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Masquerade, Engagement, and Skepticism: Richard Burton

Richard Burton provides an exemplary starting point for considering a series of lives between cultures for several reasons. First, his efforts to insert himself into a second way of life were manifold and lifelong, involving travel not just in Arabia but in India and Africa; they grew from his linguistic and scholarly passions that led both to his pilgrimage to Mecca and his translation and commentary on the Thousand and One Nights; and they included sophisticated experiments with disguise and self-transformation whose limited efficacy he well understood. He never thought to relinquish his original British identity, but he became a precocious and insightful ethnologist, devoting himself to grasping and absorbing other modes of thinking and behavior. Yet one consequence of his understanding how deeply people are stamped by the cultures they inhabit was that he ended by articulating a radical skepticism about culture itself, lashing out against the moral and intellectual restraints that cultures seek to impose on their members. In his later writings, living between cultures meant both inserting himself as deeply as he could into some way of life not his own, and asserting the human need for independence from every existing one. Without ever ceasing to see Arab life and culture as a vehicle for achieving distance from the narrowness of European values and prejudices, he came to see Islam as harboring restrictions very much like those imposed by his own native culture, and similarly in need of rescue from them.

Although this pattern only appears fully in his translation and commentary on the Thousand and One Nights, its basic lines are already visible in his account of the pilgrimage to Medinah and Mecca he accomplished in 1853. Both the pilgrimage book and the journey it reported evoked much criticism in his own time, denounced as self-promoting (the book made his reputation, as he clearly hoped it would), hypocritical (professing belief in a religion he did not embrace), and morally suspect (inspired by a partly hidden and dangerous animus against both Christian belief and European civilization). An additional charge has been leveled by more recent critics, namely that in the context of expanding European colonialism, the kind of knowledge of foreign peoples and cultures he sought was bound to be used to dominate others, so that his whole project was tainted by its connection to imperial power and the injuries it inflicted.¹ Although some of these charges were in tension with others, none of them was wholly baseless, and we will come to the grounds for them as we go along; deeply interesting as he remains, Burton was not always an admirable person.

But there can be no doubt that a central motive for the Mecca trip was a genuine admiration and attraction for Islamic faith and Eastern life, affirmed in word and deed over many years. In a later edition of the Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah he responded to the accusations of hypocrisy and apostasy lodged against the first in terms he developed at more length in other writings, arguing that his taking part in Muslim belief and practice was justified by the kinship between Islam and Christianity, both Abrahamic religions (a connection recognized and appreciated, he noted, by earlier writers, and that would later be highlighted by Louis Massignon), as well as by other features of Mohammed’s creed. “Al-Islam, in its capital tenets, approaches much nearer to the faith of Jesus than do the Pauline and Athanasian modifications which, in this our day, have divided the Indo-European mind into Catholic and Roman, Greek and Russian, Lutheran and Anglican.” Comparing the spirit of Moslem lands with some Christian ones, he concluded that “the Moslem may be more tolerant, more enlightened, more charitable, than many societies of self-styled Christians.”²

In the pilgrimage book Burton explained why he had not adopted an easier way of making the trip, namely declaring himself a convert and going as a European follower of Allah and the Prophet, a course that would have saved him both the trouble of pretending to be an “Oriental” and the danger of discovery:

My spirit could not bend to own myself a Burmá, a renegade—to be pointed at and shunned and catechised, an object of suspicion to the many and of contempt to all. Moreover, it would have obstructed the aim of my wanderings. The convert is always watched with Argus eyes, and men do not willingly give information to a “new Moslem,” especially a Frank: they suspect his conversion to be feigned or forced, look upon him as a spy, and let him see as little of life as possible. Firmly as was my heart set upon traveling in Arabia, by Heaven! I would have given up the dear project rather than purchase a doubtful and partial success at such a price.

That Burton did not merely make this explanation up to justify his desire to go in disguise is shown by his having included a similar observation in a book published two years before he set out on the journey to Mecca; here he wrote that “Islam, like many other faiths, professing to respect the convert, despises and distrusts him,” adding that in the Indian province he was writing about any new Muslim “was compelled to enter a certain caste—one of no high degree—to marry in it and to identify himself with the mongrel mass it contained.”³ Only by seeming to have practiced the faith from childhood could Burton fulfill the desire he avowed at the book’s start: to “see with my eyes what others are content to ‘hear with ears,’ namely Moslem inner life in a really Mohammedan country.”⁴

Burton’s most extensive account of what it was about Muslim religion that fueled his desire to get closer to it came in an essay he never published (although some of the ideas in it appeared in other writings): “El Islam, or The Rank of Muhammadanism among the Religions of the World.” Although printed only after his death, the text seems to have been written soon after the pilgrimage trip.⁵ Here the status Burton assigned to Islam in cultural and religious history derived from its being an exemplary instance of a phenomenon visible in other major faiths too, namely a powerful impulse to distill the pure essence of monotheism out of the muddier mix established religions made of it. He recognized the role Mosaic Judaism played in this evolution, to be sure, but he saw it as less central than some other accounts supposed, because the idea of a special divinity, superior to any others, was present within the polytheistic systems found in many places, including India, Arabia, Egypt, and Central America. (We will see that it also appears in the West African Ibo beliefs of Chinua Achebe’s forebears.) This sense that a particular god merited exceptional devotion “was the thought-germ of an eternal, unnamed, incorruptible and creative Deity. Enveloped in the mists and shades of priestly fraud and popular ignorance, still the dogma did exist; and so comforting has been its light to the soul of man, that no earthly power has ever availed to extinguish it.”

Moses gave the first clear expression to this idea, inspired by a vision that a “handful of degraded slaves” could be empowered to become a great people if they were infused with the belief that they served as the chosen vehicle of the one supreme God. But the lawgiver’s message never realized its universal potential, partly because of being restricted to the Hebrews, but equally because his work met a fate that would return to haunt other spiritual innovators and reformers, namely that the purity of his message was diluted by the need to make it accessible to an unrefined multitude. His original aim was to make the Hebrews into “a race of pure Theists, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, reverencing nothing but the One Supreme, worshiping him without medium or mediator,” but his followers were not up to it; faced with their resistance he toned the message down, absorbing into it the priestly system and the round of feasts, sacrifices, and ceremonies already common among the Egyptians, drawing Hebrew faith and ritual away from pure monotheism and back toward more adulterated forms of belief and practice. A kindred story unfolded in Christianity but on a more universal scale. Jesus directed his message to all who would listen, but the selfless and supernatural morality he exemplified was turned in a more worldly and practical direction by Paul and his successors, allowing for its absorption by a secular-minded church.

This situation provided the setting in which the Prophet did his work. Mohammed’s efforts at religious reform and purification were directed against

the absurd fanaticism of the Jews, and the superstitions of the Syrian and Arabian Christians, and the horrid idolatries of his unbelieving countrymen. … Abolishing all belief in a local or personal God, he announced to his Arabs the One Supreme, now in terms as terrible as man could bear, then in words so lofty and majestic that they sank for ever into the heart-core of his followers. … He revived the earliest scheme of Mosaicism and the pristine simplicity of Christianity by making every man priest and patriarch of his own household.

No more than in the other cases, however, could this turn to the deepest spring of religious devotion survive the need to become a faith for multitudes. The prophet’s followers turned it into “a mass of stringent ordinances so disposed as to provide for every contingency.” Yet the original inspiration remained alive at the heart of this vulgarized practice, and part of this core was a powerful move away from the Christian denigration of human nature through sin and toward an affirmation of the dignity of man, ideas the Prophet employed both to correct laxity and immorality and to “check that tendency of self-mortification which he could not wholly expel from the affections of his countrymen.” On this basis Mohammed “bequeathed to the world a Law and a Faith than which none has been more firmly or more fervently believed in by mankind,” and which “suffices to prove its extrinsic value to the human family.”⁶

Such an account suggests why Burton may have had serious reasons for wanting to put himself into contact with “Moslem inner life,” but the significance he attached to Islam lies only partly in its distinctive content or spirit, since he portrayed Mohammed’s fundamental impulse as a resurgence of the drive to capture monotheism’s essence that had surfaced earlier in other religions. This sense that different faiths all shared a common core was an important part of Burton’s stance toward religion, and he gave expression to it in various ways. But some of them were less serious and respectful than the essay on Islam. One instance, no less significant for being lighthearted and skeptical, occurs in a work published two years before the trip to Mecca. Referring to an unnamed British lieutenant serving in southern India, he wrote:

He could talk to each man of a multitude in his own language and all of them would appear equally surprised by, and delighted with him. Besides, his faith was every man’s faith. … He chanted the Koran, and the circumcised dogs [the character speaking in Burton’s writing was a Christian—not circumcised] considered him a kind of saint. The Hindoos also respected him, because he always ate his beef in secret, and had a devil [some heathen image] in an inner room. At Cochin he went to the Jewish place of worship, and read a large book, just like a priest.⁷

A number of writers have recognized an idealized image of Burton himself behind this portrait, and for good reason, as we will see soon enough. But what he elsewhere presented as a common intellectual and moral impulse that gave value to creeds he did not embrace here turns into an indifferent or cynical willingness to pretend an attachment to whichever one might happen to be of use at a given moment; among the exploits he attributed to the lieutenant was a highly elaborate but failed plot to kidnap a willing young nun from a Catholic convent in Goa. Just how these sides of Burton’s persona, one probing and serious, one shifting and frivolous, stood in relation to each other is a question to which answers will emerge as we go along. There is no better place to begin than with a talent and penchant he shared with the lieutenant, and that was crucial to his ability to complete the pilgrimage, namely his remarkable ability to take on the features of people culturally unlike himself, partly through carefully acquired knowledge—at once of languages, behavior, and customs—and partly through disguise.

* * *

Burton began to combine these elements in the 1840s, while serving as a junior officer in the army of the East India Company (then still the ruling authority on the subcontinent). There he was assigned the task of gathering information about the region of Sind, a largely Muslim province on the border of Afghanistan (today it belongs to Pakistan). The region had escaped British control until 1843, when it was conquered and then autocratically ruled by General Charles James Napier. Burton had arrived in India in the previous year; although by no means foreign to the side of military life that involved combat and physical prowess (he was disappointed that he arrived too late to take part in Napier’s campaigns, and he subsequently fought in the Crimean War and wrote a training manual about swordplay), his Indian work chiefly involved reporting on local life, an activity for which he was especially well suited because of his remarkable gift for languages. Required (like other Europeans in his time) to study Greek and Latin as a quite young child, he also became fluent in French and Italian in his schooldays, during which his family lived on the continent for many years. At Oxford, where his father hoped he would prepare for an academic career, he set himself to learn Arabic, working on his own because no undergraduate instruction was offered in that language in the 1830s (he started off by writing the characters from left to right as in English, a reversal that provoked a laugh from the Oxford Arabist with whom he eventually made contact). This was the moment when he worked out a system of language study he would employ for other tongues later: carrying a grammar book constantly with him but working with it in multiple brief stretches never exceeding fifteen minutes each, reading some text of interest to him with the aid of a dictionary as soon as he had acquired a basic vocabulary (usually the work of a week), putting himself in contact with native speakers whose pronunciation he silently imitated, and then reading out loud to himself. His devotion to linguistic study was if anything only deepened by his decision to abandon university life and seek a military commission, and he eventually came to speak and write well in some twenty-nine languages, plus nearly a dozen associated dialects. Posted to India, he began to study Hindi before leaving England, and devoted much of the voyage to advancing his knowledge of it; arrived in Bombay, he sought out the best available native tutors, and with their aid soon added Gujurati and Sanskrit to his stock.

