In August 1999, upon the passing of Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch (translator of Rûmi and a figure of the interiorisation of Islam), Le Temps du Maroc devoted this tribute to her, signed by Mohamed Leftah. We reproduce it as part of our press archives devoted to the Sidi Hamza era (may Allah sanctify his Secret).
Many Westerners, some of them among the most illustrious, have converted to Islam following their wonder-filled discovery of the life and work of great Muslim mystics. This was the case with Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, born in 1909 into a Catholic family of the French aristocracy, who has recently died. The name of her own ‘ferryman’: Jalâl ad-Dîn ar-Roûmi (d. 1273), the greatest mystical poet of the Persian language.
In her introduction to the Mémorial des Saints, Eva de Vitray, having cited several definitions of Sufism, concludes: ‘Perhaps we can 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 elucidation 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 given of the Qur’anic revelation concerns Unity, at-Tawhid. The Unity of God, with whom nothing must be associated, neither metaphysically nor psychologically.
From this follows the fundamental Unity of all revelations, beyond their different formulations according to peoples and eras. Through its etymological meaning, Islam, ‘submission’ (or ‘surrender’) to God, expresses this Unity and thereby acquires a supra-confessional dimension.
The formula of the Chahâda, the Muslim testimony, recalls and actualises this submission for, according to the Qur’an, it took place beyond time. God questions human beings not yet created, while they are in the loins of the primordial Adam. He asks them: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ And these beings, who are still in the thought of God, reply: ‘Truly, You are’ (Qur’an 7:172).
The Muslim Sûfis meditated at length on this verse. Thus Roûmi distinguishes in man between his small ‘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 that he calls: Sirr. It is the Secret of man, the divine spark within him, which he often forgets but which is never extinguished.
Ach-chawq (the essential desire)
The deep thirst for the absolute, the chawq, this essential desire for the Face of God, is the first step on the Sûfi path. Then a new orientation of the soul begins, then, says Roûmi: ‘An image passes through the heart: “Return to your source.” The heart flees in every direction, far from the world of colours and scents, crying: “Where then is the source?” and rending its garments out of love.’ This is what we read in Roûmi’s Odes Mystiques, translated by Eva de Vitray.
Jalal ad-Dîn ar-Roûmi is also the creator of the samâ’, a sacred cosmic dance perpetuated to this day by the order of whirling dervishes that he had founded. For him, more than a dance, it was a liturgy, as was music, which he regarded as a form of prayer. Eva de Vitray reports the reply Roûmi gave to a friend who, hearing the call to prayer, asked him to interrupt a concert they were attending: ‘Not so, for this too is a prayer. Both are addressed to God. He wants the one outwardly for His service, and the other inwardly for His love and His knowledge.’ We also know how vast are the anthropo-cosmic perspectives that Ibn Arabi opened up for prayer, which he described as an ‘intimate conversation’, mounâjât, between the creature and its 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 Sûfis one finds, before the term existed, a true ecumenism. An ecumenism that fascinated Eva de Vitray and of which she speaks in these terms: ‘Without knowing it very clearly, this is what I was looking for: an ecumenism that would not be a syncretism. I think that each person must go to the very end of their 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 Sûfis. And the unchanging centre of this wheel is, to come back to it, this fundamental attitude of abandonment, of acceptance, of surrender to God: ‘In your acceptance, you find all the others again, who have come from all the traditions.’
Such is the teaching that Eva de Vitray received from the Sûfis. It illuminated her life and, having become in her turn a ‘ferryman’ between the various cultures and spiritual traditions, she never ceased to pass it on through all her writings.
Mohamed Leftah
Source: ‘Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch : L’autre visage de l’Islam, un chant comme viatique’, Le Temps du Maroc (20-26 August 1999, No. 199), by Mohamed Leftah. Reproduced as part of the boutchichiya.fr press archives, the Sidi Hamza era.
