For Lust of Knowing (36 page)

Massignon disliked Shi‘a Islam in large part because he believed
that the Shi‘as were responsible for his hero's death. He seems to have thought of Shi‘ism as an early version of conspiratorial proto-Freemasonry or communism. Ironically his hostility to Shi‘ism led him to underestimate the actual influence of this version of Islam on al-Hallaj's thinking. (Incidentally, Massignon's lifelong prejudice against Shi‘ism was quite widely shared by Orientalists in the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Such grand figures as Goldziher and Hamilton Gibb presented Islamic history from a point of view that was unthinkingly Sunni in its perspective. Shi‘ism was seen as a peculiarly backward and superstitious form of Islam that had no future. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was to change perceptions.)

Massignon's work on al-Hallaj was presented and successfully defended as a thesis in 1922. At the same time he presented a complementary thesis. This was also published, under the title
Essai surles origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane
. Here Massignon took a philological approach to selected Sufi texts, his aim being to demonstrate the Qur'anic origins of Sufism. In this he was running against the broad Orientalist orthodoxy of the time, which was to emphasize (and almost certainly overemphasize) unIslamic sources for Sufism, such as Christianity, Gnosticism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Massignon's grounding in German philological techniques and his probing for deep meanings in lexical items was to pervade most of his future researches on Islam and the Arabs. His philology was wedded to mysticism, as he believed that God was immanent in the structure of the Arabic language. That language was ideal for describing the shattering effect of the transcendent Deity entering this world. The speaking of Persian by many Muslims, especially Shi‘is, was one of the things that had contributed to the degeneracy of Islam. Echoing Renan, Massignon suggested that the apparent sterility of Semitic languages arises from the fact that they are designed for interior contemplation. Although he was at first quite strongly influenced by Renan and Renan's presentation of German-style philology, it was more or less inevitable that he should eventually turn against the lapsed Catholic atheist and denounce Renan for his lack of sympathy for the cultures he wrote about. However, Massignon's own ‘sympathy' for Islam was decidedly ambivalent and in a letter to the Catholic poet and dramatist Paul Claudel (another disciple of
Huysmans's doctrine of vicarious suffering), Massignon described his project as being to study the language of the Qur'an and thereby demolish it.
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As a teacher at the Collège de France from 1925, Massignon's charismatic and anguished lectures on the meaning of Islam and the mysteries of the Arabic language won him numerous disciples (and since his death these disciples have published numerous memoirs that amount to a hagiography of their master). However, not all his students were totally enchanted. Maxime Rodinson (on whom see below) thought that the amount of time Massignon devoted in his lectures to talking about sex, especially homosexual sex, was bizarre.
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The Sura of Joseph in the Qur'an was a particularly favoured topic, as the beauty of the young Joseph in Egypt was celebrated in this sura. Massignon was also an unsystematic racist. Though he had many Jewish students, he seems to have been prejudiced against them and the young British Jew Bernard Lewis, who studied with him later, recalled that he was never sure whether he was regarded with suspicion by him because he belonged to the race that crucified Christ or because he belonged to the race that burnt Joan of Arc at the stake. Belgians were not much better. Massignon told the Arabist André Miquel that the Belgians avoided thought, ‘for, as we know, thinking involves suffering'.
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His other eccentricities included a fondness for lying on tombs. De Cuadra had introduced Massignon to the Qarafa cemetery in Cairo and ever since then he had cultivated a morbid obsession with tombs and cemeteries, one result of which was the publication in 1958 of an important article, ‘La cité des morts au Caire', which dealt with topography, funerary rites and the very Massignonian theme of prayers of intercession.

