Louis Massignon, le "cheikh admirable" (Louis Massignon: the "Admirable Sheikh"), Christian Destremau & Jean Moncelon, Paris: Le Capucin, 2005. pp519 First published a decade ago, when it won the Grand prix de biographie of the Academie française, Louis Massignon, le cheikh admirable is a biography of the famous French orientalist best-known for his biography of the 9th-century Muslim mystic al-Hallaj and for his efforts to broaden the study of Arab history and societies in France. In re-issuing the book, the authors have included new material and added new items to their bibliography. However, in the main this new edition remains the same as the one published in 1995: a very readable and subtle account of a complex and fascinating man. It should be read by everyone having a serious interest in the European study of Arab and Muslim history and societies. Louis Massignon was born into a comfortably off, bourgeois family in 1883, attending the usual Paris lycées and intending to follow, after university study of philosophy and mathematics, a suitable career for a young man of his class and generation. The fact that he did not, instead becoming one of the best-known figures in the European study of the Arab and Muslim world, says something both about Massignon's own intellectual qualities, what the authors of this book, Christian Destremau and Jean Moncelon, describe as his "inexhaustible curiosity," and the special attraction that that world then seems to have exercised over educated young Europeans. Profoundly unhappy at what he believed to be the soulless character of contemporary European civilisation, the young Massignon seems to have found in the Arab world an idealised image of everything Europe was not. Where Europe was positivist and rationalist, suffering from a kind of spiritual rigor mortis under the deadening hand of industrial civilisation, Arab societies seemed to be altogether more picturesque, presenting a tempting field for every kind of late nineteenth-century adventurer, dreamer and searcher after more intense experiences than the getting and spending of bourgeois life could offer. Massignon seems to have been a rather dreamy young man, attracted to mysticism and to what later became a striking form of Roman Catholic religiosity, and an early visit to Algeria in January 1901, then a French colony, was enough to suggest a field in which these dreams could be expressed. He had read the American adventurer Henry Morton Stanley's memoirs, In Darkest Africa, with great excitement, and the intense light and empty spaces of the Algerian Sahara seemed to suggest something to him of greater significance than the search for new kinds of "unregulated" experience that Ethiopia had famously offered the French poet Rimbaud some years before. Indeed, this visit, Destremau and Moncelon write, caused Massignon to "entertain the possibility of a career devoted to North Africa and Islam," and upon his return to France he began just that. It was in Cairo in March 1907 that Massignon, now a researcher at the Institut d'archéologie orientale du Caire, first came across the writings of Hussein Mansour al-Hallaj, the 9th-century Muslim mystic with whose name his career was to become inextricably linked. Destremau and Moncelon summarise al-Hallaj's career by noting his importance in the development of Sufism and his preaching of a mystic path to the pure love of God, falling foul of the authorities in Baghdad by so doing. "In front of a vast crowd" in 922, they write, "Hallaj was whipped, his hands and feet cut off, and then he was crucified. Still living when taken down from the cross the following day, he was decapitated, his body sprinkled with petrol and burnt, and the ashes thrown to the winds. His head was stuck upon a pole and displayed on a bridge across the river Tigris." Massignon became fascinated with the life and surviving writings of this unfortunate character, traveling to Baghdad, then in Ottoman Mesopotamia, in 1907 in order to find out more. In going to Baghdad at this time Massignon aimed to gain more than his experiences as a student in Egypt had been able to give him. This time he aimed at nothing less than the satisfaction of his "rage to understand" Islam, as Destremau and Moncelon describe it, by "meeting scholars whom he believed would be able to reveal Muslim civilisation to him." Massignon visited the empty tomb of al-Hallaj in south Baghdad and then set off on a journey to the religious centres of Kerbela and Najaf, beginning his research on Abbasid Baghdad and early Islamic civilisation at the same time. What happened next, recognised as crucial to Massignon's intellectual and personal development, has long remained vague, his editor, Youakim Moubarac, commenting only in his article on Massignon in the Encyclopédie universalis that Massignon had had "an experience to which he always referred his spiritual development, without its ever being made explicit" what that experience was. The present biography introduces as much clarity as is likely to be available on what happened to Massignon during these intense few weeks of travel in Mesopotamia, showing how his Christian religious feelings, at the time still dormant but now powerfully re-awakened, were somehow fused with the figure and example of al-Hallaj, who now took on the significance of a martyr. Barely conscious, suspected of a suicide attempt or species of madness, Massignon was brought back to Baghdad from his travels in May 1908, where he was confined to hospital and diagnosed as suffering from "paranoia, with persecution mania and attempts at suicide, his present state having been brought about by travel fatigue, exposure to the sun and malnourishment," in the words of the Baghdad physician Adriano Lanzoni, quoted here. In fact, Massignon had had a powerful religious experience, referred to later in his "Notes on my Conversion" of 1922 and elsewhere, in which he writes of a "series of terrible mental images that passed in front of my eyes against a background of Hallaj-ian flames" during the journey back to Baghdad and "under the great sun of the banks of the Tigris, where Hallaj was tortured." Constitutionally given to a form of self-understanding marked by mental conflict, and