To all this he was driven by reasons both practical and personal. As he later wrote, there were two paths to advancement in India: distinguishing oneself through combat or developing special competency in local languages. Premiums were given to officers who could show their proficiency in Indian tongues, and Burton won several; there can be little doubt he was the best linguist in the colonial administration, indeed one of the best among Europeans of his time. One reason for his success in India was that he mixed a genuine passion for formal study with a more direct kind of exposure he shared with many of his fellow officers, namely short- and longer-term relationships with local women. Such connections were a very old story by the time Burton arrived; in the eighteenth century they sometimes involved real marriages, seriously undertaken on both sides, with acknowledged offspring, and based on a relative absence of prejudice difficult to imagine in the face of the racist views that were gaining power in Burton’s day.⁸ Burton had a number of liaisons with Indian women (one of whom remained a kind of romantic ideal to him long afterward), making him part of a system that, as he later put it, “connected the white stranger with the country and its people, gave him an interest in their manners and customs, and taught him thoroughly well their language”—although often with oddities or limits, one officer being known for always referring to himself with feminine pronouns and adjectives.⁹ Burton’s passion for formal study protected him from such blunders. These linguistic achievements brought him to the attention of Napier, who assigned him to delve into conditions and customs in the newly conquered Sind, making him part of a general survey of the region directed by Walter Scott, nephew and namesake of the great novelist. In preparation Burton learned enough Persian and Punjabi to converse in those languages, both of which were spoken in the area.¹⁰

Competence in local idioms was necessary but not sufficient for gaining the kind of knowledge Burton sought, since a British officer speaking a tongue acquired in adulthood (never, to be sure, without an evident accent) was still an outsider and an object of suspicion. The inspiration to counter this situation through disguise did not surface all at once; at first Burton’s efforts to dress in local garb were not “intended to deceive,” but undertaken because “there is nothing so intrinsically comfortable or comely in the European costume, that we should wear it in the face of every disadvantage,” and because he quickly discovered that “peasants will not run away from us as we ride through the fields, nor will the village girls shrink into their huts as we near them.”¹¹ Burton was by no means the first European to put on Eastern dress for such reasons; travelers had done it for over a century, including at least one woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.¹² But mere convenience became secondary to the felt need to get beyond “the dense veil which the fearfulness, the duplicity, the prejudice and the superstitions of the natives hang before” the eyes of European officials. Such a barrier mattered little in regard to one part of Burton’s work in Sind, which consisted of surveying land and examining an existing system of canals on behalf of Napier’s project of improving both transport and irrigation in the province, thus raising the level of both prosperity and tax collections; but it was highly relevant to some of Napier’s other concerns, which involved improving the morals of the inhabitants and replacing what he considered barbaric and unnecessarily cruel practices with more humane and “civilized” ones. More generally, both Burton and his superiors were savvy enough to recognize that knowledge about everyday life was necessary in order to deal effectively with their subjects. “In a position where a foreigner is thrown into close intercourse with natives of the East, it is absolutely necessary to study the customs of their society a little, unless he desires every day to offend by apparent neglect and incivility, and to make himself ridiculous by misplaced attention and politeness.”¹³

Burton had no illusions that he could pass as an Indian of a sort familiar to locals. Instead his strategy was to take advantage of the presence of Eastern people with mixed identities (ones some anthropologists in our day call “hybrid”) in the places he wanted to explore; modeling himself on them allowed him to present himself in a guise that fit with and explained his impressive but imperfect language skills.

After trying several characters, the easiest to be assumed was, I found, that of a half Arab, half Iranian, such as may be met with in thousands along the northern shore of the Persian Gulf. The Sindians would have detected in a moment the difference between my articulation and their own, had I attempted to speak their vernacular dialect, but they attributed the accent to my strange country, as naturally as a home-bred Englishman would account for the bad pronunciation of a foreigner calling himself partly Spanish, partly Portuguese. Besides, I knew the countries along the Gulf by heart from books, I had a fair knowledge of the Shieh [Shia] form of worship prevalent in Persia, and my poor Moonshee [his language instructor] was generally at hand to support me in times of difficulty, so that the danger of being detected—even by a ‘real Simon Pure’—was a very inconsiderable one.

The persona he adopted was that of “a Bazzaz, a vendor of fine linen, calicoes and muslins,” calling himself Mirza (an honorific title) Abdullah of Bushire. The disguise, which included oil to darken his skin and elaborate, expensive clothing, made him seem “Oriental” enough to escape being treated as a European, yet exotic enough to become an object of curious interest to the people he encountered. He was able to enter village squares, private dwellings, mosques, and places “where he heard music and dancing.” The information he could collect in this way freed him from the need to rely, as most Europeans in similar positions did, on native informants (a system that long remained in use and that Rudyard Kipling later described in his novel Kim).14 On this basis he was able both to fulfill the tasks assigned to him by his superiors and gather material for the four books about India he wrote between 1847 and 1851 (when he was back in Europe, seeking treatment for eye troubles possibly related to the cholera to which he was exposed in Sind). Both in his reports and in his books, he speaks in a voice somewhere between that of an intelligence officer and a modern anthropologist.

We know from the diary Napier kept at this time (now in the British Museum, where Fawn Brodie drew on it for her excellent biography of Burton) that the general was struck and surprised by a number of the things his young lieutenant communicated to him. The surprise had less to do with attitudes of the recently conquered Sindians toward the British (which ranged, perhaps predictably, from a kind of resigned and seemingly amicable subservience to venomous hostility) than with practices that limited the changes British actions could bring to local life. One such matter involved Napier’s frustration at being unable to end the system through which welloff murderers escaped the death sentences he imposed on them by hiring poverty-stricken substitutes; one of these clarified what was going on when he explained to Burton that giving himself a sumptuous last meal and leaving the rest of the payment to his surviving family was far better than continuing with the wretched life he was leading. The data Burton provided about infanticide, especially of female babies, and of how common it was for husbands to kill or maim wives suspected of being unfaithful, convinced Napier that the harsh punishments he ordered would not succeed in putting a stop to violence inside families.¹⁵

Napier was interested in such things because he had an unquestionable faith in the superiority of British ways and a determination to impose them wherever he could. In drawing his young aide into his projects the general exposed Burton—who shared neither his boss’s premise nor his aims—to dangers that had damaging consequences for his career. Worried by rumors that British troops were frequenting homosexual brothels in Karachi, Napier assigned Burton to bring him information about such places (as the only officer who could speak any local language, he was the obvious choice). “Carefully disguised,” Burton visited several of them, reporting on what he found with the same kind of close observation and moral detachment he displayed in many other connections; but some of his contemporaries were bound to take his detailed account as evidence that he had a more direct involvement in the behavior he described. Napier closed down the brothels but he did not accuse Burton of enjoying them, and he kept his promise not to send the document to the East India Company offices where others might see it. For two years it remained hidden in the general’s files; but after Napier returned to England (like Burton in search of medical treatment) someone found the paper and maliciously sent it to higher-ups in Bombay, with the recommendation that its author be dismissed from the service. Burton was not in fact forced out, but his career in India was gravely compromised, leaving little or no chance for him to advance to higher office there.¹⁶

The brothels were absent from the books Burton published about India (he later mentioned them in his notes to the Thousand and One Nights), but the texts included incidents he knew would be shocking to many British readers. Among these was his report that respectable women in a certain ethnic group in Goa commonly exposed their breasts in public, while “females of loose character are compelled by custom to cover the body.” Another was that pregnant Hindu women betook themselves to shrines displaying phallic carvings in the hope that the respect shone to them would make their babies come out male. Burton recounted such things in the same neutral tone and with the same freedom from moral judgment he displayed in his various reports to Napier. Sometimes his subject was cultural incomprehension itself, as in the incident that began when a British officer whipped idle natives on a river bank for not going to the aid of a man struggling not to drown in the water; they remained unmoved by this treatment (Burton observed that offering a rupee would have made them jump to help the stranger), forcing the officer to dive into the river and pull the man out himself. Instead of offering gratitude, however, the rescued swimmer responded to the officer with an unexpected question: “Sahib, you have preserved me, what are you going to give me?” and, when no charity was forthcoming, cursed his benefactor, who then whipped him as he had the bystanders who earlier refused their help.¹⁷ A similar attention to cultural difference inspired Burton’s suggestion that Sindian childrearing practices were more loving than European ones because Western “parents are engrossed by other cares—the search for riches, or the pursuit of pleasure—during the infancy of their offspring,” and his explanation for why Muslim women were less devoted to motherhood than Hindus—that the greater prospect of remarriage for the former, should their husbands divorce them, made them worry more about losing the charms of youth through childbirth.¹⁸

One subject of particular interest to Burton in India was religion, including both ritual practices such as Muslim conversion ceremonies and rites of circumcision, and the intellectual content of different faiths. He noted that the stark contrast between Hindu polytheism and Muslim devotion to a single god did not prevent the two religions from each taking on features of the other. Thus “the Hindoo” has learned from neighboring Sikhs (whose monotheism stemmed from exposure to Islam) “to simplify his faith: to believe in one God,” albeit while still finding divine powers in such potent natural phenomena as rivers. In a parallel way, Islam in India as elsewhere absorbed some of the magical practices and the belief in djinns (genies) and other spirits both benign and hostile that Mohammed had sought to curb, but which remained common in regions where his teaching spread. Both cases were examples of a phenomenon evident closer to home, the way Northern European Protestantism and Mediterranean Catholicism both absorbed elements from the religions—Druid or Pantheistic—that flourished before Christianity arrived.¹⁹ Burton defended Islamic practice in terms that would recur in his later writing, for instance admonishing a fictional “John Bull” on a visit to Sind: “You might take a lesson, if not too proud to be taught, from their regularity in performing their religious duties; high and low almost all pray twice a day, some as many as five times, in public too, so that there may be no shirking,” and adding that, in contrast to the situation faced by French or Irish Catholics, “their priests will allow them to peruse their scriptures translated into the vernacular.”²⁰

Burton recognized that much of the religious life he observed was rooted in folk practices, and like others in his time he found some of these attractive because they displayed the qualities of color, directness, and innocence often cherished by romantic writers. But he also found evidence that the proximity of contrasting forms of religion generated religious attitudes of quite a different sort, closer in spirit to the urbane and worldly posture of the lieutenant in Goa who made every religion his own without holding to any. Referring to the Amils (a group of Hindus now thought to have emigrated to Sind in the Mughal period, but whose descendants would flee to India when the province became part of Pakistan in 1947), he noted: “From mixing much with the members of another faith, and possessing a little more knowledge than their neighbors, many of these men become Dahri, or materialists, owning the existence of a Deity, but dissociating the idea from all revelation, and associating it with the eternity past and future of matter in its different modifications. A few are Atheists in the literal sense of the word, but it is rare that they will trust their secret to a stranger.” Such rejections of revealed religion were “less common in the unenlightened East than it is in the civilized West,” but those Easterners who advanced them were “formidable”: “the European [unbeliever] seldom thinks proper, or takes the trouble, to make converts to his disbelief; the Oriental does, and aided by his superiority in learning over the herd, he frequently does it with great success.” Burton saw a link between the appearance of such heterodox ideas and two other phenomena that interested him, one the spread (particularly in Persia) of Sufism, an inward, esoteric, and mystically inclined offshoot of Islam often seen as suspect by orthodox Muslims, the other the work of Indian Vedantic thinkers who interpreted Hindu myths and scriptures as philosophical allegories rather than sources of doctrine and practice; together these two developments led him to predict (much too optimistically) that “a mixture of pantheism with pure deism, will presently be the faith of the learned and polite in both these countries.”²¹

This whole complex of attitudes, like the picture he gave of the lieutenant in Goa, stood very close to Burton himself. He was drawn to Sufi practice, so much so that before ending his first Indian stay in 1847 he went through a course of study and exercises that led to his being ordained as a Sufi master, and he retained ties to Sufism throughout his life; on the Mecca pilgrimage being a Sufi would be part of his disguise, and the desire he expressed in the book to experience the “inner life” of Muslims may have had a Sufi ring, too.²² At the same time, however, his later writings would turn this multiplicity of cultural and religious involvements into a rejection of the singular truth claims that particular faiths make on their own behalf, issuing in a frank skepticism toward all forms of established morality and religion and making him appear (using the distinction he noted in regard to the Amils) more as an “Oriental” atheist than a European eclectic. It is in those later texts that the most extreme and challenging consequences Burton drew from his attempt to inject himself into cultures not his own would come to the surface.

