Happy twentieth birthday, blog!

Hard to believe, but this blog is now twenty years old. The first post was dated June 14, 2006, and explained that it was time for the addenda I had been publishing on the companion website to Against the Modern World to take a new form. June 15, 2026 saw the first real post: a book announcement, welcoming Jean-Pierre Laurant’s René Guénon, les enjeux d'une lecture. Since then there have been 536 more posts, an average of about two a month, and 1,209 comments.

The blog has become more popular over time. It took nine years to reach 250,000 page views (in 2015), two more years to reach 500,000 page views (in 2017), six years to add a further 500,000 page views and reach 1,000,000 (in 2023), and finally three years to reach 2,000,000 (in 2026). This reflects both increased interest and the fact that as the years have passed there have been ever more pages for an interested visitor to view.

Over these twenty years, the blog’s audience has become more global. From 2006 to 2015, 45% of visits came from the US, UK and Canada, and from 2006 to 2017, 59% from the US alone. By 2023 the US share had fallen to 38%, and to 37% by 2026. Non-US interest came initially from the UK, France, Germany, Russia, Sweden, and Brazil, then (by 2017) especially from the UK and Russia, a pattern little changed in 2023. By 2026, Singapore came in second place after the US, followed by the UK, Brazil, Hong Kong, France, Germany, and Russia. Why the new interest in Singapore and Hong Kong? If you know, please leave a comment.

King Charles, Tradiitonalism, and a New Film

The Traditionalism of King Charles III of the UK is discussed in both Against the Modern World and Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order, and also briefly in one post on this blog, here. Many expected that we would hear less on possibly controversial topics from King Charles than we did from Prince Charles, but this is not the case. As king, he is promoting his own environmentalist-Traditionalist project that he calls “Harmony,” most recently in a documentary film released today, Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision. Available on Amazon Prime.

There is a page devoted to the “The Philosophy of Harmony” on the website of The King’s Foundation, available here, which refers to the film and also to the 2010 book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World that was published when the king was still Prince of Wales. The book and film both showcase environmentalism, but the Traditionalism is visible in the background, as I argue in an article just published in British magazine The New Statesman, available here.

Kathleen Raine, almost a Traditionalist

A new study of the poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) has just been published: Jenny Messenger, Kathleen Raine: Classics and Consciousness (Bloomsbury 2025). This supplements the “authorized biography” by Philippa Bernard, No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine (Shepheard Walwyn 2012). 

Raine was almost a Traditionalist, and it is interesting to explore how she differed from the Traditionalists on whom this blog focuses. She was a perennialist and worked (in her own words) to “reaffirm the Perennial Philosophy which, like an underground river, has flowed through all civilizations and all ages, and wherever it sends up springs and fountains, Beauty and Wisdom have flowered.” She was well versed in the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, and in Messenger’s view built on their work, though it is not explained quite how. She also worked with individual Traditionalists in England. Her Temenos journal (now the Temenos Academy Review) was established with the help of Keith Critchlow, Brian Keeble and Philip Sherrard, all of whom were probably Maryamis. Speakers at her Temenos Academy have included many Traditionalists. Raine also disliked the modern world, and—like many but not all Traditionalists—was a scholar who was somewhat on the margins of the mainstream, since she insisted that the important thing about ancient texts was their meaning for people today, more than their place in the historical context.

Several things make Raine different, however. One is that although she disliked the modern world, she did not systematically attack it or develop a theoretical basis for condemning it. Another is that she admired and studied two (relatively) modern figures, William Blake and W. B. Yeats. Then come her ancient sources: Plato and the Neoplatonists, who the Traditionalists have generally ignored—wrongly, in my view, since the Sufi philosophy that Traditionalists have studied with such attention contains much that is derived from Neoplatonism. As Messenger puts it,

She did not view eastern religions and philosophies as entirely hers, however. Hinduism and Buddhism were not her culture or tradition, she felt. Plato and Plotinus, enfolded within the grand arc of Western civilization, were – despite the fact that the Neoplatonists were not at all ‘western’ and instead were from places like Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

Finally, Raine was a woman, which—for some reason I have never understand—none of the major figures in the Traditionalist movement have been.

