The Hidden Common Roots of Diverse Traditions: Revisiting the Route of Traditionalism
Modern secular humanistic, postmodern relativist and fundamentalist religious camps all agree in privileging a certain ideological ferment that downplays/marginalizes the epistemic, ontological and axiological claims of certain or all premodern/wisdom/archaic traditions/religions or negate Absolute/Reality/Transcendence centrism of traditions and find reasons to debunk vast majority of people with their adherence to their religions, myths, philosophies, folklore and have globalizing ambitions at the cost of local, archaic, “wild”, colonized others. Against all of them are little known, little read, much reviled, mostly misunderstood traditionalist thinkers who uphold the primacy of Tradition, see its ramifications everywhere, assert that only Absolute is absolute, God has never been without witness in any culture and there are as many paths to Truth as are souls even though. It transcends in its essence every approximation of knowers/gnostics and has infinite faces and facets implying pluralism of beliefs, darsanas, rituals and other cultural expressions. It is time we seek to discover our roots and find our way to Home/Salvation/Felicity/Eudemonia. We need to explore key premises of traditionalism against West/Eurocentrism/modernism (and implied colonizing ideology that overrides and erases local expressions) and other forces that prevent people from respecting diversity without disowning a unity that grounds diversity without erasing uniqueness of diverse expressions. We illustrate the traditionalist doctrine of nondualism, for anchoring diverse expressions of beliefs and grounding dialogue between self and other enshrined in Islamic Tradition in the writings of one of its greatest expositors IbnArabi.
Critique of Modernism
Tradition is opposed to modernism because it considers the premise upon which modernism is based to be wrong and false in principle. Nasr, one of the major figures in perennialist school states in this connection: “What tradition criticizes in the modern world is the total world view, the premises, the foundations which, from its point of view, are false so that any good which appears in the world is accidental rather than essential.…It wishes to slay the modern world in order to create a normal one .…From this point of view the history of Western man during the past five centuries is an anomaly in the long history of human race in both East and West” (Nasr 1988: 84–85). Gandhi’s remark about Western civilization that it is an interesting idea expresses the same dismissive view. It is the idea of progress that is vehemently rejected by traditionalists. Renaissance humanism bound man to earthly level and in doing so imprisoned his aspirations for perfection by limiting them to the world. The traditional idea of perfection and progress of the soul from its upward vertical dimension towards God is reduced to a purely this worldly and temporal one. It directed men towards conquering the other—the nature, the neighbor or the other nations rather than the inner territory of the self.
All the defining characteristics of Post-Renaissance and Enlightenment Western modernity—rationalist, masculine or androcentric, subjectcentred or egoistic, logical, dualist, outward looking or extrovert, aggressive, scientific, capitalist, desacralizing or secularist, humanistic, individualistic—create an environment, a worldview that is congenial to colonialist enterprise which means an othering of non-Western cultures, religions, sciences, philosophies and of course the supreme science scientia sacra or Metaphysics that is the soul of traditional cultures.
The Project of Othering/Colonizing
The West has constructed the colonized world as the other and legitimated its rule on the assumptions of its superiority in religious, philosophical, scientific and other spheres. (Perennialists reverse this hierarchy). It has constructed the orient in an image, which would justify its rape of it. Said has tried to deconstruct these othering and marginalizing strategies of the West. Other postcolonialists have also worked in this direction. But their perspective remains largely Western and they are unable to extricate themselves from what may be referred to as colonialist metaphysical and theological worldview.
