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Spain voted against banning the burqa just five days ago in poignant illustration of the appalled fascination, dilemma and doubt traditionally suffered by Europeans faced with the Muslim. Back in the early 1900s, Lawrence of Arabia would depict Muslim Arabs as stereotypical "Semites...they had a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation...(they had) no half-tones in their register of vision...a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns". That was Lawrence's famously wise and autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Nearly 100 years later, it sounds incredibly inflexible, breathtakingly self-satisfied and damningly judgemental. But by that reckoning, a Lawrence alive today should be...