Henry Corbin's critique of Traditionalism

A new article looks at a dispute in 1963 between Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919–1978), the most important Traditionalist in Pakistan, discussed in an earlier post here, and Henry Corbin (1903–1978), a leading French scholar of Islamic mysticism and in his youth an enthusiast of the work of René Guénon. It is Hadi Fakhoury, “Ibn ʿArabi between East and West: Henry Corbin and Guénonian Traditionalism.” Religiographies, vol. 3, no. 2 (2024): 25–45 available here (open source).

The dispute took place in the pages of a major French philosophical journal, Revue de métaphysique et de morale (Journal of metaphysics and ethics), and started with an article by Askari (available here) which compared Ibn ‘Arabi and Kierkegaard, the former understood in Traditionalist terms as an exponent of orthodox esotericism, and the later understood as representative of modernity. This article contained a passing criticism of Corbin which ensured that Corbin read it and, unusually, responded (here). Fakhoury suggests that one reason that Corbin responded may have been that he wanted to make clear his mature position on Traditionalism. Probably referring to his own early encounter with Traditionalism, he wrote that “reading the works of René Guenon can, at some point in one’s life, provoke a salutary shock.” An interesting perspective: perhaps that is, indeed, one of the main functions of Guénon’s work.

Corbin’s basic argument was that Askari seemed better acquainted with the writings of Guénon than with those of Ibn ‘Arabi, and that Ibn ‘Arabi was more complex than the Traditionalists suspected. “Anyone,” wrote Corbin, “who has devoted his life to seeing the texts for himself will find it impossible to accept that the last word has been said in René Guénon’s work.” That is, I think, true.

Beyond this, Corbin also accuses Traditionalism of a “bias towards systematic rationalism” without really explaining why, and also of “denouncing and devaluing everything that has to do with personal individuality. Fleeing into the impersonal and the spirit of ‘orthodoxy.’” This, said Corbin, was “strangely in tune with the intellectual fashion of the day,” by which he probably meant the varieties of totalitarianism that he saw smothering the personal. As Fakhoury writes, “for both Guénonian Traditionalism and Corbin, the interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabi has implications far beyond mere historical accuracy. Indeed, their respective retrieval of Ibn ‘Arabi is intrinsically connected to, and motivated by, a series of wider, interrelated questions.”

Fakhoury contrasts the approaches of Corbin and the Traditionalists nicely:

Rather than a “return to tradition,” Corbin seeks to go one step before tradition, as it were, that is, to recover the spiritual source that gave rise to it in the first place. This implies a continuous “re-activation” and “re-creation” of tradition in the present, literally, its “modernization” – a word that derives from the Latin modo, meaning “now existing” or “just now.”

 An important and interesting article.

Ivan Aguéli and Ibn ʿArabi

In a new article, Gregory Vandamme revisits the relationship between Ivan Aguéli and the thought of Ibn ʿArabi. It is Gregory Vandamme, “Akbarian Anarchism: Ivan Aguéli (d. 1917) on Islam, Freedom and Shariʿa,” Religiographies 3, no. 1 (2024): 6–24. Available open access here.

To quote from Vandamme’s conclusion,

The various elements of Islamic tradition [Aguéli] engages with are deeply intertwined with his ideal of freedom… The case of Aguéli reveals the hermeneutical potential and adaptability of Ibn ʿArabi’s ideas... The defining characteristic of Ibn ʿArabi’s thought that Aguéli cultivates and develops lies in its capacity to structure itself around paradoxes that balance the informal with the formal, the universal with the particular, and the collective with the individual… While Aguéli’s philosophy ultimately operates within a metaphysical perspective, it also incorporates practical considerations and social and political reflections... The formal and normative framework of the Islamic religion is neither relativised nor undermined…

Aguéli’s philosophy also reveals the paradoxical dimension of the question of universality. Islam… is capable of preserving cultural diversity and particularities… arguing that only the union of East and West can bring about the advent of an authentic “kingdom of God.” While Aguéli can, in many respects, be considered one of the progenitors of the Traditionalist movement, his conception of Islam’s universal dimension stands apart from the views of figures with a far more pronounced influence.