The history of religious thought in the West can be read as a pendular movement between seemingly exclusive and evident opposites, like the following (adapted from Taylor):
| Go Eternity Being Rest Permanence Presence One Order Life Meaning Transcendent Identity Affirmation Truth Certainty Reality Light Vision Sanity Spirit Vision Spiritual Mind Innocence Good Proper God Centered Purposeful Seriousness |
World Many Negation Error Uncertainty Illusion Carnal Guilt |
Now, as Taylor says,
Like its intellectual twin philosophy, theology doesn’t regard these opposites as equivalent. It refuses to allow the possibility that opposite terms can coexist peacefully. Invariably one term is privileged through the divestment of its relative. The resultant economy of privilege sustains an asymmetrical hierarchy in which one member governs or rules the other throughout the theological, logical, axiological and even politicaldomains. (Taylor 1984)
In the precise context of discourse of othering and exclusion, we find the modern West has privileged the first term in following binaries:
| Reason Man Self Anthropocentrism being This world Becoming Kingdom of Earth Thinking Masculine Science (Positivism) Scientist Modernity Body Matter Time White Speech Head Activism Modern |
Unreason |
This privileging of one term over the other and consequent marginalization of the other as “Other” in all these binaries is what has sustained the grand narrative of modernity and one can say its child, colonialism. Traditions are, perennialist saver, nondualistic and their aspiration to middle path requires cognizance of and thus transcendence of polar opposite. Binaries are embraced and transcended and alternately affirmed. For instance they are Reality-centric which embraces God/world, matter/spirit, action and contemplation, jnan and bhakti, all six points of view that six traditional darsana in Indian tradition are. The perfect man is one who is open to all forms and bonds by no belief as all beliefs are limiting as Ibn Arabi would say. We will later turn to Ibn Arabi—whom perennialists believe to be a prime expositor of Islamic Tradition—to show how dualisms are avoided though dualities are retained and one’s commitment to realize what is due to every object—as justice requires—is ensured.
Traditionalist Perspective
Against promethean enterprises and limiting exclusivist ideological currents such as the nineteenth-century’s pseudo-religion of nationalism, the positivistic belief in science, racism and evolutionism that served to legitimize unbridled imperialism, Perennialists hold out the transpersonal authority of intellect that unifies instead of discriminates and suprahuman authority of primordial revelation, divine gnosis adapted providentially to different circumstances in the form of religions, and a evolutionistic view of history that sees the world is in a state of intellectual and spiritual decline, inevitable from the very start of an historical cycle. We are at present in what the Classical West called the Iron Age, and the Hindus Kali Yuga.
The idea of a perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis) has received different articulations throughout the history of Western philosophy. Whether explicitly formulated or not it has been an underlying idea across cultures. Though originally formulated in the East and later in the West we can trace its ideas in Plato, Meister Eckhart and some Sufi thinkers. However wherever mysticism has been lived perennial philosophy seems to be in the background. Throughout the history of philosophy, the term perennial philosophy or philosophiaperennis was also used as “a synonym for Scholasticism and Thomism; as the final goal of philosophy by Leibniz; as the regulative ideal of philosophical practice by Jaspers; and as a world philosophy, synthesis of East and West, by Radhakrishnan”. The search for a universal, permanent, and all-encompassing philosophy has been traced to the Neoplatonism of Philo of Alexandria or the Platonic Christian synthesis of St. Augustine. However, it was AgostinoSteuco (1497–1546) who coined this term to refer to the priscatheologia or philosophiapriscorium of MarsilioFicino, a unifying philosophical system based on a synthesis of Platonic principles and Christian doctrines. Here it is used to specifically refer to a school of thought spearheaded by the trinity of Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy.
Perennialists believe in an overlying/underlying current of affirmation of the Real/Absolute as universal inheritance of mankind grounding a universal orthodoxy for all people across all times. The idea is that a philosophical/metaphysical current exists that has endured through centuries, and that is able to integrate harmoniously all traditions in terms of a single Truth which underlies the apparent plurality of world views. This unity in human knowledge stems from the existence of a single ultimate reality which can be possibly apprehended by all men through intellect/intellective intuition and is accessible through universally efficacious symbolism. Religions, myths, arts and folklore across cultures have basic correspondences and are connected to this shared universal metaphysic.
