India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.
Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.
With Ameen Rihani the matter is diametrically opposite to Alois Musil's Arabian Desert, in purpose, in point of view and, above all, in personal psychology. . . I have considerable admiration for Mr. Rihani as a writer, an authentic poet and a philosopher.
He who eats alone chokes alone.
Pitch a lucky man into the Nile, says the Arabian proverb, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth!
It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).
I have never in my life encountered a religion as oppressive, cold, and stiff as Progressivism. I've never known a faith more eager to burn heretics at the stake. Even a fundamentalist Iranian Muslim would flinch if he came face to face with a western liberal's rigid dogmatism. I imagine that even a Saudi Arabian Islamic cleric would take one look at how American left wingers react when anyone deviates ever so slightly from their established orthodoxy, and say to himself, 'man, these people REALLY need to chill.
