Against the Modern World

Abstract

One effect of 9/11 has been that Muslim voices, which until then had beenmostly ignored, are increasingly reaching a wider audience of other Muslimsand non-Muslims. In Europe and North America, this has meant that selfidentified“progressive” Muslim scholars who emphasize social justice, aswell as “traditional” Muslims who emphasize Islam’s spiritual or esotericdimension, have been contributing in a much more vocal manner to the contemporaryinterpretation of what it means to be Muslim. Since most of theleading figures presented herein are Sufi Muslims of a particular strand ofesoteric Islam, this book helps fill an important lacuna concerning the developmentof the traditionalist position – a position that has been voiced bysuch 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 heinaugurated in the early twentieth century. Guénon’s movement combineselements of perennial philosophy, which holds that certain perennial problemsrecur in humanity’s philosophical concerns, and that this perennialwisdom is now only found in the traditional forms of the world religions ...