pg. n/a

ABS TRAC T

Faculty of Graduate Studies Simone Landrien and Research M.A. Comparative McGill University , 1968.

SOME ASPECTS OF THE MEANING OF IN THE LIFE , WORKS AND THOUGHT OF LOUIS MASSIGNON

This thesis aims at studying the life, works and thought of Louis Massignon and at demonstrating how they find their unity in the of Abraham.

It is not a chronological study but a study of the principal themes of bis works, following the pattern he often used the five pillars of Islamic religious and social life: almsgiving which includes the respect of - the guest and his word) prayer seen under the aspect of intercession, pilgrimage, sacrifice exemplified in and a wi tness to fai th in the Judgment of G"od. In chapter VI an attempt is made to study the evolution of the thought of Massignon from 1914 to 1947 concerning some aspects of the Christian-Mus1im encounter which, for him, points to the Judgment. SOME ASPECTS OF THE MEANING OF ABRAHAM IN THE LIFE, WORKS AND THOUGHT OF LOUIS MASSIGNON

by

Simone Landrien

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Department of Comparative Religion McGill University Montreal .

August, 1968

-.,...,,- PREFACE

Louis Massignon has a very personal style. His English sentences have the length of Latin periods and the abruptness of Arabie. His of many languages makes him choose words according to their roots rather than to their actual meaning. In French also he uses long

eomplex sentences without verbs and se~up his own rules for punctuation; he juxtaposes a number of poetie images and ideas without any link side by side.

Therefore, it is hard to express his ideas clear­ ly and translate his French accurately into English, especially for a pers on whose mother tongue is not English. l am well aware of the limitations and weaknesses resulting from this difficulty.

l wish to express my thanks to Dr. J.C. Kirby and Dr. H. Landolt for their helpful guidance, and to Miss M. Kendergi and Rev. Y. r10ubarac for lending me some private \'rritings of Massignon. l am also indebted to MessIS. Md. Abdur Rabb, George Hariton, Yosi Levy and some students of Crossroads Student Center of Montreal who have helped me in many ways, specially in correeting my .,. English and in translating old Arabie peetry • ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

PREFACE ii

ABBREVIATION v

1. INTRODUCTION 1 - purpose 7 - method 11

II. ALMSGIVING HOSPITALITY - PAROLE DONNÉE 15 - in Abraham - as a discovery through the 16 - as a motivation for action 21 III. PRAYER OF INTERCESSION 30 - Abraham - Christian Intercessors: Huysmans, Foucauld 34 - Muslim Intercessors: Hallaj, Fatima, Salman, 36 - Life experience: Badaliya 46 - Percèes 47

IV. PILGRlMAGE - in reference to Abraham, , and Hallaj 51 - vs. colonialism 56 - in Massignon's life: , Hebron, Nazareth, Ephesus and Vieux Marché, Isé 57

iii page V. SACRIFICE AND FASTING 67 - Abraham and 's vocation 68 - Massignon's first Christian guides 70 - Muslim mystics and Hallaj 71 - Gandhi, Lincoln and Fasting 76 - Percèes 79

VI. WITNESS .OF IN THE JUDGMENT 82 - Evolution of the thought of Massignon seen through an article written in 1914 and others written after 1947 85 1. Abraham's heirs 86 2. The terms of the Promise: the Messiah 87 3. and the . 88 4. The question of conversion: history, dialogue 90 5. The incompatibi1ity of dogmas 96 6. Some phenomena of convergences 98 - Personal witness 103

VII. CRITICAL APPRAISAL 108 - Herac1itus and Abraham (Bergue, Mounier, Teilhard) 110 Pascal and Massignon 113 FOOT NOTES 118

BIBLIOGRAPHY 135

iv ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations of references will be used:

For the Works of Louis Massignon

Akh Akhbar al Hallaj, (: Vrin, 1957) 3rd ed.

~ Annuaire du Monde Musulman, (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1954) 4th ed.

Ba Letters and convocations to the tlBadaliyatl (numbered, private . publication)~

Ess Essai sur les Origines du Lexique Techni~de la Mystique Musulmane, (2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, ·1954).

OM Opera Minora, (Lebanon: Dar al Maaraf, 1963), 3 vol.

Pas :La Passion de ••• Hallaj, Martyr mystique de l', (Paris: Geuthner, 1922) 2 vol.

PD Parole Donnée, (Paris: Julliard, 1962) Pr IILes trois prières d'Abrahamll "Liminaire", "L'Hégire d'Ismael" (Private publication, 1935, 1949),

RCCI IIThe Roman and Islam", Muslim vlorld, Apr. 1915, pp. 128-142.

v o

For the Works about Louis Massignon

IDMO J.J. \vaardenburg, L'Islam dans le Miroir de l'Occident, (Gravenhage, Holland: Mouton & Cie, 1961).

LF Lettres Francaises, (Paris: no 952, 15-21 Nov. 1962.).

Ma Jean Morillon, Massignon, (Paris: ed. universitaires, 1964). A. d'Alverny and 30 contributors, Memorial Massigno~, (Le Caire: Dar -Salam, 1963). -l"IW Moslem World and (Hartford, Conn.).

Miscellaneous

~ Encyclopedia of Islam.

vi CHAPTER l

INTRODUCTIONI

Louis Massignon (1883-1962) was born near Paris where he grew up. The position of his father, painter, sculptor and medalist, weIl known in bourgeois circles, brought him in early contact with the cultural life of Paris. At 19, he received his licence-es-lettres (thesis on a painter: Honoré d'Urfé) and then studied Sanscrit, history, geography,2 and went to for a study of Leo Africanus. There he became convinced of the importance of , won his diploma in classical and colloquial Arabic,3 and in 1906 he joined the French Archeological Institute in Cairo and did research work in and . In 1912 he became visiting Professor at an / Egyptian university, lecturing on Arabic philosophical and theological vocabulary. After serving in the French army in Greece, he became in 1917 attached ta the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Middle East.

Back in Paris in 1919, he became professeur suppléant at the COllège de France, chief editor and later director of the Revue du Monde Musulman. In 1927 he founded

l e 2 the Revue des Etudes Islamiques with its Abstracta Islamica.4 From 1926 until his retirement in 1954, he taught sociology and sociography of Islam at the Collège de France. In 1933 he became Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in the section Sciences Religieuses for Islam, and member of the Academy of Arabie language in Cairo. He carried out a number of cultural and scientific missions in the Islamic world, spending some weeks or months there every year, and in lecturing from Canada5 to Japan, from Russia to . Shortly before his , he was planning a trip to Afghanistan. He has a wife and two living children in Paris. His eldest son, Yves, had just started research on French Canada: La haute vallée du st. Jean en Madawska acadien, when he died.6

His first spiritual guides were J.K. Huysmans,? Léon Bloy and .8 Like Foucauld and Psichari he recovered his faith through Islam. His later friends include Catholic intellectuals such aS Jacques Maritain9 and Paul Claudel,lO Jewish scholars like Judah Magnesll and . Naming the orientalists he had as masters, guides, friends, or pupils would constitute a

who's who of twentieth century orient~lists; most note­ worthy are Ignace Goldziher,l2 Snouck Hurgronje, C.H. Beckerl3 and D.B. Macdonaldl4 with whom he kept up a 3 lengthy correspondence. the living French orientalists and many Arab intellectuals have at one time or other sat in his classes. The depth of his friendships with Arabs and appear in the Memorial Massignon.15 One could mention specially Shokri Alousi16 who played a role in his conversion, Feisal I~7 Iqbal, Mustafa Abdalrazek,18 Taha Hussein19 and others. His meetingW~~dhi20 was an influential factor in his life. He also admired Sir Mark Sykes21 with whom he worked on the Sykes-Picot agreement, regretting that British policy did not adopt his view: liberation rather than conquest. He knew Lawrence of Arabia and appreciated his genuine ~ense of honour.22

The turning point in Massignon's life is his conversion in 1908. An inner experience with the God of Abraham crystallized his vocation: having found God and himself through the Arabs, he became a "Christian hostage of ISlam".23 His discovery of the writings of Hallaj is another landmark in his life. From 1907 until his death, Massignon studied this Muslim mystic whose excommunication and martyrdom in in 922 had been the leit-motiv of Arab, Persian, Turkish, Hindu and Malaysian poetry, the the me of many plays and legends, the type of the perfect lover of God condemned to death because he was inebr::iated with

ll the ecstatic acclamation "I am the Truth , the subject of much controversy among Muslim mystics and theologians. Massignon .devoted his life to make Hallaj and his doctrine of perfect love and real sacrifice known. 24 Massignon wrote some fifteen books, mostly on Hallaj and ,25 four editions of Annuaire du Monde Musulman,26 a kind of encyclopedma with a very extensive documentation, and more than 600 articles, papers, press notices, books­ reviews and lectures; 50 Arabic texts are classified also in his bibliography. In the library of McGill's Islamic Institute, when looking for a book, one would find often. its preface written by Massignon, be it a translation from Attar, modern movements in Africa, or Indian illy.stics. In English there are a number of articles in the Encyclopedia of Islam and a few miscellaneous lectures and translations. Massignon believed that to.study one aspect of Islam,one has to possess sufficient knowledge about aIl others: history, philosophy, , law and language. But his main lines of research are on mysticism, Chiite and Persian 27 Islam, sociology and aIl that affectscontem­ porary Islam,28 especially in the clash between traditional culture and modern Western techniques. Late in his life, Muslim-Christian dialogue became his focal point of interest and commitment. 5

Personally l had three types of encounter with Massignont in his office, in Badiliya29 meetings, and in the University auditorium.

First in 1949, l went twice to his office with a friend interested, like myself, in the betterment of international relations, to ask his advice about starting a center for international students in Paris. He baffled us, encouraging us to work with the Little Sisters of ,30 with little money and in small cells. We had just bought an hostel to house 80 girls31 and this advice seemed utterly unappropriate; we thought he was rather crazy, living in another world, with his dead friends, myths and legends.

Later a Muslim Algerian requested my participation in a day of fast, for peace in North Africa, organized by Massignon, and then l joined some Badaliya meetings, and became deeply impressed by the depth of the Christian­ Muslim dialogue that took place in these meetings. A group of students then met at the Foyer comparing their views on fasting and prayer, on and , etc. Massignon had created a spirit allowing these encounters in those awful days of political violence and mistrust. It brought a new dimension of exchange with students whom l thought l knew weIl, but not on that level. l have never found since that time the authenticity of communication, the 6 openness, the respect for each other's , we then had because of our common trust in Massignon. Muslim studentsbecame proud of their cultural and religious heritage because Massignon had shown how much he appre­ ciated it, and then they began to dialogue without any problem.

Listening to his last series of lectures at the Collège de France l did not understand many of the terms and ideas he developed when speaking about the dialogue among the Abrahamic , but l could feel the love, the empathy that love gives and to which as Muslims and Christians, we wanted to answer. l started wondering whether myths are not more real than rational argumenta­ ·tion, whether Massignon's pilgrimages to the Seven { Sleepers32 do not give a truer sense of after-life than many a theological book on Resurrection. Living and working with Asiatics and Africans, l wpndered whether their answers through a proverb, a story, a poem, do not carry more meaning and depth than any conceptualisation, systematisation and direct criticism. Every day Algerians in Yaris were arrested. At that time l was trying to work for the liberation of some students l knew weIl and who were innocent of any crime against the French government, and l was completely astonished to see an old man speaking publicly, violently against that same government, and that 7 nobody -- no police -- seemed to mind.

Massignon had, by that time, impressed me as a man of God, who could mâke faith transparent to us, Christians and non-Christians, a man who had realized unitY in himself. One can judge a tree by its truits and the truits convinced me.

Purpose of this Work

Massignon said: "People reproach me for speaking about past things, for calling upon the God of Abraham,,33 and "The faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and is the essential fact of human history".34 There are numerous references to this point in all his writings.The God of Abraham seems to be the unifying factor in his life, prayer, action, works and witness for a dialogue between French and Arabs, between Christians and Muslims. His friends speak of the IIAbrahamism" of Massignon.35 The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate this unitY in Abraham. It is also to promote -- in a small way -- the knowledge about Massignon in the English speaking world. Some may know about his work on Hallaj, his stand on the origin of Sufism, but not about his personality, the his­ torical role he played in the process of decolonisation, the depth of the dialogue he could create among believers and the unity the God of Abraham brought in his life and work. 8 Ct For Massignon, Abraham was a living person. He did enough Biblical archeology and , studies on Hamourabi's code, to be able to assert the reality of the historical figure of Abraham, recognizing however the importance of the attitude of the inquirer in that matter?6 He writes:

Deep in my heart, l believe that through all the errors and mistakes, beyond the scandals and crimes, the final truth of the history of mankind is built with the sum of our definite personalities, the very ones that characterize our desire for the integral truth and the thirst for suprahuman justice that puts us in the center of ourselves and that unifies and immortalizes us. And thus, through time, some lines of spiritual force, some threads of stiffening con­ verge toward the same point ••• And l truly believe in the social radiation through centuries, beyond their death, of holy and religious personalities, which stand at the source of these threads of spiritual force: Abraham, the one who i8 buried in Hebron ••• l believe that these men are predestined to remind us how to look for the coming of God's kingdom ••• this i8 peace in justice. l believe that their methods are good not only for their country and their times, but also for any country at any time.37 For those who believe in his God, everything has started with Abraham, and with Abraham leaving Ur and going to . And l think that the spiritual force of his amazing prayers to God for Ishmael, the 9

exiled son, for Isaac, the sacrificed son, for Sodom, the condemned city where , his nephew, had set foot, have only begun stirring up consciences and determining destinies ••• for all the believers to whom he is the patriarch and in a peculiar manner in .this Roly Land which has been given to him forever. 38

"Why does this orientalist, historian of mysticism, deal with politics?" objected Dr. Omar Farrukh in a book Sufism.39 In a challenging article "L'Occident devant

1 t Orient, Primauté dt une solution culturelle Il , Massignon analyses his own attitude, and the failure of his mystical position in the eyes of the three notable Muslims he respects: it was a position of participation, of under­ standing in the Jungian sense of "Common touch with the people". \llhen studying mystics, he noticed that the reports of their experiences were much at variance, and the deeper the experiences, the more diversified their reports because the observer changed as the observed changed. There was a vital transformation, a transfer. Massignon was himself transformed by living existentially the experiences of Abraham (as of Hallaj), by entering inside the religious stream he was studying. One could reply to Dr. o. Farrukh that it was not a mystical mask to hide political activities, nor the failure of a mystic, which made him deal with politics, but the unit Y in the man which forced him to shout for the justice of the God of Abraham. 10

Massignon studied the graph of the life of Hallaj, Gandhi, Fatima, Marie'!'"'Antoinette and others.40 As in social psychology, he paralleled the social events and the answers they produce in the person: vow, fast, prayer, commitment. This is particularly striking in the case of Gandhi, reproduced as a diagram. The sarne study could be made on Massignon, especially after the Second World War. However a final judgment cannot be made as yet because some of the evidences are still missing to get a rounded view of the changing form of the graph: the posthumous influence of the life. It would also be outside the scope of this study which centres around Abraham.

What is most striking in Massignon is the unity he realized in himself, sociologist and mystic, historian and , man of science and man of letters, man of prayer and man of action, teacher at the Collège de France and at literacy classes for North African workers, member of many Royal Academies and weekly visitor of jails, "the greatest Muslim among the Christians and the greatest Christian among the Muslims",4l French patriot and strong anti-colonialist, non-violent Gandhist in action and passionately violent in words, at the end of his life and family patriarch. He once wrote:

The true value of the writer ••• will be measured by the pure value of the commitment that he brings about in his life to the words with which he lives it. There 11

can be valid intellectual movement only when the tongue speaks out what the heart fee1s, and whenever the heart keeps its word.42

And he lived it.

Methocl

A study of the evo1ution of the thought of

Massignon wou1d be most interesting. He worked on ~ Trois Prières d'Abraham for more than fort y years (1908- 1949), correcting and editing these texts which carry the of his prayer and reflexion. Unfortunate1y the only available texts are the 1atest corrected ones. Other available materia1 does not constitute enough ground for a valid chrono1ogical study on Abraham. A short article in the Mos1em Wor1d (1915) on "The Roman Catholic Chureh and Islam" indicates a very rigid position; but was it the position of Massignon himself, or was he simply expressing the views of the Church at that time? This text will be analyzed in Chapter VI. Instead of a chronological study, this thesis will be a study of the five main recurring themes linked with Abraham, which have in some way shaped the thought, life and work of Massignon. Other themes could be chosen or added but most of the recurrent themes . which shaped his thought would fit into these five. These themes have been 12 chosen to follow Massignon's symbolism as expressed in the Letters to the Badaliya, the five pillars of Islamic social and religious life. a) Alm s giving is at the core the giving of oneself (hospitality) and of one's word (parole donnée). b) Prayer is here limited to intercession. It leads to compassion and substitution. c) Pilgrimage has a spatial-spiritual dimension, as intercession has a certain historical-religious dimension. It means expatriement. d) Fasting is, with prayer, the way of search for God. It is an aspect of sacrifice, the culminating event of Abraham's story. e) A study of the prayers of Abraham leads to a realisation of the link between , Christia­ nity and Islam, despite their respective dogmatic . tendencies: this is the theme of the witness of faith in the judgment of God.

In each theme, we will study its origin and meaning in Abraham as seen by Massignon, its influence on his thought and works, and in his life's experience: how he understood i t and \'lhere i t led him in his commitments. The last chapter is more detailed because it shows the leit-motiv of what Massignon stood for in his life and work: more understanding between Muslims and Christians. 13

Especially in later years, his efforts converged towards this dialogue between Islam and ; through Abraham he could as a Christian see values in Islam, bring to light the nature of the mystical union with God and the sense of universal intercession he found in Islam and singularly in Hallaj.

We will try not to systematize the beautiful religious institutions expressed often in paradoxical or poetical forms. We will try not to take the sentences out of their context nor separate them from their pregnant meaning and orientation. We do not aim at building a theology of Muslim-Christian dialogue, but to study the man Massignon in reference to what has made the unity in his life, work and thought: the God of Abraham.

The conclusion will attempt an evaluation. With his encyclopedic knowledge, his overconscious scientific precision, his deeply religious "interiorité", Massignon was able to bring -- apart from his masterworks on mysti­ cism and on Islamic sociology -- some genuine intuitions,

II percèes", a word that Massignon found in Master Eckhart and appropriated to signify an opening, a light out of the clouds.

It is better not to say more than he does, nor to explain what he only suggests. His disciples do not 14 often agree on their interpretation of his thought. Time is needed to sort this out. Some remarkab1e texts pereàes, especia11y those written in Eng1ish, have been se1eeted to illustrate the unit Y in this prophetie seholar who was also a mystie.

", CHAPTER II

~\LMSGIVING - HOSPITALITY - PAROLE DONNÉE

For Massignon, almsgiving is at heart the giving of oneself: hospitality, respect for the guest and for his word. Massignon recalled, III had a kind of mysticism of the right of sanctuary and of the promised word"; and indeed he attempted to reduce everything, be it peace in Palestine or in the world, colonisation or mysticism, to the common denominator "Abraham's hospitality".

In Abraham

Abraham reveals the meaning of hospitality in the splendid scene: three angels under the oaks of Mamre. They were guests, Abraham treated them as if they were divine.

