Nasr and Hisham Kabbani (and Prince Charles)

A link between Traditionalism and another form of non-Guénonian "traditional" Islam: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who admittedly writes quite a lot of prefaces, has written prefaces for two books by US-based Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani (pictured right), the deputy of Shaykh Muhammad Nazim Adil Al-Haqqani of the Naqshbandiyya Haqqaniyya, one of the best known (and quite possibly the largest) of Sufi tariqas in the contemporary West.

 

Nasr welcomed Kabbani's Classical Islam and the Naqshbandi Sufi Tradition (1994) as "a precious reminder of the traditional and orthodox understanding of Sufism as represented by one of its major orders," and Kababni's multi-volume Encyclopedia of Islamic Doctrine (1998) as "re-stating traditional and orthodox Islamic teachings without any compromise" and restoring the "universal orthodoxy" that had been "attacked not only from without by the forces of modernism ... but also from within." So Nasr approves of Kabbani, and Kabbani approves of Nasr, and has no major problem with his view of "universal orthodoxy."

Nasr might have had something to do with the introduction of Kabbani to Prince Charles (pictured left, in 2006), but this might simply have been a fruit of the British government's counter-radicalization strategy.

Thanks to Simon Stjernholm, whose PhD dissertation "Lovers of Muhammad: A Study of Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufis in the Twenty-First Century" was successfully defended at Lund University on June 1, 2011, for noting these connections.