European orientalism directly solicited many Islamic-world autobiographies into existence

Evidence

The Yemeni Jew Hayyim Habshush, for example, who escorted Hale´vy in his travels in the Yemen, was asked twenty years later by Edward Glaser to write memoirs of himself and Hale´vy. Habshush wrote an autobiographical cum biographical travel book, a kind of al-Barq al- Shami on a small scale. An Egyptian shaykh called Tantawi somehow found his way to Russia where he died in 1861, but not before becoming one of the founders of the Russian school of Arabic studies. Tantawi was asked by a Russian Orientalist of the time to write an autobiography, which he obligingly did. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1914

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s cluster on how the region became legible to Western audiences — parallels the Said-adjacent mechanism of Orientalists as producers/curators of native self-narrative rather than passive collectors.
• SEED: The solicited-native-autobiography dynamic — Europeans commissioning ‘authentic’ native self-accounts that then defined what counted — is a sharp case study for an essay on how documentary legibility was manufactured.