Louis Massignon


Louis Massignon was a French Catholic scholar of Islam and a pioneer of Catholic-Muslim mutual understanding. He was an influential figure in the twentieth century with regard to the Catholic Church's relationship with Islam and played a role in Islam being accepted as an Abrahamic faith among Catholics.
Although a Catholic himself, he tried to understand Islam from within and thus had a great influence on the way Islam was seen in the West; among other things, he paved the way for a greater openness to dialogue inside the Catholic Church towards Islam. Some scholars maintain that his research, esteem for Islam and Muslims, and cultivation of key students in Islamic studies largely prepared the way for the positive vision of Islam articulated in the Lumen gentium and the Nostra aetate at the Second Vatican Council.

Life

Louis Massignon was born in Nogent-sur-Marne near Paris, France. His father, Fernand Massignon, a painter and a sculptor under the pseudonym Pierre Roche, was an intimate friend of novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. Whereas his father was a sceptic, his mother, Marie Hovyn Massignon, had a deep prayer life and was his earliest and foremost religious influence. Huysmans' own conversion to Roman Catholicism was one of the first major inspirations of the young Louis in a friendly tutorial relationship that lasted from 1901 till Huysmans' death in 1907.

Studies

Louis Massignon started his studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris where he befriended his classmate Henri Maspero, later a renowned sinologist.
Following his baccalauréat he went on a first trip to Algeria where his family had relations, and ties with high colonial officers: Henry de Vialar, Henry de Castries, and Alfred Le Chatelier, the founder of the Chair of Muslim Sociology at the Collège de France in Paris.
In 1902, he continued his studies, graduating Licentiate on an essay on Honoré d'Urfé and embarking on the first of his many Arab subjects: the corporations of Fez in the 15th century.
Exploring the sources of his study in Morocco in 1904, he vowed to dedicate himself to the study of Arabic after a dangerous confrontation in the desert.
In 1906, he received his diplome d'études supèrieures on the strength of his study.

Conversion to Christianity

In 1907, he was sent on an archeological mission to Mesopotamia. In Baghdad he was the guest of the great Muslim family of the Alusi, who introduced him to the brand of Arab hospitality he was to honour throughout his life. It was the Alusi who saved him from a very dangerous situation in the desert when in 1908—during the ferment of the Young Turk Revolution—he was captured as a "spy" and almost killed.
This situation of captivity, and the experience of Muslim spirituality, also brought about his conversion to Christianity: In mortal danger, which filled him with extreme, physical anguish, he first felt remorse for his past life, made an abortive and tentative suicide attempt, fell into a delirium and a state of great agitation, and finally experienced the presence of God as a "visitation of a Stranger", who overwhelmed him, leaving him passive and helpless, feeling judged for having judged others harshly, and almost making him lose his very sense of identity. Yet he also experienced this visitation as a liberation from his captivity, and a promise that he was going to return to Paris. He himself interpreted the state of delirium as a "reaction of brain to the forced conversion of soul".
He recovered rapidly from his illness, had a second spiritual experience and travelled to Beirut accompanied by the Iraqi priest Anastase-Marie al-Karmali, with whom Massignon became friends. In Beirut, Massignon made a confession to Father Anastase-Marie, thus confirming his conversion to Catholicism. The priest eventually escorted Massignon all the way to Brittany and met his parents before returning to Baghdad. Louis and Father Anastase-Marie would maintain a correspondence until 1936.
Massignon strongly felt that he was assisted in his encounter with God and in his conversion by the intercession of living and deceased friends, among them Joris-Karl Huysmans and Charles de Foucauld, who had also experienced God in a Muslim context.
Thus, his conversion provided a firm basis for his lifelong association with the latter. He made Massignon the executor of his spiritual legacy: the Directoire—the Rule for the foundation of the Little Brothers of Jesus, which Louis Massignon duly saw to publication in 1928 after a long hesitation by the Church authorities over the imprimatur.
However, Massignon did not follow Foucauld's invitation to join him in his life as a hermit among the Tuareg in Tamanrasset. Instead, in 27 January 1914, he married a cousin, Marcelle Dansaert-Testelin. His daughter was the linguist and ethnographer, Geneviève Massignon.

