Wouter J. Hanegraaff

“He rejected the modern world and all its values as the absolute antithesis of Tradition, and spent the last decades of his life as a Sufi recluse in Egypt.”
― Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed

“…the importance of the study of Western esotericism goes far beyond a mere “academic interest” in some historical currents and ideas that happen to have been neglected by earlier generations. On the contrary, this domain of research should be recognized as centrally important to historians of religion and culture because it is only by virtue of excluding its basic components—as imagined in the polemical imagination—from the realm of the acceptable that Western culture as such has been able to define its very identity. If I am correct in arguing that the most essential components of that identity are at bottom polemical concepts, it follows that we cannot understand them in isolation, as if they exist in and for themselves. Instead, we need to understand the dynamics of the underlying discourse that created them; and this, in turn, requires us to try and step outside the latter and analyze it from a neutral point of view.”
― Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Forbidden Knowledge: Anti-Esoteric Polemics and Academic Research