Evola’s Militant Professors and the East-West Dichotomy

Abstract

This chapter explores the expansion of Evola’s teachings by three of his notable disciples, who aimed to establish connections between Islam, particularly Shiʿism, and Italy’s ancient and medieval history. Their objective was to transcend the perception of these religions as foreign entities, rooted in Evola’s critiques of the modern East-West divide. The three scholars in focus were Pio Filippani-Ronconi (d.2010), Adriano Romualdi (d.1973), and Claudio Mutti (b.1946). Implicitly or explicitly, they drew on the nineteenth-century notion that Shiʿism and Sufism represented an Aryan Islam in contrast to Sunnism or Bedouin Islam.

Pio Filippani-Ronconi assigned exceptional importance to Persia, presenting it as the birthplace of both Roman and Islamic institutions. Harmonizing Evola’s teachings with Henry Corbin’s idealized portrayal of Persia, he reinforced convictions about the Iranian origins of various Traditionalist moral values. Ronconi argued that pre-Islamic Persia profoundly influenced both Shiʿism and Roman religious institutions. He contended that what Muslim warriors and Ismailis transmitted to the Christian Templars and the West was not just Islam but the essence of Persia’s cultural heritage. Ismailism, in Ronconi’s view, marked a revival of ancient Persia, and he claimed that Persians significantly shaped Arabic grammar, Islamic philosophy, medicine, and other disciplines.

Adriano Romualdi challenged conventional definitions of the West and the East, associating the West with Aryan culture and the East with Semitism. He regarded Persians as “Westerners of the East”, considering them part of the “white race”. Aligning with Evola and Ronconi, Romualdi praised the warrior spirit of Persians, asserting that war represented an Indo-European value, while peace signified Christian mediocrity. Despite the typical association of Christianity with the West, Romualdi argued that Christianity originated in the East.

Claudio Mutti, a convert to Islam, took a different intellectual path from Romualdi. Instead of relocating Persians from the East to the West, he sought to move Europe from the West to the East. Using linguistic connections between Islam and ancient Rome, Mutti substantiated these ties by presenting a mystified version of Eurasia influenced by Corbin and Carl Schmitt, with Iran playing a central role. By the late 1970s, Iran and Afghanistan, two non-Arab Islamic countries, stood against Western imperialism, challenging the notion that Arabs represented the entire Islamic world. Mutti’s perspective led him to criticize Evola’s views on Islam and socialism, as well as the portrayal of Saudi Arabia as representative of orthodox Islam.

These scholars, spanning history, philology, and geopolitics, offered fresh perspectives on Shiʿism and Iran. Their belief in Shiʿism as a noble and esoteric form of Islam gained further validation with the 1979 Iranian Revolution, perceived as a long-anticipated revolt against the modern world. Notably, Claudio Mutti, through his extensive network in Traditionalist associations, played a crucial role in inspiring a wave of conversions to Shiʿism among Italians.

1 Yearning for an Aryan Islam

Evola disdained academia as an expression of bourgeois life. However, three academicians among his pupils furthered his ideas in the manner that Iran, Islam, and Shiʿism developed affinities with Italy’s past. They elaborated on Evola’s disagreement with Guénon on the West-East dichotomy and challenged the definition of the two categories besides their presumed divide lines. As a result of their contributions, West and East were repositioned while Iran and Shiʿism found connections with Italy’s history. A method of building ties between Shiʿism and Italy has been to explicitly or implicitly appeal to the nineteenth century orientalist conviction about Shiʿism as an Iranian or Aryan Islam. The roots of understanding Shiʿism as an Iranian Islam can be traced back among Muslims themselves. The Spanish philosopher Ibn Hazm (d.1064) was one of the first scholars who promoted the idea that Shiʿism was an Iranian shrewdness for deceiving Muslims and escaping the Arab dominance. A similar conviction, albeit promoted for different political ends, was welcomed also among Western orientalists who cultivated racist tendencies. They presented Sunnism as Islam of Beduins and Shiʿism as Aryan Islam (Bausani, 2017, p. 159).

The idea of an Islam, which could be at the same time an alternative to Judeo-Christian heritage and independent of Semitic culture, was fascinating for European theoreticians of racism. Arthur de Gobineau (d.1882) was presumably the first European orientalist who presented Shiʿism as the Iranian revolt against Arab invasion. He underlined ideas and rituals in Shiʿism that predated Islam (De Gobineau, 2009). In a similar vein, Gobineau’s friend Ernest Renan (d.1892) presented Sufism as an Iranian contribution to the Islamic world, which was previously void of esoteric elements (Nash, 2014). Such understandings of Shiʿism and Sufism connected race and religion and at the same time disclosed some dimensions of the Persian history that had so far remained unknown.