Philosophiaperennis, as Nasr states, pertains to a knowledge “which has always been and will always be and which is of universal character both in the sense of existing among peoples of different climes and epochs and of dealing with universal principles. This knowledge which is available to the intellect is, moreover, contained in the heart of all religions or traditions” (Nasr 1988: 54). (Intellect, nuous, in the traditionalist metaphysical perspective is a supra-individual faculty distinct from reason though the latter is its reflection on the mental plane.) The philosophiaperennis possesses
branches and ramifications pertaining to cosmology, anthropology, art and other disciplines, but at its heart lies pure metaphysics, if this later term is understood as the science of Ultimate Reality, as a scientia sacra not to be confused with the subject bearing the name metaphysics in post-medieval Western philosophy. (Nasr 1988: 54)
The perennialist school believes that there is a primordial tradition which constituted original or archetypal man’s primal spiritual and intellectual heritage received through direct revelation when Heaven and Earth were still “united”. This Primordial Tradition is reflected in all later traditions, but the later traditions are not simply its historical and horizontal continuation. This concept of tradition is a key concept of this perennialist school that has arisen as a response to modernism and humanism. What is tradition? It is the knowledge of First Principles or Universal Principles, the metaphysical core or kernel of all traditional religious and wisdom traditions which are the prerogative of so-called primitive men (and that ancient age is the Age of Gold, in contrast to which modern age being the most degenerate age signalling the end of the world-Kali Yuga-Iron Age) and “barbaric” Africans and Asians—in short the third world, the premodern world or non-European or colonized world. Tradition means
truths or principles of a divine origin revealed or unveiled to mankind and, in fact, a whole cosmic centre through various figures envisaged as messengers, prophets, avatars, the Logos or other transmitting agencies, along with all the ramifications and applications of these principles in different realms including law and social structure, art, symbolism, the sciences, and embracing of course Supreme Knowledge along with the means of its attainment. (Nasr 1993: 68)
In its more universal sense tradition can be considered to include the principles which bind man to Heaven. Lord Northbourne defines it as the chain that joins civilization to Revelation.
Convergence with Other Critiques of Othering
Perennialist critique converges (though fundamental differences separate it in turn from more postmodernist approach) with postmodern critique of colonialist narrative. Postmodern turn (in Huston Smith’s reading as presented in 1961 essay “The Revolution in Western Thought” we see post-modern scepticism and uncertainty as only a transition to yet another intellectual perspective, one that hopefully will be characterized by a more holistic and spiritual outlook. And in fact that outlook is already there though we may still be searching for the appropriate idiom to express it for the postmodern man) also exposes historically and culturally constituted nature of bourgeois or Eurocentric or colonialist norms. The rationale of scientific discourses Foucault identified with the transformation of human beings into knowable—that is, controllable “subjects”. It is the self-other binary representing the exclusionary relationship between subjects who occupy opposite positions on centre/margin model of political and other power relations which is the basis of colonialist ideology. The binary relationship between self and other suggests that the “I” of the self can’t exist without the “non-I” or the other. The proponents of postcolonial theory rightly view the relationship of self to other as one of domination and exclusion that maintains unequal power relations in support of racist imperialistic colonialist enterprise. Theorists such as Gayatri Spivak have suggested the deployment of a strategic “otherness” or identity politics levelling unequal power relations and disabling this binary opposition. Perennialists would principally agree with all this but point out that self-other dichotomy is too deeply entrenched in Western thought and one needs a radical deconstructive strategy to problematize this binary and postcolonialist theorists can’t provide it being insufficiently radical for the purpose and being rooted in the modernist humanist Western (as against the traditional nondualist Eastern) framework. It is Buddhism and in fact all mysticism (which is the kernel of religion) that cuts at the root of the problem. The self-other dichotomy can’t be challenged without rejecting the whole tradition of Western philosophy or its metaphysics of presence and the cogito principle of Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, which establishes the human self and its material reality independent of human thought. The absolutization of subject-object duality is the very foundation of modern colonialist project would claim legitimacy from this basic metaphysical position. All fundamental antagonisms and dualisms of the West stems from the great cleavage between form and matter. This split is predicated upon that peculiarly Western relation between the subject and the nonsubject, in which the two stand in opposition to each other. This is true both chronologically and ontologically. For in establishing this opposition, the mind detached itself from the world and initiated the theme of Western thought and civilization which is objectivation of the given, its controls by the human subject, its relationship with it and all this necessitating and culminating in outwardly directed war against Nature and against the Other as other appears as hell to it. The history of colonialism is so to speak mirrored in the history of Western thought and civilization which is more interested in via active than in via contemplativa, in domination or mastery over the object, the other. By virtue of the incessant urge or the will to posit objects, the subject itself creates its own antagonists. It is the same will which also constitutes the means of mastering them. The modern science with its profound interest in the outer world (rather than the inner one) and its very methodology of objectivation is the logical development or illustration of this mind structure and attitude of the West. Even Absolute is conceived as an object in the West. All this is alien to Eastern mystical spirit—the entire construction with its schism between the logos and the empirical world and the ensuing pairs of irreconcilable opposites. The Eastern mind isn’t interested in shaping the non-subject as the other and encounters this other in almost Levinasian ethical sense. The Eastern framework of juxtaposition and identity and its both/and logic of polarities or logic of “contradictions” is to be contrasted to Western either/or logic and its vain attempt at unity in variety as the genuine—otherness of the other is subsumed in some abstract higher category.
