In The Shadow of Islam E-Book

Isabelle Eberhardt

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Modern Classics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 179

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

An extraordinary evocation of the desert and its people by a woman who dressed as a man in order to travel alone and unimpeded throughout North Africa In 1897 Isabelle Eberhardt, at the age of 20, left an already unconventional life in Geneva for the Morroccan frontier. Gripped by spiritual restlessness and the desire to break free from the confinements of her society she traveled into the desert, and into the heart of Islam. Her experiences inspired a profound self-examination, anda book that today isregarded as one of the true classics of travel writing. In the current political climate, it is also a book uncannily current in its treatment of the culture of Islam in North Africa. One of the most astonishing travel documents of all time, this book is also a feminist classic in its own right.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FORIN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM

‘A compelling narrative and an ideal starting point from which to discover more about Isabelle Eberhardt’s picaresque life.’ – Nicola Walker,Times Literary Supplement

‘She [Eberhardt] was the first hippie. She travelled with no money living from day to day; she had no concept that chastity was of any value and was sexually voracious; she was into kif-smoking; and she lived in Morocco dressed as a man.’ – Juliet Stevenson

‘Cultdom can imply a a blind suspension of critical faculties, and Isabelle has suffered from that. A hazy image of her as a soul-sick Amazon-of-the-desert has been recycled as each new generation discovers radical desert chic. Yet her writings, and her sheer modernity, stand up to modern scrutiny... Not only have the stories she collected become invaluable oral history for the North Africans, but her perception of Islam as a future, and not a spent, force on the world stage has proved prophetic. In that, as in the rebel-without-a-cause about her, she has proved ahead of her time.’ –Daily Telegraph

IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM

In theShadow of Islamis an extraordinary evocation of the desert and its people by a woman who dressed as a man in order to travel alone and unimpeded throughout North Africa.

In 1897 Isabelle Eberhardt, aged 20, left an already unconventional life in Geneva for the Morroccan frontier. Gripped by spiritual restlessness and the desire to break free from the confinements of her society she travelled into the desert, and into the heart of Islam.

Her experiences inspired a profound self-examination, and In the Shadow of Islam is today regarded as one of the true classics of travel writing.

In the current political climate, it is also a book uncannily current in its treatment of the culture of Islam in North Africa.

ISABELLE EBERHARDT

ISABELLE EBERHARDT (1877–1904) was born in Geneva, the illegitimate daughter of a former Russian Orthodox priest and a part-Russian, part-German aristocratic mother. Her father was an anarchist and nihilist who was to convert to Islam, and his daughter’s life was to take similar dramatic turns before her tragically early death at the age of twenty-seven.

Increasingly isolated from her family and her inheritance, she was plagued by emotional and financial problems, but she had a fierce will. From an early age she dressed as a man for the greater freedom this allowed, and she developed a literary talent and a gift for languages, including Arabic.

Like her father Eberhardt became drawn to Islam. She converted while in Algeria with her mother. After her mother’s death she cut all ties with her family, called herself Si Mahmoud Essadi and travelled throughout North Africa. She became involved with Qadiriyya Sufi order, married an Algerian soldier, worked as a war reporter, helped the poor and needy and fought against the injustices of French colonial rule. She was also the victim of an assassination attempt but later successfully pleaded for the life of the man who attacked her.

She openly rejected conventional European morality of the time, preferring to choose her own path, and drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and had numerous affairs.

She died in a flash flood in Aïn Séfra, Algeria, in 1904.

ISABELLE EBERHARDT

IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM

Translated and with a Preface by

Contents

Praise For In The Shadow of Islam

About The Book

About The Author

Preface

Departure – Ain Sefra, May 1904

Musicians of West

Death of Muslim

On the road

The Drama of Hours

Halt in the Desert

Ben Zireg

Water of Lies

Oasis Perfume

Looking back

Bechar

The Black Stallion

Legionnaires and Mokhazni

Reflections in a Courtyard

Killing time

Kenadsa

Entrance to the Zawiya

New Life

Slaves

The Little World of Women

Transformation

Mountain of Light

The Enlightened One

The Marabout’s Indignation

A Message

Vision of Women

Friday Prayer

Lella Khaddouja

Nomad Lords

Messaoud

Saharan Theocracy

In the Margin of a Letter

Garden Meal

The Rebel

Sudanese Festival

As the Night Breathes

A Gathering of Students

Evening Reflections

The Return of the Flock

People of the West

Encounter at Night

The Oblivion Seekers

Kenadsa Evenings

Love at the Well

Desert Gypsies

In the Mellah

Recollections of Fever

The Watery Paradise

Vivid Images

Symphony of Words

African Influences

Moghreb

Reflections on Love

Departure

Some Authors

Preface

Among the following pages, in the chapter entitled ‘Looking Back’, the author says, ‘For me it seems that by advancing into unknown territories, I enter into my life.’ This book recounts Isabelle Eberhardt’s ultimate advance. Courage and hunger for an authentic life led her into territories both outside her and within: she was captivated by the Sahara and its inhabitants; but the same sense of adventure led her also on an interior journey, where lay the true goal of her search, and the safe harbour from buffetings by chance.

