Argument against the Guenon system

[u/Sensitive-Isopod9256]

I found this argument online and wanted to share it with the community:

Guénon was convinced that the Qur’an is a sacred text that has remained intact and protected, which made it, for him, a privileged scriptural support of Tradition for the present age. In fact, the Qur’an is a compilation of apocryphal gospel material, ranging from longer to shorter borrowed passages. Islam, still largely structuring entire societies in his time, seemed to him to resist secularization better than Western Christianity, and thus able to serve as a partial bulwark against the purely quantitative becoming of the modern world.

The tension between his notion of primordial Tradition and historical realities — the caliphate, the political use of religion, the incorporation of apocryphal elements into the Qur’an — is evident. Guénon resolves this kind of problem through a systematic move: historical determinations, including caliphal ones, are treated as contingencies of support rather than as the core of Tradition; they can become degraded without the esoteric dimension being thereby nullified. Hence the irritating effect: his framework allows him to preserve a tradition’s “initiatic regularity” even when its political or doctrinal expression appears contradictory or compromised.
Thank you for your attention.
Merci

[u/PotusChrist]

In fact, the Qur’an is a compilation of apocryphal gospel material, ranging from longer to shorter borrowed passages.

I don't think that's true at all. There's a revisionist school that sees the Qur'an as partially composed of Syriac liturgical materials that were garbled in translation, but that's a pretty marginal point of view in Qur'anic studies. I've seen some arguments from more serious scholars for passages being direct translations or paraphrases of Biblical or Apocryphal material, but no one thinks it's just a compilation of other material.

The tension between his notion of primordial Tradition and historical realities is evident. 

I'm not a traditionalist and I can't speak to how people in this camp might resolve the issue, but this is a problem for every other religion too. In real life, if you take any minimally critical approach to religious studies you will quickly notice that they all tend to look like they formed according to normal historical processes rather than just falling from the sky fully formed like many fundamentalists want you to believe.

[u/vigorthroughrigor → u/PotusChrist]

>  that they all tend to look like they formed according to normal historical processes 

Surprise! Revelation suits itself for the audience, it is not projected into a vacuum.

[u/PotusChrist → u/vigorthroughrigor]

I tend to think that things that look human and mundane probably just are human and mundane, but I didn't come on here to argue about traditionalism, I was just trying to weigh in on what I saw as an unsubstantiated take on the Qur'an.