One of the strangest of recent movements in the world of education has been that promoting “multiculturalism” and attacking the traditional humanities for their “ethnocentricity”. Multiculturalists argue that our curriculum has focused on the works of “dead white European males”, with the tacit or conscious intention of excluding the achievements of people regarded, on account of their race, sex, culture or locality, as “other”. The thesis, argued with exemplary carelessness by Edward Said in his bestselling book Orientalism, has had an impact not only in European and American academies but also on intellectuals in those incendiary areas like the Middle...