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Louis Massignon and the Hospitality of Abraham Monks and Dervishes

Louis Massignon and the Hospitality of Abraham Monks and Dervishes

ARAM, 20 (2008) 317-327. doi: 10.2143/ARAM.20.0.2033135E. LOOSLEY 317

THE CHALLENGE OF MONASTICISM: AND THE HOSPITALITY OF ABRAHAM

Dr. EMMA LOOSLEY (University of Manchester)

MONKS AND : MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS

One of the most problematic areas in Christian-Islamic dialogue is that of monasticism. Misunderstandings abound with Christians believing that the concept of a or sisterhood devoted entirely to is alien to Muslims and Muslims taking the concept of a life of , removed from traditional family ties, as being contrary to Allah’s wishes. Both sides view the other through the lens of prejudice and it is difficult to establish how to open a bal- anced and meaningful discussion on this topic. As a preliminary step we must establish what some of these entrenched beliefs are and this will enable us to later explore the concept of a monastic movement that seeks to have meaning for both Christians and Muslims. Despite the religious narrative within Islamic traditions, Christian and monasticism continued to attract the attention of many Muslim scholars and mystics in their of , liturgical culture and scholarship.1 After the rise of and the consolidation of the territories of the Christian, eccle- siastical provinces of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem under Muslim rule, Christian monks writing in Syriac, Greek and Arabic were the first to call at- tention to the doctrinal and moral challenges of Islam to Christians.2 Monks were also the first Christians to adopt Arabic as an ecclesiastical lan- guage, to write in Arabic and to translate the Christian Bible and other classical Christian texts into Arabic. In the agreements drawn up to gov- ern the relationships between Muslims and Christians in early Islamic times, monks were often exempted from the payment of the Poll tax (jizya), and often the authority of the prophet himself was claimed for this dispensation. Historically Muslims saw as riotous and fun-loving institutions with little of the abstemious life about them.3 Their representation in art and

1 S.H.Griffths, ‘Disputing with Islam in Syriac: The Case of the of Bêt Hãlê and a Muslim Emir’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, Vol. 3, no, 2000, pp. 1-22. 2 See the studies by S.H.Griffiths, ‘Anastasios of Sinai, the Hodegos and the Muslims’, The Greek Orthodox Theological Review, Vol. 32 (1987), pp. 341-358; ‘The Monks of and the Growth of Christian Literature in Arabic’, The Muslim World, Vol. 78 (1988), pp. 1-28; Arabic in the monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine, London, Variorum, 1992. 3 Monasteries were often considered to be privileged places by Muslims and Christians alike, where help could be sought and interreligious conversations could take place. Some of them

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literature4 concentrates on the fact that monasteries had the right to produce wine for personal consumption, but also for retail, and as such were seen as encouraging licentiousness and moral corruption in Islamic society. In some cases they are even compared to taverns where rowdy young Muslim youths could meet and drink alcohol freely, served by monks acting as tavern-keep- ers.5 Leaving aside whether or not these Muslim commentators were aware that wine fulfilled a sacramental rôle in Christian life, it is easy to see how these early misunderstandings and rumours led to accusations of hypocrisy and drunkenness towards Christian monks by Muslims who understood very little of the Christian monastic tradition.6 The fact that monks had largely retreated from their earliest eremitical origins as solitary holy men and become large brotherhoods in the perceived, but often misguided view, of comfortable sur- roundings also exacerbated tensions. Whilst it is an accepted trope of popular history that monks retreated to monasteries in the face of Islamic expansion, this is simply untrue. The liturgi- cal evidence suggests that monasticism became more insular and isolated from the seventh or eighth centuries, well before Islam spread across the Levant.7 To the villagers who had thus far lived surrounded by their holy men and shared the same concerns of daily survival with the of and the “Spiritual Athletes” of , there was a bond with the earliest monks that was severed when communities retreated to live more isolated contempla- tive lives behind high walls. This break in close relations with temporal soci- ety led to a reduction of interaction and criticism that monks were increasingly unaware of the daily struggle poor people faced for survival. Accusations of monastic abuse of local people, with monks living in luxury whilst the laity goes hungry have been common for centuries, and it was inevitable that this kind of story would have been used as a tool for conversion by Muslim clerics. Whatever the real reason for this retreat into monastic isolation, and much speculation has centred on the fact that the of the fifth century had weakened ecclesiastical structures and time was needed to regroup and recover from the doctrinal divisions that had wrought havoc across Anatolia and the

