Does cosmopolitanism—as a concept and a practice—ask enough of us? Is it premature to speak of a cosmopolitan ethics or politics? Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, the most cited source in the field, emphasizes the cosmopolitan as open and receptive to the other. As a review of the work notes, most of his intended audience may already be cosmopolitan in this sense.Footnote ¹ In the eyes of his critics, however, Appiah underemphasizes the other component of his definition of cosmopolitanism, the obligation toward the other. Much recent study attempts to work toward a more muscular conception of the term, with a consensus on the left stressing the imperative to transcend celebratory, superficial, and market-based consumer cosmopolitanism. To remedy the perceived shallowness of such superficial conceptions of the term, theorists (including Appiah himself) have added prefixes: what is needed is a cosmopolitanism that is full rather than empty, rooted rather than rootless, and vernacular rather than universal. Above all, left-leaning theorists insist that what is needed is cosmopolitanism from below. Brazilian literary critic Silviano Santiago writes of o cosmopolitanismo do pobre, “the poor man’s cosmopolitanism.”Footnote ² Bruce Robbins faults Appiah for disregarding appeals to ensure that citizens outside rich countries get their fair share. Robbins, like other leftist critics of Appiah, is an egalitarian, and it is his aim to pull the notion of cosmopolitanism in the direction of an ethics of global economic redistribution.Footnote ³ This sort of move, however, begs its own questions: how would such a redistributive cosmopolitanism differ from the old-left internationalism? Would cosmopolitanism at the service of the goal of equality lose its distinctive analytical edge? Perhaps we are asking cosmopolitanism to do too much work, both as an analytical category and as an ethical and political practice.

No case study better reveals the difficulties of teasing a coherent, much less a progressive, ethical project from cosmopolitanism than the case study Appiah takes as his point of departure:Footnote ⁴ the traveling culture of Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian pilgrim to Mecca, explorer of the Nile, and translator of the Kama Sutra, the 1001 Nights, and the Lusiads. As the interrelationship among empire, cosmopolitanism, and translation became a focal point for theory in the North American academy, Burton was deployed as a key example in the schema of Said, Appiah, and Venuti. Burton is exemplary as a case study due to his extraordinary ability not only to accumulate languages (perhaps three dozen) but also to inhabit other cultures imaginatively and sometimes sympathetically. In the estimate of one biographer, Burton was unique in his ability to think like a “Mohammedan among Mohammedans, a Mormon among Mormons, a Sufi among the Shazlis, and a Catholic among the Catholics.”Footnote ⁵ Yet what Appiah and others note as a “freak[ish]” ability to inhabit other belief systems from the inside and “‘go native’... and do so time and time again” coexisted with prejudice and hierarchical attitudes toward some of the foreign cultures he encountered.Footnote ⁶ On the one hand, Burton was ahead of his contemporaries in Victorian England in culturally contextualizing and seeking to decriminalize homosexuality.Footnote ⁷ On the other hand, in his time in Brazil he sympathized with Brazilian apologists for that nation’s belated schedule for the abolition of slavery long after it was fashionable or acceptable to do so in English society.Footnote ⁸

Said, Appiah, and key cultural historians of Victorian England such as Dane Kennedy find different ways to articulate the co-existence of avant-garde tolerance and anachronistic prejudice that mingle in Burton’s cosmopolitanism. Said, in his study of modern secular Western discourses of Islam, ventures that no other foreigner or Orientalist ever quite came as close to Burton in his sympathetic identification with Islam. Yet Said notes this was an empathy ultimately at the service of an imperial apparatus of knowledge and power.Footnote ⁹ For Dane Kennedy, Burton’s singular ability to imaginatively inhabit other cultures and criticize the shortcomings of his own mark him as a cultural relativist—a cultural relativist, that is, of the typically late Victorian mold. Kennedy suggests that however long Burton may have lived abroad (from the age of six months) Burton must have always inhabited bubbles of Englishness: English schools in Italy and France, the East India Company, and the Foreign service.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Appiah, Burton is cosmopolitan in some respects, counter-cosmopolitan in others. This insufficiency might better be termed an asymmetry: Burton is remarkably receptive and open in his attitude to some foreign cultures, but not to others. Appiah’s assessment dovetails with the observations of Said and Kennedy, who conclude that however much and however early Burton may have lived and traveled abroad, the presence of prejudice in his writing suggests he remained tethered to English prejudices. Appiah inherits from Kennedy the assumption that Burton’s prejudices were inherited from Victorian English culture. In this view, Burton might be cosmopolitan in his treatment of Islam, and of homosexuality, but in other respects the Englishman and the Victorian showed through in prejudices about black Africans or Jews.Footnote ¹¹ For Appiah no one more starkly demonstrates the comingling of cosmopolitan and counter-cosmopolitan values than Burton, though his distinction raises the question of whether or not the cosmopolitan and the counter-cosmopolitan tendencies in Burton’s writing can be so easily disentangled.