searching for delivery from "a combat with himself", Massignon wrote of being saved through the intercession of figures such as the Catholic thinkers Charles de Foucauld, in later life a hermit in the Algerian desert, and Joris Karl Huysmans, an influence from his youth, as well as the Muslim mystic al-Hallaj. This exceptional experience, hard to understand but powerfully felt, "delivered him from bodily desire and taught him the essential desire of God," the authors of this biography write, and it only deepened Massignon's fascination with al-Hallaj. Massignon published the first version of his biography of al-Hallaj, entitled La Passion de Hallaj, martyr mystique de l'islam (The Passion of al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam) in 1922, and he continued adding to it until a posthumous four- volume edition appeared in 1975, more than a decade after his death in 1962. The book is not so much a biography of al-Hallaj as a portrait of an entire society, worked up and gaining in richness and detail with each successive edition. Massignon was fascinated by al-Hallaj's example, what he called the mystic's "desire to become entirely poverty-stricken, transparent and annihilated" in order to draw closer to God, and he developed a conception of martyrdom from it that he extended to later figures similarly endowed with "heroic souls". Such heroic figures, he believed, "substituted themselves" for the sins of others, bringing about a general pardon through their suffering and projecting in a single act the "trajectory of the life of that act's author beyond the world," as Massignon put it in his 1962 preface to La Passion de Hallaj. Yet, as Destremau and Moncelon note, and as their biography makes clear, for someone so attracted to religious mysticism Massignon lived a very worldly life, though while he frequently intervened in the world, it is unlikely that he wanted ever really to be a part of it. It is well-known, for example, that Massignon played a role for the French forces in the Middle East during the first world war similar to that played for the British by T.E. Lawrence, later dubbed "Lawrence of Arabia". There is even an essay on Lawrence by Massignon in his Parole donnée (Promises Made), a 1962 essay collection with an introduction by Vincent-Mansour Monteil. Massignon was involved in the diplomatic manoeuverings leading up to the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between France and Britain on the post-war shape of the ex-Ottoman Middle East, and he acted as interpreter in discussions between Feisal, son of the Ottoman Sherif of Mecca and first king of Iraq, and the French prime minister Clemenceau. He "expressed himself in a very classical, almost mannered, version of Arabic, which the Bedouin found rather comic," the authors write, unlike Lawrence "who was perfectly at ease in dialect." Massignon frequently intervened in public affairs again later, notably with regard to France's role in the Maghreb and to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, while at the same time developing an academic career that saw him appointed to a chair at the Collège de France in 1926, to the position of director of studies at the L'Ecole pratique des hautes études in Paris in 1933 and to membership of the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo in 1934, whose work he followed through annual visits to Cairo until 1960. He had earlier been a lecturer at the new Egyptian University in Cairo in 1913, lecturing in Arabic on work later published as his Essai sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane (Essay on the Origins of the Technical Vocabulary of Muslim Mysticism) and developing a friendship with Taha Hussein. After world war two, Massignon was particularly concerned by what he took to be France's responsibility towards Morocco, declared a French protectorate in 1912, and Algeria, invaded in 1830 by France and progressively colonised over the decades that followed. Independence, however, he seems to have taken to be the worst possible solution for the latter country, seeing in it a "betrayal" by France of a part of its historical mission and arguing instead for Algeria's full and genuine "assimilation". He was a firm opponent of Zionism in Palestine, writing in 1939 that Zionist policies had all the characteristics of "the most exasperating kind of colonialism, slowly pushing the Arab "natives" out into the desert", and intervening publicly after 1948 in favour of the Palestinian refugees made homeless following the declaration of the State of Israel. In the final section of their book, Destremau and Moncelon describe Massignon as someone who might appear to be "absolutely foreign to our times, who had chosen, when faced with suffering, the part of Ivan Karamazov" (from Dostoevsky's novel). His detractors, they note, did not hesitate to point to the "ambiguities, mystification, even the artfulness" of his writings, and "some of his contemporaries, by no means the least of them, spoke of his neuroticism." Massignon's vast work on al-Hallaj has also been criticised by later generations of scholars for the exaggerated place it gives to mysticism "in the general current of Islam" (Vincent-Mansour Monteil). "For a German specialist on Islam, what is true is what is to be found in the texts, or in what can be derived from them", Massignon too often being "inexact," writes Joseph von Ess. Maxime Rodinson, also quoted here, says of Massignon that his work was a form of "protest against the workaday methods [of his time]...He was looking for ways to break away from those and for different horizons, which in a way he found in his Catholic faith, revisited and revivified by his love of Islam." Finally, it seems likely that in order fully to understand Massignon one would need something of his own formidable knowledge and intellectual qualities. However, in the meantime, this book is a fascinating introduction to his life, and it is likely to send its readers back to Massignon's work with renewed interest, including to the monumental work on al-Hallaj. It seems a pity, however, that the publishers, following sober French practice, have not included a single map, illustration or photograph in this volume.
