The dictates of nature in the heart of the honest Pagan [i.e., the Arab nomad], constantly employed in long, lonely and dangerous voyages, awakened him often to reflect who that Providence was that invisibly governed him. . . . Possessed of charity, steady in his duty to his parents, full of veneration for his superiors, attentive and merciful even to his beasts; in a word, containing in his heart the principles of the first religion, which God has inculcated in the heart of Noah, the Arab was already prepared to embrace a much more perfect one than what Christianity, at that time, disfigured by folly and superstition, appeared to him to be.

XREF: Relates to Enlightenment-era primitivism and the 'noble savage' theme, contrasting natural virtue with corrupted institutional religion. Also connects to Gibbon's treatment of Islam.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 375