cousin, Marcelle Dansaert-Testelin. Activities in World War I During World War I he was a translating officer for the (the French Intelligence) at the headquarters of the 17th French Colonial Division, in which capacity he was affected to the Sykes-Picot mission (1917) as a temporary captain acting on his experience as an Arabist and an Islamist, after a spell of his own volition as an infantry second lieutenant at the Macedonian front (1916), where he was twice mentioned in dispatches and awarded a medal for bravery. At the Sykes-Picot mission he became acquainted with T. E. Lawrence, with whom he had several friendly interviews, among others on the Handbook for Arabia, which served as an example for his own Annuaire du Monde Musulman. They both shared the same sense of honour and betrayal after the collapse of the Arab-Anglo-French relationship on the disclosure of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Massignon does not figure among the friends in Lawrence's published letters, which does not mean that Lawrence did not take an intellectual interest in the subsequent contributions to Arabism by Massignon since, it will be remembered he had started his own career as a keen Francophile. Scholarly work after World War I On June 15, 1919, Massignon was provisionally appointed to the Chair of Muslim Sociology and Sociography at the Collège de France in Paris, as a successor to its creator, Alfred le Chatelier. He was finally given the chair in January 1926, when Le Chatelier retired. He conducted research on various subjects related to Islam, such as the lives of al-Hallaj, Muhammad's companion Salman Pak and the significance of Abraham for the three Abrahamic religions. His four-volume doctoral thesis on al-Hallaj appeared in 1922. It was criticized by many as giving prominence to a relatively marginal figure in Islam: especially sharp criticism appears in Edward Said's Orientalism. Likewise, his great openness for Islam was seen with skeptical eyes by many Catholics. Religious commitments In the 1930s, Francis of Assisi played a great role in his life: In 1931, Massignon became a Franciscan tertiary and took the name of "Ibrahim". On February 9, 1934, he and Mary Kahil, a friend from his youth, prayed at the abandoned Franciscan church of Damietta, Egypt, where Francis of Assisi had met Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil in 1219. They took a vow of ('substitution'), offering their lives for the Muslims, "not so they would be converted, but