This essay concerns the ways in which the West conceived of the East, and how history and the academic scholarship contributed to the understanding and estimation of the ‘Orient’. We shall see how the Orient was represented in the Western discourse from antiquity until now, and how various events (colonialism, 9/11 or 7/7) established a specific angle from which the West identifies and transposes itself against the East. One of the core problems of this essay is the influence of such a concept, as Orientalism, most prominently introduced by Edward W. Said in 1978 . Orientalism can be briefly described as a paradigm of the Western...