Jean-Louis Michon: Life and Work

The following excerpt is the “Preface” to the late Dr. Jean-Louis Michon’s illustrated book
Introduction to Traditional Islam: Foundations, Art, and Spirituality

More often than not a civilization will be pieced together starting from the material traces it has left. This is the way the archaeologists work when, their interest aroused by vestiges whose meaning remains partly obscure, they try to reconstitute the context in which objects that have been found assume their real importance. In the case of Islam, such traces abound, and many a traveler has been fascinated by them, from Marco Polo to Orientalist painters of the romantic and colonial periods,and modern tourists: auditive and visual traces, human encounters of a particular quality,ranging from the call to prayer of the muezzin heard at the first dawn spent in a Muslim land to the serene geometry of arabesques, and the warm and dignified welcome given by the artisan in his shop or the Bedouin in his tent.

It is not through such external signs, however, that I and others of my generation, who were students during the Second World War and had nothing but books by which to discover the world, became acquainted with Islam. We had to follow a very different course, starting from the inside, and it was through philosophers and mystics that Islam was revealed to us. From the outside, all what we had previously perceived about Islam had been forbidding, with a few strong images inherited from our “lay and compulsory” education: Roland at Roncevaux, Charles Martel at Poitiers, the Barbaresques, the conquest of Algeria and the “revolt” of Abdelkader, the only human impressions being those received during our provincial childhood, reduced to the chance encounters, all distances being carefully observed, with the “sidi” vendor of balloons and carpets.

In spite of what lay between us in the way of social and ideological prejudices, however, Islam brought an answer to our queries. This occurred at a crucial moment in contemporary history when, for many, the tragedy of the planetary conflict raised a new question about a number of acquired beliefs and values, such as the paternal ideals of social success, of the sovereign motherland — “State, what crimes have been committed in thy name!” — , and even those of a certain Christian moralism reduced to interdicts that had never been properly explained or justified. We felt an urge to find a raison d’être beyond these upheavals, to restructure a world that was on the verge of dislocation.

Already at that time, in the mid-forties, a few providentially gifted interpreters, such as René Guénon and other contributors to the journal Études traditionnelles, including Frithjof Schuon and Titus Burckhardt, had given the public access to the “lights of Islam” and other expressions of the Universal Tradition, the Religio perennis or, for Hindus, sanātana dharma, “The Eternal Law”: through their writings,their clear expositions of Vedanta, metaphysics, and the existential monism of Islam, we acquired a certitude that there is a Supreme Principle, a non-manifest Absolute from which all manifestation, all creation derives without assuming a separate, independent existence. We also came to recognize degrees in this manifestation, each with its own rank and features. Once this need for causality had been satisfied,some of us felt eager to embark on what Lanza del Vasto had called in a contemporary narrative “the pilgrimage to the sources”.

In 1946 I moved to Damascus where I stayed for three years, immersing myself in the Islamic culture as deeply as was compatible, without creating too much scandal, with my teaching position at the Lycée Franco-Arabe. I sought the company of students and teachers of religious science, took lessons in Koranic recitation and the Oriental lute, scoured the alleys of the old city and the slopes of Jabal Qāsiūn to visit sanctuaries and meet with saintly persons. Years later, I visited other parts of the Muslim world, from Morocco to India and the “Moros” communities of Mindanao, without ever feeling during these journeys that I was trespassing on foreign soil. It was as if the very first approach, based on ratiocination, had provided a key which, at the right moment, opened the doors of the “concrete” Islam with its faithful, its rites, its social etiquette, its art and craft productions; and as if no dichotomy had ever existed between the two paths that gave access to the world of Islam: the path of written teachings and the progression on the roads of the Orient.

It is the results of this double quest that I have attempted to assemble here, repeating by necessity a number of notions that are already familiar to readers conversant with Orientalist works, but hoping that these notions, cemented by a life’s experience, will have acquired the backing of some persuasive evidence.

At a time when Islam often occupies the front pages of newspapers and when its image, bound up with political and other interests, is distorted, or even caricatured, by its detractors as well as by blinded zealots, I felt it might be worthwhile to evoke its original and lasting features, those which belong to a true civilization, construed to remind man of his mission as a caliph, or lieutenant of God on earth, and to help him fulfill this mission while actualizing the fulfillment of his noblest qualities.