Faouzi Skali, Corbin, and C.G.Jung

A new article looks carefully at one aspect of the thought and teachings of Faouzi Skali, the Moroccan Sufi active in both Morocco and France whose point of departure was Guénon and Traditionalism. It is Ricarda Stegmann,  “Re-Spiritualising the World: Ibn ʿArabi in the Thought of Faouzi Skali,” Religiographies 3, no. 2 (2024): 88–102, available here.

Stegmann shows that Skali follows other Traditionalist in leaning heavily on Ibn ʿArabi, as did Guénon, who was introduced to Ibn ʿArabi as the prime example of Sufi thought by Ivan Aguéli. So far, no great surprise. What is a surprise is that, as Stegmann shows through a painstaking comparison of understandings of the two crucial concepts of ʿālam al-mithāl and futuwwa, Skali’s reading of Ibn ʿArabi draws not just on the Traditionalist Titus Burckhardt, as one might expect, but also on Henry Corbin, in some ways a Traditionalist fellow-traveler, who himself reads Ibn ʿArabi through lenses borrowed from C. G. Jung. So a certain amount of Jung is visible in Skali. Why? Because, suggests Stegmann, “Skali uses this recent reception of Ibn ʿArabi through Corbin because Corbin’s work has a similar objective to re-sacralise history as well as current life worlds.” This makes sense. 

An interesting article based on high-quality scholarly detective work that shows how different strands of modern “spiritually relevant” scholarship intertwine. “Spiritually relevant,” incidentally, is Stegmann’s apt term for the work of people like Corbin who live up to mainstream scholarly standards but also go a long way beyond the standard objectives of modern scholarship.