Faouzi Skali, Corbin, and C.G.Jung

A new article looks carefully at one aspect of the thought and teachings of Faouzi Skali, the Moroccan Sufi active in both Morocco and France whose point of departure was Guénon and Traditionalism. It is Ricarda Stegmann,  “Re-Spiritualising the World: Ibn ʿArabi in the Thought of Faouzi Skali,” Religiographies 3, no. 2 (2024): 88–102, available here.

Stegmann shows that Skali follows other Traditionalist in leaning heavily on Ibn ʿArabi, as did Guénon, who was introduced to Ibn ʿArabi as the prime example of Sufi thought by Ivan Aguéli. So far, no great surprise. What is a surprise is that, as Stegmann shows through a painstaking comparison of understandings of the two crucial concepts of ʿālam al-mithāl and futuwwa, Skali’s reading of Ibn ʿArabi draws not just on the Traditionalist Titus Burckhardt, as one might expect, but also on Henry Corbin, in some ways a Traditionalist fellow-traveler, who himself reads Ibn ʿArabi through lenses borrowed from C. G. Jung. So a certain amount of Jung is visible in Skali. Why? Because, suggests Stegmann, “Skali uses this recent reception of Ibn ʿArabi through Corbin because Corbin’s work has a similar objective to re-sacralise history as well as current life worlds.” This makes sense. 

An interesting article based on high-quality scholarly detective work that shows how different strands of modern “spiritually relevant” scholarship intertwine. “Spiritually relevant,” incidentally, is Stegmann’s apt term for the work of people like Corbin who live up to mainstream scholarly standards but also go a long way beyond the standard objectives of modern scholarship. 

New article on the continuing relevance of Traditionalism for Alexander Dugin

Just published: an article on the continuing relevance of Traditionalism for Alexander Dugin. It is Mark Sedgwick, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Traditionalist roots,” Studies in East European Thought, available here (open access). The abstract for that article is:

By the time of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Russian political activist Aleksandr Dugin was known as an ultra-nationalist, a fascist, a geopolitician, a Eurasianist, a Heideggerian, and sometimes also as a Traditionalist in the school established by René Guénon. Some, however, hold that Dugin had left Traditionalism far behind, or perhaps had never really been a Traditionalist in the first place. This article examines the extent to which Dugin’s engagement with Traditionalism has persisted throughout his intellectual and political career. It begins with Dugin’s formative years in the late-Soviet Iuzhinskii Circle, where he first encountered Traditionalism, and explores his adaptations of Guénon’s views. The article argues that Dugin’s works, including his best-seller The Fundamentals of Geopolitics (1997), reflect his continued commitment to Traditionalist principles, despite significant modifications. The article thus challenges views that dismiss Dugin’s Traditionalism as superficial or abandoned. It concludes that Dugin’s enduring adherence to Traditionalism is essential to understanding his influence on Russian political thought and his broad appeal.

Traditionalist takes over at the Biennale

The (slightly ironic) appointment of the Italian Traditionalist Muslim Pietrangelo Buttafuoco (pictured) as president of the distinctly avant-garde Venice Biennale draws attention to the career of a major figure on the Italian Traditionalist scene and a prolific writer.

Buttafuoco was born in Sicily in 1963 into a family that supported the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), in which he himself became active as a young man. It is not clear when he became a Traditionalist, but in 2001 he published a collection of his articles as Fogli consanguinei (Kin Pages) with the Edizioni di Ar, which was run by Franco Freda, an Evolian who had created a Gruppo di Ar named in honor of the Gruppo di Ur to which Julius Evola had once belonged. Buttafuoco also contributed to a volume on Evola and Spengler published by the Edizioni di Ar in 2004. He became known as a Muslim in 2015, but had probably converted earlier, to judge from his literary output, discussed below. He is a Shi’i, and so, presumably, a member of one of the groups studied by Minoo Mirshahvalad in her Crises and Conversions: The Unlikely Avenues of "Italian Shiism”, discussed in an earlier post here. He stresses the Muslim history of Sicily, and took the name Giafar al Siqilli (the Sicilian) in honor of Jafar ibn Muhammad, the conqueror of Syracuse in 878.