Activities in World War I

During World War I he was a translating officer for the 2ème Bureau at the headquarters of the 17th French Colonial Division, in which capacity he was affected to the Sykes-Picot mission as a temporary captain acting on his experience as an Arabist and an Islamist, after a spell of his own volition as an infantry second lieutenant at the Macedonian front, where he was twice mentioned in dispatches and awarded a medal for bravery.
Within this mission, he became acquainted with T. E. Lawrence in August 1917 in Cairo and apparently there had been plans to attach Massignon to the Arab Legion, an Arab force who had rallied to Sharif Husain's revolt and were trained by the British and French. He had several friendly interviews with Lawrence, among others on the Handbook for Arabia, which served as an example for his own Annuaire du Monde Musulman. They both shared the same sense of honour and betrayal after the collapse of the Arab-Anglo-French relationship on the disclosure of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Massignon does not figure among the friends in Lawrence's published letters, which does not mean that Lawrence did not take an intellectual interest in the subsequent contributions to Arabism by Massignon since, it will be remembered he had started his own career as a keen Francophile.

Scholarly work after World War I

On June 15, 1919, Massignon was provisionally appointed to the Chair of Muslim Sociology and Sociography at the Collège de France in Paris. In January 1926, Massignon was finally given the chair in January 1926, when the creator of the chair and incumbent, Alfred le Chatelier retired. He conducted research on various subjects related to Islam, such as the lives of al-Hallaj, Muhammad's companion Salman Pak and the significance of Abraham for the three Abrahamic religions. Since 1911, he had edited a journal on Islamic world, Revue du monde musulman.
His four-volume doctoral thesis on al-Hallaj, finished in 1914, was published in 1922. He continued to work on the life of the mystic for the rest of his life and showed the importance of al-Hallaj as figure in Muslim spirituality as reflected also in intellectual discussions, art, poetry and legends. It was criticized by many as giving prominence to a relatively marginal figure in Islam: especially sharp criticism appears in Edward Said's Orientalism. Likewise, his great openness for Islam was seen with skeptical eyes by many Catholics.

Religious commitments

In the 1930s, Francis of Assisi played a great role in his life: In 1931, Massignon became a Franciscan tertiary and took the name of "Ibrahim". On February 9, 1934, he and Mary Kahil, a friend from his youth, prayed at the abandoned Franciscan church of Damietta, Egypt, where Francis of Assisi had met Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil in 1219. They took a vow of , offering their lives for the Muslims, "not so they would be converted, but so that the will of God might be accomplished in them and through them". This vow led to the formal foundation of the Badaliya prayer association in 1947, first in Cairo and then in Paris. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, Badaliya prayer groups were also established in Boston and Washington DC.
Encouraged by Mary Kahil and with the permission of Pope Pius XII, he became a Melkite Greek Catholic on February 5, 1949, which meant he still remained in the Catholic Church, but was no longer affiliated with the Roman Rite.
Instead the Melkite Church consists of Arab Catholics and its Byzantine Rite liturgy is celebrated in Arabic. This indirectly allowed Massignon to be closer to Arab Christians and Muslims alike.
As a Greek Catholic, he could be ordained as a priest although he was married. He was ordained by Bishop Kamel Medawar on January 28, 1950, with the permission of Patriarch Maximos IV, despite some opposition from the Holy See, which, however, finally accepted his priestly ordination. Being a priest meant for Massignon offering his life in substitution for others, especially for the Muslims.

Political commitment after World War II

After World War II, while still remaining active as a scholar, his focus of attention shifted to political action to help Muslims and Arab Christians. In this he followed the model of Mahatma Gandhi, whose work he studied later in his life and considered a saint, and his principles of non-violent action. He made it clear that he did not hope for success in all his areas of action, but that, first and foremost, he wanted to bear witness to Truth and Justice, just as Jesus Christ had done.
He committed himself to the following :
Dialogue was very important for him; he also talked to the Iranian religious sociologist Ali Shariati who would later become extremely influential as a modernist Muslim thinker in Iran. Shariati had immense respect for Massignon and adored him as a teacher and a master in his book Kavir.
Massignon died on October 31, 1962, and was buried on November 6 in Pordic, Brittany. Louis Gardet, his friend and colleague, assisted in the posthumous edition of Louis Massignon's work La passion de Hussayn Ibn Mansûr an-Hallâj, published in 1975.