Tavener and the Musica perennis

Several chapters in a new collection discuss the Traditionalism of Sir John Tavener (1944-2013), the acclaimed British musician who was a follower of Frithjof Schuon. It is Heart's Ease: Spirituality in the Music of John Tavener, edited by June Boyce-Tillman and Anne-Marie Forbes (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020).

The collection consists of nine chapters and eight “interludes,” preludes or postludes, distinguished from the formal chapters by being more reflective and less academic, and often very short. The opening “prelude,” by Boyce-Tillman, sets the scene with a short biographical introduction to Tavener and his best-known work. This is followed by a chapter in which Stephen Roberts traces “Tavener’s Musical Theology of Religions,” working through Orthodoxy to arrive at Traditionalism. 

Then comes one of two chapters that deal at length with Tavener’s Traditionalism, “In Search of Truth: John Tavener’s Transition from Western Culture to Eastern Tradition” by Andrzej Kęsiak, a Polish theologian and musician who is currently working in the UK on a PhD thesis about Tavener. Kęsiak starts with Tavener’s rejection of modernism, follows through the “Search for Tradition” that led him to Orthodox Christianity, and ends with Traditionalism and the “Musica perennis,” Tavener’s application to music of Schuon’s understanding of the transcendent unity of religions.

Several further chapters deal with particular compositions: Tavener’s “Prayer to the Holy Trinity,” his “To a Child Dancing in the Wind,” his Requiem, and his “Three Hymns of George Herbert.” Then come three chapters dealing with particular issues: his “Search for an English Orthodox Musical Language”, “Sacred Silence,” and finally the use of his music in therapy. 

Of these chapters, the most important for those who are interested primarily in Traditionalism is the chapter on Tavener’s Requiem, written by Bart Seaton-Said, a practicing musician and former Anglican Franciscan. This is mostly a musical analysis, and shows how the Requiem is a “broadening of the parameters of sacred Christian art” and “manifests outwardly Schuon’s theme of the ‘transcendent unity of relations.’”

The book provides a useful study of Tavener’s music, and of the impact of Traditionalism on that music. Tavener’s project of discovering the Musica perennis is one of the most interesting recent developments of traditionalism, and – arguably – one of the most successful.

New articles on the World of Islam Festival of 1976

A number of articles have been published recently dealing with the World of Islam Festival of 1976, held in London, financed mostly by the UAE, and presenting a very Traditionalist perspective of Islamic art, given the major roles played by Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

The most comprehensive article is Klas Grinell, "Framing Islam at the World of Islam Festival, London, 1976," Journal of Muslims in Europe 7, no. 1 (2018): 73–93. https://doi.org/10.1163/22117954-12341365. This (open-access) article is also the only article that fully discusses Traditionalist involvement and perspective. It describes the Festival and its organisation in detail, and identifies two problems with its underlying conception. One is that it understood Islamic art as a single essence ("an art form governed by a few esoteric and timeless principles"), rather than following normal academic practice that looks at art (including Islamic art) in terms of periods, styles, and so on. The other is that it excluded contemporary Islamic art; Islamic art was shown as traditional, in opposition to modernity--which is fine in Traditionalist terms--or alternatively as being "incompatible with contemporary British everyday life," which is more problematic in contemporary (Islamophobic) terms.

Grinell argues that the Festival has a continuing impact today. Even if academic scholars of art were never very impressed by the way the Festival was organized, this has had a lasting impact on museum curators. Grinell does not say which museums he is thinking of, but the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar immediately comes to mind. For the adverse reaction of academic scholars of art, Grinell cites an earlier article by Oleg Grabar, "Geometry and Ideology: The Festival of Islam and the Study of Islamic Art," in A Way Prepared, Essays on Islamic Culture in Honor of Richard Bayly Winder, ed. Farhad Kazemi and R. D. McChesney (New York: New York University Press, 1988), pp. 145-52. This has been republished and is also available online, at https://archnet.org/publications/5019.

A similar but less comprehensive article in French is Monia Abdallah, "World of Islam Festival (Londres 1976) : Naissance d’un nouveau paradigme pour les arts de l’Islam," Revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review  39, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1-100. https://doi.org/10.7202/1026192ar. Abdallah broadly agrees with Grinell (or rather, Grinell follows Abdallah), and makes similar arguments.

