Different views on Asia

Given our current Western obsession with the evils of the Middle East, it's stunning to come across such a different view as this one I quote below. It's well known that Muslim cultures were the intellectual elites of the time of the European dark ages, and thereabouts. They apparently saved the works of the ancient world, and made great advances in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and the other fields of intellectual endeavour, and maintained an advanced and cosmopolitan culture. Here's proof in the words of Sir William Jones, who was sent to Culcutta as a judge in 1785. This is a recollection of "one evening on the journey out - at night standing on deck in the Indian Ocean, with India ahead and Persia on the left and a breeze from Arabia on its stern".

"It gave me inexpressible pleasure to find myself in the middle of so noble an amphitheatre, almost encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which has ever been esteemed the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius, abounding in natural wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in laws, manners, customs and languages, as well as in the features and complexions, of men."

BTW, this William Jones is noted as "a fine linguist "he knew twenty-nine languages". He founded te Asiatic Society of Bengal on his arrival in Calcutta in January 1784.

Facing two oceans : Utopian Australia in European eyes, by Marilyn Butler. In The best Australian essays 2001, edited by Peter Craven. Melbourne : Black, 2001. p. 487-495