The nature of the “holy” or “sanctified” individual in society marks them as separate, powerful, and “other” from culture or society, setting these individuals in sometimes antagonistic and complicated relationships with normative religious and social mores. At times, the rhetoric of “sainthood” is applied to individuals perceived as dangerous precisely because doing so will set them apart, ideally diffusing part of their “power” and threatening traits. This session asks how the marking of “saint” opens up power relationships, reception histories, and subsequent relationships to the saint as places of inquiry for the hagiologist.
The majdhūb is a deviant saint. The majdhūb veers from the sober path of disciplining the self, pulled directly toward God. In entering the mystical state of jadhb, a majdhūb begins to act in erratic, sometimes terrible ways. Narratives of the majdhūb can cause discomfort, prompting hagiographers to justify the majdhūb’s saintly status. In this presentation, I examine the use of deviant majdhūb narratives within Maghribi Sufi hagiographical literature. I ask: How do hagiographers navigate the discomfort produced by the majdhūb? What strategies do they draw on to alternately mute or highlight the relationship of the majdhūb to madness, of the majdhūb to sainthood? Finally, what do deviant majdhūb narratives reveal about the relationship between sainthood and power? I argue that hagiographies of majdhūb saints are never merely descriptive; rather, they illuminate broader arguments about who is considered a saint and what acts, while terrible, may be considered miraculous.
This paper presents three modern Orthodox candidates as “dangerous saints.” Mother Maria Skobtsova of Paris was a scandal to many of her time, even though she devoted that last twenty years of the life to assisting the poor and outcast, and, during WW II, Jews. She was gassed in a German concentration camp in March 1945. Fr. Pavel Florensky was a bold theologian whose ideas disturbed many. He remained in the Soviet Union, but was eventually arrested, sent to the gulag, and executed in 1937. Fr. Alexander Men was an innovative pastor and theologian who became prominent in the Gorbachev era, only to be assassinated in 1990. The Orthodox Church has difficulty accommodating unconventional but manifestly saintly persons, such as our three candidates, when they challenge, by their lives or their teachings, conventional views about what Orthodoxy is and what holiness in the Orthodox Church should be.
I argue that MLK’s transformation from a publicly disavowed critic of American society during his lifetime to a celebrated and honored hero of racial integration in the collective memory of the American public constitutes the construction persona of a secular saint for and by the American public that follows along the same narrative structures that we encounter in hagiographies of sanctified religious figures. The curtailed and tailored portrayal of MLK’s activism focuses on the iconic moment of his speech during the March on Washington and is meant to cast him as an emblem of successful and peaceful racial integration that reflects positively on the American society at large.