Spiritualism in defense of Islam

Mattias Gori Olesen recently covered the debate between René Guénon and the Egyptian intelelctual Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī (1875-1954) over modern spirituality in Al-Maʿrifa (see post here). A new article, “Taming the Animal within in Cairo: Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī and ‘Temperate Vegetarianism’” by Mariam Elashmawy (Alif 45, 2025), here, open access) revisits this debate and adds more to our understanding of Wajdī. “It is important to understand that he [Wajdī] sees spiritualism through an Islamic lens,” argues Elashmawy. Spiritualism was not an import from the modern West, as Guénon thought, but a long-standing part of Islam. “As for us Muslims,” wrote Wajdī, “the matter of the appearance of spirits is one of the most common occurrences for those close to Allah” [ie. saints/awliyāʾ]. Spiritualism, as a scientific endorsement of one aspect of Islam, could serve as a defense against the growing threat of materialism and atheism. Wajdī agreed with Guénon regarding the threat, then, but not regarding the remedy.

Ivan Aguéli and Il Convito

René Guénon’s first learned of Sufism from the Swedish Sufi Ivan Aguéli, who was also one of the most important contributors to Guénon’s first journal, La Gnose (1909-12). This was not the only journal for which Aguéli had written, however. He had previously been one of the main contributors to an Egyptian journal, Il Convito/Al-Nādi (1904-1907, with some later issues), published bilingually in Italian and Arabic. Il Convito/Al-Nādi is of importance to those who are interested in the origins of Traditionalism, as well as being of importance for the history of Italian colonial policy in the first decades of the twentieth century. 

Aguéli and the journal are covered in a new book by Paul-André Claudel, Un journal "italo-islamique" à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale : Il Convito / النادي [al-Nâdî] (Le Caire, 1904-1912) [An "Italian-Islamic" newspaper on the eve of World War I: Il Convito / النادي [al-Nâdî] (Cairo, 1904-1912)], published in Alexandria by Centre d'Etudes Alexandrines, 2023, €40, available in Europe from Peeters in Leuven (here) 

Claudel’s book is half study, half anthology of texts from Il Convito/Al-Nādi, published here in both their original language (Italian or Arabic) and in French translation. It is illustrated by facsimiles of the various forms taken by Il Convito/Al-Nādi over the years and also by photographs of key actors and a small number of Egyptian street scenes.

The study consists of an introduction, seven chapters, and an epilogue. The seven chapters start with the history of the journal, the main actors—Aguéli and Enrico Insabato, the Italian who ran it—and their networks: Italian, French, Egyptian, and (less importantly) Turkish. Then comes “One newspaper, three languages,” looking at other comparable newspapers of the time, the relationship between the Italian, Arabic, and finally also Ottoman Turkish sections, at translations, and the linguistic role of Aguéli himself. This is followed by chapters on the journal’s positions on Islam and its polemics with other journals, especially concerning the question of the caliphate, a mosque named after Italy’s King Umberto I, and Italian policy in Tripolitania. The study then closes with a chapter on “Reception, influence, legacy.”

The chapter on Islam is one of the most important, given the relationship between Traditionalism and Islam today. Its sub-sections are:

• To know and to make known: the first editorial
• Reconnecting with spiritual and initiatory Islam
• Philo-Islamism and pan-Islamism
• Unmasking the "enemies of Islam”
• Deconstructing colonization
• Promoting Italy
• Between orientalism and colonialism

The anthology translates twenty texts, mostly by Aguéli, some by Insabato, and some anonymous (and probably also by Aguéli). In addition, the book contains a full index of all articles published and short biographies of all the main persons mentioned. 

Claudel’s book provides us (if we read French) with almost everything we need to know about Il Convito/Al-Nādi and about Aguéli’s role in it. It supplements and deepens two discussions in English on the same topic in Anarchist, Artist, Sufi: The Politics, Painting, and Esotericism of Ivan Aguéli (ed. Mark Sedgwick, 2021, Bloomsbury, paperback now only £26.99), one by Claudel, “Ivan Aguéli's second period in Egypt, 1902–09: The intellectual spheres around Il Convito/Al-Nadi,” and one by Alessandra Marchi, ”Sufi Teachings for pro-Islamic Politics: Ivan Aguéli and Il Convito.” The book is also beautifully produced and printed, and reasonably priced.