claimed to have patents offering them special protection. On the other hand monks and monaster- ies were sometimes targets of anti-Christian attacks. In Arabic secular literature from the early period a genre of poetic writing often called diyariyyat, or “monastic poems”, developed that celebrated monasteries as places of revelry see G. Troupeau, ‘Les couvents chrétiens dans le lit- erature arabe musulmane’, La nouvelle revue de Caire, No. 1 (1975), pp. 265-279. 4 For example look at Golombek, Lisa, ‘Some Representations of Architecture in the Istanbul Albums’, Islamic Art 1 (1981), pp. 130-135 for a discussion of a fifteenth-century Muslim de- scription of a Christian . 5 See the entry for ‘monasticism’, The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. 7 (Brill: Leiden, 1993). 6 Contrast these attitudes to those of Western where the production of alcoholic bev- erages, whether beer or wine is regarded as a venerable tradition that still continues today. 7 See Loosley, Emma, The Architecture and of the Bema in Fourth to Sixth-Century Syrian Churches, USEK, Patrimoine Syriaque vol. 2, Kaslik, Lebanon, 2003.

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Near East, the movement towards scholasticism was disastrously ill-timed; the laity interpreted this as an abandonment at the very moment that a new reli- gion appeared on the horizon and considered that life might improve under this alternative creed. For a population that still relied on a communal spirit of hos- pitality to survive in times of need, the growth of cenobitic monasticism would have seemed an anti-social development in Oriental Christianity. On the other hand the medieval Sufi brotherhoods that came nearest to any- thing that a Christian would have understood as the monastic life were equally misunderstood. Christians saw the freedom of ‘dervishes’, who could wander alone and seek advice from time to time from their spiritual master, as lacking in the discipline of the cenobitic tradition. They were not tied by the rigid rules of monastic discipline and, although they prayed five times a day, these could be anywhere and were practiced alone. There was no need to rise in the middle of the night and file into a cold church to chant the offices amongst their brethren. Prayer for a was an essentially private matter and, by extension the offered was, again, an essentially private mat- ter for an individual rather than an offering of for a wider community. This was very different to the communal experience of Christian prayer of- fered in a spirit of brotherhood. Sufi longing for unity with the divine was a solitary pursuit of personal salvation and would have been far too individualis- tic to be understood by monks pledged to , and obedience within a brotherly monastic context. Whether or not the brotherhood extended outside the confines of the monastery into the secular world, Christian - nasticism insisted on an awareness of brotherhood with common humanity at all times. The Sufi injunction to do good was more abstract and whilst good deeds figure strongly in Sufi literature, the aim of a personal, solitary link with God was always the ultimate goal. Another obvious misunderstanding was the lack of sacramental in Is- lam. praising wine and oblivion in the search for a mystical union led to counter-charges of hypocrisy regarding attitudes to the “fruit of the vine”. Christians accused of drunkenness and immorality because they drank wine and because of the centrality of wine to the Christian were swift to point out that intoxication was never the aim of a “good Christian” and yet cast such intoxication in a positive light in ecstatic poetry. The poetry of Rumi, Hafez and other great masters also gave rise to other criti- cisms as to the sanctity of these Sufi holy men. Passages seeking the love of the Beloved in the form of a beautiful young man gave rise to suspicions of homosexuality and paedophilia. This suspicion that if God was anthropomor- phised into an earthly lover then devotion would be tainted by carnal lusts was not an issue that troubled Christianity unduly until the middle ages, when fe- male mystics began to discuss a heavenly union with Christ. The fact that the Sufi Beloved was usually depicted as an androgynous figure most easily