If the postcolonialist enterprise is decentring of the imperialist privileging of western epistemology and culture and the promotion of other formerly denigrated forms of knowledge and cultures, it is perennialist approach that is an ally in the sense that it provides an alternative epistemology, a fully developed worldview that includes whole range of sciences against the dominant colonialist modern one. Some powerful objections have emerged against the deployment of deconstructionist and postmodernist thought and methodology in postcolonial theory. Some critics have pointed to Fredrik Jameson’s identification of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism to advance their case. Lenin had argued nearly a century ago that imperialism itself represents the latest form of capitalism. This places both imperialist culture and postmodernism within the same history and fundamentally at odds with any practical resistance to the consequences of colonialism. Opponents of poststructuralist inflected theory have pointed to another tradition of anticolonial theory which considerably predated the work of Said, Bhaba and Spivak—the trinity of postcolonial theorists—and reaches back to certain African American writers (such as W.E.B Du Bios or the South African Sol Plaatje) anticolonial independence fighters and thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi and authors such as Chinua Achebe. Perennialist metaphysical approach provides a systematic refutation of all the important assumptions and grand claims of Occidental thought and civilization—perennialists have shaken the foundations of secularized Western thought—its rationalism, desacralizing secularism, nationalism, scientism, tenchnocracy, progressivism and the like—and shown how the marginalized terms of such binaries as primitive/progressive, traditional science/modern science, tradition/modernity, nature/culture, traditional crafts/modern technology, unreason/reason, etc., need to be evaluated differently and even privileged. They aren’t arguing for just neutralizing or crossing these binaries as some postmodernist would like to but clear reversal of these privileging terms. Colonization should be understood as the human condition itself and not a mere socio-politico economic historical process. It is Freudian Nietzsche an intertext of Drive for aggression and the Will to Power and is the originary violence.
Self-Other, One-Many Dialectics in the Resources of Ibn Arabi
Ibn ‘Arabî’s great contribution is to argue for cognitive importance of imaginal faculty. As Chittick notes, he reconciles the poles of transcendence and immanence by seeing the heart as unitary consciousness which must become attuned to its own fluctuations and see God’s incomparability with the eye of reason on one beating, and His similarity with the eye of imagination on other beating. Its two visions are prefigured in the two primary names of the Scripture, al-qur’ân, “that which brings together”, and al-furqân, “that which differentiates”. These two demarcate the contours of ontology and epistemology. The first alludes to the unifying oneness of Being (perceived by imagination), and the second to the differentiating manyness of knowledge and discernment (perceived by reason). The Real, as Ibn ‘Arabî often says, is the One/the Many (alwâhid al-kathîr), that is, One in Essence and many in names, the names being the principles of all multiplicity, limitation and definition. In effect, with the eye of imagination, the heart sees Being present in all things, and with the eye of reason it discerns its transcendence and the diversity of the divine faces. The scientific West sees with one eye Manyness only while the Vedantic and Buddhist East has largely emphasized the eye that sees One only. Man needs binocular vision to see the depth of things.