For all his oddities he was very much a man of his times, and his agenda as an Orientalist should be seen in the context of the Catholic revival that took place in France in the first half of the twentieth century. Massignon's thinking should be related to that of other contemporaries such as Charles de Foucauld, Paul Claudel, Charles Péguy, Léon Bloy, Georges Bernanos and Jacques Maritain. Péguy was a leading figure behind the cult of Joan of Arc and the campaign that led to her canonization in 1920. Bloy, like Massignon, meditated on redemptory suffering. Bernanos's hostility to materialism and
science probably influenced Massignon's attitude to those modern evils. Massignon's own Catholic engagement with Islam almost certainly influenced the deliberations of Vatican II and the Council's declaration that ‘Throughout history even to the present day, there is found among different peoples a certain awareness of a hidden power, which lies behind the course of nature and the events of human life. At times there is present even a recognition of a supreme being, or still more of a Father… The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions.'
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History, as Massignon conceived it, was the work of God. History was ultimately the history of holiness and was based on archetypes that manifested themselves in dreams. (Massignon was always particularly interested in dreams and his interest in them and in archetypes eventually brought him into close contact with Jung.) His methodology, if that is the word for it, was based on compassion, introspection, the quest for originality and globality. As Said put it in his essay, ‘Islam, Philology and French Culture', for Massignon ‘History… is made up of chains of individual witnesses scattered throughout Europe and the Orient, interceding with and substituting for one another.'
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Jesus, al-Hallaj, Joan of Arc and de Foucauld were among those witnesses and Massignon strove throughout his life to join that holy chain. Philology was one of the means to that end, for it was ‘the science of compassion'. Evidently his notion of philology was somewhat different from that of, say, Fleischer or Quatremère.

Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael were among the archetypal figures that featured prominently in Massignon's personal mythology. He took the figure of Abraham as it features in Islamic tradition and presented him as an archetype of the holy figure who offers hospitality and compassion and who offers himself as a substitute for the sins of others. Ishmael, the son of Abraham, and ancestor of the Arab race, had transmitted this cult of Abrahamic hospitality to his descendants. His brother Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews, had been chosen by Abraham as his successor over Ishmael the wanderer, who, as the disinherited son, prefigured the disinherited Muslims of modern times. The whole history of the Middle East could be read as the struggle between the two brothers. The great mission of the twentieth century, as Massignon saw it, was to bring Ishmael back within the fold of the true faith.

Massignon was a fervent patriot. His cult of Joan of Arc has already been mentioned and he was similarly devoted to the crusading king and saint, Louis IX. His belief in France's sacred destiny went hand in hand with an aversion to the British and their empire. He accused Britain of fostering hatred between Hindu and Muslim and he founded a group known as Les Amis du Gandhi. At first, Massignon felt rather differently about France's empire and
mission civilisatrice
in the Middle East and North Africa. He deluded himself into believing that the Arabs had accepted French colonialism in the spirit of sacred hospitality.

Ever since his first visit to Morocco in 1904 Massignon had been a friend and protégé of Marshal Lyautey. In the early 1920 she worked for Lyautey's colonial administration, researching craft guilds in Morocco. In general, French Orientalists tended to do research in Arabcities under French control, such as Fez, Casablanca, Tunis, Damascus and Beirut, and this encouraged them to present Islam as, above all, a religion of the cities. Moreover, Massignon and his colleagues took the view that there was such a thing as the distinctive Islamic city, centred around the mosque and the souq. Massignon came to believe that craft guilds played a central role in the life of the Islamic city and that Isma‘ili Shi‘ism was the dominant ideology in those guilds. Subsequently scholars have challenged Massignon's ideas of Isma‘ilism, demonstrating that there were no such things as guilds in medieval Islam and querying the essentialist notion of the ‘Islamic city'. His belief in esoterically motivated medieval craft guilds was of a piece with the twentieth-century French obsession with secret societies and sinister heterodoxies (Cathars, Templars, Illuminists, Freemasons and so on). As for the ‘Islamic city', this had been conjured up by French historians and archaeologists on the basis of their knowledge of cities in French-controlled North Africa, but with little reference to cities further east in the Persian-and Turkish-speaking lands.

Though Massignon was for a long time a believer in the French imperial project, he thought that the French colonial authorities should work with the ArabMuslims rather than play off the religious and racial minorities (Christian, Jewish, Berber, Kabyle, Druze and so on) against them. In the longer term he came to think of imperialism
in the region as an abuse of the hospitality that he imagined had been on offer and he became a prominent opponent of French colonialist policies in North Africa. From 1953 onwards he campaigned for the return of the Sultan of Morocco from his enforced exile in Madagascar. Later on, he protested against French policies in Algeria and, together with François Mauriac and Jean-Paul Sartre, he agitated for Algerian independence. (In general it is striking how many twentieth-century French Orientalists were anti-imperialist – among them Jacques Berque, Vincent Monteil, Charles André Julien, Régis Blachère, Claude Cahen and Maxime Rodinson.) Massignon became increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church in his own time as well as to ‘the rich, developed, arrogant West' and he argued that a revived Islam should take the lead against the oppression of superior technology, science and banking produced by a godless Europe.