Buttafuoco has published at least one novel or book of essays most years since 2002. Many of these focus on Sicily. The novels are usually historical and quite dramatic and/or romantic, and several feature Islam. One of his non-fiction books is pure Traditionalism, and some others deal with Islam.

From our perspective, Buttafuoco’s most interesting period was 2005-2011. In 2005, his first novel, Le uova del drago. Una storia vera al teatro dei pupi (The Dragon's Eggs: A True Story at the Puppet Theater) was set in wartime Sicily, where the “dragon’s eggs” were eleven Muslim militiamen of various nationalities, under the authority of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who fought bravely against the Allied invasion together with Italian Fascists and a glamorous female German spy. Two years later came L'ultima del Diavolo (The Devil’s last woman, 2008), which Buttafuoco described as “the first Muslim novel in the Italian language.” It switches between the time of the Prophet Muhammad, based on the sira, and the present day, in which the Devil is trying to organize the seizure of documents about the monk Bahira in order to prevent the Christian legitimization of Muhammad, against some Russians who want to bring Orthodox Christians and Muslims closer. The Americans are allied with the Devil. L'ultima del Diavolo is a sort of Islamic Dan Brown with a definite ideological message. I wonder whether Alexander Dugin has read it.

Buttafuoco’s Traditionist book, Cabaret Voltaire. L'Islam, il sacro, l'Occidente (Cabaret Voltaire: Islam, the Sacred, the West) was published in 2008. It attacks modernity and the false worship of rationality and science and the illusions of freedom and democracy in true Guénonian fashion. It further argues that Islam is misunderstood as a result of what is written in the “false liberal” and American-dominated press, and is in fact where one can still find “the sacred, the primordial forces of nature, the original bond.”

Following this came a somewhat different type of book on woman and how to seduce them, Fìmmini. Ammirarle, decifrarle, sedurle (Women: Admire them, decipher them, seduce them), before Buttafuoco returned to Sicily in 2011 with Il lupo e la luna (The Wolf and the Moon), in which a young Sicilian is captured by the Turks and brought up by the Sultan as a military commander. He later returns to Sicily and comes into conflict with his faithfully Catholic brother.This novel is evidently inspired by the life of Giovanni Dionigi Galeni (d. 1587), a not a Sicilian but a Calbrian who was captured, converted to Islam, and ended up as Grand Admiral of the Ottoman navy.

2011 marks the end of Buttafuoco’s most Islamic period. Only two of his later novels and essays in 2012-2023 mention Islam. Il feroce Saracino. La guerra dell'Islam. Il califfo alle porte di Roma (The ferocious Saracen: The War of Islam, The Caliph at the Gates of Rome, 2015), argues against terrorism, seen as an aspect of a struggle within Islam between good and bad Muslims. This is a view with which most experts would mostly agree, but that is not so obvious for the general public. Sotto il suo passo nascono i fiori. Goethe e l'Islam (Flowers bloom under his footfall: Goethe and Islam, 2019) was written together with an Italian Muslim theologian, Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre (b. 1987), and covers Goethe’s encounter with Islam, ending with his (alleged) conversion. The title is taken from a line in his “Mahomets Gesang” (The Song of Muhammad, 1817/21). Goethe is a favorite of those who want to strengthen Islam's roots in Europe.

It is not clear that Buttafuoco has succeeded in making the Italian right more sympathetic towards Islam. It is clear, though, that his Islam has sometimes been a problem for his own political career. After the MSI in which he started his political career had become the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) in 1995 and the AN had merged into Silvio Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL), Buttafuoco joined the Lega Nord, previously allied to the AN. Giorgia Meloni, later Italian Prime Minister, who had also been a prominent member of AN and PdL, is said to have vetoed Buttafuoco’s attempt to stand as the Lega Nord candidate for the post of Governor of Sicily in 2015, given that having a Muslim stand for that post would send all the wrong signals. Keeping a little quieter about Islam may have improved Meloni’s view of Buttafuoco when it came to the Bienale.

My thanks to TR for bringing Buttafuoco to my attention.