Why assume that a cosmopolitan ethic that calls for openness and receptivity to foreign mores and the possibility of being transformed by cross-cultural encounter will lead to tolerance rather than prejudice? Burton’s “freakish” ability to insinuate himself into other cultures and belief systems and think like the “natives” may not have been possible without his embrace of their prejudices. Burton lacked sympathy for the victims of the cultures he admires. In his cosmopolitan rejection of the project of imperialism as a civilizing mission, Burton chose not to criticize slavery, or sati, or polygamy. In his strong identification with particular foreign cultures, Burton took pride in broadcasting and rationalizing their low opinion of rival and enemy cultures. He took sides with the Persians against the Turks, with the Portuguese against the Spanish, and in general with Muslims against proponents of other faiths (inclusive of Christianity). Most controversially, he sought in his posting as British consul in Damascus to justify local prejudice not only against missionaries but also against Jewish creditors under British protection.Footnote ¹² Burton—the collector of worlds in the apt summation of novelist Iliya Troyanov—picked up prejudices as quickly and as vociferously as he collected languages. Burton’s anti-Semitism, the evidence suggests, was a prejudice he picked up outside of Britain that calcified in his sojourns abroad.Footnote ¹³ Burton’s thoughts may have developed in a less regressive manner had he settled in London and been responsive to its fashions rather than spending the majority of his adult life abroad. To excise from the canon of cosmopolitan experience the acquisition of prejudice abroad impoverishes the analytical vocabulary available to describe cosmopolitanism. It is not self-evident that his anachronistic prejudice attests to Burton only as a representative Victorian and Englishman, or that only his avant-garde tolerance corresponds to his extensive experience of other cultures.

Salman Rushdie read Burton and cited him in his fiction. Shame and The Satanic Verses both present the story of a young boy who discovers a copy of Burton’s Nights translation in the derelict library of a family patriarch. In the former, the boy Shakil discovers the work in his grandfather’s “dark-paneled study” of volumes bought wholesale from a Colonel Greenfield. In the latter, Saladin Chamcha encounters Burton’s Nights in his father’s “teak-lined study” of books “being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm.”Footnote ¹⁴ The model for the story repeated in Rushdie’s novels may have been suggested by a striking passage in Burton’s first Indian travelogue in which a boy guides him to the elusive abode and library of the deceased Major G. Burton is interested in Major G. as an Englishman determined “to make India his country and his home” through his mastery of Hindu sciences and acquisition of an Oriental library.Footnote ¹⁵ Might he have been a model for Rushdie’s Colonel Greenfield and his attempt to make a home in India through the accumulation of an Oriental library? Burton describes how a boy guided him to the derelict house, “threading his way through a multitude of confused dwellings, climbing over heaps of loose stones, walking along the walls of tanks, and groping through the obscurity of the cocoa groves.”Footnote ¹⁶ Might this image be a source for the depiction in Shame of the boy Shakil winding through an “indeterminate frontier universe,” stumbling over “ruined staircases,” exploring “the intricacies of brick drainage systems,” and contemplating a mansion “partly demolished by great, thick, water-seeking tree-roots”?Footnote ¹⁷

Perhaps most relevant to Rushdie is Burton’s enumeration of the “relics” of the deceased Major’s library, which are “eaten by the worm”: “Ibn Sirin [on the interpretation of dreams], and Lily, the Mantras, and Casaubon, works on Geomancy, Astrology, Ihzar or the Summoning of Devils, Osteomancy, Palmistry, Oneiromancy, and Divination.”Footnote ¹⁸ Although the state of decay of the Major’s “Oriental” library in the Indian tropical climate anticipates that of the libraries abandoned by the family patriarchs in Shame and The Satanic Verses, the focus of its contents on the “dangerous art” also anticipates that of the secret library possessed by Shakil’s grandfather. Burton sees the fate of the major and his library as a parable of the fate of the Englishman abroad, and fittingly in both of Rushdie’s novels the boy’s discovery of Burton’s Nights is pivotal to a narrative of leave-taking. In Shame it is emblematic—given the boy Shakil’s neglect of Burton and the other volumes bearing Greenfield’s ex libris plates—of his failure to leave Pakistan and discover a broader world. In The Satanic Verses, it is instrumental to the narrative of an immigrant to London’s forsaking of his father and the culture of Bombay. The recurring plot motif of a boy’s discovery of Burton’s volumes in a derelict library attests in Shame and The Satanic Verses to the self-consciously textual engagement of these works with Burton’s Nights as embodiment of a neglected cosmopolitan legacy.

In Shame the device of the discovery of the abandoned library introduces no less than four overlapping tales of attempted cultural assimilation. First there is Colonel Greenfield, who accumulates a library of the rich Indo-Muslim culture that preceded independence: illuminated manuscripts of Ghalib’s poetry, volumes of the Mughal emperors’ letters, Burton’s Nights, Ibn Battuta’s Travels, and accounts of the adventures of Hatim Tai.Footnote ¹⁹ On a second plane, there is the Shakil patriarch, who purchases this library wholesale to cultivate an “air of great learning” and “overweening hauteur” to mirror his seemingly “bottomless sea of wealth” but whose true intellectual legacy is revealed in a hidden library of the occult he has accumulated himself.Footnote ²⁰ On a third level, there is the boy Omar Khayyam Shakil, who like his grandfather neglects Burton and the other volumes of the Greenfield library, and opts for an immersion in the literature of the occult. Finally, there is the narrator, a migrant from the subcontinent to London, who presents the boy’s choice as insular and part of a family tendency to forsake the quest for self-knowledge in favor of a superficial and self-serving engagement with the sciences of the occult. For Shame’s narrator, as for Rushdie, the Greenfield library of unread volumes represents the sophisticated cultural heritage of Islam that both the Shakil patriarch and the boy Shakil fail to engage.Footnote ²¹ Although Burton’s early text presented the story of Major G. as a melancholy and possibly cautionary tale of exile, Shame’s narrator reverses the terms of this equation and presents the tale of Shakil’s neglect of a cosmopolitan library as evidence of the dangers of not migrating.