The Qiddush of Abraham had blessed the meal he offered them, and then made the material food licit for the angels. This blessing has made the whole creation enter into this suprahuman society which is based on the meal of hospitality.l Abraham has left his homeland and his father's tombe He has just circumcized Ishmael and Isaac is promised to him. Now, is he still going to care for the 15 16

Sodomites allied to his nephew? He had already saved them once. Owing to their misbehaviour, is he going to disengage himself from the pact of fidelity? He came there as a ger, a guest. They were his hosts. The host is sacred and Abraham starts to wrestle with Go~2

The angels led Abraham to plead heroically for Sodome Massignon, in his long meditation on Sodom, explained that in a spiritual sense, Sodom is the city of deceitful hospitality, which wanted to abuse the angels:

••• La cité- qui s'était exclue de Dieu, par l'amour de soi, qui a concentré toute foi et tout espoir dans­ un pacte d'homme à homme, comme les forçats; un pacte tout de même qui les a jadis liés avec Abraham ••• un pacte de loyauté de bagnards qui a été pour Abraham le surprenant point de sa vocation oecuménique, une parole donnée, respectée, derni.er refuge de la transcendance divine, du témoignage fidèle qui vivifie toute foi et tout espoir.3

This pact is not the total hospitality God asks man to give to the stranger, to the guest of God, in the name of whom God will welcome him at thej~ent; Abraham under­ stands it by substituting himself for his nephew' s nèllghbours. by prayer.4

As a Discovery through the Arabs

Massignon acknowledged aIl that he had received from the Arabs' hospitality; through it he rediscovered 17

God and himself; he found the meaning of his life, this "Parole Donnée" ta the Islamic World. First he had his "Raad to Damascus tl on the Tigris, and the Alousi family played an important role in his conversion. Later Feisal made him understand the value of the pledged word. AlI through his life, his (Futuwa, Wagf, weIl as Corporations, International Law) as/his contacts and friendships with Arabs, taught him the respect of the guest and of his word, the meaning. of Abraham's hospitaü1u.

Massignon was deeply impressed by the hospitality he received from the Alousi family in 1908 in Baghdad. It had been a startling experience for him. He had been received by them, lived with them three months, and became their friend when they saw that he was wholly given to archeological research (Okheidir's ruins5) and the thesis on Hallaj. He was denounced as a spy, taken ta prison and about ta be killed. His hosts risked everything to liberate him, saying: "If you kill Massignon, you will be killing one of us, he is our guest and therefore he is the guest of God and you must not touch him". Before he left for the Okheidir desert, they had offered ta give him a seal with the name Abduhu (servant); a sceptic at the time, Massignon accepted it out of amiability. But when,leaving jail,he received the seal, he was a believer again, really servant efqthehospitality of the Gad of Abraham, as he 18 expressed it. He often reca11ed these events, always mysteriously, always linking his conversion to the hospi­ tality and the prayer of his hosts, a1ways reca11ing his first prayer which came in Arabic.6

From 1917 to 1919, Massignon WaS attached to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had a chance to meet and know Feisal 1.7 Having appreciated him as a man

ll practising hospitality, "un homme d'honneur , he was deep1y hurt to see the way France betrayed this hospita­ lity. Raving become Feisal's friend and guarantor of his pact with Clemenceau in 1920, he saw it broken by Gouraud in Meisse1oun; like Lawrence of Arabia and with him, he suffered from the lies, the compromises of the colonial powers, the sacri1ege committed against the p1edged word to an Arab. "Our entrance into Jerusalem was done under the sign of desecration"8 and Massignon started rebe11ing against the kind of patriotism which took advantage of those who had befriended him. .

Massignon 1iked to comment on the many ways the Arabs taught him the religion of hospitality. He repeated­ ly recalled a story told at the first UN meeting in Paris by Emir Abdul Arslan:

There was a widow of a Beduin chief whose husband had been killed. One night, at the approach of the tent, she saw a man who was a fugitive, who came and took 19

hold of a string of the tente Among the Arabs, if you hold the string of the tent, you are sacred, you are a guest. So she welcomed him and gave three days' safety to the guest. After that she allowed him to escape, though he was the murderer of her husband. l do not say she forgave him. l only say she stood steadfast to the ideal of the right of sanctuary.9

In .the Algerian Hodna, one still finds in every tent an empty place where the coucb of the guest j.s ready. He is received aS a pilgrim, a guest of God. For Massignon, this disinterested bospitality is a social quality of the Arabs, called mouruwa, the quality of the man who knows he might never see his guest again, opposed to the quid pro quo commonly found in the Western world. There is a sacred aspect to it. A tradition of Harbi says i t is a dut:y' like prayer, almsgiving and pil­ grimage.lD And Massignon attested and proved that Arabs and Muslims today still know how to fulfill this dutY with their whole heart.

In a study on the respect for the human person made for the Red Cross, 11 he showed the desacraJ:li ~ sation brought by the encounter of the secularized Europ8an with the traditional . The Westerner participates in a ceremonial of salutation and hospitality where he sees only primitiveness, while this Salam, Aman, has for the Muslim bost a religious meaning; it is a canonical 20 act of his Abrahamic religion. By treating it lightly, the European -- colonizer, explorer -- shows that he has forgotten the and the sign by which Abraham's vocation has marked a divine contract on Semitic races (Jewish and Muslim circumcision attests it). For a degene­ rate Christianity Abraham seems only a legendary symbol.l2

Studying different aspects of International Law, Massignon explained the failure of International Law, European-style, because of its neglect of the protection of the guest. The Muslim world has a rough draft of International Law based on this protection of the guest, protection of the life and property, respect for the language and cult of the , people-of-the-book.l3 The Prophet founded his Hegira on it in the 7th century;

Muslim juris~defined it in the lOth century. Massignon thought that the foundation of international relations should rest on the notion of the right of asylum. He made enquiries about the Wagf, l'1uslim religious foundations, which apply this right.l4 He studied the privileges of sacred places,La Sorbonne and el Azhar, in history and concluded by saying that, in Europe, people had lost the steadfastness to believe that the guest might be really from God and expected him rather to be a spy. Massignon insisted that if the world could follow this principle: "The guest is of God and his right is higher than war, 21 even just war", it could end war and bring peace.

Islam insists on the respect of the person as a responsible oral witness. One witness is enough in court just as one pers on is enough to hand on a tradition. The opposition of one pers on invalidates the general consen­ sus. People exercising dishonorable trades15 are barred from the list of professional witnesses. Massignon again noticed that this sense of the given Word has been often a challenge to Christianity where the promise made to the unbeliever does not always hold.16 When studying the Muslim guilds in Morocco and in Baghdad17 he analysed the Futuwwa, the contract which bound together the Muslim artisans of the Middle Ages •

••• an initiation contract, a commitment upon one's honour purifies the laborer who is devoted to his fellow-working-men ••• Man does not live exclusively on bread but also by any word of hospitality, allowing the sharing of the same bread among comrades ••• The sacral aspect of a promise given to the stranger who, in Islam, may enter in the guild without any disti.nc­ tion of race or confession (under the sign of Islam an Abrahamic religion) seems to me to perpetuate itself into our time as something vital.18

As a Motivation for Action

In 1947 an encounter with the Great from el Azhar, Chennaoui, made Massignon take a new turn in 22 his life work: "Sa flèche de vérité m'avait atteint, désormais j'agirai pUbliquement1,,19 From that time especi­ ally, Massignon fought in the name of hospitality for international causes (Palestine, displ~ced persons), for the honour of France (Middle East and Maghreb, Vietnam and Madagascar), and last but not least, for all the colonized, persecuted, oppressed people.

Many times he visited the refugee camps in Palestine, and stressed the fact that refugees must not be Ifdenationalized and forced to adopt the nationality

ll of the country in which they seek refuge • Still less must they be mobilized against their own country.20

The refugees have not been treated as guests but as hostages ••• with contempt and condescension. But condescension cannot save from despair. At the Last Day, the Judge will speak by their voice: l was hungry and you did not give me hope; l was thirsty and your glass of water was full of medicine to control birth; your charity treated me as an hostage bound to your fancy, it is why you will be judged with Sodom, burnt because of abusing the hospitality that Lot gave the angels. This SOCiety will perish if it does not restore the respect of the guest, the protection of the Displaced Person.2l

Speaking on "Gandhian Outlook and Techniqes" at an UNESCO Seminar in New Delhi in 1953, Massignon asked Ralph Bunche to create zones of security for the wounded, the refugees, and also for and artistic monuments: "as artistic and beautiful places are places where people go for the contemplation of GOd".22

Massignon wrote beautiful pages on the Holy Land, showing from the failure of the Crusades tothe present time how dangerous it was to monopolize the land of hospi­ tality. Though written twenty years ago they are meaning­ ful at the present time.

If world salvation depends on believers, the kèy to world peace is the problem o.:e~ the Palestinian refugees,· not only of those who are entering but also of those who have been expatriated. And we can only find it if we work towards assuring in Palestine the presence of a supranational sense of hospitality. The state of Israe.l is the first one to create i tself in claiming the rights of Displaced Persons. It is very true that Israel has suffered like a D.P. for 2,000 years. It had priority to acquire a fatherland, because it has not ceased to suffer in an exclusive manner for God's sake ••• but then, there is no reason to create other D.P.' s .23 Because Israel's right in the Holy Land derives from the promise given to Abraham, and Abraham's privilege comes from the fact that he was a stranger in that Holy Land, a stranger who had founded a home charac­ terized by its heroic hospitality. Abraham's hospita­ litY is a preview of the final consummation of the gathering of aIl the nations blessed in him in this Roly Land which must not be monopolized by anyone.24 24

A Frenchman, Massignon suffered greatly from the compromises of French politics. He tried to defend Francels image outside and fought to make France be faith­ ful to her word.

I was without illusions. My chiefs wanted to give me a big budget in order to corrupt the Syrian beduins ••• I did not want to condemn myself by buying friends ••• I who had known the sacred hospitality of the Arabs.25 The honor of France.does not need our lies. Truth is not a little truth for me. It is not a collective idole It is a . pure, serene . spiritual relation between two persons, by their understanding of each other ••• as a stranger bec!3ID:e a gu,est. ~t is only in the measure that one gives hospitality to the other - not by colonizing - in ~he measurè thatone shares the same work, thesame suffering, the same bread, the honor of fellowsh~p; the one takes conscience of the word of Truth which unites people socially. One finds truth only by practising hospitality.26

That was not the language .used in diplomac:.y, and one may understand the failure of Massignon in his politi- cal missions, and his increasing bitterness. Two examples wîll illustrate how he acted.

When the Sheikh Ben Abdallah, preaching in the of Rabat in 1951, had invoked the witness of Joan of Arc, asking her help for Moroccan Islam in its trials,

he was arrested and jailed II pour avoir par machiavélisme voulu cambrioler l'intercession d'une sainte à l'usage 25 exclusif des catholiques français".27 Massignon, like a Biblical prophet, rose up with hard words against his countrymen and organized a public prayer to Joan of Arc:

Tu sais toi qu'aimer sa patrie ne consiste pas à se faire les jouets complaisants de ceux qui achètent et revendent l'h8te ••• Lib~re la France et l'Angleterre des traitants de l'esclavagisme économique.28

When Mohammed V was arrested, Massignon issued a number of communiques29 in the name of Association France Maghreb:

On the 19th, all Muslim hearts were turned towards Arafat and , for the feast of the sacrifice of the substituted lamb for the spared son of Abraham~ That day was chosen Œy the best of our experts, to allow, for our best interest, a Catholic minister to depose a Sultan to whom we were joined by the still­ valid word of a dead Christian Marshal: Liaute7.30

On this issue, he did not mince his words to Bidault, the French Minister: "One cannot serve two masters, one cannot guarantee a word when it is not given but bought because it will be sold again",3l nor about the Moroccan leader el Kittani:

l had with him (Kittani) two decisive confrontations, face to face. The God which inspires his conduct is not the God of Abraham, of mercy, of self-sacrifice, of the , substitute-; it i8, he , the God of private revenge (which Islam has abolished) ••• To work for peaee, one must try to understand what the interlocutor has best in him: the witness of the believer 26

must not be corrupted by our impure riches.32

At the time of the execution of Vietnamese hos- tages in Dalat, Massignon organized prayers: the respect of the right of sanctuary was at stake. In body and mind, he suffered from French injustices towards the Arabs. He saw the coming and could not stop it. He shouted against the use of torture and was not successful except for creating a distinction between the attitude of the Church and the government. President of a Committee for the Amnesty of political prisoners overseas, hewent to Madagascar and was instrumental in the liberation of Mohammed V, of five Malgache parliamentarians condemned to death, of countless known and unknown prisoners.33 He regularly visited the Algerians in Fresnes-jail and took care of the buri~ of those who died in a demonstration in Paris.34

He reproached French cultural nationalism for not allowing foreign visiting professors to participate on Jury for doctoral thesis ••• to the prejudice of Francels name for civilisation and hospitality.35 His Muslim friends praised his honesty, his hospitality to the truth when, after having promoted latinization of the Turkish script, he changed opinion and fought for the Arabie language, in order to keep Muslims in touch with fourteen centuries of Islamic tradition and culture.36 27

Above aIl, for the mystic Massignon, the guest is God's visitation to man, and this was his deepest motiva­ tion for action. He saw it above aIl in Mary, in his own conversion, in Hallaj:

The visitation of the Stranger was accepted in Nazareth by a Jewish girl of fifteen, in order that Israel might reign forever. She had accepted the Stranger, she had received as a guest the Transcendent.?7 L'Etranger qui m'a visité, un soir de mai, devant le Tâq, sur le Tigre, dans la cabine de ma prison, et la corde serrée apres deux essais d'évasion, est entré, toutes portes closes, Il a pris feu dans mon coeur que mon couteau avait manqué, cauté~isant mon désespoir qu'il fendait, comme la phosphorescence d'un poisson montant du fond des eaux abyssales. Mon miroir intérieur me l'avait décelé, masqué' sous mes propres traits - explorateur fourbu de sa chevauchée au désert, trahi aux yeux de ses hôtes par son attirail de cambriole scientifique, et tentant encore de déconcerter ses juges par un dernier maquillage, camouflé, de toucher du jasmin aux lèvres et de khol arabe aux yeux, - avant que mon miroir s'obscurcisse devant Son incendie. Aucun Nom alors ne subsista dans ma mémoire (pas même le mien) qui po.t lui ttre crié, pour me' délivre'r . de Son stratagème, èt m'évader de Son piège. Plus rien; sauf l'aveu de Son esseulement sacré: reconnaissance de mon indignité originelle, linceul diaphane de l'entre-nous deux, voile impalpablement féminin du silence: qui le désarme; ~t qui s'irise de Sa venue: sous Sa parole créatrice. 28

L'Etranger qui m'a pris tel quel, au jour de Sa colère, inerte dans Sa main comme le gecko des sables, a bouleversé. petit-à-petit, tous mes réflexes acquis, toutes mes précautions, et mon respect human. Par un renversement des valeurs, il a transmué ma tranquillité relative de possédant en misère de pauvresse. Par un retournement finaliste des effets vers les causes, des intersignes vers les archétypes, tel que la plupart des hommes ne le réalisent qu'en mourant. Et cela m'est une excuse si je ne me propose plus, ici, de chercher dans les biog»aphies des mystiques un vocabulaire technique d'ersatz pour "entrer en présence" de Celui qi'aucun \ Nom à priori n'ose évoquer, ni "Toi", ni "Moi", ni "Lui", ni "Nous", et si je transcris simplement un cri, imparfait, certes, mais poignant, de , où le Désir divin, essentiel, insatiable et transfigurant, jaillit du tré~onds de notreaioration silencieuse et nue: la nuit. Ce Quelqu'un, dont la beauté rend jaloux les Anges, est venu au petit jour et Il a regardé dans mon coeur; Il pleurait, et je pleurais, jusqu'à la venue de l'aube, puis Il m'a demandé: de nous deux, dis "qui est l'amant?38

In some part of this famous text, one wonders whether it is Massignon or Hallaj who speaks. Somehow Massignon had taken on himself a number of Hallagian symbols.

When Hallaj was on the gibbet, a Sufi39 friend told him: "Did we not forbid you to receive any guest, man or ?" v. of the Sodomites to Lot, words full 29 of hidden meaning: you betray your Sufi brothers, you break the law by acknowledging that you have received God as an host. In the Islamic law, God is inaccessible, and man, be he a mystic, cannot dare speak so.

Massignon had received the Guest as Hallaj, as Abraham had received Him in Manre. This explains how in a desacralized world, he believed that the Guest comes from God, that vow, fidelity to the word, friendship, always bind a man and inform his destiny. It explains his burning requests, his loving efforts to serve the persecuted and the forgotten. He was waiting for the meeting, face to face, with the Stranger. CHAPTER III

FRAYER OF INTERCESSION

If hospitality is the first and most important theme which strikesthe readerof Massignon, it leads to intercession, and one cannot study him without being impressed by the way intercession moulded everything Massignon did and wrote, his prayer·and his research. His faith made him live in a world populated by the li~ing and the dead who, he believed, are living.l His researches led him to discover meaningful ruins, pictures and texts which provided him with the opportunity to reconstrUct a psychologieal atmosphere, to recall a past event which had a spi.ritual di~enl:3ion-.. For Massignon, divine aetion realizes i "Gself in time, in events that men have to reeall by a spiritual response.

In the City of the Dead in Cairo,2 Massignon explained how, beside the historieal topography, we ean understand the religious experience of the visitors to cemeteries and witness their hope in the Hour (~he Resurreetion), beyond which he saw belief in the life of the dead and its axial i~portance for Muslim religious life.

30 31

A painting in the Mariammane Pagoda in Saigon, inspired from a Marathi poem written by Mukteshvar (17th century), led Massignon to a study of the primacy of spiritual compassion over sexual desire: this is the dialogue between Cuka, the greatest Brahmachari ascetic, with the Aspara Ramdha, a celestial dancer, who came to tempt him. Massignon analyzed the theme that this painting suggested to him: chaste exchange of looks, secret of the hearts, savor of the human milk of kindness, sacr~"f" l.ce ••• 3

Studying the Byzantine mirage in the Baghdad mirror of the 10th century,4 Massignon came across the premonitory texts and mystical commentaries concerning the capture of Constan"t;inople by the Turks in 1453. There was a tradition recorded before 875 by a man called Muslim and Massignon still noticed it written on the entrance of Seraskierat: "Happy the army, happy the leader who will take Constantinople". He stud!Î..ed how this tradition worked in the subconsciousness and the collective prayers of the common people: it nourished the hope of the martyrs dying in Holy Wars. The conquest of Constantinople would be due to the strength of prayers, not of swords, said (d. 1240). The Janissaries who finally took Byzance were members of a religious order Bektashi who had as part of their initiation pledge to 32 sacrifice their life to God as Hallaj did.

Dates were very meaningful for Massignon. He made for himself a lunar Hegirian calendar and a solar Gregorian one which mention the anniversaries of aIl his intercessors and important religious events? The Passion of ••• Hallaj was published in 1922 and Massignon chose to defend his doctoral thesis on it that year (he had worked on it since 1907), in order to coincide with the millenarium of Hallaj's martyrdom. Other links could be made to express this importance: often his publications are dated to coincide witn an encounter or an anniversary. What seems striking is the importance he put on the date of his meeting M. Iqbal; they had an exchange on Hallaj whom Iqbal saw as a promethean "stealing the fire of heaven", martyr of divine love and about whom he wrote Javid Name. 6 It was AlI Saints day of 1932 when they met and Massignon died on AlI Saints day of 1962. For him the becomes terrestrial so that the world of time and space is filled with signs. To him anguish holds ~ meaning; it has a prophetie value; it announces the end of all encounters which are in the way, the encounter with God. VIe will study the intercession of Abraham, of Huysmans and Foucauld, his first Christian guides, then of Hallaj, Fatima, Salman and the Abdals, his Muslim 33 intercessors, and at the end we will look at his action (Badaliya) and at some of his thoughts (percèes).

