Against the Modern World Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century by Mark Sedgwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 370 pages.)

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 ...