New article on Guénon in Cairo

A new article by Mattias Gori Olesen in Aries explains and contextualizes René Guénon’s impact on Egyptian intellectual life before and during his time in Cairo. It is “The Perennial Solidarity of the East: René Guénon, Sufism and Easternist Anti-Colonialism in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt,” Aries 2024, online first at https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-tat00020. 

The article is developed from Gori Olesen’s PhD thesis, for which see an earlier post here. Again, we see the reception of Guénon by ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri, and the subsequent engagement of Guénon with the “Easternists” and the Egyptian journal Al-Maʿrifa, in which Guénon at first wrote. This engagement ended with disagreements over modern education with Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī and over modern spirituality with Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī. 

Gori Oleson concludes that neither “Traditionalism nor any other expressions of Western esotericism came to play a role in Egypt similar to that played by the Theosophical Society in India.” Indeed. When it comes to the roles that India played for the Theosophical Society and that Egypt played for Guénon, and thus for Traditionalism and Western esotericism in general, it is less clear. The experiences that Gori Olesen has brought to light help explain how Guénon came to modify his earlier pairing of the East with tradition and the West with modernity, as they showed that modernity was also present in Egypt. Presumably there were other experiences, of which we do not yet know the details, that would help explain other modifications, notably the growing emphasis on the need for an orthodox exoteric frame for esoteric practice.

ʿAbd al-Rahman ʿIllaysh

 

A contact in Egypt has found this photograph of ʿAbd al-Rahman ʿIllaysh (1840–1921), the Sufi and expert on Muhyiddin ibn ʿArabi who taught Ivan Aguéli much of what he knew about Sufism. Since Guénon took his initial understanding of Sufism, and probably also of the relationship between the esoteric and the exoteric, from Aguéli, the ultimate global impact of ʿAbd al-Rahman ʿIllaysh was considerable. Good to see what he looked like.

New light on Guénon's impact in Egypt

A recent PhD thesis defended at Aarhus University sheds new light on René Guénon’s reception in Egypt. This is Mattias Gori Olesen’s “The Future is Eastern: Muḥammad Luṭfī Jumʿa (1886-1953) and the Drang nach Osten in Interwar Egypt.”

Guénon’s first reception by an Egyptian was before he moved to Cairo, in the 1925 doctoral thesis on the Caliphate of the Egyptian lawyer (and later jurist and politician) ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī (1895-1971). The thesis argued for the re-establishment of a caliphate, and drew on Guénon to argue that an East-West rapprochement could be achieved partly by re-traditionalizing the West, and also argued that different Oriental forms all reflected one common tradition. Al-Sanhūrī presumably encountered Guénon in France while working on his thesis, and does not seem to have been much influenced by Guénon in his later work.

The second reception was after Guénon’s arrival in Cairo, and was in the journal al-Maʿrifa, edited not by Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Rāziq (1885-1947) as both Xavier Accart and I wrongly supposed, but by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Islāmbūlī, about whom little is known. Al-Islāmbūlī was evidently himself a Traditionalist, not only publishing an article by Guénon in the first number of al-Maʿrifa, but also later arguing himself that Ibn ‘Arabī and Advaita Vedanta were one and the same. In this first article, Guénon explained the basics of Traditionalism, with “primordial tradition” rendered into Arabic as al-ʿilm al-qadīm (ancient knowledge).

This second reception soon ran into difficulties, however. First, in June 1931 al-Islāmbūlī arranged a public meeting that was attended by both Guénon and Valentine de Saint-Point. Guénon did not speak, but Saint-Point argued in Traditionalist fashion that education in Egypt should not be modernized to focus on exoteric knowledge, but should rather focus on the esoteric to equip Egyptians to resist modernity. This drew an angry response from Muḥammad Luṭfī Jumʿa, who believed that modern education was one way to strengthen the Eastern nations against the West—this was fundamental to the “Easternism” that he supported, and which is the main topic of Gori Olesen’s thesis.

Then, the next month, al-Maʿrifa published an exchange between Guénon and Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī (1875-1954) on the topic of spiritism. Wajdī wrote in favor of it, Guénon against. Wajdī rebutted, and Guénon rebutted the rebuttal, and never published again in al-Maʿrifa, or perhaps was never published again in al-Maʿrifa. Ironically, as Gori Olesen notes, in 1907 Wajdī had written in Ivan Aguéli’s Il Convito on “L’Islam, Religione Universale” (Islam, the Universal Religion). An Islamic universalism that had agreed with Aguéli, then, did not agree with Guénon.

