Western Sufism and Traditionalism

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Western Sufism and TraditionalismMark Sedgwick© Mark Sedgwick, 2003

Islam is today very present in the West and in Western awareness as a result of immigration, politics, and conflict. Mainstream Islam in the contemporary Islamicworld is somewhat political in its preoccupations, and much Islam in the West iseven more political and radical than it is in the Islamic world. It is understandable,then, that a religion that seems to devote much of its energies to criticizing or evenactually attacking the West has attracted relatively few Western converts, and thatsome of the most prominent of those converts were previously stern critics of theWestern system, active in Communist or in even more radical circles.

While contemporary mainstream Islam has proved unattractive to mostWesterners, Islam’s ancient spiritual and mystical tradition–Sufism–has provedmuch more attractive. Sufi orders have been present in the Middle East for amillennium, and in the heyday of the Ottoman empire were a respected andimportant part of the religious establishment. Until about a hundred years ago,when they came under attack from modernist reformers, these orders providedMuslims with several varieties of spiritual experience in addition to that generallyavailable in the local mosque. In many places, they were the context in whichbelievers gathered to honor local saints, to join in recitation of special liturgies, orto listen to religious poetry and singing. Other orders provided direct and individualspiritual guidance under a spiritual master or “shaykh.” A small number of veryimportant orders were led by men seen as living saints, and were followed bydevoted Muslims seeking the highest of all spiritual experiences–the encounter withGod himself. Sufism in the Islamic world today struggles to survive in a hostileclimate, but continues to provide all these varieties of spiritual experience, thoughto an ever smaller number of people.

The closest parallel to the Sufi order in Christianity is the monastic order, butSufi orders differ from monastic orders in that they almost always operate in societyrather than in isolation, with their followers working and marrying and raisingchildren in the normal way. Sufi orders also differ from monastic orders in that theyonly rarely require total commitment. For most Sufis, Sufism is an add-on to theregular religious practice of any Muslim, and sometimes no more than an occasionaladd-on. Finally, Sufi orders differ from monastic orders in that they have no centralcommand–as one might expect in a religion from which hierarchical organization isgenerally absent.

Sufism originally reached the West in two ways: through translated texts andthrough actual Sufis. Of these two means of transmission, translated texts were theearliest (Goethe probably read some), but on their own produced no actual Sufism, just occasional awareness of its existence. It was only at the start of the twentiethcentury that actual Sufis began to appear in the West. Judged by the perspective

This article was published in Danish translation as “Vestlig sufisme og traditionalisme”in Den gamle nyrelig iøs itet, Vestens glemte kul turarv [Old New Religiousness: The

West’s forgotten cultural heritage], ed. Mette Buchardt and Pia Böwadt (Copenhagen:

Anis, 2003), pp. 139-51.



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of the Islamic world, these first Western Sufis were of a highly unusual variety, andthis gave rise to a misunderstanding in the West of the nature of Sufism. Thismisunderstanding persists today, partly because nineteenth-century Islamicreformers (whose views remain hugely influential) have propagated acomplementary misunderstanding. For many twentieth-and twenty-first-century

Westerners, Sufism is a liberal and liberating alternative to Islam. For the Islamicreformers of the nineteenth century and for their successors today, Sufism was andis an illegitimate addition to Islam. For Sufis in the Islamic world, in contrast, Sufismis a part of Islam that can have no meaning in any other context. Historiansgenerally support the latter view, of Sufism as a part of Islam.

The first Western Sufi to become famous was Isabelle Eberhardt, the intrepidfemale explorer of Algeria at the turn of the twentieth century who wrote romanticand very popular accounts of the desert for the French newspapers. Eberhardt hadgrown up in highly “alternative” and predominantly anarchist circles in Switzerland,and defied many of the conventions of her time. She dressed in men’s clothes,smoked hashish, and took an extraordinary number of lovers. She also described

herself as a Sufi, and thus gave a rather strange idea of what Sufism must standfor. In fact, it is probably true that the Sufi shaykhs whom Eberhardt visited wereamong the only Muslims with a sufficient understanding of the human soul andpsychology to tolerate her behavior. Sufism was only one part of Eberhardt’scomplex persona, no part of which corresponded to Islamic norms.

