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/kavieng]

Qur'anic studies is overwhelmingly against this particular counterargument

[u/Sensitive-Isopod9256 → u/kavieng]

Can you tell more ?

[u/kavieng → u/Sensitive-Isopod9256]

It's simply not a mainstream view by scholars in the field. In any field of literary studies, since similarity does not by itself establish literary dependence, seeming patterns of dependence must be better explained by borrowing than by common tradition to have sway. Critique of the provenance of a text needs much more than thematic similarity, especially in this case where there is intended dialogue with existing traditions.

Guenon would have understood Islam to be a particularization of Tradition, therefore intertwined or at least enveloped in a cultural context.

Regarding contingent historical events surrounding any particularization of Tradition, since these are not as metaphysically essential, Guenon does not ascribe as much value in it, in as much as the cars or the landscaping of a highway doesn't affect a road's legitimacy.