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2. Aleppo: The Making of a Visionary (1720–1746)
- Syracuse University Press
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20 2 Aleppo The Making of a Visionary (1720–1746) “On June 6th [1753] Sister Hindiyya, the mother superior of the Sacred Heart of Jesus convent, was summoned and asked about the names of her parents, her place of birth and her age . . . She answered, my father is called Shukralla and my mother Helena [they are] from Aleppo, and I am thirty-three years old which I complete on the Feast of Transfiguration .”1 It was a simple answer to the first question posed by the apostolic inquisitor, Fr. Desiderio di Casabasciana. He was delegated by the Vatican to determine whether Hindiyya was truly a visionary who mystically and physically communed with Christ or a woman deluded by the devil. Over the next ten days, in a stone and sparse room at the convent of Bkerki with three wooden chairs and a table at which sat Desiderio’s secretary (Fr. Raymondo) recording the proceedings, Hindiyya answered 116 questions. At times, the scribe noted, she was visibly agitated and reluctant to answer, but for most of her testimony she appeared poised during those morning, afternoon, and evening sessions. The tone of questions and answers was, for the most part, straightforward, especially when contrasted with the emotionally ridden textual rendering of her journey into mystical union with Christ and her second inquisition in 1778. There was almost a routine aspect to Desiderio’s questions and Hindiyya’s answers, or at least a shared understanding of the boundaries and language of a religious inquisition. Together, her answers delineated a sequence of secular and spiritual events that began with her birth in Aleppo and ultimately brought her to that room on top of a mountain in Lebanon, overlooking the Mediterranean. Aleppo | 21 But like her first answer, all her responses were abridgements of an expansive and intricate set of events that had earned Hindiyya years of notoriety and fame, support and animosity, and on June 6 the inquisitorial gaze of the Vatican. On the surface, this inquisition tells an inexorable tale of one young woman’s religious devotions, visions, prayers, asceticism, struggles against her sins, and, most critically, visions of, and tangible encounter with, Christ. However, in looking through her answers to the scaffolding beneath, we begin to see a larger story populated by Jesus, patriarchs and priests, merchants and missionaries, family and community. Her hagiography and Sirr al-Ittihad (Secret of the Union), the autobiographical account of her mystical union with Christ, recount similar teleological narratives, albeit with different emphases and very different language.2 Certainly, the nature of these documents lends itself to selectivity as they aim to smooth out the wrinkles of a complex life into a saintly linearity. In fact, to varying degrees all of these texts are fraught with a tension that reflected the contradictions which coursed through Hindiyya’s life in Aleppo and beyond. On the one hand, we read of a woman who was enthralled with visions of her “beloved” Jesus and who ultimately wanted nothing but to be evermore in his presence. Yet she was deeply uncertain and burdened by a vocation that was at extreme odds with her prescribed role as a young Aleppan woman and that drew the ire and ridicule of family and acquaintances. Publicly she was expected to behave in a manner becoming of the elite status of her family and of the expectations placed upon her as a young woman growing up in such an environment. Privately , she increasingly wanted nothing to do with the secular trappings of wealth or the social life of the comfortable elites as she sought a closer relationship and knowledge of Christ. Hindiyya was thus torn between living as a bourgeois Aleppan and living as a visionary Christian. Her very personal dilemma was born out of two crosscurrents that tugged at her throughout her life in Aleppo: the secular life and materialistic mores of an emergent Christian elite in Aleppo and a religious revivalism stoked by Latin missionaries and local clergy. Caught in the middle, Hindiyya found it increasingly difficult to conceal or sustain her private struggles, and ultimately she had to make a public choice between the two. [34.229.172.86] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:55 GMT) 22 | Embracing the Divine Question 1: She Was Asked about Her Parents . . . We begin where Hindiyya started her story. She was born in Aleppo on July 31, 1720, and baptized on August 6 of that same year. (In her answer she had stated that she...