The title of Kamil Khan Mumtaz’s book is in keeping with architectural debates in South Asia, which for almost a century have remained anchored in questions about modernity and tradition. This book is a collection of sixteen short polemical essays by Mumtaz, a well-known Pakistani architect, written between 1967 and 1997. The essays chronicle the gradual shift in his position “from a committed ‘modernist’ to a believer in the essential value of traditional wisdom.” Mumtaz’s argument does not adequately problematize issues such as economic and cultural domination, or religious nationalism and secular identity. Instead, he remains satisfied with the limitations of the hackneyed dichotomy of modernity/tradition. The end product is a nationalistic mythology that reinforces some deep-seated problems in the practice and discourse of architecture in the subcontinent. Mumtaz’s career has spanned the last four decades, a time in which significant changes occurred in the discourse of Islamic architecture. During this time innovative scholarship questioned the Orientalist practices of Western history and attempted to resituate Islamic architecture within a conceptual framework that allowed discussion of representation, knowledge, and power. Architectural practice in Muslim countries, as well as in much of the Third World, received an overdue publicity during the 1980s,...