Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel

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.

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      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