Another article is Anneka Lenssen, "'Muslims to Take Over Institute for Contemporary Art:' The 1976 World of Islam Festival," Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 42, no. 1/2 (Summer/Winter 2008): 40-47. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23063541. Tis has a good discussion of the exhibition at the the Hayward Gallery.

One further article on the Festival does not engage in these discussions, but tells a good story: Rachel Ainsworth and Sarah Worden, “Jean Jenkins: Music and the 1976 World of Islam Festival,” Journal of Museum Ethnography 28 (2015): 184–197. www.jstor.org/stable/43915897.

Traditionalists and Neo-Tradtionalists

A new edited book has two chapters on Neo-Traditionalists, one of which also deals with a Traditionalist, Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad in Jordan, and with the reading of Julius Evola by a Neo-Traditionlaist, Abdal Hakim Murad in England. The book as a whole deals with modernity in the Muslim world.

The book is Muslim Subjectivities in Global Modernity: Islamic Traditions and the Construction of Modern Muslim Identities, ed. Dietrich Jung and Kirstine Sinclair (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

The first chapter is Mark Sedgwick, "The Modernity of Neo-Traditionalist Islam," pp. 121–146, available https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425576_008.

Abstract: The chapter discusses certain exponents of “traditional Islam” who are organized in an informal network spanning both the Arab world and the West and who are referred to as “Neo-traditionalists,” since the chapter argues that their traditionalism is, in fact, modern. The key figures are Muhammad Saʿid Ramadan al-Buti in Syria, ʿAli Gomaa in Egypt, ʿUmar bin Hafiz in Yemen, Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad and Nuh Keller in Jordan, Abdal Hakim Murad in England, and Hamza Yusuf Hanson in the USA. It is argued that Neo-Traditionalism is a product of what Peter Wagner would call a “crisis of modernity,” the reaction against one stage of modernity that gives rise to a new stage of modernity. 

And the second chapter is Kirstine Sinclair, "An Islamic University in the West and the Question of Modern Authenticity," pp. 147–165, available https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425576_009.

Abstract: The aim of this chapter is to discuss how Islamic universities in the West facilitate and condition the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities in minority contexts with emphasis on the institutions as providers of guidelines for good, Muslim minority life. This is done through a case study of Cambridge Muslim College in the UK, its values and aims, as well as through interviews with the founder and dean [Abdal Hakim Murad], faculty members and students and participatory observation. Cambridge Muslim College sees itself as mediator between Islamic traditions and modern Muslims in the West, and as having a responsibility in engaging in the development of both Muslim minorities and the wider society within which it operates. 

For those who are interested in modernity, the blurb of the book as a whole is:

With critical reference to Eisenstadt's theory of "multiple modernities," Muslim Subjectivities in Global Modernity discusses the role of religion in the modern world. The case studies all provide examples illustrating the ambition to understand how Islamic traditions have contributed to the construction of practices and expressions of modern Muslim selfhoods. In doing so, they underpin Eisenstadt's argument that religious traditions can play a pivotal role in the construction of historically different interpretations of modernity. At the same time, however, they point to a void in Eisenstadt's approach that does not problematize the multiplicity of forms in which this role of religious traditions plays out historically. Consequently, the authors of the present volume focus on the multiple modernities within Islam, which Eisenstadt's theory hardly takes into account.

E. F. Schumacher's path to Traditionalism

A new article in the Journal of the History of Economic Thought traces the path followed by E. F. Schumacher (1911-77, pictured) from being a “relatively conventional economist” to writing the iconoclastic best-seller Small is Beautiful, and then to Traditionalism. The article, “E. F. Schumacher and the Making of ‘Buddhist Economics,’ 1950–1973,” is by Robert Leonard, Professor of Economics at the University of Québec.

Leonard is more interested in the origins of Small is Beautiful (1973) than in Schumacher’s Traditionalism, which from his perspective is justified, as it was Small is Beautiful that had a major impact; Schumacher’s later, Traditionalist A Guide for the Perplexed (1977) was less widely read. Even so, the article shows clearly how Schumacher encountered Traditionalism—and it was not, nor at least not mostly, through Lord Northbourne (1896-1982), as I suggested might have been the case in an earlier blog post.

