3. Sir Richard Francis Burton's 'Personal Narrative Of A Pilgrimage To Al-Madinah and Meccah'
Burton is no philosopher in a strict sense, but he is a keen student of the human subject. An accomplished solider, explorer, linguist, and translator he also has amateur hats in anthropology (particularly in ethnography) and religious studies. The guy was a genuine badass with too many
exploits to cover here, but one I need to mention is his trip to Medina and Mecca disguised as a Muslim so he could study the Hajj pilgrimage. That is some serious gumption.
Burton tried several disguises before settling on portraying himself a Sufi Sheikh hailing from Afghanistan. How an Englishman could trick other Afghanis into thinking he was a fellow countryman is beyond me, but he reports that he did it on several occasions. Using tricks of folk magic and hypnotism, he earned his keep as a healer, helping perfectly healthy people overcome imagined ailments with some soothing words, tonic water, and a variety of other harmless placebos he had become acquainted with as “oriental curiosities”.
Burton’s writing seems to take Horace’s advice of: “You’ll write wonderfully, if by a deft selection make a familiar word look new.” To the current social sciences, his writings are just the antiquated scribbling of a Victorian Englishmen stuck in his times, but his wit and style are hard to match. His talent of observation cuts through a lot of the cross-cultural static that would inhibit most Western observers of Arab subjects. Consider this selection on the natives of Medina (from Chapter 21):
They are taught from their childhood that the Madani is a favored being, to be respected however vile or schismatic; and that the vengeance of Allah will fall upon anyone who ventures to abuse, much more to strike him [3]. They receive a stranger at the shop window with the haughtiness of Pashas, and take pains to show him, by words as well by looks, they consider themselves as "good gentlemen as the king, only not so rich.' Added to this pride are indolence, and the true Arab prejudice, which, even in the present day, prevents a Badawi from marrying the daughter of an artisan. Like Castilians, they consider labor humiliating to any but a slave; nor is this, as a clever French author remarks, by any means an unreasonable idea, since Heaven, to punish man for disobedience caused him to eat daily bread by the sweat of his brow. Besides, there is degradation, moral and physical, in handiwork compared with the freedom of the Desert.
[3] History informs us that the sanctity of their birth-place has not always preserved the people of Al-Nadinah. But the memory of their misfortunes is soon washed away by the overwhelming pride of the race.
I got my beat up copy of Burton’s Pilgrimage a gift from my father just before my first deployment to Fallujah in 2003 (A documentary that I've never watched about this deployment can be found here, also can read about our adventures in Fallujah from a higher echelon perspective in Karl Zinsmeister’s book, and a more personal perspective about some of the specific operation can be read in Mike Tucker’s ‘Among Warriors in Iraq: True Grit, Special Ops, and Raiding in Mosul and Fallujah’). Rather unlike Burton, the Arab culture I came in contact with was already saturated with Western influences and though it seemed strange to me, not as completely alien as it does in Burton’s account:
I directly attribute my interest in learning Arabic language and culture to Burton, and tried my best to read, write, and speak basic Arabic taught to me from Iraqi soliders, though I never came near the level of expertise that Burton achieved in over a dozen languages. Here is a page from a notebook that I carried during my second deployment to Iraq showing my effort:
Due to the combined experience of closely reading Burton during my trials in Fallujah and later in the Diyala River Valley and working closely with Arab and Kurdish soldiers, I’ve developed a fond admiration for Islam. This admiration has never lead me to seriously converting or adoption to such an extent as Burton, but it has made me sensitive to the kind of Anti-Islamic rhetoric found in both the American Right and Left. While I certainly didn’t experience some kind of extraordinarily violent campaign that is Hollywood worthy in my deployments, I still consider myself lucky to have been acquainted with Burton to make the most out of those difficult years.
