@AOG
A quibble too far, I think
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Hypognosis
/// Sikhism has already been mentioned. Three more shouldn't be hard to find, for the subcontinent region. ///
To be fair to the apologists, it does only state that he was Asian, so it now makes it a lot easier for them for me to state that the description Asian cast a much larger net than just the subcontinent of India, it also includes China etc, etc.
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If I'm not mistaken, most Brits specify "Chinese", when they mean Chinese. We may even be equally specific about Malays, Burmese, Tibetan, Thai, Vietnamese. We may use "SE Asian" as a blanket expression for everything between Bangladesh and Borneo but still excluding China, Taiwan and Korea.
If I said someone was "Asiatic", you probably wouldn't think I was referring to someone from Bangalore, would you?
Asia, the continent is just too huge an area to have much use as a descriptor for where a person came from.
However, if Sandy's article is a verbatim transcription of something written by a Dubai journalist, possibly even translated from an Arabic original, then it is anyone's guess what Dubai'is use the word "Asian" to mean.
This is why historians are obliged to refer to original source material. Otherwise we are all at the mercy of translators.