Pre-modern Muslim historical writing lacks the empathy for enemies found in Jonah and Aeschylus

Evidence

We should therefore not be surprised to find a lack of any kind of empathy with the outsider. Now empathy is not a strictly modern phenomenon. The prophet Jonah was reminded that the people of Nineveh were also people, that one should not delight in their defeat. The Greek dramatist Aeschylus shows compassion for the defeated Persians in a war in which he himself had been a combatant. In contrast, I have not come across anything of that kind in Muslim sources. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1950

Categorization

• XREF: A testable claim about the absence of empathy in a historiographic tradition — connects to reader’s work on how legibility of outsiders was produced or foreclosed.
• QUESTION: Lewis’s confessional framing (‘I have not come across’) invites challenge — absence of evidence claim vulnerable to later scholarship finding counterexamples.