* * *

Before we can approach these writings, however, we need to look more closely at Burton’s manner of inserting himself into Eastern life, and the ways it both altered and confirmed his identity. A number of writers have recognized that taking on the character of an “Oriental” over weeks or months and establishing relations with others on this basis had the power to destabilize his own sense of who he was. His wife may have been the first to suggest this, reporting that in Cairo he lived as a native, til (as he told me) he actually believed himself to be what he represented himself to be.”²³ Even some writers who see Burton largely in terms of complicity in imperial domination think the line between imitation and identification is especially difficult to draw in his case.²⁴ Certainly some of Burton’s contemporaries believed he had crossed a border they thought it important to maintain; the pilgrimage book raised fears that he had actually become a Muslim, or at least abandoned Christianity, and in India he was several times labeled as a “white Nigger” because of his evident attraction to elements of native life. The narrator of one of his books, clearly a stand-in for the author, refers to himself as a “semi-oriental,” based on his direct grasp of social and political relations that others could only view in a Western mirror.²⁵

But the “semi” in this label needs to be stressed, because Burton’s attempts to represent himself as an “Oriental,” and even in some way to become one, had the effect of at once blurring his identity as a European and bringing it into sharper focus. He well understood a basic and perhaps universal dilemma in the relation between identity and disguise, that however much a person may feel his or her sense of self altered by taking on some sympathetic and attractive new character, the need to keep up the appearance and the recognition that the stratagem may fail is bound to heighten awareness that beneath it all one remains the same person as before. His awareness on this score is evident in a comment he made about Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, whom opponents accused of being a fraud. In his account of the trip to Salt Lake City he undertook in 1860, Burton defended Smith, arguing that no movement as substantial as the one he started could owe its strength to “mere imposture”; but he added that all the same “it is impossible to ignore the dear delights of fraud and deception, the hourly pleasure taken by some minds in finessing through life, and in playing a part till by habit it becomes a nature.” Only the self that knows it is playing a part can experience such delights and pleasures, however attached it becomes to the mask it dons.²⁶ He described his relationship to Mirza Abdullah, the personage he became in Sind, in just these terms, and it surfaced again in some more casual and playful moments, such as the time he truculently walked by some fellow officers in Egypt while gotten up as an Arab. Failing to recognize him, they were on the point of maltreating the uppity stranger when he shocked them by suddenly revealing who he was.

On the pilgrimage, too, Burton’s disguise at once drew him into the Eastern character he assumed, and highlighted the distance he necessarily maintained from it. The persona under which he made the bulk of the journey was not quite the one he thought to take on when he boarded a ship to Alexandria from England; at that point his plan was to resume my old character of a Persian wanderer,” the Mirza Abdullah of Sind, but with somewhat altered features. He was no longer to be a merchant, but a prince and a Dervish, an identity especially “proper for disguise” because it is assumed by all ranks, ages, and creeds,” and because having renounced all ordinary social roles, the Dervish “is allowed to ignore ceremony and politeness” and wander where he likes. If threatened with discovery he has only to give freer rein to the oddness expected of him and become a maniac, and he is safe,” treated with the same indulgence as is “a notably eccentric character in the West.” One danger loomed, that among those who sought shelter behind the veil of the Dervish were criminals and cutthroats, whose company had to be avoided. Burton hoped to find protection from them by carrying enough money (carefully concealed to be sure) to remain independent, and by his ability to present himself also as what he actually was, a devotee of study and of books, and in particular a bearer of medical knowledge, in which he had long taken an interest and had a certain competence.²⁷

Drawing on this knowledge, he revised his character before leaving Egypt, exchanging his claimed Persian origin for a more mixed one, as a physician “born in India of Afghan parents … educated at Rangoon, and sent out to wander, as men of that race frequently are, from early youth.” He had enough Persian, Hindustani and Arabic to sustain such a mix, and “any trifling inaccuracy was charged upon my long residence at Rangoon.” He continued to represent himself as a Dervish, but in demeanor he now “assumed the polite, pliant manners of an Indian physician, and the dress of a small Effendi (or gentleman).” This transformation (first suggested to him by a clever and sharp-eyed merchant of Russian origin who befriended him in Cairo) fit with the understanding Burton earlier exhibited in India, that a hybrid identity was safer because it provided an explanation for his inevitable deviations from any pure one.

However composite the guise he assumed, however, it required a special ability and willingness to study the ways culture imprints itself on personality and to open oneself to being altered by them. He knew that the superficially mixed identities generated by European expansion could be awkward and unconvincing: his first sight of a Sepoy (the name given Indians employed in the lower ranks of the British army) soon after landing in Bombay nearly sent him back to the ship: although picturesque, the man was “an imitation European article. … The coat of faded scarlet seemed to contain a mummy with arms like drumsticks.”²⁸ Whether or not he had such examples in mind, Burton was explicitly determined to avoid a similar fate. He tells of spending much time on the voyage to Egypt “getting into the train of Oriental manners,” schooling himself in such things as drinking a glass of water (giving an elaborate account of five differences between the way a European and an “Indian Moslem” perform the act), the exclusive use of the right hand to touch things regarded as clean, “the manipulation of the rosary,” the way of sitting in a chair (“your genuine Oriental gathers up his legs, looking almost as comfortable in it as a sailor upon the back of a high-trotting horse”), the manner of walking “with the toes straight to the front, the grave look and the habit of pious ejaculations.” He was similarly attentive to differences in attitude that affected behavior, for instance explaining what lay behind the general point illustrated by the story of the rescued swimmer recounted above: that “if you save a man’s life, he naturally asks you for the means of preserving it” (a notion he saw confirmed by his ventures into medical practice). The unlikelihood of being thanked was tied up with the observation that “in none of the Eastern languages with which I am acquainted is there a single term conveying the meaning of our ‘gratitude.’” This lack was no mere “absence of a virtue” but an expression of a worldview in which every person had the right to every other’s surplus, all necessities having been provided by the Creator, who also imposes on everyone the duty of helping others: by rendering someone a service you have but done your duty, and he would not pay you so poor a compliment as to praise you for the act.” To a benefactor one responds only with a prayer that “Allah increase thy weal” and “that your shadow (with which you protect him and his fellows) may not be less.”²⁹ Burton valued this level of ethnographic understanding both for itself (later he would make use of it in regard to cultures that attracted him far less) and as a tool for successfully carrying out his project. But he never lost the anxiety that someone along the way would see through him; just for this reason he reported himself relieved and gratified on the Mecca trip whenever his action and speech overcame some person’s suspicion or doubt.³⁰

* * *

But Burton’s taking on an Eastern identity was more than a mere masquerade; the genuine quality of his desire to experience “Moslem inner life” appears with special clarity once he arrives in Medinah and then in Mecca. Until then, and along the road between the two places, other topics captured most of his attention: the landscape and climate, the feel of being in the desert and the physical features of those who live there, local food and dress both male and female, the dangers of being caught sketching or taking notes (he reproduced some of his drawings in the book), measures taken to defend against thieves, Arab hostility to the region’s Ottoman overlords, and the likely future end of Turkish rule it portended. The features of Arab life that attracted him on this part of his journey were those that contrasted with “civilization,” among them the fierce independence and the noble, even chivalric quality of social relations, especially among the Bedouins, the high emotional tone of both desert existence and the poetry written about it, the persistence there of near-animal qualities in human nature that are suppressed in more urbane settings, and an appreciative attitude toward brigands and outlaws: “Who so revolts against society requires an iron mind and an iron body, and these mankind instinctively admires, however misdirected be their energies.”³¹ Where these elements were absent he found little to value—for instance, inside Medinah, its style of life softened and corrupted by the presence of the many visitors and tourists. Once arrived at the sacred sites, however, it was Muslim faith and practice that became the focus of his attention.

Toward some elements of popular belief he felt deep skepticism, to be sure. “Although at least fifty female voices” at a famous cemetery “loudly promised that morning, for the sum of ten parahs each, to supplicate Allah in behalf of my lame foot, no perceptible good came of their efforts.” And even though “every Moslem, learned and simple, firmly believes that Mohammed’s remains are interred in the Hujrah at Al-Madinah, I cannot help suspecting that the place is doubtful as that of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.”³² The physical features of the towns and buildings often left him cold, too: the central mosque in Medina appeared as “mean and tawdry” and “decorated with pauper splendor” (by contrast, however, its counterpart in Mecca “is grand and simple, the expression of a single sublime idea”).³³ In a way, his accounts of Muslim belief and ritual partake of a similar neutrality, providing description without judgment much in the manner of his earlier writing about India; for each object or prospect along the way he gives theological or historical information to explain what pilgrims do there and why, at some points noting disputes about the importance or meaning of some site and the conflicts they occasion (including those between Sunni and Shiite), and providing many references to earlier writers’ accounts, agreeing with some and dissenting from others.

But what gives a different overall tone to these pages is the repeated insertion into them of the prayer texts recited at each juncture. Some of these he reports as spoken by others, but some of them Burton declaimed himself. He gives more than a dozen of the prayers pronounced at Medina, many of them half a page or more in length; somewhat fewer are listed in regard to Mecca. I think it is impossible to read these prayers without being struck by the utter absence of irony with which they are set down. The translations contain explanations of both unfamiliar references and an occasional word left in Arabic, but without interrupting the flow of supplication. The language is devotional and deeply felt, straightforward and poetic, at once submissive (deep bows or prostrations accompany some of the appeals) and highly dignified. Here is one representative example, offered at the spot where the Archangel Gabriel is supposed to have descended to Mohammed to convey the divine word:

Peace be upon You, O Angels of Allah, the Mukarrabin (cherubs), and the Musharrifin (seraphs), the pure, the holy, honored by the Dwellers in Heaven, and by those who abide upon the Earth. O beneficent Lord! O Long-suffering! O Almighty! O Pitier! O thou Compassionate one! Perfect our Light, and pardon our Sins, and accept Penitence for our offences, and cause us to die among the Holy! Peace be upon Ye, Angels of the Merciful, one and all! And the Mercy of God and His Blessings be upon You!³⁴

The Medina prayers “ended, as we began, with the worship of the Creator.” In Mecca, after kissing the holy black stone, there “came the Istighfar, or begging of pardon … after which we blessed the Prophet, and then asked for ourselves all that our souls most desired.” At one point Burton recites a prayer on behalf of someone else, fulfilling a promise made in Egypt.³⁵ Had he wanted to signal some sense of distance from the tone or content of these pleas he could easily have done so, but he did not. The outpouring of deep feeling in others moves him even when it puzzles him: at the tomb of Fatima, “a strange sight it was to see rugged fellows, mountaineers perhaps, or the fierce Iliyat of the plains, sometimes weeping silently like children, sometimes shrieking like hysteric girls, and utterly careless to conceal a grief so coarse and grisly, at the same time so true and real, that I knew not how to behold it.”³⁶ These are the places in the narrative that seem best to realize the goal he set out at the start, to experience “Moslem inner life in a Mohammedan country”; they present it as possessed of a purity and directness that recalls the quest for the essential spirit of monotheistic devotion Burton attributed to Mohammed in the essay from which we quoted earlier.

Burton describes his emotions at crucial moments in the pilgrimage as both sharing the feelings of his companions and leaving him at a distance from them. At the first sight of Medina from the hills around it, “nothing was more striking, after the desolation through which we had passed, than the gardens and orchards about the town. It was impossible not to enter into the spirit of my companions, and truly I believe that for some minutes my enthusiasm rose as high as theirs. But presently when we remounted, the traveler returned strong upon me: I made a rough sketch of the town, put questions about the principal buildings, and in fact collected materials for the next chapter.” Arrived at the sanctuary in Mecca, I may truly say that, of all the worshipers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Haji from the far-north. It was as if the poetical legends of the Arab spoke truth, and that the waving wings of angels, not the sweet breeze of morning, were agitating and swelling the black covering of the shrine. But, to confess humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride.”³⁷

It is far from easy to know how to take these passages: are the declarations of how closely his feelings matched those of his Muslim companions instances of the hypocrisy that some of Burton’s contemporaries saw in his journey, pretending to enter into the life of a faith he did not share? Or is it just the opposite, that he recounts the second moments of pulling back in order to shield himself from accusations of having drawn too close to an alien creed? It is difficult to believe that pride was the sole source of the feeling that overcame him at the high point of his visit to Mecca, for that would have accorded badly with his desire to experience Muslim inner life—unless we recognize that accomplishing some difficult task imposed on believers may be a source of pride even for those moved chiefly by faith (a danger often recognized by religious purists and reformers, and to which we return later). The pride Burton felt in becoming a Sufi master, given voice in the passage we quoted above, did not mark his attraction to Sufism as a mere pretense. Just the opposite: it reflected the satisfaction of accomplishing a difficult and valued task. The pride in completing the pilgrimage radiates a similar quality. This was the view of Burton’s wife, not always a wholly reliable witness to his feelings, but whose testimony in this case fits well with what we know from his own writings: “He did not go in mockery, but reverentially. He had brought his brain to believe himself one of them. … Richard was thus the only European who had beheld the inner and religious life of the Moslems as one of themselves.”³⁸

My conclusion is that neither the pride he spoke of feeling at the end of the pilgrimage, nor the turn to sketching and reflection on his experience after the upsurge of high enthusiasm he felt at the first sight of Medina, meant that he repudiated or denied the spontaneous emotion that first arose in him; instead, both moments show that identification and distance were not mutually exclusive in his relation to Arab and Muslim culture. One state of mind called the other forth; like two poles in a magnetic field, they defined the push and pull of Burton’s relations to Arab life. A similar dialectic can be discerned in his relations to other cultural milieus that occupied an important place in his career, and to which we now turn: first the ones he encountered in his early life, where his mix of identification with and distance from every given way of life had some of its roots, and in his dealings with two groups toward whom he sometimes expressed feelings and judgments most people today would regard as deplorable: Jews and black Africans.

