The Critique of Modernity in René Guénon and ʿAbdal-Raḥmān Ṭāhā: A Comparative Study

This article undertakes a systematic comparative study of the critiques of modernity advanced by René Guénon (1886–1951) and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ṭāhā (b. 1944). Both thinkers arrive at convergent diagnoses of modernity’s spiritual and ethical failures from fundamentally distinct intellectual starting points—Guénon from the universal perennialist metaphysics of primordial Tradition, Ṭāhā from Islamic philosophy of language, logic, and ethics. Drawing on Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times alongside Ṭāhā’s Rūḥ al-Ḥadātha (The Spirit of Modernity), Al-ʿAmal al-Dīnī wa-Tajdīd al-ʿAql (Religious Practice and the Renewal of Reason), and Rūḥ al-Dīn (The Spirit of Religion), and supported by secondary scholarship including Wael Hallaq’s Reforming Modernity (2019) and the edited volume Islamic Ethics and the Trusteeship Paradigm (2020), the article argues that the philosophical significance of their encounter lies not merely in their convergences—both condemn the reduction of human life to quantitative and instrumental horizons—but in the productive tension between Guénon’s initiatory-metaphysical model of restoration and Ṭāhā’s trusteeship-based ethic of engagement. Where Guénon describes Western civilization as a civilization of “moralism”—a shifting, interest-driven ethical veneer concealing the absence of genuine transcendent principles—Ṭāhā constructs an affirmative alternative through his concept of i’timāniyya (trusteeship), which grounds reason, speech, and knowledge in an ethics of responsibility toward God, others, and creation. The article further argues that these two thinkers together illuminate a double rupture at the heart of modernity: the loss of metaphysical orientation (the vertical rupture) and the collapse of ethical trusteeship (the horizontal rupture).