Rushdie’s fiction like Burton’s travelogues give voice to prejudices acquired abroad. These do not fall under the category of the counter-cosmopolitan tendencies in Burton’s writing that exert such an ambiguous fascination on Appiah, but more accurately might be recognized as cosmopolitan biases. Might Rushdie, in explicitly invoking Burton’s Nights in Shame and The Satanic Verses, and possibly his travelogues of South Asia, be deliberately engaging the legacy of Burton’s cosmopolitan bias? In trumpeting the superiority of the perspective of the émigré, do Rushdie’s narrators betray their own cosmopolitan biases, positive and negative? It is intriguing to consider the possibility that in Shame Rushdie engaged the legacy of Burton’s self-fashioning as a cosmopolitan observer in his travelogues of India of the 1840s. If Rushdie borrowed the imagery of a boy’s discovery of a derelict library of esoteric works from Burton’s Goa, and the Blue Mountains, he would have encountered Burton’s melancholy musing on the parallels between the major’s predicament in India and his own. Contemplating the spot where Major G. was cremated, “a grave prepared by strangers, around which no mourners ever stood,” Burton wondered how soon such a fate might be his own.Footnote ²² The pessimism of this intimation is consistent with the patterns of contrast suggested in Burton’s Indian travelogues, where assimilation to foreign cultural mores tends to be negatively contrasted with the relative autonomy and freedom of the cosmopolite beholden to neither the norms and values of his culture of origin nor those of the host culture.

Burton occupies a distinctive place in cosmopolitan theory, not only as the subject of the first chapter of Appiah’s seminal study, but because in his own writings he consistently contemplated the meaning of cosmopolitanism and the cognitive dissonance it entailed for the traveler and the translator. Burton located the principal virtue of his travelogues and translations in the cognitive breakthroughs made possible by the experience of extended sojourns abroad and exposure to foreign literature. Burton preferred the term cosmopolite to describe the vantage point from which he penned his travelogues, theorized his labor as a literary translator from Romance and Middle Eastern languages, and asserted his credentials to translate the 1001 Nights. The Nights themselves, in Burton’s emphasis, were the product of a “cosmopolitan” culture, and in offering them to Britain he sought to deprovincialize the country.Footnote ²³ Burton from his first travelogues of South Asia differentiated between himself and the British Orientalists in England and abroad. In translating Camões’s Lusiads, Burton distinguished between travel in youth (during the critical stage of cultural formation and imaginative development) and travel as a fully formed adult (after the completion of one’s academic education).Footnote ²⁴ He credited youthful travel with cognitive breakthrough and the widening of philosophical and cultural horizons, but later-life travel, which he associated with the England-educated Orientalist abroad, was linked with the hardening of preexisting assumptions and the confirmation of the prejudices of one’s upbringing and education about other cultures.Footnote ²⁵

Most pertinent to Rushdie’s novel of Pakistan, Shame, Burton’s writing on Sindh makes it evident that he was dissatisfied with the forms of Anglo-Indian identity he encountered in Sindh, be it in terms of the British failure to adapt to the region or of Sindhi attempts to emulate British mores. In these travelogues of South Asia, Burton differentiated between the free play of the cosmopolite, who can mix and match elements of cultures at will, and the forms of mimicry and imitation that he abhorred as badges of submission. Dissatisfaction with Anglo-Indian identities available to him in Sindh would find an analogue in his attitude toward cultural fusion in the region. He was pessimistic about the forms that cultural borrowing most often took in Sindh—a servile assimilation to the culture of the conquerors. His writing on Sindh sometimes presents cultural borrowings in terms of the “corruption” of one language by another,Footnote ²⁶ religious adaptations in terms of the “contamination” of the faith and ritual of the conquered people,Footnote ²⁷ and racial mixture in unflattering terms of physical description.Footnote ²⁸ For him local assimilation to English mores proved no exception to this rule: he holds a particular disregard for “grotesque” imitations of “Ultra-European dress” and “the English salon.”Footnote ²⁹ Burton craved neither the “Indian” life of the English in Sindh, nor the “English” life some Sindhis adopted. The few positive glimpses Burton offered of a “third variety” of culture involving the English in Sindh—“neither European nor oriental, but an artful, though mongrel mixture of the two”Footnote ³⁰—pertained to instances of English accommodation to local manners, and he therefore entreats John Bull, “can you not, O stiff-necked gentleman, accommodate yourself a little more readily to these habits and customs of ‘foreign parts’?”Footnote ³¹ He would find praise only for the forms of cultural fusion that “semi-Orientals”Footnote ³² like himself could either forge or recognize with their privileged cross-cultural insight.Footnote ³³

