide vocation.

So it’s not impossible that American elites might return to that anterior view of the world: in short, to the Monroe doctrine, but not more than that. I can’t be sure, of course, because China represents such a unique problem for American power, but I’m generally not a huge fan of declinist theories about “the end of the West.” It’s just going to have to accept that it’s one pole among many.

The economic historian Adam Tooze recently said that “China isn’t just an analytical problem, it is the master key to understanding modernity.” Do you agree with that?

I suspect Adam may have been responding to a recent and very interesting article by Kaiser Kuo called “The Great Reckoning,” which examines China at a completely different level to the usual coverage. It’s not about “who’s going to replace Xi Jinping?” or “Will China grow by 6% or 3%?” but rather showing how China, on its own terms, is defining what it is to be modern. And even more significantly, it is projecting an alternative picture of modernity which is no longer mimicking western modernity. The article is actually Fukuyama-esque in its historical implications.

Is there a direct line from Yugoslavia's disintegration to your current work on competing capitalisms and the multipolar world?

I think there was a line, yes. But it took me a long time to figure this out. Early on – this would have been 1992 or 1993 – I wrote an article about how globalisation might come to an end. I sent it to Monthly Review and they rejected it.

The piece drew on my interest in Roman and Byzantine history. I saw Roman globalisation as the first globalisation, with striking similarities to the American-led version we were living through. Latin and Greek were the lingua franca. The Gospel was written in Greek and translated into Latin precisely to spread it across the empire. And eventually, Christianity – the very thing that had unified the empire – broke it apart.

I was trying to think through similar dynamics in contemporary globalisation. I'm not claiming I predicted what would happen, but I had doubts very early on that globalisation, as conceived during the “End of History” moment, was sustainable. And these doubts came partly from what I was observing in Yugoslavia – developments that ran completely counter to what was supposed to happen. Multiculturalism was supposed to spread around the world making borders irrelevant while there we had federations breaking apart and wars being waged along the ethnic or religious lines.

I kept asking myself: Is this the last war of the previous century, or the first war of the new century? I couldn't decide for a long time. Now I think it was clearly the first war of the new century. But at the time, it could have gone either way.