SOPHIA (2012) 51:143–145

DOI 10.1007/s11841-011-0295-8

Review of Patrick Laude, Pathways to an Inner Islam:

Massignon, Corbin, Guénon, and Schuon
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010,
ISBN 978-1-4384-2955-7, hc, viii+211pp.

Brannon Ingram

Published online: 26 January 2012

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Can a renewed engagement with Islamic spirituality, what Patrick Laude calls ‘inner
Islam’, help mend the various rifts between Islam and the West? Does inner Islam—
for Laude, roughly coterminous with, but not identical to, Sufism—offer spiritual
resources for Muslims seeking to explore the interiority of their own faith and renew
its vitality? These are questions that Laude poses in Pathways to an Inner Islam:
Massignon, Corbin, Guénon, and Schuon, where inner Islam is an ‘antidote to the
philosophical disarray, intellectual poverty, and spiritual pathology that characterize
too many sectors of Islamic thought and practice’ (20).
For Laude—a Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in
Qatar—inner Islam can provide Muslims with ‘an authentic means of engaging and
understanding other faiths’ (171). In this search for Islamic ‘authenticity’, it is deeply
ironic that Laude chose four thinkers whose relations with Islam would be summarily
dismissed by many contemporary Muslims as the very antithesis of authenticity. But
that is precisely why Laude has written this book; they deserve a wider contemporary
audience, perhaps most of all among Muslims, and Laude admirably succeeds in the
task of laying out their complex thought for a non-specialist audience.
The four men in question explored inner Islam in all its nuance and intricacy. Louis
Massignon (1883–1962) was the Chair of Muslim Sociology at the Collège de France
for several decades, perhaps most known for his pioneering studies of the Sufi mystic
al-Hallaj. His student Henri Corbin (1903–1978) was one of the twentieth century’s
leading scholars of Persian mysticism and philosophy. Both were titans of French
academia, but are barely known in the English-speaking world outside of the study of
Islam. René Guénon (1886–1951) and his protégé Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) were
scholars and esoterists who shunned the academy, yet whose impact has been widely
felt in religious studies—particularly in phenomenology of religion and the study of
myth and symbols.

B. Ingram (*)
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies, Department of Religion, Wheaton College, Knapton
Hall 215 26 E. Main St., Norton, MA 02766, USA
e-mail: brannoningram@gmail.com
144 B. Ingram

Their relations to Islam, and the academy, were complex. Massignon and Corbin
worked and taught at the summits of French academe and never converted, yet their
studies of Islam thoroughly shaped their own spiritual identities; Guénon and Schuon
approached Islam through the lens of the Western esoteric tradition and did convert,
yet theirs is an Islam that few Muslims would conventionally recognize as such.
Where the four intersect is in their shared interest in Islam’s ‘inner’ dimensions. Thus
Laude proceeds by putting them in conversation across a number of themes: the
Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad, the feminine in Islam, Islam’s relation to other
religions (its ‘universal horizon’), and the question of war and jihad.
Laude’s methodology—comparing their thoughts across six core, thematically
organized chapters, an introduction and an epilogue—works well for the most part.
The sixth chapter, ‘The Universal Horizon of Islam’, addresses Islam’s relation to
other religions and is arguably Laude’s best, in large part because all four men made
this issue central to their respective bodies of work. Massignon’s visionary ecumen-
icism, to take one example, intersects productively with Schuon’s ‘transcendent unity
of religions’. Occasionally, though, Laude struggles when one of the four has no clear
views on the subject at hand. While Schuon was overwhelmingly concerned with the
‘feminine’ in Islam, Guénon’s views on it are scanty at best, and Laude readily
acknowledges this (118–9). Guénon was, rather, principally interested in esoteric
symbologies, myth and ‘metaphysics’, all of which he couched within a trenchant
critique of Western modernity. But perhaps there is a larger issue at hand; in some
ways, Laude forces these early and mid-twentieth century thinkers to address dis-
tinctly late twentieth and twenty-first century problems. So, for example, while the
specter of jihad has loomed large in Western anxieties about Islam for centuries, the
term has become so fraught with semantic baggage in our tendentious, post-9/11
debates about Islam that its usage today would likely be scarcely recognizable to any
of them. This is not to say that using these figures’ thoughts to illuminate contemporary
issues is intrinsically anachronistic; but the social and political contexts to which these
men responded and within which they worked are quite different from our own.
One fairly minor critique concerns Laude’s bibliography. Bizarrely, Laude con-
signs all of his (copious and impressive) secondary sources exclusively to his foot-
notes and thus omits them from his bibliography, such that his bibliography lists only
sources by Massignon, Corbin, Guénon and Schuon. Although he surely did not
intend it, this oversight unwittingly reinforces a certain critical view that scholarship
on these thinkers (especially Guénon) tends to be a private conversation among
fellow initiates who resist putting their thoughts into any context. In fact, Laude does
contextualize them, and for the most part does it well—but one would never guess
that simply by glancing at his bibliography.
Laude’s book will have wide appeal to scholars of Sufism, Western esotericism
and perhaps twentieth century French intellectual history, as well as non-specialist
readers interested in Islamic spirituality. But its ideal audience, as the author makes
clear, is precisely those who may be least likely to read it: Muslims who would
benefit from a reconnecting with Islam’s ‘inner’ traditions. Some readers may see in
this yet another scholar of Western provenance advancing a ‘moderate’ Islam to act as
a bulwark against its more politicized and militant incarnations. There is indeed a
growing discourse on Sufism-as-panacea, which sees Sufism (in Laude’s own words)
as ‘most conducive to bridging the gap between Islam and the West’ (3). For the most
Review of Patrick Laude, Pathways to an Inner Islam: Massignon, Corbin,... 145

part, resistance to these projects stems from the understandable, though not always
accurate, view that they thinly mask Western neo-liberal interests. I do not think that
this is a fair critique of Laude, but some will inevitably interpret his work in terms of
this debate.
Pathways to an Inner Islam will also be a fruitful and worthwhile read for anyone
contemplating the contested place of personal spiritual commitments in religious
studies today. Massignon and Corbin in particular forged a ‘new kind of Islamic
studies informed by … religious faith and spiritual commitment’ that corrected their
field’s ‘sterilization and reductive historicization’ (169), a legacy from which con-
temporary scholars of Islam have much to learn. While some may carp at the fact that
these four figures are scarcely conventional representatives of ‘Islam’, doing so not
only ignores their deep knowledge of the religion and abiding sympathies for Islam
and Muslims, but fails to appreciate how their engagements with Islam are avowedly
‘authentic’ in their own right.