Gori Olesen concludes:

Ultimately, Guénon and traditionalism were thus only of selective use to the Easternists. The perennialism and praise of the esoteric and spiritual that traditionalism represented were amenable to both Easternism’s political and cultural project and the way they conceived the problem and incipient solution at hand. But the anti-modernism was not… In Jumʿa’s case, the more direct inspiration for his perennial vision came from theosophic literature.

 This seems just about right.

Extended article on Aguéli's Sufism and Humanism

The Israeli scholar Meir Hatina contributed a chapter on "Ivan Aguéli's humanist vision: Islam, Sufism and universalism" to the edited collection Anarchist, Artist, Sufi: The Politics, Painting, and Esotericism of Ivan Aguéli. He has now published an extended version of that chapter as "Turning to the East, Rescuing the West: Sufism and Humanism in Ivan Aguéli’s Thought" in the journal Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations. See https://doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2021.1989815.

From the abstract:

Aguéli’s universal humanism, with Sufism as its main lever, is analysed and located within a transnational intellectual landscape through networks of people, ideas and print media. By attracting Western pilgrims, Sufism served as a nexus of cultural transfer from the Middle East to Europe, thus casting doubts on the prevailing paradigm of Western enlightenment as the backbone of global intellectual history. Sufism was presented by Aguéli as a spiritual philosophy that dealt with the liberation of man from materialism and selfishness. The article deals with a number of issues: How did Aguéli transform Islam and Sufism into a cosmopolitan vision? To what extent was his humanism nurtured by anarchist philosophy, which promoted a just society? Did Aguéli reconcile the anarchist perception of human beings as free creatures with the Sufi perception of total submission to a Sufi master?

New collection on Ivan Aguéli

Just published: Anarchist, Artist, Sufi: The Politics, Painting, and Esotericism of Ivan Aguéli, edited by Mark Sedgwick (Bloomsbury). 

14 chapters by 13 scholars, plus English translations of some of Aguéli's own writings. Sections on art (and anarchism) in Paris, Sufism in Cairo, and Traditionalism--influence on René Guénon. and Traditionalist theories of art. 

Chapter 13, "The significance of Ivan Aguéli for the Traditionalist movement," looks directly at Aguéli, Guénon, and later Traditionalists, but the chapters on Aguéli the Sufi will also be of interest to those who are interested in Traditionalism. And the chapters on Aguéli the Anarchist Artist place everything in a wider context.

And as the blurb says, the book shows that "Islam occupied a more central place in modern European intellectual history than is generally realized. [Aguéli's] life reflects several major modern intellectual, political, and cultural trends. This book is an important contribution to understanding how he came to Islam, the values and influences that informed his life, and-ultimately-the role he played in the modern Western reception of Islam."

The table of contents is:

1. Ivan Aguéli: politics, painting and esotericism, Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University, Denmark)

Part I: Ivan Aguéli, the Anarchist Artist
2. Ivan Aguéli's life and work, Viveca Wessel (formerly Moderna Museet, Sweden)
3. Exploring the territories of the avant-garde: Ivan Aguéli and the institutions of his time, Annika Öhrner (Södertörn University, Sweden)
4. Ivan Aguéli the esotericist in reality and fiction, Per Faxneld (Södertörn University, Sweden)
5. Ivan Aguéli's monotheistic landscapes: From perspectival to solar logics, Simon Sorgenfrei (Södertörn University, Sweden)
6. Painting the sacred as an initiatic path: Art and Cubism in the eyes of Ivan Aguéli, Thierry Zarcone (CNRS, Paris, France)
7. “Kill the audience:” Ivan Aguéli's moralistic utopia of anarchism and Islam, Anthony T. Fiscella (Formerly Lund University, Sweden)

Part II: Ivan Aguéli the Sufi
8. Ivan Aguéli's second period in Egypt, 1902–09: The intellectual spheres around Il Convito/Al-Nadi, Paul-André Claudel (University of Nantes, France)
9. Sufi Teachings for pro-Islamic Politics: Ivan Aguéli and Il Convito, Alessandra Marchi (University of Cagliari, Italy)
10. Ivan Aguéli and the legacy of Emir Abdelkader, Iheb Guermazi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
11. Ivan Aguéli's humanist vision: Islam, Sufism and universalism, Meir Hatina (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
12. Feminism and the Divine Feminine: An exploration of female elements in Ivan Aguéli and subsequent Traditionalist thought, Marcia Hermansen (Loyola University, USA)