He doesn’t merely speak of women’s rights or human rights but the rights of everything and mostly importantly of God as Reality which embraces all things and is all things. Muhammedan saints give each created thing exactly what is due to it on the basis of seeing it as a unique self-disclosure (tajallî) of the absolute Haqq. They simultaneously see the oneness of the Real and the manyness of creation that allows them “to give each thing that has a haqq its haqq”, as demanded by the Prophet (Chittick 1998). For him a Muhammedan is one who realizes the perfections of all the prophets—an ideal worthy of emulating for every man and who can assert that he is truly a Muhammedan and who can be more inclusivist than a Muhammedan in this sense? He demands, as Qunawi puts it, that one should perceive each thing only through that thing itself and inasmuch as one is identical with each thing and thus one is the attribute of every attribute and the quality of every essence and one’s act is the act of every actor (Nafahat, 265). The highest station of no-station demands disengaging oneself from all qualities, bonds, limitations, and constrictions and standing non-delimited Wuj¯ud, i.e., to be absolutely open to the Real with no imposition or will of one’s own. It is what Jesus calls the poverty of spirit and other scriptures such as the Bhagvat Gita detachment. His vision of the unity of Being demands in short implies transcendence or cessation of all inequalities and distinctions of class, creed, colour, race, gender, nationality, regionality, etc. He demands the sacrifice of the ego which thinks in terms of its rights over and against the rights of the other. “I” must be annihilated in fana so that one mirrors Existence or God and flows with the Tao. Ibn ‘Arabî thus demands nothing less than Universal Compassion and encountering the other with infinite humility and care—an ideal which Levinas attempts to appropriate.
In his inclusive perspective the binaries of action and contemplation, grace and self effort, invocation and resignation or acceptance of divine will, religious and secular or sacred and profane, knowledge and faith, men and women, soul and body, matter and consciousness, good and evil, truth and error, guidance and misguidance, philosophy and metaphysics, theology and philosophy, symbol and history, myth and fact and the like appear as complementary polarities rather than as opposites as would follow from his nondualism which means transcendence of binaries or unification of polarities.
He advocates a sort of perspectivism which implies epistemological pluralism that vetoes totalizing narratives and allows every possible angle on infinite faced reality. He embodies the perspective of “judge not” that Jesus advocated. He appropriates the conceptions of negative divine which is the hallmark of Buddhism and positive divine which is the hallmark of Islam and Judaism. Everyone can be heard as every path is a straight path in its own way. His integral spirituality appropriates all the traditional paths to God, all the basic forms of yoga—bhaktic, jnanic and karmic. The thesis of Akbarian universalism has been succinctly formulated by a contemporary scholar in the following words.
The particular gift that comes from Ibn’‘Arabî, or possibly even is Ibn‘Arabî, is the all-inclusive point of view. If it is situated anywhere it is at the point of coming into manifestation of everything. As such it is not only a spiritual point of view, unless what is meant by that is the existence of one absolute and all-encompassing reality, which is the only real existence of everyone and everything. This is a perspective that leaves nothing out. It is not a Judeo-Christian or Islamic perspective, but it is this which has informed and given rise to the Abrahamic line and to all spirituality everywhere… this point of view is completely distinguished from all partiality, and all qualifying adjectives, and that it is free from the qualifications of all religions, and is thereby completely muslim to the Truth. (Young 1999)
The rights of experience, reason, intuition, revelation all are recognized but no empiricism or positivism, intuitionism, rationalism and fidesism is allowed to emerge. The rights of both time and eternity, immanence and transcendence, man and God, self and nonself, animate and animate worlds, visible and invisible realms, history and metahistory, this world and the otherworld are recognized. The truth or haqq of all possibilities, potentialities, manifestations are in principle taken care of. He is not exclusively a theologian or a mystic or a philosopher or an ideologue of this or that thought. He is not a humanist who doesn’t lift up his eyes to heavens and sees all possibilities and potentialities exhausted in earthly career, a rationalist philosopher caught in the categories of reason, a theologian who behaves as if God needed an advocate or special secretary and he is the one, a mystic whose rational life is flooded by subjective life of feelings but a humanitarian philosopher-mystic-theologian all simultaneously. Because he is a poet as well besides being a philosopher or a theologian he embraces wider angle of what constitutes universal human experience. He is a strict monotheist but didn’t reject idolaters as utterly misguided finding God as the true object of worship despite what men would erroneously think sometimes. He is the strong upholder of universal orthodoxy, of purity of doctrine but found truth, though not the whole or exclusive truth in all doctrines. He is the heir of Abrahamic Tradition but doesn’t exclude even Pharoah from salvation.