Abraham

The first intercessor isAbraham. Massignon said simply7 that he believed in the chapters 16 to 22 of Genesis which transmit to us, in the frame of a life, three interesting prayers preserved through the centuries~ He recognized having fe1t the power of Abraham's interces­ sion himse1f. His comments may be summed up as follows:

Abraham enters into debate with God. He impo~unes the divine generosity which has loaded him with favours. To save his nephew's hosts he wrest1es with God in duel five times. Praying for the whole city, after mentioning 100 just people, he reduces the number to 50 ••• 45 ••• 40 ••• 30 ••• 20 and begs that Sodom might not be destroyed if only ten just are found there. was not able to be in front of the tempted Eve in paradise~ while Abraham becomes in the presence of the culprit Sodom: father of all believers. This promise, "If there are ten just" still holds. This prayer of Abraham hovers always on lost societies, to save them in spite of themselves. Sometimes they are found, and the fire of heaven spares cities such as Capernaum. It cost Abraham the exile of Ishmael, the offering of Isaac, two trials of love implicated in his compassion and the pledge of his blessing for the uncircumcized. 8 34-

Abraham prayed so that the social pact -- founda­ tion of societies -- be pure (prayer for SOdom), so that fighters come at the end to a brotherly peaee (prayer for Ishmael), and that the priesthood be holy(prayer for Isaac). These three prayers are one. More than anyadvo­ eate of desperate causes, Abraham is an intereessor. And Massignon eoncluded:

The other saints, healers of despair, cauterize passing wounds, while Abraham 1s still invoked as Father by twelve millions circumcized Jews who yearn to possess, for themselves alone, this Holy Land, which was once promised to them; and by 400 millions Muslims who put their trust in his God, at the five prayers, at the betrothal, funerals and pilgrimage. The Jews have only one hope, that is the hope in Abraham; the Muslims have only one faith, but that '- faith is the faith of Abraham -in the justice of God. 9

His Christian Intercessors

Huysmans

Chronologically it is through J.K. Huysmans that Massignon learnt at an early age about intercession. When studying satanism, Huysmans had learnt from a fallen priest about La Salette (a center of Marian pilgrimage) and intercession, as Massignon himself had learnt about Hallaj from a Christian renegade friend. 35

For Huysmans, mankind is regulated by two laws: the law of solidarity in in Adam, the law of solidàri• ty in good in Christ. Everyone is responsible for others' faults and must expiate them and somehow may contribute his merits for others.lO Huysmans illustrated that in a life of st. Lydwine, Flemish of the 15th century, for which Massignon's father made some modelled prints.

With the theme of intercession are linked those of substitution and compassion. The physical and moral suffering of one person may help toward the salvation of others. Massignon lived by that idea. In his old age, he used ta repeat Pascal' s words: IIHow can one laugh ••• Jesus will be in agony until the end of centuries!'. In his eyes, Jesus gave the example of mystical substitution and his sufferings extend here to the members of his mystical body: the saints.ll

Through Huysmans and Léon Bloy, Massignon became acquainted with La Salette, the place of an apparition of Our Lady with tears in her eyes which is believèd to have happened in 1846. For Massignon Mary represents also the intercession between God and man. A whole thesis could be written on his Mariology, the place of Mary in his life and in his understanding of Islam. She became for him IIthe

ll intercessor ; but in the limited scope of this work we will not dwe11 : on that aspect. 36

From 1899 on Massignon went on pilgrimage to places dedicated to her, and his life was filled with landmarks about her: La Salette,12 Lourdes, where he went with Muslims who also venerate the Immaculate Conception, Ephesus, and later in Russia he discovered Our Lady of Pokrov spreading her veil whicb reminded him of La Salette. In Fatima, Massignon saw an bomonymic coincidence, sign with of Muslim-Christian convergence on which he meditated l ; Koranic verses and ~ chapter twelve of the Apocalypse.

He studied the symbolism of the tears (La Salette - Blachernes) and linked it to Hagar's first tears in the her Scriptures. Muslims in pilgrimage are still recalling plight, running between the hills like the crying Hagar looking for water.

He searched for the archetype of the "Virgin of Transcendency" in different cultures, Persephone in the Eleusian mysteries, Kwan Yin in Buddhist China and 14 Onimatsu in Shinto Japan. He specially studied the cult of the Nusai:r-is and other Chiites concerning Fatima. ··

Foucauld

Massignon :. ;q~me'· ' " to know about Foucauld through a topographie work on Morocco. He sent him a letter of congratulations and learnt that the gifted scholar had become an hermit. Foucauld answered him by promising to •~ 37 pray for him. After Massignon's conversion, a correspon­ dence started between them, Foucauld hoping that Massignon would join him in the desert, but it was not Massignon's vocation.

From him, Massignon learnt to face the confronta­ tion between Muslim mono~ithic religious attitude to the whole of life and the secular penetration of Western culture and technique. He recalled that this clash helped them to find "Christian faith in the wound of diyine compassion".

Foucauld taught him to find the sacred in others,

espec~ally in the most forgotten; he taught him in an existential way this sense of fellowship with the poor. The experimental understanding of the sacred takes ·time; it needs interiorisation, acceptance, transfer to us of their sufferings, explained Massignon. It cannot be proved scientifically but it can be approached somehow by statistics on different cases of compassion that psycholo­ gy and sociology recognize while denying their religious interpretation. Massignon thought of fellowship and compassion as parts of the universal order of things. It is a sign of to a superior immortal life: "He whose heart lives in love, cannot die".l5

Later he meditated on a whole pleiad of saint­ intercessors: and Saint Louis, Joan of Arc 38 etc. He spent his life in communion with them, studying them as signs of GOd, witne.sses of the spiritual history ll of the world, "the axis of which is the cross • He made a lengthy study of the vow and destiny of Marie-Antoine~, the last queen of France in his eyes!16 He became interested also in people who had received stigmata such as Catherine Emmerich, Christine de Wonderbare,17 Mélanie Calvet from La Salette.

The Muslim Intercessors

Hallaj

Massignon discovered the meaning of Hallaj when reading Attar, the Persian poet, and he studied the ecstatic prayers of that mystic Muslim madly in love with GOd,so much so that they became somehow his own. Massignon, in his research, took an interiorist position, getting out of himself to enter into the thought and world of the one he was studying, and certainly Hallaj exercised a great influence on his life and thought.

The study of this life filled with challenges and trials has not revealed to me the secret of his heart. It is rather he who has probed mine and who is still doing i t. va th respect and reverence l salute this image which always appears to me through a veil, 18 even on the gibbet. Hallaj had written in bis Tawasin about intercession: 39

A single loving glance by God at this earth (they would occur at the rate of one each quarter of an hour) draws closer to Him the spirit of a friend from among His friends; by the same act he raises, to the place thus become vacant, one of his friends, and has mercy on 70,000 of those who manifest friendship for the friend upon whom He first gazed.l9

Massignon commented that it is through friendships between definite pers ons that the eternal community is built so that the diverse forms of divine intimacy which is realized in their suffering and actions united in the creative Will, may appear. Such passionate which have the vocation to pray and suffer for aIl continue to grow and to make others grow by interceding after their death.20

After spending a life practising the law, fasting, making pilgrimages, praying, making apostolic trips as far as India Hallaj became conscious of the conflict between the Islamic law and mystical grace. He wished to perfect what was lacking in l"1uhammad:

When asked to pray for grave sinners ••• , Muhammad prays only for those of the I1uslim community. His will does not dare follow the path of the perfect life; he refuses the mystical engagement; ••• left on the thre­ shold, blinded, he does not try to enter the blaze; and by that very action, he bars himself from under­ standing ab intra the personal life of God, which would have sanctified him. It leads to the importance 40

and scandal of any integral mystical vocation in Islam: nobody is allowed to try to pass beyond the threshold where Muhammad stopped.2l

And Hallaj started to express publicly his astonishing desire for God and his wish to die anathema~+or the Islamic community and for the salvation of all. He said, For my friend, l am a blessing, and for my enemy also o my GOd, You have consumed my humanity in Your Divi­ nity; by the claim of my humanity on Your , l ask You to have mercy on those who have labored for my death.22 Your servants have gathered to kill me, thr6ugh zeal for You, to please You ••• Forgive them; if ~ou had revealed to them what You have revealed to me, they would not do what they do; and if You had hidden from me what You have hidden from them, l would not under­ go the trial that l am undergoing.23 Erase the faults of your creatures but not mine, Have mercy on them, not on me. l do not speak about myself. l do not speak about my merit. Do with me what You wish.24

Meditating upon his~fering and prayer for friends and foes, Massignon saw in Hallaj an intercessor of primitive, universal . A number of Muslims see in Hallaj, in spite of his official excommunication, a spiritual pole attracting Islam towards its final unity. 41

Fatima Massignon wrote about "The l'1uslim experience of compassion directed towards all men, in regard to Fatima and Hallaj".25 At the Mubahala (Muhammad's proposition of ordeal by fire to the Nedjran Christians) she was the central hostage, the physical link with the others "under

ll 26 the coat : daughter of Muhammad, wife of Ali, mother of Hasan and Husayn. She became symbolically the human hos­ tage of belief in divine inaccessibility, while for Massignon is the host of divine immanen.ce.

At the request of her father, Fatima used to go and pray on Fridays at the tombs of the martyrs of Uhud's battle, prostrating herself like her father, meditating on the moment of Adam's creation.2? Barred from her dying father's room by his favorite wife, after his death she went on weeping at the Bagi, first Muslim cemetery, for aIl her community, and she wept until her death thus origineting in Islam the feminine custom of praying at the tombe

She was refused her inheritance (the Fadak oasis) and when Umar, in angry search of her husband, was going into "her house of mourning", Fatima distracted, left it, loosened her hair and in her frenzy lost her unborn-baby according to the Chiite tradition. In Persia she is often represented that way, shouting for justice in front of 42 the . In the Sunnite tradition, she occupies very little place and her personality is rather unattrac­ tive.28 But for the Chiites she represents a noble ideal, the incarnation of the divine in womanhood; and her qualities are numberless, for through her alone are perpe­ tuated the descendents of the Prophet, especially the Fatimids who founded Cairo.

She is called themother of her father, Umm Habiba, by a symbolic substitution and because it is through her that the inheritance of the Islamic message is perpetuated until the . For the Fatimids, the Mahdi will be a descendant of Fatima.

She is called al Batul, the Virgin, by a cuItaI sacralisation because of her vocation: scorned as a woman but protesting in the name of aIl the little-girls buried alive in Pre-Islamic times.29 Rer father vowed her to this role of compatiente the day of the ordeal Mubahala, and predestined her to insure the survival of the Islamic community through sufferings and violent à.eaths (Kerbela) until the Mahdi.

Chiite Meditation associates Maryam and Fatima -­ the two daughters of Abraham -- following the principle that each Koranic verse about Mary concerns Fatima acconDng to the philosophical alphabet of Arabie Kabbale and the numerical value of the letters (290). Ristory tells that 43

Islam which does not separate dogmas from politics waited until the year 290 A.H. (902 A.C.) to rebel for justice and start the Fatimid movement in Khurasan, in Yemen and in .

Massignon commented at length on a beautiful poem on Fatima written around 1270 by Nasir Tusi:

Mother of her father, oh Fatima, the secretly buried, the publicly spoiled, the dis-regarded in her dignity, the unknown for her tomb ••• 30 Elle s'immola dans un deuil solitaire et définitif pour que ses désirs pour sa communauté se réalise jusqu'à la fin des temps; selon une compassion ordonnée à l'universel pour le Sceau des Prophètes; selon un destin d'extraordinaire fécondité à la fois charnelle et spirituelle en "substituée au Prophète" pour l'accom­ plissement de la justice; réintégrée graduellement par cela même, gr~ce à la dévotion des masses, dans la chambre de son père mourant - bien plus devenant pour lui cette véritable Rawda al Batul, la Vierge, le jardin fermé qui donne miraculeusement naissance au Mahdi et à tous les élus.31

Salman

In 1927, Massignon discovered another powerful Christian-Muslim intercessor: Salman Pak, a Mazdean-born Christian convert.32 Adopted by Muhammad as one member of his family,· he would have helped him to find the sense of the Scriptures. At Muhammad's death, he took the side of Ali and brought into Islam the desire for temporal justice. In him originates the Chiite devotion to the legitimacy and to the expected Mahdi. He became the patron saint of the guilds and the originator of the initiation rites which started in Madain (Ctesiphon-Séleucie) and moved to al-Karkh, a suburb of Baghdad. Massignon, in a heavily documentated work, attested his historical existence, expounded his posthumous influence in Islam, especially on the Nusairi sects and on the 'workers' guilds. He looked at Salman as a forerunner of the reconciliation of aIl the outlaws in a brotherly community of work like freemasonry and international Marxism in a more secular way.33

The Abdals

The vocation of Hallaj, for Massignon, seems to have started by a meditation on the Abdals' intercession

for the community~ Through them Massignon discovered in Islam the theme of intercession.

The Abdals are the apotropaic saints who succeed each other by permutation, constituting the spiritual pillars without which the world would collapse, so that if one dies, God calls another to take his place:

Humble and hidden, imitating Abraham in his interces­

~ sion, sharing with him, according to an immemorial ~ 45

Islamic legend from century to century, the over­ whelming honour to participate in the reconciliation of the sinning world to his Judge.34

Unknown to men and to themselves, they participate in the preservation of the universe; their merit and intercession bring about the necessary rain, the victory over the enemy and the conquest of . The Prophet had said: "It is owing to them, the holy ones, that it rains, that the harvest comes; among them are the ~.35 Started as an old Imamite belief, it became classical by the tenth century. Ghazali declared in his autobiography:

There has always been men yearning towards God and God would not deprive the world of them for they are the pegs of the earth's tente Their blessing attracts divine mercy upon the earth.36

Massignon summed up his thinking about intercession in Islam by this:

Islam recalls to Christianity and to Israel that the potential for intercession of their and patron saints remains within anyone's reach and can­ not be monopolized by their selfishness as means for their privileges. Islam also has the right to calI upon 110ses as the Supreme Ecstasy, and Mary from Nazareth as the Immaculate Conception ••• Et si on lui conteste ses recours, il sait qu'ils seront maintenus par une méditation des noms de ses guides prédestinés, Abraham, maitre du sacrifice; Mohammed, cet orphelin banni dont dieu se fit l'Hôte 46

(Nul ne me sauvera de Dieu, Cor. 72,22); , qui fut caution de l'envol de son âme vers Jérusalem; Umar qui alla à sa place à l'Aqça de Jérusalem; Uthman qui se fit tuer son livre à la main; Ali à qui il légua sa fille bien-aimée Fatima Zahira Umm Abiba, qui l'ensevelit avec tout l'avenir de sa Communauté de croyants, dans le lineeuil maternel et filial, infini­ ment pur de ses larmes.37

Life Experience: Badaliya

Massignon was deeply marked by his prayers for an unhappy friend who committed suicide in Valentia. For fifty years, he deepened his intercession and in a letter in 1961 he could write:

If it is true that death can prove one's love, and thoroughly - to the friends from whom one dies, let us plan together how to die with Him in order to prove to them how God loves them ••• Corporal death cuts short any earthly voice down here, but it will not get ho Id of our testimony and we are not pre- occupied by the extension of its echo; for He takes us, alone with Him alone. He who has brought about ou~death has already paid the price of blood, the Arabie diya, whieh is ineumbent to the killer. This old transport of compassion which has brought us together fills us with hope ••• 38

In 1947 he organized a sOdality Badaliya, from the ward badal (singular of AbdaI). In Arabie it means substitution for another in the military service; in the 47

,days of St. Louis, it meant monks substituting for slaves in the galleys to redeem them. The Badaliya started with a group of Christian Arabs praying and substituting so that their Muslim brethren might be faithful to their

Islamic faith, perfect in it the image of Christ, ~­ ibn-Maryam (Jesus son of Mary), the Ruh' , (Spirit of God) whom they venerate and of whom they have some, albeit imperfect, understanding. Later, Western Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and others joined in prayers, fasting, pilgrimages and all-night vigils organized for justice and peace aIl over the world.

Massignon discovered that the measure of the intercession becomes the measure of the predestination ••• and that only God changes the heart and reconciles each one from inside in the loneliness of the heart.

In the Memorial,39 Raymond Francis attests that Massignon could persuade because he did not try to convince, but substituted himself in the hope that at the level of sincerity where one answers for the other, the affirmation of Truth will triumph one day.

Percées

A definition of compassion: The real compassion is a thought, beyond which has slipped into the human race in the home of 48

Abraham like a foreign guest, by a strange anti­ the sis , a promise coming from a human lineage, and an offering of the heir for sacrifice (Ishmael in the desert, Isaac on the funeral pyre). Therefore within the experience of this compassion there are two terms: the practice of hospitality and the offering 40 of a sacrifice.

Massignon's understanding of intercession guided him in studying the sociology of community work and experimental psychology about prayers and devotions. Rere are some percées from an essay IIThe Notion of 'Real Elite' in sociology and historyll:

••• some religions allude to great souls. Hindus called them mahatmas, Arabians abdal, and Christians saints, but they are usually ignored during their lifetime. And so, if their posthumous renown gives to their name a special glory, it is not because of their posthumous life ••• but of their apotropaian character. That is to say, they are not isolated in time, but become part of a homogeneous series, bearing witness to the same certitude about the efficacy of spiritual means in improving corrupted social and political situations with their sense of compassion for the universal ••• We cannot grasp the notion of a real elite without a recourse to an observation of human history. For example, there is a number, probably a fixed and limited number - archetypal Jung would say - to which we can reduce the mass of themes in the universe as they might be catalogued by such folklorists as Aarne 49

and Thompson. This limited number is that of dramatic situations endowed vii th a viable catharsis in a given social contexte The elite becomes aware of these crisis and finds in their outcome a recapitualation of its own definitive personality over and above the arbitrary schemes of history. It is in such an heroic act that the elite affirms itself; an act endowed with an axial, communicative and transsocial value, and act which is capable of raising the mass, of giving value to interested acts, as "in a series" ••• The heroic elite is linked to these deeds only by its suffering in truly redemptive compassion for the universal.4l

At the International Congress of the History of Religions in Tokyo in 1958, Massignon gave a communica­ tion in English whose title is in French: "Sur des cas de trasfert réel de la douleur par la compassion, leur authenticité psychosomatique et leur essentielle réalité: leur connexion avec la tradition extrême-orientale des 'transmigrations'''. In this he said:

Common sense ••• observes: that transmissive~ompassion has been historically ascertained, in heroic lives, that heroes' is the positive basis of History ••• The impact of heroic compassion on most of our human, traditional and legendary records (and legend is an immediate projection of the event in the world of symbols) shows that there is the secret of history: and that this secret is disclosed to an elite, · tasted only by men of sorrow and compassion; born to assume the blind anguish of living multitudes, and to 50 understand and announce its transcendental glory. Among the myriads of anonymous sufferers, helplessly crushed and so quiclùy forgotten apparentlymavenged - it is enôugh, for Justice offended, to rely on the faithful hope: that intermittingly a Hero of compassion may appear, from the midst of wars and plagues, as the Herald of a Doomsday for aIl, as unexceptionable as unavoidable. This vocation for Heroic Compassion begins by an epoche, by a sudden stop of time, by a sudden aboli­ tion of space, by a shock ••• It is a sparkle from some unkown Personal Being, badly veiled under the wretches' poverty, flashing out the holes of this pierced frock of disabled humanity. A fire, quickening the careless heart with an everlasting Need. Gotama on his royal youth's road, the Good Samaritan going down on his tradesway. The psychosomatic shock they endured was dee.per than human love: i t was Absolute Desire defying the lack of Justice in the whole World, a kind of revoIt against the Laws of Nature, in the Name of their Hidden Lawgiver; 1Iin the name of the Compassionatell as says the beginning of the l"Iuslim prayer ••• To be genuine in itself, this absolute psychosomatic shock must create a permanent link between us and the object of our compassion and cooperate to the building of Mankind's Unity. Statistical parapsychology shows, in a thousand cases of telepathy and precognition, how this link is cons­ tellated and built, how everyone of us, without having the slighte~ propension to heroism, is mobilized by suffering for others' sake ••• The history of humanity is overstreaming (specially in Japan) with positive and fruitful experiments of transmissive compassion. 42 CHAPTER IV

THE PILGRIl'1AGE

As intercesssion brings the dimension of time and history, pilgrimage brings the dimension of space and geography. As there is a history of intercessors through the centuries, there is a spiritual geography, a religious archeology, a sacred topology of places where one can te el a presence of , where mystery is revealed to man. The real spiritual geography is not static but dynamic made up of canverging streams. A pilgrimage is not simply a journey to a holy place at which a spiritual experience may occur. The journey itsau is potentially a spiritual experience, an uprooting with a meaning and a direction. Massignon expressed it in a way which cannot be translated:

Nous désirons tous trouver un centre de figure ••• un pôle attractif unique à l'oecumène. Or les synthèses scientifique, parce que statiques, sont impuissantes à le fournir à nos termitiaires de concentrationnaires; seul un Lieu Saint peut faire cliver notre commune destinée dans un sens spirituel, libérateur. La "vraie internationale" qui sera "le genre humain" n'est pas l'ensemble des groupes humains additionnés avec leurs appétits, et même leurs théories, c'est 51 52

une structure supranationale centralisant l'effet des voeux et sacrifices des croyants; cela mtme dont le Sionisme vient d'arborer à la face du monde l'énigma­ tique et ambivalent symbole, le Signe eschatologique indéniable du Retour d'Israe1.1

VIe will first study the Muslim pi1grimage "hajjll in its reference to Abraham and Muhammad as seen in Les Trois Prières d'Abraham, its importance for Ha11aj, then the opposition Massignon saw between pi1grimage and cOlonia1ism, and final1y the pi1grimage in his own 1ife: from Abrahamic sites to a cave in Britanny and to Isé sacred woods.

