Louis Massignon and Badaliyya

Louis Massignon

1.  Charity.  It is an active and sensitive charity.  Solidarity understood as the ability to suffer with those who suffer injustice.  It is an attempt to liberate … at least to know how to protest with sorrow.  It is to accompany the poor with help and sympathy. Charity is shown with great delicate respect to a person before many and varied religious option.

2. Figure of Abraham.  The figure of Abraham is a mystery of election and exclusion.  Is it also a mystery of acceptance and a mystery of rejection?  Ismael vs. Israel, David and Paul…  Hadith has it: “No one is truly a believer until one prefers not for his brother what one prefers for himself.”

3. Badal – Substitution.  Louis Massignon had “discovered” the reality of BADAL – Substitution for the reparation of injustices and for witnessing to the poor and victims of injustices.  Substitution demands an offer of the total self – similar to the test of fire.  The witness “par excellence” is the one who does complete or offered as a total ransom that is lacking in truth that God knows… Massignon found this in the life and martyrdom of Husayn at Kerbala in the Shi’a Theology.  Husayn is the vivification of the mystery of redemption.

• The Ram in place of Isaac
• The Paschal Lamb for the first born of Israel
• The tribe of Levi for the nation of Israel
• Jesus for humanity.

       4. Examples used by Fr. Louis Massignon…

• The demand on the part of Christians at Najran
• The offer of St. Francis at Damietta
• The Desire of St. Raymund of Lull
• The acceptance of Fr. Massignon mystically to become Badal…

In their lives, each person is assured by Christ, ransomed by him and in return they assure and ransom others … assuming unto themselves all others and standing in the place of others notwithstanding their weaknesses before the mystery of God through via dolorosa unto the violent death of the cross.

        5. Values Lived by Badal…

• Hospitality.  He discovered hospitality when wounded in battle and cared for by Muslims.  “I had been saved in the Muslim land by the virtue of the obligation of sanctuary lived heroically by my Muslim hosts notwithstanding the espionage and betrayal that they denounced before me.” He discovered that in Islam the priority of sanctuary is over the obligation of the just war. The praxis of hospitality made Massignon understand the sense of Abrahamic faith – communicated not by logic but by living intuition emerging from a life lived in their midst.  “I share the trust of the Muslims in the God of hospitality.”  The hospitality of Abraham is the sign that announces the final end of gathering all nations. The host is God’s envoy.  He is the witness – person that welcomes strangers, heals the sick, clothes the naked…

• Person is a Shahid (witness). In Islam the person is above all a witness.  The Semitic language is a language of witness.  Spirituality is intimately linked to language – which one speaks.

• The Person in Prayer (through Remembrance - DHIKR).