Although this understanding of Shiʿism has been debunked by recent scholars of Islam,¹ it has not lost its fascination and every now and then shows up in different appearances among Traditionalists. In Italy, following Evola and Henry Corbin (d.1978), Shiʿism and esoteric Islamic trends started to be branded as an Iranian Islam or in debt with the pre-Islamic Iranian cultural and religious heritage. Evola’s inclination to look for the roots of jihad and the Shi’a messianism in the Aryan culture, thanks to some of his heirs, has been bolded and emphasized. This operation is enacted especially via a synergy between Evola and Corbin’s teachings that has provided the possibility to notice the common roots between political and religious institutes in the ancient Rome and Persia. In Italy, the interest for Persia is mainly entertained by French intellectuals. The French culture has influenced Italian Iranistics both concerning the knowledge about Persian lay authors such as Hedayat and gnostic intellectuals like Suhrawardi (Casari, 2007). Corbin gave a crucial contribution to the understanding of Shiʿism as an Iranian Islam, and became the most important non-Guénonian European scholar who shaped ITs’ ideas about Shiʿism and Iran.

Despite not having subscribed to Guénon’s school, Corbin shared some of Guénon’s concerns, such as his objection to historicism and his belief in Philosophia Perennis. Corbin in Paris established the Centre for Comparative Spiritual Research, known also as the University of Saint John of Jerusalem, and was attracted to the common components of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Nonetheless, he had no interest in the primordial Tradition, transcendent unity, or anything related to Hinduism or non-monotheistic religions. As reported by Seyyed Hussain Nasr (b.1933), he even condemned teachings of the European Traditionalists, especially Guénon (Nasr, 2001, p. 50). Corbin knew well Guénon and in his youth wrote a review on Guénon’s book, but their relationship was complex. Guénon and Corbin diverged on some points. Due to his trips in Germany, Corbin had become interested in Protestantism and theosophy, which for Guénon were forms of deviation. Following WWII, they took distance. In 1947, Guénon wrote a review on a Corbin’s book Suhrawardî d’Alep fondateur de la doctrine illuminative (ishraqî) (1939) (Suhrawardi of Aleppo, Founder of the Illuminative Doctrine). In this review, Guénon claimed that ishraq was not an authentic form of esotericism because it was not connected to a regular Sufi silsila. Guénon considered Suhrawardi, a philosopher who had cloaked Neoplatonism under Islamic appearance. For Corbin, instead, ishraq² was imbued with authentic gnosis. According to Corbin, Sufism was a degenerated form of Shiʿism because Sufism attributed some features to the Prophet that indeed belonged to Imams. In Shiʿism, the faithful’s connection to the Imam obviates the Sufi initiation. Corbin looked at Guénon’s obsession for tracing the demarcation line between Tradition and counter-initiation with perplexity. In 1963, Corbin wrote a letter to a professor of the University of Karachi claiming that Guénon’s ideas would usher in a unilateral dogmatism (Accart, 2008a, 2008b).

Corbin reached Iran, following his attempts to circumvent the Cartesian cosmology. His antipathy to the secularizing Modern rationalism shaped his ideas about Iran. In Iran he found a universe governed by an archaic cosmology comprising cyclical time, otherworldly leaders, and angles. Corbin was looking for the East, but not any East. East for Corbin became Iran, which he had discovered through Suhrawardi. This country for Corbin was not only a geographic zone, but a specific type of intellectualism. The inherent gnosis of this intellectualism allowed him to create connections between Christian and Iranian cultural components. For instance, he presented the mother of the Hidden Imam Nargis as a ring that unified Christianity and Shiʿism.

Without any doubt, Evola and Corbin wrote for quite different ideals. There is not any evidence about their probable relationship, correspondence, or collaboration. Nonetheless, they both contributed to the utopianization of Iran and to the esoteric ecumenism. Therefore, their common concerns eventually encouraged some ITs to put them in dialogue.

2 Iran in the East and the West

Among Evola’s followers, there was an Italo-Spanish scholar of Iranian studies who believed in the dark age, but conversely to the old Evola was optimistic and believed that the solution could be found even in other contexts. Pio Filippani Ronconi³ (d.2010) offered crucial contributions to the Traditionalist understanding of the ancient Persia and Shiʿism. He integrated Evola’s ideals of the grandiose and mystified Rome with Corbin’s utopianized Iran. In this way the solution of the West’s crisis, which for Evola corresponded to a revitalization of the ancient Rome, in Ronconi could be traced in Iran. In Ronconi’s works, on the one hand, the roots of many Shi’a and Islamic doctrines, and on the other, the origins of the Roman institutes are to be sought in Iran. The relations he made among cultures influenced ideas of Italian Traditionalists (ITs) about Iran and Shiʿism. After his death, his figure has been exalted by Traditionalist scholars who have published edited volumes (Iacovella, 2011) or interviews (Vitiello, 2010; Del Bel Belluz, 2013) about him and his contributions to the development of the Italian Iranistics.

In 1934, Ronconi in his teens came across Evola’s l’Uomo come Potenza (Man as Power) and a while later, he encountered Evola personally and felt great respect for him (Ronconi, 1983). Ronconi in his youth served in the SS as a Untersturmführer (Junior storm leader), bore the iron cross (Savino, 2015; Piscitelli, 2011), and until mid-1970s worked for the Italian secret service (Albanese, 2023). His youth experiences were one of the reasons that earned him the epithet orientalista guerriero (combating orientalist).⁴ In his memories he wrote that in his youth he had found in Evola a romantic ideal to pursue, which he had not found in Nietzsche, Hegel, and Fichte. Evola was the man capable of generating new philosophy in the West (Ronconi, 1983).