Pi1grimage in Reference to Abraham Ishmae1 and Muhammad

In the Trois Priêres d'Abraham, Massignon meditaŒd upon the Muslim and its reference to Abraham. This is a summary of it:

Exiled as Ishmael in his Hegira which is the counter­ part of Hé€;ar' s banishment, Muhammad 1eaves Mecca for . In front of God, he claims for the Arabs alone 2 the spiritual and temporal inheritance of Abraham.o. After 16 months, he shifts the direction of the prayer, gibla, from the North (Jerusa1em) to the South (l'-1ecca), his fatherland. He hails the Ka-ba, the of his ancestors. He recognizes in it a living testimony of the pact of Abraham and 53

Ishmael with GOd, the stone commemorating the primor­ dial pact, which predestines humanity to the cult of the one God. Muhammad is going to wrestle from God the annual for the of his people, substituting the Meccan hajj (~re-Islamic pagan sacrifice of she­ camels) by the Jewish sacrifice of lambs. The former Jewish which had been interrupted then for 500 years, is reestablished as before Christ, as if there had been no Pentecost, no destruction of the temple of Jerusalem. It acquires a different symbo­ lism, different rites, specia11y the ihram, the sacri­ lisation: the pilgrim wears a special white dress from his entrance into Mecca's sacred territory until the end of the pilgrimage a few days later. During that time he can neither shave, eut his hair nor have sexual relations. The Hajj is not a racial renewal of the Jewish Pass­ over; it is essentially a spiritual offering in Arafat, the day before the blo(ody sacrifice of the victims, and forgiveness comes down on all. The great Jewish scholar Maidonides has recognized the Abrahamic validity of this forgiveness. The pilgrim shouts tl "LabbaYka , "\ve are here for you, 0 ," an expres­ sion of total to God's will. Each pilgrim off ers himself for the whole community, present and absent, for whom he shouts the names. Owing to the intercession of a few pure souls ,once a year the communi­ ty life is cleaned. The Hajj is essentially a vow, the gesture of the believer coming to submit himself to God's orders, the culminating act of Muslim devotion and the great feast of the faithful people. There is in the Islam of 54

Ishmaells descent a way to salvation: the Hajj. Holy war is for men only. For women, pilgrimage is the holy war. Islam alone has made the pilgrimage every year for 14 centuries. Going to Mecca once in their lifetime, Muslims get reunited in numbers as high as 200,000. Pilgrimage is not an archaic remnant but a social phenomenon, forerunner of the consummation of humanity in its final unity.3 Islam which started in exile (Medina) will finish in exile (Jerusalem, its first and last gibla). Not only had the Prophet to become exiled to Medina but also he could not realise -- in the Nocturnal ascension his expatriement towards the , the object of his desire. (In Islam the is conceivable only as desire).4

And Hallaj

The life of Hallaj is completely centered on the hajj. His three pilgrimages to Mecca mark starting points in his vocation. At his first pilgrimage he took a vow to stay a year on the porch of the mosque, fasting and keeping silence like Maryam who, according to the Koran, prepared that way for the birth of Jesus.5 These pilgri­ mages preceded his trips to the borders of the Islamic world. At the third one he understood, according to Massignon, its spirit, the call to go beyond onels self which is the foundation of pilgrimage. Beyond the 55

Muslim community Hallaj thought about the whole of humani­ ty, wanting to communicate that strange desire for God which characterized him from that time on. He wished to see himself sacrificed to the law as the legal victim of the Ka-ba which he wanted to see destroyed. He said, "Destroy the Ka-ba of your body ••• to build it again according to so that it participates in the adora­ tion and prayers of the angels bowing and circling around God ••• ,,6

Following a tradition from Hasan al-Basri, Hallaj had suggested that one does not need to go to Mecca for the pilgrimage; the sacrifice of Arafat could be celebra­ ted without bodily presence but with spiritual participa­ tion which is efficient for the forgiveness of sins. This spiritualisation of the essential rite of the hajj is the ikhlas, the purification of the rituaI intention which realizes perfect love. "People go to the pilgrimage; l am going on pilgrimage to my beloved Guest, the Friend living in me ll ,7 said Hallaj.

This thesis was the pretext for Hallaj's condemna­ tion. It was the trial of the canonical rite itself. It was the trial of the perfectpilgrim whom the love of God had sublimated beyond the material rite; it was the trial of the invisible intercessor in the name of whom God forgave the actual pilgrims. Massignon insisted that 56 the essential parts of the pilgrimage are Arafat and the offering of the sacrifice of Abraham. At his , the Prophet did not exhaust the significance of the hajj which projects forgiveness beyond the Muslim community. Momentary, actual witness of the Eternal, Hallaj offered his life saying,

Yes, go and tell my friends that l am embarking for the open seas and that my bark is breaking. It is in the supreme suffering of the cross that l will die. l do not want to go any moreto Medina and Mecca.8

Pilgrimage vs. Colonialism

Massignon did not believe that many pilgrims were necessary in Christianity. One is enough as ambassa­ dor and intercessor of the whole believing community even if he is not conscious of it.

The efforts of the Crusades resulted in : gold, blood and hatred among brethren. The divided Christiàn nations went for the conquest of the world in order to know it, to take advantage of it and to colonize it. Colonisation is a degradation, a corruption of pilgrimage. One empties the mines, one exhausts the soil. The indigenous host is treated as a galley-slave. He is reduced to wandering or deported as a D.P., or forced to work for the benefit of the Europeans. 57

In the halting place of the pilgrimage, the foreign host invites the passer-by to the meal, to the agape "of divine friendship, to rest in the peace of God.nlO

Since the Crusades, Christians have lost the eschatological sense of the pilgrimage, the participation in the second coming of the Judge and Friend. Christian love is, for Massignon, the naked ·desire of a heart strip- . ped of everything, expecting the coming back of the One for Whom he left everything, going to recognize Him and find Him again never to lose Him any more. This love has a magnetic pole orientatedtDwards a determined holy place. Christianity weakened in its well-being ought to take again the staff of the old traveler, for the two archaic witnesses -- Jews and Muslims -- have already delegated their representatives to the meeting place where humanity will be judged.ll

In Massignon's Life

Massignon knew how to appreciate the joys and difficulties of beginning a journey, and he used to repeat that the essential thing is to start. He saw the pilgrim as a man of simple faith in a concrete sense like the Russian pilgrim kissing the earth when disembarking from Odessa, like the Christian Copt tattoaing a cross on his wrist when he leaves Jerusalem, like Foucauld writing on 58 his note book that he had touched such a stone on such a holy place -- and for him i t meant kneeling down \>li th his forehead on the stone he had kissed.12

There is no lost path, forgotten tomb or hidden corner of the spiritual geography of the world that did not touch the heart of this eternal traveller, as Raymond Francis said.13 Pilgrim of the absolute, he was not, as he teasingly called sorne of his feIIow-workers, a grave-digger looking only for memories of the past or moving dead dust. He was searching on the map of Palestine for the fixed points, the religious pilgrimages which, in his mind, stirred up the human passion for justice.

He ,went from Abrahamic sites to Isé Shinto sacred woods; from St. Louis' old slave market where he prayed for the oppreosed American negroes to Our Lady of Bermont (Donrémy) where he organized prayers to Joan of Arc for : Algeria; from Uganda for the 70th anniversary of the Namugongo martyrs to Damiette (Egypt) where he proved the historical meeting of Francis of Assisi with F. Farisi, a Muslim mystic, and from Mehrauli, the site of Gandhi's last pilgrimage and of Hindu-Muslim friction, to a cave in Britanny where Christian martyrs, who are martyrs also in the .o eyes of Muslims, are venerated. He used to leave Paris every year for a pilgrimage to the Middle East. It was for him a vow. Some places were especially dear to him. 59

J"erusalem

Melchisedech came from Salem which is J"erusalem, offering Abraham bread and wine; Isaac was offered on the Moriah, and Jesus died there on Golgotha facing the Temple condemned to destruction, where he will come back at the end of time when the evolution of mankind will be completed.14 Massignon wrote much about:

••• Jerusalem the Holy where Muhammad ascended in hismystical ecstasy to rise to the throne of God, J"erusalem, the first and last gibla of Islam, pro of of the authenticity of the desire for the God of Abraham which pushed Muhammad towards this temple: oratory of Zacharias, father of , priest at the temple where, according to Muslim tradi­ tion, Mary, his niece, had been brought very young and where she was fed miraculously. It is recalled on the wall of Many by the words of the Koran: "Every time Zacharias came to see her, in the oratory••• " At Muhammad's time it was the Byzantine church of the Presentation of Our Lady. With Umar it became the Mosque AI-Aqca. It is looked upon by the as a chain linking earth and heaven (Qubbat el ).15

Massignon went to meditate in Jerusalem 28 times. First he was shocked there by the desacrilisation brought by Christians on Muslim lands by the betrayal of their word to the Arabs who had been promised the freedom of Palestine, and by the prostitution brought to the Roly City by the A11ied armies in 1917. He rea1ized 60 there that pilgrimage alone might help humanity to under­ stand that pacificist theories are not sufficient for its reconciliation. It depends on a holy place II where

ll God's mercy flows , Jerusalem, aim of the Nocturnal Ascension and the threshold of the kingdom promised to the juste Americans speak of internationalization; what is needed, asserted Massignon, is a spiritualitY ,based on Abraham.

Hebron, Mamre and Beni-Naim

These places could be venerated by the three in memory of their cornrnon ancestor.l6 Massignon defended the rights of the Muslims for the wagf, Tamini in Hebron: Arabs and Muslims (since Arabs have universalized Ishmaelism) come to Hebron because of the tomb of Abraham, the place where everything started. They have the right to install themselves there as Ishmael's descendants. A pilgrim cannot be a Displaced Persan, for pilgrimage symbolizes a gift, a definitive departure for the true fatherland.

Nazareth

Foucauld who was deeply attached to Nazareth helped Massignon ta understand the words of Jesus ta

Nicodemus: 1I0ne must come back to one's mother's womb for 61

a second birth", one must come back to the spirit of chi1dhood of Nazareth, the place in the world where the will of God was purely received by a daughter of Abraham. 17

The Seven Sleepers: Ephesus and Vieux Marché

Through Huysmans, Massignon learnt about Anne Catherine Emmerich, a stigmatized compatiente as he said, who died in Dulmen in 1824, had described the probable site of the dormitio of Mary, a house nearEphesus. This house was 1ater found and ca1led Panaghia Kapouli, Door of the Powerfu1.18 In an archeo1ogica1 expedition in 1951, Massignon discovered this house and the Seven Sleepers' cave. Ephesus became a great centre of Marial pilgrimage where Muslims and Christians joined to calI upon "Our Lady Mary".

There Magdalen, first witness of the Risen Jesus,

wou1d h~ve been buried at the entrance of the cave where later the Seven Sleepers took refuge. The first contempla­ tive of Christianity may have lived the expectation of the Resurrection there: Mary with John (Ephesus is in front of Patmos where he wrote the Apocalypse), Magdalen and the Seven Sleepers.

Massignon meditated much on what he called the Apocalypse of Islam, the Surat XVIII, Ahl al Kahf, those 62 of the cave, which Muslims recite every Friday aIl over the world in their solemn service. It starts with the Seven Sleepers who take refuge in the cave, surrendering to God's will, voluntarily emmured and rocked by God as in a boat. They supposedly awake after 309 years, which corresponds to 922, the year ' of Hallaj's martyrdom,. and, the very year in which the Mahdi, founder pf the Fatimid according to the Ismaeli Chiites, appeared in the Maghrib. For Muslims they symbolize the belief in the resurrection of the dead, as, for them, Christ is not risen.

Massignon's Le Culte des Sept Dormants d'Ephèse19 ' mentions an important number of' places of pilgrimages: churches, statues, stones, domens, koubbas, legends, hymns, etc. dedicated ,; to the Seven Sleepers. There are 48 places described in Christendom· from Baveria to Ethiopia and 34 places in the Islamic countries from Setif (in Algeria) to the Chinese .

Shipswere dedicated to them and their names written on the stern of the Turkish fleet. The clouds which guide the sailors in the Indian ocean were named after them before being called Magellan's clouds. The Sleepers supposedly awoke when Islam became divided in three (Sunni, Chi'a and the Kharijite sect), as in Christianity they are supposed to have awakened in 448, 63 under Theodosius II, just beiore the schism of the Eastern Church in three branches (, Jacobite and Nestorian).

The feast of the Seven Sleepers is celebrated on August 4th and October 22nd in the Oriental Synaxis 'and on July 27th in the Roman martyrology. The Muslims have their feast on the 18 rajab and 4 jUh'l-ga-da.

In Vieux-Marché, , since the sixth centur,y, had accepted the of the tombs -- dolmen of pagan chiefs dedicated to the Seven Sleepers. A very old Breton hymn relating their story and and which tresses the surrender to God is sung at the Pardon every year, the Sunday after the feast of Mary Magdalen.

Beginning in 1953, Massignon organized Islamic­ Christian pilgrimages to Ephesus and to Vieux-Marché. Herbert Mason in the Muslim World20 recalls his partici­ pation in one of these at Vieux-Marché in an unusual fraternal witness of peace and common prayer in July, 1959. He had witnessed the atrocities growing out of the Algerian war and there he saw some people from both sides at peace, praying, talking and eating together. Massignon was the host of the pilgrimage, taking pains to make stranger feel at home, making links among the pilgrims, 64 explaining the story of the Seven Sleepers, their cult in the Christian West and East as weIl as in Muslim lands.

Isé

The furthest of Massignon's pilgrimages led him out of his Abrahamic world (Mehrau1i, Gandhi's last pi1grimage was still a Muslim pi1grimage) into a Shinto , Isé. Invited to the International Congress of History of Religions in Tokyo in 1958, he agreed to parti­ cipate in it out of filial piety for his father whose art had been much inf1uenced by Japan.

He recalled his childhood's pilgrimages to a Virgin in the woods (Donrémy, Vexin) with his father who did not believe in God but believed in some way in Joan of Arc and the apparitions she had witnessed.

Later, studying Mus1im folklore, he came across resemblances between Islamic themes (from Arabia to Indonesia) and Shinto pilgrimages: the apparition of a "Virgin of Transcendency", the lunar calendar of the Pleiads, the mirror of the betrothed called Ayine i Bibi Maryam, ''l'Iirror of Our Lady Mary", in Teharan and in Kabul. He found in it a way to explain the process of "stabilisation" of the Solar Virgin Amaretusu Omikami with her sacred mirror in Isé. He became convinced that these symbols, before the Islamisation, formed already 65 the main tenets of primitive people in the whole rice civilisation area. He wrote:

If the of rice is not a virgin in India, she is a virgin in Indonesia, among Batak and Dayaks ••• whose virgin-priestesses dancing with swords ••• reminded me of the Shinto rites performed in Ise.2l Such a notion of pilgrimage looks, for outside observers,as a rather unreal, and unfinished escape, a rather paradoxial attempt to jump out form human rationalized condition, thraldom, helpless slavery; not only social pressure ••• but merciless Law of nature, Time and Space and Axiomatics ••• The hope against hope of a appearing in the hyper­ extension in an involution, unite us as freedman of a Hidden Guest, half-veiled as before dawn. Such a notion of pilgrimage, however, is aIready felt and tasted, for inside sufferers, as the threshold of rescue. We foresee that most of the pilgrims on the Path flock together, on lines spiritually converging. Marked out by "subjective" monitions, transhistoric, transpatial, transfinite - by striking premonitions and recalls. Parapsychological researches have elaborated now, in Universities, methods of analysis, so as to ascer­ tain critically, and statistically, thousands of subjective warnings of this kind: and establish their validity. (Duke University, N. Carolina). Among the millions of Japanese pilgrims who visit Isé, since the defeat of the Mongol fleet in the Xlllth century, - investigations should be made to discover personal records of their "spiritual 66

"itinerary" to Ise, saying how their vows had been in fact, hearkened to.22

Massignon then suggested to Konan University in Kobe the creation of a Shinto psycho10gica1 center of enquiry at Isé for research of documents, among Japanese pilgrims, of the spiritual answers to their vows there. He tried himself to describe his own personal itinerary to Isé with the hope that one day it might be recognized as one of these Abodes of Peace on earth.

One can translate Massignon's ideas and words,

but it is nearly impossible to bring together the ~, the images given by the juxtap'osition of words. So, once more 1n~ us listen to him:

Le pélerinage, que ce soit celui de l'Exode hébreu qui culmina au Sinai, avec la vision, avant de déboucher en Palestine, ou que ce soit celui du Croisé chrétien, peut et doit culminer au seuil de la Vision béatifique, mais il nous mène ici-bas, par l'étape sacramentelle de l'hospitalité, de la Maison-Dieu, de l'Hôtel-Dieu, comme disait le Moyen-Age au repas communiel que est l'aum8ne de vie spirituelle du Pauvre des pauvres. La pélerinage est le seul moyen collectif de sanctification, d'ascèse et d'interces­ sion à la portée des plus humbles; il est aussi et surtout l'image de l'Incarnation, ce pé1erinage terrestre du Verbe. Et nous savons où il est venu.23 CHAPTER V

SACRIFICE AND FASTING

One might wonder why a chapter on sacrifice. It is certainly important in Abraham's life, but is it so important for Massignon? The answer would be: his , ..!l_fe­ long meditation on the Sacrifice of Abraham and his fifty years consecrated to the study of the Passion de ••• Hallail. Mysticism, Christian as well as Muslim, is based on renunciation, sacrifice, self-denial and surrender, and Massignon, with his interiorist method, emptied himself so thoroughly trying to understand his heroic friends that this theme took on a great importance in his own life. From 1948 on he had wished his life to be offered in sacrifice for a humanly lost cause like Hallaj,

Foucauld, Gandhi an~ others.

Why give so much importance to fasting? Massignon discovered the social dimension of fasting when he was seventy. Perhaps a study of non-violence would be more appropriate. But this work tries to follow Massignon's symbolism, his classification according to the five foundations of Muslim religious life, and fasting is one of them. 67 68

We will examine sacrifice in Abraham, Massigno~s first Christian guides, Muslim mysticism, then Gandhi and the new dimension he brought to Massignonrs life. It will end by some percèes.

Abraham and Isaacrs Vocationl

The vocation of those going back to Palestine may not be different from Abrahamrs vocation, said Massignon. Two sentences may sum this up: the first, "Go out, leave your parents, your people" and the second which completes the first, Hinayni fil am here" for the sacrifice of my son.

The Holy Land is not a transmissible family property; Abraham possessed it only for his descendants as a bleesing for aIl the others and because he had made the sacrifice of the son of the Promise. Because he had sacrificed the future of his family, it is given back to him. He has,however, to persuade his descendants to achieve the interrupted sacrifice. He has vowed the Israelites to become . There is a mystery in Israel's vocation and its role when coming back to the Holy Land, said Massignon; Israelrs race is sacerdotal.

Massignon wanted to forget about whom God allowed to kill the Canaanites because of their idolatry. But the Second Return hasbeen·different: 69 people had to fight but they built a Temple. It was not an annexation but the restoration of the Promise, the sacrifice, and one needs te know the meaning of a sacri­ fice and ofa sacerdotal mentality.

