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..although at first sight universalism looks all-inclusive, it can often in fact be exclusivist, claiming a universal validity for one particular interpretation. Lipton argues that this is what happened in the case of Schuon, whose views, he argues, were ultimately “hegemonically supersessionist, subtly authorizing its own perfection, while classifying the religions of Others as necessarily incomplete” (p. 150).
* hegemonic adjective
ruling or dominant in a political or social context.
"the bourgeoisie constituted the hegemonic class"
* suspersessionist -- supersedes, renders the previous version obsolete
In this context, Schuon's interpretation of traditionalist sufism in which adherance to Islam was not needed for the aspirant who had superior insight into a timeless truth that undergirded all expressions of religions in historical time.
Schuon's timeless (primordial) sufism supposedly
superseded and rendered obsolete lineages of sufism whose adherants regarded
Islam as necessary.
Ibn ‘Arabi, Schuon, and Universalism
[traditionalistblog.blogspot.com]
Summary from Amazon
Rethinking Ibn Arabi Gregory Lipton
[www.amazon.com]
Quote
The thirteenth century mystic Ibn `Arabi was the foremost Sufi theorist of the premodern era. For more than a century, Western scholars and esotericists have heralded his universalism, arguing that he saw all contemporaneous religions as equally valid. In Rethinking Ibn `Arabi, Gregory Lipton calls this image into question and throws into relief how Ibn `Arabi's discourse is inseparably intertwined with the absolutist vision of his own religious milieu--that is, the triumphant claim that Islam fulfilled, superseded, and therefore abrogated all previous revealed religions.
Lipton juxtaposes Ibn `Arabi's absolutist conception with the later reception of his ideas, exploring how they have been read, appropriated, and universalized within the reigning interpretive field of Perennial Philosophy in the study of Sufism. The contours that surface through this comparative analysis trace the discursive practices that inform Ibn `Arabi's Western reception back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century study of "authentic" religion, where European ethno-racial superiority was wielded against the Semitic Other-both Jewish and Muslim. Lipton argues that supersessionist models of exclusivism are buried under contemporary Western constructions of religious authenticity in ways that ironically mirror Ibn `Arabi's medieval absolutism.