Orientalism - autonomous learning

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268 ORIENTALISM
Orientalism Now
269
definite structure, intact from the beginning to the end of his career,
and it was laced up, despite its almost unparalleled richness of scope
and reference, in a set of basically unchanging ideas, Let us briefly
describe the structure and list the ideas in a summary fashion.
Massignon took as his starting point the existence of the three
Abrahamanic religions, of which Islam is the religion of Ishmael, the
monotheism of a people excluded from the divine promise made to
Isaac. Islam is therefore a religion of resistance (to God the
Father, to Christ the Incarnation), which yet keeps within it the
sadness that began in Hagar's tears. Arabic as a result is the very
language of tears, just as the whole notion of jihad in Islam
Massignon explicitly says is the epic form in Islam that Renan
could not see or understand) has an important intellectual dimension
whose mission is war against Christianity and Judaism as
exterior enemies, and against heresy as an interior enemy. Yet
within Islam, Massignon believed he was able to discern a type of
countercurrent, which it became his chief intellectual mission to
study, embodied in mysticism, a road towards divine grace. The
principal feature of mysticism was of course its subjective character,
whose nonrational and even inexplicable tendencies were towards
the singular, the individual, the momentary experience of participation
in the Divine. All of Massignon's extraordinary work on mysticism
was thus an attempt to describe the itinerary of souls out of
the limiting consensus imposed on them by the orthodox Islamic
community, or Sunna. An Iranian mystic was more intrepid than
an Arab one, partly because he was Aryan (the old nineteenthcentury
labels "Aryan" and "Semitic" have a compelling urgency
for Massignon, as does also the legitimacy of Schlegel's binary
opposition between the two language families 78 ) and partly because
he was a man seeking the Perfect; the Arab mystic, in Massignon's
view, inclined towards what Waardenburg calls a testimonial
monism. The exemplary figure for Massignon was al-HaUaj, who
sought liberation for himself outside the orthodox community by
asking for, and finally getting, the very crucifixion refused by Islam
as a whole; Mohammed, according to Massignon, had deliberately
rejected the opportunity offered him to bridge the gap separating
him from God. AI-Hallaj's achievement was therefore to have
achieved a mystical union with God against the grain of Islam.
The rest of the orthodox community lives in a condition of what
Massignon calls "soif ontologique"-ontological thirst. God presents
himself to man as a kind of absence, a refusal to be present,
the devout Muslim's consciousness of his submission to God's
will (Islam) gives rise to a jealous sense of God's transcendence
and an intolerance of idolatry of any sort. The seat of these ideas,
according to Massignon, is the "circumcised heart," which while
it is in the grip of its testimonial Muslim fervor can, as is the case
with mystics like al-Hallaj, also be inflamed with a divine passion
or love of God. In either case, God's transcendental .
is something to be achieved and understood over and over by the
devout Muslim, either through testifying to it or through mystic
love of God: and this, Massignon wrote in a complex essay, defines
the "intention" of Islam. 7 !l Clearly Massignon's sympathies lay with
the mystic vocation in Islam, as much for its closeness to his own
t"''''''''''''''ament as a devout Catholic as for its disrupting influence
the orthodox body of beliefs. Massignon's image of Islam
is of a religion ceaselessly implicated in its refusals, its latecoming
(with reference to the other Abrahamanic creeds), its comparatively
barren sense of worldly reality, its massive structures of defense
against "psychic commotions" of the sort practiced by al-HaIlaj and
other Sufi mystics, its loneliness as the only remaining "Oriental"
religion of the three great monotheisms. so
But so obviously stern a view of Islam, with its "invariants
simples"81 (especially for so luxuriant a thought as Massignon's),
entailed no deep hostility towards it on his part. In reading Massignon
one is struck by his repeated insistence on the need for complex
reading-injunctions whose absolute sincerity it is impossible
to doubt. He wrote in 1951 that his kind of Orientalism was "ni une
manie d'exotisme, ni un reniement de l'Europe, mais une mise au
niveau entre nos methodes de recherches et les traditions vecues
d'antiques civilisations."82 Put into practice in the reading of an
Arabic or Islamic text, this kind of Orientalism produced interpretations
of an almost overwhelming intelligence; one would be foolish
not to respect the sheer genius and novelty of Massignon's mind.
Yet what must catch our attention in his definition of his Orientalism
are two phrases: "nos methodes de recherches" and "les traditions
vecues d'antiques civilisations." Massignon saw what he did
as the synthesis of two roughly opposed quantities, yet it is the
peculiar asymmetry between them that troubles one, and not
merely the fact of the opposition between Europe and Orient.
Massignon's implication is that the essence of the difference between
East and West is between modernity and ancient tradition.
And indeed in his writings on political and contemporary problems,