The first Sufi to establish a significant following in the West was equallyunusual. This was an Indian musician, Inayat Khan, who arrived in Europe viaAmerica a few years after Eberhardt’s death, at the start of the First World War.Khan propagated a view of Sufism as “the pure essence of all religions andphilosophies,” an essence to which Islam was almost incidental. A number of organizations in Europe and America continue his teachings to this day, and are

best described as branches of a New Religious Movement. A similar view of Sufismalso became widespread in the West as a result of the writings of Idries Shah, anEnglishman of partly Indian extraction, who in 1964 published The Sufis, a verysuccessful book which has remained popular ever since. Shah attracted a sizeablefollowing in Britain, including the novelist Doris Lessing and the poet and novelistRobert Graves, but also elsewhere. Although Shah’s vision of Sufism is somewhatmore Islamic than Khan’s, it would still be almost totally unrecognizable to anyMuslim Sufi in the Islamic world.

Something very close to what such a Sufi would regard as “real” Sufismappeared in Europe shortly before the Second World War, in the form of a Swissbranch of a famous Algerian Sufi order, the Alawiyya. This branch was established

by a Franco-Swiss textile designer and visionary, Frithjof Schuon. The Alawiyyaspread to France and England and America, attracting many influential writers,academics, and other intellectuals, but remained almost entirely unknown becauseit kept its very existence carefully secret. This is in itself a departure from thenorms of the Islamic world. Other departures followed, deriving in part from a seriesof visions in which, Schuon believed, the Virgin Mary entrusted him with a specialmission, and deriving in part from Schuon’s and his followers’ intellectual origins inan entirely Western philosophical movement, Guénonian Traditionalism.

Guénonian Traditionalism has been one of the main influences on Sufism inthe West. It was established by René Guénon, a French philosopher who at onepoint worked within the context of the Catholic Institute in Paris, but in 1930 left



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Paris for Cairo where he died some twenty years later, cited as a model of Muslimand Sufi piety by no less an authority than Abd al-Halim Mahmud, then rector of theAzhar and so the preeminent religious authority in Sunni Islam. Mahmud, however,had not read Guénon’s books, and failed to appreciate the true nature of Guénon’sTraditionalism. This derived ultimately from Perennialism, a religious and

philosophical school established in Florence during the Renaissance. RenaissancePerennialism held that all the world’s religions were expressions of a single original “perennial” religion, since lost to humanity. This hypothetical “perennial” religion isthe “tradition” referred to in the title “Traditionalism.”

Guénon’s Traditionalism, however, was more than a revival of an old and bythen somewhat discredited theory. He added to it a conviction that Europeancivilization was in terminal decline, having lost even the memory of those eternalreligious truths that are the only real basis of genuine civilization. Guénon and hisfollowers were convinced that these truths could be recovered from survivingnon-Western religions, principally Hinduism, and that individual Westerners couldachieve real spiritual progress only by joining such surviving living repositories of

spiritual truth as Sufi orders. Guénon, then, was using Islam and Sufism to an endthat Rector Mahmud would never have recognized.

Central to Guénon’s Traditionalism is a distinction between the esoteric andthe exoteric. The exoteric consists not only of the profane things of this world, butalso of the regular rites of religion–church services, communal prayer in mosques,and the requirements and prohibitions of sacred law. The esoteric is what lies withinall this–the individual human relationship with God and all that goes with it, both interms of possibilities and of techniques. The exoteric is within reach of all; not sothe esoteric. The few who travel the esoteric path, maintained Guénon, must travelwithin the vessel of orthodox exoteric religion. Islam is the exoteric framework, andSufism the esoteric path.

Guénon established the philosophy of Traditionalism and watched over itsearly practical expressions, but did not himself led any religious movement, exotericor esoteric. This role was played, in the Sufi expression of Traditionalism, bySchuon. Schuon’s Traditionalist origins and approaches, however, led to hisfollowing becoming progressively less Islamic as the years passed, and especiallyafter Guénon’s death. In Guénon’s terms, many of Schuon’s followers concentratedon the esoteric in a way that led them too far from the necessary exotericframework. The Sufi order Schuon headed was never more than formally subjectto its Algerian leadership, and soon became formally independent, changing itsname from Alawiyya to Maryamiyya in response to Schuon’s visions of theVirgin–“Maryam” is the Arabic form of “Mary.” By the time of Schuon’s death in

1998, Sufism had become almost incidental to a wider enterprise that involvedChristians, Red Indian dances, and– according to some reports–sacred nudity. Atthis stage, some of Schuon’s followers had come to see him as, in some form, adivine incarnation.

