Publisher's Synopsis
Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS (1821-1890) was a British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat. He was famed for his travels and explorations in Asia, Africa and America, as well as for his extraordinary knowledge of languages (purportedly he spoke 29 European, Asian and African languages) and cultures. His best known achievements include: a well-documented journey to Mecca in disguise at a time when Europeans were forbidden access on pain of death; an unexpurgated translation of One Thousand and One Nights (commonly called The Arabian Nights); the publication of the Kama Sutra in English; a translation of The Perfumed Garden (the Arab Kama Sutra); and his journey with John Hanning Speke as the first Europeans to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi (1880) is a long English language poem written pseudonymously by Burton who claims to be the translator, giving the English title as 'Lay of the Higher Law.' It is thus pretending to be an original Persian text which never in fact existed. The Kasidah is essentially a distillation of Sufi thought in the poetic idiom of that mystical tradition, through which Burton hoped to introduce Sufist ideas to the West.
