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Abstract
This article turns to the trajectory of an often ignored figure in the history of French Islamology, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch. Through the trajectory and circuits of de Vitray's life and thought, it explores the ambiguity of a forgotten variety of twentieth-century French Islamology, one which attempted to make itself into a mystical study of mysticism and follow the internal logic of its object of study. This article considers the aspects of de Vitray's life and thought that cannot be purely reduced to the circuits of imperialism, or predestined to be a spiritualist search for the “mystical East” as the inferior other of the “rational West.” It looks at the possibility of partial disidentifications from the Orientalist commitment to the European imperialist project, “moments of departure” from classic Orientalism. These can be found in the moments of identification with the mystics who are studied by Islamologists like de Vitray. The East, here in the form of Islamic mysticism, no longer functions as “a career” but rather enables possessive and colonial epistemological attitudes to be defied. Through de Vitray's biography, trajectory and works, I suggest that the Orientalist “type” she represents introduces a form of double-translation that does not make the studied object immediately available for colonial use or scholarly possession, but rather generates a transformative conversion of the translator and scholar whose position of mastery is “cast into dust,” to use Rumi's words, and is transformed into a position of discipleship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Other poets like August von Platen-Hallermünd (1796–1835) and Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) shared this poetic Persophilia with Goethe (Dabashi Citation2015, 80–102; Lewis Citation2001, 506). For a discussion of “Indomania” as a dominant strand in early British Orientalism, see Trautmann (Citation1997).
2 The absence of Eva de Vitray in most accounts of Sufi Islamology is striking. Khalil and Sheikh (Citation2014) discuss the role of Massignon, Arberry and Guénon in Sufi studies. They list all major contributors to the study of Sufism in post-Massignon Islamology, including figures who were not strictly “scholars of a field” and rather identified with the mystics they studied, but fail to even mention de Vitray (355–370).
3 I am rephrasing Edward Said’s epigraph in Orientalism quoting Benjamin Disraeli: “The East is a career.”
4 In reference to the volumes written by the French Orientalist army of scholars that accompanied Napoleon in 1798, Said identifies the uniqueness of the Description de l’Égypte in its attitude to its subject matter. The main feature is the attempt to “engulf” Egypt by “the instruments of Western knowledge and power,” “to transmute living reality into the stuff of texts, to possess (or think one possesses) actuality, mainly because nothing in the Orient seems to resist one’s powers” (Said Citation1978, 86).
5 My translation from the Persian text of Mawlana Jalal al-Din Mawlawi-ye Balkhi (Citationn.d.). See also Rumi (trans. Mojaddedi, 2004, 30).
6 The allegedly unified nature of Orientalist discourse has been questioned by many scholars in response to Said’s work (Sharafuddin Citation1994, ix; Varisco Citation2007, 45; Hallaq Citation2018, 140).
7 Her self-appointment as a Sufi disciple of Rumi, though highly unconventional in terms of traditional Sufi rules of discipleship (irāda), is a common trend among “Western Sufis”.
8 De Foucauld insists that the European does not need disguise because of “religious fanaticism,” but rather because he can only be recognized as an “emissary” or a spy sent to “study the field in view of an invasion.” In peripheral regions where the European cannot circulate freely, “one fears the conqueror much more than one hates the Christian.” Through this account, de Foucauld justifies his travestissement as a means not to appear as a conqueror among “the natives” (de Foucauld Citation1888, xvi).
9 For a biography of Charles de Foucault, see Six (Citation1965).
10 For Said, Massignon’s distinction between “nos methodes de recherche” and “les traditions vécues d’antiques civilisations” as an East-West opposition implies that “the essence of the difference between East and West is between modernity and ancient tradition” (1978, 269). Hallaq argues instead that this fundamental difference is at the heart of Guénon’s critique of the “modern Western civilization,” which is then considered to be a more “subversive” critique of Orientalism than its Saidian counterpart.
11 For her, “traditional Islamic literature” seeks to teach through “symbols,” since what is transmitted is “hardly transmissible into a discursive thought” and needs a sort of “osmosis,” a transmission without speech (de Vitray-Meyerovitch Citation1975a, 209).
