Another Orientalism? the Case of Eva De Vitray-Meyerovitch and Rumi

Abstract

This article turns to the trajectory of an often ignored figure in the history of French Islamology, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch. Through the trajectory and circuits of de Vitray's life and thought, it explores the ambiguity of a forgotten variety of twentieth-century French Islamology, one which attempted to make itself into a mystical study of mysticism and follow the internal logic of its object of study. This article considers the aspects of de Vitray's life and thought that cannot be purely reduced to the circuits of imperialism, or predestined to be a spiritualist search for the “mystical East” as the inferior other of the “rational West.” It looks at the possibility of partial disidentifications from the Orientalist commitment to the European imperialist project, “moments of departure” from classic Orientalism. These can be found in the moments of identification with the mystics who are studied by Islamologists like de Vitray. The East, here in the form of Islamic mysticism, no longer functions as “a career” but rather enables possessive and colonial epistemological attitudes to be defied. Through de Vitray's biography, trajectory and works, I suggest that the Orientalist “type” she represents introduces a form of double-translation that does not make the studied object immediately available for colonial use or scholarly possession, but rather generates a transformative conversion of the translator and scholar whose position of mastery is “cast into dust,” to use Rumi's words, and is transformed into a position of discipleship.