Rubbing salt in wounds is not a healthy exercise so I am not asking you about the European Parliament election results. Instead I am falling back upon one of the staple questions that 60 second interviewers ask, except that in your case you are allowed a slightly longer answer: What book are you reading at the moment?

Before answering your question, I would like very briefly to clarify the motivation of my post-election blues: it is the loss of the elections by the Left.

On the one hand, the increased relative majority obtained by the Popular Party cannot be considered to be a victory of Christian Democracy. Even my life-long friend Guido de Marco, who is above any suspicion of being a Marxist, defined his position on the political spectrum as being centre-left. The dominant group in the Popular Party is now rather more right than centre-right.

On the other hand, the local victory by the Labour Party certainly cannot be considered an exception to the general trend. Alfred Sant had long abandoned any pretence of recognisably left economic policy. This, in my opinion, consists in essence of extending democracy from the sphere of political institutions to the structure of work organisations by introducing equality in place of hierarchy as governing principle.

When I said something to this effect on television, the Labour Party obtained a right of reply that had to be restricted to the couple of minutes that I had actually taken up to make my point. The reply consisted only in a declaration that Labour's policy was quite similar to that of the European Socialists.

Evidently that did not contradict what I had said. Everybody knows that Tony Blair's policy, for instance, was that of capitalism "with a human face". The sad thing that even this "human face" was discarded like a mask by the Labour Party in Malta at the EP election when dealing with the issue that occupied most attention, namely immigration.

Thus, I see little hope of the European Parliament working towards what I have repeatedly said I consider should be main planks in a left policy.

The first, it may be recalled, is building up the institutions for holistic governance of the Mediterranean as a step towards the Euro-African partnership so badly required by the global situation.

The second is developing the sort of self-managing enterprises that the electronic revolution has made possible. Such policies, as I have argued on different occasions, are among the components most likely to get us beyond the crisis that neo-Liberalism (i.e. Capitalism in its post-Keynesian form) has engulfed the entire world in.

Now that you have not allowed me to spare you the pain of your previous remarks can you answer my question about the book.

It is a two-volume paperback edition of the memorable writings of Louis Massignon published by Robert Laffont, in a series with which French Ambassador Daniel Rondeau was connected.

Massignon is a writer whom I consider to be one of my spiritual fathers. He was for half of the 20th Century the leading French Orientalist and there is evidence of this in the current collection, notably in the section called Privilege of Semitic Languages.

In particular, Massignon's unconventional reflections on 'Semitic vowels and musical semantics' should be fascinating for all lovers of the Maltese language. But it is the political and theological dimensions of his lifetime's activity that attracted me most.

Massignon happened to be the French counterpart of Laurence of Arabia in guiding the Arab rising against the Turks in the First World War and in fact he walked into Jerusalem by the side of Laurence on November 11, 1917, at the head of the allied Arab and Anglo-French forces. Like Laurence, he was subsequently dismayed when the promises made to the Arabs were mutilated. He became a follower of Gandhi and wrote a major book on the importance of 'keeping one's word' particularly in Muslim culture.

The other great theme of Massignon's work is hospitality, a common perspective in all the three religions that he famously described as "the children of Abraham".

The author of the preface to the current edition shows that this focus on hospitality is intimately linked to a distinctive way of regarding God. "He remains always the Stranger, the impoverished, not He who lacks nothing, not the necessary being, but He who is the reject of all the extant universe, the Displaced Person."

There is a very moving 34 page memoir on Charles de Foucauld who had nourished great hopes of Massignon becoming the first of the Community of the Little Brothers that Blessed Charles dreamt of establishing. Massignon, however, married and had three children.

He led an ascetic and even mystical life, following the counsel of Brother Charles even after the assassination of perhaps the greatest spiritual master of our times in 1917 that coincided with Massignon's entry into Jerusalem.

Is there any connection between Massignon's message and our current predicament?

The editor devotes the final paragraph of the preface to noting the relevance of Massignon's consideration of God as essentially the host of whom we are the guest in this world to a situation when hospitality has become a concept degraded by its commercialisation by the tourist industry and when migrants are simply rejected on the basis of "obscene accounting" mentalities.

Massignon's strong convictions about how the Palestine question should have been resolved are now outdated, but his presentation of the Sufi crucified martyr Al-Hallaj is a model of self-sacrifice offered to Jews and Christians as well as Muslims. His vision of the dialogue between the Sons of Abraham as a path-breaker to global peace in justice is still as valid as ever.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.