Against Modernity Western Traditionalism and Islam

Abstract

There are many varieties of traditionalism in the West, but only one that really deserves a capital 'T', and only one that modified the understanding of both Islam in the West and modernity in the Islamic world. This is 'Guénonian' Traditionalism, the fruit of the marriage of 19th-century oriental scholarship with the Western esoteric tradition, a movement established by the work of the French religious philosopher René Guénon (1886-1951). Born in the provincial French city of Blois, GuŽnon lived the last twenty years of his life in Egypt, where he died a Muslim and an Egyptian citizen just before the 1952 Revolution. Despite this, his books and articles draw far more heavily on Hinduism than Islam, and were all written in French and published in Paris. At first, Traditionalists were all Europeans, mostly converts to Islam; today, their number includes born Muslims in the Islamic world and the West.