Muslims are not "sacrificateurs" but fighters; they draw the sword for the divine . There might be sorne bad priests in Israel, some cruel soldiers in Islam, some bad Christians who since the Crusades have idolized blood (killing ) and gold (destroying Constantinople, .shrine of Oriental Christianity). Massignon linked bad Jews to bad priests following Bloy's interpretation, The sign of the Spirit marks with sacrilege the Jewish people as the Catholic when they are unworthy. As the Jews need to surpass them­ selves to achieve Abraham 1 s sacrifice, so the Catholic clergy must sacrifice themselves. Massignon insisted:

One possesses spiritually only what one has renounced materially. Among the three groups who find in Palestine their homeland, the sacrifice asked from the Jews is the hardest ••• Because they would like to keep for them­ selves alone this land, symbol of the Spiritual Israel to which Bible and Psalter invite aIl races.2 The Catholic 0hurch can only repeat to Israel the advice of holy perfection it received from the Bible and the . Everything must be given and sacri­ ficed to God, aIl that He has given us, the dearest, 70

as for Abraham, ••• and each time Israel tried to compromise with its liturgy, it has been harshly puni shed by God. The Church guesses the coming apostasy of the nations. In the end, it will be from Isaac and Ishmael's children that the renewal will come in order to give the witness of holy men and of a pure sacrifice, facing idolators, the apostate Christians.'

Massignon's First Christian Guides

Huysmans, Bloy and Foucauld have been marked in their return to God by this discipline of fasting and prayer in the most severe tradition of the Latin West:

La Trappe. And Massignon, in the l~ht of their example, recalled his own innèr experience:

Asceticism is not a solitary luxury; adorning us for God, but the deepest act of piety: one which heals bruised hearts by its own bruising and wounding. Forty years ago, in a stretch of desert in upper · Egypt, praying and trying to imitate these three beloved friends ••• it was given to me to taste its force. There, in the desert of the Forty Days, our vow to give battle is forged. By fast and by prayer. The desert i5 silent and dreadful, fasting is espe­ cially the taming of the urges of the flesh, and prayer is the daughter of fear of Judgment and Jud~ ••• It is the calI in which God extends to us the two supreme weapons which He gave paternally to His Son, to help him enter into his Passion through public life.4 71

Often he recalled how Foucauld made him under­ stand that the priest is trustee of an almsgiving of eternal hospitality, entrusted to him by a man condemned to death, at the time when he was betrayed, delivered .and executed. Foucauld's advice was: "We must never hesitate to ask for posts in which danger and sacrifice are greater. Let us leave honour to him who wishes. it, but let us always claim danger and labour.1l5

Muslim Mystics and Hal1aj

Massignon remarked that it is not enough to study scientifically the psychological problem of mysti­ cism, to set some principles from which can be inferred a number of deductions helping to explain the whole of phenomena described in mystics' books. A study of Ghazali's autobiography helped him to prove it. The great scholar confesses that in the studying of law, philosophy and theology it suffices to assimilate, by hypothesis, the fundamental axioms and to reconstruct and even extend the rational deductions implicit in those premises. But to understand mysticism, one must have experienced willingly the trials and sufferings of the most humble life. Junayd had said in strong terms:

"\'Je have not learned this science (mysticism) through hearsay, but through privations, hUDg.er, separation;; from 7'4 loved ones and loved things: experimental asceticism.,,6

The vocabulary o~ mysticism was ~ound experi­ mentally, springing from the Koranic meditation and ~rom life experience. In his Essai sur les Origines du Lexique Technique de la Mystique l'1usulmane, Massignon found that to study mysticism and the process o~ forma­ tion o~ the vocabulary o~ the mystics, one has to compare the succession of their works with the stages of their life. Sufism -- when vivifying Islam --has been a method o~ integral introspection, using a~ntra aIl life's events, a religious experience of suffering, trans~orming those who were loyal enough to push it to the end, into healers of others. Muhasibi described it:

They throw their eyes, thanks to divine vlisdom, on sorne lands where medicinal plants are growing. God, having taught them how the remédies act, ~irst by healing their own hearts, has ordered them to relieve the broken-hearted.7

From that cornes the social importance of Sufism: its

healing value. To assess the reality o~ the mystics'

practices, it i~best to check their social results: the value and etficacy of their rule of life for the healing of society. The strength of Muslim mysticismresides in

the desire of sacrifice for others exemplified in Hall~ts martyrdom. 73

In the Essai sur Le Lexique Technique ••• , Massignon describes the careers of the early Sufis in a very captivating way. Books could be written about how these ascetics 'and mystics saw sacrifice, lived i t and spoke about it in the glorious days of early Islam.

Hallaj

In 1909 Massignon al~eady wrote about Hallaj: "The idea of sacrifice is of an eternal beallty. The example of hel:'oic sacrifice never loses its strength; its memory never dies. 1I8

In the great variety of Hallaj's texts translated by Massignon, it is hard to make a choice. The Koranic meditation on serves as a basis for understanding.

When God takes a heart, he empties from it every­ thing but Himself. V/hen He loves a servant, He incites others to persecute him in order that this servant come closer to Him. \~hen God' s love increases towards his servant, He takes hold of him, leaving him no goods nor son.9

Trials, temptations and sufferings are signs of vocation. Mystic union exposes one to suffering.

Surrender is keeping hot the coals under the vicissi­ tudes of destiny. God illuminated Job's conscience and revealed to him the light of His goodness, and suffering lost for JOb 74

its bitterness. Then he shouted: "Sorrow has toucbed. me. l have no more reward to hope for my suffering and unhappiness, because sorrow has become my father­ land and my joy."lO It is through temptation that God provokes our heart to give Him a real avowal of love. Also this avowal of love could not be agreed by God without suffering as a signe Suffering is He, happiness comes from Him}l To belong to him is to be without master or disciple, without preference or choice, without diversion or change: to have nothing for oneself ••• nothingt In him, there is what is. Itr is 'in him' but without 'in him': as a Desert without water in a desert without water, as a Sign in this sign (of God).l2 The deepening of Abraham's sacrifice, symbolized in the Muslim hajj, is realized in the martyrdom of Hallaj in Baghdad, dying for the love of God and for his brethren. Massignon compares Hallaj to Joan of Arc, because their trials were performed in the most civilized cities of their time, on a theatre "surélevé" in the glittering setting of a court. Both were exco~municated but the reintegration of Joan is more advanced in France than that of Hallaj is in Orthodox Islam.

On the way to the place of his death, Hallaj answers the people questioning him about his happiness: "Call that which seduces the martyr, coquetry of Beauty which attracts His elect to Him."l3 His sayings are pregnant with that astonishing desire of God which fills him: 75

To love is to stand closeto . ~s Beloved, renouncing onels self completely and transforming onels self in His COnformity.14 If the y offer lambs to the sacrifice, l bring my heart, my blood.15 Do know that God has made my blood lawful for you. Put an end to my life~ You will be rewarded for it. You will have fought for faith and l will have died martyr~ It is in my murder that my life is1 My life is to die.16

Hal1ajls idea that the salvation of the Islamic communi­ ty may be obtained by the immolation of his saints is 17 . diffused aIl over Islam for Massignon. His martyrdom is one of the commonest subjects of 11uslim mys:tic poetry according to him:

In the long and sometimes tragic history of mystical vocations in Islam, one does not find, either before or after, such superhuman accents, where the entire passion of love bows down with veneration and filial surrender before i ts God \'lho is personally present. They are, in Hallaj, the fruits of a life freed from everything by self-denial and suffering, constantly renewed in God by prayer for others, and crowned by the passion of the unity of the Islamic community, rising to the fulfilled desire to die excommunica~ for its salvation.18 76

Gandhi, Lincoln and Fasting

Gandhi has also in:fluenced Massignon. As early as 1921 he learnt about Satyagraha through a Muslim, Dr. Ansari, and understood its univers al role. In 1931 he met Gandhi twice and was struck by his comment IlGod is the essence of vow". Vrata, in Sanscrit, commented Massignon, literally means vow and practically, fasting. Fasting is, explained Massignon, vow by excellence, because then one lives by God a1one. Hunger-strikes are not for Gandhi a technique to coerce others to his way of action, but a desire coming from God which enables' him to hunger-strike.19 From Gandhi also Massignon learnt to listen to the c1aims of the pariahs, underpri­ vileged and outcasts.20 It is on1y in 1953, however, during a pilgrimage to Mehrauli in memory of Gandhi's last pilgrimage there that Massignon gr~sped the social impact of Gandhi's fasts. In Mehrauli he learnt about the events of 1948: Muslim ladies, fasting with Gandhi for peace between Muslim and Hindus, came in a de1egation in purdah to complain that in spite of their fasting, violence was going on. Gandhi asked them to raise their vei1s, spoke to them as a brother, expressing his compassion for their trials and his hope to see the exquisite Muslim artisan work revivified. They comp1ained ?? about the difficulties of carrying their pilgrimage to the tomb of Guth Bakhriya (d. 1235) and Gandhi promised to accompany them and organize their protection on the wa:y.

He found the shrine damaged, promisedto have it repaired, prayed with the worshippers and vowed with them a pledge of brotherhood that Delhi might solve the problem of unit y of India through nonviolence. It was.his last social act ••• It was a sacred place for Muslims. He wanted to atone for others, for his brethren who had broken the shrine.2l

Massignon had for a long time been haunted by the conflict:"violence versus truth as expressed by Pascal when he said, "AlI efforts of violence cannot suppress truth, aIl lights of truth cannot stop violence". Gandhi gave him the solution by his civil non-violence. We must not use the truth but accept violence on our­ selves without resisting. If truth tries to dominate, its noblest ideas will be corrupted. Ideas have not been given as arms but as guests, naked and unarmed, to teach us the deprivation which identifies us with them. Only strictness about the whole truth might convince others that there is only one truth. This was a very difficult. lesson for a man as passionate as Massignon to learn.

When he was in the United states in 1952 before his trip to India, I-lassignon discovered Lincoln. He went 78 to pray in Washington, the place of his murder, IIbecause Lincoln had realized the emancipation of negro slaves, after having ordered a solemn fast, a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer (April 3, 1863) in order to give justice to the oppressed.,,22 l''Ieditating on this "Father Abraham" as American negroes call him, l''Iassignon's understanding of the social dimension of fasting matured, and back in Paris, facing the excesses of colonial repression, he took the lead in organizing private fasting during the Summer of 1953.

On September l4th, the identical date for the Muslim Achoura and the Jewish Kippour, the Badaliya drew a large crowd: Martin Buber and his IHUD group (disciples of Judah Magnes, l''Iassignon's friend who wanted the reconciliation between Jews and Arabs), l''Iuslims from Istambul to Fez, different Christian groups and contempla­ tive monks. This fasting is accompanied by silence, like that of the Christians and Muslims of early days. It makes a deep impression among the participants, producing an interior peace, giving hunger and thirst for justice, which is, for Massignon, the consummation of love.23

The Badaliya fasting on the first.Fridays of the month aimed at the restoration of peace between . Massignon suffered because he was unable to do 79 more when the situation in Paris worsened for the North African workers (torture and concentr.ation camps). It was hard for him not to be able to help the suffering directly in other ways than by silent prayer, fasting and self-sacrifice. However "it is the example of the Master," he reminded his friends.

Through the Association "Friends of Gandhi", he was able to lead a fasting at a critical juncture of the Algerian drama which drew a number of associates from aIl confessions, fromLos Angeles to Tsugaru (Japan), from Mehrauli (with the Tshishtiya) to New York (Jewish friends), from Kairrouan (non-violent Algerian refugees) to Karachi and Bombay. He then expressed his joy to see this fasting of the non-violent for justice spreading all over the world. 24

Percées

God and Gandhi

The great thing is to contemplate through social work. The aim must be Moksha. That must be by the vow. One must feel through vow the sacredness of God. It is not merely in~ellectual, but a spiritual reali­ sation. God is not an invention, God is a discovery ••• God hides himself in a way. \~e have to find him. IS\

presence is revealed. We have to make sacrifices. You find that in the text of the Vedas and the Brahamanas.I felt most that Gandhi had always tried to console the broken-hearted. The broken-hearted recognized in him one who would help them truly and efficiently. Men in their misery went to him and got help and guidance. Gandhi was a man of sorrow, and it is only the man of sorrow who discovers God. He discovers Him in the humble weavers, in the naked­ ness of the intouchables. By becoming naked himsel~ he tries to make their sorrows clothed.25 Sacrifice is still the meaning of the pilgrimage for the man who has a vow of Satya (truth). Among the Hindus there is a common belief of going to Moksha in the way in which the Muslims think of going to Mecca which is not something material but something spiritual like the Moksha of the Hindus.26

Silence If recourse to spiritual arms implies fasting from what enters the mouth and leaves it, there is a . first problem in fasting: it is an invitation to silence.27

l have tried to bring together Christians and Mus~ by fasting for justice. Fasting is silence; it is not yet a witness. One cannot say that l have committed Christians in a communicatio in sacris since it is a silent IIsuppressionll.28

The Night of Destiny, Last of the Muslim Ramadan

~ The Muslim fasting is the highest witness of divine ~ Transcendence; when it is going to finish, the Veil 81 half-opens itself, which has hidden God's face. 29

A Summary of Themes

••• how to spot the threshold of sacralization (pavitra, punya): in an overstretched trial of painful love, -- in an 'hyperextension' of Self for mental identification with the other's need; when one cannot help him, except by sharing, mentally, so poorly his pain. By tears, if one can't afford blood, -- by burning of his hunger, if one's breast can't givehim the milk of human kindness? Tears and blood, milk and fire are the means of the house­ keeping, of the immemorial Rite of Hospitality and Right of Asylum (Atithi Dharma, Caranya Dharma). But they are undiscoverable and unworkable if one has not 'recovered his mother' s .. womb' in pilgrimage, bound straight in his own Hospitality for others, by the pledge of Honour which alone may render 'lawful' the bread, render 'apportionable' in common the Truth (Satya), sought in the sâme Path.~O CHAPTER VI

WITNESS OF THE FAITH IN THE JUDGMENT

"The convergences in the Abrahamic prayers as seen through the respective dogmatic tendencies of Isla~ Christianity and Israel" was the title of the last series of lectures Massignon gave in the Collège de France before retiring in 1954; it well summarizes his work and thought. In these lectures, Massignon spoke of the Mubahala, the Seven Sleepers, Mary and Fatima, Christ in the Gospels according to Ghazali, the in Ibn Arabi and in Raymond Lull; he spoke of the dark night of the soul, , the heart in comparative mysticism; he spoke of time, rite, vow, language, nature, the idea of the spirit as he saw it in Islam, etc. These subjects were seen in the same light: in relation to the God of Abraham and to the Judgment. Massignon wrote so many works on this subject that one is at a loss to select relevant materiàl in the limited dimension of this thesis.l

In addition, it is difficult to summarize or elaborate, Massignon's genuine intuitions, poetic images and mystic insights cannot be matched and his disciples

82 83

must beware of careless or rapid interpretations. Mass~, because of his personality -- mystic and prophet -- could say things and express points of view which were acceptable to Muslims and Christians, but no one else could imitate him. That is why it is better in some ways to let him speak for himself, to let the of his words, images and thoughts play upon the reader.

These studies are part of his vocation, his way to answer the calI of the God of Abraham which came to him in Arabie, helped by the prayers of Muslim friends who did not want to see him die an unbeliever. It was the witness of his life, the witness of the faith in the so typically Islamic. He described it thus:

The judgment, in which aIl believers believe, shall be pronounced against the privileged, according to the yield in common good of the exercise of their privileges for those to whom they have not been granted. For the levelling at the lowest ebb, vainly sought by various syncretisms, shall in fact be realized when responsibilities shall be established according to the strictest standard.2

These matters of a chosen people, election, privileges, which are linked with his view on judgrnent and on the relations among religions, may seern puzzling, but they form an inegral part of his interpretation of Islam: Isaac and Ishmael; and, as he expressed it, the election of the Jewish (or Christian) people does not 84 signify the rejection of the others. It does not exhaust the richness and fecundity of God's grace. In Catholic theology the idea of election has developed from "out­ side the Church, no salvation", to the idea that God's grace comes to all men by Christ in some mysterious way, and is not limited to the belonging to Christ's body, the Church and to its sacraments. However, there is a whole range of opinions on the question and Massignon chose a very personal interpretation. He explained that the Koran denounces as impious the illusion of some Jews and Christians who believe that God is obliged to save some human families "en bloc". The Koran rejects their reassuring theory of physical dadoption friend, son -- by which God is obliged to care for the adopted circumcized or baptized children of parents who believe in Him as if they were normal offspring .3

As Massignon grew old and more disillusioned by the compromises of the churchmen · -- with their superstition of "fécondité de l'argent et finalité de l'utile" (Maritain) -- and by the "idolatry" of the post­ Christian West, the Judgment became more important in his interpretation of Islam and of the convergences among the Abrahamic religions, which we will now study. 85

Evolution of the Thought of Massignon seen through an Article Written in 1914 and Others Written after 1947

"The Roman Catholic Church and Islam", an article wri tten by Massignon in the Muslim vlorld, 4 is a reflexion on the theology and the attitudes of the Church towards Islam which were elaborated from the time of Pope Urbain II (d. 1095), at the timeaf the Crusades, and which evolved little after the 17th century. One wonders if this article reflects Massignon's ideas or whether he only reports the opinion of the Roman Catholic Church. The note by the editor of the Muslim World, linking Massignon's position with the one he assigns to the Church, implies that the views of the Church and those of Massignon were identical. That could have been true at that time. NO'where in this article does Massignon express a conflict of opinion. The most one could say is that he doesnot develop at length the hard dogmatic positions of Marracci, who died in 1696 and was still influential in 1930. Massignon's attitude can be understood if we recall that he was then a young convert, with all the accompanying fire and aggressive­ ness. However, in the present religious situation, it appears full of harsh statements and narrow points of view; we can now see the great change undergone by the church in this field during the past half-century, a 86 change in which Massignon took such a leading part and one that is still in process at the present time.

In 1949, he wrote "Les trois prières d'Abraham, père de tous les croyants" which isa résumé of "Les trois prières d'Abraham. 5 Other articles of the same period show his concern for a Christi.an-Muslim dialogue, and the change that had occurred by the end of a life spent in trying to know and understand Islam and Islamic culture, in loving Arabs and Muslims. His opinions then are very personal and might not a1ways exactly reflect the consensus of Roman Catho1ic theologians.

We will compare successively his views, in 1914 and from 1947 on, about the heirs of Abraham, the two terms of the promise (the Messiah and the Land), the question of conversion, the incompatibility of the dogmas and some phenomena of convergences.,

I.

In 1914, Massignon wrote:

Christians are the true heirs of Abraham to the exclusion of Moslems and Je\'ls. Just as Ishmael has been exc1uded for Isaac's benefit, so the Mosaic synagogue and the Moslem community have been excluded for the benefit of the Christian Ecclesia. This heritage of Abraham included a twofold promise by 87

God: the Messiah and the land of .6 In 1947, he recognized Muslims as Abraham's heirs. Through the taslya (liAs You have prayed for Abraham and his people ••• as You have blessed Abraham and his people ••• Il) which the Muslims repeat ét the prayers five times a day, the Muslim faith links itself to the prayer of Abraham, who is called the founder of the Mus­ lim community in the Koran.7 Itthus points to a supra­

natural source, giving it, suggested M~ssignon, a theological foundation: the last incorruptible part of

the ~ternal legacy to Ishmael finally rediscovered and venerated with a jealous .8 He saw a positive mission in Islam. He recognized personally his debt towards Islam. It is the monotheistic religion which has kept the memory of the common ancestor in the purest way.

2.