12 Aimé Césaire spoke of “the boomerang effect of colonization” on the colonizer, who loses his own humanity by undertaking colonial conquest and holding contempt for the native (1955, 41).
13 In response to the argument that “we must own our navy, our army, and we must have our own splendour and then will India’s voice ring through the world,” Gandhi famously responded in his Hind Swaraj that such endeavours imply “want[ing] the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger,” mimicking the colonizer’s nature without the colonizer, keeping English rule without the Englishman.
14 Iqbal was a very close friend of Massignon (who was her master) and Bergson (de Vitray-Meyerovitch Citation1991, 38).
15 She says Iqbal has a “permanent desire to reconcile the fundamental principles of the Quran and the discoveries of science,” practicing what Henri Bergson called “bringing a supplement of soul to western culture” (1991, 38). In fact, Iqbal considered Sufism to be a “recycled version of Plato” that is foreign to Islam and excessively dependent on spiritual leaders (Sijbrand Citation2012, 106).
16 Oscar Culmann was a foundational thinker in the ecumenical movement and the creation of a dialogue between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions.
17 She started with Iqbal (Citation1980, 1995) from English, followed by Iqbal (Citation1956), translated from Persian to French with Mohammad Achena, and Iqbal (Citation2014) with Mohammed Mokri in 1962. Between 1968 and 1974 she translated a biography of the Catholic French philosopher Simone Weil (Rees Citation1968), Zaehner’s works, a British scholar of comparative mysticism (Zaehner Citation1974, 1983), and an Arabic treatise from the medieval Sufi-theologian Ghazali (Al-Ghazzālī Citation2001).
18 During 1990 and 1991, de Vitray translated from Persian to French the masnavi poem Gulshān-e Rāz (The Rose Garden of Mystery) (Shabestarī Citation1995) by the poet Mahmud Shabestari (1288–1340) and simultaneously wrote a book about the city where Rumi was born and buried, Konya (de Vitray-Meyerovitch Citation1999).
19 This is a very common pattern. For instance, in 1894, Ivan Aguèli travelled to Egypt instead of the Maghreb probably because of an interest in visiting India. After converting to Islam, he began to study both Arabic and Sanskrit (Sedgwick Citation2017, 61).
20 The “real motivations” behind conversion are neither accessible to us nor are they theoretically useful. This study does not claim to portray de Vitray’s “authentic identity” or evaluate her “authentic” change of “consciousness” (Asad Citation1996, 265). I do not think it is valuable to treat de Vitray’s life and work as an “empirical case study” to “probe Western women’s motivations for converting to Islam” (van Nieuwkerk Citation2018) or to do sociological or ethnographic research on European Muslim converts (Köse Citation1996; Zebiri Citation2008; Wohlrab-Sahr Citation1999).
21 Stuart Schaar thinks Said failed to recognize the importance of Massignon’s public rejection of French colonialism in North Africa. Francesco Gabrieli wrote that Massignon was in fact “beaten by fascists” and by the French police for this very anticolonial commitment (Varisco Citation2007, 330).
22 The Theosophical Society, for instance, turned to Indic religion and to “esoteric teachers” to “save” the West from itself (Sedgwick Citation2017, 143).
23 De Vitray discusses what she calls “Islamic poetics” in Julia Kristeva’s seminar, transcribed in La Traversée des signes. In 1973–4, after Kristeva returned from her voyage to China, she organized a seminar at the University of Paris 7 on the aesthetics and semiotics of “oriental” languages in which de Vitray participated as the Islamic Orientalist representative in the midst of an Indologist and Sinologist group put together by Kristeva (de Vitray-Meyerovitch Citation1975a). This was part of Philippe Sollers’ series Tel Quel.
24 All essays in Kristeva’s series focus on language to think about forms of aesthetics and semiotics outside “the Western metaphysics of rationality.” De Vitray argues there is a poetics (e.g., the symbol) and a number of “constant” patterns (e.g., poetry trying to mimic the way God intervenes in the world through instants, signs, and revelations) across Islamic languages. Her intervention disrupts the general organization of Kristeva’s compilation of “oriental” languages (which includes Sanskrit and Chinese) by insisting on the category of “Islamic poetics” instead of “Persian” or “Arabic poetics.”
