Sufi Studies - Early Sufi Studies in France

Early Sufi Studies in France

The earliest Europeans to study Sufism were French, associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Quietist movement. They were Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville (1625–1695), a professor at the Collège de France who worked from texts available in Europe, François Bernier (1625–1688), the physician of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb who spent 1655-69 in the Islamic world (mostly with Aurangzeb), and François Pétis de la Croix (1653–1713), a diplomat who spent 1674-1676 in Isfahan, where he studied Rumi's Masnavi-ye Manavi and visited the Bektashi order.

D'Herbelot's great work, the Bibliothèque orientale (published posthumously in 1697), included an entry on Sufism (as tasawwuf) and detailed entries on Al-Hallaj, Najmeddin Kubra, and Abd-al-karim Jili. There were a number of references to the Masnavi and to Rumi (as Gellaledin Mohammed al Balkhi), and there may also have been entries on them.

Bernier published an article on Sufism entitled "Mémoire sur le quïetisme des Indes" in the periodical Histoire des Ouvrages des Savans in September 1688. Following this article, there is said to have developed in France a view that the French expression of the creed of Pure Love (Pur Amour/Quietism) was in fact a disguised form of Islam. The debate over Quietism between the bishops Fénelon and Bossuet was remembered as the "Querelle du Pur Amour". Many Quietists (including Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon) were imprisoned. Others exercised caution and self-censorship.

Pétis de la Croix did not publish himself, but his son (writing later under a pseudonym) gave reasons why he thought "the Mevlevi are perfect Quïetists" (Ahmed Frangui, Lettres critiques de Hadgi Effendi à la Marquise de G... au sujet des mémoires de M. le Chevalier d'Arvieux, Paris, 1735).

D'Herbelot de Molainville's Bibliothèque orientale went through several editions, one of the last of which was the 1777 edition printed in the Hague. It has been suggested that some entries on Sufi topics that were present in the 1697 edition were absent from the 1777 edition. The word "Sufi" appears (vol 3, p. 329).