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equated with an adolescent or pre-adolescent male only added to Christian hostility. In this once again the common misunderstandings between the two were demonstrated as the Christians were not taking into account that the segregation of the sexes in all but the poorest Muslim households meant that celibate dervishes never actually saw women, let alone had any social in- teraction with them and could therefore not imagine these alien and exotic creatures as objects of affection. For monks pledged to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience that essen- tially tied them to one place, this freedom to roam the world unfettered and obligated only by a vague sense of loyalty to a spiritual master, rather than tak- ing a vow of obedience to him, led them to view dervishes as undisciplined and introspective. In some ways we can perhaps link this to the fact that as dis- cussed above, after an early flush of popularity in the early Christian era, the eremitical life seems to have fallen out of favour until it was revived in the European Middle Ages with the practice of institutional hermitical practices, reaching their apogee with the foundation of the Carthusian and orders.8 With both groups the age-old tension of how far the monastic life was to be an example to the faithful and how far it was simply to guarantee per- sonal salvation gave critics of both practices plenty of possibilities to attack these traditions. With this amount of misinformation on both sides it is unsurprising that monasticism or otherwise choosing to lead a still remains a complex topic not yet fully embraced in the dialogue process. This issue is perhaps all the more emotive at a time when the extreme and funda- mentalist religious practices of “Jihadi camps” are portrayed in the western world as an archetypal form of “Islamic Monasticism”. By equating extreme piety with violence many western societies now view the majority of Muslim religious leaders with suspicions that are as prejudiced as they are unfounded. The fact that the traditional Muslim holy man, the dervish, was often viewed as a holy fool for his extreme passivity and indifference to the material world is now often forgotten. On the other hand, Christian rôle models have also been devalued, with monks often being accused of being chronically out of touch with the twenty-first century; neither tradition is treated with respect and both are equally misunderstood in a society that has an increasingly dysfunc- tional relationship with .

LOUIS MASSIGNON AND THE IDEAL OF ORIENTAL MONASTICISM

Bearing the issues discussed above in it is also perhaps no surprise that this was one issue that preoccupied Louis Massignon. Whilst he lived be- 8 See the pioneering work of Cécile Caby, De l’Érémitisme Rural au Monachisme Urbain: Les Camaldules en Italie à la fin du Moyen Âge, Rome, École Française de Rome, 1999.

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fore the tumult of 9/11 when pundits rushed to assert the truth of Samuel Huntingdon’s prediction of a “Clash of Civilisations”, to Massignon and his contemporaries the world was just as dark and godless as it appears today; theirs was the generation that had to make sense of the senseless, the genera- tion who had to resolve a meaning of life amidst the Great War. It was also perhaps no coincidence that as Europe tore itself apart, the collapse of the Ot- toman Empire left the Islamic world with a question over how the umma should be governed that still remains largely unresolved today. As a young man Massignon had felt the call to bear witness in a Muslim country when he briefly considered the idea of joining the ascetic Charles de Foucauld at in French North Africa. The fact that he ultimately did not see this as his personal vocation has been discussed many times else- where, but nevertheless this event demonstrates that Massignon felt a close af- finity to those with a monastic vocation and it was a subject that stayed close to him throughout his life.9 Perhaps it is also significant that the life espoused by Charles de Foucauld was closer to the archetypal Islamic system of master and acolyte than to a traditional Christian monastic structure.10 Whilst his method of taking up residence amongst poor Muslims and sharing the harsh- ness of their life was in some senses a return to the ideals of the desert fathers, it was also akin to the lifestyle of a dervish or spiritual master and his pupils.11 Having married in 1914 did not mean that Massignon abandoned his com- mitment to a life affiliated to a . In 1931 he became a third-or- der Franciscan and chose ‘Abraham’ as his religious name.12 It was also around this period that he met whose views on non-violent protest were to have a profound effect on him.13 However it was in 1934 that Massignon finally began to articulate his vision of an Oriental Christian Com- munity dedicated to a life-long work of embracing Islam within the framework of the hospitality of Abraham. 9 Hughes Didier, ‘Louis Massignon et Charles de Foucauld’ in Jacques Keryell (ed.) Louis Massignon et ses contemporains, Éditions Karthala, Paris, 1997, pp. 93-109; H. Didier, Petite Vie de Charles de Foucauld Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 1996. See also the correspondance be- tween De Foucauld and Massignon in J.-F. Six L’aventure de l’amour de Dieu (80 lettres inédites de Charles de Foucauld à Louis Massignon) Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1993. 10 J.-F. Six Itinéraire spirituel de Charles de Foucauld, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1958; Jacques Keryell, ‘Louis Massignon et les problèmes d’inculturation de la Fraternité d’El-Abiodh Sidi Cheikh’, Louis Massignon au cœur de notre temps, (éd) J.Keryell, Éditions Karthala, Paris, 1999, pp. 211-230. 11 See the reflection by Ali Merad, Christian in an Islamic World: A Muslim’s View of Charles de Foucauld (Translated from the French with a foreword and afterword by Zoe Hersow), New York, Paulist Press, 1999). 12 p. 156, S.H. Griffiths, ‘ Merton, Louis Massignon and the Challenge of Islam’ in The Merton Annual: Studies in , Religion, Culture, Literature and Social Con- cerns vol. 3, 1990, pp. 151-172. 13 P. Dall’ Oglio, ‘Massignon and jihad, through de Foucauld, al-Hallaj and Gandhi’, in , Power and Violence, ed. J.J. Donohue, sj, & C.W. Troll, sj, coll. “Orientalia Christiana Analecta” 258, Roma, 1998, 103-114.

