European models reshaped but did not initiate Islamic memoir-writing

Evidence

In the course of the nineteenth century, under the influence of European models, many memoirs of one kind or another were added. In the twentieth century, they became an unstoppable torrent. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1919

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the Said-adjacent argument that a native Islamic autobiographical tradition predates and complicates the story of Western forms arriving to fill a perceived gap.
• CANDY: A compact, quotable counterintuitive line: Islamic life-writing was a native torrent before European memoirs were merely ‘added’.