What lay behind Small is Beautiful was first the impact on a German (Schumacher was born in Bonn) who had spent the Second World War in England of seeing what had happened to Germany in his absence. This led Schumacher to difficult questions and then to the Fourth Way of George Gurdjieff (died 1949). He translated The New Man by the Gurdjieff teacher Maurice Nicoll (1884-1953) into German, and spent time with the Gurdjieff teacher and one-time Sufi J. G. Bennett (1897-1974) at Coombe Springs (later famously acquired by Idries Shah, 1924-96).

When he went to Burma on assignment in 1955, Schumacher initially agreed with another German-British former follower of Bennett living in Burma, the anthropologist and film-maker Gulla Pfeffer (1887-1967), that Gurdjieff’s teaching was really Buddhism—an interesting counterpart to those who were at about the same time concluding that Gurdjieff’s teaching was really Sufism. Pfeffer suggested that Gurdjieff had learned his teachings from “a monastery in Upper Burma," but Schumacher did not go so far: “What we in England call ‘Work’ [the Gurdjieff method] is everywhere here a living thing,” he wrote. “I find that the G./O. [Gurdjieff/Ouspensky] teaching… is remarkably accurate. ‘Self-remembering’ is identical (as far as I can see) with ‘Sattipatthana’ [awareness] as it is being taught here.”

The next ingredients were Gandhi (1869-1948) and swadeshi (self-sufficiency), a nationalist doctrine of local production that Gandhi modified and promoted, and which was then much discussed. It has echoes in today’s local source and ethical trade movements--and, of course, in Small is Beautiful.

Schumacher's path, then, is clear. It was the war-time devastation of Germany, Gurdjieff, and Buddhism, then, that helped structure his reaction to Burma. Next come Gandhi and swadeshi. This gives us Small is Beautiful, and also gives us an interested reader of Ananada Coomaraswamy’s Art and Swadeshi (1912). Coomaraswamy then naturally leads to René Guénon, Traditionalism, and A Guide for the Perplexed. Clear.

British Roman Catholic Traditionalism in the 1940s and 1950s

As Scott Randall Paine, an American priest teaching at the University of Brasilia, notes, there are not many Roman Catholic Traditionalists. This, Paine thinks, may be because it is hard to transfer the central esoteric/exoteric paradigm from Traditionalism into Catholicism, as for Catholics “the ‘inner secret’ of God as Love is overtly on display in the crucified and risen Lord… [and] the ‘availability’ of this mystery to one and all… is at the very heart of the Gospel message” (Paine 2017, p. 9).

Be that as it may, there have been some Roman Catholic Traditionalists, including Jean Borella. Another, less known, is Bernard Kelly (1907-1958), whose writings Paine has collected in A Catholic Mind Awake: The Writings of Bernard Kelly (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2017).

Kelly, a London bank clerk, was a Dominican tertiary and an occasional contributor to Dominican publications, including Blackfriars. Some of these contributions are reprinted in A Catholic Mind Awake, dealing for example with Gerald Manley Hopkins and “Christians and the Class Struggle” (1937). Then, in 1940, Kelly discovered the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy, with whom he began a long correspondence, and thus also the work of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, who he later visited in Switzerland. He remained, however, a committed Catholic.

A Catholic Mind Awake is divided into four sections. The most interesting is the first section, “Metaphysics East and West,” which makes up almost half the book and reflects Kelly’s Traditionalism. The other three sections contain mostly earlier work, on “Spirituality and Beauty,” “Poetry and the Arts,” and “Reflections on Society.” This is where the essay on “Christians and the Class Struggle” is to be found; it also contains two later essays from Kelly’s Traditionalist period, both reflecting on the work of Eric Gill (1882-1940), the English sculptor, typeface designer, and printmaker who had been a friend and admirer of Coomaraswamy.

