Revisiting Catholic Scholarship on Islamic Mysticism
A conference held on 6–7 June at the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies.
Priests and Sufis: Unexpected Connections
It is a fact: among the foremost specialists in Islamic mysticism are several Catholic priests and religious figures, from Louis Massignon, Georges Anawati, and Louis Gardet in the last century to Giuseppe Scattolin, the Comboni missionary from the province of Trento, who died on April 27 of this year after devoting his entire life to the study of the Egyptian mystical poet Ibn al-Fārid (1181–1235).
Almost instinctively, without relying on grand strategies or substantial resources, these religious scholars saw in Sufism a privileged gateway to understanding Islamic civilization and to encountering Muslims. One need only think of the experience of Christian de Chergé, prior of Tibhirine, and his profound dialogue with a local Sufi brotherhood, also mentioned by Pope Leo during his recent visit to Algeria.
At the same time, this interest, expressed in a vast body of critical editions, translations, and studies, raises several questions: Is it possible to enter into the spirituality of another faith while remaining rooted in one’s own? Is there not a risk of unintentionally distorting it? Where does the boundary lie between academic research, pastoral practice, and spiritual quest? And how have Muslims, and Sufis in particular—who number in the millions worldwide—responded to this interest in their doctrines and practices?
The credit for identifying this original issue, and for recognizing its potential for Christian-Muslim reflection beyond the commonplaces of interreligious dialogue, belongs entirely to Dr. Riccardo Paredi, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at our university. Within the framework of the SEMENSUF project, he organized the conference Of Priests and Sufis: Revisiting Catholic Scholarship on Islamic Mysticism, held in Cairo on June 6 and 7. The Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO), a major center for Catholic scholarship on Islam since the time of its first director, Georges Anawati, partnered in the initiative. Anawati had been invited several times to the Catholic University for lectures and courses, one of which was later published in a volume by Vita e Pensiero. “How,” asked Father Emmanuel Pisani, the current director of IDEO and holder of the Anawati Chair, “has this mystical dialogue colored the reality of Christian-Muslim dialogue? How does it act in the life of a priest, in his preaching to his community, and in the faculty where he teaches?”
The “Muslim Catholic” and His Network
Naturally, one of the most closely examined experiences was that of Louis Massignon, the French Orientalist who returned to Christianity during a stay in Iraq in 1908. The overwhelming “visitation of the Stranger,” as Massignon always chose to call his mystical experience, led him to undertake a genuine Copernican revolution: to study Islam no longer through its external phenomenology, according to a positivist approach, but from within its spirituality, drawing on the category of sacred hospitality. For, in his own words, “to know the other, one must not annex him to oneself, but become his guest.”
In this existential adventure, Massignon assigned an essential role—perhaps disproportionate to his actual importance within Islamic Sufism—to the mystic al-Ḥallāj, who was sentenced to death in Baghdad in 932. Ordained a Catholic priest in the Melkite rite toward the end of his life, Massignon gathered around him a large circle of disciples, both Christian and Muslim, who helped shape the intellectual history of the twentieth century in the Middle East and beyond. Among them was the Iranian thinker ‘Ali Shariati, one of the ideologues of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, who drew from Massignon the notions of redemptive suffering and martyrdom, while transferring them from the theological plane to that of political action.
No less significant than the path of the “Muslim Catholic”—the nickname given to Massignon by Pius XI—were other intellectual and human trajectories, such as that of the Moroccan Franciscan Mohammed ‘Abd al-Jalīl. He arrived in Paris intending to refute Christianity, yet was baptized a few years later under the name Jean-Mohammed, as if to underscore the double fidelity of a conversion he always wished to understand in continuity with the religious values received in his homeland.
Nor should one forget more recent experiences, such as that of Henri Teissier, Archbishop of Algiers during the dark years of Islamist terrorism; Thomas Michel, the Jesuit who taught for many years in Turkey while engaging with the thought of Said Nursi; and Liberius Pieterse, the Dutch missionary in Pakistan, to whom we owe an Urdu version of the Bible rich in Sufi resonances. Pope Francis himself included a quotation from a Muslim mystic, ‘Alī al-Khawwās—who, incidentally, is buried only a few hundred meters from IDEO—in his encyclical Laudato si’, quite possibly an unprecedented occurrence in a magisterial text.
Contrary to the idea that the question of Islam entered European reflection only in recent decades, the Cairo conference showed that it already occupied a prominent place in French Catholicism between the two world wars. So much so that figures such as Jacques Maritain, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Paul Claudel, and Giovanni Battista Montini—the future Pope Paul VI—were also involved in the effort to develop a renewed understanding of Islam beyond traditional polemics.
Creative Reception
And how, for their part, did Muslims respond to this interest? Several papers explored this second dimension, offering numerous examples of creative reception, such as the case of Henri Corbin. The first French translator of Heidegger, a disciple of Massignon, and a convert to Islam, Corbin took as the model for his intellectual project Étienne Gilson’s endeavor to breathe new life into medieval Christian philosophy.
The reception of Massignon on the banks of the Nile was also highly significant: ‘Uthmān Amīn, Abū l-‘Alā’ ‘Afīfī, Mustāfā Hilmī, and other intellectuals gave rise to an Egyptian school, still alive today, which seeks to recover Alexandrian Neoplatonic philosophy by rereading it through the prism of Islam and the mystical illuminationist philosophy that developed from Avicenna onward.
The Cairo conference, however, did not confine itself to the past, even the recent past. In his paper, Ahmad Hasan Anwar, Father Scattolin’s principal disciple in Egypt, recounted how his academic and spiritual research had been shaped by his encounter with the Italian missionary, by the rigor of his philological scholarship, and by the depth of his religious philosophy.
It was likely this combination of academic rigor and existential involvement, transmitted by these figures, that deeply moved the roughly one hundred participants, among them many professors and students from the nearby Islamic University of al-Azhar. They contributed to intense sessions of exchange and debate.
For me personally as well, as supervisor of the SEMENSUF project, the Cairo event was more than a successful conference. When, at the close of the proceedings, Amr Saleh, professor at the Faculty of Languages at al-Azhar University, took me to visit some of the Sufi shrines preserved in Cairo’s City of the Dead, including that of Ibn al-Fārid, the “Sultan of Lovers” studied by Father Scattolin, I felt that the intellectual encounter had become spiritual closeness.
Martino Diez
Click here to download the program.