Billie Melman has pointed out the connection between Middle East ‘travellers’ individual quests and their particular searches for personal redemption in the desert' with the ‘political dimension’ that developed as a result of their journeys (Melman 2002, p. 114). At the heart of Westerners' travel narratives frequently lay what Behdad calls ‘the travelers’ solitary quest for elsewhere as a response to the onset of modernity in Europe’ (Behdad 1994, p.16). The non-European world also exercised a fascination of connection that cohered around notions of race, history and culture. Behdad's term ‘belatedness’ can be stretched further so as to define a formative aspect of imperial thinking that was imbricated in notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development‘. Habituated to thinking in linearities, such thought placed western society at the head of the continuum and consigned the Oriental, as one might a grown up but very backward pupil, to an elementary class. Nineteenth-century thought in the fields of new human sciences such as sociology and anthropology, not to speak of older areas like history and the philosophy of history, busily erected periodicities establishing ‘phases, stages of evolution in a single line of development, starting from the same point and leading to the same end’ (Lévi-Strauss 1958, p. 13). While they might appear to accord full recognition to the diversity of cultures, Lévi-Strauss argued, such theories constituted a ‘false evolutionism’ that in reality wiped cultural diversity out, conforming all the so-called stages in human development to the Western model.