Like Burton’s cosmopolite personae they invoke, Rushdie’s narrators are most comfortable in a third vantage point, neither British nor South Asian. In the emphasis of Shame’s narrator, this is the perspective of the translated man.Footnote ³⁴ Rushdie’s narrator also emphasizes the transformative impact of travel in youth, positively in the form of the critical perspective gained by the narrator on the shortcomings of his homeland, and negatively in meditations on the danger of not traveling.Footnote ³⁵ It is tempting to read this narrative voice as a late twentieth-century and postcolonial variant of Burton’s cosmopolite personae, improvising upon topics and themes familiar from Burton’s South Asian travelogues. In both cases the provinciality of the English and Indian at home and abroad is measured against a presumed cosmopolitan grasp of the sophisticated nuances of multiple cultural realms, and it is deemed lacking. Note the provinciality the cosmopolitan narrator ascribes to his imagined local interlocutor: “Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell us but lies?” Footnote ³⁶ Rushdie’s cosmopolitan narrators focus their satire upon some of Burton’s targets: for instance, the English who failed to adapt to the subcontinent (these jokes in Shame are not far from Burton’s complaints about stiff-necked gentlemen).Footnote ³⁷ Likewise, Rushdie is scathing in his mockery of South Asian colonial and postcolonial imitations of Englishness respectively in Shame and in The Satanic Verses.Footnote ³⁸ Rushdie’s narrators share Burton’s disdain for assimilation to the norms of a dominant culture, be they to the British colonial communities in South Asia or the immigrant’s desire to internalize the values of Thatcherite Britain in The Satanic Verses. Against this backdrop, unforgiving of most forms of Anglo-Indian identity available in South Asia and Britain, Rushdie’s narrators hold out only the promise of the cosmopolitan’s possible reconciliation of two or more cultural influences.Footnote ³⁹

Given this apparent alignment of biases, it is sometimes difficult to discern what in Rushdie may be an unconscious citation of Burton or simply coincidence between their respective narrative articulations of cosmopolitan prejudices. “Shame is a passion with all Eastern nations,” Burton declared in his famous 1855 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah.Footnote ⁴⁰ A comparable conviction voiced by the narrator lends Rushdie’s 1983 novel its title. “We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the death of God and tragedy,” declares the narrator of Shame. “Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn.”Footnote ⁴¹ Because the idea of the novel originated in a report of a Pakistani father stabbing his only daughter in London’s East End because he feared she had brought shame to his family by loving a white English boy, Rushdie’s narrator insists that “to write about her, about shame, I would have to go back East, to let the idea breathe its favourite air.”Footnote ⁴² The narrator’s genealogy of “shame” resembles in tone and form Burton’s anthropological and philological musings.Footnote ⁴³ Uncannily, in his condescending satire of local superstition and folklore, Rushdie’s England-returned narrator is close in sensibility to the bile of Burton’s cosmopolitan personae. “The physiological ideas of the Koran are curious,” Burton wryly observes in a note to the Nights. “It supposes that the Mani or male semen is in the loins and that of women in the breast bone” and that fertilization occurs via “the mingled seed of the two.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Likewise in Shame the young Shakil sisters fantasize “about what a man might look like when undressed, imagining... bizarre genitalia such as holes in the chest into which their own nipples might snugly fit, ‘because for all we knew in those days... fertilization might have been supposed to happen through the breast.’”Footnote ⁴⁵ The mediating influence of Burton’s corrosive, disenchanting mockery might be useful in helping explain the strained quality of Shame’s magic realism,Footnote ⁴⁶ where the supernatural is presented through the lens of hyperbole, artifice, and the ridiculous.

Like Burton in the conclusion to his commentary on the Nights, Shame’s narrator finds it natural to invoke the ideals of the French revolution (“all available from stock at short notice”) as the standard against which to gauge the relative historical development and political evolution of contemporary Muslim societies.Footnote ⁴⁷ On this point their respective cosmopolitan biases led Burton and Rushdie to contrasting conclusions. Burton attributes a revolutionary quality to the legendary figure of the caliph Harun al Rashid wandering the streets of Baghdad in disguise in the Nights tales and suggests that upon the publication of Galland’s French translation, the figure had a subversive force in prerevolutionary Paris. Burton’s conclusion to his Nights commentary in 1885, which he knew would prove counterintuitive to his European reader, is that Muslim societies had better approximated the egalitarian goals of the French revolution than European societies had by the same historical juncture. In Shame Rushdie’s narrator deploys the ideals of the French revolution in a manner less questioning of received notions of Islam and the subcontinent among British readers. Although a performance of Büchner’s Danton’s Death in London suggests that “the dialectic of history” is the opposition between the “epicure against the puritan,” the narrator implies that in Pakistan this contrast is reduced to that of shameless and shame.Footnote ⁴⁸ Rushdie too deploys the figure of Harun al Rashid in his capacity as an idealized repository of the dream of restored justice in a time of injustice. His character of Harun Harappa, however, despite a youthful flirtation with exposing the excesses of corruption and tyranny in Peccavistan, devolves into a parody of the legendary Harun al Rashid of the Nights tales and comes to embody the hopelessness of the nation’s dire political predicament.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is as if Rushdie with the benefit of hindsight deliberately answers Burton’s optimism about the greater egalitarian promise of the political manifestations of Islam.