In 1914, he wrote: "The Christians alone have received the Messiah, they own Him and live in inHim by the sacraments".9

In 1949, he saw as the positive mission of Islam te- refrain from putting its trust in privileges. Islam reproaches Israel for expecting a Messiah born from 's race by a human paternity, and for not recognizing 88

Jesus as born of a vigin-mother and as one whose return is expected at the 1ast days. Islam a1so reproaches Christians for not having yet 1ived that Rahbaniya (per­ fect rule of life) which cou1d form in them the second birth of Jesus and which cou1d anticipate by this coming of the Spirit of God, the resurrection of the dead of which Jesus is the signin the Koran.lO

About the Promised Land, he wrote in 1914:

The Christians a10ne have a right to the earthly inheritance, the Promised land where Jesus, the Ho1y One of Israel, was born and where he died. They must take it back from the present possessors, the Mos1em Arabs of the seed of Abraham by Ishmae1, son of fl Hagar; for these "Hagarenese", "Ishmae1ites , these

Il sons of the bondwoman", are there only to perpetuate" the truth of the divine promise unti1 the return of 1egitimate heir.11

By 1949, his outlook had changed. He recognized the role of Islam in Palestine and the right of Muslims to live there. By keeping the Ho1y Sepulchre whi1e Jews "insult the tomb of the bastard", Islam seems for him to have assumed an historica1 ro1e in the Roly Land.12

He recognized a1so the right of the Jews to come back peacefully te Zion -- more in the spirit of Abraham than in the spirit of Joshua -- and he heped that they 89 would take the side of the oppressed in Asia, the Bandoeng side.

He pleaded with the Christians not to try "to divide in order to rule" and not to search only for material advantages (potassium andcil) but to be an ele­ ment of conciliation among the divided Semitic peoples.

He admitted that, except for a spiritual inter­ pretation, a Christian must recognize that the Holy Land belongs to Isaac's descendants. Symbolically, he under­ stood the Christian and Muslim points of view: Israel, coming back, has to conform to its liturgy of penance and its search for justice. He repeatedly recalled that the salvation of the world and of its spirituality depends on Israel.l3

However, he recognized the rights of the Christians -- contemplatives, pilgrims -- to dwell in the Holy Land. Christian Arabs, as Muslim Arabs, ought to be able to stay in their homes: Hébron, Nazareth, Bethlehem and so on, especially in the places which have a spiritual significance for them.

Palestine ought to be the symbol of a kindergar­ ten for humanity, a human nest prepared for the flight to the bosom of Abraham, "where we must go back if we

ll lit want to be born again , repeated Massignon. 90 1),

4.

About conversion, the attitude of the Church seems to have been pragmatic in 1914: to protect pi1grims and not to bring trouble to the Eastern Churches. Catho- 1ics must respect the status quo, assure the re1igious 1ife of the Christian communities and avoid propaganda in the Mus1im community.

The doctrinal power of the Popes has distinguished in Islam, in theory, a spiritual power, and, in practice, a temporal power, a distinction ignored by Islam. Theoretically they have defined and condemned the doctrine of the Is1amic state, Il'the infide1 statetl par excellence. In practice, they have considered the Mos1em princes simp1y as the temporal rulers of nations to be evange1ised, Hagarene (Hagar: HGR, 1ike Hegire) Arabs, sons of Ishmae1, Persians and Turks.15 Anxiety for the protection of these affiliated sects has prevented the Pope from authorizing mission­ aries to evange1ise the Mos1ems. 16 Work for the conversion of their Mos1em brethren of the colonies of their mother country, is, indeed, an imperative duty upon the Catho1ics of every nation.17

In 1947, Massignon had come to oppose comp1ete1y any effort towards conversion ad extra. He spoke of' interior conversion which is va1id for Christians as for Muslims. 91

First Massignon discovered the Arabs, then he found himself (and God), then Hallaj, and still later, he discovered the religious values in Islam (witness of God, liturgical language, Koranic message and spirituali­ ty) its mystical values through Hallaj, its historical values through Abraham, and he became more particularly concerned about dialogue between Islam and Christianity. As this point is very important, we will study it in detail and examine successively the three aspects: mysticism, history and dialogue.

A. Fr0m a mystical point of view, Massignon found values in Islam's surrender, circumcision of the heart,

ll essential desire, sacrifice, II great holy war which is the holy war against one's self, compassion directed towards aIl, of God's word, mystical love, etc. He saw in Islam a possibility of interior conver­ sion, deepening of its own values exemplified in Ghazali and especially in Hallaj who found a way to the mystery of sacrifice in Christ. It is in Islam that the Muslim

finds God, and Christ himself from within ~ by catalysis. Islam is not closed to the working of grace. Religious vocations spring from it.

Already, Islam has predisposed millions of men towards a discipline which is monklike and sober: not oDly a spontaneous hospitality, a brotherly 92

charity - and a fast rigorously observed lias long as a blue thread cannot be distinguished from a black one" - but also and especially a silence in God's hand, a feeling immaterial and sacred, of a pure, divine, omnipresent transcendence - where the Chris­ ••• recognizes in its simplicity the patriarchal adoration of the earliest times ••• The human vOice, organ of the calI to prayer, the sober and powerful outlines of the postures of adoration suggest simpli­ city.18 It is especially inside Islam itself that imminent graces, sown directly by the , have sprouted here andthere: heroic ascetic and mystical vocations, lives of nightly prayers and fasts. The real authenticity of the program followed by the first Muslim mystics is seen: to realize this monas­ tic life "rahbaniya" outlined by those Christian hermits, refered to by the Koran in a famous verse (57,27), to perfect and to practice this way of life which they had only imperfectly followed.19

Massignon's interpretation as a Catholic of mysticism allowed him to understand another correspondUg mystical author -- Hallaj -- with empathy. He saw the special role of Hallaj in Islam in spite of his excommunication: According to Hallaj, the absolute separation between man and Goel which is found in Islam, the inacessibi­ lity of divine essence, is caused by -~ Because of his love for God whom he considered inacessible, Iblis, incapable of true dialogue whe·n God ordered him to bow in front of Adam, refused because he 93

wanted to glorify God according to his own views. This sterile love led him to preach law and sin, and this put an obstacle between man and God. Muhammad Was unable to break that obstacle. Invited to parti­ cipate in the divine unitY during his ecstatic vision, Muhammad refused and delayed the time when men would be liberated. But Hallaj, entering into mystical union, substi­ tuted himself for Muhammad and for aIl those who could not cross the divine threshold thrnugh a sacrifice in which Islam would be consu~ated. From then on, divine essence is approachable. Hallaj opened the way to God and in God ••• 20

I1oreover Massignon believed that Islam ought to recognize -- in Hallaj on the gibbet -- that the cruci­ fixion is a reality and that Hallaj's survival in Muslim religious consciousness bears testimony to crucified love as life and resurrection.2l

B. Historically, once Massignon had accepted the claim of Muhammad and the Arab Muslims to descend from Abraham and share in the promise of God to Abraham and to Hagar,22 Ilthe place of Hallaj within Islam and the place of Islam with regard to Abraham determined his theological interpretation of Islam". 23 For Massignon,

I1uhammad simply admonished his hearers; he did not claim ' holiness nor Jesus' divinity, but seems to have put his trust, above aIl, in the intercession of his great ancestor, Abraham, in order to obtain 94

from God the salvation of his people, of all those who will have believed in his word because "for them Abraham had uttered the truth (Kor. 26,84).,,24

Muhammad, calling on Abraham, performs in the eyes of Massignon a religious act, appropriating the election lost by the Jews and restoring the liturgy of Abraham's children -- as individuals, the prayer five times a day; as a community, the sacrifice annually et the ~ -- joining Christians in proclaiming the ulti­ mate religious mysteries, Resurrection and JUdgment.

C. As regards conversion versus dialogue, Massignon's position in 1949 was clear. It aimed not at converting but at spiritually reconciling Christianity and Islam \'li thout syncretism. His interpretation of Islam was in view of its salvation.25 As Islam had been the way for him to recover his faith in the God of Abraham and to rediscover its Christian significance, he hoped that his efforts would help his Muslim friends to recover their Abrahamic inheritance ab intra. As he did not become a Muslim, he was not hoping nor working to convert Muslims, but to deepen their religious commit­ ments. In the Badaliya, he \'las asking each one to deepen his actual confessional position by a rule of life including prayer and renunciation. He felt that deeply religious men, at the top, do meet.(He communicated 95 deeply also with Hindu Gandhists and with Japanese pilgrims to Isé). In a memorandum presented to a World Congress of , he summed it up in English:

Union of all creeds is not to be reached through levelling aIl the dogmas to the lowest common level of natural religious feeling, nor by a mere table of transpositions. Dogmas must, on the contrary, be tested, develop their full distinct features, sprout till of full height, so as to be judged on their fruits from this low humble common level by the ordinary man. If we take the three Abrahamic religions, Israel, Christianity, Islam, we realize that between Israel's jealous segregation and Islam's open easiness (and readiness to evolve universalism, simple and clear worship), room remains for Chris­ to elaborate the gradual incorporation of aIl men, through good will and good works, into the Church's soule Meanwhile, Islam standsas a supreme divine summons, on behalf of all the umprivileged believers, before Israel's and Christendom's special privileges, remembering both the "legacies" they boast of may condemn them on the Day of Doom. 26

Regis Blachère, his former student, fellow­ worker and friend, describes this aspect of Massignon's thought with much finesse:

Il voulait utiliser ses connaissances des mystiques en général pour tâcher de faciliter un rapprochement des trois religions: Judaisme, Christianisme, Islamisme. Non pas de créer un syncrétisme, mais 96

tenter de retrouver les dénominateurs communs, les bases, les départs, les convergences, chacune des religions conservant sa personnalité, mais cessant de s'opposer aux autres. C'est ce que nous ses collaborateurs, avons appelé l'Abrahamisme de Massignon.27

About the incompatibility of the dogmas, Massignon had written in 1914:

In order to make the Musulman, who is accustomed to deny the , the Incarnation, and the Atonement, appreciate the harmonious structure of the dogma, the undying splendour of the liturgy, the exquisite suit­ ability of piety, it is necessary that the three divine virtues should abide in the heart of the missionaries ••• 28

His outlook had much changed in 1947. The texts where he described the different approaches to the dogmas are very rich in images, allusions and theological background; their summary in English might convey a very imperfect and incomplete approach. Massignon no longer speke of. dogmas denied but of lack of understanding, of hardening of positions which were at first open, as the Mubahala proves:

When the Nedjran Christians came to Medina in order to tell the Prophet that they recognized the Messiah 97

of Israel not ohly as their prophet but as the Creator God, the reaction of Muhammad had been a violent protest in favor of monotheism: how to recognize God in the first coming of the son of Mary, as a Messiah reserved for Israel alone, which did not recognize him? Only a judgment of the universal God of Abraham, of whom Muhammad had rightly reasserted the universality (with the Christians against the Jews) could bring about the recognition, in the second coming of Jesus, of the universal of God~7

Islam does not exclude the possibility of the second coming of Jesus as judge bringing himself gra­ dually to men as a spiritual master and sanctifier. The way Jesus speaks at the Judgment (in the Koran) recalls the words "My Father is greater than l''. Jesus will be witness both for men and for God. Massignon insisted that the eight times the Koran mentions ~ (fiat), it is linked with the word of God and suggests the exceptional identification of Jesus to God. The negation of the hypostatic union found by modern Mus1im apo10getists in surat 112 is not true according to Massignon. Rather it recovers the definition of the divine essence. which was accepted by the Lateran Council in 1209. It affirms the unity of the divine essence and not its divine unipersona1ity. So it does not refute the Trinit y as such. 30 98

For the Muslims, Jesus could not have suffered on the cross. Massignon guessed that the Koran is rather protesting against the mortality of the soul in favour of the immortality of the divine testimony of the martyrs. The one who ressuscitated the . dead could not die! Massignon however recognized sorne difficulties, like the impossibility of speaking of the death of a . The Koran does not accept that the free insertions of grace be reduced to the equivocal vocabu­ lary of natural relations (father-son), with the ambiva­ lent terms of our idioms. Reporting the words of a Muslim that Hallaj did realize the myth of Calvary, Massignon stressed the fact that Calvary is indeed a myth if Christians do not live it.31

6.

In 1914, Massignon remarked that he did not acknowledge comparisons

between certain articles of the Catholic faith and certain Islamic thesis such as the immaculate conception of the Virgin and Nur MUhammadiyah ••• , the doctrine of infallibility and Ta'lim (imam ma'soum), the rosary and , the scapulary and khirkah Khidriyah, the Aristotelism of Thomas Aquinas and the of . These ideas, products of rational thought applied to religious facts, have remained in Islam as a mere aberration, 99

an adventitous growth; whereas in the structure of Catholic dogmas, they form an integral part of a logical system. They form in Islam an historical and personal feature of worship, in Catholicism a sacramental source of grace precisely defined.32

Thirty years later, Massignon's views had changed. These comparisons are investigated in numerous studies. Once Massignon 'had accepted the validity of Muhammad's claim on Abraham and evaluated him as a "negative Prophet", he could see the working of grace in Islam.

In an article on Muslim and Christian mystics in the Middle Ages, Massignon explained, on a historical level, the influences, exchanges and borrowing that took place during the 13th century.33

On one side the scholastic presentation of Muslim theology influenced the formation of Latin Catholic scholasticism (Scotus and Thomas). It was called the theological Averroism of Thomas Aquinas.

On the other side, the philosophical presenta­ tion of Neoplatonic Christianized mysticism influenced existential , the doctrine elaborated by Ibn Arabi in Islam. It was called the Avicennism of Sufi theoreticians.

Massignon wrote much about that subject in order to defend Hallaj who had been accused of having promoted J.UU this doctrine. For Massignon, Hallaj's Essential Desire CIshq) has not an emanationist meaning ( of the cosmos), but refers to a testimonial monism, parallel to the concept of the Word among the mediaeval Chris­ tian mystics who were not contaminated by Greek terminology.

Massignon defended Hallaj's position34: testimonial· monism is founded on the experience of mystical transformation. The mystic survives the trans­ forming union with the ; his witnessing allows him to keep his individuality. He attains his true personality not by thought but· by acting and witnessing God.

Hallaj has defined mystical union as an inter­ mi ttent identification of subject and object whic.h is only renewed by an unceasing 'and lovingtransposition of roles between them, by exchange of words, and by love which he calls desire, but which can never be stabilized permanently in human life.35

Ibn Arabi,on the other hand, for the sake of formaI logic, has eliminated the intervention of a transcendantal from mysticism. He abandoned the primacy given to introspection (the interior holy war of the examination of conscience, linked with Koranic meditation and personal spiritual experiences) and chose 101 the primacy of a theoretical, speculative doctrine with­ out moral control. Under neoplatonic influences, he taught that the origin of all things is in the divine essence, its fulfilment in the existence of human souls. Mysticism is here an interior enlightenment and a love drawing the mystic back into himself. It leads to ,quietism and Massignon called it existential monisme

Socially it brought about the break between the spiritual energies of mystical vocations and the Islamic community which the Sufis could have vitalized by their prayers, sacrifices and examples. For Massignon, this was the very cause of the disintegration of the Islamic community.36

The Semitic languages -- contrary to the Greek language -- insist on a via remotionis. Beyond the transitory, God only is permanent. In the Koran, Abraham sees the disappearing at night, the hidden by eclipses, the stars fading away at dawn and he concludes that God alone is permanent. 37 Massignon distinguished Persian from Arabic mysticism. The Arab Semite has the sense of the transcendental, the Persian Aryan searches for perfection, aestheticism and is more inclined towariW an existential monism.' Massignon contrasted Sufism, in which man tries to reach God in his one and only life, 102 to the Chiite gnosis with its symbolistic interpretation, which affirms the opposition between spirit and matter, and in which the soul tries to reach God through a number of initiations and . This Chiite gnosis had been strongly influenced by hermetism, neo­ platonisism and manicheism while Sufism originated from Koranic meditation.38

Massignon made a number of studies on Fatima and Maryam, the Immaculate Conception and the Muslim : the rich Chiite meditations, the numerous feasts especially for women, the litanies and also the theolo­ gy of divine inacessibility and feminine immaculate conception.39 He studied the intercession of Mary at the Judgment in connexion with Shafa'a, Muhammad's intercession at the JUdgment.40

He studied the scapulary in its common origin, , who is also the common spiritual guide in the · 41 three mono the~sms.

He analyzed the confrontation of the Christian and Muslim forms of mysticism in two encounters, the

Mubahala and Damiette~

Massignon had reflected much on the Mubahala, the only manifestation of the total faith of Muhammad in

his mission. vlhy did not the Nedjran Christians, sons of 103

martyrs, accept this test by fire? Is it because one must not tempt God? "The cross cannot be vanquished for it is defeat itself" (Chesterton) seems to have been his answer. He reflected also on Damiette, aS an answer to theMtibahala~2At the end of the Crusades, Francis of Assisi went to the ruler of Egypt in Damiette, Malik Kamil, and offered to test by fire the reality of the Incarnation. On the advice of Farisi, a Sufi disciple of Hallaj, Màlik refused the offer; according to Massignon, this step became very important'in Francis's mystical life: the promise of the stigmatas. n43

These few elements give us some hints on the comparisons which, when Massignon dedicated himself more to the Muslim-Christian dialogue, became the starting points of research for him.

Personal Witness

Really, Massignon was above all a witness to faith in the God of Abraham. The communist poet, Aragon, expressed it simply: words of a Muslim (Hallaj) were transmitted by a Christian (Massignon) to him, a marxiste He more than once read Hallaj as a poet and also as a witness of spiritual heroism, important when people were suffering in French jails as a result of the Algerian 104 crisis. He was moved by the pi1grimage to the Seven Sleepers, Resurgence directed towards a dream, a future when man will be reconciled with himse1f. In the eyes of Aragon, Massignon was a man working hard to incarnate human dreams.44

He stood as a sign of contradiction 1ike Hallaj, or Christ or Abraham. He who as early as 1920 wrote on Is1amic c1aims45 and worked so hard to ease the clash in the crises of decolonization, became by 1947 very disappointed about intellectual means (searching for truth in an atmosphere where truth cou1d not be accept­ ed), about po1itical action (he resigned from the Académi~des Sciences Colonia1es)46 and about the West as he expressed it in the Annuaire:

So often we forget to keep our word that (Muslims) be1ieve on1y in the technical material they order from us. We are so sceptica1 about their capacity to use it without us that we do not hope anything for us nor for them from a continuing dia1ogue.47

And he decided to resort more to prayer and non­ violent action. He stood pub1ic1y as a witness to truth and to values, achieving resu1t by the opinion he cou1d change through various committees, by his appea1 for justice through and common prayers, by the mutua1 trust that wou1d be created in his joint pilgrimages. 105

Re who used to visit jails for years was stopped by st. Vincent de Paul group because of his stand on conscientious opjection.

He an old man of 78, president at a meeting of Catholic Intellectuals, was booed and bruised for his stand on North African workers. Twice he was arrested and spent the night in jail when participating in sit­ ins in the Champs-Elysèes and Vincennes to protest the concentration camps for North Africans.48

Like Abraham, he was exiled. The calI of God to take an anti-colonial stand, considered anti-French~ made him become a stranger to his own people. His knowledge of Arabic culture helped him to belong to Islam but his silent Christian witness made him feel isolated. His Arab friends resented him for not:".going aIl the way with them and his French friends believed he was betraying his country. Massignon was living Abraham's sacrifice and Hallaj's trial -- the thousand pages of Passion d'Al Hosayn Ibn l'Iansour Al Hallaj, Martyr Mystique de l'Islam -- he was living the trial of justice in the world and engaged in it as completely as in his studies (he was preparing a new bigger edition of this work when he died).

His personal interpretation of Islam (Abraham­ Ishmael -Muhammad-Hallaj) was not weIl accepted either 106 by Muslims (he was accused of promoting anarchie mysti­ cism instead of sc01astic theology )~%.or ,by Christians who accused him of syncretism, of ireni.cism, of finding in Islam what Muslims do not see ("inventer un Islam amélioré") of restricting revelation to the Semitic languages (neglecting Luke and Paul!), etc.

"From a crucially difficult position between Christians and Muslims, he strove first for sanctifica­ tion, then for a dialogue with Islam in the presence of GOd".50 He certainly did open a new era of understanding between Muslims and Christians. He helped some Muslims to appreciate their liturgical language, their"tradi­ tional culture and their mystics when Western materia­ lism was attracting their youth. He looked on an ideal Islam, and because he loved the Arabs and saw their qualities, they could accept their traditional inheri­ tance and be proud of themselves. He strove so that modern humanism might benefit from the ri~ ; h Islamo­ Arab cultural values.

