re: #902 CuriousLurker

Yes, he was great. I read his qasida as well as his translation of the “Thousand Nights and a Night”. I’m currently re-reading my way through the six vlumes of the Mardrus & Mathers translation of the same. They’re decidedly not the versions I heard as a child! LOL

FWIW, I cam to Islam through the Sufi door so to speak, so my whole understanding of Islam is colored by that approach. It’s one of the things that helps keep me calm when the nastiness starts flying—I just revert to khalwat dar anjuman (solitude in the crowd).

You wanna marry me right now?

Serious offer.

Hell, grrrl, Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the original would be banned as children’s literature today. Ain’t no Disney World.

Burton is one of my true heroes. He was called “The White N*g*er” by his messmates for trying to understand the peoples his Empire sent him to rule. He learned their languages, dressed in their dress, and was a scholar and a gentleman in multiple cultures.

He got that scar on his face fighting in Somalia.

He was by most accounts an extremely ugly man, but his wife said she never met anyone more beautiful.

His bones rest in a marble Bedouin tent in England.

If I could resurrect at will, his would be the ghost that I would call up from amongst the shades of the dead to guide us to understanding of one another.

He was in fact a Sufi adept, and a devotee of the sword dance. The real one, not that silly Yemeni farce I posted about earlier. When his corpse was examined after death, the doctor reported that it was “covered with fine scars” (“fine” in the old sense of “barely visible”), plainly incurred in the trance state of dancing.

Oh! How I honor him cannot be told.