“Today we are apt to think of the Middle East, however defined, as something of a geographical unit. During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, and in fact until the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, the Mediterranean and the Levant were physically and psychologically very remote from the Red Sea, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf.”

“The Middle East was not a wilderness, and the people there were not savages: if anything they were over civilized. Too many American newcomers to the East saw it in frontier terms.”

“Americans were known for a zealous and often immoderate attachment to the United States and all it represented.”

“For eighteen centuries avid and pious Christians of divergent sects had overlaid the simplicity of Biblical scenes with tawdry symbolism, rude commercialism, and pious hokum.”

“Calvinism and Islam had this much in common: neither was just a religion; both were social systems.”

“The English are rapidly expanding their conquests in Afghanistan [ca. 1840]”

“[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.”