Hindiyya, Mystic and Criminal, 1720-1798: A
political and religious crisis in Lebanon
Bernard Heyberger
James Clarke & Co. £25
(978-0-227-17388-6)
THIS complex and convoluted story takes us into the strange and
unfamiliar world of Maronite monasticism in the 18th century. It
tells of the encounter between Eastern Christianity (in a Catholic
Uniate form) and Roman efforts to judge, control, and discipline
from a distance, in a context where the tribal loyalties and
rivalries of the Lebanese mountains exercised a more immediate
influence.
At its centre is a woman from Christian Aleppo, Hindiyya
'Ujaymi, her devotion to the Western cult of the Sacred Heart, her
calling to found a new religious order, and her claimed
supernatural revelations and messages from her "union with Christ".
It is a bizarre story of religious enthusiasm, which led to a
sadistic and dictatorial regime, in which physical torture,
beatings, attempted poisonings, and suspected murders all played
their part behind the convent walls of Bkerki to make Hindiyya's
convent a veritable hell for many of the nuns of her community.
There are powerful echoes of The Devils of Loudun, on the
one hand, and The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, and
similar accounts of nefarious goings-on in convents, on the
other.
Professor Heyberger's original work in French (published some 12
years ago), of which this is the English translation, is clearly
the product of wide-ranging and meticulous research in original
material in archives in Rome, the Maronite patriarchate, and of
religious orders who were involved in one way or another with this
crisis.
Yet, sadly, it is not the compelling narrative that I had hoped
it would be. The plethora of unfamiliar names, combined with a
characteristically French approach reminiscent of Brémond's
Histoire Littéraire du Sentiment Religieux en France,
leaves the reader, time and again, mired in the complexities of too
many unfamiliar names and places. I could have wished for some
straightforward signposting at the beginning, to provide clearer
direction through the twists and turns of this extraordinary
story.
It is a book that will be valuable to those wishing to
understand more of the Maronite religious heritage and Lebanese
religious history, and to those concerned with the psychological
aberrations of claimed spiritual experience. The elements of a
detective story, which Heyberger's quest for the truth about
Hindiyya implies, may lead some to expect that this is bedtime
reading. It is not - even for a reviewer who happily explores both
Eastern Christianity and the wilder reaches of religious
enthusiasm.
Dr Geoffrey Rowell is the Bishop of Gibraltar in
Europe.