Isabelle Eberhardt lived her first nineteen years in Geneva, born there in 1877. Her mother was the wife of an aristocratic Russian general named De Moerder, but she eloped to Switzerland with her children’s tutor, Alexander Trophimowsky, a former Russian Orthodox priest turned anarchist. Trophimowsky was Isabelle’s father, though neither he nor her mother acknowledged the fact. Instead, Isabelle always called him ‘Vava’, or great-uncle. Trophimowsky gave Isabelle her mother’s maiden surname and directed her upbringing, schooling her in the nonconformism which would mark her entire life. He had her wear boy’s clothes, learn to ride, work alongside her brothers at toughening, outdoor labour, and willingly taught her Arabic at her request. Trophimowsky imparted to Isabelle, however painfully for her, the moral and physical stamina her later life would demand; for his tactics from the start ensured that Isabelle would be ill suited and ill equipped for life in middle-class European society. In North Africa she would conduct herself nearly everywhere and always as an Arab and a man. Traditional Arab courtesy and discretion led native North Africans to respect her masquerade, though they were never taken in by it. But for Isabelle to pull it off must have required of her a considerable degree of self-assurance and singleness of purpose, particularly as her disguise never prevented her from taking numerous lovers from among the French military and native troops, and even, eventually, an Arab husband.

Although it was unconventional, Isabelle felt her home life to be restrictive and gloomy. She would gaze with fascination at the long road, white in the moonlight, curving away from the Villa Neuve, as their house was called, and dream of elsewhere. As she would later write in her diary, ‘As always, I feel a boundless sadness, an inarticulate longing for something I cannot describe, a nostalgia for aplacefor which I have no name.’

Perhaps influenced to some extent by the orientalism gripping Europe at the time, and already attracted to Islam, Isabelle, accompanied by her mother, sailed for Tunis in 1897. There they both officially became Muslims. Her mother died six months later, leaving Isabelle morbidly bereaved until Trophimowsky arrived and responded to her suicidal ravings by offering her his pistol, which she refused.

Isabelle lived on in Tunis, impressing some (by her intelligence), scandalizing others (with herkif-smoking and sexual promiscuity), until she had to return to Geneva to replenish her funds. Trophimowsky died around this time, leaving his estate to Isabelle. However, his will was contested by a surviving wife in Russia, and Isabelle was too naïve, too impatient, or both, to remain in Geneva to supervise the legal settlement, and thus forfeited most of her inheritance.

Around the middle of August 1900, at El Oued in the Algerian desert, Isabelle met the man whom she would marry, Slimène Ehnni. He was a quartermaster in thespahis, a regiment of native troops under French command in which Slimène’s brothers, father, and uncles had also served. Isabelle’s attachment to Slimène was marked from the first by a combination of desperate need and fatalistic pessimism about their prospects together. She clung to him as her only family, her best friend. She also saw him as ‘the only true Muslim’ of all the men she had known, ‘for he loves Islam with all his heart and is not content with paying it mere lip service’. Slimène was a member of the Kadriya, the first and oldest of the Sufi orders, to which Isabelle was also initiated. Their relationship was punctuated by frequent and lengthy separations, due partly to his military orders and partly to Isabelle’s wanderlust, as well as to the fact that Isabelle was for a time expelled from the French North African colonies.

The cause of her expulsion was an assassination attempt made on her in January 1901, by a fanatic member of a non-Sufi cult, the Tidjanya. The attack occurred in Behima, near El Oued. She was in the company of her Sufi brethren, in a house belonging to one of them, and engaged in translating a telegram for a local tradesman. The hood of her burnous was covering her turban, her head bent in concentration, so that she could not see the stranger rush up with a sword. His blow was blocked by a laundry line above her head, sparing her skull the full impact, but her left elbow was cut to the bone. A number of speculations have been put forth about the assassin’s motive. Isabelle’s own testimony to the investigating authorities held that he was in the pay of the Tidjanya sea whose hatred for the Kadriyas was well known: she was a choice target because of her popularity among the Tidjanyas’ enemies. Isabelle quickly forgave the assassin, Abdallah, insisting that it was not he who should stand trial, but those who were behind him.