25 Massignon rejected Arthur de Gobineau and Renan’s “Aryan thesis” on the inability for Semites to produce science and art, which he says “denies the authenticity of Islamic mysticism and makes it into one of the forms of racial, linguistic and national reaction of Aryan peoples conquered by Arab Islam” (Rocalve Citation1993, 51–67).
26 The prophetic saying often cited as an example of Sufism’s self-perception is “the Law is my words” [qawlī sharīʿatun], “the Way is my works” [ʿamali ṭarīqatun], and “the Truth is my inward states” [ḥālī ḥaqīqatun] (Chittick Citation1983, 10).
27 See Massignon’s description of his reconversion to Catholicism, of “God coming to him as a mysterious Stranger,” in Six (Citation1962, 241–242). In 1934 he founded a prayer movement along with Mary Kahil called Badaliya (the Arabic word for substitution), which included Christians and Muslims (Six Citation1962, 219).
28 Pope Pius XI once told Massignon, “You are in fact a Muslim Catholic” (Krokus Citation2017, 190).
29 Massignon himself, in a 1957 speech on pedagogy in Toumliline, Morocco, said that three “masters (maîtres)” “guided his life”: Ignác Goldziher, Hajj ‘Ali Alusi, and Charles de Foucauld. “A Hungarian Islamologist, an Iraqi religious notable, a French hermit and ethnologist” (Angelier Citation2011, 195–196).
30 Karatani sees the base of “astheti-centrism” in the Kantian division between the cognitive domain where one judges the true and the false, the moral domain where one judges right and wrong, and the aesthetic domain where one judges the pleasant and the unpleasant. Each domain must “bracket” all others and purify itself from them.
31 Hurgronje worked in the Dutch colonial administration at Batavia to ensure the perpetuation of Dutch rule (Sijbrand Citation2012, 105).
32 She claims to have travelled at least ten times to Konya and ten times to Morocco, fifteen times to Algeria, while translating and writing (de Vitray-Meyerovitch Citation1991, 31).
33 De Vitray explicitly expresses her anticolonial sentiments: “We should not forget there was Western colonialism … It is not Algerians who came to France, but the French who invaded the Maghreb, then Indochina. It is after all the Europeans who massacred the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas, and destroyed these civilizations that were great civilizations. And what did we do with Africa? All of this is relatively recent. The abolition of serfdom in Russia only dates from the last century. I find that in the West, we give ourselves good conscience easily” (1991, 137).
34 For an exploration of the relation between Sufi ṭarīqas and new colonial forms of power, see Bezzaz’s (Citation2010) study of the Kataniyyah Sufi order and shaykh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Kabir al-Kattani and its critical role in late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century anticolonial resistance in Morocco, specifically in Fes.
35 On the widespread phenomenon of anticolonial uprisings led by Sufi leaders and the trope of “fighting dervishes,” see Sedgwick (Citation2017, 128–130).
36 If we take the concrete example of the Boudchichiyyah brotherhood, the first studies of “the Moroccan bloc” preceding its formal occupation by the French forces were undertaken by Charles de Foucauld and Édouard Michaux-Bellaire (who was the head of the French Mission in Tangiers) in 1890. The ethnological study of the most important religious men of the tribe of Beni Snassen was undertaken by De la Martiniére and N. Lacroix in 1894, directed from the “general government in Algeria” (Ben Driss Citation2002, 106).
37 These are Massignon’s words in his article “Le nouveau sacral” written in 1948. In his “Introduction to the doctrine of Hallāj,” Massignon diagnosed that “out of lack of sufficiently practicing the Quran, many Europeans have studied Muslim thinkers ‘from outside’ without entering the heart of Islam itself; not knowing how to genuinely become hosts of this still living community; for the past thirteen centuries that its members have ‘wanted to live together,’ they could not grasp the radiant structure and the central interdependence of the lives that their patient erudition dissected” (Rocalve Citation1993, 99–109).
38 On a longer history of universalist Sufism, see Sedgwick (Citation2017, 102–108). See also Schuon (Citation1984).
39 Cusa wrote that “when the Quran says ‘When you speak of God, do not speak of Trinity,’ it is right because people believe that it means [there are] three Gods” (de Vitray-Meyerovitch Citation1991, 32).