Schuon’s later Traditionalism, then, was neither particularly Sufi norparticularly Islamic. Over the first half century of its existence, however, his Sufiorder gave rise to other, more Islamic, Sufi orders. Some of these orders wereheaded by men who had formally dissociated themselves from Schuon because of what they saw as departures from proper Islam; some formally remained followersof Schuon, but distanced themselves from his less Islamic views and practices.These two varieties of Sufi order deriving from Schuon are today present in several



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European countries, in North and South America, and also in parts of the Islamicworld. For reasons that are still not understood, the distribution of Schuon’s andother Traditionalist Sufi orders in Europe closely follows the old Protestant-Catholicfault line. Guénon’s and Schuon’s books are read and appreciated in France, Italyand Spain, and also in Hungary, but are little known in Germany or Scandinavia.

England and America lie somewhere in between: Guénon and Schuon are readthere, but not widely. No Danish or Norwegian Traditionalist groups are known,though there is some interest in Sweden. This is appropriate, since one of Guénon’searliest associates was the Swedish painter Ivan Aguéli, whose Sufism was littleknown until the publication of Torbjorn Säfve’s semi-fictional account of Aguéli’s life(Ivan Aguéli: En roman om frihet) in 1981.

Schuon’s most important follower, now the shaykh of the most importantIslamic branch of the Maryamiyya Sufi order, was Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Author of numerous books on Islam, Sufism, and religion, Nasr is currently a distinguishedprofessor of Islamic studies in America, and is taken increasingly seriously as aphilosopher as well. Although Iranian by birth, he went to highschool and university

in America, and was introduced to the works of Guénon by a philosopher at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Schuon’s Maryamiyya.

On his return to Iran, Nasr taught at Tehran University, where he becameprofessor of philosophy. His teaching concentrated on Iranian esoteric philosopherssuch as Mulla Sadra, until then ignored in the Iranian university system, but sincethen central to it. Nasr also founded and directed the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, a Traditionalist school of advanced studies that quickly becameinternationally renowned. He also established the first non-Western branch of theMaryamiyya, and introduced Traditionalism and Traditionalist perspectives into themainstream of Iranian philosophy and intellectual life. All these activities were,however, brought to an end by the Iranian Revolution. Nasr had enjoyed excellent

relations with the court and had carried out various confidential missions for theempress. As a consequence, Nasr was seen as an enemy of the revolution,whatever the positions taken in his writings and speeches. These had in factgenerally been in favor of the Islamization of Iranian life along traditional lines,though hostile to the modernist and socialist elements in the Islamist opposition tothe Shah.

In exile in America after the revolution, Nasr continued to write. Translationsof his books introduced Traditionalism into the progressive intellectual discourse of Turkey and Malaysia and–as the memory of Nasr’s association with the detestedShah faded–his books again became popular in Iran. From the 1990s, Traditionalismcame again to play a part in parts of the Iranian public debate. Nasr, then, was the

means by which an essentially Western understanding of Sufism and Islam reachedthe Islamic world. Similarly, the barely Islamic versions of Sufism as a “pureessence” that had been propagated by Inayat Khan and Idries Shah also began toappear in the Islamic world towards the end of the twentieth century, though thisversion was never as widespread or influential as Nasr’s Traditionalism.

Nasr’s writings and the branch of the Maryamiyya that he heads are, at thetime of writing, the most important expression of Traditionalist Sufism. Otherexpressions are in general restricted to one country, as for example the Ahmadiyyaof Abd al-Wahid Pallavicini, based in Milan. Pallavicini was among those whoseparated himself from Schuon, and his Sufi order derives from a respected Malayshaykh in Singapore; it has less than a hundred followers. Pallavicini has however



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become well known in Italy, initially as a result of his participation in inter-religiousdialog with parts of the Catholic Church. Although he was largely unsuccessful ininteresting the Vatican in a Traditionalist conception of the unity of all religions onan esoteric level, Pallavicini’s views received extensive press coverage. Pallavicini’ssomewhat later proposal to build a mosque in Milan led to petitions and

demonstrations organized by anti-immigrant groups, and so to more press andtelevision coverage. It is ironic that anti-immigrant groups should target a Sufiorder consisting exclusively of Italians, the fundamental philosophy of which derivedultimately from not only from the European Renaissance, but actually from Italy.

