Nicholson disliked the very Arabic literature he professionally documented

Evidence

Although Nicholson knew a huge amount about Arabic literature, he did not like it very much and he found Arabic poetry much more alien than Persian. He judged the Qur’an to be ‘obscure, tiresome, uninteresting: a farrago of long-winded narratives and prosaic exhortations’. He preferred Persian mystical poetry and translated an enormous amount of the verses of the remarkable thirteenth-century Sufi, Jalal al-Din Rumi, but even Rumi was described by him as ‘rambling, tedious and often obscure’. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 370

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the export of Victorian-period aesthetic distaste into Orientalist scholarship, echoing canonical debates about whether Arab poets were truly poets.