'Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys Collected During his Travels in the East, by the Late John Lewis Burckhardt' [‎vi-v] (19/470)

IV
PREFACE.
nary customs, manners, and institutions ; of their arts and sciences,
dress, arms, and many other particulars relative to that interesting
race of Arabs.
In the second portion of this volume, Burckhardt has compiled
from such original information, both written and oral, as seemed
on minute inquiry, most authentic, a history of those Moham
medan sectaries and fierce enthusiasts, the Wahabys ; tracing
them from their earliest appearance as reformers, in the last
century, through all their wars with other Arabs and with the
Turks, down to 1816 , that year in which he returned from
Arabia, the scene of action, to Egypt; where, not long after, a
premature death terminated his literary career, and prevented
the accomplishment of many important designs: his favourite
object being to explore the interior and least-known regions of
Africa.
In preparing this volume for publication, the editor must here
declare, (as in his preface to Burckhardt’s Arabia) that he has
invariably adopted the plan of his ingenious friend, that accom
plished scholar and antiquary, who superintended during their
progress through the press, our lamented traveller’s accounts of
his Nubian and Syrian journies, in expressing with scrupulous
fidelity the author’s sentiments on all occasions, and in retaining,
without any regard to mere elegance of style or selection of terms,
his original language, wherever an alteration was not absolutely
necessary to reconcile with our system of phraseology and gram
matical construction, certain foreign idioms which had crept into
his English writings.