Traditionalism’s influence in the contemporary West extends beyond thesevarious Sufi orders. Research on conversions to Islam in France and Italy suggeststhat the works of Guénon frequently play an important part; arguably, onlymarriage to a Muslim is a more frequent cause of conversion to Islam. TheseGuénon-reading converts to Islam frequently do not join any Traditionalist groupor Sufi order (and so are hard for the researcher to count), but generally carryTraditionalist perspectives with them into their new religion.

Non-Muslim Traditionalists include many of Schuon’s later followers, Andothers who attempted to recover tradition in non-Sufi contexts, IncludingFreemasonry. For Traditionalist Freemasons, purified Masonic ritual represents anesoteric path that can be combined with the exoteric practice of Christianity.Traditionalism has in this way made a major contribution to a the mainstream of Masonic reform and revival. There are also two non-religious varieties of Traditionalism, one political and the other scholarly, both of which started beforeSchuon’s Sufi order, and also before Guénon himself had begun to place theemphasis on Sufism that he did towards the end of his life. Accordingly, neither of these other movements has much to do with Islam.

Political Traditionalism was established in the 1930s by an Italian, Baron

Julius Evola, on the basis of Nietzsche as well as of Guénon. Evola was lessinterested in esoteric aspects of the original religion of humanity–Guénon’s andSchuon’s primary focus–than in other varieties of esoterism (including magic) andin what he saw as the decadence of contemporary Western civilization. Althoughconcerned by spiritual and esoteric questions as much as Guénon was, Evolafocused not on religious practice but on spiritual virtues, for example those of medieval chivalry. He initially hoped to transform Europe through the possibilitiesthat then seemed available, notably the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and theSS. Mussolini however disappointed Evola by being insufficiently radical, and the SSrejected Evola’s proposals as too different from their own ideology. Evola’s only realimpact during the Second World War was during a brief period as Mussolini’s chief

adviser on race. This period ended when the Italian government summoned Evolaback from Berlin after realizing the possibly frightening implications of Evola’sunusual racial theories, which were based not on biology but on esoteric spiritualcriteria. Fascist Italy’s racial policies thereafter followed more familiar Nazi lines.

Although often described as a Fascist, Evola was something else (and quitepossibly something more frightening). Because he was something other than aFascist, he was not implicated in what many Italians saw as the fiasco of ItalianFascism. In the postwar period there was little competition to Evola for the role of Italy’s principal political philosopher of the far right, and his books became the chief intellectual inspiration of Italian rightist terrorist groups during the 1960s and1970s. Those readers who remember the bombing of Bologna railway station and



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similar outrages of the time may be surprised to learn that the ultimate objectivewas the restoration of a quasi-medieval spiritual and chivalrous order.

After the suppression of political violence (of both left and right) in Italy,Evola’s writings entered the cannon of the European radical far right, and today areto be found on the websites of countless minor far-right groups from Italy to

Germany. The fault line between Catholic and Protestant Europe that defeatedGuénon’s Traditionalism has not restricted the spread of Evola’s politicalTraditionalism. One important point needs to be made here. Evola drew on Guénon,and although Evola and Guénon corresponded, Guénon took little or nothing fromEvola. Serious readers of Evola are thus led sooner or later to Guénon, but readersof Guénon are not led to Evola. Traditionalist Sufism is almost without exceptionapolitical.

The radical far right is at present marginal to European politics, and sopolitical Traditionalism is marginal in Europe. One exception to this is Russia, wherethe collapse of Communism gave rise to a much more varied and confused politicalscene than elsewhere. One of Russia’s better known radical political philosophers

is Alexander Dugin, a former Soviet dissident who once belonged to a smallTraditionalist group established in Moscow during the 1960s. Dugin’s Traditionalismderives more from Evola than from Guénon, and has been adapted from variousother sources to create a philosophy appropriate for contemporary Russia, forexample by emphasizing Russian Orthodoxy rather than Sufism as the repositoryof esoteric truth.

