Middle Eastern Muslim visitors and inhabitants and their feelings of similarity and alienation, inclusion and expulsion are not a recent phenomenon in Europe. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many European countries hosted tourists, students, people living in exile, journalists and scientists from the region during a first wave of globalisation, which came to an end after World War I. Taking a look at their descriptions can help us to understand the complex interplay between expectations brought from home and experiences actually made in the process of creating a picture of Europe. Looking through the eyes of the other helps us to understand in how far the depictions of Europe are a product of of the self and how much Europeans with their ideas and behavior shaped these depictions of themselves. In regard to Muslims in Europe today, such an analysis may help us to understand in how far both integration and (self-) exclusion are not produced by the outsider alone, but rest on both sides of a social process.