Burton and Rushdie’s differing assessments of the political emancipation afforded by the influence of Islam in political organizations in their writings on South Asia reflect not only their different time periods but also the distinct targets of the cosmopolitan biases of their respective narrative personae. Burton’s earliest travelogue of the Sindh was written in the form of a prose dramatic monologue, where his cosmopolite persona addressed the silent John Bull. He attributed to John Bull platitudes such as the belief that English identity resided in the English countryside as captured by eighteenth-century elegists. Burton’s exposition of Sindhi culture was intended to disabuse his stereotyped interlocutor of such inherited assumptions about belonging: “I regret to say, that the Scindians... having no word to explain your “home,” attach none of those pretty ideas to the place in question, which supply Mr. John Bull, Mrs. B. and the children, with matter for eternal maudlin.”Footnote ⁵⁰Shame’s cosmopolitan narrator italicizes as Burton does the imagined objections of his interlocutor, but in his case, the interlocutor is South Asian: “Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject!” Footnote ⁵¹ Rushdie’s narrator’s exposition of the ideals of the European Enlightenment is intended to disabuse his provincial interlocutor of well-worn clichés about roots and belonging: “To explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.”Footnote ⁵² Both Burton and Rushdie imagine their cosmopolitan teaching of the virtues of unbelonging would serve to deprovincialize audiences and readerships: Burton’s cosmopolite voice engages the metropolitan English reader; Rushdie’s England-returned narrator addresses himself specifically to the South Asian elite. Shame’s narrator champions unbelonging as progressive resistance to conservative myth, a reminder that Burton and Rushdie’s cosmopolitan biases serve different political projects. Burton desired a more cosmopolitan mode of imperialism, where Britain would govern with sympathy and deference to local belief systems.Footnote ⁵³Shame’s narrator was more comfortable recommending the ideals of the French revolution as universally applicable, suggesting the limits to the cultural relativism of his postcolonial position.

Five years after penning Shame, in his retelling of “Aladdin” in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie would invoke Burton’s Nights as an elusive symbol of familial reconciliation and a more cosmopolitan conception of belonging in at once a more melancholy and redemptive vein. The Satanic Verses introduces, like Shame, the scene of a boy’s discovery of Burton’s edition of the Nights in the family patriarch’s neglected library, and this discovery introduces a rift between the boy and his father. The patriarch’s neglect of the cosmopolitan culture symbolized by Burton’s Nights is associated with the crucial image of a magic lamp, promised to Saladin by his father and withheld from the son until the novel’s conclusion: “On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala’s teak-lined study, beside a ten-volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights... there stood a magic lamp, a brightly polished copper-and-brass avatar of Aladdin’s very own genie-container: a lamp begging to be rubbed.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In contrast to Shame’s patriarch, Changez ultimately redeems himself by embracing the legacy signaled by the lamp and Burton’s Nights—thereby facilitating Saladin’s own reconciliation with the rich Indo-Muslim heritage he had forsaken in his youthful Anglophilia. Rushdie constructs both father and son with reference to traits specific to jinn and ghouls. As Burton had emphasized in his notes to the Nights, jinn appear in the Quran, and Rushdie seems to understand that the supernatural elements of the Nights from which he draws cannot be divorced from an underlying religious cosmology. In this light it becomes evident that he is not so much rejecting a religious for a secular sensibility, but privileging the legacy pertaining to the jinn over that pertaining to prophecy. The evocation of jinn signals a positive engagement with a Quranic tradition that helps counterbalance the novel’s treatment of the prophet Muhammad, which is more in keeping with the dystopian presentation of contemporary manifestations of political Islam in Shame.

Burton presented his translation of the Nights as the outcome of a long melancholic exile from the land of his predilection, Arabia, and affirmed its character as a cosmopolitan work that might offer readers cognitive breakthroughs and broaden imaginative horizons. Writing forty years after his first travelogues of South Asia, Burton had been disabused of his youthful optimism that a traveler’s perspective might be heeded by his superiors in the army and the foreign service. The frenzy of his language acquisition in South Asia in the 1840s had not brought about the desired advancement in the East India Company or the British army, and to his great disappointment his store of experience of Arabia and Arabic had not brought about further postings after his controversial appointment as consul in Damascus (1869–1871). If he goes through the motions of claiming that his literary labor on the Nights might benefit Britain as “the greatest Mohammedan Empire in the world,” and that colonial officers should learn Arabic and govern with sympathy to Islamic values,Footnote ⁵⁵ his manuscript revisions intended for a second edition make it evident that he was certain this call too would go unheeded:

Penning his preface as the British consul in Trieste in 1885, in the knowledge he would not be reposted to the Middle East, his consolation was to recall the broadening of horizons that translating the Nights had afforded him in what he terms the harsh half-clearings of South America and Africa.Footnote ⁵⁷