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Significantly this vision began in the Franciscan chapel in Damietta. This was a physical and symbolic link with St. whose thirteenth century mission to Damietta had sought to halt the bloodshed of the . With his friend Marie Kahil, Massignon took a vow to found the al- Badaliyyah, a movement where were to pray and fast on be- half of the Muslim majorities in the countries in which they lived.14 The enor- mity of this move and the sacrifice it entailed for Marie Kahil is difficult for Western Christians to fully comprehend. The experiences of Arab Christians of centuries of suffering and uncertainty are completely outside our experience and it is only by bearing witness to the life of Oriental Christians today that we can have any grasp of how significant this gift of compassion and understand- ing was for Marie Kahil. It is perhaps not underlined enough that whilst com- passion and prayer for Islam meant one thing for Massignon as an Occidental Christian, it meant quite another for Oriental Christians such as Marie Kahil who had lived all their lives in the of a Muslim society. From this initial vow taken in Damietta, Massignon and Kahil developed their thinking into how this vow and new movement could spread amongst the Christians of the . A group known as the Dar al-Salam (House of ) was founded in Cairo. Later groups of Badaliyyah were set up in Paris, Rome and the United States. This perhaps suggests that the concept is easier for Western Christians to grasp than their Oriental counterparts, a criticism that Massignon himself seems to have been aware of: …They say that the Badaliya is an illusion because we cannot put ourselves in the place of another, and that it is a lover's dream. It is necessary to respond that this is not a dream but rather a suffering that one receives without choosing it, and through which we conceive grace. It is the visitation [by the spirit of God], hidden in the depth of the anguish of compassion, which seizes us as an entrance into the reign of God. It certainly appears powerless, yet it requires everything, and the One on the cross who shares it with us transfigures it on the last day. It is suffer- ing the pains of humanity together with those who have no other pitiful compan- ion than us.15

However the Badaliyyah movement was only one element of Massignon and Kahil’s dream of a community founded for the service of Islam. Together they went further in their thought to posit the idea of a monastic community that they named L’Abbaye de L’Amour, the Monastery of Love. This commu- nity would follow the normal monastic injunctions of poverty, chastity and obedience but would also have an extra dimension; of, and love for, the Islamic world. This love was to be demonstrated by the practice of selfless hospitality in the manner of Abraham.

14 P. 156, S.H. Griffiths, ‘Thomas Merton, Louis Massignon and the Challenge of Islam’ 15 A translation of one of Massignon’s 1955 letters to Kahil, published in ‘A Model of Hope’ by D.C.Buck, http://www.dcbuck.com/Badaliya/ accessed 6/7/06.

