For Lust of Knowing - Orientalists and Their Enemies

In recent times Orientalists, with their passion and fascination for the East, have been variously accused of imperialism, colonialism and distorting history. In this magnificent new book Robert Irwin powerfully overturns these views and radically reassesses the influence and legacy of the Orientalists. Robert Irwin has spent a lifetime investigating and imagining the history of the Islamic world. In For Lust if Knowing, the culmination of that lifetime's devotion, he makes the definitive case for the Orientalists. Irwin charts the origins of Orientalism - in this case, the study of the Middle and near East - and its foremost practitioners, from Ancient Greece to the present day. In doing so, he finally banishes the ghosts of Edward Said's Orientalism, which branded this rich and wondrous field of study a weapon of imperialism. Irwin shows that, whether making philological comparisons between Arabic and Hebrew, cataloguing the coins of Fatimid Egypt or establishing the basic chronology of Harun alRashid's military campaigns against Byzantium, these scholars have been unified not by politics or by ideology but by their shared obsession. Irwin does more than restore reputations, rediscover the forgotten and marginalized and rewrite history. His lasting achievement is to provide a new framework through which scholars can contribute to the world's understanding of the Orient. Irwin presents history as the work of living, breathing human beings, bringing this field of study into the twenty-first century with personal and anecdotal insights as well as fascinating historical research. For Lust of Knowing is an extraordinary, passionate book, both a sustained argument and a brilliant work of original scholarship.