Barbelith Underground > Temple > The Yazidi: a strange sect in Iraq.

grant, somehow I never saw that question. Burton learned how to infiltrate native societies in India as a military commander with the British East India company. He was frustrated with the short-sighted brutality of the English administrators and prefered the company of the Hindu mystics (though he later had very harsh and nasty things to say about them). He learned Hindi and lived as a Hindu for years, sometimes abandoning his British identity for months. It's not clear whether he was instructed to do so or whether the administration was so lax and corrupt that he simply got away with it, but he did often turn up just in time to warn his superiors of uprisings and so on. He also explored West Africa, searching for the source of the Nile, where he ruined his health and fortune and took a spear through the mouth.

When he travelled to the Middle East, he used pretty much the same methods--hired local tutors to learn the language and then "went native". His time with the Yezidis is not well-documented and there are lots of stories about the specifics, some of which are pretty fantastic. He told a number of tall tales about it himself and, as he was a prickly and stubborn man with lots of political enemies, there were lies circulated about him as well. I think he probably met someone at a bar and, pretending to be Persian, bribed/finnegled his way in. It's been said that they adopted him because they admired his skill as a liar. He considered himself a Muslim and thought it was the most dignified and honorable religion in the world, but was also a terrible racist and imperialist who once refused to ride in a riverboat that allowed "blacks" (I think it was actually an Indian) to ride in the same area as English women. In Africa, he noted that many English women become debauched there because the natives have such enormous members--sometimes as big as six inches. He had such a facility with language that he could speak as a native within a few months--he learned something like 14 separate languages, and dozens of local dialects, over the course of his life. He spent his retirement translating and retranslating Indian erotic literature, such as the Kama Sutra, and various Persian poets--like Omar Khaiyam? Is that the right guy? Or Khalil Gribran? I don't know much about that end of things--though he was not above "adapting" or "correcting" parts he felt were unsound or ugly.