Ibn ‘Arabi, in arguing for cognitive importance of imaginal faculty, offers invaluable tool for bridging philosophies. He reconciles the poles of transcendence and immanence by seeing the heart as unitary consciousness which must become attuned to its own fluctuations and see God’s incomparability with the eye of reason on one beating, and His similarity with the eye of imagination on other beating. Imagination perceives the unifying oneness of Being and reason the diversity of divine faces. The scientific West sees with one eye Manyness only while the Vedantic and Buddhist East has largely emphasized the eye that sees One only. Man needs binocular vision to see the depth of things. Modern man lacks the unifying eye of imagination and all his knowledge is “dispersion in detail”. Much sought after unity of knowledge is impossible to be achieved without the use of the currently atrophied eye of imagination.
Acknowledgement fundamental mystery and unity of existence in Ibn‘Arabî amounts to possibility of dialogue with the other that transcends our comprehension and granting that it can be accessed/known or spoken to, in a way, means that we can have a dialogue with everything that exists beyond the narrow cocoon of our self. Life being He/not-He is dialogic, dialectical play of binaries, of God and the inexistent world or transcendent divinity and the world of forms. Life is a dialogue. Ibn ‘Arabi while resisting every attempt to make absolutes from philosophical and theological positions would not be much troubled by such seemingly antagonistic formulations in different schools that sharply categorize and distinguish them in such terms as presence or absence of personal God in them, prophetic vs. mystical, mayaistic vs. world affirming, rational vs. intuitional, pantheistic/polytheistic vs. theistic or transcendentalist, idealist vs. realist/pragmatic, theological vs. philosophical. All beliefs are limiting though have some truth at their own levels. The perfect man can accommodate all the sects that there are as Rumi, Ibn ‘Arabi’s contemporary said in his famous Diwani Shamse Tabriz, or appropriate all points of view or beliefs seeing the aspect of truth in all of them but without identifying with any of them as Ibn ‘Arabi would like to put it. Dualistic binary thinking is transcended in the metaphysical standpoint as knowing and being become one.
One recalls Simone Weil’s method here that one may surmise echoes Jainasyadvada. And this does converge with the implications of Nagarjuna’s method of crossing all positions and taking rest in a position of no-position—the right view is no view—and as Ibn ‘Arabi would put it, the highest station is the station of no-station. Socratic dialectics was originally tailored to arrive at a consensus of rational just beings which Habermas’ idea of communicative dialogue. “One must accept all opinions”, Simone Weil has written, “but then arrange them in a vertical order, placing them at appropriate levels”. She also noted that “as soon as one has arrived at any position, try to find in what sensethe contrary is true”. Thus we find, as Leslie Fielder notes in the introduction to Waiting for God, that “corresponding to Simone Weil’s basic conviction that no widely held belief is utterly devoid of truth is a dialectical method in which she balances against each other contrary propositions, not in order to arrive at a synthesis in terms of a ‘golden mean,’ but rather to achieve an equilibrium of truths”. This equilibrium of truths is what traditionalism attempts to attest in world religion, art traditions, mythologies, folklore and darsanas. Recognition of this would help resolve all conflicts based on superiority of one’s ideological or truth claims. Dialogue that Plato extolled as a mechanism for reaching truth requires mastery of the art of listening about which Kierkegaard also reminds us so eloquently.
