Muslim perceptions of European ascendancy shifted from military to economic inferiority

Evidence

Among the earlier writers in this period of growing European domination, two themes predominate, both of them developments of themes already perceptible in earlier writings. They are respectively the military and the political. The one began as a concern with Western weapons, then with Western methods of war­ fare. This in turn developed into a concern with Western technology and even­ tually industry, as the realization spread that it was to no small extent on these that the superiority of Western armies depended. In the course of the nineteenth century, Muslim awareness of economic inferiority began to equal their awareness of the more dramatic and more obvious political and military weakness of the Islamic world, and some Muslim rulers began to be concerned with economic development along Western lines, not just as a support for better armies and navies, but for its own sake. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1096

Categorization

• XREF: Charts a sequence of perceived inferiority types — analogous to how Lewis elsewhere periodizes Muslim ‘loss’ awareness; connects to the representation-cluster’s interest in how the region internalized Western categories of measure.