Call for articles on the contemporary uses of Ibn ʿArabī

Call for Articles – Special Issue – Religiographies, Vol. 3, n. 1, May 2024: "Reviving Muḥyiddīn: The contemporary uses of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought and the reinventions of Islam."

The intellectual and spiritual legacy of Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) has been the object of multiple socio-political and religious interpretations. The fact that his thought is at the same time intensely innovative and deeply rooted in the tradition may explain in part why it had such a lasting influence, both among followers and detractors (Knysh 1999). 

In the West, Ibn ʿArabī appears today as a central reference in contemporary debates concerning Islamic spirituality, and his thought is one of the main sources of inspiration of the proponents of various creative adaptations of traditional Sufism in contemporary societies, ranging from the most conservative forms to openly New Age and syncretic movements (Morris 1986; Sedgwick 2017). 

This special issue aims to explore and analyze contemporary cases of the use of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought, and to shed light on the motivations, dynamics and methods underlying its interpretations. 

We invite scholars from all backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, as well as social and political actors and artists, to propose contributions focusing on Ibn ʿArabī in connection with one or more of the following topics: 

• Sufism, Sufi institutions, and the spiritual path 
• Theology, metaphysics, and epistemology 
• Anthropology, cosmology, and world vision 
• Normativity, Islamic law, and rituals  
• Ethics, ecology, and politics 
• Social issues, gender, and diversity 
• Art, media, and creativity 

Download the call – Reviving Muḥyiddīn 

Guest Editors:

• Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University)
• Gregory Vandamme (Université catholique de Louvain

Deadline: 5th of January 2023

Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch and the mystical study of mysticism

Doha Tazi Hemida has just published an excellent article about Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch (1909-1999) who, as she notes, is not mentioned in my Western Sufism, and really should be. The article is “Another Orientalism? The Case of Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch and Rumi,” preprint in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2022.2104171.

Vitray-Meyerovitch encountered Rumi through Louis Massignon (1883–1962), and Tazi Hemida draws attention to the conclusion of Pierre Rocalve, that Massignon founded a “a school of mystic specialists in mysticism.” She sees Vitray-Meyerovitch as another example of what she calls the “mystical study of mysticism,” which she argues convincingly is quite different from Orientalism and “the colonial relation of power and knowledge that seeks to appropriate its object of study, to destroy it and make it its own.” “The ‘type’ that de Vitray exemplifies belongs to a variety of Islamic Orientalism that is not invested in a civilizational endeavour of self-consolidation but rather inserts itself within a long subterranean tradition of encounters,” including European-Sufi encounters.

Tazi Hemida observes correctly that while the German and American reception of Rumi was mostly through poets (Goethe, Emerson and Thoreau), the French reception was through Orientalists (Massignon, Corbin, Vitray-Meyerovitch). Of these “mystic specialists in mysticism” only Vitray-Meyerovitch went beyond the universalism that she found in Rumi and actually became Muslim, in about 1954. She then learned Persian, and published her translations of Rumi between 1973 and 1990. She also spent 1969-73 teaching comparative philosophy at the Azhar in Cairo, and in 1972 became a follower of the Moroccan Sufi shaykh Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Boudchichi (1922–2017).

Citation: Pierre Rocalve, Louis Massignon et l’islam: Place et rôle de l’islam et de l’islamologie dans la vie et l’œuvre de Louis Massignon (Damascus: Presses de l’Ilfpo, 1993).