Part III: Ivan Aguéli and Traditionalism
13. The significance of Ivan Aguéli for the Traditionalist movement, Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University, Denmark)
14. What is esotericism in art? Ivan Aguéli's art versus the Traditionalists' “traditional Art,” Patrick Ringgenberg (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)

Part IV: Writings by Ivan Aguéli
15. Letter from Paris
16. Letter from Ceylon
17. The Enemies of Islam
18. Pure Art
19. Universality in Islam

Bibliography
Index

The book is currently available only in hardback at £85 or $137.60 and on Kindle at £51.11 or $82.80, so get your library to order or it or wait for the paperback. And in the meantime you can read the introduction and bits of some other chapters on Google Books here.

Guénon, Saint-Point, and Agarttha

A new collection in French casts light on the life of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953), best known for the first part of her life as poet and novelist, Futurist and feminist, but also a convert to Islam (as Rawhiya Nour Eddine) and friend of René Guénon in Cairo. It is Valentine de Saint-Point. Des feux de l'avant-garde à l'appel de l'Orient (Valentine de Saint-Point: From the Fires of the Avant-garde to the Call of the Orient), edited by Paul-André Claudel and Élodie Gaden, and published by the Presses Universitaires de Rennes (2019) at €28.

The book consists of seven sections: artistic beginnings, artistic experiments, “Latin Sisters: Artistic and Theoretical Dialog with Italy,” feminism, politics, influences, and inheritance. Most of these deal with the avant-garde. The call of the Orient is dealt with primarily in the section on politics, in which three of four chapters cover the last three decades of Saint-Point’s life, spent in Cairo, and her Islam. They are by Frédérique Poissonier, Daniel Lançon, and Alessandra Marchi. Poissonier looks primarily at French diplomatic correspondence relating to the attempted expulsion from Egypt of Saint-Point for conducting Bolshevik propaganda, Lançon looks most importantly at Saint-Point’s short-lived Egyptian journal, Le Phœnix. Revue de la renaissance orientale (The Phoenix: Review of the Oriental Renaissance), and Marchi looks at Saint-Point’s conversion to Islam, which she compares to that of an Italian contemporary of Saint-Point, the Italian anarchist (and friend of Benito Mussolini) Leda Rafanelli (1880-1971).

The main source for the relationship between Guénon and Saint-Point is Saint-Point herself, writing in the newspaper L’Egypte nouvelle in 1952, on the first anniversary of Guénon’s death. She had been forewarned of Guénon’s arrival in Cairo, she wrote, and during the years before Guénon’s marriage in 1934 he had visited her weekly, and they spent many hours together. She was not, however, a disciple of his, having made her own study of religions and esotericism before she met him. His work contributed some details to her understanding that were interesting, but “not indispensable.”

One writer who seems to have been more indispensable for Saint-Point was an earlier French esotericist, Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842-1909), who was also appreciated by Guénon. This, and the fact that the circles Saint-Point had inhabited in Europe connected with those that Guénon had inhabited, probably explains the close relationship between Saint-Point and Guénon.

Saint-Yves was best known for a political system, “synarchy,” that he proposed as an alternative to anarchy. He was also known for his description of Agarttha, a subterranean synarchical utopia located somewhere in Asia, probably in India. Agarttha was described in Saint-Yves’ Mission de l'Inde en Europe, mission de l'Europe en Asie. La question du Mahatma et sa solution (India's mission in Europe, Europe's Mission in Asia: The Question of the Mahatma and its Solution), written in 1886 but withdrawn from the press and then not published until after Saint-Yves’ death, in 1910. Its final publication was the work of Papus (Gérard Encausse, 1865-1916), the founder of the Martinist Order, to which Guénon had once belonged. Encausse had acquired Saint-Yves’ papers.

Mission de l'Inde does not deal directly with the question of the Mahatma, which may have been added as a subtitle by Papus to improve sales. This question was raised by the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky (1831-91), who claimed to be in receipt of communications from enlightened adepts known as Mahatmas. It was never made clear who these Mahatmas were. Saint-Yves’ book suggests an answer: they were inhabitants of Agarttha, initiates who guarded the ancient, esoteric Tradition (given a capital T by Saint-Yves).

