sent on an archeological mission to Mesopotamia. In Baghdad he was the guest of the great Muslim family of the Alusi, who introduced him to the brand of Arab hospitality he was to honour throughout his life. It was the Alusi who saved him from a very dangerous situation in the desert when in 1908—during the ferment of the Young Turk Revolution—he was captured as a "spy" and almost killed. (The Alusi also helped him gather the sources for his magnum opus on the 10th-century mystic al-Hallaj.) This situation of captivity, and the experience of Muslim spirituality, also brought about his conversion to Christianity: In mortal danger, which filled him with extreme, physical anguish, he first felt remorse for his past life, made an abortive and tentative suicide attempt, fell into a delirium and a state of great agitation (later diagnosed as either malaria, or a stroke caused by sun and fatigue), and finally experienced the presence of God as a "visitation of a Stranger", who overwhelmed him, leaving him passive and helpless, feeling judged for having judged others harshly, and almost making him lose his very sense of identity. Yet he also experienced this visitation as a liberation from his (outer) captivity, and a promise that he was going to return to Paris. He himself interpreted the state of delirium as a "reaction of [his] brain to the forced conversion of [his] soul". He recovered rapidly from his illness, had a second spiritual experience and travelled to Beirut accompanied by an Iraqi Carmelite priest, Père Anastase-Marie de Saint Elie. In Beirut, he made a confession to Père Anastase, thus confirming his conversion to Catholicism. Massignon strongly felt that he was assisted in his encounter with God and in his conversion by the intercession of living and deceased friends, among them Joris-Karl Huysmans and Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), who had also experienced God in a Muslim context. Thus, his conversion provided a firm basis for his lifelong association with the latter. He made Massignon the executor of his spiritual legacy: the —the Rule for the foundation of the Little Brothers of Jesus, which Louis Massignon duly saw to publication in 1928 after a long hesitation by the Church authorities over the imprimatur. However, Massignon did not follow Foucauld's invitation to join him in his life as a hermit among the Tuareg in Tamanrasset. Instead, in January 1914, he married a