advocacy of freer sexual talk was never absolute (he resisted putting his translation of the Nights in the hands of girls and young women), but it was clearly part of a sense that involvement in Eastern practices could liberate Westerners from the restrictions they senselessly imposed on themselves. He defended the “dirty talk” (turpiloquium) both in his foreword to the first volume and in the Terminal Essay that concludes the last, agreeing with many in his own time and since that what counts as gross or indecent language changes with time and place, insisting in particular that (as the eighteenth-century English orientalist William Jones said about Indians) many peoples to the east of Europe have never considered “that anything natural can be offensively obscene,” and enjoying the irony with which an early French traveler described the Japanese as “so crude that they only know to call things by their names.” Burton made it clear, however, that this ease of dealing with things only gingerly touched by his contemporaries did not lower the level of the Nights as a whole; on the contrary (and I think any fair and attentive reader will agree), “The general tone of The Nights is exceptionally high and pure. … The pathos is sweet, deep and genuine; tender, simple and true. … Its life, strong, splendid and multitudinous, is everywhere flavored with that unaffected pessimism and constitutionals melancholy which strike deepest root under the brightest skies and which sigh in the face of heaven” that (translating the words that Burton quoted, as he often did, in Latin) “human life is but a brief escape from death.” What the tales lacked was not civility but what some in the nineteenth century took to be refinement: “innocence of the word not of the thought; morality of the tongue not of the heart, and the sincere homage paid to virtue in guise of perfect hypocrisy.”71
The overall implications of this defense of liberated speech only emerge when we note that Burton did not view the power of the Nights to undermine cultural limits as limited to Europeans: it operated in the East, too, by virtue of the tales’ ability to give free rein to a human capacity for cultural inventiveness against which Islam set up barriers no less rigid than those imposed by Christianity. Burton’s attention to this aspect of the collection has at least two features that have not been sufficiently appreciated, first his insistence on regarding the stories as a hybrid product of two cultures and religions, one Persian-Zoroastrian, the other Arab-Muslim, and second the way that his emphasis on this mixing led him to view Mohammed and his achievement in a more negative light than he had before.
Several earlier scholars and writers (including Galland, the first European translator) had maintained that the main body of the tales originated not in the Arab lands but in Persia before the advent of Islam, but others contested the point, including Lane. His authority gave the claim new currency, so that Burton’s emphasis on it formed part of what made his approach distinctive. The arguments need not detain us much; they involve the Persian origins of the chief figures’ names, including Scheherazade and her sister Dunyazad, and references in early Arabic sources to the Persian originals of the collection. Burton maintained that over time Arabic names and historical figures were inserted by “a host of editors, scribes and copyists,” who also converted “the florid and rhetorical Persian” into “the straight-forward, business-like, matter of fact Arabic,” at the same time giving Arabic names to the originally Zoroastrian gods, spirits, and kings. These changes affected all three of the basic types of stories in the Nights, animal fables, historical anecdotes, and fairy tales, but it was especially the last category that was “wholly and purely Persian,” and it was from it that the collection derived its remarkable power over readers. Even in Galland’s corrupt and limited version, compelled by “deference to public taste [a century before Victoria, and in France] to expunge the often repulsive simplicity, the childish indecencies and the wild orgies of the original,” and which clothed “the bare body in the best of Parisian suits,” the tales “arouse strange longings and indescribable desires; their marvelous imaginativeness produces an insensible brightening of mind and an increase of fancy-power, making one dream that behind them lies the new and unseen, the strange and unexpected—in fact all the glamour of the unknown.”
In a comparison whose personal reference we will easily recognize, Burton explained that “the grand source of pleasure in Fairy Tales is the natural desire to learn more of the Wonderland which is known to many as a word and nothing more, like Central Africa before the last half century: thus the interest is that of the ‘Personal Narrative’ of a grand exploration to one who delights in travels.”72 Although Galland and other translators, by leaving many tales out and cleaning up the language of others, sought to separate the Nights as a gateway to a world of fantasy from the frank and direct talk about sex contained in the original, the continuity between them was central to what made the collection so attractive and significant to Burton. In his eyes the power of the sex talk to inspire fantasy was twinned with the ability of the fairy-tale atmosphere to license talk about sex. We see this especially in a comment he made about a story in which a eunuch makes clear that his physical maiming did not leave him void of desire. Burton noted that eunuchs could be created by removing or damaging their sexual organs in various ways, “but in all cases the animal passion remains, for in man, unlike other animals, the fons veneris [the spring of amatory desire] is the brain. The story of Abelard proves this.”73 The continuity between sexuality and fantasy was hardly a new idea, to be sure, but it was the essential ground on which Burton located the Nights.
It is just this positive valuation of fantasy that Burton now portrayed as foreign to the spirit and letter of original Islam. The change from what he had said earlier was chiefly one of emphasis but it is striking nonetheless. In his earlier essay on “El Islam, or The Rank of Muhammadanism among the Religions of the World,” Burton described the terms of the Prophet’s revelation as “so lofty and majestic that they sank for ever into the heart-core of his followers,” but blamed some among the latter for turning the message into “a mass of stringent ordinances so disposed as to provide for every contingency … a well-organized system of practical precepts.” Now, however, the attempt to make Islam a legalistic and prosaic system of permitted and forbidden things, and from which “Persian supernaturalism” was specifically excluded, began with the Prophet himself, albeit under the influence of his milieu:
Mohammed, a great and commanding genius, blighted and narrowed by surroundings and circumstance to something little higher than a Covenanter or a Puritan, declared to his followers, “I am sent to ’stablish the manners and customs”; and his deficiency of imagination made him dislike everything but “women, perfumes, and prayers,” and with an especial aversion to music and poetry, plastic art and fiction.
The Prophet took over some miraculous and magical notions from Judaism (which had borrowed them, against Moses’s original intention, from the Babylonians) but violently repressed a movement to allow “certain Persian fabliaux” to achieve recognition alongside the stories of the Qu’ran. Thus it was he who inspired the “furious fanaticism and one-idea’d intolerance which made Caliph Omar destroy all he could find of the Alexandrian Library and prescribe burning for the Holy Books of the Persian Guebres [the Zoroastrians]. And the taint still lingers in Al-Islam: it will be said of a pious man, ‘He always studies the Koran, the Traditions and other books of Law and Religion; and he never reads poems nor listens to music or to stories.’ ” In other words, the founder of Muslim faith saw his task as setting limits not just to belief and behavior but to imagination and the materials that could nourish it; resources for overcoming these constraints had to come from somewhere else, and in the Nights this meant access to the materials of a different culture, to the poetic sense of wonder infused by the Persian progenitors of the tales. Without this alien fertilization, the form of life the Prophet instituted remained no less confining and restrictive than was the European culture whose limits Burton sought to transcend through his involvement with Islam.
The Islamic world did not wait idly for what Persian storytellers would contribute to its culture, however; the receptivity to some such infusion of foreign content was prepared by something in human nature that spontaneously rebelled against such restrictions. Before this need found its voice in the Persian accents of the Nights, “human nature” itself, “stronger than the Prophet” and “outraged”