In Burton’s portrait in the “Terminal Essay,” the Nights tales speak to the cosmopolitan spirit of Harun al-Rashid’s Baghdad, where openness to the cultural legacies of Persia and Greece had entailed that “all manner of metaphysical subtleties had cropped up.” In this legendary Baghdad, Burton specifically admires “the cosmopolitan views which suggest themselves in a meeting-place of nations.”Footnote ⁵⁸ From the perspective of the cosmopolitan moment privileged in Nights tales, Burton offers a genealogy of Islam that stresses its latent pluralism, claiming that Islam borrowed the “whole of its supernaturalism” from Persia.Footnote ⁵⁹ The prophet Muhammad had sought to purify the faith of Mesopotamian and Persian influences, yet in Burton’s emphasis by the first century these influences had revived along with those of Platonism and Gnosticism giving rise to Sufism and other sects. Muslim belief in the jinn, in this context, betrays an affinity with belief in comparable entities in Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Roman cosmologies. In contrast to Orientalists who stressed the Islamic cosmology of the Nights jinn, Burton proposed a cosmopolitan genealogy that speculated on the need “to trace the evident connection, by no means ‘accidental,’ of ‘Jinn’ with the ‘Genius’ who came to the Romans through the Asiatic Etruscans.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Already in his 1851 travelogue of the Sindh, Burton had speculated on the resemblance between belief in jinn and in fairies, noting that because the word fairy is of Persian origin, “it is not uninteresting to trace the gradations through which the beautiful sylphs of [Persian] Guebrism dwindled down into the pigmy green folk of Northern Europe.”Footnote ⁶¹ Burton’s note on the jinn in his 1885 Nights would echo the cosmopolitan insight and language of his earlier note by tracing the derivation of this belief to “the Div and Rakshah of old [Persian] Guebre-land and the ‘Rakshasa,’ or ‘Yaksha,’ of Hinduism.”Footnote ⁶²

By reading the Nights in this light, Burton suggests the reader is offered a cosmopolitan education in uncertainty and the unknown. Magical tales such as those of jinn that outrage probability and outstrip possibility work a strange fascination upon the European reader. Surrendering to the spell, he feels almost inclined to ask “and why may it not be true?” The reader encounters the tales as the traveler does “the sudden prospect of magnificent mountains seen after a long desert-march: they arouse strange longings and indescribable desires; their marvelous imaginativeness produces an insensible brightening of the 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.”Footnote ⁶³ The reader of the Nights is initiated in their cultural, religious, and sexual cosmopolitanism. Burton stresses the heterogeneous make-up of the Nights fables and fairy tales. The Nights fable is a longer variation on a form that allows for multiple morals and speaks to the cross-cultural pollination entailed in its development.Footnote ⁶⁴ Likewise the supernaturalism of the Nights fairy tale is not properly Arabian but Persian, that is, the product of a culture that “repeated for Babylonian art and literature what Greece had done for Egyptian.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Greek, Persian, and Sufi influences are key to what Burton finds to be the most timely cosmopolitan lesson the Nights tales have to teach his British contemporaries in 1885, tolerance of homosexuality.

In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie comparably juxtaposes the legacy of the prophet—seeking to purify the faith from pagan and foreign influences—to the heterogeneity of the more popular forms of belief encapsulated in the tradition of the Nights. Rushdie would appear to follow Burton in seeking to put cosmopolitanism to creative purposes to salvage the sum of resistant narratives of “heterogeneous” Islam suppressed by mainstream religion. Burton’s translation of the Nights had preserved heterodox literary narratives in Islam in which figures such as the jinn occupied subaltern positions. The Quran assigns a paradoxical role to jinn (also termed shayātīn, “demons”), a class of created beings thought to have power for good or evil.Footnote ⁶⁶ A certain defensiveness governs most of the references to jinn in the Quran, which curtail the powers ascribed to jinn by various forms of pre-Islamic belief. The Quran denies their most significant powers: to spy the secrets of heaven and aid humankind with knowledge of futurity and things invisible, and to be agents of magic. Nonetheless, the very delimitation of the power of the jinn betrays an understanding of their prior role as mediators between the material and the invisible world and necessitates their broader incorporation into the cosmography of Islam. The Quran presents God as master of the earth’s two spaces, the territories of jinn and of humankind. And the delimitation of the power of the jinn serves to reaffirm their (remaining) power: though jinn can no longer spy the secrets of heaven, they can still rise up to heaven’s gates without relying on the routes required for the ascension of angels, preserving that freedom of mobility treasured in jinn by the faiths of pre-Islamic Arabia. The Quran even appeals to their persistent power in calling upon believing jinn to attest to the fidelity of the transmission of revelation, where the rationale appears to be that if jinn are convinced, how could men remain unpersuaded?Footnote ⁶⁷

It is this call that the narrator of The Satanic Verses answers in identifying himself as a skeptical shayātīn and in questioning the “official” account of the process of Quranic revelation: “Shaitan interrupting Gibreel. Me?”Footnote ⁶⁸ The novel thus engages Quranic traditions pertaining to skeptical jinn, exploiting the connotations present in Quranic references to both the Iblis (is he a jinni or a rebellious angel?) and to shayātīn as a proper name denoting a rebel against God, an enemy of the people, and an ally of the infidels. In spite, or because, of the marginalization of the jinn in the Quran, the pluralistic Islamic traditions to which the tales of the Nights pertain preserved the jinn’s broader powers despite the passage of centuries. As Islam spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia the figure of the jinni often acquired traits associated with figures from non-Islamic folklore such as fairies, sorcerers, and spirits. In Burton’s stress, the influences were not only regional but also far flung. The paradoxical role assigned the jinni in the Quran allowed this figure to function as a floating signifier not circumscribed by the established order and the accompanying expectations of theology and canonical literature. In this light one can comprehend the extraordinary diversity of traits associated with jinn in the tales of the Nights, stories situated outside high literature and unrepresentative of orthodox Islamic religious doctrine. The Nights jinn differ from their Quranic brethren: they conspicuously exhibit the powers that the jinn were excised of in the Quran—such as divination and geomancy—in addition to others assimilated from supernatural beings from other traditions with which Islam came into contact, including witchcraft and various forms of sexual prowess.

