Sir Richard Francis Burton on the Eve of Dakota Spring

Friday, March 19th, 2004

Words for Today
"The station house was no unfit object in such a scene, roofless and chair less, filthy and squalid, with a smoky fire in one corner and a table in the center of an impure floor, the walls open to every wind, and the interior full of dust. Of the employees, all loitered and sauntered about as cretins with the exception of the cripple who lay dying on the ground."
​Sir Richard Francis Burton, one of the true geniuses among all of those who have passed through this middle world, was born on this day in 1821. In the passage above, he described one of the station house's of the Pony Express during his travel in the American West. The England-born Burton traveled the world, wrote scores of books and translated some of the best of the literature of the Arab and Indian cultures into English, and enjoyed his life immensely, a passage that ended at age sixty-nine. Burton could speak some forty languages like a native. Expelled from Oxford University in 1821 for a minor offense, he went to India as an army officer and then on to the Middle East where he could assume the identity of a Muslim. He went to the source of the Nile in Africa. 'Twas Burton who gave us translations of The Thousand and One Nights and from the classic Hindu erotic classic, The Kama Sutra. A genius. What Burton left in terms of translations and delightfully descriptive travel books (which emphasize the spiritual journey more than the geographical exploration) is huge. It could be even more, but his wife Isabel, who burned all of his diaries and manuscripts as soon as he took his last breath and wrote an expurgated version of his colorful life which depicted him as a good Catholic, wonderful husband, and misunderstood adventurer and traveler. A sampling of Burton's wry observations about himself belie his wife's attempt to make him otherwise. Burton's philosophy was to listen to his instincts at all times. In The Kasidah, Burton writes:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none
  but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes
  and keeps his self-made laws.

All other Life is living Death, a world where
  none but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling
  of the camel bell.

Happy Birthday, Sir Richard - wherever you are. Your books continue to delight tens of thousands around the world. 'Tis a gloriously beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful day in Dakota, where there will be the weest bit of March wind whilst the temperatures soar to the fifties - heat wave! The bit of snowing clinging to the ground in shaded areas - like our yard here on Arthur Avenue in Bismarck - will not be able to withstand the onslaught of spring, which is just around the corner. This is the day, of course, that the swallows return to San Juan Capistrano in California. 'Tis rather grand to be able to depend on such things as the return of swallows and comets - eclipses from time to time - 'twas on this day in 721 B.C.E. that the first lunar eclipse was recorded in Babylon. And this is the first anniversary of the beginning of the short shooting war with Iraq - President Bush will be talking to the nation later this morning about why we invaded and what will happen after the occupation - and doubtlessly address the nation's conflict with international terrorism. 'Tis curious: Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote at considerable length about the Muslim assassins, a word of Arabic origin that the western world didn't know about until Burton told him - as he introduced them to other aspects of cultures other than our own. One of Burton's biographers, Edward Rice, author of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, wrote of Burton's description of one sect of Muslims:

The Isma'ilis had once been known as the Assassins, for they had developed special techniques for eliminating religious and political enemies, but assassination had probably not been practiced for several centuries.

A key tool in the growth of Isma'ilianism was the use of devotees, the fida'is, whose role it was to propagandize and convert and also to murder opponents as a final act of dedication. .  .  .   Many legends developed about their skill and secretiveness in attaining their goals, one being that they were given the best of all material lives, with fine foods and their pick of nubile young women, and were drugged on hashish - Indian hemp or cannabis. The Syrian Arabic term for these fida'is was hashshashin, hashish takers, and it was not long before the Crusaders, who faced them in the Levant, had turned the word into 'assassins', now common in many languages.

​Says a modern commentator on Rice's biography, "One of the failings of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton is that Rice flips back and forth between current events (in the 19th century) and historical events without trying to put the information into a chronological context. So, it looks like the term 'assassin' was used during the Crusades and also in the 19th century to refer to modern Isma'ilis. There's a fascinating study of this group. It's entirely possible that the mythic Isma'ilis and their reputation for murder and mayhem were made up by those feared those they did not know much about - in much the same manner that some of us Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century have created an inhuman group of fanatics who kill mindlessly - Al Qaida. That both Isma'ilis and Al Qaida were (and are, in the case of the latter) responsible for murder and mayhem is true; whether either were motivated by drugs and the promise of sexual bliss is quite another. It's a mysterious tradition - with origin in the religious wars we know as the Crusades, perhaps beyond. But a contemporary scholar of comparative literature wrote in a review of the 1994 book The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma'ilis by Farhad Daftary, "The Assassin Legends represents the latest contribution to a more critical and contrapuntal scholarship on the Isma'ilis. It stands comfortably on the shelf as a generally persuasive critical foray into the history of East-West relations by its interrogation of a discourse of ignorance and fascination, awe and ideological enmity, through which a multi-culture made up of Muslims, Jews, and Christians imagined Isma'ilism." In short, we have a good way to go if we really wish to understand each other - especially those bent on our destruction. The obverse is true, of course - Al Qaida has no interest whatsoever in seeing Americans as anything but imperialistic, materialistic godless subhumans.

This is not a new story or recent development, of course - 'tis as old as the rise of consciousness and the earliest human experiences in thinking of themselves as separate from, different than, and superior to other groups of humans. We don't have many Sir Richard Francis Burtons bent on understanding other cultures - and willing to invest time and energy (and have the genius to be able to do so to good effect) in learning the language and experiencing firsthand those cultures so different from our own. 'Tis a pity.

But this is a glorious day, a great one to be alive. I must be about the business of doing what I can to help those public humanities organizations I serve help Dakotans better understand other minds in other times in places other than our own - be well, kola - take care of yourselves, and if you want to see for yourselves how one who traveled here in the middle world we share spent a lifetime learning about others, have a look at Sir Richard Francis Burton.

Ev Albers