Guénon in The Philosophical Forum

Following on Professor Wael Hallaq’s academically Traditionalist book Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (see blog post here), another scholarly article has appeared, in the venerable journal The Philosophical Forum, by Noah H. Taj. This is "On rooting religious studies: The metaphysical proposal of René Guénon," and can be read here. The abstract is:

The   present   article   problematizes   current   dominating   approaches  to  method  and  theory  in  the  study  of  religion  by  pointing  to  their  inapplicability  to  theorists  working  outside secular worldviews. The first section of this article introduces  decolonialist  narratives  by  touching  on  important topics which are subsumed within larger discussions, such as secularism, positionality, and others. This is done by putting René Guénon (1886–1951) in conversation with other  theorists,  the  foremost  of  whom  is  Bruce  Lincoln.  Section two introduces Guénon using Wael Hallaq's categorisation of him as a subversive author, and sections three and  four  elaborate  on  his  subversion  through  touching  on  two key theories. The first relates to problematizations of the term ‘religion’ itself along with a treatment of Guénon's actual  theory  of  religion.  The  second  is  Guénon's  metaphysical  method,  which,  contrasted  against  the  historical,  opens  new  avenues  for  our  study  of  the  past  in  manners  unrestricted  to  materialism  alone,  expanding  thereby  the  academic frameworks with which we come to the table in the academic study of religion.

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.

Traditionalists blog passes 1 million page views

This blog has now received one million page views. Started in 2006, it passed 500,000 page views in 2017. Over this period, interest has come from all over (see map). 38% of visits have been from the US, 29% from a range of other countries (in order, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, Canada, Italy, Sweden, Brazil, and Spain), and 33% from elsewhere—or perhaps from countries that Google Analytics failed to identify.

Thanks to all concerned: the readers whose interest makes this blog worthwhile, the individuals who from time to time have written to me with information and suggestions, and also the various authors of guest posts over the years. And thanks also to Google, for making Blogger available, free, and user-friendly.

New study of the Alawiyya

Manuel Chabry has just published an excellent study of Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi (died 1934) and of the Alawiyya, the Algerian-based Sufi order that Frithjof Schuon brought to Europe and then developed into the Maryamiyya. 

The study is entitled Le Pôle - La confrérie soufie Alawiyya (1894-1952), and was written as an MA thesis at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), one of France’s leading research institutions for the social sciences and humanities. It is self-published, and available from Amazon for $22.65. 

Chabry’s study is exhaustive, and carefully based on primary sources, notably the Alawiyya’s own publications. It falls into three parts: a historical study of the Alawiyya before, under, and after Shaykh al-Alawi (pp. 13-247), an analysis of the Alawiyya’s positions and activities (pp. 249-441), and a selection of primary texts, translated into French (pp. 461-560).

The historical study documents the dramatic expansion of the Alawiyya, especially between 1923 and 1934. The analysis is especially interesting, with short chapters on sanctity, legitimacy, and the Alawiyya’s positions regarding Islamic reformism, modern natural science, modernity in general, and Christianity. This section ends with a chapter on the Alawiyya’s ambition to spread Islam in Europe and another chapter on the Alawiyya’s Western disciples. 

The Alawiyya’s central objective, argues Chabry, was “to lead the Sufi orders to play a role in the revival of Algerian Islam in an authentic form, and against the imported innovation of reformism, by emphasizing religious education instead of relying on tribal practices and the organizations of another age.” This involved taking modernity seriously. There is a lot more to it than that, as Chabry also shows, but that is the core of what was going on. 

The chapter on Western disciples mentions Schuon, but relatively little is said of him. His relations with the Alawiyya, Chabry thinks, deserve a separate study of their own, but little light is shed on them by the published sources on which Chabry’s study is based. Even so, that study will be of interest for those who are interested in Schuon’s Traditionalism, as it reveals the context of his attachment to Sufism: the Alawiyya in general, and its (often universalist) approach to Christianity and Westerners in particular. It reminds us that Arab Muslims, as well as Westerners, played active roles in shaping relations between Islam and the West. 

The study is also an important contribution to the whole question of the adaptation to modernity of Sufism in the Muslim world.