Louis Massignon et le dialogue des cultures ed. by Daniel Massignon (review)

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 in social and political movements. For over three decades, he taught night classes for North African immigrants. He organized regular meetings of "The Friends of Ghandi," ofwhich he was the founder. He strongly supported De Gaulle for his declaration in 1959 that Algeria had the right to self-determination. Algeria was granted independence in 1961, but violence between rival factions continued and still continues today. In this era ofunending strife throughout the world,we can join Mary Louise Gude in her moving, impressively documented homage to an heroic, compassionate spirit, who devoted his life to the service of God and to bringing peace and mutual understanding to humanity. Dead of a massive heart attack on October 31, 1962, he was nearly granted his long-expressed wish to die on All Saints Day "the feast of holy ones throughout the ages who offer their lives to God for others." John L. Brown Washington, D.C. Louis Massignon et le dialogue des cultures. Edited by Daniel Massignon. [Collection :"L'histoire à vif."] (Paris: Éditions du Cerf. 1996. Pp. 371. 165FE) The French scholar of Islam, Louis Massignon (1883-1962), is best known for his monumental four-volume biography of the tenth-century Sufi mystic, Mansur al-Hallaj. Massignon's career spanned the first half of the twentieth century and shaped Islamic studies in France for two generations.Yet his influence extended far beyond the confines of both the university and France. Assignments in the diplomatic service as a young man gave him a keen sense of shifting geopolitical realities in the Middle East and North Africa. His critique escalated into protest after 1945 with the creation of Israel and demands for independence from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria; he attempted to end suffering and political violence that affected Palestinian refugees and later the indigenous population ofAlgeria during the Algerian War. A committed Catholic after his book reviews569 19O8 conversion in the Iraqi desert, Massignon worked tirelessly to improve relations between Christians and Muslims. Scholar, Christian, and activist, Massignon defies easy categories because his life alternated between prayer and action, theological reflection and social protest, the library and the street. Its one unifying characteristic was an unceasing effort to understand the other, particularly Muslims. To do so he practiced what he termed "sacred hospitality," whereby he attempted to enter mentally into another's thought processes and situation. Louis Massignon et le dialogue des cultures, the proceedings of a 1992 UNESCO conference honoring the thirtieth anniversary of his death, reflects this attempt to understand people of other cultures on their own terms. The book is divided into two parts, "Les Bases du dialogue" and "La Pratique du dialogue," a division which proves to be somewhat arbitrary, since in the case of Massignon, theory always implied practice. Thus, the content of some chapters tends to overlap, and many contributions would have benefited by more rigorous editing. However, students of Arabic and readers with some knowledge ofMassignon's life will find here a rich source ofinformation. Moreover , since many quotations come from Opera Minora, the essential collection of...