The mystical vision of Louis Massignon: Islam inspired scholar's gratitude, life work and Christian faith

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 17, 2004 by Jerry Ryan

Better known in his native France than in this country, Louis Massignon was one of the most important scholars of Islam who ever lived. His influence on the study of Islam in the West was far-reaching, but Massignon was far more than an influential academic. His engagement with Islam was deeply personal and marked his life in profound and dramatic ways.

In a preface to a 1999 biography, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, paid tribute to Massignon's passionate engagement with the Other: "Louis Massignon invites us to enter into... the rediscovery of the original dialogue between cultures and religious. ... At a time when our world is prey to new waves of intolerance and new fundamentalisms ... we need to revive, in the hearts of men, this existential spirituality of Louis Massignon: dialogue, openness and tolerance."

A turning point in Massignon's life and the onset of his personal relationship with Islam began at the approach of dawn on May 3, 1908. While being held prisoner aboard a steamship on the Tigris River, accused of being a spy, Louis Massignon received a visit from a "Stranger without a Face" who took away everything he was and gave him everything he would become. Many years later, when he tried to describe this experience, Massignon stammered and resorted to metaphors. Massignon wrote that he saw himself as God, his judge, saw him at that moment--depraved and pretentious, worse than useless, undeserving of love or mercy or even of existence. He had abandoned the faith of his childhood; he was an active homosexual, a slave to his passions.

Massignon reported the execution of this judgment was suspended due to the prayers of five intercessors: Massignon's mother, the writer Juris Huysman who had prayed for Massignon on his deathbed, the Saharan hermit Charles de Foucauld, the tenth-century Sufi mystic al-Hallaj, and the Alousi family, pious Muslims who had given Massignon hospitality in Baghdad. It was thanks to these intercessors, both Christian and Muslim, that he was able to receive pardon. Massignon would later marvel that the prayer that spontaneously came to his lips after the mysterious visitation was in Arabic: "O God, O God, have mercy on me in my weakness!"

Louis Massignon was born on July 25, 1883, at Nogent-sur-Marne. His father was a sculptor who was well known in the French artistic community. Massignon was fascinated by Africa and the desert from his youth. His first trip to Algeria in 1901 confirmed his passion for this totally different world. By the age of 20 he had ceased to practice his Catholic faith and declared himself an agnostic. In 1904 he traveled to Morocco and began to seriously study both classical and dialectic Arab. In 1906 he was in Cairo. There he learned of the legends of al-Hallaj and met Luis de Cuadra, a Spanish nobleman, a convert to Islam, who became his lover and companion in "debauchery." The following year Massignon was sent by the French ministry of education to Baghdad for an archeological expedition into the Mesopotamian desert. It was during this mission that he was detained and accused of espionage and experienced his visitation from God.

While in Baghdad, Massignon had presented himself to the Alousi family of whom he had heard good reports. They didn't know him and had every reason to be suspicious of him. Yet they gave him hospitality, made him part of the family, shared everything with him and protected him as one of their own. After his capture, at great risk to themselves, the Alousi family rescued Massignon when the steamship he was on arrived in Baghdad. They made sure he received the medical attention he needed and helped him escape from Iraq.

When the "Stranger without a Face" presented himself to Massignon, it was like a reversal of his own role with the Alousis. The fact that he had been received as a faceless stranger enabled him to receive the divine visitation. Massignon never forgot that he owed his physical and moral salvation to the hospitality of this Muslim family. Through them and his other intercessors, Massignon encountered the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Hospitality, one of the sacred duties of Islam, became a leitmotif for him, a lens through which he saw the entirety of God's relationship with us and our relationship to one another. To receive the other such as he is, in his strangeness and mystery, to accept him and share with him and, at the same time, be received--in this consists the Law and the Prophets and the Fiat, the gracious acceptance of the Incarnate Word by the Virgin Mary.

Massignon's other Muslim intercessor was al-Hallaj. One of the reasons Massignon traveled to Baghdad was his decision to write his doctoral dissertation on this 10th-century mystic who suffered greatly from the divisions in Islam and dreamed of a unified Muslim community. Although his God was the transcendent God of Islam, al-Hallaj claimed an intimate, loving relationship with him. Because of this, Al-Hallaj was condemned as a heretic and crucified; his body was cremated and his ashes thrown into the Tigris River in the area in which Massignon received his visitation.