In 1888, Cambridge University Press published Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta. The book had been rejected by commercial publishers, and with good reason; it was long, difficult to read, and in a number of respects courted controversy. Composed in an unfamiliar, quasi-romantic style, it drew on Old English to offer commentary on and translations of Doughty’s two-year-long ‘adventures’ amongst Arab towns and Bedouin camps.[1] Though he declared that he had made a number of lifelong friends amongst his hosts, Doughty’s work, published almost a decade after his voyage, frequently portrayed the inhabitants of the peninsula in racial caricature, and their religion as dogmatic, superstitious, and characteristic of a people that had not yet attained sufficient evolutionary progress to be sensitive to the civilizing influence of his own Christian faith.