There is a persistent assumption in the study of cultural encounters since the eighteenth century that the global transfer of knowledge was a one-way process, transmitted from Europe and received by those outside its borders. By the mid-twentieth century, with the emergence of modernity as a largely intangible and rhetorical concept, processes of global knowledge exchange continued to be dominated by this perceived European authority and non-European apprenticeship of modernity. Derived from the central argument of her thesis on Islamic intellectual migration to Paris from the 1930s to the 1960s, this author will discuss in her paper this problematic framework of analysis for cultural encounters in the mid –twentieth century. Omitting the detailed case based studies of the thesis, this paper will instead provide a conceptual overview of this problematic paradigm which is fundamental to our understanding of global knowledge in the context of both colonial and post-colonial global history. The paper will thus discuss how this paradigm has come to frame the study of cultural encounters, how it was sustained and how it is a misleading interpretive framework contributing to fractious cultural relations, especially between the West and the Muslim world. It will subsequently put forward an alternative framework in which to explore both cultural encounters and intellectual developments relating to the idea of modernity. In particular, it will attempt to identify some of the global forces characterised under the banner of modernity and attempt to de-regionalise responses to them. While this problematic framework will be shown in relation to this author’s study of Islamic intellectual migration to Paris, it will also seek to engender further deliberation about the universal relevance of these considerations.