Louis Massignon. The Crucible of Compassion by Mary Louise Gude (review)

BOOK REVIEWS567 newfound "relevance" of the churches and people stayed away in droves. They are still staying away from all the "relevant" churches and seminaries in Britain and America to this day. Ken Hendrickson Sam Houston State University Huntsville, Texas Louis Massignon. The Crucible of Compassion. By Mary Louise Gude. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 283. $34.95.) Mary Louise Gude's admirable biography ofMassignon is the only one in English (a French life appeared in 1994) despite his international reputation as an Oriental scholar, a religious mystic, and a social and political activist who devoted much ofhis life (1883-1962) to promoting understanding between Islam and Christianity and, in a larger context, between the Arab world and the West. The work appears at a sadly opportune moment, when with increasing violence and fanaticism the need to achieve such understanding becomes even greater than in the past. Gude records in detail Massignon's career as one ofthe greatest Arab scholars of his time, dwells on the profundity of his religiosity which co-existed with social and political activism as evidenced in his attacks on colonialism and social injustice, and in his heroic efforts, despite fierce accusations against him as "anti-French" and "Communist," to bring peace to Algeria . Massignon's family belonged to the "grande bourgeoisie." His father, an agnostic, successfully practised sculpture under the pseudonym of "Pierre Roche." His mother, a devout Catholic, gave her son a religious education, but by the age of eighteen he had become an unbeliever who was to recover his faith only "in contact with the African desert and with Sufi mystics. . . ." With the years, he became a devoted husband and father and an ordained Melkite priest. After receiving his "bac" in mathematics in 1901 , he made his first contact with Arab culture during a trip (the first of many) to North Africa, a trip which was to influence the rest of his life. In a letter to Paul Claudel he states:"It was there that I was really born." He was enchanted by the beauty of the desert, where he experienced "a sense of beauty and of deep religious exaltation."After completing his military service (1902-3) he re-affirmed his commitment to Arab culture by choosing, as the subject ofhis "Diplôme d'études supérieures" Leo Africanus, a sixteenth-century Moroccan geographer. In 1906 he obtained a diploma in written and spoken Arabic and became deeply interested in the medieval Sufi mystic, Hallaj. (His study, La Passion de Hallaj, martyr et mystique de l'Islam, was published in Paris in 1922. English translation by Herbert Mason, 1982.) In Paris, he was named a member of an archaeological mission in Mesopotamia. He arrived in Baghdad in December, 1907, rented a house in a Muslim neighborhood where no Westerners lived, dressed as an Arab, frequented young Muslims . On the way to the archaeological site in a remote village, he was attacked by a group of Bedouins who suspected him of being"a spy" and was robbed by 568BOOK REVIEWS members of his own caravan. He complained to Turkish authorities who claimed that he "wasn't in his right mind." Mentally depressed, he returned to Baghdad, where he was hospitalized for several weeks and then was sent off to France. On the ship, he suffered attacks of paranoia and was confined. This experience , as he recalls in numerous essays, culminated in his return to the Church. In the following years, he soon enjoyed increasing success as an Orientalist , as professor at the Collège de France, as founder of the Institut des études islamiques, as writer (the author of twelve major works) and lecturer, as a social and political activist, and as a member of the national academies often different countries, including Iraq and Egypt. But all these official honors did not suppress his unrelenting criticism of governmental injustice. He enraged conservative French Catholics for his pro-Arabic position in the Algerian war. He criticized the Americans for their support of Israel against the Palestinians, although he greatly admired Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the last years of his life, despite failing health, he remained passionately involved...