In Mary Boyce’s account of the Zoroastrian community in Sharifabad (A PERSIAN STRONGHOLD OF ZOROASTRIANISM, OUP 1977), she notes that one of the Zoroastrians had made the Hajj under, uh, false pretenses. The interesting part is that everyone in town, Zoroastrian or Moslem, habitually addressed him as “Hajji”. The Moslems seemed to feel that it showed how enterprising the local boys are.
This is an exceptional book (2 volumes from Dover).
This chronicle of his journey in 1853 is filled with insights into Islamic culture which are still relevant today.
Far from claiming to be the first Westerner to travel there, he cites his predecessors extensively.
Can be read again and again.
So in other words, he dispenses with the answer in one line, followed by a neat anecdote which gives him a chance to talk about the karma sutra, while sorta staying on topic.
Nice to know the world’s smartest man isn’t above cheap showmanship!
Burton didn’t claim to be the first Westerner to have entered Mecca. In his Appendices he not only listed previous non-Muslim visitors, but he reprints three accounts of prior visitors from the 16th through the 18th century. See here:
I’ll look for it in earnest after class. But, either it was on Discovery or National Geo, etc, they had a film crew go to Mecca and to the black stone (Kabba) itself. IIRC, it’s a meteorite, or believed to be.
a.) There’s a National Geographic DVD on the Hajj, with three different pilgrims featured. It was filmed by Muslim crews. Spike Jones also filmed the Hajj for his film X, again using Muslim camera crews.
b.) There’s an extensive article about the Black Stone in an old (circa 1940s) issue of Popular Astronomy.
c.) A Muslim scientist who made the hajj and examined the Black Stone up close published an article in a Meteorite journal ([ii]Meteoritika*, I think) in which he stated that , in his opinion, having examined it up close, the Black Stone was not a meteorite at all.
d.) The belief that the Black Stone is a meteorite stems from the claim that the angel Gabriel brought it down. But other features of the story (for instance, that it was originally white, but turned dark through the years, due to the sins of humans) that donb’t support the meteoric origin are generally ignored.
His claim, which I believe is justified, is that he is the first non-Muslim to visit, write extensively about the visit, and write from both an informed and unbiased viewpoint.
“Write extensively” is not questionable.
“Informed” in that he spoke the key languages fluently enough to pass for a native and had studied the component cultures from both the inside and outside; he was not limited to a translator, pidgin Arabic or Persian communication, or a cultural outsider’s viewpoint.
“Unbiased” is certainly up to debate. For all his immersion in, fascination with and admiration for Arab and southwest Asian cultures, he certainly had his biases and never got too far from an imperial British mindset. But he was not overtly biased in every word of his description, as many others before and after him were.
One of the most fascinating men to ever walk the earth, not the least of which is because of his powerful quirks and flaws.