* * *

Burton’s family was British (with roots in Ireland and possibly France), but his childhood was almost entirely spent in France and Italy, his soldier father having taken the family to live on the continent after he lost his military commission and a large part of his income, as a consequence of his refusal to testify against George IV’s consort Queen Caroline when the king was seeking to divorce her in 1820. (Although probably guilty of the adultery with which she was charged, Caroline had enormous popular support in England, and the controversy that swirled around her became a cause célèbre; the elder Burton’s loyalty to her stemmed from the kindness she earlier bestowed on British officers in Genoa while he was stationed there.) The family settled in Tours in 1821, the year of Richard’s birth; they returned to England briefly following the revolutionary upheaval of July 1830, in Paris, but soon departed for another Loire Valley town, Blois. Burton’s parents found themselves ill there, however, leading them to seek the milder climate of Italy; over the next years parents and children spent periods in various Italian cities, including Pisa, Florence, Rome, and Naples.

Burton attributed many things about his later personality and career to his youthful experiences on the continent. The family was by no means wholly isolated from English life, since British colonies existed in the places where they settled (as in numerous European towns), providing a setting for the social life of their members. Dane Kennedy sees a certain similarity between these outposts and those in colonial locales outside Europe, but whereas Burton described British societies in India as spaces where John Bullish narrow-mindedness found more developed expression, it was the opposite with the continental communities. The “Anglo-Saxondom” they established was devoid of “snobs,” as well as of the “bitter discord” often found in ménages bourgeoises. The prudery then spreading in English life was absent, too: “The difference of the foreign colonies was that the weight of English respectability appeared to be taken off them, though their lives were respectable and respected. The expatriates were not exactly cosmopolitans, since living abroad made them “intensely patriotic” (although not much concerned about English politics); they “stuck to their own Church because it was their Church, and they knew as much about the Catholics at their very door, as the average Englishman does of the Hindu.” Many looked on their French neighbors with suspicion and especially condemned romantic relationships between young people of the two countries.³⁹

But continental life all the same gave Burton and his siblings a taste for a broader and more open kind of social existence than England afforded, a preference that he discovered both when the family returned briefly to England in 1830 and still more later on, when he became a student at Oxford. On the first trip the children were put off by the small and commonplace nature of English buildings, by the inferior food, and by “the national temper, fierce and surly …a curious contrast to the light-hearted French of middle France.” Later, in Oxford,

the old dislike to our surroundings returned with redoubled violence. Everything appeared to us so small, so mean, so ugly. The faces of the women were the only exception. … The houses were so unlike houses, and more like the Nuremberg toys magnified. … The little bits of garden were mere slices. … The interiors were cut up into such wretched rooms. … And there was a desperate neatness and cleanness about everything that made us remember the old story of the Stoic who spat in the face of the master of the house because it was the most untidy place in the dwelling.

To contrast England and France in such terms was not unique to Burton in these years: the young John Stuart Mill reported a similar impression from a visit across the Channel, later recalling that being “able to breathe for a whole year the free and genial atmosphere of continental life” made him aware of “the low moral tone” of British social intercourse.⁴⁰ But no one ever saw Mill as un-English, whereas people in Oxford viewed Burton in just this way, disapproving of his manners, his accent in Latin (the continental pronunciation was closer to Italian), and his dislike of the teaching and food in his college. The disapproval was mutual; when one student laughed at his mustache Burton tried to challenge him to a duel: “I felt as if I had fallen among épiciers.” None of the learning or experience he had absorbed was appreciated: “It was found out that I, who spoke French and Italian and their dialects like a native, who had a considerable smattering of Bearnais, Spanish, and Provençale, barely knew the Lord’s Prayer, broke down in the Apostles’ Creed, and had never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles—a terrible revelation.” That Burton’s animus was directed at least as much against British smugness as against religious education as such seems clear in the positive impression he retained of John Henry Newman, the don who later became a Catholic and a cardinal; although his person and speech struck Burton as somewhat colorless, he showed qualities of “complete candour and honesty; he said only what he believed, and he induced others to believe with him.”⁴¹

Neither the preference for continental life nor the strong sense for the power of cultural difference these experiences bred in Burton kept him from seeing many things about France and Italy in negative terms, too, the pettiness of life in small French towns, the squalor and dirtiness of pre-Risorgimento Rome. But toward his own country Burton’s childhood cast him as an outsider in another way: it deprived him of the formative experiences and personal connections that making a career in nineteenth-century England required. “The conditions of society in England are so complicated, and so artificial, that those who would make their way in the world, especially in public careers, must be broken to it from their earliest day. The future soldiers and statesmen must be prepared by Eton and Cambridge. The more English they are, even to the cut of their hair, the better. In consequence of being brought up abroad, we never thoroughly understood English society, nor did society understand us.” In particular, Burton lacked a kind of tie that formed an important part of every national identity in the nineteenth century (and in many ways still does), namely to a particular locality (he used the word “parish”). “It is a great thing, when you have won a battle, or explored Central Africa, to be welcomed home by some little corner of the Great World, which takes a pride in your exploits, because they reflect honour upon itself. In the contrary condition you are a waif, a stray; you are a blaze of light, without a focus. Nobody outside your own fireside cares.” Burton already felt much of this distance during his time at Oxford (it contributed to his leaving without taking a degree), but through all these comments there beams a clear sense that his impaired and conflicted British identity was one he could never cast off, however much it came to be mixed with other ones.⁴²

As other writers have noted, his description of himself as “a waif, a stray … a blaze of light without a focus” fits with some persisting features of his personality already visible in his childhood. His mother seems to have had a complex fascination with both self-command and indiscipline (she was passionately attached to a half-brother she described as “wild”), two contradictory qualities that Burton would display and value in later life. Their roots seem readily visible in such incidents as the one in which she called her two sons’ attention to tempting apple tarts in a French pastry-shop window, only to call the boys away, praising the virtues of self-denial. Burton and his younger brother Edward broke the glass with their fists and ran off with the tarts in their bloody fingers.⁴³ A persisting desire to challenge and outrage their parents seems evident in a later moment that involved disguise as part of their strategy. An epidemic of cholera broke out while the family was living in Naples; mortality was especially high among the poor, many of whose bodies were cast into mass graves outside the city in the dead of night. Fascinated by the macabre events, Burton and his brother put on clothes in which they could pass as mute undertaker’s assistants and helped with the internments. Later he remembered the decaying bodies as giving off “a kind of lambent blue flame … which lit up a mass of human corruption, worthy to be described by Dante.”⁴⁴ The disguise was much simpler than the ones Burton would later employ, but here as later it served to gain entry to actions in which mystery was mixed with religious significance; now as later he was moved by a fascination for foreign and forbidden things and a disposition to manipulate his own identity in order to draw closer to them.

Burton recounted these things about his childhood at least partly because he thought they pointed toward the conflicted relationship to English life he would always retain. The suspicion in which he was held by many influential people cast a pall over the diplomatic career he began in 1861; although he received a number of consular appointments, most of them sent him to difficult, even dangerous places in which he had little interest. Only Damascus, where he arrived in 1869, allowed him to draw on his knowledge of Eastern cultures (there he went back to his old practice of masquerading as a local, wandering about incognito in order to gain information, a stratagem in which he was now joined by his wife); but his inability to deal effectively with conflicts between various ethnic groups there—and especially his hostility toward the city’s Jews, part of a complex attitude to which we will come in a moment—overcame him and he was forced out. Trieste, his next and final posting, was easier to deal with but it was also a comedown from Damascus and paid less (he did a great deal of writing there, working in a room he furnished in a Moroccan style). During these years he spent periods in England, but often unhappily, and his closest associates in London were figures who resembled him in arousing suspicion and hostility in more conventional people. Among them were Richard Monckton Milnes and Algernon Swinburne, members with Burton of a band that called itself the “Cannibal Club,” known for their sometimes poetic eccentricity, their interest in erotic and pornographic literature, and their association with nonstandard sexual practices. Burton displayed these involvements most publicly in his translations of the Thousand and One Nights (including the commentaries that accompanied it) and his publication of the Kama Sutra (in a translation by someone else that he revised).

All the same, the knighthood he eventually received in 1886, four years before his death, owed more to his writing than to his government service. That he received it should remind us that Victorian England was morally and culturally far more diverse and open than its guardians of virtue wished. The Arabian Nights translation had many defenders as well as enemies, a response that testified to the more affirmative attitudes toward sexuality that began to appear from the 1860s, and that remained alive even among many highly respectable people and despite the objections of bigots; indeed, the still common image of Victorian life as one-sidedly repressive owes much to the reaction against these liberalizing currents.⁴⁵ Such coexistence of staid and restrictive attitudes with more open and adventurous ones was exemplified by Burton’s own marriage: his wife, descendant of a family whose storied history went back to the Middle Ages (the Arundells) and a fervent Catholic, was also a determinedly independent woman who married without her parent’s consent and used her many social connections to defend her husband against his moralistic critics; she had much to do with obtaining his knighthood. At certain moments her fearful puritanism took destructive turns, leading her to suppress publications she saw as harmful to his reputation while he was alive, and to burn some of his notebooks and manuscripts after his death; but she clearly understood that these facets of his person and career were part of what made Burton the special figure he was, and to whom she was devoted.⁴⁶ These complex, sometimes confusing aspects of Burton’s relations to circumstances and people in his time were deeply connected to the sense of himself as at once bound up in a particular cultural identity—British—and unable to enter fully into it, bred into him from childhood.

* * *

The rich but also often troubling, equivocal, and inconsistent nature of Burton’s relations to other peoples and cultures is especially evident in his dealings with Jews and black Africans. Some of his pronouncements about both groups are bound to strike most people today as somewhere between embarrassing and despicable, especially since he regularly viewed them through the prism of race, and his unembarrassed use of racial categories in regard to those who bore the brunt of Nazi and colonialist violence makes it tempting to class him as an outright racist. We need to remember, however, that “race” could be an extremely vague notion in the nineteenth century, applied to groups both large and small and by no means (as some of the language quoted below shows) always indicating biological determination of traits. Pinning the label “racist” on him does not prepare us for the highly critical, even demeaning, things he said about supposedly higher or more advanced groups, notably Christians in general and his own countrymen in particular, especially as they appeared in colonial settings. Rather than suppose that it was some set of racist impulses that determined his attitude toward Jews and Africans, we need to consider the particular mix of hostility and appreciation he displayed toward each group, and to take the racial language he used not as driving his thinking but as the then-commonplace instrument through which he expressed it.