Rushdie’s retelling of “Aladdin” in The Satanic Verses provides the narrative arc for the novel’s tale of Saladin’s reconciliation with his father, and the novel associates both with the characteristic traits of the jinn. The paternal disappointment of the widower Changez is reminiscent of the sorrow Aladdin causes first his father and then his widowed mother. While in “Alaeddin” the tailor fears his son is a “ne’er-do-well” vagabond and a “scapegrace,”Footnote ⁶⁹ in Rushdie’s tale Changez reprimands his son as a “fauntleroy” and a “grand panjandrum.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Saladin’s discovery of a “fabulous hoard” outside his home recalls Aladdin’s find of what Burton’s text specifies as a “hoard” and an “enchanted treasury,”Footnote ⁷¹ and Burton’s note that a Muslim would see in this discovery “the hand of Destiny bringing good”Footnote ⁷² is echoed in Saladin’s sense that “a rainbow had arched down to him from the heavens... like an answered prayer.”Footnote ⁷³ Rushdie follows Burton’s commentary in presenting “the promise of the magic lamp” that inspires Saladin as “the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Burton’s account notes the expectations raised by the then popular Muslim saying “the son ‘is the lamp of a dark house,’”Footnote ⁷⁵ and these expectations are ultimately fulfilled in the conclusion to Rushdie’s novel in which Saladin becomes the lamp in his father’s dark house and literally “a light in his eye.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Father and son are both likened to shaitan or the bad jinn. Even though Changez was “a giant,” he materializes behind his son with a “lightness of foot,”Footnote ⁷⁷ in the manner of the jinni in the Nights frame tale that first appears like a gigantic column in the sky and then assumes human shape. Saladin notes his father’s “magic-lampism” and the “open sesamist” ease with which he accumulates “charm, women, wealth, power, position.” Changez, who shares the ghoul’s aversion to travel, lives by the sea in a house increasingly given over to ruin, and his work as a leading manufacturer of “artificial dung”Footnote ⁷⁸ links him with the marketplace and the latrine (known abodes of the jinn).Footnote ⁷⁹

In turn, the text deploys Saladin’s jinnlike gift for voice acting and cultural impersonation as a parable of the perils of the migrant’s assimilation in Britain. The Nights jinn is an enchanter who takes on a variety of forms (human, animal, and monstrous) and who also possesses the power (and perhaps the curse) of invisibility, and the young Saladin is an actor of “a thousand voices and a voice” who equals the feats attributed to jinn by assuming with his voice forms that range “from animal to vegetable, and also mineral.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Tellingly, the relationship of father and son degenerates into mutual accusations of demonic possession: “A man untrue to himself becomes a two-legged lie, and such beasts are Shaitan’s best work.”Footnote ⁸¹ When Saladin suddenly becomes visible to the English as a foreigner—his gift for impersonating an English accent and identity fail him—he loses all that he had achieved through his “magic lampism”: his wealth, his house, and his wife. It is only in retrospect that Saladin recognizes that his was a “crippled legend,” a “dark star,” because he “remained invisible,” shedding his body “to put on voices.”Footnote ⁸² As in the original tale of Aladdin, the riches and happiness obtained through enchantment and the aid of the jinni (the palace and hence the hand of the princess Budur in marriage) turn out to be ephemeral. Saladin’s jinnlike talents earn him the outward attributes of a member of the upper-middle class, but it cannot win him the love of his wife, Pamela, but only a “brilliant counterfeit of joy.”Footnote ⁸³ Saladdin’s trajectory via the parallel with the tale of Aladdin emphasizes the emptiness of a certain mode of cultural detachment, assimilation, and “cosmopolitan” flexibility in adopting various different accents and cultural personae. If beyond Burton’s version of the tale Rushdie has Burton himself and his frenzy of disguises in mind, this may be a critique of the hollowness of a cosmopolitanism that constantly supplants one identity with another.