The four main articles in the section on “Metaphysics East and West” attempt to reconcile Traditionalism with Catholic doctrine, notably Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), and to introduce the key Traditionalists to a Catholic, Dominican audience. The earliest is “How May we Approach the Spiritual Traditions of the East?” (1946), which objects to the “impudent philistinism” of “humanist philosophers” and instead advocates “metaphysical contemplation” to access “the truths diversely/expressed in the varying traditions of mankind,” and regrets in passing “the spiritual chaos of the modern world” (pp. 51-52). It then cites Coomaraswamy at length.

The second article, “Notes on the Lights of the Eastern Religions” (1954) attacks Western translators of Hindu texts who lack traditional training and “appear to have taken their philosophical language from the newspapers” (p. 31), and then introduces and praises the work of Coomaraswamy and Guénon. “A Thomist Approach to the Vedanta” (1956) likewise introduces and praises Coomaraswamy and Guénon, adding Schuon and Burckhardt. It also attempts a Christianization of Traditionalism, referring to a “primordial revelation to mankind of which we have a record guaranteed to us in the first chapters of Genesis” and noting that finding the truth in other traditions “requires of us an interior rather than an external approach” (p. 21). This is one way of solving the problem of the esoteric and exoteric. The last article, “The Metaphysical background of Analogy” (1958), addresses Aquinas and Thomas Cajetan (1469-1534).

Bernard Kelly’s attempt to promote Traditionalism within a Dominican context is indeed unusual and interesting. It seem to have met with some success. Two articles by Coomaraswamy were published in Blackfriars, perhaps through Kelly’s influence (“Why Exhibit Works of Art” in 1942 and “Gradation, Evolution and Reincarnation” in 1946). An editorial in 1948 praised Coomaraswamy, comparing him in importance to C. G. Jung and Nikolai Berdyaev (Editorial 1948). A Dominican priest, Victor White (1902-60), likewise praised Coomaraswamy (White 1951, 586; White 1953, 331). White, however, also took exception to Guénon’s “smugly superior… didactic and pompous” style (White 1959, 18) and his “strange illusions” regarding the Western tradition (White 1946, 441), though he still welcomed Guénon’s “rare flashes of insight” (White 1951, 586).

Bede Griffiths (1906-93), a Benedictine monk who later became a celebrated Christian yogi, found Schuon’s attempt to reconcile Christianity and Islam “not very convincing,” but even so felt it should be taken seriously, and concluded of Guénon that “though a Christian has to make continual reservations, there is revealed an astonishing insight and a vast erudition in the spiritual doctrine of east and west” (Griffiths 1954, 30).

There was, then, something of a Roman Catholic Traditionalist milieu in and around Kelly and Blackfriars in the 1940s and 1950s.

Works cited
Editorial 1948. “Over the Wall of Partition.” Blackfriars 29, pp. 257-263.
Griffiths, Bede, 1954. Review of The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times by René Guénon and The Transcendent Unity of Religions by Frithjof Schuon. Blackfriars 35, pp. 29-31.
Paine, Scott Randall, 2017. Introduction. In A Catholic Mind Awake: The Writings of Bernard Kelly, ed. Paine (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2017), pp. 1-15.
White, Victor, 1946. Review of Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines by René Guénon and of Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta by René Guénon. Blackfriars 27, pp. 440-441.
White, Victor, 1951. “Buddhism Comes West.” Blackfriars 32, pp. 585-591.
White, Victor, 1953. “The Impact of Eastern Wisdom on The West.” Blackfriars 34, pp. 329-333.
White, Victor, 1959. “Some Recent Studies in Archetypology.” Blackfriars 40, pp. 216-219.

John Michell and Anglo-American Radical Traditionalism

A recent article deals knowledgable and informatively with the Traditionalism of the British author John Michell (1933-2009). This is Amy Hale, "John Michell, Radical Traditionalism, and the Emerging Politics of the Pagan New Right," The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies 13, no. 1 (2011), pp. 77–97.

Michell is best known for his 1960s Neopaganism, and for his glamorous connections, as his Daily Telegraph obituary illustrates. But he published Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist in 2005, and Hale argues convincingly both for his Traditionalism and that "the ascendance of Radical Traditionalism and the concerted efforts to promote it within very specific Pagan and political contexts since 2000 that are now bringing the writings of John Michell to a whole new audience." Among these contexts is Ultra and Tyr, the heavy-weight American Traditionalist journal that has been mentioned occasionally in this blog, last in connection with its most recent issue.

