ABSTRACT
Introduction The Bergsonians embraced the immanent frame and shaped an Islam that would fit within it. Their vision of man as a dynamic, action-orientated being in a state of becoming chimed in with a number of significant Muslim intuitions. Yet the strain that this new focus on the humanum brought to bear on the basic theological datum of Islam shows through in the failure of Bergsonian styles of thinking to catch the imagination of the mainstream. Whilst Iqbal still commands widespread respect as a cultural icon, his influence on trends in contemporary Islam appears rather weaker than that of those who criticize his endorsement of the immanent frame. Amongst this larger group, one small body of Muslims, the Traditionalist1 (or Perennialist) school, stands out for rigorously resisting immanentism and for championing the most radical rejection possible of evolutionary theory. In many ways marginal, yet increasingly influential, the Traditionalists articulate an impressive intellectual response to the profound implications of the evolutionary account of man, even as they reject it wholesale. Traditionalist writers map out a totalizing account of knowledge, metaphysics, religious history and anthropology using the idea that a series of divine revelations has disclosed perennial truth. Each revelatory event founded a ‘tradition’ which would then subsist in a ‘traditional’ civilization. Next to these, western modernity stands out as a regrettable aberration, a project opposed to God’s reiterated initiative. In this light, evolutionary theory is seen as the end-product of a long-drawn-out epistemological ‘fall’. Traditionalism rejects not only Darwin but the whole civilizational context within which evolution became thinkable. So ambitious is the claim that a recent account of the movement calls itself ‘the secret intellectual history of the twentieth century’.2 René Guénon (1886-1951) was indisputably the pioneer of the movement and Fritjof Schuon (1907-1998), a quondam disciple, its most significant theorist, later passing the baton to the younger Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933), an eminent and distinguished scholar of Islamic philosophy and tasawwuf. The output of these three figures, an abundant and strikingly homogeneous corpus, constitutes the focus of the present chapter.3 So far, little impartial research has been devoted to the evolution of their thought. Since the sheer quantity of their texts puts such a task well beyond the scope of the present study, the exposition
which follows will privilege Nasr’s account, offering some suggestions as to the debt of his position to his two intellectual forebears.
