For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  In the early years of the School Thomas Arnold (1864–1930)was Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and he was assisted by Hamilton Gibb. They taught tiny classes of half a dozen or so students. Arnold had read classics at Cambridge, but became interested in Islam and studied with Robertson Smith and Wellhausen. He went out to teach philosophy in the Muslim Anglo-Oriental College of Aligarh in India. In 1896 he published The Preaching of Islam (1896), an early major study of the spread of the Muslim message. He worked for a while at the India Office before moving to the School of Oriental Studies in 1917. There he turned to the study of Islamic art and was indeed one of the first scholars seriously to engage with this subject.52 His Painting in Islam (1928) was a pioneering work in English. But this field, like so many others, was dominated by German scholarship and consequently it was from Germany and Austria that America was to recruit its leading historians of Islamic art, including Ernst Herzfeld at Chicago and Richard Ettinghausen at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Arnold died just a year too early to witness the great Persian Exhibition held in Burlington House, London, in 1931. Ross had a leading part in organizing this exhibition, which was a major event and was to inspire many who went on to do valuable work in Persian studies and Islamic art. (A previous exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910 was similarly important.)

  In 1937 the much less flamboyant Ralph Turner, a specialist in Indian studies, followed Denison Ross as Director of the School (which a year later became the School of Oriental and African Studies). Ross and then Turner presided over an institution that was infested by eccentrics. Quite a few of its eminent professors regarded teaching as beneath their dignity. Sir Reginald Johnston, the Professor of Chinese from 1931 to 1937, used to turn up at the School once a year. Otherwise he lived as a recluse in Argyll. (The story is that when the School in despair advertised for someone who would actually do the teaching, Johnston was one of those who applied.) David Marshall Lang, the Professor of Caucasian Studies, did his best to discourage students from taking up his subject. The Arabist J. Heyworth-Dunne, who was wealthy and lived in a house furnished in the Islamic style, cultivated an air of sinister mystery. The linguistic genius Harold Bailey, who became lecturer in Iranian studies in 1929, was reputed to know fifty languages, including Sanskrit, Khotanese, Avestan, Ossetic, Pali, Prakrit, Chechen, Abkhaz, Circassian, Ubykh and even Welsh, but he possessed no small talk at all in any language.53 Bailey, who studied Manichaeanism, must have been one of the sources for C. P. Snow’s fictional Orientalist Roy Calvert in The Light and the Dark.

  Orientalists had sold to the government the idea of the School as an imperial training centre, but most of those appointed seem to have been academics who despised the idea of vocational training. Cyril Philips, who taught at the School during Denison Ross’s directorship and later became Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies himself, did not get on with Denison Ross and disapproved of the way the place was run: ‘The study of Oriental subjects in Britain owed much to the German philological tradition of teaching and scholarship in which each professor and head of department arrogated, and was awarded excessive deference by his chosen circle of dozenten. A tradition of unrelenting, unpleasant, and often personal controversy had also carried over…’54 As noted, there was not much money available. The young Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Stanley Baldwin, observed to Ross in the opening years of the School’s existence, ‘The opportunity of earning an income from the teaching of Oriental languages must be so limited that it does not appear to me that you ought to have any difficulty in retaining your existing lecturers or acquiring new ones on existing terms.’55

  THE HOLY MADMAN – MASSIGNON

  It must already be clear that, from Postel onwards, the ranks of the Orientalists have included more than their fair share of eccentrics. Few, however, can match Louis Massignon (1883–1962) for sheer strangeness.56 His father was a painter, sculptor and medallist and a friend of the Orientalist painter Jan-Baptist Huysmans (1826–1906). Jan-Baptist was the father of the famous novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907). Though the latter’s early novels, A Rebours and Là-Bas had dealt with decadent and Satanist subjects, he moved on to write novels with Catholic themes, in particular redemptory suffering and martyrdom. Incongruously, Huysmans’s meditations on the Christian meaning of redemptive suffering seem to have been first inspired by the teaching of Abbé Boullan, a defrocked priest and Satanist. Huysmans believed that it was possible through conscious acceptance of one’s own physical and spiritual sufferings to take some of the burden of sin and suffering from others. In his death agonies Huysmans was to pray for Massignon’s soul.

  Earlier in the nineteenth century similar belief in redemptive suffering had pervaded the writings of the arch-royalist and reactionary Joseph de Maistre (1755–1821). De Maistre held that the monstrous French Revolution was a blood sacrifice that had been necessary for national regeneration. The shedding of blood was a purifying act and the public executioner was consequently the guarantor of the community. According to his bizarre masterpiece of reactionary political theory, the Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, the ‘whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death’.57 For Massignon, as for de Maistre, humanity was redeemed by blood sacrifice. The theme of mystical substitution – of atonement for the sins of others by offering up one’s sufferings on their behalf – was to pervade his life and works. It is also possible that Massignon acquired a lifelong interest in secretive and esoteric groups from a reading of de Maistre (an Illuminist and Freemason).

  While still at school Massignon became friends with Henri Maspero, the future Sinologist and son of the famous Egyptologist and archaeologist, Gaston Maspero, and it was through the Masperos that Massignon first became interested in Oriental matters. He studied Islam and Arabic in Paris and Morocco and produced a philologically oriented thesis on Leo Africanus (the sixteenth-century Moroccan who converted to Catholicism in Rome and produced an important and lengthy description of Africa). In 1904 he went out to Morocco where he met Marshal Lyautey, the protectorate’s military administrator, and became his friend and protégé. In the next few decades Massignon would receive several commissions to do research and advise on conditions in French colonial Morocco and Syria. In 1905 he met Goldziher at an Orientalist conference in Algiers. This meeting and a subsequent encounter with Goldziher in Copenhagen exercised a crucial influence on Massignon’s direction as an Orientalist and there seems to have been a sense in which Massignon regarded himself as Goldziher’s intellectual son and was so regarded by Goldziher. In particular, Goldziher’s advocacy of Verinnerlichung, or interiorizing what one observes, strongly appealed to Massignon. Moreover, when in 1906 Massignon went to study at the al-Azhar in Cairo, he may have been following Goldziher’s example.

