Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
in one milieu by weaving in attitudes and understandings drawn from somewhere else provided one spur for their attempts to inhabit a space between cultures.
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Before turning to our subjects, I need to say a word about why they have been chosen. It would be easy to criticize the selection as incomplete or even arbitrary, as in some ways it is, but three things speak in its favor. The first is the intrinsic interest of the people chosen, a valuation that readers may have to take on faith at this point, but which I hope most who follow the accounts below will share. The second is that the group as a whole provides a sufficient variety of examples to reveal at least something of the range of possible attractions and difficulties that the attempt to live between cultures involves. That they come from diverse times and places highlights the broad range of contexts and environments in which attempts to live simultaneously in more than one culture have been undertaken. The third, and not the least important, is the ample body of material each provides for examining these lures and risks. The range of documentation in every case includes personal material, biographical or autobiographical (memoirs, letters, interviews), together with writings of a more general cast: literary, philosophical, historical, and anthropological. This seems to me a critically important reason for choosing to include them rather than others, since being able to draw on such a rich archive makes it possible to examine their careers and experiences in terms they developed themselves, native to them as individuals, rather than imposing some vocabulary or conceptual idiom from outside. For this reason I am tempted to say that they offered themselves as subjects for this book even as I went in search of them. It is the absence of this range of writing and reflection, with its specific attention to what the experience of simultaneously inhabiting more than one culture entails and how it might be understood, that has led me to exclude some figures who might well have been candidates had they approached their experience differently and provided a more extensive account of it. Among these are (I list them for those who will recognize the names) Lafcadio Hearn, Trebitsch Lincoln, Ernest Fenollosa, Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss), and, alas, all of the women whom I hoped at one point I might be able to include: Lady Stanhope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Isabelle Eberhardt, Gertrude Bell, Alexandra David-Neel, Sister Nivedita, Pearl Buck, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It would create too bulky a digression to try to justify all these exclusions here, but none seems to me to offer the rich texture of materials provided by the figures included. (The differing nature and quantity of the material each of them provides is reflected in some chapters being longer than others.)11
One unintended and in some degree regrettable result of not taking on some among the people just listed is that one particular alternative to Europe generates most of the intercultural spaces at issue here: Arab and Muslim life and belief. Such a configuration has genuine advantages at a juncture—our present—when the relations between Islam and the West are of great moment for a wide range of reasons, and it might be justified historically as well, on the grounds that the geographical proximity of European and Islamic societies, and the conflicts and interchanges that resulted from it, have given a special weight to their relations over a large sweep of history. But I did not intend it at the start, and the absence of any figures who stand between European and South or East Asian forms of life may threaten to make the general questions I have tried to raise in this introduction recede behind more particular ones involving relations between Christian and Muslim lifeways. This danger may be lessened in some degree by the relatively small place that strictly religious concerns occupied for either Lawrence or Pamuk (in contrast to both Burton and Massignon, for whom Islamic belief and practice were cardinal points of focus), by Burton’s (albeit less intense) involvement with Hindu and pre-Muslim Persian as well as Islamic culture, and by the circumstance that the alternative to European Christianity in Achebe’s world was African village life and the polytheism that reigned within it. If the range of “others” to Europe in the lives and careers examined below still remains narrower than one might wish, I hope this limit may be at least partly overcome by what we are able to learn from the group as a whole, based on the mix of personal and general insights each of them drew from exploring the particular intercultural space he inhabited.
C h a p t e r 1
Masquerade, Engagement, and Skepticism: Richard Burton
Richard Burton provides an exemplary starting point for considering a series of lives between cultures for several reasons. First, his efforts to insert himself into a second way of life were manifold and lifelong, involving travel not just in Arabia but in India and Africa; they grew from his linguistic and scholarly passions that led both to his pilgrimage to Mecca and his translation and commentary on the Thousand and One Nights; and they included sophisticated experiments with disguise and self-transformation whose limited efficacy he well understood. He never thought to relinquish his original British identity, but he became a precocious and insightful ethnologist, devoting himself to grasping and absorbing other modes of thinking and behavior. Yet one consequence of his understanding how deeply people are stamped by the cultures they inhabit was that he ended by articulating a radical skepticism about culture itself, lashing out against the moral and intellectual restraints that cultures seek to impose on their members. In his later writings, living between cultures meant both inserting himself as deeply as he could into some way of life not his own, and asserting the human need for independence from every existing one. Without ever ceasing to see Arab life and culture as a vehicle for achieving distance from the narrowness of European values and prejudices, he came to see Islam as harboring restrictions very much like those imposed by his own native culture, and similarly in need of rescue from them.
Although this pattern only appears fully in his translation and commentary on the Thousand and One Nights, its basic lines are already visible in his account of the pilgrimage to Medinah and Mecca he accomplished in 1853. Both the pilgrimage book and the journey it reported evoked much criticism in his own time, denounced as self-promoting (the book made his reputation, as he clearly hoped it would), hypocritical (professing belief in a religion he did not embrace), and morally suspect (inspired by a partly hidden and dangerous animus against both Christian belief and European civilization). An additional charge has been leveled by more recent critics, namely that in the context of expanding European colonialism, the kind of knowledge of foreign peoples and cultures he sought was bound to be used to dominate others, so that his whole project was tainted by its connection to imperial power and the injuries it inflicted.1 Although some of these charges were in tension with others, none of them was wholly baseless, and we will come to the grounds for them as we go along; deeply interesting as he remains, Burton was not always an admirable person.
But there can be no doubt that a central motive for the Mecca trip was a genuine admiration and attraction for Islamic faith and Eastern life, affirmed in word and deed over many years. In a later edition of the Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah he responded to the accusations of hypocrisy and apostasy lodged against the first in terms he developed at more length in other writings, arguing that his taking part in Muslim belief and practice was justified by the kinship between Islam and Christianity, both Abrahamic religions (a connection recognized and appreciated, he noted, by earlier writers, and that would later be highlighted by Louis Massignon), as well as by other features of Mohammed’s creed. “Al-Islam, in its capital tenets, approaches much nearer to the faith of Jesus than do the Pauline and Athanasian modifications which, in this our day, have divided the Indo-European mind into Catholic and Roman, Greek and Russian, Lutheran and Anglican.” Comparing the spirit of Moslem lands with some Christian ones, he concluded that “the Moslem may be more tolerant, more enlightened, more charitable, than many societies of self-styled Christians.”2
In the pilgrimage book Burton explained why he had not adopted an easier way of making the trip, namely declaring himself a convert and going as a European follower of Allah and the Prophet, a course that would have saved him both the trouble of pretending to be an “Oriental” and the danger of discovery:
My spirit could not bend to own myself a Burmá, a renegade—to be pointed at and shunned and catechised, an object of suspicion to the many and of contempt to all. Moreover, it would have obstructed the aim of my wanderings. The convert is always watched with Argus eyes, and men do not willingly give information to a “new