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THE HOSPITALITY OF ABRAHAM AND THE EUROPEAN DREAM OF THE EAST

In twenty-first century Europe the significance of the sacrality of hospitality is difficult to understand in a society where many people have become isolated and socially alienated. This is a situation that can happen only when a society is wealthy. In poorer countries where there is often a lack of resources, a com- munal life of ‘share and share alike’ is the only way to survive. In the harshest of all conditions, that of the desert, a willingness to share resources is essen- tial. Sharing food and drink with others in need is obligatory as you never know when those you have aided will be your saviours when the roles are re- versed. This reliance on hospitality is one of the central tenets of bedu life and Massignon saw it as a core duty running through all three Abrahamitic reli- gions. Whilst this seems a simple injunction, Abrahamitic hospitality is becoming increasingly rare in today’s society. The world described by Wilfred Thesiger in the 1950s has largely been eradicated and when camels are replaced by 4X4s the need for hospitality is extinguished and falls into abeyance. These traditions are now only practiced in a few small communities that survive in poorer Arab countries. On the whole foreigners now experience this “hospital- ity” at “theme nights” arranged by tour guides where the exchange of money betrays the authenticity and true significance of such encounters. It is this superficiality that takes us back to the heart of the matter; just as they have for centuries, European tourists today allow their romantic ideas of the “Orient” to colour their perceptions. This creates a “them and us” sce- nario where the Arab hosts are either romanticised as noble and elemental desert creatures or are seen as primitive and under-educated. It may be conten- tious, but if we accept that Massignon was a relatively typical product of his time with regard to his opinions on the French Colonies, then we have to con- sider that he fell into one of these groups. The evidence suggests that Massignon fell into this romanticising group and, as part of a society capti- vated by the nineteenth century idea of “the noble savage”, how far could he be in sympathy with the Christians of the Middle East? It has been said that: For Massignon the Quran points to Christ. He saw it as ‘an Arabic edition of the Bible with conditional authority’ because in the end it excludes the full revelation of Christ in the Gospel and in the Church. It poses a challenge of purity of heart for Christians, just as Sufism does for monasticism. Thus Massignon has helped us to see that Islam has a place in God’s providence.16 It is worth reiterating once again that to a European in the early twentieth century, who had had far less contact with Islam than we are accustomed to 16 p.103, A. Wilkins, O.S.B., “Thomas Merton’s Encounter with Islam” in Catholics in Interreligious Dialogue: Studies in Monasticism, Theology and , A. O’Mahony & P. Bowe O.S.B, eds., Gracewing, 2006, pp. 97-119.

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today, it was easy to develop a theory of how the two religions, Christianity and Islam, could live peacefully side by side. The real sacrifice was the one made in the knowledge of the true reality of the situation; years of Christians suffering sporadic attacks and being treated as outside the mainstream of soci- ety. It was native Christians such as Marie Kahil who were making the true sacrifice as they had no other world to escape to if the project went wrong. We must also consider that this is a view still widely held amongst many Middle Eastern Christians. After an encounter with a self-proclaimed French “hermit” in the Lebanese mountains several years ago (a hermit who nonethe- less lived in a smart cottage in a village and had regular visitors), a Maronite priest at the Université Saint Esprit gave a long peroration on the well-mean- ing but naïve foreigners who foist themselves on Oriental Christians. He claimed that these people use local Christians to access an idealised view of early Christianity and to further their own spiritual growth, before the interlop- ers either return home or “suffer” with local Christians through events like the Lebanese war, losing sight of the fact that they have choices that local people do not. This may seem a cynical and somewhat shocking viewpoint to many Western Christians, but is nevertheless a valid criticism and one that the hagiographical literature of De Foucauld, Massignon and others often fails to take account of. If Massignon’s mission was to reach a deep and meaningful understanding of the spiritual world of Islam then the attitudes of Oriental Christians must obviously be considered. In fact the core issue of this debate is summed up by these sentiments, and that is the role of suffering. For Massignon it was the suffering of the Sufi mystic Abu ‘Abdallah al-Husayn Ibn Mansur al-Hallâj that crystallised his be- liefs and drew Christianity and Islam into close parallel: Louis Massignon saw Christianity and Islam through the lens of the tragic figure of the mystic al-Hallâj (857-922). Al-Hallâj, who was ‘martyred’ in Baghdad for heresy, represented for Massignon a direct parallel to the suffering of Jesus on the Cross. As Christianity had suffering and compassion as its foundation, so too, ac- cording to Massignon, did Islam. Indeed, he regarded suffering as fundamental to Semitic and Jewish tradition.17 Whilst Western activity of the second half of the twentieth cen- tury can be traced, through the intermediary of Jean Danielou SJ, back to Massignon18 we must accept that this is a specifically Occidental interpretation of the missionary role of the Church and that this may not be appropriate when

