BOOK REVIEWS 121

cacophony of voices a harmonious whole (p. 212). The subtle and perceptive
commentary is rich enough to reward reading and re-reading.
C. A. Colmo
Dominican University, Emeritus
E-mail: farabi@dom.edu

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doi:10.1093/jis/etaa033

Rethinking Ibn ‘Arabi

By GREGORY A. LIPTON (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), xv
þ 285 pp. Price HB £53.00. EAN 978–0190684501.

Gregory A. Lipton’s engaging book Rethinking Ibn ‘Arabi is not, as one might
expect from its title, a revisionist evaluation of the modern scholarly and/or
popular reception of Ibn 6Arab; across the board based on a comprehensive,
new reading of his vast oeuvre, which would have been nothing less than a
Herculean task, but instead an in-depth analysis of Ibn 6Arab;’s reception by
the Swiss Perennialist Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) and some of his followers.
In fact, going beyond such a somewhat limited, albeit fascinating and fruitful,
reception study, Lipton directs the full weight of his considerable scholarly acu-
men to uncovering the genealogy of Schuon’s religious universalism, trenchantly
exposing its rootedness in essentialist and racialist nineteenth century
Eurohegemonic discourses on religion through deft comparisons of his thought
with those of Schleiermacher and Kant. In the process, he skilfully traces the
absolutist contours of the discourses of religious universalism he analyses, re-
vealing the exclusive supersessionism that lies at their core. Ultimately, even
though Ibn 6Arab;’s presence is palpable throughout the book, it is overshadowed
by that of Schuon: Rethinking Ibn ‘Arabi, it turns out, is a theoretically rich,
critical assessment of Schuonian Perennialism.
After a short prologue and an introduction, in which Lipton gives his readers
glimpses of the overall architecture of his study and provides a chapter outline,
the author plunges into a detailed criticism of Schuonian misreading of Ibn
6Arab; on the issue of religious universalism. In ch. 1, ‘Tracking the camels of
love’, he focuses on the following celebrated verses of Ibn 6Arab; from his
Tarjum:n al-ashw:q (The Interpreter of Desires) that are frequently cited by
Perennialists and others as evidence of his religious pluralism: ‘My heart has
become capable of every form: it is a/ pasture for gazelles and a convent for
Christian monks, /And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka‘ba and the / Tables
of the Tora and the book of the Koran. / I follow the religion of Love: whatever
way Love’s / camels take, that is my religion and my faith’ (p. 24, as translated by
Reynold Nicholson, 1911). Pointing to the ‘conflation between Ibn 6Arabi’s con-
ception of belief and the modern idea of religion’ (p. 29) that allows modern
Euro-American readings (Affifi, Corbin, Izutsu, Sells, and Chittick are discussed,
of whom only the last has Perennialist connections) to occlude the ‘cosmology of
power’ (p. 26) behind these lines, Lipton sets out to demonstrate, with help from
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Ibn 6Arab;’s own commentary on The Interpreter of Desires, that the poem is
instead a ‘forceful assertion of the spiritual sovereignty of Muhammad from both
socio-historical and metaphysical perspectives’ (p. 53). He develops this argu-
ment further in ch. 2, ‘Return of the solar king’, with clear textual evidence
drawn from al-Fut<A:t al-Makkiyya (The Makkan Openings), where he argues

