A moment in reverse
WHILE INTERVIEWING Italian converts to Islam nine years ago, Mark Sedgwick, a British professor of Islamic history at the American University in Cairo, stumbled upon Traditionalism, a secretive movement whose adherents have since the late 1920s rejected the modern West because beliefs and practices supposedly transmitted from time immemorial have been lost. Since then, he has traveled from Casablanca to Paris to Tehran to Washington, D.C., in an effort to trace the influence of Traditionalism's founder, obscure French thinker Rene Guenon, on movements as disparate as Sufism, right-wing extremism in Europe, and comparative religion departments in American universities. The results are recounted in his new book, "Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century" (Oxford). While his research may sound like the plot of an Umberto Eco novel, Sedgwick assured Ideas via telephone from London, "Nobody has taken a shot at me yet."
IDEAS: After writing such works as "The Crisis of the Modern World" (1927) and gathering followers, Rene Guenon converted to Islam and retreated into solitude in Cairo. Why was he so influential?
SEDGWICK: Guenon combined the notion -- not original to him -- that all religions derive from a single, lost source with two other ideas. From Hinduism he took the notion that we are living in the kali yuga, a final age in which all that is spiritual is lost. Guenon also claimed that the esoteric heart of the primordial religion of mankind still exists, especially outside the West, and that it's possible to reconnect with it. . .. A kind of soft Traditionalism has proved attractive to those -- including T.S. Eliot, the scholar Mircea Eliade, who transformed the academic study of religion in America, even Britain's Prince Charles -- who've sought an overarching explanation of modernity's general lousiness.
IDEAS: Is Traditionalism also a political movement?
SEDGWICK: Some Traditionalists would like to see the return of a kind of medieval social order. Italy's Baron Julius Evola, for example, attempted to bring Italian Fascism and German Nazism into alignment with Guenon's philosophy [in the 1930s]. Traditionalists also helped found one of post-Soviet Russia's weirder political parties, the National Bolsheviks, who aimed to combine Nazism and Stalinism, as well as the Eurasia Movement, which has united extremists of every variety. On the other hand, in the 1970s many disillusioned Europeans influenced by Guenon abandoned politics for Sufi Islam.
IDEAS: The recent book "Imperial Hubris," by an anonymous CIA insider, suggests that radical Islamists hate the West not because of "our freedoms," as President Bush put it, but because of America's support for Israel, among other policies. Why are Americans so willing to believe that modernity itself is the problem for the Islamists?
SEDGWICK: In my opinion, Islamists don't hate Westerners because we're modern and liberal -- we hate ourselves because we're modern and liberal. Between soft Traditionalism and postmodernism, the notion that the Enlightenment was a big mistake has filtered into the mainstream, so Bush was merely articulating our own self-criticism. . .. Also, ever since the Cold War we've grown accustomed to being hated not for any specific policies, but for our beliefs and way of life. Today I think we're hated for different reasons, and it's time we worked out what they were.
