Against the Modern World

Abstract

One effect of 9/11 has been that Muslim voices, which until then had been mostly ignored, are increasingly reaching a wider audience of other Muslims and non-Muslims. In Europe and North America, this has meant that selfidentified “progressive” Muslim scholars who emphasize social justice, as well as “traditional” Muslims who emphasize Islam’s spiritual or esoteric dimension, have been contributing in a much more vocal manner to the contemporary interpretation of what it means to be Muslim. Since most of the leading figures presented herein are Sufi Muslims of a particular strand of esoteric Islam, this book helps fill an important lacuna concerning the development of the traditionalist position – a position that has been voiced by such Muslim scholars as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Martin Lings. Sedgwick promotes the book as a biography of René Guénon (1886- 1951) and an intellectual history of the traditionalist movement that he inaugurated in the early twentieth century. Guénon’s movement combines elements of perennial philosophy, which holds that certain perennial problems recur in humanity’s philosophical concerns, and that this perennial wisdom is now only found in the traditional forms of the world religions ...