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persuasively that Ibn 6Arab; unequivocally considered all previous religious dis-
pensations––specifically Judaism and Christianity––and their laws abrogated by
the prophetic mission of MuAammad and the appearance of the shar;6a. In this
well-known hierarchical scheme of religious plurality, which Lipton dubs ‘the
doctrine of qualified subjugation’ (p. 76), the People of the Book were allowed to
follow their own laws within the confines of a Muslim-dominated polity as long
as they paid the jizya, or indemnity tax. This supersessionist stance is a far cry
from religious universalism of the type conceived by Perennialists, and Ibn
6Arab;, Lipton avers, was decidedly not a ‘proto-religious universalist’ (p. 36).
In the rest of the book, Lipton explores the intellectual genealogy of
Schuonian Perennialism. Through a comparison of Schuon with
Schleiermacher in ch. 3, ‘Competing fields of universal validity,’ Lipton shows
how Schuon makes a ‘Copernican turn’ from Ibn 6Arab;’s ‘hierarchical religio-
centrism to a multireligious model united by the transcendent religious a priori of
the ‘‘perennial religion’’ (religio perennis)—that is, ‘‘religion as such’’ ’ (p. 119).
Ironically, this model turns out to be, like Ibn 6Arab;’s, also an exclusivist abso-
lutism that is ‘hegemonically supersessionist, subtly authorizing its own perfec-
tion, while classifying the religions of Others as necessarily incomplete’ (p. 150).
In ch. 4, misleadingly titled ‘Ibn 6Arabi and the metaphysics of race’ (it should
have been ‘Schuon and the metaphysics of race’), Lipton exposes the Aryanist
and racialist aspects of Schuon’s universalism, showing how ‘Aryanist discursive
practices found within Schuon’s writings function as strategies for authorizing
authentic religions subjects—and thereby excluding Others’ (p. 123). And in the
Conclusion, which is a full chapter of its own, Lipton reads Schuon’s religious
universalism alongside Kant’s ‘conceptual grammar of universalism’ to demon-
strate how ‘Kantian and Schuonian idealism both share discursive strategies that
claim to pluralistically accept the essential core of every religion, but at the
ultimate cost of religious and socio-historical difference’ (p. 179). Ibn 6Arab;,
Schuon and Kant, Lipton asserts, all subscribed to different versions of ‘abroga-
tive supersessionism’ (p. 180), but the discourses of Schuon and Kant, unlike that
of Ibn 6Arab;, he contends, were also racialist.
Rethinking Ibn ‘Arabi is a rich and rewarding book. Lipton pries Schuonian
Perennialism open by demonstrating its reading of Ibn 6Arab; as a proto-religious
universalist to be wide off the mark and proceeds to lay bare the exclusivist
absolutism, with its foundations in Eurohegemonic and racialist discourses on
religion, that lies at the core of its alleged religious universalism. His reading of
Ibn 6Arab; as a straightforward, mainstream supersessionist Muslim figure—al-
beit one whose salvific horizons were unusually, but not exceptionally, broad—is
right on the mark (as others had observed before: Lipton himself points to
Michel Chodkiewicz, Tim Winter and Nuh Ha Mim Keller), and his thorough
critique of Schuonian Perennialists, based on revealing and insightful forays into
 BOOK REVIEWS 123
the thought worlds of Schleiermacher and Kant, is incisive and effective. In short,
as Lipton himself observes in his Prologue, Rethinking Ibn ‘Arabi is really a
sustained analysis of religious universalism, and on that level, it succeeds bril-
liantly in exposing the exclusivist underbelly of universalist claims, including that
of Schuon, to have discovered the essence of all religions.

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But after reading the book, there are a few lingering questions. Lipton’s study
is without doubt of interest to scholars of religion as a whole, but why should
scholars of Ibn 6Arab; and Sufism be interested in Schuonian Perennialism? Are
Perennialist interpretations of Ibn 6Arab; on universalism hegemonic in academic
circles? Is the modern reception of Ibn 6Arab; by Euro-American specialists on
Sufism compromised by Perennialist misportrayals of Ibn 6Arab; as a religious
universalist avant la lettre? Or are non-academic discourses on Ibn 6Arab; and
Sufism in general suffused with Perennialist perspectives? Although Lipton dan-
ces around these questions, especially in his introduction (pp. 6–10), he does not
discuss them in any sustained fashion. The dispatch with which he tackles the
task of disentangling Ibn 6Arab; from Perennialist appropriations of him suggests
that he believes such an intervention is sorely needed, and it would have been
appropriate for him to articulate the nature of this need more clearly.
Nor does Lipton attempt to provide his readers with an overview of the
Perennialist movement and its place in and outside the academy. After all, there
is considerable research on universalist movements during the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, and Lipton, who is clearly familiar with this literature,
could have distilled a brief account of Perennialism from them to place Schuon
into his broader context. For instance, he makes little use of Mark Sedgwick’s
Against the Modern World (2004), which includes a full account of Schuon and
the Maryamiyya order he led; one has to wait till ch. 3 for him to refer to
Sedgwick’s book in a footnote, only to dismiss it as ‘tendentious’ without further
comment; he does not cite Sedgwick’s 2016 work Western Sufism at all, which
contains much information on the entanglements between universalisms of dif-
ferent stripes, including Perennialism, and Sufism in especially non-academic
settings. Lipton is, of course, entitled to his own views about Sedgwicks’s schol-
arship; the point is that he certainly could have used Sedgwick’s books—and
others like them on the history of religious universalism and ‘Sufism in the
West’—to contextualize and explain the significance of his own analysis of
Schuonian Perennialism to his readers in clear terms.
The book is exceptionally well-produced and remarkably free of spelling and
transliteration errors, but the absence of a bibliography diminishes the utility of
its formidable notes section, which takes up fully one third of the work. It is hoped
Oxford University Press is not sacrificing the needs of scholarship in order to reduce
production costs. However, the Press is to be commended for publishing Lipton’s
splendid volume, which marks a watershed in the study of religious universalism and
simultaneously rectifies the refraction of Ibn 6Arab;’s thought in Perennialist hands.
Ahmet T. Karamustafa
University of Maryland
E-mail: akaramus@umd.edu
doi:10.1093/jis/etaa036