Richard F. Burton's Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca (2013)

For anyone interested in Burton, I strongly recommend the now-forgotten film The Mountains of the Moon (1990), directed by Rafelson and starring Patrick Bergin as Burton and Iain Glen as his companion John Hanning Speke. Bergin (whose career quickly faded after this, unfortunately) is fantastic as Burton, an early Byronesque renaissance man who eschewed Victorian customs but combined both learning and adventure, and whose lack of respect for societal norms made him unpopular with the upper classes. Overall, it's an incredibly beautiful film, shot by the great Roger Deakins on location in Africa.

> He spent a month or so in Alexandria learning all over again the right ways to eat, drink, sit, sleep, and of course, pray. The tiniest misstep might be a betrayal—literally: the proper way to enter a mosque was with the right foot first. According to Burton’s account, most Muslims who ran into him thought he was certainly Muslim, but “not a good one like themselves, but, still better than nothing.”

I understand the idea of practicing prayer to look like a Muslim. But what is the need to practice going to sleep, eat or sit as a Muslim. Yes there will be a problem with some food (that he would not find anyway in his journey) but muslims do sit, eat and sleep like any other one. They are not aliens from another planet.

Even if they mean cultural ways of life, they are very diverse as muslim world represents the whole world. The pilgrimage is where people understand they are meeting with people from the whole world.

Kind of lame to go to a holy site while basically spitting on the people who give you hospitality. "Unpleasant garbage" indeed.

Read Leopold Weiss' book (known as Muhammad Asad), "Road to Mecca", which is a much better memoir. A beautiful tale of self-discovery and bridging cultures and religion