was based on the assertion of an essential continuity and coherence across vast stretches of time and space, from the purported birth of that civilization in ancient Greece through almost twenty centuries to its re-emergence and flowering in the modern age, in the very different setting of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century western Europe. To claim this kind of unbroken cultural continuity required presuming that the West as a civilization had some essence, some core, which had always remained basically unchanged, intact and unsullied by contamination from "outside" sources. It also required assuming that as a civilization the West was unique and essentially different from all other cultures. Accepting these premises had the effect of defining the West and framing its history in such a way to render invisible many of the cultural, economic, and political interactions, linkages, and processes which helped shape what would later come to be called the West - for example, what the ancient Greeks and Romans had borrowed from other peoples and the powerful impact which (as we have seen) Arab culture had had on medieval Europe. It also meant ignoring the many aspects of European history, society and culture that could not be made to fit with the new story Europeans began to tell themselves about the West and its transcendent values. As the same time - and most crucially for our purposes here - it also made it difficult for early modern Europeans (and their successors) to grasp how it was they had come to see themselves as inhabitants of a distinct and superior West. [13]
-Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, p. 56
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