Traditions

… a Tradition transmits itself as something alive,
since it is a ceaselessly renewed inspiration,
and not a funeral cortège
or a register of conformist opinions.
The life and death of spiritual things are our responsibility;
they are not placed “in the past”
except through our own omissions,
our refusal of the metamorphoses that they demand,
if these spiritual things are to be
maintained “in the present” for us.- Henry Corbin, En Islam Iranien, 1971

The dilemma of wishing to be able to remain faithful to one’s own
religion and yet come to accept
the validity of other traditions is one of the
results of the abnormal conditions that modern man faces and is a
consequence of the anomalous conditions in which he lives.
Yet it is a problem that he must face
on pain of losing faith in religion itself.
For a traditional Muslim living in Fez or Mashhad it is not necessary
to be concerned with the verities of Buddhism or Christianity.
Nor is it urgent for a peasant in the hills of Italy
or Spain to learn about Hinduism.
But for a person for whom the homogeneity of a religious culture
has been ruptured by modern secularist philosophies or, alternatively,
affected by contact with the authentic spirituality of foreign traditions,
it is no longer possible to ignore
the metaphysical and theological implications
of the presence of other religions.
If he does so, he falls into the danger of either losing his own religion
or having a conception of the Divinity which, to say the least,
places a limit upon the Divine Mercy.
- Seyyed Hussein Nasr, Sufi essays, 1972