A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans, with an Account of the Author's Being Taken Captive was without question one of the most boring and inexorably uninteresting pieces of literature I have ever forced myself to read. I would go so far as to claim the The Prince was a more engaging piece of literature.
The first chapter was passably readable and looked as though we were going to be treated to an interesting narrative of the journey of a bonded man into a strange land. However Joseph quickly did away with these hops and jumped to the heart of his writing, Tedium Incarnate. Let me give you an example:
"The Algerines, in the month of April, have three several camps go forth: one to the east, one to the west, one to the south, of which the first is the greatest and consists of about an hundred tents, each tent containing twenty men. The western camp consists of about seventy or eighty [of] the like tents, and the southern camp but of fifteen. Each of these divisions hath a bey, or general, who gives so many thousand pieces of eight monthly for his place to the dey, or governor of Algier, and moreover defrays the whole coast and charges of the camp and is to make due provision of bread, butter, oil, and also wheat to make burgu, and likewise flesh for them twice a week, and barley for the horses. It is to be observed that every tent have their allowance, which allowance is far more than they can dispense withal, and therefore they have the liberty to take what they think will serve them and rest in money, which they divide among themselves."
fun!
So, moving to the author; he managed to go to great lengths to insult the Algerians while relentlessly reminding the reader that they seem to be more devoted to their false god than the average Briton was to his. He is inconsistent through out the book on several issues including marriage and divorce practices, claiming that only a virgin woman could be married then mentioning that divorce and remarriage was common. He was by and large somewhat balanced in his recounting of his experience if not painfully precise. I have no question that historians surely find this an excellently engaging piece but I found it questionably more exciting than my book for Classical Mechanics.
Overall I was left sure that he is neurotically Christian and holds a severe grudge against the Islamic faith and a general derogation for the Islamic Faith.
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3 comments:
I have to agree there were parts that dragged. Terribly. Horribly.
However, I must admit I found some of the details quite intriguing. I really do enjoy the brief insights into someplace so wholly different.
I wonder if the reading would have been less painful had he started as he finished? I find the personal story so much more interesting than the dry recitation of facts.
Ryan,
Did you feel differently after our discussion? I think that you missed the conflictedness of Pitts as a narrator which is, to me, one of the most interesting aspects of his narrative. Even the form which diverges from the structure of most travel narratives which place personal experience before cultural description suggests a deliberate attempt at not prejudicing readers by giving his account of forced conversion before describing the culture within which he lived for 15 years.
Ryan...you never posted our second formal post. I wasn't sure you realized as much. You're usually so prepared!
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