Saladin’s status as a jinni sets him apart from Gibreel Farishta (Gibreel “Angel”), whose schizophrenic dreams of religious prophecy lead him to believe himself to be an avenging angel. The contrast between the two protagonists serves Rushdie’s reclamation of the qualities associated with evil jinn in the Quran and the Nights, while treating all claims of prophecy from Muhammad to Khomeini with scathing irreverence.Footnote ⁸⁴ Rushdie makes use of the tradition recounted by al-Qazwini according to which God bestowed his favors upon pre-Adamic jinn, who had government, prophecy, religion, and law until they opposed the prophets and “made wickedness abound in the earth,” at which point God sent an army of angels to defeat them and banish the survivors to the region of the islands.Footnote ⁸⁵ Resistance to prophecy, which damns the pre-Adamic jinn in the eyes of God, is what endears jinn to Rushdie. The Satanic Verses revisits the narrative of God’s suppression of the angels’ rebellion from the vantage point of a rebellious shaitan: “He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them... angels, they don’t have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent. I know; devil talk.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In fashioning Saladin as a character who expressly seeks to work his own magic and be his own jinni,Footnote ⁸⁷ Rushdie plays upon a tradition that holds jinn to be nothing more than “unruly” men: “[a] man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator’s role, according to one way of seeing things; he’s unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination.... Playing God again, you could say. Or you could come down a few notches, and think of Tinkerbell.... Or you might simply say: it’s just like being a man.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Saladin’s relationship to Gibreel is that of an unruly shaitan to a compliant angel, a parallel that helps explain the novel’s initial episode in which the two protagonists miraculously survive the explosion of an airplane at the height of twenty-seven hundred feet.Footnote ⁸⁹

In the novel’s conclusion, Saladin’s inheritance of the wonderful lamp symbolizes his own jinnlike liberation from the obligation of the actor and migrant to enact the identity and fate of others. In a late draft of the novel, Saladin does not return to Bombay from London in time to reconcile with his father, yet in the published novel the author opts uncharacteristically for a fairy tale resolution in which the protagonist reconciles with family and love (Zeeny Vakil) and survives the text’s accumulated prophecies of tragedy and doom. The wonderful lamp proves key to the novel’s final acts of forgiveness and reconciliation between the two protagonists. Saladin awaits his punishment at the hands of Gibreel for encouraging the unfounded jealousy that led Gibreel to murder his wife. In the novel’s retelling of Othello, Saladin recognizes that he has played the part of Iago to Gibreel’s Othello, and he muses upon the significance of Gibreel’s concealment of a gun inside the wonderful lamp he has inherited from his father. As Gibreel rubs the lamp three times and the revolver jumps into his hand, Saladin recalls the Nights tale: “A fearsome jinnee of monstrous stature appeared.... ‘What is your wish? I am the slave of him who holds the lamp.’... The true jinns of old had the power to open the gates of the Infinite, to make all things possible, to render all wonders capable of being attained.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Gibreel, no longer able to bear his schizophrenic dreams of angelic prophecy, turns the gun not on Saladin but on himself, and his confession that he can no longer bear his burden recalls the Nights mythology of the rebellious desire of angels and jinn to be free from millennial slavery to a master’s bidding. The emphasis on the lamp as the instrument of his delivery, and the concomitant stress on suicide as an act of freedom (“[he] pulled the trigger, and was free”),Footnote ⁹¹ reinforces the image of an angel or jinni set free from the curse and bondage of eternally performing the will of others.Footnote ⁹²

Though only five years separate the two scenes of the discovery of Burton’s Nights in an abandoned library in Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988), the brash arrogance that led the “translated” narrator of the earlier novel to recommend the adoption in Peccavistan of French revolutionary principles available “from stock” gives way in the latter novel to a more melancholy meditation on the effects of travel and migration. In Shame the translated narrator’s cosmopolitan vantage point in all its contradictions is privileged unambiguously over the untraveled imagination of Omar Shakil, who fails to become cosmopolitan through travel or reading. In The Satanic Verses, the use of jinn to describe both Saladin and his father does not translate into a straightforward privileging of secular European Enlightenment values over those of societies informed by Islamic traditions. Upon his first relocation to Britain, the protagonist, Saladin Chamcha, appears to exhibit an initial rush of superiority over his South Asian roots akin to that articulated by the earlier novel’s narrator. Yet the cognitive shock of migration registers as a disruption and disorientation from which he would appear unlikely to recover, destroying the cultural edifice of his childhood and leaving him merely with a blind desire to assimilate to English society, a gift for imitation the novel’s narrator mocks scathingly as Shame’s narrator had treated the colonial subjects’ imitations of the English in South Asia. In Saladin Chamcha’s aggressive Anglophilia, the narrator mocks, in Rushdie’s characteristic fashion, the erasure of one cultural self in submission to another.

Against the bitterness and barrenness of this self-imposed exile, the narrator contrasts a longing for a more productive engagement between the cultures that contribute to his formation (a cosmopolitanism of multiple attachments, in Bruce Robbins’s sense).Footnote ⁹³ Such a cosmopolitan promise resurfaces linked to the Nights in the novel’s last chapter and retelling of Aladdin, “A Wonderful Lamp,” in an otherwise disillusioning meditation on migration, as if signaling a stubborn hope in a fairy tale ending to a dystopian fantasy. The novel’s concluding affirmation of the promise of cosmopolitanism comes after the knowledge that the cognitive shock of travel and migration need not signal a broadening of horizons (as it originally failed to produce in the youthful Anglophile Saladin), that it may just as likely lead to a cosmopolitan bias as articulated in the form of prejudice as to tolerance. In light of the echo of the earlier scene of the neglect of the legacy of an abandoned library in Shame, and possibly also in Burton’s South Asian travelogue, The Satanic Verses offers a qualified affirmation of the promise of cosmopolitanism, more certain of the dangers of neglecting the inheritance of a cosmopolitan library and tradition than of the virtues of embracing it.