Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man’s hunger for ‘belief’ which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright cease to be belief.74
It was to the same Sufism (Tasawwuf is another name for the spiritual teaching it promotes) that Burton himself had long been attracted, receiving instruction and training in it during the 1840s, and it gave life to the character of the wandering Dervish that he chose for his disguise on the pilgrimage. The “Hylozoism” Burton refers to here—the notion that all matter is in some sense alive—appeared in the fusion of Hindu metempsychosis with Darwinist materialism he effected in Stone Talk, and it was the mystical implications of this mix of physicalism and vitalism that informed the behest the Kasidah addressed to lovers of truth not to make the object of their quest too definite and concrete: “leave it vague as airy space, / Dark in its darkness mystical.” The dream world of boundless wonder provided by the Nights, where imagination was free to break through the confines set by both European culture and by original Islam, provided a continuation and supplement to the Sufi’s poetical approach to all things, unrestrained by practical considerations.
Thus the Nights stood as testimony to the need that arises for people in Islam no less than in the West—Burton did not explicitly extend the point to include every culture, but these were the two he knew best—to find escape from the particular world of their formation in order to liberate the human powers of creativity reined in or suppressed by established ways of life. Here Burton’s commentary on his translation generalized his long-pursued quest to inhabit a space between cultures, making it exemplify a necessary response to the situation all people face once they become enmeshed in the webs of meaning and nonsense they create in order to give bounded coherence to their collective lives.
C h a p t e r 2
Commitment and Loss: T. E. Lawrence
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