Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch: the other face of Islam
Press article taken from the tariqa.fr press review. See also the text by Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch herself: ‘Eva, in her own words’.
A chant as viaticum
Many Westerners, some among the most illustrious, have converted to Islam following their wonderstruck discovery of the life and work of the great Muslim mystics.
Such was the case of Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, born in 1909 into a Catholic family of the French aristocracy, who passed away recently.
The name of her own ‘ferryman’: Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi (d. 1273), the greatest mystical poet in the Persian language.
In her introduction to the Memorial of the Saints, Eva de Vitray, having cited several definitions of Sufism, concludes:
‘Perhaps we may simply define Sufism as the lived interiorisation of Islam.’
In a series of interviews published under the title ‘Islam, l’autre visage’, we find an explanation of what the author meant by the ‘interiorisation’ of Islam. Three fundamental ideas emerge from it.
At-Tawhid (Unity)
At the level of faith, the fundamental datum of the Qur’anic revelation has to do with Unity, at-Tawhid. The Unity of God, to whom nothing may be associated, neither metaphysically nor psychologically.
From this follows the fundamental Unity of all the revelations, beyond their differing formulations according to peoples and epochs. By its etymological meaning, Islam, ‘submission’ (or ‘entrustment’) to God, expresses this Unity and thereby acquires a supra-confessional dimension.
The formula of the shahada, the Muslim testimony, recalls and actualises this submission for, according to the Qur’an, it took place beyond time. God questions men not yet created, while they are in the loins of the primordial Adam. He asks them: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ And those beings, who are still within God’s thought, answer: ‘Indeed, You are.’
The Muslim Sufis have long meditated on this verse. It is thus that Rumi distinguishes within man between his little ‘self’ of daily life and his higher ‘self’, the great ‘Self’. An immense distance, ‘greater than the sea’ he writes, separates these two ‘selves’ which, he adds, nevertheless have the possibility of merging in a supra-consciousness he calls: Sirr. It is man’s secret, the divine spark within him, which he often forgets but which is never extinguished.
Ach-shawq (the essential desire)
The deep thirst for the absolute, the shawq, that essential desire for the Face of God, is the first step on the Sufi path. Then begins a new orientation of the soul; then, says Rumi:
‘In the heart an image passes: “Return to your source”. The heart flees on every side, far from the world of colours and perfumes, crying: “Where then is the source?” and tearing its garments for love.’
This is what we read in the Mystical Odes of Rumi, translated by Eva de Vitray.
Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi is also the creator of the Sama’, a sacred cosmic dance perpetuated to this day by the brotherhood of whirling dervishes he founded.
For him, it was more than a dance: it was a liturgy; just as music, which he regarded as a form of prayer. Eva de Vitray reports the answer Rumi gave to a friend who, hearing the call to prayer, asked him to interrupt a concert they were attending: ‘No, for this too is a prayer. Both are addressed to God. He wills the one outwardly for His service, and the other inwardly for His love and His knowledge.’ We also know the very vast anthropo-cosmic perspectives that Ibn ’Arabi opened upon prayer, which he called an ‘intimate converse’, munajat, between the creature and his Creator. It is in the wake of these great masters that Eva de Vitray would write her book ‘La prière en Islam’.
‘The centre of the wheel’
In the work of the great Muslim Sufis one finds, avant la lettre, a veritable ecumenism. An ecumenism that fascinated Eva de Vitray and of which she speaks in these terms:
‘Without knowing it very clearly, that is what I was looking for: an ecumenism that would not be a syncretism. I believe each person must go to the very end of their own tradition. Then, and only then, when you reach the centre, you find the others again.’
This symbol of the wheel is the great symbol of the Sufis. And the unchanging centre of this wheel is, to return to it, that fundamental attitude of surrender, of acceptance, of entrusting oneself to God:
‘In your acceptance, you find all the others again, come from every tradition.’
Such is the teaching that Eva de Vitray received among the Sufis. It illumined her life and, having become in her turn a ‘ferrywoman’ between the various cultures and spiritual traditions, she never ceased to transmit it through all her writings.
Mohamed LEFTAH
Le Temps du Maroc, 20-26 August 1999 - N°199
