Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
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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.
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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.