Upon being released from a six-week hospital stay, Isabelle was ordered by the French to leave Algeria. Her presence was doubtless seen by the authorities as provocative, and her activities dangerous to herself as well as to colonial law and order. Isabelle set off for Marseilles to stay with her brother Augustin and his wife, whose finances were quite as strained as Isabelle’s own. She was, to her surprise, commanded to return to Algeria in June for Abdallah’s trial. This occasioned her some distress in wondering what to wear. She was sensitive to the fact that it was her Arab men’s dress which had to a great extent provoked both Abdallah’s attack and the hostility of the French military authorities. She decided first on European men’s dress, writing to Slimène, ‘I don’t care if I dress as a workman, but to wear ill-fitting, cheap and ridiculous women’s clothes, no, never...’ But when the day came, she appeared in native women’s dress, asserting in answer to the defence lawyer’s question, that she normally wore male attire because it was more practical for riding.

Abdallah’s death sentence was commuted to hard labour for life, and was protested by Isabelle who declared in a letter to the court her pity for Abdallah, his wife, and children. A later appeal by her resulted in a further reduction of his sentence to ten years’ imprisonment.

But even before the trial concluded, she was again served with an order of expulsion from Algeria. From May to October she lived with Augustin and his wife in Marseilles and, still dressed as a man, worked as a stevedore as best she could with her disabled arm. Otherwise she spent her time writing her journal, a novel, and numerous letters to Slimène. During this period, the impact of her brush with death stimulated her religious and mystical feelings. She came to view Abdallah as the heavenly emissary he had claimed to be, because of the effect his action had on her inner life.

Finally, in August, Slimène was transferred to Marseilles, and by October he and Isabelle were married in a French civil ceremony. Their union bestowed French citizenship upon Isabelle (Slimène was already a naturalized French citizen) along with the right to return to Algeria, which they did in January 1902. The following months were spent living at first with Slimène’s family in Bône, then in Algiers. Isabelle was sometimes thrilled to be living the life of a ‘hermit’, alternately pleased to sample again the conversation of intellectuals. In Algiers, she met Victor Barrucand, a journalist: ‘A modern mind, subtle and perceptive, but biased by the notions of his time’, as Isabelle described him. A couple of months later, she began to see him as ‘a dilettante in the domain of thought and even more so when it comes to feeling, a spiritual nihilist in other words’. However, she also recognized him as a practical man ‘who knows how to handle himself’, a quality Isabelle lacked, by her own admission.

Though so recently reunited with Slimène, Isabelle was soon taking to the road alone, to visitzawiyas– Sufi schools or centres of learning – in unexplored regions. She was commissioned by Barrucand to contribute a series of articles forLes Nouvelles, which he edited. Barrucand also helped Slimène obtain a position following his military discharge.

Slimène’s new post was that of khodja, or interpreter-secretary to the administration at Ténès, a town on the Algerian coast, one hundred miles west of Algiers. Here the couple were able to enjoy for the first time a period of relative financial security, and a few good friendships, including that of the writer Robert Randau. However, the colonials in Ténès soon came to rub Isabelle the wrong way. For her they were ‘pretentious Philistines who strut about sporting tight trousers and silly hats’. They, for their part, must have found Isabelle’s ways a constant irritant. Moreover, Isabelle and Slimène were drawn against their will into local political intrigues, which eventually drove Isabelle back to Algiers to help Barrucand edit his new magazineEl Akhbar.Slimène, unwilling to carry on alone, resigned his position in April 1903.

This opened a new phase in Isabelle’s life which coincided with a new phase in North African political affairs. In 1903 General Hubert Lyautey was posted to Algeria, in charge of pushing France’s influence westward into Morocco. Lyautey was an imaginative man, with more original ideas on colonization than his military colleagues in North Africa. He cast France’s mission in completely new terms, with a goal of ‘pacific penetration’ rather than military conquest of Morocco. His liberal views were championed by Barrucand inEl Akhbar, and he wrote to Lyautey about Isabelle. He promoted her as someone uniquely equipped to advance their cause and possibly gather intelligence among the native Muslims: a French citizen, married to a gallicized Muslim, familiar with native language, religion, and customs, and enormously trusted by Arabs and Berbers alike. Her Kadriya membership gave her access to places where no other European dared venture. Barrucand proposed to Isabelle that she go to the district south of Oran to report on army activities, the insurgent tribes, and to describe the as yet unknown territory. Isabelle enthusiastically agreed, and set off for the southern desert by railway. Slimène, meanwhile, had taken up a new post, this time askhodjain Guergour, another northern town.

When Isabelle and Lyautey met in October they quickly became friends. Lyautey shared Isabelle’s attraction to Islam, mysticism, and Africa, and admired her rebelliousness, her rejection of ‘prejudice, servitude and banality’. Isabelle seemed to respect Lyautey’s attitudes and his quick grasp of local issues. In some of her articles from this period, her reports reflect his views. But despite her friendly intimacy with the general, she continued to prefer the company of soldiers – legionnaires and nativemokhazni– enthusiastically exchanging stories with them in the cafés, whatever their language.