Dugin’s Russian Traditionalism provided much of the ideological justificationfor an apparently unlikely alliance, established towards the end of the Yeltsin years,between what remained of the Russian Communist Party and one of Russia’s majorradical right groups, the Patriots of Alexander Prokhanov. At one point this alliancelooked as if it might become significant in Russian politics, but faded after the

election of President Putin. Dugin then shifted his approach from confrontation withthe Kremlin to cooperation. At the time of writing he heads a foreign-policy thinktank that seems to be well regarded by the Kremlin and also by parts of the Russiansecurity services and army high command. He has recently launched a politicalparty, the Eurasian party, the significance of which remains to be seen.

The central theme of Dugin’s writings, think tank, and party is that HolyRussia embodies tradition and spiritual virtue as identified by Guénon and Evola.The Atlantic alliance dominated by America embodies its contrary–the spirituallyempty shell of true civilization that Guénon left for Cairo in 1930. Dugin sees asinevitable a major conflict between a traditional and spiritual Eurasian block underRussia, and a modernist and spiritually desolate Atlantic block consisting largely of

America. This thesis is in some ways the Russian equivalent of Samuel Huntington’sClash of Civilizations thesis, according to which the conflicts of the post-Cold Warperiod would be not between ideologies but between civilizations, for examplebetween America and Islam. Dugin’s thesis has proved as Attractive to Russianstrategists as Huntington’s did to American ones.

Scholarly Traditionalism is even further from Guénon than politicalTraditionalism, to the extent that it is even disputed to what extent it exists. Itscentral figure is Mircea Eliade, a Romanian intellectual who in 1958 becameprofessor of the history of religion at one of America’s most important academicinstitutions, the University of Chicago. As a young man, Eliade belonged to a groupof prewar Romanian Traditionalists, some of whom were oriented towards Guénon



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and some more towards Evola. Many of the Guénonian Romanians became Sufis,and an important Sufi order in Paris was for many years headed by a formerRomanian diplomat who remained abroad after the Communists came to power inRomania. During the 1930s, many of the Evolian Romanians–including Eliade–wereinvolved in the Legion of the Archangel Michael. This was a spiritually oriented

political movement that during the Second World War changed its nature to becamebarely distinguishable from the Nazi Party. For obvious reasons, this branch of Traditionalism dispersed after 1945.

Eliade’s early politics were little known when he was appointed to theUniversity of Chicago, since from the start of the Second World War he haddistanced himself from political activity. What remained with him from his Romanianyears was a non-Sufi version of Guénon’s attempt to reassemble the originalreligion of humanity, carried out in more rigorous and academically respectable.Rather than tradition, Eliade studied “archaic religion,” and rather than speak of theperennial unity of humanity’s original religion, he wrote of the “unity of thetraditions and symbols” that are “the foundation of constituted consciousness and

being.” The terminology is different, but the basic ideas are much the same.Through Eliade, something of Traditionalism passed through into mainstream

American religious studies, as that discipline was being constructed during the lasthalf of the twentieth century. Non-Christian religions were originally studied inEurope by theologians as a branch of heresiology, an approach that was hard tosustain in the 1960s. A later approach, typified by Max Weber, studied religionalmost as social pathology, and by the 1960s seemed to promise few newdiscoveries. The alternative approach of comparative religion that rules today mightwell have triumphed even without Eliade’s influence, but was championed by Eliade.For many decades religious studies were indelibly marked by Eliade’s methodology,which was in itself a product more of prewar Romanian Traditionalism than of any

other influence.The contemporary impact of Traditionalism is not limited to Eliade’s religious

studies, Evola’s politics, and Schuon’s Sufism. Traditionalism has merged with otherinfluences to enter the general culture of the West in often unsuspected ways. Itunderlies much of E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, one of the key books of the1970s, and inspired VITA, a London art school that is one of the projects of PrinceCharles. It also lies at the base of an unusual British feminine group, Aristasia.Members of Aristasia see feminism as the ultimate triumph of patriarchy, “extirpating femininity even from the heart of women herself.” Aristasians rejectfeminism and attempt as much as possible to live in a parallel world which excludeseverything that has happened since the mid 1960s. This parallel world also excludes

not only actual men, but also the very idea that a male sex exists.Traditionalism is also incidental to several contemporary Western Sufi orders.