17 p.151, A. O’Mahony, “Our Common Fidelity to Abraham is What Divides: Christianity and Islam in the Life and Thought of Louis Massignon”, in Catholics in Interreligious Dialogue: Studies in Monasticism, Theology and Spirituality, A. O’Mahony & P. Bowe O.S.B, eds., Gracewing, 2006, pp. 151-190. 18 P. 152, A. O’Mahony, “Our Common Fidelity to Abraham is What Divides: Christianity and Islam in the Life and Thought of Louis Massignon.”

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applied to Eastern sensibilities. Oriental Christians are aware of the daily reali- ties of their situation and are suspicious of zealous . Their natural conservatism, born of years of experience, counsels them to remain aloof from converts and, with the possible exception of the Lebanese, those born Chris- tian refuse to have any relationship with converts across the region. The re- ceived wisdom is that those born to a religion should remain within it; suspi- cion surrounds anyone who would chose to convert and this is a sentiment that seems alien to outsiders. This viewpoint is applied to the Western travellers who pass through the Middle East and who mystify Christian and Muslim alike with their approach to the “Spiritual Supermarket”; their willingness to try new religions such as and in a manner akin to chang- ing their hair colour is seen as yet another example of the decadence of the West. So if there is such a divide amongst east and west, can an Occidental Christian ever bridge this gap and formulate a theory such as Massignon and Kahil’s L’Abbaye de L’Amour that will actually take root in the region?

MASSIGNON IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY

As we enter into a new century and the relationship between Christianity and Islam becomes the defining political issue of the day, affecting the peace of many different societies, then we have a duty to try and apply any formula that offers us hope of bringing the two communities together. The crucial fac- tor with the work of Louis Massignon is to adapt his views of Badaliyyah to a manner that is compatible with contemporary society. One community has al- ready tried this and, fifteen years into the life of the community, is able to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the model laid down by Massignon. The Community of al-Khalil (popularly known as the Community of Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi) near Nebek in Syria was founded by Fr.Paolo Dall’Oglio SJ based closely on Massignon and Kahil’s prescription for L’Abbaye de L’Amour19 and, as such, it gives us some indication of whether or not Massignon’s blueprint is translatable into a contemporary, functioning monastic community. Predictably the answer is yes and no; on some levels the Community has flourished and on others life has been more difficult. To begin with the successes; the Community of al-Khalil has become a na- tionally recognised centre where youth of all religions and denominations can meet and pray together. Debate is encouraged and a series of conferences on issues as emotive as the future of Jerusalem have been held there. Prayer

19 See Loosley, E & Dall’Oglio, P, «La communauté d’Al-Khalil: une vie monastique au service du dialogue islamo-chrétien », Proche-Orient Chretien, 54 (2004), pp. 117-128, for a dis- cussion of the theological inspiration for the foundation of this community.

