Kabbini

According to Rana Kabbini in Europe’s Myth of the Orient, the most important thing to Edward Lane while writing is believability, “the need to appear truthful.” The way he presents his evidence in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians is directly related to his need to seem like a factual source. Kabbini points out that Lane often provides insider information about the Orient to legitimize his spot as an authority. He mentions “an incident he himself had not witnessed” but he “assured his audience that he had been informed of its details by a very reliable source.” The source is reliable because he tells us it is. He does not need to witness it because the truth value is untainted by the secondhand source.Lane’s own language is quoted in the instance where he is speaking about Egyptian magicians. This

“Europeans in the East depended on each other’s testimony to sustain their communal image of the Orient.” They have authority because they are from Britain which is the author’s homeland. This is “the ‘incestuousness’ of European testimony” that Kabbini is talking about. The truthfulness of these testimonies is reaffirmed by the fact that they are coming from Europeans and are accepted by Europeans. As they each reference each other and confirm each others’ “factual accounts” they become more factual. Lane’s audience is British as he is writing in English for English publication. Kabbini finds that “the very fact that the book was in English made it ‘the most truthful and detailed account,’” quoting James Aldridge. The trust of this account of the Orient comes from the very language it uses. The English people will read his book and so they will trust a source that is from their own home, who can be objective towards the Orient because they are not from the Orient.“Lane’s book became a classic mainly because it instructed England about