Who was René Guénon - Shaykh `Abd Al Wahid Yahya?

An introduction to Shaykh Abd Al Wahid Yahya - René Guénon
by Omar K Neusser

RGuénon_desk

He said:

"In any case, what Westeners call civilization, the others would call barbarity, because it is precisely lacking in the essential, that is to say a principle of a higher order."

RG, East And West, 1924

"When man is imprisoned like this in life and in the conceptions directly connected with it, he can know nothing about what escapes from change, about the transcendant and immutable order, which is that of the universal principles" RG EW90

Disclaimer

NB: References to other traditions should not lead the casual reader to the conclusion that it is of no importance or that it would not matter which divine tradition to follow: far from it! The last authentic and living traditional, spiritual path to lead to the Divine Presence is Islam, as elucidated in the article:
On The Common Eternal Principles, And That Islam Reigns

Some Quotes By Others

"René Guénon's role (was to be the) reviver of Tradition for the Western world."
Charles Upton < sacredweb.com >

"His function (was), in a world increasingly rife with heresy and pseudo religion, to remind twentieth century man of the need for orthodoxy which itself presupposes firstly a divine intervention, and secondly a tradition which hands down with fidelity from generation to generation what Heaven has revealed..."
Dr. Martin Lings < sophiajournal.com >

"Guénon undermined and then; with uncompromising intellectual rigor, demolished all the assumptions taken for granted by modern man, that is to say Western or westernized man. Many others had been critical of the direction taken by European civilization since the so-called 'Renaissance', but none had dared to be as radical as he was or to re-assert with such force the principles and values which Western culture had consigned to the rubbish tip of history. ..."

"... the language of this Tradition [is] the language of symbolism, ... interpretation of this symbolism. Moreover he turned the idea of human progress upside down, replacing it with the belief almost universal before the modern age, that humanity declines in spiritual excellence with the passage of time and that we are now in the Dark Age which precedes the End, an age in which all the possibilities rejected by earlier cultures have been spewed out into the world, quantity replaces quality and decadence approaches its final limit. No one who read him and understood him could ever be quite the same again." < Sh. Hassan Abdul Hakeem Gai Eaton >

"The writings of the great French thinker René Guénon - Shaykh `Abd Al Wahid Yahya (1886-1951) have by now achieved luminary status. His castigation of the modern world, grounded upon a pioneering reinstatement of the universal, first principles of the one true metaphysic abiding at the heart of the sacred traditions, has stood fast against the shifting sands of recent philosophies and can refurbish our powers of discrimination in face of the new millennium and the postmodern age."
<seriousseekers.com >

Video with some of his quotes from Crisis of The Modern World

His Function

His function was (and is still today) to warn people of religion, including Muslims, of the entanglements (fitna) of (post-) modernity, how it threatens to destroy the mentality even of some religious people as it did when modernity first emerged in the West, how it casts into doubt any absolute, metaphysical truth and how it influences the public at large.

His works are primarily in French and in English. In Swedish there is an excellent book about Shaykh Abd Al Wahid Yahya: "I tjänst hos det Enda" ( In the service of The One), edited by Kurt Almqvist, a Swedish author writing on metaphysical questions. This is still the only disposition of RG's life and work in a Scandinavian language and it includes excerpts from some of his books, such as "Crisis of the Modern World" and "The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times."

A European intellectual from the first half of the 20th century, he had witnessed the tragic and seemingly unavoidable events of his times, not the least both World Wars. He confronted the ruling myths of this civilization, such as 'human progress', 'technical development towards a brighter future' and he penetrated some of the most important philosophical and religious traditions - when towards the middle of his life - he embraced Islam and travelled to Egypt where he lived until the end of his life as a well-respected Muslim author.

One of his main concerns was to produce an unsentimental analysis of Western ideological and religious development since the Renaissance, focusing on the degradation - as he saw it - of metaphysics, religion and philosophy and consequently of the mentality of the general populace.
He explained why the civilization of the West was built on false foundations, like a house built on sand: its positivism, its denial of true tradition and in consequece its metaphysiscal blindness. He also showed the way to reform this situation by gaining access - through initiation - to the sacred and eternal treasure of timeless wisdom hidden beyond pseudo-sciences. His writings have inspired many engaged readers to search for truth and meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.

Another of his main concerns was to clear from the pure concept of Ultimate Reality everything that IT is not and to teach its pure doctrine, because IT can only be described in negative terms ( of what IT is NOT ). His work is to remind us of the impossibility of having some rational concept of Ultimate Reality, except for the insight gained from intellectual intuition (the ma`rifa - intuitive knowledge of God) and the knowledge of revelation and prophetic tradition by following its teachings.

This introduction is not an adequate overview over this outstanding writer's work, who wrote no less than 26 books and conducted a numereous correspondance with many intellectuals of his time. Some of his main areas of focus are:

• A definition of tradition versus anti-tradition and sentimentalized religion
• a distinction between metaphysics versus philosophy and religion
• an exposition of metaphysics and the hierarchy of stages of being
• a clear doctrine of the Ultimate Reality, Allah, Almighty God
• a thorough examination of Western thought and mentality:
- individualism, modernism, rationalism, quantification; slackening of doctrine
• a rigorous distinction between Intellect and reason
• an explanation of esoterism and its function in religion, of initiation
• an explanation of the science of symbolism

Text-excerpts by René Guénon

(1.) text-excerpts by René Guénon [• = external links]

english