Arab students long came to England to study their own history.

Evidence

In 1938 the University of London offered me a position as an assistant lecturer in Islamic History. The first class I taught in 1938 consisted of four students, three Arabs and an Iranian. I remember my father asking me in wonderment at the time why the University of London would pay me a salary to teach Arab history to Arabs. Many others have asked more or less the same question, in a variety of forms. Some also asked why Arab students would come to England to study their own history, and were given—by both the students and their teachers—a variety of answers. For whatever reasons, they continued to come, and for the rest of my teaching career in England a varying number of my undergraduate students and a steady majority of my graduate students were Arabs from Arab countries. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 75

I remember my father asking me in wonderment at the time why the University of London would pay me a salary to teach Arab history to Arabs. Many others have asked more or less the same question, in a variety of forms. Some also asked why Arab students would come to England to study their own history, and were given—by both the students and their teachers—a variety of answers. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 75

Categorization

• QUESTION: What were the actual answers given for why Arab students came to England to study their own history? The author leaves them unstated.
• XREF: Complicates the one-way Orientalist-power narrative: colonized subjects actively sought out Western institutions to study themselves.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 75