266 ORIENTALISM the extraordinary achievements of scholars like Jacques Berque, Maxime Rodinson, Yves Lacoste, Roger Arnaldez——all of them differing widely among themselves in approach and intention-—to be struck with the seminal example of Massignon, whose intellectual impress upon them all is unmistakable. Yet in choosing to focus his comments almost anecdotally upon Massignon’s various strengths and weaknesses, Gibb misses the obvious things about Massignon, things that make him so different from Gibb and yet, when taken as a whole, make him the mature symbol of so crucial a development within French Orientalism. One is Massignon’s personal background, which quite beautifully illustrates the simple truth of Lévi’s description of French Orientalism. The very idea of “un esprit humain” was something more or less foreign to the intellectual and religious background out of which Gibb, like so many modern British Orientalists, developed: in Massignon’s case the notion of “esprit,” as an aesthetic as well as religious, moral, and historical reality, was something he seemed to have been nourished upon from childhood. His family was friendly with such people as Huysmans, and in nearly everything he wrote Massignon’s early education in the intellectual ambience as well as the ideas of late Symbolisme is evident, even to the particular brand of Catholicism (and Sufi mysticism) in which he was interested. There is no austerity in Massignon’s work, which is formulated in one of the great French styles of the century. His ideas about human experience draw plentifully upon thinkers and artists contemporary with him, and it is the very wide cultural range of his style itself that puts him in a different category altogether from Gibb’s. His early ideas come out of the period of so-called aesthetic decadence, but they are also indebted to people like Bergson, Durkheim, and Mauss. His first contact with Orientalism came through Renan, whose lectures he heard as a young man; he was also a student of Sylvain Lévi, and came to include among his friends such figures as Paul Claudel, Gabriel Bounoure, Jacques and Raissa Maritain, and Charles de Foucauld. Later he was able to absorb work done in such relatively recent fields as urban sociology, structural linguistics, psychoanalysis, contemporary anthropology, and the New History. His essays, to say nothing of the monumental study of al-Hallaj, draw effortlessly on the entire corpus of Islamic literature; his mystifying erudition and almost familiar personality sometimes make him appear to be a scholar invented by Jorge Luis Borges. He was very sensitive to “Oriental” themes in European literature;

Orientalism Now 267 this was one of Gibb’s interests, too, but unlike Gibb, Massignon was attracted primarily neither to European writers who “understood” the Orient nor to European texts that were independent aftistic corroborations of what later Orientalist scholars would reveal (e.g., Gibb’s interest in Scott as a source for the study of Saladin). Massignon’s “Orient” was completely consonant with the world of the Seven Sleepers or of the Abrahamanic prayers (which are the two themes singled out by Gibb as distinctive marks of Massignon’s unorthodox view of Islam): offbeat, slightly peculiar, wholly responsive to the dazzling interpretative gifts which Massignon brought to it (and which in a sense made it up as a subject). If Gibb liked Scott’s Saladin, then Massignon’s symmetrical predilection was for Nerval, as suicide, poéte maudit, psychological oddity. This is not to say that Massignon was essentially a student of the past; on the contrary, he was a major presence in Islamic— French relations, in politics as well as culture. He was obviously a passionate man who believed that the world of Islam could be penetrated, not by scholarship exclusively, but by devotion to all of its activities, not the least of which was the world of Eastern Christianity subsumed within Islam, one of whose subgroups, the Badaliya Sodality, was warinly encouraged by Massignon. Massignon’s considerable literary gifts sometimes give his scholarly work an appearance of capricious, overly cosmopolitan, and often private speculation. This appearance is misleading, and in fact is rarely adequate as a description of his writing. What he wished deliberately to avoid was what he called “Panalyse analytique et statique de l’orientalisme,”’* a sort of inert piling up, on a supposed Islamic text or problem, of sources, origins, proofs, demonstrations, and the like. Everywhere his attempt is to include as much of the context of a text or problem as possible, to animate it, to surprise his reader, almost, with the glancing insights available to anyone who, like Massignon, is willing to cross disciplinary and traditional boundaries in order to penetrate to the human heart of any text. No modern Orientalist—and certainly not Gibb, his closest peer in achievement and influence—could refer so easily (and accurately) in an essay to a host of Islamic mystics and to Jung, Heisenberg, Mallariné, and Kierkegaard; and certainly very few Orientalists had that range together with the concrete political experience of which he was able to speak in his 1952 essay “L’Occident devant l'Orient: Primauté d'une solution culturelle.”” And yet his intellectual world was a clearly defined one. It had a