Search Results

This chapter covers Gu”non’s biography from a series of disasters in 1927–28 that led to his emigration to Egypt in 1930 until the start of the Second World War. It examines Gu”non’s life in Egypt and the nature of his conversion to Islam, and the impact of Egypt and Islam on Traditionalism. As well as lying behind future developments in French Freemasonry, this impact resulted in the formation of two Traditionalist religious groups, one short-lived and Catholic and one long-lived and Islamic, a European branch of an Algerian Sufi order--the Alawiyya--under Frithjof Schuon, assisted by Titus Burckhardt. The chapter covers Schuon’s biography and the history of his Alawiyya up to 1943.

This chapter returns to Gu”non’s biography, covering the period from the Second World War until Gu”non’s death in 1951. It introduces Martin Lings and Henri Hartung, and includes the split between Schuon and Gu”non during 1948–50. The chapter explores the causes and consequences of this split. It examines the modifications made to the Alawiyya by Schuon that led to the rejection of Schuon by Gu”non and others, and the independent Traditionalist groups established as a result of the split. These included various Masonic lodges in France, one Sufi order in Turin, another under Michel Vâlsan in Paris, and (much later, in the 1980s) a third in Italy, in Milan. The chapter completes the history of Traditionalist Masonry and Traditionalist Sufism with an examination of the later histories of these lodges and orders; the later history of Schuon’s order, however, is covered in later chapters.

This chapter is the first of two devoted to the later history of Schuon’s Sufi order, originally the Alawiyya. This was renamed the Maryamiyya as a consequence of a series of visions during the 1960s in which, Schuon believed, the Virgin Mary appeared to him and gave him a universal mission. The chapter covers events from the split with Gu”non in 1950 until Schuon’s last known major vision in 1966, and considers the consequence of these visions for Schuon and for the Maryamiyya. It ends with a discussion of Schuon’s most important follower, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and of Traditionalism in Iran up to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, especially the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy

This chapter completes the history of Schuon’s Maryamiyya (formerly the Alawiyya), covering events from the 1970s to Schuon’s death in 1998. It considers the spread of the Maryamiyya, its involvement with two best-selling writers (one a Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, and the other a scholar, Huston Smith), and its influence through the books and other activities of Schuon’s followers. The chapter ends with a discussion of the controversial community around Schuon in Bloomington, Indiana, during the 1990s. This stage of the Maryamiyya’s history is notable for Native American “Indian” influences and for sacred nudity.

Discusses Traditionalism, René Guénon, and Frithjof Schuon as a reference point for understanding (and critiquing) American religious immediatism. Discusses the history of Schuon and his work, as well as the history of his community in Bloomington, Indiana.

This chapter examines two interwar movements that link Theosophy and Western Sufism: the Traditionalism of René Guénon, and the teaching of George Gurdjieff. Although Guénon publicly rejected both Theosophy and emanationism, he was still influenced by both, as well as by perennialism and anti-exotericism on the model of John Toland. The Gurdjieff teaching owes less than is thought to Sufism and much more than is though to Peter Ouspensky and, through him, to the psychology of William James. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff were early promoters of the transformation of emanationism from its original focus on the soul and the One to a focus on consciousness and the expansion of consciousness. To this end they used novel practices, including asceticism and “discomfiture.” The chapter also introduces the two men who would later apply Traditionalism and the Gurdjieff teaching to Western Sufism: Frithjof Schuon, and John G. Bennett .

This chapter argues that in the period immediately after WWII, Western Sufism began to polarize between more and less Islamic tendencies. The most important Islamic tendencies were represented by the Traditionalist Alawiyya in Paris and the Traditionalist Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Iran, where he established the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. The most important less Islamic tendencies were represented by Meher Baba, an Indian understood to be an avatar, and by Pak Subuh, an Indonesian guru. Both were universalist and anti-dogmatic, and both perhaps owed something to the Theosophical Society, but neither were particularly Sufi. Frithjof Schuon and John G. Bennett exhibited polarization within their own selves. Schuon was adopted into the Oglala Sioux, while remaining shaykh of a Sufi tariqa; he eventually gravitated toward universalist perennialism. Bennett lived as a Muslim Sufi in Damascus and Turkey, only to end up joining the Catholic Church.

This chapter situates Schuonian Perennialism within the larger discursive tradition of essentialist, religious universalism through a comparison with Friedrich Schleiermacher. It thus argues that Frithjof Schuon, and those writing within his orbit, made a Copernican turn away from Ibn ‘Arabi’s hierarchical cosmology to one of cosmic pluralism united by a Schleiermacherian notion of a transcendent and universally valid religious a priori, or “religion as such.” To clearly demonstrate this turn, Ibn ‘Arabi’s discourse is here historicized in relation to the polemical thought of Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064). Like Ibn Hazm, Ibn ‘Arabi claims that the Jews were guilty of textual corruption (taḥrīf al-naṣṣ) and not simply a corruption of meaning (taḥrīf al-maʿānī) as implied in Perennialist discourse. Rather than the soteriological power of their religions, Ibn ‘Arabi holds that the salvation of the People of the Book is metaphysically determined by their submission to Muhammad’s prophetic authority.

This chapter reveals a buried order of politics underneath the Perennialist cosmology of religious universalism ironically constituted through long-held European discursive strategies of racial exclusion. Through a detailed comparison of Frithjof Schuon’s discursive practices with that of nineteenth-century Aryanist discourse, this chapter argues that although Schuon claims to recognize the universal validity of all religions beyond the limits of exoteric exclusivity, his work consistently presents as self-evident the metaphysical superiority of an Indo-European spiritual typology over that of the Semitic. Here, Ibn ‘Arabi’s “Semitic” propensity for subjectivism is understood as lacking the enlightened objectivity necessary to consistently discern the transcendent formlessness of essential truth from religious particularism. The extent to which Ibn ‘Arabi is thus decoupled from so-called Semitic subjectivism is the extent to which he is claimed to be an enlightened representative of Islam and authentic purveyor of the universal core of all religions—the religio perennis.

The conclusion situates key discursive elements of Schuonian Perennialism within a genealogy of German idealism leading back to Kant to show metaphorical resonances with a Kantian metaphysics of autonomy and its attendant universalism. In contradistinction to Ibn ‘Arabi’s heteronomous absolutism, this chapter tracks how Frithjof Schuon’s religious essentialism functionally echoes the discursive practices that mark Kant’s “universal” religion as defined against Semitic heteronomy. While both Kantian and Schuonian universalist cosmologies thus appear to reflect a similar Copernican turn where an autonomous, universal perspective forms the essence of all religion, this chapter argues that these respective discourses also metaphysically reflect the imperial cartography of the Copernican age itself and its attendant ideological conceit of a universal perspective. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the overlapping discursive formations of Kantian and Schuonian universalism conceal absolutist modalities of supersessionism that are ironically similar to those openly posited by Ibn ‘Arabi.