About: For Lust of Knowing

For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, published in the United States under the title Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, is a 2006 non-fiction book by British historian Robert Irwin. The book is both a history of the academic discipline of Orientalism and an attack on Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, which he calls "malignant charlatanry, in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations." The title of the British version of the book comes from the poem "The Golden Journey to Samarkand" by James Elroy Flecker.