This book started with epigrams by Dr. Samuel Johnson. In the second of his piquant remarks he said that “there are two objects of curiosity, the Christian world and the Mahometan world. All the rest may be considered as barbarous.” The writers discussed in this book exhibited a great deal of curiosity about one of his “objects,” the Islamic world. In doing so they provided detailed information as well as valuable perceptions of that world and of the Orient. In his brilliant speech on the “perpetuation of our political institutions” to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield on January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln warned that memories of the past might be lost by the “silent artillery of time.” Reacquaintance with the perceptions of our major writers regarding the two themes of this book, Oriental despotism and Islam, and regarding the symbiotic relationship between them may help prevent the erosion of knowledge of history of the Orient. They also help us understand the complex relationship between European and Oriental nations and societies, a relationship that has been distorted or simplified in some contemporary writing for polemical purposes, often anti-Western rhetoric, as can be seen from the previous chapters. The perceptions of our writers are not expressions of imperialist hubris nor are they manifestations of colonial humiliation of the Orient.

One can admit that the vocabulary of politics is sometimes vague and that attempts at definition may be inexact because the thing named often changes.