The canal project imposed modern technopolitical will upon the fixity of East and West.

Evidence

In short, contrary to the myth that the West and the East have always been in conflict, conflict has in fact coexisted with cooperation. Far from the notion that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” what we have seen is that the histories of the East and the West, to the extent we can even talk about a singular East and West, are deeply intertwined. At the very least we have to say that such broad geographical and religious characterizations as “Islam and the West” are extremely problematic—not least because the Christian Byzantine Empire thrived in the lands designated as “the East” up until the fifteenth century, and Muslim rule in al-Andalus lasted for about eight hundred years. Thus, the notion of a transhistoric “clash of civilizations” between a united Christian West and a Muslim East is highly flawed. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 97 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A shared East-West binary grounds vast and diverse bodies of thought; The East and West have coexisted in conflict and cooperation, not eternal clash — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 97; The Orientalist’s internal East-West conflict erases Oriental agency (+1 more)

Related

• The West’s apparent unity masks deep internal divisions (similarity 0.88)
• A shared East-West binary grounds vast and diverse bodies of thought (similarity 0.88)
• Orientalist assumptions restrict non-Western history to relations with the West (similarity 0.87)
• The East and West have coexisted in conflict and cooperation, not eternal clash (similarity 0.86)
• The Orientalist’s internal East-West conflict erases Oriental agency (similarity 0.85)
• The Suez Canal completed the Orient’s transformation from hostile distance into submissive possession (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist discourse frames Westerners and Orientals as absolute binary opposites. (similarity 0.82)
• Western scholarship constructed the East as savage to justify imperial conquest. (similarity 0.81)
• Islamic Orientalism resisted internal critique while cognate fields engaged it. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism was internally divided rather than a monolithic colonial tool (similarity 0.79)
• Bernard Lewis reduced fourteen centuries of East-West to unchanging conflict. (similarity 0.79)
• Institutional Orientalism rests on four interlocking civilizational assumptions about stagnant Eastern societies (similarity 0.79)
• West-versus-rest political conflict is an intra-Western ideological dispute (similarity 0.79)
• The West defined itself as the mirror image of the Muslim Orient (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• A shared East-West binary grounds vast and diverse bodies of thought #expands (0.82)
• The Orientalist’s internal East-West conflict erases Oriental agency #expands (0.78)
• The East and West have coexisted in conflict and cooperation, not eternal clash #qualifies (0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 97
• Knowledge production about the East is itself an index of Western power #expands (0.72)