Pathways to an Inner Islam: Massignon, Corbin, Guenon, and Schuon

1. INTRODUCTION

Chapter One INTRODUCTION The spiritual, mystical, and esoteric doctrines and practices of Islam, which may be conveniently, if not quite satisfactorily, labeled as Sufism, have been among the main avenues of the understanding of this religion in Western academic circles, and possibly among Western audiences in general. This stems from a number of reasons, not the least of which is a diffuse sense that Sufism has provided irreplaceable keys for reaching the core of Muslim identity over the centuries, while providing the most adequate responses to contemporary disfigurements of the Islamic tradition. It is in this context that we propose, in the current book, to show how the works of those whom Pierre Lory has called the “mystical ambassadors of Islam”1 may shed light on the oft-neglected availability of a profound and integral apprehension of Islam, thereby helping to dispel some problematic assumptions feeding many misconceptions of it. The four authors whom we propose to study have introduced Islam to the West through the perspective of the spiritual dimension that they themselves unveiled in the Islamic tradition. These authors were mystical “ambassadors” of Islam in the sense that their scholarly work was intimately connected to an inner call for the spiritual depth of Islam, the latter enabling them to introduce that religion to Western audiences in a fresh and substantive way. It may be helpful to add, in order to dispel any possible oversimplifications, that these authors should not be considered as representatives of Islam in the literal sense of one who has converted to that religion and become one of its spokesmen.2 None of these four “ambassadors” was in fact Muslim in the conventional, external, and exclusive sense of the word, even though two of them did attach themselves formally to the Islamic tradition in view of an affiliation to Sufism, in Arabic tasawwuf. The four of them experienced, at any rate, the spiritual influence of Islam in a very direct, profound, and powerful manner. By contrast with some other areas of Western scholarly discourse on Islam, most of the greatest works of French Islamic Studies have been informed by an inquiry into the inner dimensions of Islam. 3 These terms cover a diverse range of phenomena, from popular tasawwuf to Shī’ite theosophy, but they 2 PATHWAYS TO AN INNER ISLAM all point to an understanding of Islam that breaks away from the reductionist view of that religion as a strictly legal, moral, and political reality. This may prima facie come as a surprise in light of the French and French-speaking intellectual and academic climate, one that has been most often characterized by its rationalist and secular bent, but most of the seminal contributions to the field published in the French language have tended to take the road of an inquiry into the supra-legal and supra-rational aspects of Islam, whether this be as a reaction against the rationalist and positivist ambience of French academia, or as a result of a residual but enduring influence of the Christian spiritual heritage. In this context, the current study focuses on two intellectual lineages within the domain of Islamic studies: One ran from the seminal and “revolutionary” contribution of Louis Massignon (1883–1962) to Islamic Studies and was continued, along a significantly different line—more gnostic than mystical, more centered on Shī’ism than on Sunni Islam—by his student Henry Corbin (1903–1978); the second originated with the works of René Guénon (1886–1951) in metaphysics and the study of symbols, and was pursued in a distinct way by the religious philosopher Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998), whose notions of esoterism and tradition have played an influential role in redefining the nature of religious intellectuality among a significant number of contemporary Islamic and non-Islamic scholars. One of the theses put forward in the present book is that these two intellectual lineages are complementary in more than one way: On the one hand, Massignon and Corbin were both deeply rooted in the Christian tradition (Catholic in the former, Protestant in the latter) while being intensely involved in a scholarly redefinition of the academic study of Islam; on the other hand, both Guénon and Schuon developed their works outside of academic institutions and protocols, and were able to illuminate central facets of the Islamic tradition from the point of view of an actual participation in its spiritual economy. This book...