Guénon addressed the issue of Agarttha (now generally spelled Agartha) in Le roi du monde (The King of the World, 1927), treating accounts of it primarily as myth, and comparing them to other, similar myths. It seems, however, that he did on balance accept that Agarttha, or something like it, actually existed. So did Saint-Point, who wrote of Sufism as “anterior to Islam” and as connected to Agarttha. Guénon, of course, also saw Sufism as a repository of ancient, esoteric Tradition, though he would not necessarily have drawn a connection through Agarttha.

Saint-Point and Guénon agreed on a number of other points, too. Both valued Oriental civilization over Western civilization, which both condemned, and both were French converts to Islam. Again, there were differences, however. Saint-Point’s commitment to the Orient was political and activist, unlike Guénon’s. This was the motivation for her journal and the cause of her political difficulties, resolved only through the personal intervention of the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand (1862-1932), who knew Saint-Point’s ex-husband, Charles Dumont (1867-1939), a member of the French Senate who was twice minister of finance. Briand knew that Saint-Point was not a Bolshevik. Her anti-colonial agitation was probably inspired by Theosophy.

Saint-Point’s Islam was also different from Guénon’s. She admired Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud (1875-1953), the founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who she saw as a “young patriot” who was “returning Muslimism [Musulmanisme] to its origins, to the Spirit.” She evidently knew little of Ibn Saud’s Wahhabism, and he probably appealed to her romantic view of Islam as “the religion of silence, the Voice that speaks in the desert, the poetry of horizons framed by the sands.”

Those who are interested in Agarttha and do not read French may refer to the English translation of Mission de l'Inde, as The Kingdom of Agarttha: A Journey into the Hollow Earth (Inner Traditions, 2008, $14.95), with an excellent introduction by Joscelyn Godwin which is recommended even to those who do read French.

[This post has been edited to remove a quotation incorrectly attributed to Saint-Point that was actually from Rafanelli.]

Guénon at French Institute in Egypt

Slimane Rezki is launching his new book on Guénon, René Guénon : l’homme, le sens de la vérité (René Guénon: The man, the sense of truth; Paris: Al Bouraq, 2016) at the French Institute in Mounira on Wednesday, October 5, at 18:00, under the auspices of the French Embassy in Egypt. The event is co-sponsored with the Azhar (section of Francophone Islamic Studies) and the Fondation René Guénon (René Guénon Foundation) of Abdel Wahed Yahya Guénon, and is notable because Guénon has recently been relatively neglected in Egypt, the country that he made his home.

Rezki himself is also notable, as a French Guénonian of the younger generation, who is active not only in writing but also in giving courses and conferences, especially for the Fondation Conscience Soufie (Sufi Conscience Foundation) of Éric Geoffroy. This organisation is a major hub for Sufi Traditionalism in France.

My thanks to Hatsuki Aishima for bringing this event to my attention.

New book on Western Sufism

A new book on Western Sufism is due out some time around October 2016: Mark Sedgwick, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (New York: Oxford University Press).

Western Sufism is in some ways the continuation of Against the Modern World, but also goes a long way back in time, as the subtitle suggests. Actual Guénonian Traditionalism is only one topic among many, but perennialism is a topic that comes and goes throughout the book, and Guénonian Traditionalism appears in a new light (as do many other things, from Maimonides to Gurdjieff). Ivan Aguéli is covered in more detail than in Against the Modern World, as Swedish sources have been used.

The table of contents can be seen on the companion website, which also has a gallery which gives a good idea of the book's contents. There is also a companion blog, which will be used for posts that are not relevant to Traditionalism.

It is possible to pre-order the book now: $35.00 from Amazon in the US or from Oxford, or £22.99 from Amazon in the UK.

Guénon and Abd al-Halim Mahmud

One of those who knew Guénon in Cairo was Abd al-Halim Mahmud (1910-78), who from 1973 until his death was Shaykh al-Azhar, the senior position in Egypt's official Islamic hierarchy. Abd al-Halim did a PhD in Paris, spoke French, and became friends with a number of French intellectuals in Cairo.

The nature of the relationship between Guénon and Abd al-Halim has been discussed before, and is discussed again in a new book on Abd al-Halim and the media by Hatsuki Aishima, Public Culture and Islam in Modern Egypt: Media, Intellectuals and Society (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016). Aishima disagrees with the view of Abd al-Halim as the intellectual follower of Guénon, pointing out that Abd al-Halim was a public intellectual with an agenda of his own, and referred to Guénon to support that agenda--the critique of Western modernity, and the promotion of the role that Sufism could play in modern Egypt.

