De-Semitizing Ibn ʿArabī: Aryanism and the Schuonian Discourse of Religious Authenticity

Abstract

Commonly taken to be based upon the metaphysics of the Andalusian Sufi Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), Frithjof Schuon’s Perennialist doctrine of “the transcendent unity of religions” posits a timeless truth underlying all so-called orthodox religious forms. Yet this article argues that rather than a transhistorical message of inclusive unity, Schuon’s Perennialism is a hegemonic discourse of authenticity built upon presuppositions founded within what Léon Poliakov famously dubbed the nineteenth-century “Aryan myth.” The extent to which Schuon decouples Ibn ʿArabī from so-called Semitic subjectivism, thus finding in him a primordial Aryan objectivity, is the extent to which Schuon claims him to be an enlightened representative of Islam and authentic purveyor of thereligio perennis.