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.

World of Islam Festival anniversary evening

It is now 40 years since the World of Islam Festival opened in London in 1976. This was a major event, inspired and in many cases arranged by Maryamis, and succeeded in introducing the British public to Islam in terms of major achievements in culture and art. Unfortunately, stronger and very different impressions were then created by the Iranian Revolution.

To mark this  anniversary, a small exhibition and some lectures have been arranged jointly by the "Everyday Muslim" Project and the British Library, which was heavily involved in the original festival. It starts at 17:30 on Monday 25th April at the Brunei Theatre, SOAS, in London.

Speakers include Ahmed Paul Keeler, who was the Festival's director, Dr. Mohammed Isa Waley, Professor Salim Al-Hassani, Dr. Karim Lahham and Professor Oliver Watson. There will be Quran recitation by Ali Keeler. Tickets can be booked online, and further information is available from info@khizrafoundation.org.

Lord Northbourne, organic agriculture, and Schumacher

Lord Northbourne in 1956

John Paull has just published a short biography of Lord Northbourne (1896-1982) in the Journal of Organic Systems, “Lord Northbourne, the man who invented organic farming, a biography,” Journal of Organic Systems 9 (1), 2014, pp. 31-53.

Northbourne is generally known to those with an interest in Traditionalism as the first English translator of René Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity (1953), of Frithjof Schuon’s Light on the Ancient Worlds (1965) and of Titus Burckhardt’s Sacred Art in East and West (1967). John Paull’s article argues convincingly that Northbourne’s 1940 book Look to the Land invented the term “organic farming,” which Northbourne put in opposition to “chemical farming.” He did not actually invent organic farming, however, but rather repackaged ideas deriving ultimately from Rudolf Steiner and Koberwitz via Ehrenfried Pfeiffer’s Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening; the term was then picked up and popularized by Jerome Rodale with his periodical Organic Farming and Gardening.

According to Paull, it was after the publication of Look to the Land that Marco Pallis got in touch with Northbourne and introduced him to Traditionalism. This led to Northbourne’s Religion in the Modern World (1963), to a number of articles in the Maryami-aligned journal Studies in Comparative Religion between 1967 and 1974, and to a final book, Looking Back on Progress (1970). It seems that it was Northbourne who introduced E. F. Schumacher to Traditionalism: Schumacher and Northbourne were both active in the Soil Association, which promoted organic farming. Northbourne may thus be important for the environmentalism of Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Prince Charles.

Northbourne was the fourth baron, descended from the first baron, a friend and colleague of Prime Minister William Gladstone. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford University Boat Club and for some time lectured on agriculture before succeeding to the family estates in Kent, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

Traditionalists banned by University College London Student Union

Discussion continues concerning the decision of the student union at University College London (UCL) to ban a Traditionalist reading group initially called "Tradition UCL" but renamed, at the time of its banning, "The Nietzsche Club." This was a smart move on the part of the UCL Traditionalists, as the ban has been most frequently reported as the banning of Nietzsche, and criticized as such.

The Nietzsche Club put up some posters entitled "Too much political correctness?" and "Equality is a false god" and advertising readings of de Benoist, Evola, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. They were, then, somewhere between political Traditionalism and the New Right. The student union voted to ban them on March 11, 2014 on grounds of protecting UCL students against the dangers of fascism, but the Trustees of UCL then suspended the ban while they took legal advice. Nothing has happened since, but the story passed from online news source to online news source until it was picked up by The Huffington Post on June 3 and The Daily Beast on June 6. And then by this blog.

It is not clear how many students were involved in the club, but their reading list has certainly reached a far wider public as a result of the ban than it did as a result of the initial advertisements.It also seems that the UCL student union is itself somewhat political, as the motion banning the Nietzsche Club noted that "fascism is used by the ruling class to divide workers and students... to split them and thus... undermine their resistance to... consequences of the crisis of the capitalist system."

Guénon goes mainstream?

