“The orientalist scholars of the Enlightenment created or inspired works that have entered the Western patrimony, from Galland’s seminal translation of the Thousand and One Nights of 1717, through Goethe’s West-Östlicher Diwan to FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Of course this tradition was also an appropriation – a remaking of Islamic material from a Western perspective. But why not acknowledge this as a tribute, rather than a snub? You cannot appropriate the work of others, if you regard them as fundamentally ‘Other’.”
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
Thinkers of the New Left
Roger Scruton
PsikoSerum 