Besides Evola, other sources of Ronconi’s inspiration were Steiner, Corbin, Tucci, and Bausani (d.1988). He was an assistant and alumni of Giuseppe Tucci in Indian philosophy at the University of Naples L’Orientale, and collaborated with Alessandro Bausani in Persian Language and Literature. Ronconi followed Corbin’s narratives about the Iranian Islam, while received inspirations from the Russian orientalist Wladimir Ivanow regarding Ismailism (Melasecchi, 2011).

Walking in the footsteps of Corbin and Evola, he contributed to Iran’s romantic image. His Iran was a transcendental place, which started where the mendacious world of everyday life finished. From Ronconi’s viewpoint, Iran possessed a genius, which survived various dynasties and even the Arab invasion; an idea that echoes Renan’s description of Persia (Renan, 1947–1961). As a militant intellectual and Evola’s heir, Ronconi admired the warrior nature of Zoroastrianism. Zarathustra invited mankind to combat in this world, because he did not consider this world as a maya or illusion, but as a battlefield between light and darkness (Ronconi, 2007). Iran’s ancient history, on the one hand, shaped Shiʿism and, on the other, contributed to the formation of numerous roman institutes.

Ronconi’s depiction of Shiʿism comprised elements that had previously captivated Corbin, namely the secret qualities, which were building blocks of the so-called ghulāt⁵ currents of Shiʿism. In 1966, he translated the mysterious Umm-al-Kitab: presumably written by followers of Mukammisa.⁶ This book hosts a confluence of various intellectual currents including gnostic, kabbalist, tantric, and Islamic elements, such as metempsychosis (popular among the early Shi’a ghulāt) and Nusayris beliefs.⁷ In the introduction, Ronconi underlined the specifically Iranian features of the book, such as the angelology, the human nature of time, and Salman’s function as the architype of the whole humanity, which made him comparable to the Zoroastrian daena and Saoshant (Ronconi, 1964, 1966a, 1966b).

Aside from Umm-al-Kitab, Ronconi in different works mentioned a series of tropes that Shiʿism in his view had adopted from Zoroastrianism and Christianity. The idea of the sacred kingship is one of these motives. The primordial sacred king was Yimo who received the throne, the sword, and the crone from Ahura Mazda and then came to the earth. He was endowed with xvarenah or the divine light, which was transmitted from sovereign to sovereign. This divine light formed the figure of the king-priest or what later in Shiʿism became Imam (Ronconi, 2010a), whereas Yimo himself, or the bright sun, in the Islamic gnosis, became ar-ruḥ al-qudus (Sacred Spirit), or al-Insan al-Kamil (Perfect Man) (Ronconi, 1980). Imam Ali and Imam Hussain were invested by this ancient Iranian light or xvarenah (Ronconi, 1973). In the veins of Ahl al-Bayt, besides Prophet’s blood there was also the blood of Sasanids because Zeyn al-ʿAbedin married the daughter of the last Sasanian emperor, Shahbanu. Shi’as understood how to conserve the ancient Persian sacred royalty, “which was initially repugnant to the egalitarian spirit of Islam” (Ronconi, 1980, p. 49). The sacred royal blood of Imams, which guaranteed their infallibility and rationalized their cult, was originally an Iranian element (Ronconi, 1973, 1997, 2012). The awaited Imam had also a herald who announced doctrines that were unacceptable for a “normal” Islam. The most important of these doctrines is the semi-divinity of the Imams (Ronconi, 1973).

While Imam Zayn al-Abedin introduced Zoroastrian elements into Shiʿism, the 12th Imam (the imagined grandchild of the Byzantine emperor) brought Christian ideas into the religion. A Christian tenet that entered Shiʿism was the idea of redeemer and martyrdom. Shi’a martyrs were universal saviors and suffered for entire humanity (Ronconi, 2012). Also the figure of messiah, which unites Shiʿism and Christianity, was not an Arab heritage but a Mazdakite and Manichaen influence (Ronconi, 1973). The Shi’a messiah or the Hidden Imam was an avatar of Mithra, the Iranian Apollo (Ronconi, 1980), or the Zoroastrian Saoshant (Ronconi, 2012). Even the fact that the Hidden Imam is represented by Shi’a clergy demonstrates that this clergy is a reincarnation of its Zoroastrian counterpart (Ronconi, 2012).

Ronconi emphasized that the whole post-Mongol Islamic mysticism, spanning from Andalusians Ibn Masarra and Ibn ʿArabi to Persians Shams-i Tabrizi (d.1248) and Rumi (d.1273) besides their entourage, developed a sort of spirituality, not originating from Muhammad’s heritage and his Quran, but rather from late pagan, Pythagorean hermetic, and Zoroastrian gnostic mysticism. It is the same also for the Shi’a imamology. Defining Imams as owners of divine wisdom and as al-Insan al-Kamil does not find confirmations in the Quran and the mainstream Islam (Ronconi, 1980). The Quran has inherited the Iranian religious influence; otherwise, this book would have remained void of any mysterious cosmology because Muhammad was not aware of the ghayb (occult). For example, the Quranic verse 33:72⁸ reverberates the Zoroastrian understanding of human beings as God’s trustees (Ronconi, 1980).