Peter King, Reader in Social Thought at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, has just published The Antimodern Condition: An Argument Against Progress with Ashgate (£54 or $109 hardback, ISBN 978-1-4724-0906-5). The title deliberately echoes Jean-François Lyotard's Postmodern Condition/La condition postmoderne, the 1979 book that helped launched the word "postmodern." But King maintains that the most comprehensive critiques of modernity are made not by postmodernists but by antimodernists, and that "the most complete challenge to modernity by any thinker before or since" is that of René Guénon.

King's book is "soft Traditionalism"--it draws on Guénon, but also draws on other sources. It starts with De Maistre and the Counter-Enlightenment, then moves on to Guénon, and then the Romanian-French philosopher Emil M. Cioran, especially as interpreted by Susan Sontag (not someone I have previously encountered in any relationship with Traditionalism). King then turns to the pre-revolutionary Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, Epicurus, the University of Chicago's Martha Nussbaum, and five film directors, including Ingmar Bergman and Hiroshi Teshigahara. All these assist King to examine absurdity, anxiety (the modern "lack of acceptance of what we are and how we are"), egoism, complacency (including blandness, reundeerstood as a virtue) and acceptance. Quite eclectic, then, but it works, and in his final chapter King manages to pull all this together into a coherent critique of modernity.

The book is also "soft Traditionalism" because King parts company with the Traditionalists on certain points. He explicitly rejects Guénon's interest in initiation, as well as Evola's emphasis on race, which he sees (like nation) as a modern construct unworthy of the attention of the true antimodernist. King keeps Guénon's views on esoteric spirituality, but makes them incidental to Guénon's critique of modernity--while for Guénon, of course, the critique of modernity was ultimately incidental to esoteric reality.

King's Antimodern Condition may bring Guénon to new audiences. Ashgate is a mainstream (and good) academic publisher, and The Antimodern Condition complies with mainstream academic conventions. King himself is also a mainstream academic, having previously worked mostly on housing policy, both at De Montfort University and as part the Housing and Poverty working group of the Centre for Social Justice, a Conservative Party think tank. With this book, then, Guénon may join some of the mainstream intellectual discussions that he himself was not interested in, but which may one day finally find themselves interested in him.

"Traditional Islam" explained

An important new article on Traditional Islam has just been published, and is easily available online. It is Kasper Mathiesen, "Anglo-American ‘Traditional Islam’ and Its Discourse of Orthodoxy," Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 13 (2013), pp. 191-219.

In this article, Mathiesen explores and explains the discourses of "Traditional Islam," which he distinguished from Traditionalism, despite its origins in Traditionalism and the ways in which it continues to parallel Traditionalism.

He suggests that Traditional Islam, with capital letters, "may be construed as a denomination within Sunni Islam."  It is, he considers, "one of the main paradigms and most influential currents within contemporary Islam," but is predominantly Western: as a Google search confirms, al-islām al-taqlīdī ("Traditional Islam" in Arabic) barely exists.

Mathiesen traces the origins of Traditional Islam to Seyyed Hussein Nasr’s Traditional Islam in the Modern World (1987) which, he considers, "sets forth a holistic, inspiring and learned grand vision of the Islamic past, of traditional Islam as it was, is, should and could be." Since 1987, he argues, Traditional Islam has developed into something more specific, more Sunni, and less perennialist--replacing, for example, the classic Traditionalist account of decline with one based soundly on Islamic hadith.

Above all, however, there has developed a distinctive discourse, mostly at the hands of Nuh Ha Mim Keller and Abdul Hakim Murad, which the bulk of Mathieson's article explains. The essentials of this mirror the classic trio of  islam, iman and ihsan, and are the importance of the madhhabs in fiqh, an ʿaqīda that stresses complete Divine transcendence against the anthropomorphism of Ibn Taymiyya and his contemporary Wahhabi/Salafi followers, and "the revivification of Islamic Sufism," which for Mathiesen is the "real core issue" in Traditional Islam.

The article is valuable for giving a more thorough and precise picture of Traditional Islam than is available anywhere else, and for explaining its relationship to Traditionalism clearly and convincingly. Mathiesen is right that Traditional Islam today is something separate from Traditionalism, and yet its debt to Traditionalism is clear: it is after all quite possible to object to reformists and Salafis, to value the madhhabs and stress Divine transcendence, without ending up in Sufism. Traditional Islam in a sense simply reaches the same destination as Traditionalism proper by a different route.

