Being Human in Islam by Howard Damian

Author:Howard, Damian.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Misosophy139 and evolution

The Kali Yuga, in Schuon's view, makes the East inert and the West decadent.140 Access to metaphysical truth and tradition itself, however, is not entirely precluded and Nasr sees tradition as having made provision even for westerners through the work of Guénon and Schuon.141 It is with this in mind that Nasr sets out his idea of inversion. He shares Guénon's uncompromising position that the existence of the modern world is purely negative;142 the ‘modern’ is best understood as that which is cut off from the divine source.143 Guenon's concept of ‘inversion’ is a fundamental tenet of his worldview.144 In the first place ‘inversion’ is a description of the status of the motley collection of inauthentic schools of ‘oriental wisdom’, theosophy and other pseudo-mystical movements, which proliferated in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.145 They assert their grounding in initiatory practices but in fact they are deracinated from real tradition, more a symptom of the modernity they despise than a solution to its malaise. By extension the term is used to explain how westerners see progress where in fact there is positive decay. It is not sufficient for Traditionalism to condemn modernity for not espousing the values of a valid tradition; it has to be condemned for actively going in the opposite direction.

Although Nasr employs the word ‘inversion’ sparingly,146 trying as he does to move away from the constricting narrowness of Guénon, nevertheless the fundamental thesis remains: ‘the traditional worlds were essentially good and accidentally evil, and the modern world essentially evil and accidentally good’.147 He gives an example in what he calls ‘inverse analogy’. Whereas God's creativity, he argues, is an exteriorization of the ‘principial’, authentic human creativity, of the sort one finds in the traditional arts, proceeds by a process of internalization or recollection. The inversion of this process is clearly at work in modern art which seeks to exteriorize an experience of the inner self in an expressivist turn. So, whereas the object fashioned by the traditional craftsman brings him back by internalization to his true nature,148 the modern artist gives expression to his inner turmoil and loses himself. This makes for a feedback mechanism similar to that which we find going on in the interaction between secular science and the formulation of evolutionary theory. Both work to desacralize society.149

The occasion of the ‘fall’ of the West hangs on its turn towards desacralized knowledge which begins in its adoption of the rationalist wing of Ancient Greek thought,150 in particular Aristotle. As Nasr points out, in Traditionalism:

‘Philosophy’ as a mental play or discipline which does not transform one's being is considered meaningless and in fact dangerous. The whole of the teachings of such Islamic philosophers as Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra and all of Sufism are based in this point.151

For Schuon, a strand of epistemological ‘decline’ can be traced through Graeco-Roman art in all its spiritual vacuity and then in the idealism of Gothic architecture, before it comes to the fore in the deep-seated individualism of

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