Missionary justifications often masked purely intellectual interest in the exotic

Evidence

In general, Christian attempts to evangelize among the Muslims of the Near East and North Africa had no success and in the sixteenth century it was more a matter of writing treatises for the hypothetical use of missionaries than of sending preachers out into the infidel fields. Moreover, some of those who wrote books about Islam or Oriental languages, though they suggested that such studies might be useful in the furtherance of missionary activities, seem to have been using that claim as a pretext to justify their more purely intellectual interest in the exotic. The declaration in the preface to a treatise on, say, the Arabic language, that it had some exalted Christian purpose, might well be successful in securing patronage and a financial subsidy from some senior ecclesiastical dignitary. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 122

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the patronage-dynamics theme from The Library: A Fragile History, where dedicatory prefaces and flattery won subsidies.