European ethnocentrism, from its inception, was aimed at legitimizing European colonization and convincing native minds of reasons to be civilized – domesticated. Invested as superior entities, Europeans convinced themselves they were under obligation to expand Western civilization to other overseas nations. This opened the doors towards the proliferation of travel writing, chronicles where the non-Western Other was symbolically undermined as irrational, lazy and morally frustrated. The cruelty of army forces was accompanied by an uncanny sentiment of paternalism where natives’ customs, artefacts and arts should be protected before they disappeared. This cosmology moulded a double-standardized discourse created to domesticate the world. Bandyopadhyay and Morais claimed that Third World destinations and the obsession for cultural consumption hide part of the ethnocentric discourses forged in colonial times. The international destinations are certainly drawn by ideological representations which are designed in Europe and the Global North. The nonWestern world was conceived as a dangerous place to the European presence. The military establishment of colonial powers resented the peripheral economies, leading them into a state of ongoing poverty and reclusion. Today, tourists visit these landscapes as ambassadors of civilization, cultivating the European taste. The rivalries, conflicts and violence tourism engenders is ideologically explained in view of the indifference of non-Westerners by embracing rationality, democracy and free trade. The failures of the West to understand the East was historically linked to deficiencies of the East instead of the academic works of the West which imagines the world through its lens. In this vein, the academic circles proclaim that tourism derived from the inception of the Industrial Revolution and the changes that technologized modes of transport. The custom of travelling was reserved for the European aristocracy who traversed Europe in the Grand Tour. These scholars never studied ancient history and their view of tourism was partly inspired by medieval times. In the same way, tourism was not only their pride but also a unique invention of European genius. The narratives of the Global North demarcate the borders of normalcy and deviation. While classic tourism was considered the symbolic touchstone of rational travellers, the peripheral natives were marked as the uncivilized Otherness. Likewise, Aboriginal cultural, Asian, Latin American or Afro tourism evoke travels to these continents but the term Anglo-Saxon tourism has no meaning. At the time we introduce the term Muslim tourism we are ideologically forced to guess tourism which was uniquely cultivated in the erudition of Europe was borrowed and introduced into the Muslim world. Needless to say, this is an ethnocentric conception of an activity which transcended Europe and the irruption of modernity.
Cultural Tourism, Pluralism and Tragedy
