Middle East hostility to the West is civilizational, predating specific grievances.

Evidence

We shall be better able to understand this situation if we view the present discontents of the Middle East not as a conflict between states or nations, but as a clash between civilizations. The “great debate,” as Gibbon called it, between Islam and Christendom has been going on since the Arab Muslim conquerors first swept westward into Christian Syria, North Africa, and Spain. It continued with the Christian counter-offensive of the Crusades and its failure, the thrust of the Turks into Europe, and their hard-fought retreat and withdrawal. For the past century and a half Middle Eastern Islam has been subjected to the impact and domination of the West—political, economic, and cultural domination even where, as in most of the Middle East, there was no direct rule. This impact has shattered traditional patterns of thought and behavior, of political and social loyalty and organization, beyond repair, and has posed to the peoples of the Middle East an immense problem of readjustment, both in their dealings with the outside world and in their own internal affairs. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1192

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the Huntington ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis and sits in productive tension with Said’s critique of such framings — a key debate node in the reader’s cluster. — connects to: Middle East discontents reflect a centuries-old civilizational clash, not interstate conflict
• QUESTION: This is a 1950s formulation by Bernard Lewis — worth tracing exactly how this civilizational-grievance framing traveled forward into the post-9/11 ‘they hate us for our freedom’ discourse.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move — reframing specific colonial wrongs as epiphenomena of a civilizational clash — quietly absolves any particular Western actor while explaining everything; a paradigm-shaping analytic with deep afterlife.