The West has come to know about the East through the accounts of travelers: some favorable but mostly unfavorable. Over the centuries, these accounts have accumulated into a wealth of travel literature which has come to dominate the Western mind concerning its standing with the East (as theorists such as Edward Said have shown). Largely forged and/or supported by the political structure, compared to the Easterner, the Western man appears in that narrative as the superior power both in intellectual and moral terms, armed with a virile strength to penetrate, and, hence, to understand and to dominate a feminine east, inferior to the West in every respect. This image reached its apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it remains influential in the minds of many people in both the East and the West. 

The West has come to know about the East through the accounts of travelers: some favorable but mostly unfavorable. Over the centuries, these accounts have accumulated into a wealth of travel literature which has come to dominate the Western mind concerning its standing with the East (as theorists such as Edward Said have shown). Largely forged and/or supported by the political structure, compared to the Easterner, the Western man appears in that narrative as the superior power both in intellectual and moral terms, armed with a virile strength to penetrate, and, hence, to understand and to dominate a feminine east, inferior to the West in every respect. This image reached its apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it remains influential in the minds of many people in both the East and the West.