FORTHCOMING:
Towards
the Heart of Islam: A Woman's Approach
Eva
de Vitray-Meyerovitch; Translated by Cathryn Goddard
Fons Vitae (Forthcoming; Publishing date to be announced) ISBN 1887752226 paper TBA
As the French title indicates, L'Islam: L'Autre Visage (Editions
Albin Michel, Paris 1995), this book describes a face of Islam
you don't usually read about in the newspapers. Author of over
forty books and the greatest French scholar and translator of
Jelaluddin Rumi's works, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch leads us to
the heart of Islam through her own love of its most celebrated
poets, philosophers, and practitioners. What led this brilliant
multilingual twentieth-century French woman, a scholar trained in
law and philosophy, to turn to Islam? This book reaches the core
of all true religion, the personal internal reflection and the
universal connection, imbued with the love that mysticism
represents.
Eva de Vitray describes her own voyage, beginning with a very
proper education in Roman Catholic schools appropriate to her
aristocratic family. She speaks with warmth of the total
sincerity of her Protestant Scottish grandmother. And she
describes her growing discomfort with dogmatic religion.
After her marriage to a Frenchman of Russian-Jewish origin, she
tells of her exciting escape from Nazi-occupied Paris with the
son of Pierre and Marie Curie. After the war, her life as a
director of research is changed abruptly by the gift from a
former classmate of a book by Mohammad Iqbal, the dazzling
twentieth-century Islamic philosopher and poet.
Suddenly the external form of religion pales before the internal
quest. She goes on to learn Persian and translates into French
the works of Iqbal and those of the thirteenth-century mystic,
Jelaluddin Rumi, who becomes her spiritual guide. Dr. de Vitray
fills us with the love of this affirming internal connection in
anecdotes from her pilgrimage to Mecca, to teaching at Al Azhar
in Cairo, to praying with a group of men in Algeria who fought to
win their independence from her country, to the relevant lines of
Rumi, "I did not write these lines for people to wear them
or repeat them, but for people to put them under their feet and
fly with them."
Her most recent book, Prayer in Islam (Albin Michel, Paris: 1998)
was chosen as the French Book of the Month.
This title is not yet available.
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