He found in Islam spiritual values: transcend~e, sacred respect of the guest and of the word. His inter­ pretation of Hallaj might have been subjective but he found in him a truth for himself, a God of whom Hallaj was witness, close because of His mystical presence and far away because of His transcendence. Thus he could be 107 an active agent in the change of attitude of Western Christianity towards Islam, seeing its positive values, and respecting persons and institutions.51 A look at the 1914 article mentioned above, shows the evolution of the Roman Catholic Church as compared to the text on Islam at the 2nd Vatican Council and the more recent appeal of the Pope ~uring the last Ramadan. Massignon had a leading role in this evolution, net ohly for Islam but also for a new understanding of dialogue with all non-Christian religions.52 His oecumenical insight and his numerous connexions with Eastern churches helped to create a new spirit and awareness which have facilitated-the last Council.

Owing to him the Church in France could avoid some traps at the time of decolonization -- one remem­ bers how he fought for the image of Foucauld that some French officers wanted te use for their politics53 -­ Massignon certainly helped the Christians to recognize in - themsely~s their proud feelings of superiority and the Europeans to recognize their paternalism towards under-develeped countries. His scientific honesty forbade him syncretism, but his generosity opened hearts. He taught us -- more perhaps by his. life than by his words and works -- what it means to bear witness to the God of Abraham and where that witness leads. CRAPTER VII

CRITICAL APPRAISAL

This thesis is not an exhaustive study but only an attempt to grasp sorne of the meaning of the life, sorne of the inspirations and genial intuitions of a great scholar, a prophet and a mystic, with his quali­ ties and defects. This is how Massignon described him­ self m aWorld Congress of ,faith:

Trying to live, among my Christian brethren, just as l live ft among the others, my faith, hope.and love, pregnant.· of the full dogma. My only way to love my friends is to love them personally, with all that may seem to them, in their Roman Catholic

ll friend "queer, obsolete, or borrowed , with all the.t l recognize as the living structural p.ersonality of the Roman Catholic Church: ecclesiastic hierarchy, sacramental realism, vows perpetual, all that warrants my irrevocable love; for me, and for them: immaculate in Rer conception, exclusive in Her infaLûbility, indissoluble in lier wedlock, wearing the threefold token of crowning union given by the Spirit to the Bride.l

Several times, he defended his studies of Abraham, the Seven Sleepers, Salman and Rallaj, which seern histori­ cally fluid and vanish too quickly under the excessive

108 109 fires of severe criticism. Massignon thought it valid to investigate these legends, reconstruct their archaic elements, trusting the value of oral transmission and liturgical testimony by which the y came to us.

He refused to reduce Hallaj to the least common denominator of the modernhagiographers. Lives of mystics carry strange images and unreasonable happenings, but they open the significance of events and they bring dynamicpotentialities in the human search for a hope.

Massignon thought it illuso~y to normalize probabilities in which he saw "an exquisite musicality". He emphasized that he refused to distinguish between history and lege.nd, to separate miracles from speech, words from their rhytmical presentation; he refused to distinguish the literaI translation from the general orientation of the speech, the texts from the meditations they have inspired. Such personalities cannot be summarized by statistics. Hallaj is the unforeseen, he is the excep­ tional in spiritual books. But which creature of God should not be unique, peerless for Him?2

As to Christians and Jews who believe that the Law given to Moses and Christ's Last Supper dispense them from believing in the historical existence of Abraham, Massignon answered: "Listen to the voice of the Fire in the Burning Bush, to the voice of Mary in the 110

Magnificat. 113

Heraclitus and Abraham

A good way to judge a man is to see what he says of himself and also how he reacts to what others say of him. Massignonls confrontation with Jacques

Ber~ue, with Emmanuel Mounier and indirectly --with Teilhard de Chardin, will help us to assess his view of the world.

A.

For Bergue, "technical civilization is not only the result of a dialogue between Israel and Ishmael, but also an important stage of humanity, a stage in which the Westerners have taken the lead".4 Berque substitutes for Abraham as common hero for the Arabs and Europeans. The alliance would not be in Abraham, !! Khali1, the friend of GOd, but in the friend of things, Heraclitus, their common father. Berque looks for a community with the Arabs not so much in a Semitic testi­ mony but rather in a Greek-Orienta1 message. He thinks about "this old axial Mediterranea, signalized by Herac1itus, in which our time recovers sorne extraordi­

ll 5 naryanticipations • III

Massignon answers with the "Doomsday,1I the vindication for justice, which the under-developed countries calI for when technical development is accom­ panied by paternalism and injustice.

The warmth of behaviour which characterizes the Arabs seems to Berque more Oriental than Semitic. And Massignon recognized this, speaking on a different wave­ length that is closer to Feisal l than to the young intellectual Marxists Ber:que knew. 6

B.

Answering Mounier in an astonishing editorial in Dieu Vivant,7 Massignon made a personal apology while defending his periodical, and it helped him to situate himself in his own eyes. Mounier had said that by stressing Transcendency and Revelation exclusively, the

review was narrow~ng its position to an exclusive Christian with an apocalyptic bent, attracted to the worst calamities, recalling rough prophets, sensitive mostly to the harshness of dogma, the mystery of truth and the inflexibility of vocations. It would lead to a stiffening neo-jansenism, uniting the magazine to nihilism by condemning aIl that the collec­ tive effort of mankind had tried to huild so that one day humanity might achieve happiness. 112

Massignon answered by attacking the impropriety of calling man "collaborator of God". God is at the root of our acts. How can we speak of perfecting the work of the Creator to which we ape united by our surrender. Massignon spoke of a new "sacralisation", of mariology. Our conceptions become more and more secularized and there is a clash. His sacral view of the world seems irrelevant for today's people. Again he stayed on a different wave-length.

C.

Jean Morillon compares Massignon to Teilhard de Chardin:

Whereas the Teilhardian evolution lifts up the cosmos towards the Christ of the ab ove and the ahead, the Massignonian research immerses into the depths where time dissolves itself in the eternal, "in the encoun­ ter of the Presence on the ground of our deepest searching, in our remotest pa.st". Just as paleontology reconstitutes the history of life from the original cells to man, sacred archeo­ logy follows step by step the ways of God, as a half­ veiled light before dawn, in the darkness of the cosmic night, where the Spirit blows, where and when He wants ••• Mystical concentration helps to distin­ guish the eternal meaning of archëtypes structured by tradition. 113

Teilhard de Chardin is the singer of Christ as Pantocrator, the cosmic Christ of St. Paul; Massignon is a disciple of the Christ of Gethsemane, the Christ in the agony of Pascal.8

And here, in Christ, beyond the opposition Heraclitus-Abraham, lies the answer.

Pascal and Massignon

Vincent Monteil affirms: "We have known a living Pascal, greater, deeper, sharper and more universal than Pascal.,,9 In fact, there are many.similarities between the two men. Both had a startling experience: conversion

to the God of Abraham, Who is not the God of philosophe~s. Both, men of faith, science and action, show unity in their life, thought and work. Pascal certainlygreatly influenced Massignon, fortunately not in his under­ standing of Alcoran, but by his living in Christ. In the works of both, there is a mixture of pearls, wonder­ ful insights and much that is questionable.

Sorne of Massignon's insights have been much criticized, for example:

a. The way Massignon linked the three Abrahamic religions with the three theological virtues has been called superficial,lO but these critics ignore the scope of Massignon's investigations on Hope centered on the 114 person of Elijah,ll and on Faith, in several studies on Islam:12

In Islam, faith which will never end is superior to charity. The essence of b: .titude is not that charity be filled by God, but that faith be satis- fied with the rewards created for rationalcreatures••• 13 A Muslim may without being illogical renounce heaven without giving up loving God. He is damned but is not deprived of loving Him Who damns him. For man has not been made to love but te serve; obedience surpasses charity.14

b. Massignon's vision of the Judgment pronounced against the privileged may shock rather than please Muslims. They may not agree te represent the under­ develeped world, any more than to be called exiled, non­ privileged and non-elected. They do not believe that it is because they are Muslims that some of their countries are under-developed. They believe that they have received the last Revelation and the last Prophet, and 15 are really the Elect.

As Pascal was a man of God, a saint but not by his denigration of those looking for divertissements nor by his abuse of the Jesuits, so Massignon had hard words for our modern materialist technical world and uncharit- ble comments on aIl colonialists, exploiters, panderers, pharisees and the rich clergy. His invectives were not 115

inferior"to Pascal's in color or in vigor~

Like Pascal, Massignon was a genius. The intensity with which he perceived some events, facts, phenomena, like the historical importance of Abraham, of Hallaj, or the Doomsday, may obscure other important facts or events. Abraham is important for the Muslims but perhaps not that much. There are other great mystics besides Hallaj, before and after him; and for a number of OrthodoxMuslims Hallaj is a charlatan, outlaw, anarchist, heretic performing strange miracles and "making himself god by his proclamation III am the Truth".

There is not always much precise delimitation between what is Massignon's intuition, his grasp of the meaning of the historical or sociological facts he studies, and the result of his scientific research, his amazing documentation. In some articles he recalled and linked facts, persons, stories with so little information about them that the reader is at a loss to see their objective value and the link between the documentation and the argument he drew from it.16

He~ten moved between past and present. These shifts in time obscure the perspective, the understanding of an evolution. Science and action, hypotheses and

affirmation, histo~y or its subjective interpretation are aIl mixed. Intuition can be an important groundwork 116 for research but not a base for affirmation; it has to be supported with facts and chronology. A witness can be a valid base, but only if others corroborate his testi­ mony. The interpretation relevant for aIl ought to be distinguished from the one specifically relevant for Massignon.l ?

Sorne convergences of his Koranic and Bib1ical exegesis might look artificial and far from actual Muslim interpretation, which raises the difficult ques­ tion: is it good to give a Christian interpretation of the Koran or to respect the interpretation the Muslims nowadays give it?

In sorne studies one wonders whether he studied the Israelite theology of the Return and the universal message of 2nd Isaiah and Micah and its implication (election does not mean privileges but suffering for others) as deeply as Islamic theology and universalisme Qne wonders whether his concern for the Palestinian refugees did not make him overlook the fact that work and ideal have made Israel as much as money and tech­ nique have.

The qualities of a genius might not be the nuances, proportioning, lack of parti-pris of a less gifted man or of a man without a vision or a cause. 117

Because he was -- like Pascal -- li~ing an extraordinary ascetic and saintly life, his demands on others could be exacting and disproportionate.

However, in spite of these criticisms, we must recognize with H• . Laoust18 that we may dispute his conclusions but not brush them aside, and that his studies on mysticism and on contemporary Islam stand as land­ marks for the future.

The profound inner experience he underwent on a May evening in 1908 unified his life, thought and works in the God of Abraham for the next 54 years, in the sense of a Christian vocation for Islam. The reproaches of his critics as well as the praises of his friends corroborate this unity. FOOTNOTES

Chapter l

1. The bases for a biography on Massignon can be found: Henri Laoust, "Louis Massignon: 1883-1962", Moslem World (hereafter referred to as MW), Oct. 1964, pp. 300-306. Vincent Monteil, "IntroductIon" to Parole Donnêe, (here­ after referred to as PD, (Paris: Julliard, 1962). Jean Morillon, Massignon (hereafter referred to as ~), (Paris: Ed. Univ., 1965). . J.J. Waardenburg, L'Islam dans le Miroir de l'Occident, (hereafter referred to as IDMO), (Paris: Ed. Mouton, 1963). Waardenburg, "Massignon", notës for further research", MW, July 1966; pp. 157-172. 2. Dip16me d'Etudes supérieures d'Histoire et de Géographie, 1904. 3. Dip16me d'Arabe littéral et d'Arabe vulgaire, Ecole Na­ tionale des Langues Orientales, 1906. 4. Overall view of world studies·dedicated to classical and modern MUslim culture and religion. 5. He gave six lectures at McGill's Islamic Institute in December, 1952; during which he made a word-play on The Plains of Abraham. 6. Louis Massignon, PD, pp. 250-257. 7. He wrote five articles about Huysmans, his tomb, his rehabilitation, and the role of Notre-Dame de la Salette in his conversion which appear in Opera Mlnora (hereafter referred to as OM), (3 vols.; Beyrouth: Dar al-Maaref, 1963), III, pp.~33-769.

8. He gave a lecture at the Sorbonne on the meanin~ of . Foucauld in his life: "Toute une vie avec un frere parti au désert: Foucauld", PD, 1959; pp. 63-73, and wrote an article: "Foucauld au desertY devant le Dieu d'Abraham, Agar et Ismael", OM, III, pp. 772-785. There is much material still to be gathered cfr. Maubarac's bibliography on Massignon, p. 23. 9. Louis Massignon, OM, "L'amitié et la présence mariale dans nos Vies", In, pp. 767-770. 119 (ch. 1)

10. OM, "Sortes Claudelianae", III, p. 372. Il. OM, "La mort de Judah Leib Magnes", III, p. 494. 12. OM, "Ignace Goldziher", III, pp. 391-400. 13. OM, "L'amitiê de C.H. Becker, arabisant et islamisant - ërarl Einrich Becker ein Gedenkbuch", III, pp. 406-408. 14. E. de W. Root, "Louis Massignon and DUncan Black Macdonald", MW, Oct. 1964. MUch information about these four orientalIsts and their relations with Massignon is given in Im!2. 15. 31 contributions in Arabie and French, Memorial Massi- . grum~thereafter referred to as MM, (Le Caire: Dar e1= Salam, 1963).

16. ~, "Mahmud Shukri AI-Alousi", III, pp. 387-389. 17. OM, "Note sur Faysal", III, pp. 415-418. 18. OM, "MUstafa Abdelrazek", III, p. 400. 19. (arabic), MM, pp. 28-29. 20. There are five texts on Gandhi in OM, III, pp. 339-387 and PD, pp. 130-139. 21. OM, "In Memoriam Sir , Remarks about the Pre­ sent Disruption of British Po1icy in the Near East", pp. 418-423. 22. OM, "Mes rapports avec Lawrence en 1917", III, pp. 423-427. 23. MM, p. 88. 24. For Hallaj, see bibliography at the end. Besides there 1s an article in the Encyclopediaof Islam (hereafter referred to as El), and 18 articles in DM, II, pp. 9-344. 25. For Sufism, see bibliography at the end, espeeially the Essai, a number of articles in English in El, "Tasawwuf", "Tarika", "Nur Muhammadi", "Salimiyan, "Sanusiya", "Sa~aniya" and in DM, II, pp. 345-470 (16 articles). ( ch. 1) 120. 26. Four editions: 1924, 1926, 1929, 1954. H. Laoust describes it "A monumental work which gives evidence ;tnot only of sound political and administrative information rarely equalled, but also of historical scholarship ••• it is a manual of practical documenta­ tion" with information and elementary bibliography for each of the Islamic countries (~, Oct., 1964). 27. OM, 12 articles and 3 partial bibliographies, pp. 443-650. l, 28. OM, 17 articles, l, pp. 1-57, 167-351, 272-369. OR, 20 articles~ III, pp. 428-486, 559-610. . 29. Name of a sodàlity Massignon founded in Damiette in 1947, first with Christian Araba, it was later open to all believers; for more information see chapter III. 30. A contemplative commun~ty founded under the inspiration of C. de Foucauld. 31. Foyer International Carrefour. 32. Christian martyrs, see chapter IV, p. 61. 33. OM, "Le problème des réfugiés et son incidence sur le 1roche-Orient", III, p. 520. 34. Yoachim Moubarac, Abraham dans le Coran, (Paris: 1958), (Liminaire). Vrin,

35. Lettres Francaises, (hereafter referred to as LF), Nov. 9-16, 1962; remark of Regis B1achère. 36. Louis Massignon, "Les trois prières d'Abraham", (here­ after referred to as Pr), (Paria: Private publication, 1935, (Liminaire) 37. OM, "Ce qu'est la Terre Sainte pour les Communautés numaines qui demandent la justice", III, pp. 472-473. OM, "La Palestine et la paix dans la justice", pp. 462-463. III, 38. OM, III, p. 474. 39. OM, "L'Occident devant l'Orient, Primauté d'une solution -culturelle ", l, p. 208. 40. OM, "Etude sur une courbe personne de vie: le cas de Hallaj, martyr mystique de l'Islam", II, pp. 167-191. OM, "L'exemplarité singulière de la vie de Gandhi", pp. 354-363. III, Q!1, "Graphie on Gandhi", III, p. 357. 121 (ch. l) '.' .. 41. Expression of Dr. Ibrahim Madkour in his commemoration speech beiore the Academy oi the Arabie Language in Cairo, Dec. 1962; cfr. MM and Waardenburg's article in MW. 42. QM, "L'Islam et l'Avenir d'un Contact international en­ tre Travailleurs intellectuels", 1, p. 228.

Chapter II

1. QM, "Réfugiés europêens et migrations internationales", III, p. 538. 2. !Q, "Les trois prières d'Abraham, Père de tous les croyants", 1949; p. 263. "Israll et Ismael", Le monde non-chrétien, Jan. 1947. 3. !Q, p. 260. 4. PD, p. 265. 5. DM, "Le Château d'AI-Ckhaider", 1909; III, pp. 28-35. 6. Principal texts on his conversion: PD, pp. 282-283 and 014, "L'Idée de Dieu", III, p. 832. l5D, .pp. 345-346 and on, "L'Apostolat de la souffrance et de la compassion ~paratrice au XlIIème- siè:çle, . L'exemple de Ste-Christine l'Admirable", II, pl. 641. !Q, p. 414 and .QM,"Méd'itatlon d'un passant sur sa visite aux bois sacrês d'Ise", III, p. 718. !Q, p. 294 and CM, "L'honneur ~es camarades de travail et la parole de véritê", III, pp. 841-842. 7. CM, "Note sur Faysal", l asked ior the Memorial of the Hachemite Court), III, pp. 415-418. 8. CM, "Mes rapports avec Lawrence en 1917", III, p. 427. 9. CM, "Gandhian Outlook and Techniques to the solution oi tensions between and within nations", lMinistry of Edu­ cation, Government of India, New Delhi: 1953), III, p. 367. 10. OM, foreword to "L'Homme Humilié", III, po 532. Il. OM, "Le respect de la personne humaine en Islam et la Piiorité du droit d'asile sur le devoir de la juste guerre", III, pp. 539-554. 122 (ch. II)

12. QM, LII, p. 548. 13. OM, III, pp. 532-533 and 542-543. 14. ,QM, "Documents sur Plusieurs",wa2fs musulmans, princi­ palement sur le wagf T~ini a' H bron et sur le wagf, Tlemcinien Abu Madyan a Jérusalem", 1951; III, ' ' pp. 181-233. This study Was in the news this month, because the Wailing Wall is part of the MUslim wagf. 15. Money-changera, panders, wine-dealers, etc. 16. In Varna, 1444. 17. ,QM, "La Futwwa ou pacte d'Honneur artisanal entre les travailleurs musulmans au Moyen-Age", l, pp. 396-422. 18. QM, "L'Islam et l'avenir d'un cantact culturel inter­ national entre travailleurs intellectuels", l, p. 235. 19. OM, "Allocution à l'occasion du 13ème anniversaire de ra mort de Gandhi", III, p. 379. 20. ,QM, III, p. 374. 21. .Q!!, III, p. 534 • 22. QM, III, p. 366. 23. OM, "Le problème des réfugiés et son incidence sur le ~oche-Orient", III, p~ 518. 24. OM, "Le problème des réfugiés arabes de Palestine", nI, p. 526. 25. QM, III, p. 425. 26. OM "Colloque universitaire du 2 juin 1957 sur le pro­ DIemet algérien", III, p. 608. 27. OM, l, p. 220 and OM, "L'Islam et le témoignage' du ~"vroyant , II, p. 593.- 28. OM, "Jeanne d'Arc et l'Algérie, En manière d'oraison dTun soldat de marine, dite à Notre-Dame de Bermont", 1956; III, pp. 605-606. 29. OM, "Pour sauver le Maghreb, il faut promulguer une amnistie outre-mer généralisée - comme la répression collective a été généralisée", 1953; III, p. 600. aM, ftA la mosquée de Paris", 1955; III, p. 603. 123 (ch. II)

30. OM, "La croisade ,i rebours', la caution qui n'est pas -permise ", III, p. 596. 31. OM, "Il n'y a pas de fait accompli au Maroc", III, p. 598. 32. OM, III, pp. 591-592.

