Louis Massignon and the Hospitality of Abraham Monks and Dervishes
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ARAM, 20 (2008) 317-327. doi: 10.2143/ARAM.20.0.2033135E. LOOSLEY 317 THE CHALLENGE OF MONASTICISM: LOUIS MASSIGNON AND THE HOSPITALITY OF ABRAHAM Dr. EMMA LOOSLEY (University of Manchester) MONKS AND DERVISHES: 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 brother or sisterhood devoted entirely to God is alien to Muslims and Muslims taking the concept of a life of celibacy, 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 monks and monasticism continued to attract the attention of many Muslim scholars and mystics in their world of prayer, liturgical culture and scholarship.1 After the rise of Islam 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 theology 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 monasteries 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 Monk 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 Palestine and the Growth of Christian Literature in Arabic’, The Muslim World, Vol. 78 (1988), pp. 1-28; Arabic Christianity 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 07-0398_Aram20_18_Loosley 317 09-16-2008, 17:24 318 LOUIS MASSIGNON AND THE HOSPITALITY OF ABRAHAM 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 Desert Fathers of Egypt and the “Spiritual Athletes” of Syria, 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 schisms 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 monastery. 5 See the entry for ‘monasticism’, The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. 7 (Brill: Leiden, 1993). 6 Contrast these attitudes to those of Western Europe 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 Liturgy of the Bema in Fourth to Sixth-Century Syrian Churches, USEK, Patrimoine Syriaque vol. 2, Kaslik, Lebanon, 2003. 07-0398_Aram20_18_Loosley 318 09-16-2008, 17:24 E. LOOSLEY 319 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 prayers 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 dervish was an essentially private matter and, by extension the salvation offered was, again, an essentially private mat- ter for an individual rather than an offering of sacrifice 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 poverty, chastity and obedience within a brotherly monastic context. Whether or not the brotherhood extended outside the confines of the monastery into the secular world, Christian mo- 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 ritual in Is- lam. Sufi poetry 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 sacrament were swift to point out that intoxication was never the aim of a “good Christian” and yet Sufism 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 07-0398_Aram20_18_Loosley 319 09-16-2008, 17:24 320 LOUIS MASSIGNON AND THE HOSPITALITY OF ABRAHAM equated with an adolescent or pre-adolescent male only added to Christian hostility.