'Ananda Coomaraswamy and Traditionalism'
Date: 9 February 2018, 4.20pm
Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy
As well as introducing the West to Asian art, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy also helped introduce the West to Asian religion, not as something remote and distinct from Western religion, but as an instance of that core religious truth that is "the common inheritance of all mankind." Coomaraswamy came to understand common, core religious truth in terms of what the Franco-Egyptian philosopher and metaphysician René Guénon (1886-1951) called “tradition,” itself a form of the “perennial philosophy” hat had interested Western thinkers and esotericists since the Renaissance. Coomaraswamy in turn changed the understandings of Guénon and of other “Traditionalists,” both by adding a certain academic rigor to their work and by convincing them to accept Buddhism as a valid expression of tradition, along Hindu Vedantism, Islamic Sufism, and Late Antique Neoplatonism. This paper placed Guénon’s Traditionalism within its wider context and examined both Traditionalism’s impact on Coomaraswamy and Coomaraswamy’s impact on Traditionalism. This included an abiding emphasis not only on Buddhism but also on traditional arts, reflected for example in the activities of the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, founded in 2004 by Great Britain’s Prince of Wales.
Mark Sedgwick is professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Before moving to Denmark, he studied at the universities of Oxford and Bergen and taught for many years at the American University in Cairo. He works on cultural and religious transfer between the Muslim world, the West, and global transnationalism. His Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century was first published in 2004, and his Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age was published in 2016. He also works on contemporary politics.