The last quarter century has seen the arrival in Europe and America of Sufi ordersthat–like Schuon’s original Alawiyya–are Western branches of mainstream Islamicorders, but that–unlike Schuon’s order–remain under the control of Sufis in theIslamic world. As a consequence, they are much closer to “regular” Sufism, thoughall make some unavoidable concessions to the Western environment in which theyare operating. A Sufi order that insisted on immediate compliance with all Islamicsocial and cultural norms would have difficulty in recruiting many Western followers.

The Bouchichiyya, for example, is a Moroccan Sufi order that has beenunusually successful on its home ground in recruiting “modern,” educated followers.



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Its shaykh comes from an old and traditional family of shaykhs, but many of itssenior members are university professors, and many of its ordinary members comefrom the Westernized, French-speaking elite. This is a milieu where Sufism isgenerally regarded as an alarmingly primitive folk custom. Faozi Skali, a Moroccanfrom this milieu, discovered Guénon while a student in Paris, and under the

influence of Guénon’s books became a Sufi and a Bouchichi. He now runs theBouchichi branch in France, expanding its reach through a variety of culturalactivities well calculated to appeal to thoughtful Frenchmen and women–Sufisinging, handicrafts sales, conferences, and so on. He and many of his followers areTraditionalists in the sense that they take their view of the modern world fromGuénon, but post-Traditionalists in the sense that their spiritual and religious life isnourished not from Guénon or Schuon but from a regular Sufi order in the Islamicworld.

A second Sufi order that resembles the French Bouchichiyya is theNaqshbandiyya Qubrusiyya, arguably the most important Sufi order in the Westtoday. This order is run by a Turkish Cypriot, Muhammad Nazim, and has thousands

of followers worldwide, especially in Turkey, England, Germany, and America. Likethe Moroccan shaykh of the Bouchichiyya, Shaykh Nazim has probably never readGuénon, but many of his followers have. They take their world view not fromGuénon but from their shaykh, but in some respects their shaykh’s world view fitswell with that of Guénon. For Shaykh Nazim, religions other than Islam are of littleinterest, but modernity is much as Guénon saw it–the end of a process of declinewhere nothing of true value is left, a stage of degeneration that cannot last muchlonger. A somewhat over-literal understanding of this view led some of ShaykhNazim’s European followers to await the first day of 2000 on top of the Lebanesemountains, equipped with canned food, candles and donkeys to see them throughthe initial stages of the end of the world.

This review of Sufism and Traditionalism has concentrated on Traditionalismto the exclusion of several other forms of contemporary Western Sufism. Today,two other strands continue to prosper: the non-Islamic strand that dates fromInayat Khan at the start of the twentieth century, and the strand represented byalmost purely Islamic orders such as Shaykh Nazim’s. In this latter strand,Traditionalism is sometimes relevant to individuals, but not of importance to wholeorders. It seems likely that, with ever increasing mobility between the Islamic worldand the West, it is this Islamic strand of Sufism that will become most important inthe West during the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, it is also possible that thetwenty-first century will see Traditionalism becoming ever more important outsideWestern Europe–in Russia, in Turkey, and in Iran. Traditionalism seems to benefit

from globalization.



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References

Dugin, Alexander 1996: Metafisiki blagoivesti: pravoslavnyi esoterizm, Moscow.Evola, Julius 1993: Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee.Guenon, Rene 1999: La crise du monde moderne, Paris: Folio.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 1990: Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man,London: Unwin.

Rocca, G. (ed.) 1988: ‘Abdul-Hadi: Ecrits pour La Gnose, Milan: Arche.Safve, Torbjorn 1994: Ivan Agueli: En roman om frihet , Stockholm: Man.Sedgwick, Mark 2004: Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret

Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century , New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

Schuon, Frithjof 1975: The Transcendent Unity of Religions, London: Harper andRow.

Skali, Faouzi 1993: La voie soufie, Paris: Albin Michel.

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