Dugin OpEd in FT

Alexander Dugin has an OpEd piece in today's Financial Times, "The world needs to understand Putin" (March 12, 2013). Very measured and moderate--Putin is a conservative, and why this is, and why it matters. Dugin is described as "chairman of the department of the sociology of international relations at Moscow State University." Well, yes. But there's a lot more to him than that!

Postdoc in Sweden

The University of Gothenburg in Sweden is offering a postdoctoral fellowship for a person working on "Western Esotericism and Islamology, for example notions of the Muslim in esoteric discourses, transfer of magic, alchemy and astrology from Islamic traditions to Western currents, and the adoption of Western esoteric practices within Sufic organisations." Some projects dealing with Traditionalist Sufism would fall in that category, I think. Further details here. It's a good department.

Traditionalist economics

Waleed El-Ansary has brought Traditionalism to bear on a new area, Islamic economics, following on E. F. Schumacher's classic application of Traditionalism to economics in general in Small as Beautiful (1973).

El-Ansary, who is University Chair of Islamic Studies in the Department of Theology at Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio), has contributed a chapter on "Islamic Science and the Critique of Neoclassical Economic Theory" to Karen Hunt-Ahmed's Contemporary Islamic Finance: Innovations, Applications and Best Practices (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013), pp. 75-101. El-Ansary gives Schumacher and S. H. Nasr as his points of departure, and concludes that the application of divine law to economics not only ensures that spiritual needs are met rather than ignored, but also strengthens such principles such as justice and contract that are essential for free markets to operate in the first place.

Breton, Surrealism, Traditionalism

In 1978, Eddy Batache published Surréalisme et tradition: la pensée d’André Breton jugée selon l’oeuvre de René Guénon (Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles), arguing for Guénon as a major influence on Breton and on Surrealism.

Tessel Bauduin has now completed a PhD dissertation, "The occultation of Surrealism: a study of the relationship between Bretonian Surrealism and western esotericism" (University of Amsterdam, 2012), arguing against Batache (amongst other things). Her dissertation may be downloaded from here.

Batache, argues Bauduin, built his argument on accumulating similarities between Breton's thought and Traditionalism, and ignored the fundamental incompatibilities between Surrealism, which was of the Left and had no interest in extra-European phenomena, and Traditionalism, which tended towards the Right and was primarily interested in extra-European phenomena. Also, as Breton himself said, Guénon was interested in the mind, not the heart. Yes, Breton was briefly interested in Guénon's work, but he was interested in it in the way that Surrealism in general was interested in esotericism in general and even in spiritism: poetically, as a source of material.

A nicely written and well argued dissertation that makes a real contribution to our understanding of the relationship between art and esotericism in general, and Surrealism and Traditionalism in particular.

A Jesuit critique of Traditionalism

An interesting discussion of Traditionalism has been published by Damian Howard, a Christian theologian and Jesuit priest.

Howard's 2011 book, Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview (Abingdon: Routledge), deals with three Islamic approaches to the challenges raised by the theory of evolution. First come approaches inspired by Henri Bergson, second comes the Traditionalist approach, and third and last come approaches Howard places under the rubric of Islamization of knowledge--Syed Muhammad al-Attas and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). None exactly mainstream in Islam, then, but all interesting. Howard explains his selection of Traditionalism on grounds of its inherent interest, and of the influence Traditionalist views have among non-Traditionalist Muslims, especially in the West.

For Howard, Traditionalism's rejection of evolution follows inevitably from its rejection of modernity--a rejection which he sees as itself problematic. Firstly, the Traditionalist conception of tradition is simply too all-inclusive: "it elides radically different models of revelation" (p. 110). Secondly, to see modernity as "pure negation of the transcendent" (p, 118) is to grant too much to modernity, in effect to accept modernity's own claim to be unique.

Howard himself would prefer to distinguish the major elements that he sees Traditionmalism lumping together as "tradition"--"emanationist metaphysics, initiatory esotericism, a theology of revelation" (p. 117)--and to see modernity as "a complex, multi-layered phenomenon" (p. 118).

An interesting critique, and an interesting book.