She returned north in December 1903, to spend Ramadan with Slimène. There seems to have been a break in their relations, though, for she left again abruptly in February 1904 for Ain Sefra: Lyautey’s headquarters and her stepping stone to the south and west. Many reminiscences among the following pages date from this period of living native-style, sleeping under the stars or on the floor of a Moorish café, intoxicated by the vastness of the desert. Perhaps only the Sahara could give her the physical distance from Europe’s social mores to match the psychological distance she had always lived with.

We know from his letters that Lyautey desired an alliance with Sidi Brahim, themaraboutof Kenadsa, site of a major centre for Sufi studies in North Africa. Sidi Brahim’s influence in the region was so great that France regarded his friendly rapport as asine qua nonfor ‘pacifying’ the dissident, warlike tribes. Isabelle’s decision to go to Kenadsa and take up residence at itszawiyaseems likely to have been at Lyautey’s urging. Her presence there would have been convenient for his purposes of gathering information and promoting the French cause to themarabouts. From Isabelle’s point of view, Lyautey’s endorsement of her journey would have been equally convenient, and there is no evidence that Isabelle went to Kenadsa for any but her own reasons. ‘The Marabout’s Indignation’, ‘Saharan Theocracy’, ‘Garden Meal’, and ‘African Influences’ contain, to varying degrees, glimpses of the political situation at the time. They show Isabelle sympathetic to local laws and customs and convinced that European conquest of Africa was doomed.

Kenadsa was not the firstzawiyaIsabelle had frequented, but it was doubtless the most important, not only for its spiritual prestige and traditions, but also for the fateful timing of her arrival there, in terms of her own development. Although on one level the following narrative is a travel journal, it is distinctive for what is omitted. For instance, we don’t know that she is headed for Kenadsa until she actually arrives there. She would have been obliged by the esoteric tradition to remain silent about the instruction she received at thezawiya, and the inner tension established by the secret affects the style of her writing. She turns outwards: towards the surrounding landscape, the comings and goings of Kenadsa’s inhabitants and nomadic neighbours, the quotidian events within thezawiyawhich were not forbidden to tell. Yet to these observations she brings a heightened sensitivity to their detail and to their significance; the reader begins to anticipate theaperçuat the end of chapters, the resolution uniting object with subject, observer with observed.

The shift in Isabelle’s attitude toward Slimène can be noted at many points in these pages. To live alone is to live free’, she writes from the road in ‘Looking Back’; ‘...I will suffer no more from anyone’. And by the close of her stay at Kenadsa she would write, in ‘Reflections on Love’, that she had found ‘a great talisman’, whether imparted to her from her teachers, or composed in her own heart: ‘Never give your soul to a creature, because it belongs to God alone; see in all creatures a motive for rejoicing, in homage to the Creator; never seek yourself in another, but discover yourself in yourself.’ Solitude, which formerly had been her crucible, was transformed into a gift and a necessity, a state in which she could be at peace.

Isabelle had intended to stay at Kenadsa all summer, and it is clear from what she writes that her departure was premature, though the date is unknown. Her hospitalization in Ain Sefra did not begin until 2 October, and she wrote to Slimène on the 16th asking him to come down for her release. He arrived by the 20th, rejoining his wife after a separation of eight months. She had rented a rude, clay house near the riverbed where she went to meet Slimène after releasing herself from hospital around eight in the morning. By midday the town was ripped apart by a torrent of yellow flood water – completely unexpected, the weather having been mild. All the lower part of the town was swept away. Slimène somehow escaped; Isabelle’s body was found inside the shut house, wedged behind a fallen beam under the staircase. Lyautey took charge of her burial, and ordered a thorough search of the flood’s debris for her manuscripts.

The text of the following pages, which Isabelle referred to as her ‘Sud-Oranais’ stories, was discovered in an urn and sent by Lyautey to Victor Barrucand. Grieving, Barrucand addressed Isabelle in a note written at a visit to her grave at Ain Sefra, and retitled the work, saying, ‘I want to situate our lovein the warm shadow of Islam.It’s the tide that I’ve given to your Saharan adventure.’ He assumed the role of Isabelle’s literary executor, and edited her work for publication, attracting sharp criticism for claiming co-authorship whenDans l’ombre chaude de l’Islamappeared in 1920.

Hence my task has been to translate Barrucand’s words along with Isabelle’s. If, as the Italians say, ‘to translate is to betray’, his was the first betrayal, though well meant. I hope my betrayals have been to Barrucand’s emendations rather than to Isabelle’s intentions.

For their help to me in the writing of this preface I am particularly indebted to Paul Bowles’sThe Oblivion Seekers; Annette Kobak’sIsabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt; and Nina de Voogd’sThe Passionate Nomad: The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt.I am also very grateful for Sacha Palliser’s advice on the meanings of Arabic words within the text.

Sharon Bangert     

Departure Ain Sefra, May 1904