After the Arab invasion of Persia, the spiritual and political heritage of this land for the first time reappeared thanks to Ismailism. This conviction allowed Ronconi to make his most significant contribution to the convergence between Evola and Shiʿism. Ronconi wrote “many” (he meant Evola) believed that Ismailies through their ambiguous relation with Knights Templars or with the Roman Sacred Empire had introduced esoteric elements in the West, and by doing so, Ismailis had resuscitated the already existing occult currents in the Western countries. However, what Ismailis presented to the West was not Islam (as Evola had understood) but Iran (Ronconi, 1972).

The divine light of the Persian kings, the primordial fight between Adam and the evil, and the cyclical vision of time are Zoroastrian elements of Ismailism. Each cycle of time is divided in three thousand years. In the last cycle, especially after Imam’s concealment, the mankind becomes incapable of comprehending the mysterious teachings of the Imam. Only a few chosen can comprehend these teachings, others can grasp not more than their appearance (Ronconi, 1972). The mysterious teachings are transmitted especially by the fifth and the sixth Imams who transformed Shiʿism into an esoteric sect in which the Prophet and his message have been overshadowed by Imams (Ronconi, 1972, 1973).

The Zoroastrian gnosis shaped Shiʿism both thanks to Persians who converted to Islam (e.g. Salman-e Parsi) and those who translated Neoplatonist and Persian works in Arabic. The confluence of various gnostic currents and religious sects partly occurred at the Bayt al-Hikma in Baghdad, and partly in India (Ronconi, 1973, 1979). The gnostic ecumenism provoked the modification of Zoroastrian divinities in angles. Afterwards, Ismailism transformed angels in alive Imams (Ronconi, 1973). Ismailism abrogated all previous official religions including Islam and became the indispensable gate for the comprehension of the Tradition (Ronconi, 1972). Although Ronconi was inspired by the Guénonian Traditionalism, his approach to Ismailism was clearly shaped by Evola and Corbin, rather than Guénon.

Ismailis glorify Salman as the paradigm of the true believer. His figure is the locus of interaction among different motives from Kabbala, Mazdeism, Sabianism, Manicheism, Buddhism, and Islam (Ronconi, 1966b). Salman manifests in Jesus Christ, Saoshant, and the Holy Spirit. Ronconi built upon ghulāt accounts of Salman.⁹ Following Corbin,¹⁰ Ronconi described Salman as an inspiration for Muhammad. Salman was the “Sun of the West” (Ronconi, 2014, p. 122), the archetype of foreigner and an embodiment of the Imam. He mirrored the perennial theophany and was a source for the divine light that after the Fall eliminated the darkness. Salman’s legacy is intermingled also with Mithraic mysteries. According to Mithra’s secrets whoever accomplishes an interior ascesis will become “The Persian” or Salman (Ronconi, 1980, p. 51).

Persia’s impact on the Islamic civilization went beyond Gnosticism and doctrinal issues. Not only Persians formulated the Arabic grammar, they contributed to the Islamic philosophy, medicine, geometry, and many other sciences. Ronconi affirmed: “the whole so-called Arabic philosophy, and the great part of the Islamic theology, either the orthodox version (al-Ghazzali), or the heterodox and heretic [voices], are a marvelous work of spiritual synthesis in debt with the Persian genius” (Ronconi, 1980, p. 56).¹¹ In addition, Arabs owed their administrative, bureaucratic, and militant order to Persians.

Abbasids were influenced by Iranians and in this way, Arabs were defeated by the same people they had conquered and had given them the religion. Even the name “Baghdad” has Persian roots. Under Abbasids, in Baghdad, a synthesis occurred between Persian and Greek cultures that subsequently formed the Islamic sciences. Al-Mʾamun was inspired by the initiative of the Sasanid king, Shapur, and the intellectual center that he had founded. Indeed, the Bayt al-Hikma was constructed following the model of Gundeshapur (Ronconi, 1973). The latter influenced even the sciences in the twentieth century. “[Gundeshapur] was a scientific flowering, to which we are still in debt in the full twentieth century, which arises from a spiritual freedom and religious tolerance such as our Middle Ages never knew” (Ronconi, 1980, p. 59). Ronconi expressed his resentment for Persia’s “splendid past”, which was lost under Arabs. He compared Greek and Arab conquests of Persia and affirmed that the latter was much more devastating for Persia than the former. The Arab invasion “swept the old empire” and the Persian language was sacrificed for the “language of God” (Ronconi, 1980, p. 45).

