Reynold Nicholson's The Mystics of Islam was among the first Orientalist works I read seriously when I began to investigate aspects of the Islamic tradition twenty years ago. What I found in Nicholson was exceptional erudition combined with profound anxieties about his subject: the British scholar was determined to resist the pull of Muslim pietism that he clearly understood and, at unguarded moments in his text, approved. In order to contain his own enthusiasm, he poisoned the well of his exegesis of previously unavailable Arabic and Persian works with condescending observations about the inability of the "Oriental mind" (unlike the European) to recognize clear contradiction (p. 130), or to appreciate the subtleties of "natural law" (p. 139). I did not have to read Edward Said to take exception to such remarks: Nicholson's mixture of scholarship and bigotry left me admiring of the former and disgusted with the latter. The passage of time has not made his defects any easier to swallow. Such is the legacy of Orientalism: it serves to remind us that, among the roots of racism, is repressed envy.
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