Burton’s offensive anti-Jewish pronouncements belong to the last two decades of his life, and had at least part of their origin in the tense and hostile relations with Jewish inhabitants of Damascus he developed after he became the British consul there in 1869. Conflicts between ethnic groups were rife in the city and its region, and Burton’s troubles began when he sided with Muslims who accused Jewish apprentices of defacing an Islamic school, and Jewish moneylenders of cheating peasants. After some Jews with connections in England lodged complaints about this with British officials in London, followed by Burton himself adding fuel to the fire by some hot-headed actions on other matters, he was dismissed from the long-coveted post. His anti-Jewish feelings deepened after he moved to Trieste, a city where Jews were prominent in business and cultural life, and where early stirrings of the political antisemitism that soon became powerful in the Habsburg empire (of which Trieste was then a part) were already present. It was there that he assembled materials for an essay entitled “The Jew” that remained unpublished in his lifetime but of which parts were issued by W. H. Wilkins in 1898, in the same volume that contained the text on the historical significance of Islam we considered earlier, as well as a piece about “The Gypsy.” The essay on Jews was a motley collection of his own observations and statements by others, not all negative or critical, but clearly intended to contribute to the burgeoning stream of anti-Jewish polemic that became a flood by the end of the century. It included most of the stock tropes of antisemitic rhetoric: Jews were covetous money-grubbers, shifty, selfish, and aggressive in their search for wealth; keeping apart from the peoples in whose lands they lived, they still managed to acquire great power and influence, feeding the sense of superiority that underlay their aggression toward others; thus they were rightfully feared and despised by those who knew them. Displaying as he often did the fruits of his wide reading, Burton acknowledged the defenses of Jews put forward by liberals and other defenders, inserting into his text a long passage from a speech by the Whig historian and politician T. B. Macaulay that attributed the negative qualities often identified with Jews to the exclusion and oppression visited upon them. Burton took this explanation seriously, but he blunted its effect by asserting that Jews had long responded to such treatment in a way that people of a more noble and generous nature would not have, namely by developing a theory and practice of revenge. He supported this view by citations from the Talmud and by a list of incidents in which Jews had been accused of violence toward outsiders, evidence that modern Jews did not shrink from putting the Talmudic precepts into practice. The credence Burton clearly gave to these accusations extended even to the often-repeated charge of murdering Christian children in order to use their blood in rituals. This part of the dossier against the Jews was highly truncated in the published version of “The Jew,” however, since the editor Wilkins (a friend of Burton’s and especially of his wife’s) thought it too offensive to publish in toto.⁴⁷

What prefaced this polemic, however, was an account of something about Jews that Burton clearly admired, namely their strength and vigor, both as a group and as individuals. Of all human types the Jews “possess the most abundant vitality,” an “indestructible and irrepressible life-power” that found expression not just in the influence they had gained in so many countries, but also in mental and physical well-being that let them live longer than other groups and enjoy greater immunity from disease (Burton cited statistical studies that he believed supported these differences). We might expect such a catalogue to be attributed to innate physical constitution, in line with the language of race he often employed. But the explanation he gave was not biological; it was cultural: Jewish strength was the consequence of a certain way of life, given shape by the laws laid down by Moses himself:

All the laws attributed to the theistic secularism of Moses were issued with one object—namely that of hardening and tempering the race to an extent which even Sparta ignored. The ancient Jew was more than half a Bedawin and not being an equestrian race his annual journeys to and from Jerusalem were mostly made on foot. His diet was carefully regulated, and his year was a succession of fasts and feasts, as indeed it is now, but not to such an extent as formerly. The results were simply the destruction of all the weaklings and the survival of the fittest.⁴⁸

The famous phrase with which this statement ends was first used by Herbert Spencer in his 1864 treatise Principles of Biology, as an equivalent for what Darwin called “natural selection”; it seems reasonable to assume that Burton had read Spencer by the time he wrote this passage (although I know of no other evidence that he had). What needs to be noted, however, is that the racial character Burton describes was not some genetic inheritance but the result of a set of cultural practices (even if they were in some degree imaginary); it was because the severe demands that Mosaic law imposed on Jews as a people could not be met by their own weaker members that the aggregate grew strong. This was a view quite in line with the social Darwinism Spencer developed out of evolutionary theory, but it departed from the more purely biological perspective usually associated with post-Darwinian racial thinking.

Although Burton seems not to have expressed this view of Jews before he compiled his essay about them, he very likely had something close to it in mind some years earlier in a favorable, albeit cryptic, declaration about them. Responding to some antisemitic statements he encountered in Brazil (where he served as consul before going to Damascus and Trieste), Burton wrote: “Had I a choice of race, there is none to which I would belong more willingly than the Jewish—of course the white family.”⁴⁹ The implication that some Jews were not “white” and that these were inferior to the others suggests that Burton already harbored a certain ambivalence toward Jews. Although he does not say so, it seems likely that “strength and energy” were the qualities that drew him to the ones he admired, since he valued these traits wherever he found them and liked to attribute them to himself; recall the comment about desert bandits quoted above from the Personal Narrative: “Who so revolts against society requires an iron mind and an iron body, and these mankind instinctively admires, however misdirected be their energies.”

Clearly, Burton had moved far from this identification by the time he wrote “The Jew”; all the same, even that essay offered a ground for admiring its subjects, namely that the same culture that hardened Jews as a people also fostered in them a moral attitude Burton found worthy of deep respect, the determination to serve God out of pure devotion and not for any personal advantage. Although the ancient Hebrews already interpreted their special relationship to Jehovah as justifying hostility and violence toward other peoples, the same sense of special communal solidarity

inculcated a rare humanity amongst its own members unknown to all other peoples of antiquity: for instance, it allowed the coward to retire from the field before battle, and, strange to say, it inculcated the very highest of moral dogmas. In 250 B.C. Sochaeus, and after him the Pharisees, according to Josephus, taught that God should be served, not for gain, but for love and gratitude: hence his follower Sadik forbade the looking forward to futurity, even as Moses had neglected the doctrine with studious care. Even in the present age of the world such denegation of egotism would be a higher law.⁵⁰

It may be impossible to decide whether the approval Burton here expressed for allowing cowards to escape battle was genuine or ironic, and similarly whether his association of high moral purity with Jews was at work also in his earlier profession of kinship with them. But finding these ideas in the later essay adds more substance to the evident ambivalence at the core of his dealings with Jews, visible and active even in the moment of his most hostile stance toward them.

Although more difficult to see, a similar complexity can be discerned in his attitude toward black Africans. Burton seems never to have felt any sense of special kinship toward them, but here too the antipathy he often voiced in racial categories needs to be considered alongside some very different judgments. It is worth recalling that Burton appears never to have been bothered by being called a “white Nigger” on account of the relations he sought out with darker-skinned people in India, and it may be that the best path toward understanding his overall relationship to Africa and Africans lies in reversing the usual approach to the question and considering his positive pronouncements before taking up the negative ones. The latter must not be either ignored or underplayed, but the former help to provide a framework within which to see how they fit into his larger mindset.

Burton’s most extensive discussion of black African culture came in the preface he wrote for a collection of West African proverbs and sayings he published in 1865. That he troubled to do the book at all is evidence that he took African culture seriously, and his comments about it are remarkable enough to deserve quotation at length. Invoking the question often (and regrettably) posed in his time, whether “the Negroes are a genuine portion of mankind or not,” Burton went on:

If it is mind that distinguishes men from animals, the question cannot be decided without consulting the languages of the Negroes, for language gives the expression and the manifestation of the mind. Now, as the grammar proves that Negro languages are capable of expressing human thoughts—some of them, through their rich formal development, even with astonishing precision—so specimens of their “Native Literature” [the proverbs] show that the Negroes actually have thoughts to express; that they reflect and reason about things, just as other men. Considered in such a point of view, such specimens may go a long way towards refuting the old-fashioned doctrine of an essential inequality of the Negroes with the rest of mankind, which now and then shows itself, not only in America, but also in Europe.

Such negative judgments had been developed by people who had never heard, or been unable to understand, the speech of black people in their own languages:

But when I was amongst them in their native land, on the soil which the feet of their fathers have trod, and heard them deliver in their own native tongue stirring extempore speeches, adorned with beautiful imagery, and of half an hour’s duration; or when I was writing from their dictation, sometimes two hours in succession, without having to correct a word or alter a construction in twenty or thirty pages; or when in Sierra Leone, I attended examinations of the sons of liberated slaves in Algebra, Geometry, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc.—then, I confess, any other idea never entered my mind but that I had to do with real men.

Burton followed this with similar testimonies from others who had been in like situations, and concluded: “The fact is, civilization takes too much upon herself. There is more of equality between the savage and the civilized—the difference being one of quantity, not of quality—than the latter will admit. For man is everywhere commensurate with man. Hence, whilst the average Englishman despises the Yoruba, the Yoruba ‘reciprocates’ with hate and fear.” Burton made a similar observation in a letter to his friend Monckton Milnes: “Those who talk of the benighted African should have seen the envoy who conveyed to the Governor the ultimatum of the Ashanti King. There was not a European on the coast to compare with him in dignity, self-possession and perfect savoir-faire touching the object of his mission.”⁵¹

Faced with such declarations as these, it is hard not to be astonished, as well as appalled, by the very different things Burton wrote on other occasions. Here he gave vent to all the standard tropes of anti-black prejudice and polemic: Africans were dirty, smelly, lazy, drunken, violent, bestial, stupid, oversexed, and undisciplined. About East Africans in particular, he wrote that their “stagnation of mind, indolence of body, moral deficiency, superstition, and childish passion” betray an “apparent incapacity for improvement,” and that their inability to take a distance from the concerns of each passing moment kept them from developing either memory or any productive kind of imagination. Burton was particularly critical of Africans who attempted to take on European ideas, clothing, or behavior (especially under the influence of Christian missionaries), and his outpourings in this line received enough public notice for them to be attacked by African writers, including the then well-known black physician, scientist, and banker James Africanus Horton, who castigated Burton for advancing false and insulting racial theories.⁵²

A number of things help to account for the sharp differences between what almost seem to be two different Richard Burtons speaking in these voices. One is that in some degree his views changed over time. The negative comments mostly reflect his experiences at the end of the 1850s, when he had his first encounters with Africa and Africans in the continent’s eastern regions, starting with the journey he undertook to the third major Muslim pilgrimage site, Harar in Somaliland, and followed by his attempt to find the source of the Nile in the central African lake regions in the company of another British army officer, John Hauning Speke. Although each trip achieved its aim in some ways, both were painful failures in others, especially for Burton. He undertook the Harar trip as a continuation of his earlier visit to Medina and Mecca, and expected to do it, too, in disguise, as a Muslim merchant. The plan seemed to go well at first but had to he abandoned when Burton was convinced along the way that his light complexion (he neglected to bring along the nut oil he had used to darken his skin in Arabia) would put his life in danger in Harar itself—not because he would be suspected of being a Western European, but because people were likely to take him as a Turk, an identity no less hated in East Africa than that of “Frank.” Thus he made his entrance into Harar in uniform as a British officer and not as a Muslim pilgrim. Even so, he was effectively imprisoned for ten days by the Amir, who ruled the place with a strong and often violent hand. Burton’s life seems to have been in real danger, the Amir fearing that his presence would fulfill an old prophecy about the kingdom losing its independence should any European succeed in entering it. In the end, however, Burton was allowed to go free, chiefly because the ruler feared that the British might retaliate if he harmed one of their officers, curtailing his profitable participation in the slave trade.

While in Harar, Burton pursued his longstanding interest in local cultures and histories (he believed that his ties to local people from whom he sought information on this score may have aided in preserving his life), but one lesson of the visit was that he would not be able to pursue his cultivation of an “Oriental” identity on African soil, and his next African projects chiefly involved geographical exploration in the style of other famous nineteenth-century travelers such as David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. These, however, turned out to bring greater dangers and worse suffering than the Harar trip, partly because of the difficulties of organizing enough local people to support the undertaking, the perils presented by the climate and terrain, the hostile reception given the visitors by local tribes (which ended with Burton being severely wounded and having to be carried in a litter for some weeks), and partly because of the conflict that developed between Burton and his partner Speke. The two were badly matched, Speke being an enthusiast for big-game hunting with no interest in native cultures or religions and no familiarity with local languages. But he was an intrepid if sometimes careless explorer, and it was he who succeeded in locating the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria, at a time when Burton was laid up with illness. The grounds on which he believed in his discovery were shaky and uncertain, involving what he thought he had been told by local people with whom he had no common language, but he succeeded where Burton failed. The latter, partly out of jealousy, refused to credit Speke’s claims, and the venomous and public controversy between them dragged on for years, ending only with Speke’s death in 1864, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that may have been an accident but some believed to be suicide.

