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).

New light on Inayat Khan’s time in Moscow

New light is shed on Inayat Khan’s year in Moscow (1913-14) by Oleg Yarosh, in “Universal Sufism and the Cultic Milieu in Russia at Turn of the xx Century,” Mondi 1, no. 1 (2019), pp. 101-20. Yarosh, who is head of Oriental Philosophy at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, uses not only Inayat Khan’s memoirs but also Russian sources that other researchers have not used.

Inayat Khan’s most important Russian host, it seems, was Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949, pictured), a celebrated poet who had spent much of his life abroad and whose salon was one of the most fashionable in Moscow. He was a follower of Anna Mintslova (1865-1910), a Russian disciple of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), and was also interested in Sufism, which few Russians then were—Sufism was too closely associated with Russia’s Muslims, who were not highly regarded by the elite, says Yarosh. Notes on Sufism are to be found in Ivanov’s archive, and he wrote poems referring to Rumi and Hafez. One of his last poems, written in exile after the Russian Revolution, was “Певец у Суфитов” (Sufi Singer), which hails both Rumi and Hafez, who are linked to the “witness” of Plato.

Ivanov’s understanding of Sufism, then, seems to have something in common with the literary Western Sufism of Goethe and of the later nineteenth century, not especially with that of Inayat Khan. But even if Ivanov did not learn his Sufism from Inayat Khan, a pre-existing interest in Sufism may have been what led him to introduce Inayat Khan into Russian society, and it was evidently through him that Inayat Khan met other celebrities such as the composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915), a friend of Ivanov—celebrities who, one gathers from Yarosh, may not have been quite as taken by Inayat Khan as his memoirs suggest.

Before he met Ivanov, Inayat Khan’s point of arrival in Moscow was a fashionable night-club called “Maxim,” run by an unusual African-American entrepreneur, Frederick Bruce Thomas (1872-1928: see Vladimir Alexandrov, The Black Russian, 2013). A Russian Theosophist, Eugenia Spasskaya, noted in her memoirs that when other Theosophists heard of “a Hindu, Inayat Khan” in this “tavern hell,” they tried to “buy out the naïve teacher,” but that Inayat Khan preferred to stay at Maxim for a while.