This was not a unique phenomenon in history, of course. During the Crusades, a European identity had emerged out of the confrontation with the Muslim-Jewish East. It, too, was shaped by the otherness of the other: Europeans built a sense of who they were by identifying who they were not. At that point, however, Europe was a civilization on the rise. Defining itself as the opposite of the other expressed an energetic triumphalism. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Islamic world, by contrast, was a civilization waking up to its weakness and desperate to halt its own decline. Here, an
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