Abd al-Halim's agenda was certainly compatible with Guénon's, as Aishima's book shows, but far from identical.

T. J. Winter on Valentine de St.-Point

Thanks to Mohsin R of Lahore for drawing attention in a comment to this blog to a 2009 lecture by T. J. Winter on “The Prophet (PBUH) and his wives.” This 57-minute lecture is of interest partly because almost half of it deals with Valentine de St.-Point (see also later post), Guénon's friend and associate in Cairo, providing three answers to the question asked by a comment on this blog: why would a woman like her convert to Islam? It is also of interest because Winter is a leading non-Guénonian (small-t) traditionalist, and shows here what an excellent lecturer he is.

So, why did  St.-Point become Muslim? Winter suggests three answers. One is that she saw Islam as an “authenticity that industrial man has finally lost.” Another is that Islam provides an alternative to the “fragmentation of the human persona imposed by Christianity.” And the third answer is that St.-Point was far from being the only European artist who looked to the Muslim world and Islam for answers to questions raised by the problems of European civilization.

I think Winter is  probably right, though I am not sure that “the take on gender” follows as directly from views of sexuality as he seems to think.

The lecture is in six parts.

An anti-Traditionalist???

Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), Mufti of the Egyptian Realm, was hardly a Traditionalist. In fact, he was perhaps an anti-Traditionalist. A jurist, religious scholar, political activist, and freemason, he wanted to span the divide between Islam and the West, and advocated a more modern conception of Islam, grounded in rationalism.

I have just published a biography of Muhammad Abduh: Muhammad Abduh (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009). A Middle East edition (as Muhammad Abduh: A Biography) is soon to be published by the American University in Cairo Press.

"Asserting that he was as much a patriotic Egyptian as Islamic reformer, Mark Sedgwick examines the life and thought of the great Mufti and explores his lasting influence on Islamic culture. Drawing on a wealth of new sources and the latest research, this is the only modern biography of this controversial and enigmatic figure."

Guénon on Egyptian television

Guénon has finally appeared in an Egyptian soap opera!

Hatsuki Aishima, a scholar working on Abd al-Halim Mahmud (1910-78), a celebrated rector of the Azhar in the 1970s, found Guénon in a multipart Ramadan soap opera devoted to the life of Abd al-Halim Mahmud.

Of course, one has to simplify a bit for television. Guénon was not the only Frenchman who Abd al-Halim Mahmud knew. The other was Louis Massignon, the celebrated scholar of Islam who taught him at the Sorbonne. So Guénon and Massignon, who did not think highly of each other, are combined uncomfortably into one person, Frédéric.

In the soap, Guénon-Massignon converts to Islam in Paris after reading the Quran with Abd al-Halim Mahmud, and then moves to Cairo, where he lives as a pious recluse in a villa in Dokki, working on ancient Islamic manuscripts. Well, sort of.

The soap not only manages to introduce Guénon to Egyptian television viewers without referring to Traditionalism, but even manages to deal with Sufism without referring to Sufism--reducing it simply to generic piety, ignoring altogether anything that might seem controversial today. That's modernity for you!

Source: Hatsuki Aishima, "Producing a National Icon through the Mass Mediated Hagiography: al-`Arif billah al-Imam `Abd al-Halim Mahmud and Sufism in the Egyptian TV Serials," paper given at a conference on "Islamic Resurgence in the Age of Globalization: Myth, Memory, Emotion," held at the NTNU, Trondheim, September 4-6, 2009.

More on Valentine de St.-Point

In my last post on Valentine de St.-Point, I said that it seemed she was more important as an artist than I had thought. Well, it now seems that I have to add to this that she was also more important as a thinker than I had thought.

An anonymous comment on my earlier post has drawn my attention to her Manifeste de la femme futuriste (Manifesto of the futurist woman) of 1912. This is available in French in a new edition of 2005 (Paris, Mille et une Nuits) and in English translation in Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: a century of isms (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), and makes fascinating reading in whatever language.

