Ockley’s Saracen history sparked Gibbon’s interest in Islam

Evidence

It was Ockley’s History of the Saracens that got Gibbon interested in Islam and inspired him with the wish to study Arabic at Oxford. Gibbon called him ‘spirited and learned’, adding that his work did ‘not deserve the petulant animadversions of Reiske’. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 211

Categorization

• CANDY: An obscure debt-imprisoned vicar is the intellectual seed behind Gibbon’s Decline and Fall — nice chain-of-influence trivia.

Related

• Gibbon’s famous Islamic history chapter was unoriginal, repeating medieval themes (similarity 0.78)