Traditionalist-inspired Bosnian art

A new article deals with a Sufi- and Traditionalist-inspired Bosnian artist, Meliha Teparić (born 1978). It is “Diving Deep into the Word of God: A Sufi Approach to Religious and Trans-Religious Images” by Haris Dervišević and Meliha Teparić, Religions 2024, 15(12), 1525, available open access here. 

Shown to the left is one of three versions of Teparić’s Gens Una Sumus [We are one people] (2017-2018), which shows the Virgin Mary in a mihrab, and is inspired by Frithjof Schuon’s conception of the transcendent unity of religions, and also by the Maryami understanding on the figure of Mary. It is especially relevant in Bosnia, where the sectarian divisions that emerged during the Bosnian War of 1992-1995 are still not fully resolved.

As well as the work shown, Teparić has also worked with re-imagined Arabic calligraphy, as can be seen on her website at http://melihateparic.com/paintings/.

Her work is inspired not only by Islam and Maryami Traditionalism, but also by “the abstract forms of artists like Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt.” This synthesis might be seen as not very traditional, but “Her deconstruction of Islamic calligraphy is not an act of rejection but rather a method of renewal—an attempt to bring the script into conversation with contemporary art while preserving its spiritual significance.”

Teparić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Sarajevo in 2002. In 2003 she joined the Naqshbandi tariqa of Shaykh Mesud Hadžimejlić (1937-2009), who came of a long line of Bosnian Naqshbandi shaykhs, and whose son Ćazim Hadžimejlić (born 1964) was teaching calligraphy at the Academy of Fine Arts. Professor Hadžimejlić later succeeded his father as Shaykh Ćazim.

Dugin’s status in Russian philosophy

A recent article by the Russian philosopher Yulia Sineokaya, currently based in Paris, reviews the Russian philosophical landscape, identifying four generations and dividing them between opponents of Vladimir Putin’s regime (mostly in exile), supporters of the same, and neutrals in “internal exile” who keep their heads down and try to preserve the structures of philosophical scholarship in Russia. It is “Philosophical generations in contemporary Russia,” Ethics & Bioethics 14 (2024), no. 3, pp. 140–150, available here.

The two generations that matter most, Sineokaya considers, are the second and third, consisting of those who emerged under perestroika/glasnost and those who emerged in the 1990s during the period of market reforms. The second generation, she writes, can be seen as “a generation of translators into Russian,” the third as “a generation of interpreters,” and the current generation (which is not yet prominent) as “a generation that speaks the languages of the world.” Possibly a little cruel, but not without truth.

Those in these generations who support the regime “have actively engaged in the process of transforming the Russian education system of values from universal liberal (‘Eurocentric’) to conservative, isolationist ‘Russian traditional values.’” Sineokaya’s list of “the most influential” members of these generations is headed by Alexander Dugin, though she then goes on to divide the neo-Eurasians between two groups: “In the first group are ultra-nationalism and isolationism with elements of the fascism of Alexander Dugin, and in the second is the symphonic pan-Eurasian internationalism of Andrei Smirnov.” It would be interesting to know more about Smirnov. The third generation includes followers of Dugin such as Nikolay Arutyunov and the late Daria Dugina. All of these philosophers, Sineokaya reports, became prominent after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, certainly a turning point in relations between Russia and the West (though she does not say this).

Sineokaya also reports the appointment of Dugin to head the Ivan Ilyin Higher School of Political Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities in August 2023. Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954) was an émigré Orthodox philosopher, often cited by Putin, and also by Dugin. Student protests against this appointment were, in her view, an exception to the neutrality of those who neither support or oppose the regime. She sees the Institute as “stillborn,” having failed to achieve its objectives, but does not say why. More effective, though less noticed, she thinks, is the Institute for Heritage and Contemporary Society, also at the Russian State University of Humanities, led by Valery Fadeyev, a journalist with various government posts, not a philosopher.

The article is mostly written with normal academic neutrality, but Sineokaya is evidently not sympathetic towards Dugin or the Putin regime. That she places Dugin first among the currently ascendant faction of Russian philosophers, then, is a real testimony to his current importance.

