The Orient's medieval ‘Orient(alism)'

Nabil Matar is not totally wrong when he deplores the fact that Anthony Pagden’s voluminous collection of articles published under the title Facing Each Other: The World’s Perception of Europe and Europe’s Perception of the World fails to include “a single entry about the perception of or by any of the civilizations of Islam”. ² He has, however, overlooked a “single” exception: it is Jacques Le Goff’s reference to the medieval Arabs’ perception of the Indian Ocean in his seminal article “The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: An Oneiric Horizon”. ³ For the erudite Le Goff, medieval Westerners’ ignorance of the Indian Ocean and India in particular was in part the result of a negative Arabic influence. To the medieval Arabs, Le Goff states, “it is possible that the Indian Ocean was a forbidden and unknown world”. ⁴ This lack of information about the Indian Ocean on the part of medieval Arabs, Le Goff goes on to observe, did nothing but reinforce the “illusions” of medieval Western writers and merchants who “sometimes turned to them for information.” ⁵ Fortunately, Le Goff’s statement does not represent the scholarly attitude of the vast majority of Western Arabists, many of whom have made efforts that have been instrumental in both introducing and safeguarding the rich heritage of medieval Arab-Islamic geo-cosmographical, historiographical, and travel literature. ⁶