Achmed Abdullah

“ Europe never came to Asia. The Greeks built up a whole literature about the fact that Asia invaded their country ... and not because they invaded Asia. Afterwards the descendants of Alexander, the Macedonian Generals, founded a few dynasties in Western Asia. They disappeared, and they did not leave even a trace of themselves behind. Nothing European has ever taken firm root in Asia. ”

“ The glass merchant was a Circassian who handled mostly Persian wares, and the Armenian who owned the candy booth imported his sweets from Turkey and India.
Yet I knew that the Russian had spoken the truth. Fifteen years ago the town had been barbaric, half-Asian, quite unknown.
To-day it was known. European capital had poured golden floods into the district, and was receiving huge dividends, from steamship lines and docks and oil-wells. If wealth is the opposite of barbarism, the town was barbaric no more. ”

“ Not one Asian nation, not a single tribe, not even a single Asian individual has ever become completely Europeanized. Not a single European idea, habit, custom, not a single distinctively European branch of knowledge has ever penetrated into Asia .... ”