The “Muslim Catholic” Who Invented the Christian-Muslim Relationship

The origins of the dangerous myth of “Abrahamic Religions”.

When Pope Leo hails Islam and when western politicians praise Islam as an “Abrahamic religion,” they are not reaching back to an ancient Christian tradition but the relatively new twentieth century invention of a man whom Pope Pius XI had described as a “Muslim Catholic”.

Traditional Christianity saw Islam as a pun for the sins of nations and Islamic rulers like Sultan Mehmed II as a “second Mohammed,” a “son of Satan” and a harbinger of the Antichrist.

One unlikely Christian ‘Islamist’ in the twentieth century helped change all that.

Louis Massignon was a French academic, intellectual, artist, officer, priest, gay man and likely spy, whose obsessive orientalism led him to spend a good deal of his time, occasionally at risk of his life, in the Muslim world, to advocate for its causes and to find spiritual meaning in Islam.

This was the era of ‘orientalism’ when dissatisfied wealthy western young men and women set off to find meaning in other cultures while often joining cults and engaging in sexual experimentation. Following the familiar pattern, Massignon’s travels in the Muslim world allowed him to experiment with Islamic mysticism and homosexual relationships. Along the way he developed an interest in Sufism, suffered a mental breakdown and became a scholar of Islam.

Such things were not all that unusual back then and Massignon had a number of Jewish contemporaries like Hugo ‘Hamid’ Marcus, a gay Jewish man who translated the Koran into German and was released from a concentration camp after the Nazis realized he was Muslim, Jacob ‘Israel’ de Haan, a gay poet who moved to Israel while trying to undermine its rebrth, and Leopold Weiss who changed his name to Muhammad Asad and became a spy for Saudi Arabia.