Gibbon and Muhammad

About two months ago I read the sections in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that dealt with the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam (currently I am finishing his last chapters on the fall of Constantinople to the Turks). Consequently I was delighted to find the following quote from Gibbon's autobiography quoted in a work by Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, that I picked up to reread today.

Mahomet and his Saracens soon fixed my attention, and some instinct of criticism directed me to the genuine sources. Simon Ockley, an original in every sense, first opened my eyes, and I was led from one book to another, till I had ranged around the circle of Oriental history. Before I was sixteen I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks, and the same ardor urged me to guess at the French of De Herbelot and to construe the barbarous Latin of Pococke's Abulfargius.

The man was a born historian.

Lewis then goes on to explain who all these authorities were and what they had done to advance the study of the Arab and Muslim world during the Enlightenment. It was a time when Europe was thirsting for knowledge about other societies on the globe, and with less of the assumed superiority that would mark much of their work in the century after the publication of Gibbon's study of Rome.