Besides Shiʿism and the Arabs’ cultural and linguistic components, Ronconi underlined the Persian roots of many Western rituals and institutes. Persia has influenced the West in multiple manners, even though, the Persian cultural motives that have travelled to the West have been so Westernized and Christianized that they are not recognizable anymore. In religious terms, Iran has influenced Christianity and Judaism. For instance, angles, such as Michael and Gabriel and even the late Judaism, had Iranian origins. The scatological function of Jesus can be found in the Avestan scatological books. The nimbus around Roman kings’ heads is the Avestan xvarenah. The Avestan light took different forms such as eagle: the symbol that unites the ancient Rome and Persia. These motives were transmitted from ancient Persia to the West through the late Roman Empire.

The Persian spirit of militancy made it affine to the Western character. Conversely to India, where the world is considered to be Maya, Iranians perceived the world as a battlefield against druj (falsehood). In the Bundahishn,¹² Ahura Mazda asked human Faravashi if they wanted to remain in the sky or to fall down and fight against Ahriman, they chose the second option. In this virile and positive choice, the whole spirit of the ancient Iran resides (Ronconi, 1980).

Rome felt the impact of the Iranian cultural and religious influence in various periods of its ancient and early medieval history. In the late Roman Republic, Julius Caesar (d.44BC) and his nephew adopted Persian epithets like Ashkan. The title Augustus, which Octavian chose for himself, was a phonetic transposition of a quality attributed to Fravashi. When Augustus (d.14 AD) founded the Principate, his government did not have Italic but Iranico-hellenistic characteristics. The Roman officials were initiated through the Iranic ritual of Anahita and Mithra. Anahita would confer a sacred nimbus to Roman generals. When Constantine converted to Christianity he abandoned the radial crown of Persian origin with solar aspects, but he maintained the diadem. Despite Christianity, the religious practices of the emperors remained the same and the sacredness of kings carried on its Iranian origins. Roman emperors and even Normans of Sicily used episcopal dresses, which were the custom of Sassanid kings. Even the treasures of the Italian literature, such as Divine Comedy and the Secret Language of the Fedeli d’Amore, were inspired by the Persian literature, namely Ardaviraf Name and the Gulshan-e Raz (Ronconi, 1980).

Through all these debates, Ronconi aimed at demonstrating the extent of the influence of the ancient Persia, which shaped the religious-mystical ideas, the philosophical theories, and the political systems of the whole civilized world that expanded from India to the Atlantic shores. In synthesis, Persia influenced three civilizations: the Hellenistic, the European-medieval, and the Islamic one. Ronconi offered such importance to the ancient Persia that surpassed any other Italian scholar of Iranistics.

Although Ronconi praised Iran and its cultural heritage, similar to Evola, he was against conversion to other religions and criticized Guénon for his conversion to Islam. In 1983, Ronconi wrote an article under pseudo-name Alexander von Pamphilij and published it in Solstitum wherein he criticized followers of Guénon who converted to Hinduism or Islam. He claimed: “there is no need to plead the oriental paludament of Islam, even much less to convert to its creed. One should instead start to act on himself energetically”. Then he added: “for a real occultist, a creed is the same as the other” (Ronconi, 2010b, p. 58). Ronconi observed that people who converted considered the initiatory path as a “prefabricated package” that existed in some certain religions like Hinduism or Islam. The religious conversion, in his view, was a “ecstatic hypnosis”. “America’s streets are full of such hypnotized people” (Ronconi, 2010b, p. 56). To these people Islam seems the modern version of magic East. Whereases, “Islam swept away all late ancient Gnostic-magical world that was flourishing in the lands of the East” (Ronconi, 1983, p. 57).

3 Westerners of the East

Attempts for making connections between Rome and Persia’s past among Evola’s heirs were strategies for decoupling Italy’s past from Christianity by substituting the Semitic religion with the remaining expressions of a presumably Aryan culture. Adriano Romualdi (1940–1973), the son of the MSI’s head, despite his premature death (at the age of 33 years) contributed to this trend. He was one of the most uncompromising and assertive pupils of Evola and in 1966 published an authorized biography of his mentor (Romualdi, 1966). Adriano was a historian and, like Ronconi, occupied an academic position. In 1971, he became an assistant of Giuseppe Tricoli (a professor and a representative of MSI in Palermo) at the University of Palermo (Parlato, 2015).

