Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel

      Introduction

      Early in September 1853, Richard Burton arrived in Mecca. Part of a caravan of Muslim pilgrims, Burton was clothed much like his companions and, like them, recited the appropriate prayers, in good Arabic, as he approached each of the storied and sacred sites. But Burton was an Englishman in disguise, a captain in the British army who had begun his study of Arabic at Oxford and tried out his ability to present himself as an “Oriental” while serving in India during the 1840s; he would spend most of his career as a British civil servant and diplomat, while writing many books. In 1855 he told the world about his trip in a Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah, the work that made his reputation as the colorful, adventurous, challenging, and to some people suspicious and problematic figure he would remain until his death in 1890. By then he would be known at once for his far-ranging travels, his deep involvement in Eastern culture, and for his assertive skepticism toward both religion and established morality.

      Interest in Burton’s life and writings has been inspired by many things: the rare mix of adventurousness and intellect that made him at once one of the preeminent explorers of his day and a writer of astounding range and erudition; his ability both to represent the Victorian age to which he belonged and to challenge its pieties; his mix of loyalty to the British Empire and the values it claimed to foster with a radicalism that undermined them. But what best joins these strands of his persona together is a thread his pilgrimage to Mecca strongly highlights, especially since, as we will see, he was moved by a genuine fascination and respect for Arab life and religion: he sometimes sought to inhabit more than one culture at the same time. In these moments he dedicated himself to opening up a real or imagined space between cultures, where he could infuse the persona formed in one with qualities and energies drawn from another.

      Burton was far from alone in undertaking such a project. In some ways it has been shared by people of many times and places, and global migrations since the late twentieth century have made it ever more evident today. But there are manifold ways to cultivate such a mode of being, and in this book we take Burton as the first among a group of people who pursued it along a special path, making themselves into vehicles for examining the nature and consequences of what I will call an intercultural identity. Such self-conscious experimentation sets these individuals apart from those with similar experiences, among them immigrants, many Jews throughout history, Islamicized Christians in medieval Spain, and various hyphenated peoples throughout the globe today.¹

      Individuals in all these situations may feel a need to navigate between cultures, to cross cultural boundaries while somehow acknowledging or preserving them. But immigrants are principally engaged in passing from one cultural environment to another (although the transition may stretch out over generations), a situation to which certain advocates of “multiculturalism” today respond with defensive strategies for preserving group identities against forces that threaten to dilute them. Neither substituting one group identity for another nor circling the wagons around an identity considered to be endangered generates what the figures represented in this book attempted: to explore the lineaments and horizons of an intercultural space while residing within it. At times some sought to protect one way of life against another, but even in doing so they were preoccupied with the challenge of taking on a second cultural identity as part of their way of inhabiting their first. Each created a kind of dialogue between two personae within a single self.²

      Alongside Burton, the people whose lives and careers we take up below are T. E. Lawrence (celebrated as Lawrence of Arabia), Louis Massignon (a renowned, deeply introspective, and profoundly troubled French scholar of Islam), Chinua Achebe (a major pioneer in modern African literature), and Orhan Pamuk (the Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist). A few others appear more briefly, in particular two African writers with ties to Achebe, Sheikh Hamidou Kane and Tayeb Salih. I will say more about why I have chosen them in a moment, but two things they all have in common need to be noted at the start. One is the high degree of self-awareness already mentioned: all of them gave special and sustained attention to assessing the benefits and dangers of intercultural existence. The second is that each sought to bridge some explicitly European identity with a