M. A. R. Barker

Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker (born Phillip Barker; November 2, 1929 – March 16, 2012) was an American linguist who was professor of Urdu and South Asian Studies and created one of the first roleplaying games, Empire of the Petal Throne. He wrote several fantasy/science fantasy novels based in his associated world setting of Tékumel.

Between 1990 and 2002, he was a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Journal of Historical Review, which advocated Holocaust denial. In 1991 he published a neo-Nazi novel, Serpent's Walk, under the pseudonym Randolph D. Calverhall.

Quotes

• Socially and culturally, Tekumel is as complex – and as alien to modern thinking – as Byzantium, ancient Egypt, Tenochtitlan, or the India of the Mughals. [...] The discerning reader will indeed perceive elements taken from [...] Egypt, the Aztecs and Mayans, the Hellenic Age, Mughal India, and mediaeval Europe.
  • 1983, Tekumel Source Book: The World of the Petal Throne, p. 1

• I lived in India for many years, and I often encountered very intelligent, sophisticated people who had absolutely no curiosity about how things worked or technology. In fact, there are many people here, myself included, who are not "scientifically curious" about how an electric motor works, how far away the stars are, or what materials make up their clothing, their toothpaste, or their shoes. We take some things as beyond the need for curiosity; other peoples take more, other, and different things as such. The tribal people I lived with in India saw the airplane from Calcutta to Delhi fly overhead every day; they shrugged, wondered briefly if it was a steel bird, and then went back to being totally uncurious about it.
  • June 1, 2004, Tekumel Discussion Group, quoted in Inloes (2018)

• We American males make fun of each other, using jibes and sarcasm to embellish our conversations and establish bonds. When I did this with Indian and Pakistani friends, I got myself into lots of trouble! They have a wonderful sense of humour, too, but the manifestations and the "buttons they push" were VERY different. I have now learned to behave quite differently in their society. This is exaggerated when I deal with non-Westerners who have less exposure to American/European norms. Try kidding a Baluchi tribesman about his wife, and he’ll hand you your head!
  • The Blue Room, vol. 2, no. 74. quoted in Inloes (2018)

• If man has direct, hot-line access to God through prayer - and if God is "Good" (i.e. on mankind’s side essentially) – then what need is there of physical devices: weapons, crucifixes, talismans, holy water, and the like? On this one I pass. Go ask your friendly neighbourhood theologian.
  • "Create a Religion", p. 19, quoted in Inloes (2018)

• I cannot conceive of an ancient, classical, mediaeval, or 'legendary' world without some form of organised religion... 'Religion,' in some form or another, is so central to the lives of most human beings that it cannot be omitted, minimised, or ignored
  • "Create a Religion", p. 20, quoted in Inloes (2018)

• Tolkien had this Britisher's sort of attitude that religion is something you do in church, and... It doesn't really do that much to your daily life... Whereas I’d been living and working in societies where religion is just permeating the atmosphere... Even the simple villagers are behaving in ways that they consider related directly to religion, rather than secular politics or something like this.
  • Quoted in Joseph Laycock's Dangerous Games, quoted in Inloes (2018)

• I once spent three months in Hong Kong long ago – compulsorily: I had lost my passport in Singapore, and the American embassy people did not believe I was an American until they checked my fingerprints with Washington. I thus ended up in Hong Kong waiting for my new passport to arrive. I was nearly penniless and lived quite comfortably in a brothel in Kowloon – without the services of the girls, I must add. They were all very nice to me, and my few remaining dollars were enough to pay for rice and an occasional bowl of vegetables. I thus saw Hong Kong from the underside, as it were. When my passport finally arrived, I managed to catch a Norwegian freighter going home to San Francisco. All of this was rather jolly, and the British police in Hong Kong were understanding. Everybody seemed to think I was either an agent for the Russians or an escaped Nazi war criminal, although I speak neither Russian nor German. Just my "good looks", I guess.
  • Undated and unpublished letter to a British author, quoted in Inloes (2018)

Serpent's Walk

• What matters? What is worth establishing and maintaining? Survival. Only survival. Individual survival is first; then comes the survival of the family, the clan, the tribe. These are immediately comprehensible. Beyond them lie ever larger and more diffuse, long-term loyalties.
  • p. 66
• Christianity and the other Middle Eastern religions were certainly alike in one respect: they all sweated over "sin." The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead had a great judgment scene, Lessing had read somewhere. When you died, Thoth, the ibis-headed god, weighed your heart against the Feather of Truth. You confessed your sins before Osiris, the Lord of the Dead, and if you lied you were lunch for a crocodile-headed monster. Needless to say, this sternly moral scene was followed by other chapters that told you how to lie safely to the Forty-Two Judges of the Dead, how to con Osiris, how to fool old Croco-Smile, and how to sashay on into the Fields of the Blessed without anybody laying a hand, claw, or tentacle on you!
  Why did all the religions from that part of the world bother postulating an omnipotent, omniscient god who handed down iron-clad commandments—only to spend the rest of history figuring ways to bamboozle him? Must be something in the Middle Eastern psyche.
  • p. 368
• Ah, but what about persons in our society who are not members of our ethnos? I shall not mince words. We are not responsible for members of such groups. This is our society. We live here, and we shall govern here. We thus strongly encourage others to go and live where their own ethnos-groups hold sway. We see no need for them in our land.
  • pp. 377–378
• We will not tolerate either mongrelization or the proliferation of unwanted and unassimilable persons who can never fully participate in our society. Should such people refuse to leave, then we will enforce our will with whatever means are needed. No excuses, no wishy-washy hypocrisy! We will not be blackmailed info being the Great White Father of all of the unfortunates of the world! Let other ethnos groups care for their own, just as we care for ours.
  • p. 379
• At last Lessing could let go. The Thousand Year Reich had gone off the track, derailed for a space of a hundred and forty-four years, but now it was back on and chugging along strong.
  • p. 449