Guénon for Algerian immigrants in Paris

A new article on the reception of René Guénon in France, or rather the contemporary presentation of his thought at the Paris Grand Mosque, has just been published in the Journal of Sufi Studies. It is “Guénonian Traditionalism at the Grand Mosque of Paris: A Profile of a Sufi Teacher” by Ricarda Stegmann (JSS 13, 2024, no. 22, pp. 211-229, available here).

Stegmann followed the classes of a well-established (and anonymized) teacher at the Grand Mosque of Paris who introduced some of Guénon’s ideas to first-generation immigrants from Algeria. She draws the thought-provoking conclusion that while at first sight Guénonian perspectives on the difference between the traditional Orient and the modern West might seem to reinforce an old-style Orientalist othering of Algerians and act against their integration and acceptance into French society, in fact it may do the opposite: “While Guénon’s worldview was originally meant to suggest an alternative lifestyle for Westerners, it might here offer migrants a positive evaluation of their Muslim identity as well as an explanation for experiences of foreignness and discrimination in France.” Thus, “it rejects integration while carrying it out.” Yes, it probably does. Worth reading.

More on the history of the esoteric-exoteric distinction

The Swiss scholar Urs App, in his The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), gives an early instance of the esoteric-exoteric distinction that I missed in my book Western Sufism. The esoteric-exoteric distinction is, of course, central to René Guénon's Traditionalism.

In Western Sufism, I identified the analysis of Chinese religion of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) as an early example of universalism (WS, pp. 92-93), but failed to note that some of Ricci’s colleagues were adding an esoteric-exoteric framework to their understanding of Japanese religion. At abut the same time, another Jesuit, Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), interpreted the Buddhist doctrine of the “two truths” into something approaching the esoteric and the exoteric, starting a tradition of interpretation of Japanese religion that leads us to Leibniz and then perhaps to John Toland (1670-1722), whose definition of esoteric and exoteric in Clidophorus (1720) I emphasize in Western Sufism.

According to App, Valignano first made a distinction between the gonkyō (権教, Sanskrit saṁvṛti-satya, provisional or mundane, approximately exoteric) and the jikkyō (実況, Sanskrit paramārtha-satya, ultimate, approximately esoteric) in his Sumario de los errores del Japon (Summary of the Errors of Japan) of 1556.  He made the same distinction again in his Catechismus christianae fidei, in quo veritas nostrae religionis ostenditur, et sectae Iaponenses confutantur (Catechism of the Christian Faith, in which the truth of our religion is shown, and the Japanese sects are refuted) of 1586, which then became standard reading in a 1593 re-edition. 

Ricci did not make Valignano’s distinction, but João Rodrigues (1561-1633) did, and in this was followed by Niccolò Longobardi (1559-1654) in his Trattato su alcuni punti della religione dei cinesi (Treatise on Some Points of the Religion of the Chinese). Longobardi was cited by Leibniz in his Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois (Discourse on the natural theology of the Chinese, 1716) as writing that the Chinese 

have two kinds of doctrine: a secret one that they regard as true and that only the learned understand and teach encoded in figures [symbols]; and the vulgar one which is a figure of the first and is regarded by the learned as false in the natural meaning of the words (cited in App, p. 144). 

Longobardi, then, may have been a source for Leibniz’s one-time friend Toland.

One further update. In Western Sufism, I identify the French Protestant scholar Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) as the first person to identify Sufism, along with Buddhism, as a form of Spinozism in 1702 (WS, p. 103). App notes that an opponent of Bayle’s, the Swiss protestant theologian Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736 ), in fact made the same connection in the case of Buddhism, though not of Sufism, rather earlier, in 1688 (App 150-151).

Bloomington

Just published: an article by Mark Sedgwick (me) on "The Traditionalist micro-utopia of Bloomington, Indiana," in the Journal of Political Ideologies, available here, open access. It starts with general considerations regarding Traditionalism and politics and utopias in general, as the article was written for a special issue focusing on the political. It then looks at Frithjof Schuon's community in Bloomington during the 1980s. Conclusion: "In many ways the Bloomington community was indeed a spiritual micro-utopia free of modern vulgarity and bathed in beauty. To an extent, practice corresponded to principle... In the end, however, the objectives that proved easiest were the less central ones, the aesthetic and the aristocratic. Spiritual objectives were marred by distractions, passions, and ambitions."