268 ORIENT ALISM 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 (which Massignon explicitly says is the epic fonn in Isiam 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) 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-Hallaj, 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-Hallajs 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,

Orientalism Now 269 yet 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 unity (tawhid) 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.** Clearly Massignon’s sympathies lay with the mystic vocation in Islam, as much for its closeness to his own temperament as a devout Catholic as for its disrupting influence within 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-Hallaj and other Sufi mystics, its loneliness as the only remaining “Oriental” religion of the three great monotheisms,* But so obviously stern a view of Islam, with its “invariants simples”®* (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 Europe, mais une mise au niveau entre nos méthodes de recherches et les traditions vécues d’antiques civilisations.”* 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 méthodes de recherches” and “les traditions vécues 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,