Conclusion
It is time to let thousand flowers bloom, let all cultures cultivate their unique styles while seeing how our roots trace to the soil of the Real and we are led, by appreciating the other, to the depths of our own selfhood. Iqbal’s great work Secrets of the Self echoing Hegel and Sufis elaborates the idea that everything is really a projection of the self and thus every other is one’s own self that is there as part of the grand play of the Self. The idea of creation as lila (cosmic play) and its embodiment in great epics like Mahabharat and Ramayana amply demonstrates that there is no real other to be bothered about and one in loving others loves only oneself and thus compassion is really for one’s own good. What is especially noteworthy in great Indian epics is how the political or ideological other is engaged in dialogue and even thought to be redeemed due to sticking to dharma even though that dharma contradicts what one is following. This explains lengthy dialogues of attempts at reconciliation or engagement with opponents, trying to avoid war to the end, possibility of last minute redemption of Rawan in Ramayana and Barberek envisioning Krishna as fighting on both sides in Mahabharatas. What is required is to instil this spirit in polarized geopolitics and politics. In fact self gets its recognition from the other. Levinas showed how we owe everything to other and this other should include other cultures, other communities. This calls for countering what de Sousa Santos calls epistemicide—the killing of different knowledge traditions in the wake of modernity—through cultural regeneration, one important aspect of this cultural regeneration is regeneration of knowledge, one’s knowledge tradition (de Sousa Santos 2007, 2014). It is heartening to see, despite globalization’s homogenizing move causing disappearance of local languages and other formations, a slow movement of regeneration of knowledges of our soil and soul in varieties of indigenous movements. In the North East of India where tribals were converted to Christianity, there is a movement for indigenization of Christianity into one’s soil (Frynkenberg 2010). Religious and spiritual movements such as Donyi Polo in Arunachala Pradesh create new spaces of cultural regeneration from one’s soil. Post Corona is an opportune movement for more local-centric and environment-centric traditional expressions and it is hoped that Corona will prove a blessing in disguise for dying local traditions and we collectively find better anchorage in our roots and fight fragmentation and alienation. It was thanks to commitment to local land, tribe, language, folklore, customs and what Ibn Khaldun called asbiyah that people have preserved diversity and it is now thanks to traditionalists and their hermeneutic that we are better able to appreciate unity in this diversity and see traditions mirroring each other and getting their strength from embracing the other instead of negating it.
If philosophy is a way of life and its end communion with Ultimate Reality and ethics or cultivation of virtues integrally connected with it and not the science of ratiocinative arguments or mere linguistic analysis or clarification of concepts then perennialist contention that there is unity among different—in fact all—traditions, Semitic and non-Semitic, archaic and “advanced” ones can be granted without much difficulty. All traditions teach the doctrine of two selves, one lower and the other higher divine one. All traditions are for self-transcendence. All traditions advocate a vision of hierarchy of existence consisting of a series of gradations from matter to Spirit. All traditions believe in the other or deeper world that encompasses or complements this world. The primacy of the moral but transcendence of good-evil binary by sages is discernible in all major traditions. Transcendence of binary thinking and the principle of simultaneous negation and affirmation serves not only as a critique of the given in both individual and social realms—and thus answer Marxist critiques that complain that religion and mysticism are complicit with the given or dominant sociopolitical reality which is never the ideal and always in need of transcendence or negation from the perspective of social justice and individual’s freedom from most forms of alienating and exploiting power structures—but also allows us to see relative validity of divergent philosophical and theological points of view which are often couched in terms of binaries in divine economy.
References
Chittick, William. 1998. The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-‘Arabî’s Cosmology. Albany: State University of New York Press.
de Sousa Santos, Boaventura (ed.). 2007. Another Knowledge Is Possible. London: Verso.
de Sousa Santos, Boaventura (ed.). 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice AgainstEpistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Frynkenberg, Robert E. 2010. Christianity in India: From the Beginnings to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ibn‘Arabî. 1972–1991. al-Futûhât al-makkiyya, 14 volumes, ed. O. Yahia. Cairo: al-Hay’at al-Misriyyat al-‘Âmmali’l-Kitâb.
Nasr, S.H. 1993. The Need for a Sacred Science. SUNY.
Nasr, S.H. 1988. Knowledge and the Sacred. Lahore: Suhail Academy.
Weil, Simone. 1959. Waiting for God (Letters and Essay), Introduction by Leslie Fielder.
G.B Putnam’s Sons. Young, Peter. 1999. Ibn ‘Arabî: Towards a Universal Point of View (from the website of MIOS)
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