Since Said was more of a political militant than a scholar one might have thought there was no need to reply to him with the kind of dense research undertaken by Irwin. Irwin says he decided to write the book in response to the late Edward Said's "Orientalism" in which some of the leading Western students of Islam were portrayed as "agents of colonialism and imperialism." The "lust of knowing" mentioned in these lines provides the core of the case that the British novelist and scholar Robert Irwin makes for the Orientalists, a tribe of many different peoples from various European nations who turned their attention to studying the East, more specifically the Muslim world.īut why did Irwin think there was a need to defend a branch of research and scholarship that, over the past 150 years or so, has helped shed light on key aspects of human history and the development of civilisation?
Flecker's 19th century play "Hassan or The Golden Road to Samarkand", is given these lines:īy hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:įor lust of knowing what should not be known
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