I feel that the best tribute I can pay to the memory of Louis Massignon is to set down some of my personal memories of this great man. I first met him in Cambridge in 1954 at the International Congress of Orientalists. I was then a very junior Islamologist. We spoke about various things but not, so far as I remember, about my book Muhammad at Mecca, which had come out the previous year. What specially stands out in my memory is that, when he learnt I was from Scotland, he told me he was hoping to make a kind of pilgrimage to the birthplace of his friend Duncan Black Macdonald, which was in or near the island of Mull off [the] west coast of Scotland. I was able to give him details of trains, ferries and buses, and I put him in touch with Eric Bishop, then Lecturer in Arabic in Glasgow, who helped him with the ‘transfer’ across that city. I believe that he did in fact reach his goal and was well satisfied with having achieved this. I thought it was very typical of the man that he should be so interested in the particular geographical localities associated with some of the deep experiences of particular human beings. This is in line with the importance for him of the chapel in Brittany dedicated to the Seven Sleepers, and indeed with the importance of Mecca for Muslims and of the ‘holy places’ in Jerusalem for Jews, Christians and Muslims. I notice that Jacques Waardenburg in Le Miroir says that Macdonald was born in Glasgow. If this is correct and Macdonald was not born in Mull, then the place Massignon wanted to visit must have had a formative influence on him in some other respect.

At Cambridge Louis Massignon invited me to call on him in Paris, and I did so several times in the following years. I gather that my visits did not differ greatly in character from those of other scholarly acquaintances. I would ring him up and he would give me a time, usually ten or eleven o’clock in the morning. There seemed to be an understanding that the visit would last for an hour.