Summary
Louis Massignon, the French Orientalist whom Said treats in Orientalism as one of the two careers — with H. A. R. Gibb’s — that dominated French and Anglo-American Islamic Orientalism until the 1960s: the outsider of genius whose lifelong study of the Sufi martyr al-Hallaj, Catholic sympathy and political defense of Muslims still held the Islamic Orient inside an ancient, Semitic time against Western modernity (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.255, 272-281 / printed p.246, 263-272).
Details
- Said introduces Massignon in Chapter Three, II as the French career complementary to Gibb’s: where Gibb’s interest was defined by Sunna (orthodoxy) in Islam, Massignon’s focus was the quasi-Christlike, theosophical Sufi figure Mansur al-Hallaj (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.255 / printed p.246).
- Gibb’s 1962 obituary notice, as Said quotes it, says Massignon “never ceased to seek out” al-Hallaj’s traces “in later Islamic literature and devotion,” wrote in two registers — objective scholarship and an individual intuition of spiritual dimensions — and impressed on his generation that even classical Orientalism is inadequate without committedness to the vital forces of Eastern cultures; Said notes the tradition of identifying with those forces in later French Islamology (Berque, Rodinson, Yves Lacoste, Roger Arnaldez) (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.273-275 / printed p.264-266).
- His formation, as Said gives it: a family friendly with Huysmans, early education in the ambience of late Symbolisme, debts to Bergson, Durkheim and Mauss, first contact with Orientalism through Renan’s lectures, study under Sylvain Lévi, friendship with Paul Claudel, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain and Charles de Foucauld; he wished deliberately to avoid what he called the analytic and static analysis of Orientalism (the French phrase is given in the reading notes of Orientalism (1978)) and spoke from concrete political experience in his 1952 essay L’Occident devant l’Orient (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.275-276 / printed p.266-267).
- The unchanging structure of his thought, as Said summarizes it: Islam is the religion of Ishmael, excluded from the divine promise made to Isaac, a religion of resistance keeping the sadness of Hagar’s tears; Arabic is the language of tears; against the orthodox Sunna stands the mystic countercurrent, al-Hallaj its exemplary figure, having achieved the crucifixion-union Mohammed had refused, the community left in “soif ontologique” under a transcendental unity (tawhid) that defines the “intention” of Islam (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.277-278 / printed p.268-269).
- His 1951 definition of his Orientalism — neither a mania for exoticism nor a renunciation of Europe, but a leveling of our methods of research with the lived traditions of ancient civilizations (the French is given in the reading notes of Orientalism (1978)) — carries, for Said, the asymmetry of modernity against ancient tradition (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.278 / printed p.269).
- Politically, as Said presents him, Massignon fought tirelessly for Muslim civilization and, in essays and letters after 1948, supported Palestinian refugees and defended Arab Muslim and Christian rights in Palestine against Zionism, scathingly calling Israeli policy, with reference to something said by Abba Eban, Israeli “bourgeois colonialism”; yet his Palestine efforts never got past the quarrel between Isaac and Ishmael, and in the 1960 Esprit dialogue with Jacques Berque he refused the notion of an “anthropological variation” for the Arabs and held the Arab-Israeli conflict to be really a Semitic problem (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.279 / printed p.270).
- Said’s verdict holds both directions: Massignon’s Orient remained spiritual, Semitic, tribalistic, radically monotheistic, un-Aryan — a catalogue of late-nineteenth-century descriptions — while he also reconstructed and defended Islam against Europe and against its own orthodoxy, his al-Hallaj embodying values the doctrinal system outlawed; methodologically he is a system for producing statements within the field of Orientalist representation, his declaration that we are all Semites (the French is given in the reading notes of Orientalism (1978)) showing the category’s force outside the discipline (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.280-283 / printed p.271-274).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, H. A. R. Gibb, Sylvain Lévi, Duncan Black Macdonald, Representation