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as political power. It seems highly unlikely that any of these
Orders would have appealed to or been willing to admit a
Renegado, but it's not impossible. In fact, a fascinating document
purporting to give an account of the captivity of St.
Vincent de Paul, hints that an educated captive and an educated
Moor might well share a fascination with mysticism.
Unfortunately recent scholarship has cast this text into the
realm ofpseudepigrapha; but luckily Gosse, in his stylish and
entertaining HiJtory 0/ the Piratu, still believed in the text's
authenticity and quoted the whole thing. It may not be true,
but it's extremely important because it was beliew:iJ to be
true - because it was belie"a.6le. (This same argument will be
made for Defoe's perhaps apocryphal account of Captain
Mission's Libertatia.) Here is the relevant passage:
I was sold to a fisherman, and by him to an
aged alchemist, a man of great gentleness and
humility. This last told me he had devoted fifty
years to a search for the Philosopher's Stone.
My duty was to keep up the heat of ten or
twelve furnaces. in which office, thank God, I
found more pleasure than pain. My master had
great love for me, and liked to discourse of
alchemy and still more of his creed. towards
which he did his best to draw me. with the
promise of wealth and all the secrets of his
learning. God maintained my faith in the deliverance
which was to be an answer to my continual
prayers to Him and the Virgin Mary (to
whose intercession I am confident my deliverance
is due).
Just such a character as the Moorish alchemist was
described by Holmyard in his classic Alchemy, where a chapter
is devoted to Holmyard's friendship with a 20th century
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Moroccan adept. Such a person would by definition belong to
one of the classical Sufi orders. If "St. Vincent" had turn'd
Turke, he might have ended up in a Fraternity like the
Shadhiliyya, where these occult mysteries are sometimes
taught.
Note once again, in the St. Vincent text, the aura of
JeiJuctwn that hovers around the image of conversion:
..... promise of wealth... all the secrets of his learning..."
and the "great love" the Moor feels toward Vincent. This
almost seems an obligatory trope ofthe"captivity narrative"
as a literary genre. and I would maintain that it illustrates my
thesis ofthe "positive shadow" of Islam embedded secretly in
the European discourse of religious and racial bigotry. Here
is the intellectual equivalent of those "Moorish nieces".
These texts are pregnant with an unspoken yearning, quite
erotic in tone. to embrace the enemy of all Christendom. One
is reminded of those other "captivity narratives" written by
New England women and children who had been taken
away by Indians. Not all of them wanted to return to civilization,
and many actively resisted re-capture by Puritan
husbands and fathers. They were quite happy-some of
them-to "turn Indian" and escape from the Puritan patriarchy.
Their narratives are likewise embued with a perfume
of.1eductwn.
Only a rare Renegado might be attracted to alchemy or
Sufism, but Moroccan Islam knows other forms ofmysticism,
which might be called rural/non-literate in contrast to the
urbane literacy of the Shadhiliyya. The "marabout orders"
have been discussed at some length, usually by anthropologists
rather than scholars of Sufism, and I won't attempt to
explain them here. [See Geertz. 1968; Crapanzano, 1973.] A
few broad themes should be sketched, however. These popular
orders are frequently centered on the tomb of a saint and
its attendant miracles-cures for disease, usually-but also
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