Provides a detailed reconstruction of the heated debates between Salafis and Traditionalist over the contested role of Islamic scholarly authority.

Introduction -- Historical background -- The game -- Roles and factions -- Core texts and documents.

Against the Modern World is the first history of Traditionalism, an important yet surprisingly little-known twentieth-century anti-modern movement. Comprising a number of often secret but sometimes very influential religious groups in the West and in the Islamic world, it affected mainstream and radical politics in Europe and the development of the field of religious studies in the United States, touching the lives of many individuals. French writer Rene Guenon rejected modernity as a dark age and sought to reconstruct the Perennial Philosophy - the central truths behind all the major world religions. Guenon stressed the urgent need for the West's remaining spiritual and intellectual elite to find personal and collective salvation in the surviving vestiges of ancient religious traditions. A number of disenchanted intellectuals responded to his call. In Europe, America, and the Islamic world, Traditionalists founded institutes, Sufi brotherhoods, Masonic lodges, and secret societies. Some attempted unsuccessfully to guide Fascism and Nazism along Traditionalist lines; others later participated in political terror in Italy. Traditionalist ideas were the ideological cement for the alliance of anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russia, and in the Islamic world entered the debate about the relationship between Islam and modernity. Although its appeal in the West was ultimately limited, Traditionalism has wielded enormous influence in religious studies, through the work of such Traditionalists as Ananda Coomaraswamy, Huston Smith, Mircea Eliade, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

"This book explains why no one engaged in religious and cultural studies can afford to disregard the urgent message of the traditionalists who have reminded a forgetful world - in a manner which can be ignored but not refuted - of those principles which everywhere and always remain true. It also demonstrates why any reassessment of contemporary values - now increasingly called into question - must take into account the profound traditionalist critique of the modern Western worldview."--BOOK JACKET.

In this original and perceptive study Donna J. Amoroso argues that the Malay elites' preeminent position after the Second World War had much to do with how British colonialism reshaped old idioms and rituals _ helping to (re)invent a tradition. In doing so she illuminates the ways that traditionalism reordered the Malay political world, the nature of the state and the political economy of leadership. In the postwar era, traditionalism began to play a new role: it became a weapon which the Malay aristocracy employed to resist British plans for a Malayan Union and to neutralise the challenge coming groups representing a more radical, democratic perspective and even hijacking their themes. Leading this conservative struggle was Dato Onn bin Jaafar, who not only successfully helped shape Malay opposition to the Malayan Union but was also instrumental in the creation of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) that eventually came to personify an ïacceptable Malay nationalismÍ. Traditionalism and the Ascendancy of the Malay Ruling Class in Colonial Malaya is an important contribution to the history of colonial Malaya and, more generally, to the history of ideas in late colonial societies.

This book is a first attempt to examine the thought of key contemporary Jewish thinkers on the meaning of tradition in the context of two models. The classic model assumes that tradition reflects lack of dynamism and reflectiveness, and the present¿s unqualified submission to the past. This view, however, is an image that the modernist ethos has ascribed to the tradition so as to remove it from modern existence. In the alternative model, a living tradition emerges as open and dynamic, developing through an ongoing dialogue between present and past. The Jewish philosophers discussed in this work¿Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, David Hartman, and Eliezer Goldman¿ascribe compelling canonic status to the tradition, and the analysis of their thought discloses the tension between these two models. The book carefully traces the course they have plotted along the various interpretations of tradition through their approach to Scripture and to Halakhah. Contents Editorial Foreword Introduction Returning to Tradition: Paradox or Challenge The Tense Encounter with Modernity Soloveitchik: Jewish Thought Confronts Modernity Compartmentalization: From Ernst Simon to Yeshayahu Leibowitz The Harmonic Encounter with Modernity Religious Commitment in a Secularized World: Eliezer Goldman David Hartman: Renewing the Covenant Between Old and New: Judaism as Interpretation Scripture in the Thought of Leibowitz and Soloveitchik Halakhah in the Thought of Leibowitz and Soloveitchik Eliezer Goldman: Judaism as Interpretation Epilogue ¿My Name¿s my Donors¿ Name¿ Notes Bibliography About the Author Index