Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Muslimah Media Watch

Home
Muslim
Religion News
Isabelle Eberhardt: Swiss Explorer, Sufi Adventurer

Isabelle Eberhardt: Swiss Explorer, Sufi Adventurer

Last updated on: May 14, 2012 at 2:00 am by tasnim

Isabelle Eberhardt: Swiss Explorer, Sufi Adventurer 2012-05-13T16:50:19-04:00 tasnim

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Isabelle Eberhardt’s extraordinary life is the stuff of legends – and movies, and operas. Song From the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, Missy Mazzoli’s multi-media opera, which premiered this spring, explores the unconventional twists and turns of Eberhardt’s short, “operatic” life. You can see the trailer, the Kickstart video, some excerpts and a shorter earlier performance here.

The New York Times review describes the work as ”Crackling Vignettes From an Adventurer’s Life”:

a 19th-century Swiss adventuress who blazed a headstrong trail before perishing prematurely in Algeria at 27, there surely is a saga worthy of operatic treatment. Eberhardt learned Arabic, converted to Islam, dressed as a man to travel freely, survived an assassination attempt and died in a flash flood after saving her Algerian soldier husband from the same fate.

Source: vagabond.com

Mizzy Mazzoli describes her as a female T.E Lawrence:

There are photos of Eberhardt in boys’ clothes with a sailor’s hat, and in several North African male outfits. Just picture Lawrence of Arabia (who was a contemporary of Eberhardt’s), only with a woman wrapped in the draping clothes.

Born in 1877, Eberhardt was the daughter of an aristocratic Russian mother and an Armenian-born father who was an ex-priest and anarchist. Aged 20, she traveled to North Africa with her mother, where they both converted to Islam. Her mother then died suddenly, and was buried in Algeria under the name of Fatma Mannoubia. This was followed by the death of Eberhardt’s father and the suicide of her half-brother, severing her ties to her former life. From that time on, Eberhardt traveled through North Africa dressed as a man and going by the name Mahmoud Essadi, wandering from Marseilles to Tunis and Algeria from 1899 to 1904 and eventually joining a Sufi sect in Algeria.

My first encounter with Eberhardt’s story was when I came across her travel journals, on which Mazzoli’s work is based, collected in The Nomad: the Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt, and, like Mazzoli’ ”became obsessed with Isabelle Eberhardt’s strange and moving life story.” Eberhardt’s writings are collected in The Nomad, In the Shadow of Islam, Prisoner of Dunes, The Oblivion Seekers and a novel, The Vagabond.

Via Amazon.

As Mazzoli describes it:

I was struck by the universal themes of her story – how much her struggles, her questions, her passions, mirrored those of women throughout the 20th and 21st century. Isabelle made a great effort to define herself as an independent woman under extreme circumstances.

As this review points out, Mazzoli’s Eberhardt stands in contrast to one view of the heroine in operas as the perfect victim:

The philosopher Catherine Clément called opera a “spectacle thought up to adore, and also to kill, the feminine character.” Critics of her views counter that men in opera don’t always have it any easier—think Verdi’s Macbeth or Wagner’s Tristan—and that the form’s supposed victims are portrayed by divas who rise in glory to sing again.  As revivified in composer Missy Mazzoli’s enthralling Song from the Uproar, Isabelle Eberhardt is no victim.

Eberhardt’s strange and moving life story has been told and retold in countless biographies, such as the 1954 The Wilder Shores of Love, which in a rather speculative fashion told the stories of ”four nineteenth-century European women who leave behind the industrialized west for Arabia in search of romance and fulfillment.” The particular flavor of Orientalism of that book (self-described as offering “exotic true-life stores”) has been eclipsed in the last few decades, and in 2003, In the Shadow of Islam describes how “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.”

Annette Kobak’s biography was more prosaically titled Isabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt. But some things do not change. One selected collection of her writing in 1995 is entitled Prisoner of the Dunes. This year, there is a new collection of her writings with the almost equally terrible title Writings from the Sand. The soft black and white images of Song from the Uproar features sand too, endless sand, and endless ocean. The imagery in fact seems peculiarly suited to a description of Eberhardt’s “stormy love affair with the Algerian desert.”

Source: vagabond.com

As the titles of these works suggest, there is a justifiable focus on the cultural transgressions of Eberhardt’s life, and on her bold individuality. But what can be said about the way she fit within the colonial system, and the political aspect of her writing against the abuses of French colonial rule?

Ali Behdad’s book Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution identifies Eberhardt’s sympathetic relationship with ”the natives” as having influenced French colonial policy. Her intimate knowledge proved useful, Behdad writes, to such figures as General Lyautey, since “already a strong supporter of the new idea of association presented by the French colonial lobby…which aimed at a more indirect, flexible rule that would gain native cooperation.” Eberhardt’s writing and her relationships with locals replaced the “inadequacies of the assimilation policy” and was part of “the shift from a detailed program of absolute domination to a general policy of more subtle control.” In the 1991 film Isabelle Eberhardt where the heroine was portrayed by Matilda May, Peter O’Toole portrayed General Lyautey.

Much could be said about how far the transgressive elements of Eberhardt’s life affected or was inscribed within official colonial and orientalist discourse. However, while it involves a more personal portrait, Song From the Uproar offers a compelling and inspiring celebration of the idiosyncratic free spirit and cultural nomad, and of an extraordinary woman’s “lives and deaths.”

Art/Theater

Isabelle Eberhardt

Song from the Uproar

Previous Post

May 11, 2012

Friday Links | May 11, 2012

Next Post

May 15, 2012 Maria Toor Pakay vs. the World

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Advertisements Art/Theater Books/Magazines Cinema Comics/Cartoons Culture/Society Events Fashion Film Friday Links Merchandise/Commodities MMW Announcements MMW Highlights Music/Radio News Photography Politics Profile Ramadan 2012 Ramadan 2013 Ramadan 2014 Ramadan 2015 Roundtable Satire Social Media Sports Technology/Science Television Uncategorized Video Web

Select a Month November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What sea did Moses part?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Sea of Galilee Red Sea Dead Sea Mediterranean Sea