Like the Harar episode, the Nile project presented Burton with a very different experience from those he met with in either India or Arabia, and some of what he wrote about it simply reflects the contrast. That many of his comments are bound to strike people with more modern sensibilities as vile and contemptible is testimony to an evolution in attitudes that we should cherish as an advance in both understanding and human empathy. But affirming our commitment to this gain should not close our eyes to the truth of some of Burton’s observations (a number of which, as we shall see, still applied to the life Chinua Achebe described a century later). As Fawn Brodie insists:

There was filth, mutilation, ignorance, indolence, drunkenness and violence. The natives did live in huts populated with “a menagerie of hens, pigeons, and rats of peculiar impudence,” like the poor in Ireland, as he was careful to point out. Certain tribes did burn their witches, again, as he noted, like Europeans of a not-too-distant date. … In several tribes, if an infant cut his upper incisor teeth before the lower, he was killed or sold into slavery. If twins were born, they were often both killed. … Burton saw the disregard for life among his own bearers. One bought a slave child, who as he discovered shortly, could not keep up with the caravan because of sore feet. The owner decided to abandon her, but cut off her head lest she benefit someone else.⁵³

The splendor of nature in Africa could not compensate Burton for the sense of alienation he felt there: “The absence of all association, the sense of loneliness and estrangement, the absurd distance from friend and family seem to diffuse an ugliness over every African river, however fair.” The continent was a “stranger-land,” at the other pole from the Arabia where he so easily felt at home, and which he described in the foreword to the Thousand and One Nights translation as “the land of my predilection … a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past.”⁵⁴ The antipathy Burton felt toward African life was not so complete as to blind him to features he could admire; even in the eastern regions whose conditions made him speak about “degeneration” and “bestiality,” he noted elements close to those he would later cite as evidence for intelligence and cultivation, reporting that “many negro and negroid races” possessed “an unstudied eloquence which the civilized speaker might envy, and which, like poetry, seems to flourish most in the dawn of civilization.” But such observations were mostly drowned out by the tide of revulsion.⁵⁵

One reason why later writings such as the proverbs book could shift the balance toward the positive judgments noted above may simply have been that the impact of Burton’s first experiences in Africa was no longer so immediate and potent, receding at the same time that he acquired more experience of native languages and thinking. Curiously, however, not only did his recourse to racial categories not diminish in the face of his recognition that African tongues and speech testified to genuine intellect and creativity, the moment when Burton presented African cultural forms as evidence for black people’s unquestionable intellectual capacity was also the one when strictly biological and physical thinking became more prominent in his writing. Burton was not alone in taking this direction: he pursued it in concert with the friends and associates with whom he banded together to found the Anthropological Society of London in 1863. The group broke away from an older organization, the Ethnological Society, precisely to give greater emphasis to the physical and biological basis of racial and cultural difference (a viewpoint encouraged by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859); the shift was signaled by the substitution of “anthropological” for “ethnological” in the new organization’s name. Other considerations motivated the break as well, in particular a desire to speak freely in meetings and discussions about sexual behavior in “primitive” societies and about physical sexual features both male and female; such things were forbidden at the Ethnological Society because their sessions were open to women, a problem the new group dealt with by excluding them. Burton stood close to James Hunt, the Anthropological Society’s president and a leader in compiling and using data on measurable physical differences in such things as skull and brain size, and facial and bodily proportions. Burton contributed to all this by collecting skulls in Africa (beginning on the trip in search of the Nile’s source); he often spoke about the racial elements he thought he could discern in various parts of people’s faces or torsos, and like Hunt gave much attention to phrenology, that fashionable nineteenth-century “science” that traced attributes of personality to cranial shapes and bumps.⁵⁶

How can we understand Burton’s turning in this direction just at the moment when he was praising the precision and expressive power of African languages and the high cultural level of their proverbs, declaring at the same time that the distance between “savage” and “civilized” was much less than commonly supposed? And how can a person so aware, as he was in the case of the Jews, that significant “racial” characteristics can be generated by culture and history no less than by biology, have insisted on the determining power of measurable physical features? These tangled questions stand near the center of any attempt to grasp how Burton’s preconceptions and experiences shaped his understanding of cultural relations and whether there was any consistency to his thinking. They are important in grasping broadly shared nineteenth-century attitudes as well.

A key to unraveling them has been supplied by Dane Kennedy: behind Burton’s emphasis on the biological determination of differences between human groups was his opposition to one particular and prominent way of affirming human universality in his time, the one advanced by Christian evangelicals. For them what mattered most about human beings was the state of their souls; cultural difference was a marginal concern compared with the spiritual core common to humans everywhere and the need to bring all individuals into the fold of faith. By contrast, looking for a physical basis of differences in thinking and behavior was a way to shine a more intense light on cultural diversity too.

Evangelical Christians played a large role in nineteenth-century culture. Much of the puritanical moralism signaled by the term Victorian, and against which Burton spoke out all through his life, arose from the evangelical campaign to shape everyday life around rigorous adherence to Christian precepts. Thus it is not surprising that Burton was anything but friendly to the missionary project of conversion pursued by evangelicals in the 1860s. Among their converts were the most prominent of the Africans who rose up against Burton’s negative pronouncements about African life and culture. Like the Sepoy whom he decried on his first trip to India, such people appeared in his eyes as ungainly hybrids, neither genuinely African nor truly European. He saw the Africans who had embraced the missionary message as coming from the same mold, dressing themselves up in “the cast-off finery of Europe” and behaving accordingly. Like some of Burton’s other reactions to Africans, this one seems to have been fed by a visceral dislike that issued in judgments both superficial and mean-spirited; later he came to recognize that people such as his chief critic, James Africanus Horton, were capable of genuine cultivation and accomplishment. All the same, I think it is wrong to see these notions as in tension with Burton’s own engagement with disguise and cultural synthesis, as some writers have. On one level, his dislike of Christianized Africans constituted his own version of the Muslim suspicion and distrust of converts he noted in both India and Arabia; in addition, it gave expression to his understanding that merely changing one’s religious faith could not bridge the distance between cultures, because it did not address the pervasive contrasts in everyday behavior and the presuppositions about the world underlying them that bulked so large in cultural identity.

Burton’s objections to the missionary project rested on an additional ground, his conviction that core elements of Christianity fit badly with African life as it existed, especially in contrast with the other non-native religion that was expanding its presence on the continent during the nineteenth century, Islam. Muslim doctrine and ethics set itself against practices that constituted immediate and powerful barriers to moral and social advancement in Africa: “cannibalism and fetishism, the witch tortures, the poison ordeals and legal incest, the ‘customs’ [to be described below] and the murders of albinos, of twins.” That it left in place other objectionable things, “polygamy, domestic slavery, and the degradation of women,” was true, but abolishing them (as Christian missionaries desired) would have required a fundamental social restructuring. “Unlike Christianity,” as Dane Kennedy summarizes Burton’s view, “which left its converts socially deracinated and morally unmoored, [Islam] supplied them with a syncretist faith that accommodated itself to ancestral traditions while contributing a new social and ethical framework for meeting the wider world.”⁵⁷ It was this cultural fit, not any theological consideration, that led Burton to see Islam’s influence there as positive, while Christianity’s was not.

Here as elsewhere, however, Burton’s ability to grasp such contrasts in cultural terms did not lead him to retreat from his emphasis on racial difference conceived biologically. The “first step in moral progress” Islam provided prepared “the African … for a steady onward career, as far as his faculties can take him.” Such a formula makes modern readers cringe, a reaction that is bound to be deepened in the face of two positions Burton took that were in accord with it. The first of these was his attitude toward slavery. In several writings he argued that slavery was an appropriate and justifiable condition in situations where people’s degree of social and intellectual development had not reached a sufficiently “civilized” level, and that Africans were still in the process of reaching such a point. Although no longer so justified as it had once been, slavery had until recently served as a vehicle of improvement, taking people out of situations whose isolated and undeveloped conditions offered few resources for bringing them to a higher plane of existence.⁵⁸ The second notion Burton and his friends such as Hunt defended against Christian-inspired views (and those of the Ethnological Society) had to do with whether differing human groups were all branches of a single tree, or whether instead they descended from separate origins and lineages. Christianity, rooted in the Biblical idea of a single creation, entailed a monogenist view of humanity, a single point of human origin; but the Anthropological Society promoted polygenism, which traced differing groups to different evolutionary pathways, along which some had advanced farther than others. Few notions are more offensive to advocates of human equality today, and it is not easy for us to recognize the very different implications that the choice between the two notions carried. All the same, as Kennedy has recognized:

Burton’s embrace of a polygenist understanding of race was motivated not just by his belief in the separate genesis of Africans, but by his desire to defend their distinctive social practices and sense of cultural identity against extinction. He was most fervently outspoken in his advocacy of the polygenist position during his years in West Africa because it was there that the missionaries had made their most significant inroads against indigenous systems of behavior and belief. … What appears to us a paradox—the convergence of curiosity about other cultures as autonomous systems operating outside any absolute standards with the view of race as a biological fact whose various groupings are distinct, fixed, and hierarchically ordered—was entirely consistent and logical to Burton.⁵⁹

The idea that cultural contrasts were rooted in racial difference firmed up the ground on which different ways of life could be granted independence against the homogenizing thrust of European and especially Christian claims to cultural universality.

It was this perspective that allowed Burton to arrive at some remarkable and even sympathetic understandings of practices often regarded as merely cruel and barbaric. Of these, few were looked on with greater horror by Westerners than the “customs” of the West African kingdom of Dahomey, the ritual acts by which groups of people were put to death to provide companions for a defunct king. Burton had listed the “customs” along with cannibalism and infanticide as among the most barbarous of African practices in his 1863 book Wanderings in West Africa. But the next year he was sent to Dahomey to try to put a stop to the practice, and once there he became convinced that it was too deeply rooted in native beliefs and loyalties to be abolished (a judgment that recalls his reports to Napier about intra-familial violence in Sind).

These beliefs and loyalties, moreover, were akin to some that underlay “civilized” practices: rather than “love of bloodshed,” what the executions expressed was “filial piety.” “The Dahoman, like the ancient Egyptian, holds this world to be his temporary lodging. His true home is Ku-to-men, Deadman’s Land. It is not a place of rewards and punishments, but a Hades for ghosts, a region of shades, where the King will rule for ever and where the slave will for ever serve. The idea is perpetually present to the popular mind.” When a king dies, he must be sent to Ku-to-men with a retinue of wives, ministers, friends, and servants; royal dignity required that the numbers be large, so that as many as two thousand people might be decapitated in the “grand customs” that followed a royal death. Smaller numbers were dispatched in the yearly echoes of the larger ritual. Sometimes these were carried out in order for the living to communicate with the dead. “The king, wishing to send a message to his father, summons a captive, carefully primes him with the subject of his errand … and strikes off his head. If an important word be casually omitted he repeats the operation.” The deaths were therefore vehicles of social connection, not a breaking of interpersonal bonds. “A Dahoman king neglecting these rites would be looked upon as the most impious of men.” For an outsider to argue that the practice should stop was bootless: “It may be compared without disrespect to memorialising the Vatican against masses for the dead.”⁶⁰

Burton’s account of these practices—as well as of some others, involving female warriors and their complex sexuality—foreshadows that of more modern anthropologists, making clear that his positing of a biological basis for cultural difference did not impede—if anything it encouraged and enhanced—his ability to understand it in strictly cultural terms. His attention to the ways that apparently senseless forms of behavior give expression to coherent and pervasive systems of belief calls up a well-known comment of the highly (and rightly) esteemed anthropologist Clifford Geertz: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs.”⁶¹ Burton did not rise to the level of Geertz’s metaphor, but he would easily have grasped its sense.

We need to recognize, however, that he offered such analyses in a somewhat different spirit from the cultural anthropology that has descended from Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. Anthropologists in this tradition have been not just inquirers into cultures that are more compact and integrated (and to us more exotic) than the ones modern Westerners inhabit, but defenders of those other ways of life, against outside efforts to “improve” the lives of their members.⁶² Burton was also a defender of the cultures he sought to understand, the African ones toward which he felt some kind of instinctive unease no less than the Arab ones he spontaneously admired, but his attitude differed in one significant respect from that of modern anthropologists. The best way to describe this difference might be to say that he was more mindful than his successors that what Geertz describes as webs of meaning are also tissues of nonsense, or—perhaps it would be better to say—that it mattered more to him to make clear how fully permeable the boundary between cultural meaning and nonsense really is.

That he regarded “primitive” cultures as shot through with nonsense no less than with the meaning he identified in the Dahomey “customs” is already clear in his earlier writings on Africa. Burton was surely aware that such practices as killing or enslaving infants who cut their incisor teeth in the wrong order had some basis in shared beliefs and assumptions too, but the practice was no less to be condemned for that, and on some level this was his attitude toward sending messages to the land of the dead by chopping off the heads of living messengers. In the same place where he defended the Dahomey customs he told of a tribe that had nearly been annihilated because its members believed that putting a sacred snake on the path to their village would defend them from their enemies (the reptile was dangerous, Burton maintained, only to rats). This does not mean that he regarded all such “civilized” judgments as superior to those of less advanced people: contesting the common European view that Africans in general led “a wretched existence,” he maintained that “the so-called reflecting part of Creation will measure every other individual’s happiness or misery by his own; consequently it is hoodwinked in its judgment. Considering the wisdom displayed in the distribution and adaptation of mankind, I venture to opine that all are equally blessed and cursed.” Generalizing this judgment in another place, he wrote that “nations are poor judges of one another; each looks upon itself as an exemplar to the world and vents its philanthropy by forcing its infallible system upon its neighbor. How long is it since popular literature has begun to confess that the British Constitution is not quite fit for the whole human race, and that the Anglo-Saxon has much to do at home, before he sets out a-colonelling to regenerate mankind?” (To which Americans in the first decades of the twenty-first century may sadly respond that for some of their elected leaders such a time has, alas, not yet arrived, even now.)