Mathiesen notes in passing that he accepts Ron Geaves' classification of British Barelwis as "Traditional Islam." It would be interesting to see a fuller examination of the relationship between this and the Traditional Islam of Keller and Murad.

In closing, I must declare an interest: Mathiesen is a PhD student in the Islamic Cultures and Societies Research Unit at Aarhus University, where I teach.

On Prince Charles

Rod Dreher has just published an interesting article on Prince Charles in the American Conservative, "Philosopher Prince: The revolutionary anti-modernism of Britain’s heir apparent." The article is interesting both because it is a thoughtful profile that places the prince's Traditionalism within its wider context and because it provides food for thought about the political and ideological right. Dreher maintains that "Postwar American conservatism is a fusion of traditionalist and libertarian schools" (he is using 'traditionalist' in the general, little t sense, of course). I don't know to what extent this is true of American conservatism in particular (though the on-line comments on Dreher's article suggest that it is), but--more importantly--I suspect that it is true of the broad right as a whole.

The main topic, though, is Prince Charles, and my feeling is that Dreher has got that more or less right.

Sources for the Alawiyya of Mostaghanem

Two  unusual sources for the Alawiyya of Mostaghanem in the 1960s, and--especially--for what sent two different Westerners there: one is Robert Irwin, Memoirs of a Dervish (London, Profile Books, 2011, previously mentioned here), and the other is Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992, and later editions). I had not realized that Freud's Sufis were from the Alawiyya until I read Irwin, who says they were, and is not contradicted by Freud.

Both books are memoirs, Irwin's based on diaries kept at the time, Freud's based on childood memories--it was Freud's mother who decided to go to Motaghanem, not the two young daughters she took with her. Freud's book probably has more literary merit, while Irwin's has more Sufism, and has literary merit too.

Irwin and his friends discovered Sufism through the Traditionalists. A friend of Irwin's, in fact, read Schuon at twelve and converted to Islam at fifteen. But none of them became Traditionalists, and the Traditionalists merely cross the pages of Irwin's book from time to time, sometimes to be condemned (as "pernicious rubbish," for example). For those interested in Traditionalism, the value of Irwin's book is that it gives an independent picture of what the Mostaghanem zawiya was like for a young Westerner on a spiritual quest, though Irwin of course arrived there some thirty years after Schuon, and was evidently a very different sort of young man, as well as belonging to a different age.

Both books are, from a Traditionalist perspective, highly irreverent, and psychological rather than doctrinal.

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.

Traditionalism and art in Jordan

An interesting comment on my post on "Traditionalism and art--and perhaps more than art" draws attention to the Institute of Traditional Islamic Art and Architecture in Amman, Jordan, which is evidently the Jordanian equivalent of London's VITA (Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts), now The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts. The Chairman of the Board of the Amman institute is Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad (born 1966), who is very involved in the Common Word initiative, as are a number of notable Traditionalists. Jordan definitely seems to be the Arab country where Traditionalism is currently faring best.

Prince Charles and Rumi

Prince Charles enjoys reading Rumi, according to his office's press release after his second visit to Konya, on November 26, 2007. His other visit was in 1992.

In a speech after the visit, Prince Charles quoted Kathleen Raine, referred to the work of the Temenos Academy, and also (once again) implied fairly clearly that he himself subscribes to some version of the perennial philosophy. Most interestingly, he was also explicit about how he combines this with his ecological views:

If we hope to create a more sustainable way of living with the grain of Nature rather than so destructively against it then, surely, it is only with our innate sense of the sacred intact ... The natural World, indeed the entire Universe, is rooted in and bound together by wholeness... By seeing the external and material world as the only reality, the modern industrialised world view too often considers “the part” to be “the whole.” But, in so doing, not only does it falsify the whole, it also diminishes the part... We, too, are a microcosm of that organism and our separation from it becomes a profane act with profane consequences in today’s fragmented, conventional ideology.

The speech was poorly received by the audience. As a result of confusion in the office of the mayor of Konya, the audience consisted mostly of schoolchildren.

PS for Daniel Pipes, who has been exploring the possibility that Prince Charles is a secret convert to Islam periodically since 2003: it is more complicated than that.