In his presentation of the esoteric Islam as Aryan heritage, he did not appeal to Corbin and was less sophisticated than Ronconi in this historical construction. In 1972, he published a tripartite article entitled Sul problema d’una tradizione europea (On the Problem of a European Tradition), which was then republished also as a monograph. In this work, he aimed to define the Tradition of the “white and Western race” by adopting Dumezil’s theses. He claimed that no Christin Traditionalism could ever exist because this religion was against hierarchy and the values of the white man. Moreover, the Catholic Church flirted negritude, Judaism, and other “spiritual impurities”. In the south Europe, a female culture existed, which was invaded by the Olympic virility and Indo-European civility of the north Europe; the same civility that had reached Persia and India. Indeed, Persians and Indians were Occidentali dell’Oriente (Westerners of the East). They were Aryan, noble, and hari (blonde) as Europeans. The ancient Persian and Indian type of spirituality was fundamental for a definition of the “Indo-European and white” spirituality. Romualdi cited Alfred Rosenberg’s¹³ work Blut und Ehre (Blood and Honor), and added: “West and East are mere geographic expressions: the decisive is the blood quality, which flows from West to East and vice versa”. Even a rapid glance at the language helps us understand the affinity between the European and Indian blood. The central concept of the European religiosity can be found in the Rigveda. The Indo-European world admires war, whereas for the “mediocre moralism” of Christianity, war is incompatible with spirituality. The Nordic culture is virile and contrasts the feminine Mediterranean culture that loves promiscuity, equality, and freedom. The female order belongs to gineco-cratic people. This order is xeno-philic and welcomes foreigners, whereas, the Indo-European culture despises mixture among people. It supports family, state, castes, race, and bloodline against fratellanza universale e bastardo (universal and bastard brotherhood) (Romualdi, 1971, p. 117).

Inspired by Alfred Rosenberg and Evola, Romualdi challenged the geographic East-West divide. Christianity was “racially, religiously and socially” alien and hostile to the classic world. It was racially hostile because Christianity came from the East, whereas Persians and Indians were racially westerners. The European Tradition declined with the progress of Christianity and Islam. Romualdi despite his aversion to Semitic cultures, similar to Evola, found a way to appreciate the esoteric currents of Islam. Sufism was different from the mainstream Islam. It was a reaction of Persia’s Aryans to the semitic-Islamic dogmas. The relationship between Sufism and the mainstream Islam is like the interaction between the medieval mysticism and Christianity. The medieval mysticism in the same manner tried to circumvent Christianity. As underlined by Evola, the medieval mysticism and Sufism were not Semitic (Romualdi, 1972).

Romualdi could have advanced his Evolian campaign to dissociate neo-fascism from nationalism, liberalism, and biological racism by reformulating the Semitic-Aryan dichotomy and their East-West positioning. However, his untimely death prevented him from completing this task.

4 Easterners of the West

To challenge the East-West binary, instead of transplanting esoteric Islam from the East to the West by invoking racist theories (as Romualdi did), another successor of Evola undertook the opposite operation: he shifted Europe from the West to the East. It is the step taken by Claudio Umar Amin Mutti (b.1946): a prolific intellectual from Parma with vast publications on matters related to mythology of different Eastern European and Asian countries. In 1960, he became a member of the youth wing of the MSI called Giovane Italia (Young Italy) (1954–1971), but later severed all contacts with the MSI due to its presumed alliance with the Atlantic forces (Galoppini, 2017a).

Mutti is a friend and follower of the neo-fascist intellectual Franco Freda (b.1941), a proponent of armed spontaneity and convicted for the bombing of Piazza Fontana in 1969 (Fabbri, 2014; Sedgwick, 2004). The Parmisan scholar in his youth met Gheddafi and in 1975, translated in Italian and published a collection of Gheddafi’s lectures for Freda’s AR publishing house. In 1978, Mutti launched his own publishing house All’Insegna del Veltro and in 1979 founded the association Europa-Islam in Turin. For a certain period he was a professor of Hungherian and Romanian languages at the University of Bologna, but he lost the job and served a prison term due to his involvement in the bombing of the Bologna railroad station in 1980 (Francis, 1982). In the early 1980s, he converted to Islam and in honor of Johann Jakob Von Leers (d.1965),¹⁴ chose the name Umar Amin for himself (Sedgwick, 2004). In the mid-80s he joined the editorial board of the Iran-backed magazine Jihad (see Chap. 5).

Mutti is active in the Murabitun World Movement: an organization of the European converts to Islam founded by Ian Dallas or Shaykh ʿAbdalqadir as-Sufi, which besides Mujahiddin of Palestine fight for the expulsion of USA from Eurasian region (Guolo, 2003; Fasanella & Grippo, 2013; Savino, 2015). As declared in its manifest, the movement was formed in Granada in 1988 to “revive Islam, which is currently fading in the Arab countries”. It aims to restore the purity of the Medinan Islam, a mission that can be accomplished only by Western Muslim elite educated in Sufism, which is the “heart and spirit of Islam”.¹⁵

Besides Evola and Gheddafi, Mutti has published on Ayatollah Khomeini, Hitler, as well as Romanian and Hungarian far right politicians such as Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (d.1938), Ferenc Szalasi (d.1946), and Ion Mota (d.1937). He has examined Evola’s influence on Czech, Romanian, and Hungarian intellectuals (Mutti, 1998a, 1998b). Mutti’s proficiency in various languages has made him a reference point for the international network of Traditionalists in Romania, Hungary, Italy, France, and Russia.

Like Evola, Mutti constructs his own version of world history, but he emphasizes the Islamic origins of various significant phenomena. According to his perspective, figures such as Alexander the Great, Hitler, Plato, Rome, the Holy Grail, and Nietzsche, in one way or another, validate the authenticity of the Islamic tradition. He connects these dots through his impressive linguistic proficiency, which enables him to deconstruct and reconstruct history using philology and the Traditionalist method, namely the comparative study of religions and languages. Since the eighteenth century, comparative philology has facilitated various historical interpretations, and Mutti employs this tool to establish connections between Islam and ancient Rome. While Evola dreamt the revival of the Empire, Mutti believes that this dream can only be realized through Islam.