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workshops have encouraged people from a variety of backgrounds and creeds to celebrate what links them rather than what divides them and local relation- ships are so strong that the , Fr. Paolo, has given a number of homilies in Damascus . As a forum for discussion and a place that is recognised as conducive to prayer and contemplation for everyone the project is undoubt- edly a success. This is now acknowledged internationally and the imminent institution of an Abrahamitic pilgrimage across the Middle East for parties of , Christian and Muslims, with a planned stop at Deir Mar Musa al- Habashi is perhaps a validation of this work and of Massignon’s commitment to the hospitality of Abraham. Despite these great steps forward we have to ask what of the Community itself? Is that as Massignon would have wished it? The answer in this case is far more complex as, ironically the Badaliyyah model or the organisation of a lay-order fits the Community better than the tra- ditional monastic pattern. The Community of al-Khalil has had many voca- tions over the years but many have led young people onto a path outside the Community. Of the many postulants and novices who have entered the order, few have seen the noviciate through to its conclusion. Despite this, few of these people have left the Community completely and they continue in Syria and across Europe to work for the Community of al-Khalil as volunteers, many still extremely active in matters of dialogue. So why are they attracted in the first place and why do so few choose to stay forever? The first factor an- swers both of those questions. The monastery is extraordinarily beautiful and is located in the mountainous desert north of Damascus, in a landscape that is the essence of a European dream of the Orient. However the beauty of the site masks the fact that the weather is extreme and fluctuates between great heat and severe cold in a mediaeval building without electricity or hot water. The of life are often too tough for European novices and, with the excep- tion of the Abbot, only one European to date has proved tough enough to sur- vive the rigours of the lifestyle. Whilst this romantic idyll obviously has some effect on Syrians considering their vocation, they have usually visited enough at different times of the year to be aware of practicalities. For many young Syrians the more difficult task is that pointed out by Marie Kahil; after centu- ries of friction how can they let go of their resentment of the Muslim majority and learn to truly love their neighbours? In this the Community has had more success, both amongst the monks and and with the local workers who are employed by the Community. Christian and Muslim alike are part of the mon- astery workforce and, whilst the usual petty arguments apply, religion is not a factor in the squabbles over holiday, overtime and all the other niggles of daily life. Equally when the monastery librarian married the deputy foreman, no- body thought it worthy of note that the bride’s best friends all attended wear- ing the .

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In this way the Community of al-Khalil has demonstrated that taking ele- ments from the Badaliyyah and grafting them to a contemporary monastic movement in the Syrian desert have largely met with success, but the same problem remains; that of vocations. For Western Christians such an endeavour is invariably undertaken with a naïve and rose-tinted view of what the vocation will entail. On the other side Middle Eastern Christians are daunted by the weight of history and the prejudice of family and friends when considering whether this is their true calling in life. Only time will tell whether or not the Community of al-Khalil will survive in the long term and their recent accept- ance into the Foucauldian “Family” might prove the way forward. It seems that whilst many are called to try this way of life, few have the strength to see it through to its end and perhaps that is why Massignon himself never man- aged to establish such a foundation in his own lifetime.

MASSIGNON AND MONASTICISM IN THE FUTURE

It is too easy to associate lack of monastic vocations with the vicissitudes of modern life and to assume that it has simply gone out of fashion. This is incor- rect and shortsighted, although we must acknowledge that less materially privileged societies provide more vocations that wealthy ones. When examin- ing whether or not Oriental monasticism can be used as a major element in Christian-Islamic dialogue we must be careful. It is wrong to assume that just because Oriental Christians live in Muslim majority cultures that they are the obvious people to lead the dialogue process; first and foremost they are Chris- tians who have a responsibility to their community and many do not see dia- logue as part of this vocation. Having said that, a number are interested in this issue and neither should we assume that impetus for dialogue is always initi- ated by outsiders. Louis Massignon’s ideas on and brotherhood with Muslims have had an immense impact on dialogue, but the impact has been most significant in Europe. When his teachings have reached the Middle East it has been through the influence of orders such as the Jesuits (and here it must be noted that the founder of the Community of al-Khalil is a Jesuit). His ideas never quite managed to penetrate the European ideal of the Orient and until we deal with Eastern Christians on their own terms, rather than seeing them as idealised and romantic figures, we will never be able to further the dialogue process in the Middle East.

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