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Robert Irwin, British historian and scholar of medieval Arab history, born in 1946, has a long academic as well as creative pedigree. After reading Modern History at Oxford University, he gained his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury, where he studied the history of the Near East and Middle East between 1967 and 1972. He taught at the University of St. Andrews until 1977. Since then he has produced six novels: The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), The Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (1997), and Satan Wants Me (1999). Besides his output, Irwin wrote a chronological survey, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1382) (1986). Subsequently he has produced a series of scholarly books for a general readership: Islamic Art (1997), Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999). His most recent works are The Alhambra (2004) and For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (Allen Lane, 2006). Since he ceased to be a fulltime academic, Irwin has variously taught Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the universities of London, Cambridge, and Oxford. He is also director of a small publishing company and currently Middle East and Islam editor of The Times Literary Supplement, having written extensively for the journal on these subjects for twenty years. His recent book For Lust of Knowing attracted considerable media attention because it is intended as a rebuttal of Edward Said's influential Orientalism (1978) as well as a defense of traditional Orientalist scholarship. Taking selections from Irwin's prolific output this essay examines his seminal novel The Arabian Nightmare, which will be read against his more recent non-fiction works The Arabian Nights: A Companion and The Lust for Knowing, since these texts are closely interconnected, besides representing Arab or Islamic culture. Mamluk culture was Islamic, but Turkish rather than Arab in terms of ethnicity. The Arabian Nightmare is a special kind of historically based fantasy, probably best classified as historiographic metafiction, especially given that while the novel is presented as an entertaining fantasy, it is nevertheless grounded in Irwin's own research into the Mamluks and story-telling, offering a knowing and deep implicit analysis....