In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans and Americans who visited Egypt, the Holy Land, or elsewhere in the region often experienced the chasm between their reality and fiction, while clinging to some part of the imaginaire about the East. During his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land in 1836, American traveler John Lloyd Stephens wrote, One by one I had seen the many illusions of my waking dreams fade away; the gorgeous pictures of Oriental scenes melt into nothing; but I still clung to the primitive simplicity and purity of the children of the desert

XREF: Connects to Orientalism (Said's framework) — the persistence of the imaginaire despite firsthand evidence is a core Saidian theme.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 45