An 18th-century explorer praised Arabs as naturally virtuous pre-Christians

Evidence

The dictates of nature in the heart of the honest Pagan [i.e., the Arab nomad], constantly employed in long, lonely and dangerous voyages, awakened him often to reflect who that Providence was that invisibly governed him… . Possessed of charity, steady in his duty to his parents, full of veneration for his superiors, attentive and merciful even to his beasts; in a word, containing in his heart the principles of the first religion, which God has inculcated in the heart of Noah, the Arab was already prepared to embrace a much more perfect one than what Christianity, at that time, disfigured by folly and superstition, appeared to him to be. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 375

Categorization

• QUESTION: James Bruce’s depiction is a rare sympathetic Arab portrait; worth checking how isolated this is and what it does to the ‘fear without object’ thesis.
• SEED: Could angle an essay on the rare sympathetic Arab figures in Western imaginaries and why they never displaced the monster.