* * *

This skepticism, dashing cold water on both the claims cultures make to regulate the lives of their members and on their belief in the high worth of their values, became a central element in Burton’s meditation on cultural difference sometime in the 1860s. That this attitude should be understood as a fruit of his longstanding sense of never belonging wholly to any single culture, and of his attempts to carve out for himself some kind of space between different ones, can best be seen by looking at the two works in which he gave it most explicit expression, Stone Talk (1865) and The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el-Yezdi (1880).

The two writings strike different tones, the first excited and aggressive, the second calmer and more reflective, and only the former speaks specifically about life in the nineteenth century, but the two works are very close in spirit. Both are written in verse, there is much overlap in their content, and both put ideas and sentiments that are clearly Burton’s own in the mouths of imagined “Orientals,” a Hindu in the first and a Muslim in the second. Burton never publicly admitted being the author of either, a tactic that served to shield him from the opprobrium that giving voice to radical critiques of morality, religion, and contemporary British and European life would have been bound to call down on his head; but not putting his name to the works also allowed him to speak at once as a person with a particular cultural identity—not his own—and as an anonymous voice coming from no definite place. The first book, a dialogue between an English scholar, “Dr. Polyglott,” returning very tipsy from a dinner at which the talk was “’Bout India, Indians and all that,” and a London paving stone that his inebriation helps him to see as the metamorphosis of a long-ago Brahman, was published under the name “Frank Baker” (“Frank,” as Fawn Brodie notes, was a version of Burton’s own second name, Francis, and Baker the family name of his mother); the second claimed to be a translation by “F.B.” of a poem by the Persian friend (and Mecca pilgrim, since he bore the honorific “Haji”) whose name appeared on the title page. Burton printed 200 copies of the first but few survive because his wife, Isabel, quickly recognizing him behind the pseudonym and fearing that enemies would use the book to damage his chances for getting desirable appointments from the Foreign Office, bought up as many copies as she could find and burned them. With its more polished and sweet-sounding style, the Kasidah seems to have been partly inspired by the success of Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (published in 1859), which Burton hoped to emulate, but in contrast to its model it found little success with the public (although it has recently been reprinted a number of times). Like Fitzgerald’s book, Burton’s affirms the pleasures of life in the present over the promises of any future or beyond, but the Kasidah is peppered with anti-religious ideas that most readers at the time would have found shocking.⁶³

One thing that made Isabel so anxious about the possible impact of Stone Talk on Burton’s career was the book’s wide-ranging and acid-voiced criticisms of contemporary European life. A major focus was on moral and religious hypocrisy, especially in regard to English sexual and moral prudery and its effects on women; putting this critique in the mouth of a Hindu allowed its anti-Christian dimensions to receive especially free rein. No less harsh, however, was the blast against imperialism, an evil in Europe since the time of the Romans: “But SHE forgot / to plunder subjects; You do not.” The “death and doom” brought by “the ravening Saxon,” and that left “India once so happy, now / In scale of nations sunk so low,” was so palpable that the very mention of her name in the House of Commons “clears every bench to England’s shame.” (This did indeed happen on some occasions in Parliament.) Similar effects of imperial domination were evident among “the Red Man in the [American] West,” as well as in Turkey, Tasmania, and Japan. Nor were things better inside Britain itself, where many poor people had been turned into virtual slaves, condemned to inhabit such places as “the dread dens of Manchester.” All the same, no horror of the time was worse than the actual slave trade, “blacks bepacked like cotton bales, / Sold like cattle, lashed till raw / By nankeen’d whites in hats of straw.”⁶⁴

The strong accents in which these things are condemned (and the fatuous replies put in the mouth of “Dr. Polyglott”) make it evident that Burton shared the views of his Brahman “stone. These features of Stone Talk cast strong doubt on the claims put forward by some writers that his negative pronouncements about Africans, even when couched in terms of race, were those of an apologist for empire. In fact, Burton had been a critic of it all along, condemning British domination of India for the hatred and animosity it bred even before he left in 1849, and in one unwelcome memo effectively predicting the bloody uprising that shook the foundations of British rule in 1857, leading the crown to take over the East India Company’s status as the Raj’s sovereign authority. He repeated this diagnosis in the autobiographical memoir published by his wife, describing how the rigidity of the Company’s administrators and their failure to understand local life led them to turn once flourishing villages into places of poverty and suffering; in contrast, the native rulers whom the Company displaced had taxed heavily when harvests were good and lightly when they were not. “Anglo-Indian rule had no elasticity, and everything was iron-bound; it was all rule without exception. A crack young Collector would have considered himself dishonored had he failed to send in the same amount of revenues during a bad season, as during the best year.”⁶⁵

The religious and moral radicalism and the extreme cultural relativism of both Stone Talk and the Kasidah sprang in large part from the generalization of these views. Railing against the readiness of British Protestants to condemn Catholics for their errors and to attribute immorality to countries still loyal to the papacy, thus hypocritically casting a veil over their own lapses, the Brahman insists that religious beliefs are never founded on anything objective, and that people simply absorb whatever views happen to hold sway where they grow up:

Chance birth, chance teaching—these decide

The faiths wherewith men feed their pride;

And, once on childhood’s plastic mind

The trace deep cut, you seldom find

Effaceable, unless the brain

Be either wanting or insane.

The Kasidah applies the same perspective to morals:

There is no Good, there is no Bad;

these be the whims of mortal will:

What works me weal that call I “good,

what hams and hurts I hold as “ill”:

They change with place, they shift with race;

and, in the veriest space of time

Each Vice has worn a Virtue’s crown;

all Good was banned as sin or crime.

In the notes appended to his “translation” of Haji Abdu’s verses, “F.B.” refers back to these lines when he says that his friend was “weary of … finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error.” It is from these observations, more than from any philosophical argument, that the poem’s author derives his conviction that no religious system can contain universal truth; at best each one grasps some fragment of the meaning that every human group seeks to wrest from the world in order to give value to its own form of life.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true:

Truth is the shattered mirror strown

In myriad bits; while each believes

his little bit the whole to own.

But this is no mere banal affirmation of diversity. Quoting Pope’s line “whatever is, is right,” “F.B.” at once accepts and upends it: “Unfortunately the converse is just as true:—whatever is, is wrong.”⁶⁶

Applied to the interweaving of claims to universal truth with the particular forms of life they seek to validate, Burton’s variation on Pope’s maxim stands as a generalized declaration that the “self-spun webs of significance” that are human cultures are interwoven with threads of nonsense. Achieving a liberating distance from them is the precondition for acquiring genuine knowledge and understanding: “he knows not how to know / who knows not also how to unknow.” One particular point on which Haji Abdu offered such skeptically grounded knowledge was that there exists no spiritual realm independent of material reality, and that therefore the soul was not an entity separate from the body. The soul was one of those “words that gender things. … Sufficeth not the breath of life / to work the matterborn machine?” Burton elaborated this mix of materialism and skepticism in part by drawing on Enlightenment thinking; the Kasidah quoted both Voltaire and Diderot, and its author surely knew that Montesquieu had preceded him in warning against the limited and parochial perspective from which peoples stake their claims to cosmic significance. Haji Abdu followed the author of the Persian Letters in finding both irony and grounds for modesty in the way that creatures who live on a mere “dot in the universe” propose themselves “as an exact model for providence.”⁶⁷

But the particular inflection the Kasidah gave these notions put Burton closer to an intellectual figure of his own time, Friedrich Nietzsche. Burton’s skepticism about culturally rooted notions of morality and truth led him to speak in radically individualist terms very close to those Nietzsche would use in connection with the figure he called the Übermensch,the heroic personality who creates life-sustaining values wholly from within, summoning up the deep power that lesser individuals both lack and fear. “He noblest lives and noblest dies / who makes and keeps his self-made laws,” the Kasidah proclaims in one place, and in another, “Be thine own Deus: make self free, / liberal as the circling air.” Nietzsche’s path to similar formulations was more complex and more philosophically sophisticated than Burton’s, but he too drew part of the inspiration for them from the recognition that every human culture, in setting up what Zarathustra called a “tablet of good” for itself, at once releases the force of human creativity and imprisons it within limits, erecting barriers against the very powers that humanity might employ to raise itself to a higher and freer mode of existence.⁶⁸ Burton shared with Nietzsche the sense that the path to such liberation lay through people recognizing themselves as the sole source of their beliefs and values, and of the supposedly divine beings that proclaim and enforce them, thereby regaining access to the creative powers cultures obstruct in the very moment of releasing them.

In proclaiming this radical message, Stone Talk and the Kasidah also shine a light on the link Burton himself recognized between it and his condition of living between cultures. Already in writings of the 1840s, as we saw above, he associated the skepticism and materialism he would advocate in his later works with Indians whose intellectual independence was made possible by their simultaneous connection to two competing belief systems. This was the case with certain Amils who “become Dahri, or materialists” through reflecting on the similarities and differences between their traditional Hinduism and the Muslim beliefs of their neighbors; they acknowledged a deity, but one uncoupled “from all revelation,” and embodying “the eternity past and future of matter in its different modifications.” Only a few of these materialists became outright atheists, but those who did were more likely than European unbelievers to urge their conclusions on others. Burton’s involvement in Eastern religions and forms of life played a parallel role in the evolution that drew him to a similar advocacy, a connection he acknowledged by choosing Hindu and Muslim spokesmen for himself in his two verse books. These connections would be reaffirmed in the project that capped his career in the 1880s, his translation of the Thousand and One Nights; but we will see that in it he declared Islam to be no less in need of rescue from the limits all cultures impose on their members than was the complex of British values and attitudes whose narrow puritanism he had long bemoaned.

* * *

The stories that make up the Thousand and One Nights had been popular in the West since their first translation into a European language by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717; a number of English versions were made from Galland’s French text both in his century and the next, and the exotic and magical qualities of the tales made them staples of popular literature, especially for children. But Galland’s version was far from complete, and his choice of what stories to include was shaped partly by a passion for fairy tales that made him see the Nights chiefly as a source for them, and partly by his desire to produce a book that would not offend moral sensibilities. Very similar motives assured that the English version made from his text and even some early attempts to go back to the Arabic original in the early 1800s would suffer from many of the same limits.

Burton was not the first person to seek a more authentic rendering; in his time two English Arabists preceded him in bringing out new versions of the tales. The first was Edward W. Lane, whose earlier book, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), provided a major source of knowledge about Arab and Muslim life for many in the nineteenth century, including Burton. Lane had dressed and lived in the manner of a local during the two years he spent in Cairo in the 1820s, gathering material for his book and learning Arabic. He later produced an Arabic-English dictionary still regularly used by scholars today. His translation of the Nights has both admirers and detractors (Burton among the latter), but whatever its virtues it was far from complete, leaving out whatever he considered “objectionable” or “licentious.” Much closer to what Burton had in mind was the work of a younger Arabist, John Payne, the first to produce a complete version (around four times the length of Galland’s, and three times that of Lane), of which the first volume appeared in 1882. Burton greeted it with praise, judging its success in rendering difficult passages so complete that “all future translators must perforce use the same expression under pain of falling far short.” In a letter to Payne he acknowledged the younger man’s priority and promised not to put out his own version until the other’s was complete; the friendly relations between the two led each to dedicate a volume to the other. Despite this, much controversy has grown up around their relations, some accusing Burton of simply stealing from Payne. This judgment is almost certainly too harsh (Fawn Brodie has given a balanced and sensible defense of Burton in her biography), but there seems no doubt that Burton made considerable use of Payne’s text in producing his own, and it may well be that his own version would not have been ready for publication in 1885 (or ever) if Payne’s work had not been available to him.⁶⁹

For us, however, these questions matter far less than the role the translation played in Burton’s larger involvement with Arab and Muslim culture. He saw his work on the Nights as “a natural outcome of my Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah,” noting that while on his way he stayed for some weeks with a physician friend, John Steinhaeuser, who lived in Aden and shared his fascination for the tales, and that the two agreed to collaborate on the “full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated translation” they both wished to see. The plan was for Steinhaeuser to work on prose passages and Burton on verse ones, but these hopes collapsed when Steinhaeuser died suddenly while still in his fifties. Whatever work he had done was lost, leaving Burton with the need to start pretty much from scratch. In his foreword he described the book, arduous as it appeared (especially because of the extensive apparatus of notes, many of them learned and extensive essays on matters grammatical, religious, or social), as “a labor of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction,” especially during the years when he suffered “banishment” to West Africa and South America; it was in contrast to these other places that he described Arabia in the terms we noted earlier, as “the land of my predilection … a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past.”