33. OM, Among the lib~rated prisoners: Dr. Raseta (Madaga8~ Car), Lyazidi (Mol)OCCO), Habib Bour~iba (), Messali Hadj (Algeria), Zoro Bitra (Former ASF), Benhamida (Morocco). And a180: Professor Sadighi . (), K. Chardichi (Iran); III, p. 376. 34. OM, III, p. 380. 35. OM, l, p. 218 and OM, III, p. 537. IOout the Abdal, see chapter III, pp. 44-45. 36. LF and MM. 37. Louis Massignon, Lettres à la "Badalyia" (hereafter referred to as Ba), (numbered; private publication). 38. OM, III, pp. 832-833. 39. Louis Massignon, Akhbar al Hallai, (hereafter referred to as Akh), (3rd ed; Paris: Vrin, 1957), p. 170. 124 Chapter III

1. Massignon believed in the intercession of the living for the living and the dead, in the intercession of the dead for the li"1ing. 2. DM, "La 'Citê des Morts au Caire", III, pp. 233-286. 3. QM, "La tentation de l'ascète Cuka par l'apsara Rambhâ: sublimation de ce thème dans la dêvotion populaire - , Dauer im Wandel, Fetschrift zum 70", III, pp. 723-729. 4. DM, "Textes prêmonitoires et commentaires mystiques re­ latifs à 'la prise de Constantinople par les Turcs en 1453 (858 Hêg.)", II, pp. 442-451. QM, "Le mirage byzantin dans le miroir bagdadien d'il y a mille ans", l, pp. 126-142. 5. Pr, pp. 57-61. 6. Ba, XI, Massignon wrote the introduction for Igbal's bOok: Reconstruire la ensêe reli ieuse de l'ISlam (Paris: Maisonneuve. 7. Pr, liminaire. 8. Pr, pp. 263-265 and 270. 9. DM, III, p. 806. 10. PD, p. 29.

Il. ~, p. 76. 12. DM, "Notre-Dame de la Sallette et la conversion de HUysmans", III, pp. 749-752. DM, "Notre-Dame de la Sallette", III, pp. 752-767. 13. Ma, p. 67. 14. DM, "Mêditation d'un passant sur sa visite aux bois sacrês dtlsé", III, pp. 716-718. 15. DM, "Words of an Iranian poet: ", II, p. 347.

16. DM, "Un voeu et un destin. Marie-Antoinettelt , III, pp. 654-685. DM, "Bi-Centenaire de la naissance de Marie-Antoinette", 111, pp. 685-688. 125 (ch. III)

17. Ba, XIII. DM, "L'apostolat de la souffrance et de la compassion reparatrice au XIIIe siècle. L'exemple de Ste-Christine l'Admirable", III, pp. 627-642.

18. ~, ~Le Martyr de Hallaj à Bagdad", II, p. 272. 19.

20. ~, "Etude· sur une coubbedde vie: le cas de Hallaj, martyr mystique de l'Islam", II, p. 189. 21. Pf!:, p. 18. 22. Akh, no. l, p. 103. 23. Pas, p. 303 and Akh: p. 104. 24. !!!, p. 760 and !!h, no 50, p. 136. 25. OM, "L'expérience musulmane de la compassion ordonnée a-l'universel, à propos de Fatimaeet de Hallaj", III, pp. 642-654 ~ 26. fQ, "La Mubahala de Médine et l'hyperdulie de Fatima", pp. 147-168. The Prophet took his fami1y - the five - as hostages under a coat. 27. OM, "La Rawda de Médine, cadre de la méditation musul­ mane sur la destinée du Prophète", III, p. 302.

28. Cfr. Lammens' article on Fatima in ~. 29. Koran 81, 8. OM, "L'oratoire de Marie à l'aqca vu sous le voile de Qëui1 de Fatima", II, pp. 592-619.

30. ~, III, p. 297 and p. 645. 31. DM, "La notion du voeu et la dévotion musulmane à Fati- -ftma , II, pp. 573-592.

32. OM~itIII, p. 288. 33. DM, "Salman Pak et les prémices spirituelles de l'Islam Iranien", l, pp. 443-484. 126

( ch. III) 34. -'OM:1fiIII , p. 648. 35.

36. OM, "Les saints musulmans enterrês à Bagdad", 1908; III, p. 98. 37. OM, III, p. 97. 38. Ba, 1. 39. MM, p. 62. 40. OM, III, p. 644. 41. OM, "The Notion of 'Real Elite' in Sociology and in R!story", l, pp. 267-270. (written en English by Massignon) • 42. OM, "Sur les cas de transfert rêel de la douleur par li compassion, leur authenticitê psychosomatique et leur essentielle rêalitê: leur connexion avec la tra­ dition extrême-orientale des transmigrations", 1959; III, pp. 702-713. (English, Massignon). 127 Chapter IV

1. OM, "Le P~lerinage", III, p. 817. 2. Pr, p. 14. 3. Pr, pp. 21-22. 4. Pr, p. 50. 5. OM, "Perspective transhistorique sur la vie de Hallaj", n, p~ 323. 6. Pas, p. 279.

7. Pas, p. 278. Diwan - Hocein Mansur:~' Halla.i (Paris: Cahiers du Sud, 1922), p. 98. In Orthodox Islam, this thesis is rejected. 8. Diwan, p. 106. 9. OM, "Mystique musulmane et mystique chrétienne au ~yen-Age", II, p. 480. 10. OM, III, pp. 819-820. Il. OM, II, p. 225.

12. OM, III, p. 818. 13. MM, p. 61. 14. Ma, p. 101. 15. Louis Massignon, Annuaire du MOnde MUsulman (4th ed.; Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1954), (hereafter referred to as AMM), p. 219 - Koran 2, 37. 16. AMM, p. 220. and OM, "Documents sur plusieurs wakfs musulmans", III, pp. 181-232. 17. OM, III, p. 492. 18. Ba, VI and VIII. 19. OM, ilLe culte liturgique et populaire des VII Dormants Nirtyrs d'Ephèse: trait d'union Orient-Occident entre l'Islam et la Chr~tient~", III, pp. 119-181. 128 (cb. IV) 19. (continued from page 127) PD, "Les nuages de Magellan: remarques sur leur utili­ sation par les pilotes arabes dans l'oc~an Indien: sous le signe des VII Dormants", pp. 421-438. 20. MN, Sept. 1967. 21. OM, III, p. 718. (English, Massignon) • 22. .QM, III, p. 721 • (English, Massignon) • 23. OM, III, p. 822.

Chapter V

1. Louis Massignon, "Isaac et Ismael", Le monde non­ chr~tien, (Paris, Jan. 1949), IX. 2. OM, III, p. 468.

3. OM, "Ce qu'est la Terre Sainte pour les communaut~s humaines qui demandent la justice", III, pp. 474-475. 4. OM, III, pp. 804-805. 5. OM, III, pp. 780-781. 6. .QM, II, pp. 475-476 and Ess, pp. 14-16. 7. Ess, p. 17. 8. OM, "La passion d'Al-Halladj et l'ordre des Haladjiyyah lt lI, p. 17. 9. Akh, no 36 and Diwan, p. 18. Pas, p. 618. 10. Pas, pp. 621-622. 11. Pas, pp. 894-895 and 898; theme of Hallaj's Riwayat li, VI, XIV. 12. Pas, p. 862: Tawasin, ch. V, 35. 13. Akh, p. 155. 14. OM, II, p. 169. 15. f!!, p. 278 and Diwan, pp. 26 and 98. (ch. V) 129

16. Akh, p. 104- and Pas, pp. 129-130. 17. Akh, p. 100. 18. Pas, pp. 530-531.

19. ~, "Réfugiés européens et migrations interna- tionales" III, p. 535.

20. OM, III, p. 369. 21. OM, III, p. 365. (English, Massignon). 22. Ba, VI and Om, III, p. 711. 23. Om, "La signification spirituelle du dernier pé1erinage de Gandhi", III, p. 353'-

24-. ~, XIII .. 25. Qtl, III, p. 375. (English, Massignon). 26. OM, III, p. 371. (English, Massignon). 27. OM, "L'Involution sémantique du symbole dans les cultures sémitiques", II, p. 629. 28. OM, II, p. 631.

29. ~, III, p. 783. 30. III, pp. 712-713. (Eng1ish, Massignon). 130

Chapter VI

1. At random: - DM, "L'homme parfait en Islam et son originalité eschatologique, l, pp. 107-126. - OM, "Pro Psalmis, Défense de l'idée qu'assume l'idée dans les langues sémitiques", II, pp. 496-503. - DM, "Mystique et· continence en Islam", II, pp. 434-442. - QM, "Islamic influence on Dante's Divine Comedy", l, pp. 57-82. 2. OM, III, p. 788. (Eng1ish, Massignon). 3. OM, III, pp. 478 and 812. 4. Louis Massignon, "The Roman Catho1ic Chur ch and Islam", MW, April 1915, pp. 129-142. (hereafter referred to as RCCI). This article was written before the war. ( Engrrsh, Massignon). 5. PD, pp. 257-272 and DM, III, pp. 804-816. 6 • . RCCI, p. 130. (English, Massignon) • 7. Kor., 22, 77. 8. Pr, p. 15. 9. RCCI, p. 130. Cou1d "own" be a trans1ator's mistake ror- belong ton? 10. PD, p. 267. 11. RCCI, p. 130. (English, Massignon) • 12. OM, III, p. 478. 13. OM, III, p. 475. 14. DM, III, p. 808. 15. RCCI, pp. 134-135. (English, Massignon). 16. RCCI, p. 134. (Eng1ish, Massignon). ~ 17. RCCI, p. 138. (Eng1ish, Massignon). 131 (ch. VI)

18 • Pr, p. 51. 19. Pr, p. 49. 20. IDMO, pp. 173-174. QM,IIPP. 328 and 176-177. 21. Pr, p. 19. Diwan, XIV. IDMO, p. 174. 22. Gen. 16, 10-12 and 21, 11-13 and 18. 23. Waardenburg, "Massignon: Notes for further research", ~, (Ju1y, 1965), p. 164. 24. Pr, p. 16. 25. Louis Massignon, "Le signe marial", Rythme du monde, (Paris, III, 1948), pp. 7-16. Louis Massignon, "Le salut de l'Islam", La Jeunesse de l'Eglise, 1947; pp. 140-147. 26. OM, III, pp. 788-789. (English, Massignon). 27. LF. 28. RCCI, p. 136. (Eng1ish, Massignon). 29. "Le signe marial", p. 11. 30. Er, pp. 43-44. 31. OM, II, pp. 190 and 342. 32. RCCI, p. 136. (Eng1ish, Massignon). 33. OM, II, p. 481. 34. And Serhindi and Iqba1, OM, III, p. 542. 35. OM, "Valeur culturelle internationale de la coopération des penseurs iraniens du Moyen-Age à l'essor de la civilisation arabe - l'âme de l'Iran'!, l, p. 542. Ess, p. 314. 36. Ess, pp. 315-316. IDNO, p. 185. OM, II, pp. 480-481. 132 (ch. VI)

37. OM, "Les mêthodes de réalisation artistique des peu­ PIes de l'Islam", III, p. 13.

38. IDMO, pp. l86-l~7; OM l, pp. 499-514. 39. OM, "La notion du voeu et la dêvotion musulmane à Jatima", II, pp. 573-593. ' OM, "Thêologie de la Fitra: la Taslya divine", II, "" pp. 582-585. 40. OM, II, pp. 473-475. 41. OM, l, pp. 142-162. 42. OM, "La MUbahala de Mêdine et l'Hyperdulie de Fatima", r, \PP. 550-573. Pr, pp. 25-27. 43. OM, "Damiette", III, pp. 102-103. aM, II, pp. 482-484. lT, p. 56. 44. LF. 45. OM, "Introduction à l'étude des revendications ISlamiques", l, pp. 272-287. . 46. OM, III, p. 379. 47. AMM, 1954; p. VII. 48. Ba, XIII. aM, III, p. 381. 49. Ba, XIV. 50. Waardenburg, "Massignon: notes for further research", MW, July 1956: p. 166. 51. J. De Menasce, MM, p. 81. 52. LF. 53. OM, III, p. 780. ct 133

Chapter VII

1. OM, III, p. 789. (English, Massignon). 2. OM, II, p. 273. 3. Louis Massignon, "Liminaire", Abraham dans le Coran, (Paris: Vrin, 1958). . 4. OM, "Dialogue sur les Arabes", III, p. 611. 5. OM, III, p. 621. 6. OM, III, p. 622. 7. Massignon was co-founder of the periodica1 Dieu-Vivant which appeared from 1945 to 1955. OM, "Un nouveau sacral", III, pp. 797-803. 8. Ma, pp. 115-116. 9. Vincent Monteil, Esprit, (Paris; Dec. 1952). 10. Comments from Yosi Levy. Il. OM, l, pp. 159-162. 12. OM, III, pp. 539-555.

13. OM, "Al-Hallaj, le phantasme cruciti~ des Docètes et ·~tan selon les Y~zidis", II, p. 22. 14. It could be compared to the study of Fr. Schuon, Understanding Islam, (London: G. Allen and Unwind Ltd) 1963) on fear, love and gnosis, p. 141. 15. Comments from Mr. Abdu Rabb. 16. Reading a typical page of ·"Les Trois Prières d'Abraham" (OM, III, p. 813), we see how Massignon jumps from Abraham's sacrifice to womanhood, Mary, the Church, without warning. He shifts from theology to history, trom exegesis to mystical analogies. Any outlook might be valid but needs continuity. Words are used without enough explanations of their meaning (Pharisee is not a pejorative term to a Jew). 134 (ch. VII)

16. (continued trom page 133) Symbole are not explicated enough to be acceptable (temple). Facts are not situated in their historica1 perspective (womanhood). Starting trom Abraham and Christ to the modern times, Massignon goes back to Moses and Mary, to the 4th and llth century A.D. 17. LF, Claude Cahen. 18. H. Laoust, "Louis Massignon - 1883-1962", MW, (Oct. 1964). BIBLIOGRAPHY

Massignonts Works

Books:

Annuaire du MOnde MUsulman, (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1924, 1926, 1929, 1954). Akhbar al Hallaj, (3rd ed.; Paris: Vrin, 1954). Diwan. Hocein Mansur Hallaj, (Paris: Cahiers du Sud, 1922). Essai sur les Ori ines du Lexi ue Techni ue de la MUsulmane, 2nd ed. aris: Vrin, 19 Kitab al Tawasin de Hallaj, (Paris: Geuthner, 1913).

Les VII Dormants dtEphèse en Islam et en Chr~tient~, . Recueil documentaire, (Paris: Geuthner, 1955). Opera Minora, (3 vols.; Beyrouth: Dar al-Maaref, 1963), containing 207 writings.

Parole Donnée, (Paris: Julliard, 1962), containing 31 writings.

textes in~dits relatifs à la bio aris: Geuthner, 1914 • Recueil de textes inédits concernant l'histoire de la mys­ tique en pays d'Islam, (Paris: Geuthner, 1929).

Articles:

"Badaliya~ Letters and Convocations, (private publication, 1947-1962), lent by Miss M. Kendergi.

~ "Africa (Excluding Egypt)", Whither Islam, H.A.R. Gibb, (London: V. Go1lancz & Ltd, 1932), pp. 75-98. 136 "IsraBl et Ismael", Le monde non-chrétien, (Paris, Jan. 1947). IX, pp. 87-110. "Le Salut de l'Islam", Jeunesse de l'Eglise, (Paris, 1947), pp. 140-147. "Le signe marial", Rythme du monde, III, 1948; pp. 7-16.

"Les Trois Prières ~'Abraham, l Limaire, II Prière sur So­ dome, III Hégire d'Ismael", (Private Publication, Paris, 1929, 1935, 1949), lent by Y. Moubarac. "The Roman Catholic Church and Islam", The MUslim Wor1d, (The Hartford Seminary Foundation, Conn., Apr. 1915) pp. 129-152. "Tasawwuf" and 39 other articles, Encyclopedia of Islam.

About Massignon

A. d'Alverny and 30 contributors, Mémorial Louis Massignon, (Le Caire: Dar el-Salam, 1963). . Aragon and 15 contributors, "Hommage à Louts Massignon", Lettres Francaises, (no 952, 15-21 ~ov. 1962). Henri Laoust, "Louis Massignon 1883-1962", The MUslim World, (Oct. 1964), pp. 300-306. Herbert Mason, "A memory of Massignon",. The MUs1im World, (Sept. 1967), pp. 321-322. Henri Massé, "Introduction", Mélanges Louis Massignon, (Damascus: Institut Français, 1965), l, pp. VII-XIII. Vincent Monteil, "Introduction", Parole Donnée", (Paris: Julliard, 1962). ------, "Louis Massignon", Esprit, (Paris, 1962), XII, pp. 913-914. Yoachim Moubarac, "Bibliographie de Louis Massignon", Mélanges Louis Massignon, (Damascus: Institut Fran­ çais, 1965), l, pp. 3-56. Jean Morillon, Massignon, (Paris: Ed. Universitaires, 1964). 137

J.J. Waardenburg, L'Islam dans le Miroir de l'Occident, (Gravenhage, Ho11and: Mouto~ & Cie, 1961).

______-=~~~, "Massignon: notes for further research", The Muslim World, (July 1966), pp. 157-172.

About Abraham

Martin Buber( "Le Sacrifice d'Isaac", Dieu Vivant, (Paris, 1952J, XXIII. Michel Hayek, Le Mystère d'Ismael, (Paris: Seuil, 1964) • . Henri Corbin, L'imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d'Ibn Arabi, (Paris: Flammarion; 1958). Yoachim Moubarac, Abraham dans le Coran, (Paris: Vrin, 1958). Cardinal Tisserant and 9 contributors, Abraham père des eroyants, (Paris: Cerf, 1951).

About Islam Sufism and Hallaj

J.M. Abd el Jalil, Aspects Intérieurs de l'Islam, (Paris: SeuS/l, 1949). R. Arnaldez, Hallaj ou la religion de la croix, (Paris: Plon, 1964).- . A.J. Arberry, Sufism, (London: G. Allen and Unwind, 1950). F. Attar, Le Livre divin (Elahi Nameh), (Paris: Albin Michel, 1961) • G.C. Anawiti & L. Gardet, Mystique musulmane, (Paris: Vrin, . 1961). . Mohammed A. Lahabi, Le personnalisme musulman, (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1967). Duncan MàDonald, Religious attitude and Life in Islam, (Chicago: 1909). R. Nicholson, Mysttes of Islam, (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914). 138

About the Encounter of Religions

Books:

G. Basetti-Sani, Mohammed et St-François, (Ottawa: Comm. de Terre Sainte, 1959). Etienne Cornelis,Valeur Chrétienne des religions non-chré- tiennes, (Paris: Cerf, 1965). . J.A. Cuttat, The Encounter of Religions, (Tournai: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960)...... M. Eliade & J. Kitagawa, The History of Religions. Essa! on Methodology, (Chicago: Un. of Chicago Press, 19 9). Fr. Schuon, Understanding Islam, (London: G. Allen & Unwind, 1963) • , Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions, (New-York: Columbia University, 1964). R.C. Zaehner, At Sundry Times, (London: Faber & Faber, 1962).

Articles:

A. d'Alverny, "Chrétiens en face de l'Islam", Etudes (Paris, May 1956), pp. 161-175.

G.C. Anawiti, "L'Islam à l'heure dll Con~ile, prolégomènes à un dialogue Islamo-chrétien, Angelicum, 1964; no 41, p. 145. . . ------, "Vers un dialogue islàmo-chrétien", Revue Thomiste, 1964; l, pp. 280-326 and IV, pp. 585-680. Y. Moubarac, "Y a-t-il une nouvelle vision chrétienne de l'Islam?", Informations Internationales Catholiques, (Paris, Nov. 1959), no 107.