He was a consistent anti-Zionist and a partisan for Palestinian rights. In part this was because of his identification with Arab and Muslim culture, but in part it seems to have been because he did not like Jews very much. There were a lot of Jews teaching at the Collège de France – until, that is, the Second World War and the purges instituted by the Vichy regime. During the 1920s Massignon, like many Catholic thinkers, had been close to the extreme right-wing organization, Action Française. He viewed with dismay the influx into France of Jews fleeing Nazism. In 1938 he had argued that French Jews were leading France to destruction. He believed that the war, when it came, was largely the result of the scheming of British (and Jewish) financiers. On the other hand, he did remain friendly with individual Jewish scholars and he despised the Vichy regime. After the war, he came to fear that Israel, once established, would be in effect an Anglo-American colony and he prayed that Palestinians and Jews would combine against Anglo-American hegemony. He hated the technocracy and atheism of the leading Zionists. In 1945 he intervened to prevent Hajj Amin al-Hussaini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, from being extradited from France. During the war al-Hussaini, in the hope of seeing a Palestine cleansed of Jews, had put himself in the service of the Nazis.

When Massignon died in 1962 many of those who knew him regarded him as a saint. He believed that Christians had a great deal
to learn from Muslims about true monotheism, the nature of prayer and much else. He prayed for the salvation of Muslims and for their coming over to the true faith. His own deep religious convictions led him to empathize with Muslims and at the same time to patronize them. His history of Islam was permeated by esoteric and Christological themes that only he and his disciples found in that history.

Massignon had been involved in the French colonial enterprise in North Africa. Snouck Hurgronje spent much of his life in the service of Dutch colonialism. However, if one wants to give full and proper consideration to the relationship between Orientalism and imperialism, then one should turn to Russia with its vast empire of Muslim subjects in the Caucasus and Central Asia. No history of Orientalism can be regarded as serious if it has totally neglected the contribution of the Russians. The opening year of the twentieth century saw the establishment of the Imperial Oriental Institute in St Petersburg. Viktor Rosen was at that time the dominating figure and the teacher of Barthold and Kratchkovsky, the two greatest Russian Orientalists of the early twentieth century and the guardians of a pre-communist tradition of scholarship.

According to
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia
, Vasili Vladimirovich Bartold (1869–1930) had a bourgeois upbringing and consequently embraced an idealist conception of historical processes.
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Although he paid a lot of attention to the class struggle, he was no communist. He remained an idealist who tended to place emphasis on ideological factors rather than material ones. He was primarily a Turcologist, who tended to present a positive picture of pre-modern Turco-Mongol culture, and consequently he was attacked by the orthodox communist Orientalist Petrushevsky for his ‘racialist-nationalist idealization of the Turco-Tatar nomads'. Moreover, his views on the economic consequences of the Mongol invasions ‘cannot be accepted by Soviet historiography'. (Bartold had argued that accounts of Mongol destruction and savagery in the thirteenth century were exaggerated and that in
some respects the Mongol occupation of medieval Russia had had beneficial results.
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)
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia
echoed Petrushevsky and decreed that not enough ‘consideration is given to the fact that the Mongol conquest led to the destruction of productive forces and the protracted enslavement of subjugated peoples'. The communist Orientalist Belyaev pronounced Bartold's
The World of Islam
to be a valuable work of vulgarization, ‘despite being written from the standpoint of European bourgeois Orientalism'. Smirnov, another communist academic hack, denounced Bartold for not regarding Islam as an ideology and for failing to detect the class-based nature of Islam and ‘the fact that it always and everywhere serves as an instrument of exploitation and coercion of the toiling masses'. Bartold's books were banned by the Soviet authorities for a while, but then reprinted in the 1960s with corrective annotations. Though Bartold's main work was on Turkish materials, he was also an Arabist and, for example, in an article on ‘The Koran and the Sea', he argued that the maritime references in the Qur'an could not have come from Jewish sources.