Aguéli was not the only Western Sufi of the early twentieth century, though he is the first Westerner known to have established a genuine branch of a Sufi order, however small, in Europe. Perhaps the best-known Western Sufi of the time was Isabelle Eberhardt, a French journalist and novelist born in Geneva of Russian parents (her surname was German because her maternal grandmother had been German, and both she and her mother were illegitimate). Eberhardt’s writings presented a romantic view of the desert and of Arab life that proved very popular in France; they were the Algerian equivalent of Pierre Loti’s enormously popular romantic novels of Ottoman Turkish life. Eberhardt’s own life is also often interpreted romantically, and the picture of the intrepid Frenchwoman braving danger and colonial disapproval in the clothes of an Arab man has a lasting appeal. Eberhardt has as a consequence become something of a feminist (and, to a lesser extent, an anti-colonial) icon.
Eberhardt’s father, Alexander Trofimovsky, was born a serf, and had been employed as tutor by Eberhardt’s mother’s first husband, an army officer. Trofimovsky, Eberhardt’s mother, and her first three children left Russia together for Switzerland, where Eberhardt herself was born. Trofimovsky was a radical socialist and an atheist, following Tolstoy and Bakunin. His education of his daughter, Isabelle, was similarly radical and nonconformist; not only did he teach her Latin and Greek (then more commonly taught only to boys) but he also encouraged her to dress as a boy. Eberhardt also learned Arabic, possibly from her father, who was an enthusiast of Islam as an anti-colonial force. Among her father’s friends was James Sanua, an Egyptian Jew of Italian origin, who had moved to Paris in 1878. Sanua became a close friend of Eberhardt, mostly through a correspondence started in 1896, and introduced her to various Tunisians, one of whom she corresponded with on religious matters.
The Trofimovsky household collapsed, and the 20-year-old Eberhardt and her mother moved to Algeria in 1897. One of Eberhardt’s half-siblings remained in Switzerland; the other two returned to Russia, where they both later committed suicide. In Algeria, Eberhardt supported herself and her mother through her journalism, which was to some extent modeled on the writing of Pierre Loti. She meanwhile shocked local French colonial sentiment with her behavior—dressing not only as a man but as an Arab man, smoking hashish, appearing drunk in public, and sleeping with large numbers of Algerian men. She also shocked the French by describing herself as a Muslim and a Sufi.
It is unclear how or when Eberhardt became Muslim; it seems that her father converted to Islam before his death, probably more out of political sympathy than spiritual conviction, and Eberhardt may well have become Muslim in Europe before leaving for Algeria. Conversion to Islam is, technically, an easy process: there is no need for any period of instruction or any real formalities. All that is required is to pronounce in front of two witnesses — who must themselves be adults, Muslim, and sane — the Confession of Faith, the words (in Arabic): “I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is His Prophet.” The person who says these words is then Muslim, and as such is obliged to abide by the Sharia, the code of Islam – which among other things proscribes dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex, discourages the smoking of hashish, forbids the consumption of alcohol, and prohibits sex outside marriage. Eberhardt, then, does not seem to have been a very good Muslim, or — put differently — her understanding of what it meant to be Muslim did not include carefully observing the prohibitions of the Sharia.
It is not clear whether Eberhardt observed the Sharia in other respects. The Sharia does not only consist of prohibitions, but also specifies the religious practices required or encouraged by Islam — ritual prayer, periodic fasting, almsgiving, and the like. Almsgiving was probably not an issue, since what is known of Eberhardt’s often desperate financial situation suggests that she would have been exempted from this duty on grounds of poverty, but prayer and fasting are required of all. Many born Muslims do not pray regularly, of course, though nearly all fast Ramadan; unfortunately, there are no reliable reports of whether or not Eberhardt prayed and fasted.
Eberhardt was, however, serious about aspects of Sufi practice, even if not about the prohibitions of the Sharia. She was in contact with two different Sufi orders, the Qadiriyya and the Rahmaniyya. She joined the Qadiriyya in 1899 or 1900, two years after her arrival in Algeria, and in 1901 went into retreat (khalwa), a Sufi practice which differs little from its Catholic equivalent. In 1902 she made the difficult journey to Bu Sada in the south of Algeria to meet a Rahmani shaykh (leader of a Sufi order), Zaynab bint Muhammad ibn Abi’l-Qasim. Zaynab was remarkable as the successor of one of the most celebrated Algerian shaykhs of the nineteenth century, Muhammad ibn Abi’l-Qasim, her father, and also for being a female shaykh (which was and is very rare). In 1903 Eberhardt again traveled south to see Zaynab, and in 1904 she went into a second retreat, this time with a Qadiri shaykh at Kenadsa, again in the south. These visits are what one would expect of a regular Algerian Sufi; the two retreats would, in an Algerian, indicate real dedication to the Sufi path.
Shortly after her second retreat, late in 1904, Eberhardt was killed (along with many others) in a flood—aged only 27, but suffering from malaria and possibly syphilis, and having lost all her teeth. Despite her anti-colonial stance, she was at the time supplying sensitive intelligence on the Algerian resistance to French commander General Hubert Lyautey, with whom she may have also been conducting a love affair.
As a convert to Islam who ignored much of the Sharia yet visited Sufi shaykhs and went into retreat, Eberhardt was a special kind of Muslim—more of a Sufi than a Muslim, it might seem. During the twentieth century the view of Sufism as something separate from Islam became widespread in the West, but it is essential to appreciate that this view is a purely Western one and that the variety of non-Islamic neo-Sufism that has come into being in Europe and America is a purely Western phenomenon. In Algeria and elsewhere in the Islamic world, Islam and Sufism were and are inseparable. Sufis are by definition Muslim, and the religious practices of a Sufi are based on the careful observance of the Sharia. Eberhardt’s approach to religion would have been incomprehensible to most Muslims, though perhaps it was not to her shaykh, since great shaykhs are specialists in the many ways of the human heart.
– Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2004), pp. 63-5