Western Romantic Arabism eventually shaped Arabs’ own self-image retrospectively

Evidence

Finally a word should be said about the influence of Western romanticism, which rediscovered the Arabs and revived an interest in their remote and glorious past. The immediate impact of such writers as Disraeli, Washington Irving and Lamartine in the Arab countries was minimal or perhaps nil, but their writings initiated a chain of influences, and in time such romantic ideas began to penetrate to the Turks and to the Arabs themselves. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 836

Categorization

• XREF: A key Orientalism mechanism — European literary representation of ‘the Arab’ feeding back into regional identity construction — extends Lewis’s Said-adjacent material.