Orientalist scholarship framed East-West difference as modernity versus ancient tradition

Evidence

Massignon saw what he did as the synthesis of two roughly opposed quantities, yet it is the peculiar asymmetry between them that troubles one, and not merely the fact of the opposition between Europe and Orient. Massignon’s implication is that the essence of the difference between East and West is between modernity and ancient tradition. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 690

Categorization

• XREF: This asymmetric modernity/tradition binary is a core Orientalist mechanism that recurs in later Islamophobia analyses of Muslim societies as ‘backward’ — connects to: The West-civilizes-the-Eastern-despot claim chains climate theory through Orientalism to modernization theory; Institutional Orientalism rests on four interlocking civilizational assumptions about stagnant Eastern societies — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 180
• DEFINE: Clarifies the temporal asymmetry embedded in Orientalism: East equals ancient tradition, West equals modernity
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 690