Burton invoked this sense of having an especially intimate connection to the Nights and its world in explaining why he thought his version of the tales was still needed despite the existence of all the earlier ones. His object was “to show what ‘The Thousand Nights and a Night’ really is,” not by translating the text literally, word for word, but “by writing as the Arab would have written in English.” Burton would probably have acknowledged that both Edward Lane and John Payne had the linguistic capacity to pursue such a goal, but neither in his view identified enough with the spirit and tenor of the tales to undertake it—Lane because he remained an Evangelical Christian, and Payne out of reticence. “My work claims to be a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga-book, by preserving intact, not only the spirit, but even the mécanique, the manner and the matter.” The last sentence brings to mind his attempt in the pilgrimage book to convey both the workings and the spirit of what went on at Medina and Mecca through careful attention to the details of the rituals, participation in the feelings aroused in other pilgrims, and a literal and sympathetic enunciation of the prayer texts.

But the project of the Nights had a second side, namely achieving what was the “glory” of the translator: “to add something to his native tongue,” providing new and expressive metaphors and turns of speech. He hoped these novel words or phrases would enter English as equivalents for “the tropes and figures which the Arabic language often packs into a single term.” To offer them required that the translator gamble on the willingness of readers to accept the new coinages as an enrichment of English rather than a defection from it: “I have never hesitated to coin a word when wanted, such as ‘she snorted and snarked,’ fully to represent the original. These, like many in Rabelais, are mere barbarisms unless generally adopted; in which case they become civilised and common currency.” Seeking to enrich his own language in this way gave his intercultural existence a new dimension. Hitherto his Arab involvements had chiefly focused on himself, expanding or deepening his personal existence; here he turned the interchange in the opposite direction, reinvesting the fruits of his efforts in the native cultural ground that was still his own.

Intertwined with this aim was the one Burton pursued in the Kasidah and Stone Talk, using an expanded consciousness to show the arbitrary nature of the moral and intellectual limits cultures impose on their members, so as to encourage a certain degree of escape from them. It was especially in the realm of erotic experience that he saw the Nights as contributing to this liberation. Exposure to Eastern ways showed the provincial nature of Western sexual mores both in regard to certain particular topics and in attitudes toward sex more generally. The two particular matters were same-sex relationships and the amatory lives of women. Burton was less than consistent in regard to the first: he employed a general argument to defend homosexuality against the notion common in his time that it was “unnatural,” countering that whatever human beings do is natural to them. But when he set out to show that same-sex relations were more common and widespread outside Europe than within it, it was only male homosexuality he considered; sex between women did not enter the picture. We may never know whether Burton himself ever engaged in sex with other men, but he clearly had a fascination with it (going back at least to his days in Sind), and in the Terminal Essay that concluded his translation of the Nights he used the diverse attitudes taken toward it in different places to underscore the arbitrary nature of cultural restrictions (he also offered some possible explanations for the differences, but we must leave them aside here). He did not recommend that Europeans follow these examples in regard to same-sex relations, but clearly thought that Westerners could profit from an understanding of Eastern attitudes toward female sexuality; these were premised on a widespread sense that women no less than men had a right to sexual satisfaction, and that men had a responsibility to provide it. Such a stance made for more harmonious and more mutually respectful relationships, raising the general level of happiness.⁷⁰

All these aspects of actual sexual practice were deeply tied up in his mind with a less physical side of erotic life, namely the power of desire to nurture imagination and fantasy. In this regard linguistic norms were no less significant than behavioral ones, and Burton gave much attention to the contrast between the Western and especially British penchant for casting a veil of prudish reticence over sexual matters, and the taken-for-granted Eastern expectation that people could and should speak directly and unreservedly about them. Burton’s advocacy of freer sexual talk was never absolute (he resisted putting his translation of the Nights in the hands of girls and young women), but it was clearly part of a sense that involvement in Eastern practices could liberate Westerners from the restrictions they senselessly imposed on themselves. He defended the “dirty talk” (turpiloquium) both in his foreword to the first volume and in the Terminal Essay that concludes the last, agreeing with many in his own time and since that what counts as gross or indecent language changes with time and place, insisting in particular that (as the eighteenth-century English orientalist William Jones said about Indians) many peoples to the east of Europe have never considered “that anything natural can be offensively obscene,” and enjoying the irony with which an early French traveler described the Japanese as “so crude that they only know to call things by their names.” Burton made it clear, however, that this ease of dealing with things only gingerly touched by his contemporaries did not lower the level of the Nights as a whole; on the contrary (and I think any fair and attentive reader will agree), “The general tone of The Nights is exceptionally high and pure. … The pathos is sweet, deep and genuine; tender, simple and true. … Its life, strong, splendid and multitudinous, is everywhere flavored with that unaffected pessimism and constitutionals melancholy which strike deepest root under the brightest skies and which sigh in the face of heaven” that (translating the words that Burton quoted, as he often did, in Latin) “human life is but a brief escape from death.” What the tales lacked was not civility but what some in the nineteenth century took to be refinement: “innocence of the word not of the thought; morality of the tongue not of the heart, and the sincere homage paid to virtue in guise of perfect hypocrisy.”⁷¹

The overall implications of this defense of liberated speech only emerge when we note that Burton did not view the power of the Nights to undermine cultural limits as limited to Europeans: it operated in the East, too, by virtue of the tales’ ability to give free rein to a human capacity for cultural inventiveness against which Islam set up barriers no less rigid than those imposed by Christianity. Burton’s attention to this aspect of the collection has at least two features that have not been sufficiently appreciated, first his insistence on regarding the stories as a hybrid product of two cultures and religions, one Persian-Zoroastrian, the other Arab-Muslim, and second the way that his emphasis on this mixing led him to view Mohammed and his achievement in a more negative light than he had before.

Several earlier scholars and writers (including Galland, the first European translator) had maintained that the main body of the tales originated not in the Arab lands but in Persia before the advent of Islam, but others contested the point, including Lane. His authority gave the claim new currency, so that Burton’s emphasis on it formed part of what made his approach distinctive. The arguments need not detain us much; they involve the Persian origins of the chief figures’ names, including Scheherazade and her sister Dunyazad, and references in early Arabic sources to the Persian originals of the collection. Burton maintained that over time Arabic names and historical figures were inserted by “a host of editors, scribes and copyists,” who also converted “the florid and rhetorical Persian” into “the straight-forward, business-like, matter of fact Arabic,” at the same time giving Arabic names to the originally Zoroastrian gods, spirits, and kings. These changes affected all three of the basic types of stories in the Nights, animal fables, historical anecdotes, and fairy tales, but it was especially the last category that was “wholly and purely Persian,” and it was from it that the collection derived its remarkable power over readers. Even in Galland’s corrupt and limited version, compelled by “deference to public taste [a century before Victoria, and in France] to expunge the often repulsive simplicity, the childish indecencies and the wild orgies of the original,” and which clothed “the bare body in the best of Parisian suits,” the tales “arouse strange longings and indescribable desires; their marvelous imaginativeness produces an insensible brightening of mind and an increase of fancy-power, making one dream that behind them lies the new and unseen, the strange and unexpected—in fact all the glamour of the unknown.”

In a comparison whose personal reference we will easily recognize, Burton explained that “the grand source of pleasure in Fairy Tales is the natural desire to learn more of the Wonderland which is known to many as a word and nothing more, like Central Africa before the last half century: thus the interest is that of the ‘Personal Narrative’ of a grand exploration to one who delights in travels.”⁷² Although Galland and other translators, by leaving many tales out and cleaning up the language of others, sought to separate the Nights as a gateway to a world of fantasy from the frank and direct talk about sex contained in the original, the continuity between them was central to what made the collection so attractive and significant to Burton. In his eyes the power of the sex talk to inspire fantasy was twinned with the ability of the fairy-tale atmosphere to license talk about sex. We see this especially in a comment he made about a story in which a eunuch makes clear that his physical maiming did not leave him void of desire. Burton noted that eunuchs could be created by removing or damaging their sexual organs in various ways, “but in all cases the animal passion remains, for in man, unlike other animals, the fons veneris [the spring of amatory desire] is the brain. The story of Abelard proves this.”⁷³ The continuity between sexuality and fantasy was hardly a new idea, to be sure, but it was the essential ground on which Burton located the Nights.

It is just this positive valuation of fantasy that Burton now portrayed as foreign to the spirit and letter of original Islam. The change from what he had said earlier was chiefly one of emphasis but it is striking nonetheless. In his earlier essay on “El Islam, or The Rank of Muhammadanism among the Religions of the World,” Burton described the terms of the Prophet’s revelation as “so lofty and majestic that they sank for ever into the heart-core of his followers,” but blamed some among the latter for turning the message into “a mass of stringent ordinances so disposed as to provide for every contingency … a well-organized system of practical precepts.” Now, however, the attempt to make Islam a legalistic and prosaic system of permitted and forbidden things, and from which “Persian supernaturalism” was specifically excluded, began with the Prophet himself, albeit under the influence of his milieu:

Mohammed, a great and commanding genius, blighted and narrowed by surroundings and circumstance to something little higher than a Covenanter or a Puritan, declared to his followers, “I am sent to ’stablish the manners and customs”; and his deficiency of imagination made him dislike everything but “women, perfumes, and prayers,” and with an especial aversion to music and poetry, plastic art and fiction.

The Prophet took over some miraculous and magical notions from Judaism (which had borrowed them, against Moses’s original intention, from the Babylonians) but violently repressed a movement to allow “certain Persian fabliaux” to achieve recognition alongside the stories of the Qu’ran. Thus it was he who inspired the “furious fanaticism and one-idea’d intolerance which made Caliph Omar destroy all he could find of the Alexandrian Library and prescribe burning for the Holy Books of the Persian Guebres [the Zoroastrians]. And the taint still lingers in Al-Islam: it will be said of a pious man, ‘He always studies the Koran, the Traditions and other books of Law and Religion; and he never reads poems nor listens to music or to stories.’ ” In other words, the founder of Muslim faith saw his task as setting limits not just to belief and behavior but to imagination and the materials that could nourish it; resources for overcoming these constraints had to come from somewhere else, and in the Nights this meant access to the materials of a different culture, to the poetic sense of wonder infused by the Persian progenitors of the tales. Without this alien fertilization, the form of life the Prophet instituted remained no less confining and restrictive than was the European culture whose limits Burton sought to transcend through his involvement with Islam.

The Islamic world did not wait idly for what Persian storytellers would contribute to its culture, however; the receptivity to some such infusion of foreign content was prepared by something in human nature that spontaneously rebelled against such restrictions. Before this need found its voice in the Persian accents of the Nights, “human nature” itself, “stronger than the Prophet” and “outraged” by the “arid, jejeune, and material” dispensation Mohammed provided, “took speedy and absolute revenge”:

Before the first century had elapsed, orthodox Al-Islam was startled by the rise of Tasawwuf or Sufyism, a revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man’s hunger for ‘belief’ which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright cease to be belief.⁷⁴

It was to the same Sufism (Tasawwuf is another name for the spiritual teaching it promotes) that Burton himself had long been attracted, receiving instruction and training in it during the 1840s, and it gave life to the character of the wandering Dervish that he chose for his disguise on the pilgrimage. The “Hylozoism” Burton refers to here—the notion that all matter is in some sense alive—appeared in the fusion of Hindu metempsychosis with Darwinist materialism he effected in Stone Talk, and it was the mystical implications of this mix of physicalism and vitalism that informed the behest the Kasidah addressed to lovers of truth not to make the object of their quest too definite and concrete: “leave it vague as airy space, / Dark in its darkness mystical.” The dream world of boundless wonder provided by the Nights, where imagination was free to break through the confines set by both European culture and by original Islam, provided a continuation and supplement to the Sufi’s poetical approach to all things, unrestrained by practical considerations.

Thus the Nights stood as testimony to the need that arises for people in Islam no less than in the West—Burton did not explicitly extend the point to include every culture, but these were the two he knew best—to find escape from the particular world of their formation in order to liberate the human powers of creativity reined in or suppressed by established ways of life. Here Burton’s commentary on his translation generalized his long-pursued quest to inhabit a space between cultures, making it exemplify a necessary response to the situation all people face once they become enmeshed in the webs of meaning and nonsense they create in order to give bounded coherence to their collective lives.