Like Evola, St.-Point is interested in virility, and like Evola, St.-Point distinguishes the spiritual from the biological. “It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of masculinity and femininity.” Unlike Evola, she sees a need for a balance in these two essential principles: “The fecund periods, when the most heroes and geniuses come forth from the terrain of culture in all its ebullience, are rich in masculinity and femininity.” Like Guénon (and of course like many others at the time), she sees an age ending–an age dominated by femininity. A strong dose of virility, of the brute, was needed to restore balance and move on to the next age. Unlike Guénon, she placed the new age firmly in the future (she was a futurist, after all), associating “turning toward the past” with femininity.

Nancy Locke sees St.-Point’s Manifesto as Fascist (“Valentine de Saint-Point and the Fascist Construction of Women” in Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, eds, Fascist visions: art and ideology in France and Italy, Princeton University Press, 1997) while Barbara Spackman sees it as pre-Fascist (“Fascist Women and the Rhetoric of Virility” in Robin Pickering-Iazzi, ed., Mothers of invention: women, Italian fascism, and culture, University of Minnesota Press, 1995). In certain ways, both are right–depending very much on what one means by fascism, of course. Perhaps more accurately, Steven Aschheim sees it as "almost a parady of eclectic, erotic-liberationist Nietzscheanism" (The Nietzsche legacy in Germany, 1890-1990, University of California Press, 1994).

St.-Point provides yet another glimpse of the period and intellectual milieu out of which Traditionalism arose, even if she had no direct influence on its origins. Nietzsche, avant-garde art... and of course Theosophy too. St.-Point converted to Islam in Morocco in 1918, then spent several years with Blavatsky's works.

She moved to Cairo in 1924, and was initially involved in something like a Cairene version of her earlier life--a "Centre idéiste" and political activity in favor of the Egyptian and Syrian nationalists, rather like Aguéli some years before. She published a French-language journal, Phœnix, revue de la renaissance orientale (despite the widespread view in Egypt at the time that the Oriental Renaissance involved a renaissance of Arabic literature). Political activities ceased in 1928: she was expelled from Egypt, and the order was only rescinded after the intervention of the French embassy, and on condition that she abandon politics. Two years later, Guénon arrived and she became his closest French friend in Cairo.

There are a number of books on her in French, of which the most recent and most complete seems to be Véronique Richard de la Fuente, Valentine de Saint Point, une poétesse dans l'avant-garde Futuriste et méditerranéiste (Édition des Albères 2003).

Valentine de St.-Point

Valentine de St.-Point, Guénon's friend and associate in Cairo, was more important as an artist than I had thought--mostly for her 1917 performance of Metachorie at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and as the only female futurist.

For the 2009 PERFORMA in New York, marking the Centenary of Furturism, Adrien Sina and RoseLee Goldberg are proposing a multi-media symposium, "Valentine de St.-Point: Tragédies Charnelles. Performance, Dance, War, Politics and Eroticism."
Articles that have newly come to my attention include:

• Günter Berghaus, "Dance and the Futurist Woman: The Work of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953)," Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 11, no. 2 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 27-42.
• Leslie Satin, "Valentine de Saint-Point," Dance Research Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 1-12.

For the start of an investigation of the relationshop between St.-Point's art and her spiritual life, see:

• Nancy Gaye Moore, "The Hermetic Dances of Valentine De St.-Point (1875–1953)," Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars Twenty-second Annual Conference, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico10–13 June 1999.
• Nancy Gaye Moore, "The Convergence of Orientalism and Parisian Occultism in the Dances of Valentine de St.-Point (1875-1953)" Supplement to the Proceedings of the Congress on Research in Dance held at NYU, October 26-28, 2001.

Italian scholar visits Guénon's tomb

Another pilgrimage to Guénon's tomb... this time, by Massimo Introvigne (see photo), the director of CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions, one of the leading bodies in the field.

In his account of his visit (in French), Intovigne gives a mobile phone number for those looking for the tomb (+ 20 12 375 6109). But since phone numbers in Egypt change quite frequently, if this doesn't work, see an earlier post on the subject here.

The account also has some good photos.

Finding Guénon's tomb

Since I've had a number of enquiries about how to find Guénon's tomb, here are the directions:

1. Cross Salah Salem from the Azhar to the Northern Cemetery, the Qarafa al Kubra, also known as "the city of the dead."
2. Look on the left for the mausoleum of the Tawil family (see photo), which is easily identifiable.
3. Go through the small archway in front of the Tawil mausoleum, and ask someone for the tomb of Shaykh Abd al-Wahid Yahya. It is nearby.