In 1977, Mutti published an article wherein he discussed the continuity between the tradition of the ancient Rome and Islam (Mutti, 1977). The Tradition is unique and only the dogmatic exotericism cannot understand this unity. He then extremized the Guénonian dictum by affirming that even Plato and Plotinus invited men to tawḥīd (God’s oneness) and the difference between the monotheism of Islam and the polytheism of the Ancient Rome is only apparent. The Roman polytheism and the Islamic al-ʾasmaʾ al-ḥusna represent the same plural personality of God. In the world of Tradition, where the Roman religion was a fully-fledged citizen, there was no polytheism.¹⁶

The ancient Rome and Mecca had several hidden relations. The first element to reconstruct was Muslims’ axis mundi. Similar to Evola (see Chap. 3) he predated Kaaba to Abrahamic religions. The name Cybele or Romans’ Magna Mater (goddess of mountain and the mother of all divinities) had phonetic affinities to Kaaba. Both Rome and Mecca hosted meteorites that made them world centers. In the ancient Rome, this meteorite was the one dedicated to Cybele. Following the Roman senate’s order, this stone was moved from Pessinus in Anatolia to Rome. When Rome was “destructed” by Christianity, it lost the Traditional unity between the spheres of politics and religion. As a result, Rome no longer has its position as the “navel of the world”. Afterwards, the Islamic world, which has another black stone as its reference point, became the new world center.

Following Evola, Mutti compared the Roman heroic sacrifice of one’s life mors triumphalis with the Quranic glorious death. Caliphs were avatars of the Roman emperors. Muhammad and the son of the goddess Venus were one and the same person. The Latin fas, which indicates the Divine will, corresponds to the Islamic fiqh (Galoppini, 2017b). Islam is an alive Traditional form that announces the unity of politics and religion. The spirituality of Islam is virile, active, and combative. Islam is in relation with the Aryan and hyperuranian spirituality. If Rome wants to return to its pre-modern greatness, it is possible only through Islam because not only Europe, but also Renascence had Islamic roots. Due to these common roots, Islam and the “heirs of Rome” have developed the same concerns and enemies (Mutti, 1988). Therefore, only Islam can save Rome and restore its Ghibelline spirit and pre-modern centrality. If Islam appears as a foreign entity to Europe today, it is a consequence of Europe’s decline. Europe should rediscover its Roman Imperial past but in “renewed forms appropriate to our time” (Jalali, 2017, p. 137).

In 1979, Mutti in an article presented evidence of Muhammad’s arrival in the Gospel John (Mutti, 1979a). In this gospel (16:7), Jesus in his Farewell Discourse announced the arrival of an “advocate” or “comforter”. According to Mutti, the Greek equivalent of this word was periklytos, which means glorious: the exact translation of Ahmad or Muhammad’s epithet. In addition, one of Muhammad’s denominations was ar-ruḥ al-quddus or the Holy Spirit. Due to the exigencies of the cycle, Jesus did not reveal the entire divine message. Muhammad’s teachings, by difference, were complete and included both esoteric and exoteric dimensions of the religion, whereas Jesus did not consider the possible union between worldly and spiritual matters. Indeed, between God and Cesare, Jesus considered only God. According to Mutti, since Muhammad and Mahdi are the same person, the proclamation of the Gospel of John also bears witness to the arrival of Mahdi.

When Mutti has traced Muhammad’s arrival in the Gospel John, there is no surprise that he found it also in the Gospel of Barnabas, which is considered the Gospel of Islam.¹⁷ In 1985, Mutti emphasized that not only this gospel was not apocryphal, but also it is the most faithful one to the real message of Jesus Christ, because it confirms Muhammad’s arrival clearer than Gospel John. In this gospel, each prophet belongs to his time, whereas Muhammad was the prophet of all human beings. Muhammad has been presented as the reason of the creation of universe and ontologically anterior to other prophets (Mutti, 1985).

As one can read in a book translated by Mutti, he believes that the couple Muhammad-Mahdi has launched a pathway that in the twentieth century was persuaded by Nazism. In 1979, Mutti published an Italian translation of the chapter ten of Souvenirs et reflexions d’une aryenne (Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman) of Savitri Devi¹⁸ (originally published in India in 1976). In the introduction of the book, he underlines the “deep spiritual dimension” of Nazism, which has been neglected for a long time in the West. Hitler was indeed an avatar of the Shi’a Hidden Imam and of Veltro (greyhound) who would “break the cross and transfix the pig”. In a note, Mutti explained that for pig he meant the Jews who were “enemies of mankind” (Mutti, 1979b, p. 7).

