As an article in Al-Ahram Weekly notes, “Youssef describes his life's work as a single, protracted attempt at establishing, in the Western academic mentality, the existence of a contemporary Arab culture -- in the widest sense of the word. And it is on the vitality, creativity and "objective difference" of such a culture, he insists, that every successful step on the way to demystifying Orientalist preconceptions about the Arab world has depended.”[35]