  But weirder, less straightforwardly academic contacts also shaped Massignon’s mind. In 1906 on the boat out from Marseilles to Alexandria, he had encountered an aristocratic young Spanish homosexual, Luis de Cuadra, for whom he conceived a great passion. De Cuadra was a convert to Islam and during their time together in Alexandria and Cairo he sought to introduce Massignon to the interior life of Islam. Despite his religious conversion, de Cuadra led a wild life. In 1913 he fell seriously ill from typhus, whereupon Massignon prayed for his recovery, for his return to Christianity and the adoption of a less hedonistic life. Though de Cuadra recovered from the typhus, he did not otherwise improve. In 1921 Luis committed suicide in prison in Spain and his suicide was swiftly followed by that of his father. This tragedy was to mark Massignon for the rest of his life.

  De Cuadra had introduced Massignon to the life and teachings of al-Hallaj, a controversial Sufi who had been hanged and then beheaded for heresy in Baghdad in 922. It was in pursuance of research on al-Hallaj that Massignon went to Iraq. Since he lived as
an Arab he fell under suspicion of being a spy and was briefly imprisoned by the Turkish police and threatened with death (according to his own uncorroborated account). However, he escaped and it was during his flight that on 8 May 1908, before the ruins of Taq, the palace of Sasanian Emperor Khusrau, he experienced a mystical epiphany when he seemed to hear the doves above him call out ‘Haqq, haqq’. (Haqq is the Arabic for truth and one of the heretical statements that al-Hallaj had been accused of making was ‘Ana al-Haqq’, meaning ‘I am the Truth’, a statement that seemed to imply the mystic’s identity with God.) In 1909 Massignon formally converted to Catholicism. Emaciated, always sombrely dressed and burning with a spiritual fervour, he looked like a latter-day Savonarola. The Catholic novelist François Mauriac, who encountered him at this time, recorded that he ‘ascends to the highest levels of mysticism, and like many saints talks only about himself and offers himself endlessly as an example. He decked me out in Persian fabrics: he himself was dressed up like an Egyptian student. He talks about his disordered life when he brushed up against God in the slums of Cairo.’58

  During the First World War, he worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then fought with distinction in the Dardanelles and Macedonia before ending up in the Middle East as the French High Commissioner Georges Picot’s assistant political officer. It was Picot who, together with the British representative, Mark Sykes, drew up the agreement that divided the Arablands that had formerly been part of the Ottoman empire into French and British spheres of control. Massignon was on the Anglo-French committee that drafted the Sykes–Picot agreement. In the closing stages of the war he was part of the French team that worked to prevent the Hashemite prince, Faisal, establishing an independent Arab monarchy in Syria.59 In 1919 he got a post at the Collège de France, teaching the sociology of Islam, where he remained for most of the rest of his life. (The Collège was an elite institution with a distinguished history. Postel had taught there in the sixteenth century.)

  The book that came out of the research in Egypt and Cairo, La Passion d’al-Hallaj martyr mystique de l’Islam, published in four volumes in 1925, is a weird book by a weird man about another weird man. In this book, Massignon not only presented a life of the much travelled and wonder-working Sufi, but furnished a rich and detailed portrait of the Baghdadi milieu in which he preached and studied his spiritual legacy. It is a seductive book but a highly problematic one. An American historian of the Middle East, R. Stephen Humphreys, recently described the book as ‘an astonishing tour de force which cannot be – and perhaps should not be – duplicated’.60 A reviewer of the English translation of Massignon’s book (which appeared in 1983) noted that it ‘combines extraordinary erudition with extremely incisive thought in a considerable variety of disciplines. The main thesis would, however, appear to be wrong.’61 There are in fact very few reliable primary sources on al-Hallaj’s life and teachings. Massignon made use of this deficiency, as he cast his net widely to present a Christian Catholic version of the Muslim Sufi’s life. Al-Hallaj’s execution in 922 was a kind of re-enactment of the Crucifixion, as al-Hallaj offered up his life for the Muslim community in an act of mystical substitution. Not only was he a Muslim Christ figure, he was also in a sense a precursor of Joan of Arc and Charles de Foucauld, the hermit martyred in the Algerian desert in 1916. (As we shall see, Massignon was a fervent French nationalist.) Though al-Hallaj was the obsession of a lifetime, Massignon was to declare that ‘I do not pretend that the study of his life has yielded to me the secret of his heart, but rather it is he who has fathomed mine and who fathoms it still.’

  Though the book is indeed brilliant, its fragmentary, digressive text reads oddly. It is more like a building site than a finished work of scholarship. Its footnoting is shoddy and inadequate, as the eventual American publishers of the English translation found to their cost. The notion of redemption through self-sacrifice that Massignon imposed on the story is quite alien to the Islamic mystical tradition. Nor does Islam recognize saints in the Catholic sense. As far as Massignon was concerned, al-Hallaj’s performance of miracles was proof of his sainthood. (This sort of argument does not go down well with more conventional Orientalists.) Massignon’s cult of al-Hallaj as a central figure in the Islamic tradition led him to disparage later, more influential Sufis such as the thirteenth-century Andalusian Ibn al-‘Arabi. However, many Muslims in medieval times and, for that matter, today regard al-Hallaj as a heterodox and marginal figure.

  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.62

  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.63 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, th
inking involves suffering’.64 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.’65