Given all these considerations about the importance of Islam for Europe, Mutti went beyond Evola, and even criticized him. He agreed with Evola that the East was in the same crisis of the West. However, Islam was the only quality that could return orient-ness (i.e. the role of guidance) to the Orient. The value of the East, in Mutti’s mind, consisted in its role of being the spiritual guidance for the West. The East did not have any intrinsic value. It becomes Orient only as long as it is Islamic, otherwise it becomes similar to the West and shares its catastrophic destiny. Islam is neither the West, nor the East. As the last religion of the “current cycle”, Islam is the only remedy for the modern world. Contrary to Hinduism, Islam is universal and the Quran talks to all human beings. Therefore, the West will be eventually emancipated by Islam: a prophecy of both Quran and the Nazi intellectual Sigrid Hunke (d.1999). The latter in her book Allahs Sonne uber dem Abendland (Allah’s Sun Shines on the West) claimed that Islam could free Europe from Christianity (Mutti, 1984).

Mutti gathered his objections to Evola in an article published under several different titles and in various languages (e.g. Mutti, 1998b). The paper version of this article, aside from Italian, is present in French entitled Julius Evola et l’Islam and published by Akribeia. The online article is available in English,¹⁹ Italian (Mutti, 2019), and Spanish (Mutti, n.d.). In 2016, he presented this article with some additional points, besides an Italian man converted to Shiʿism, in a conference in Brescia (Rigenerazioen Evola, 2019). This article, its republication, and representation show the challenging nature of the matter for Mutti, but also the ways in which he came to terms with Evola. In the article he stressed the points of convergence and divergence between Evola’s and his own approach to Islam. He reported Evola’s objections to Guénon’s choice of conversion to Islam and Burckhardt’s optimism regarding the existence of initiatory centers outside Europe. Nonetheless, according to Mutti, when Evola observed the path trodden by Guénon admitted that converting to Islam “is practically necessary for those who are not satisfied with mere theory” (Mutti, 2019). Although Evola in 1949, in the first edition of Maschera e volto dello spiritualismo contemporaneo (The Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism), considered Islam, similar to Protestantism and Catholicism, a “tragic doctrine”, he had eliminated this affirmation in the edition of 1971 (Mutti, 1998b, p. 87).

According to Mutti, with the rise of the Arab socialism, Evola changed his mind over the relation between Islam and Europe: Islam could not be a paradigm for the Old Continent anymore. However, he did not consider that the Arab countries were only one-tenth of the Islamic world, Mutti underlined. Therefore, despite Evola, it is not accurate to take Arab countries as representatives of world Muslims. Moreover, Evola deemed Saudi Arabia as the representative of the orthodox version of Islam. Evola’s approach to Saudi Arabia irritated his Parmesan heir because the Baron had not considered that Saudi Arabia was actually masterminded by Britain against Ottomans. Evola in the Revolt presented Islam as superior both to Judaism and Christianity, but then in the 50s he contradicted himself by illustrating Islam as needy of the West. Whereas Islam is the only possible solution for whoever wants to react to the unavoidable degenerative course of the modern world that derives from cycles’ law. Therefore, to overcome the perplexity between following or abandoning Evola, Mutti suggests a decoupling of Evola as a political analyst from Evola as a scholar of Tradition (Mutti, 2019).

As a reaction to Evola’s “misleading” depiction of Islam, soon after the Iranian Revolution, the magazine Jihad dedicated an issue to the rejection of the presumed equivalence between being Muslim and being Arab. In 1979, two non-Arab neighboring countries, Iran and Afghanistan, fought the Western hegemony. Thus, in this year the two countries became the focus of this magazine. On 1 December 1979, Jihad contains a lecture that Mutti held in Rimini (Mutti, 1981). In this lecture, he argued that the notion of equating being Muslim with being Arab was propagated by Western conspiracy to tarnish the image of Islam, even though “Imam” Khomeini was Persian. Since the proto-Islamic period there were Indo-Europeans among Prophet’s companions, namely Salman and Suhayb Rumi. After having mentioned the Arab nationalism, Mutti affirmed that Arabs were not capable of constructing Evola’s “race of spirit” or umma.

Mutti glorifies Iran through his mystified geopolitics. Geopolitics for him is not a modern discipline or a geography applied to politics. He appealed to Carl Schmitt (d.1985) and Guénon to disclose the spiritual origins of geopolitics. He adopted a theory of Schmitt confirming that all modern concepts of the modern state were indeed the secularized adoptions of the theological notions. Based on this assumption, Mutti affirmed that geopolitics was in fact the secularized version of Guénon’s sacred geography, especially because Schmitt was interested in Guénon’s works. According to the sacred geography, all places have a spirit or “genius”. This spirit has been challenged by globalization. Therefore, Europe should stand against the unfirming forces of the West, namely USA and its allies.

The West is the locus of darkness. In the Quran, Allah is the God of two Easts and two Wests. Although the Shi’a exegesis of this Quranic verse considers the maqrib (West) as a spiritual entity, Mutti, following Heidegger, presented the Occident as a gloomy and lifeless world or a perennial hell. The world is in crisis because it has been debilitated by Western rationalism, materialism, and individualism.

Europe is not part of the West. Europe has been imprisoned by the West headed by the USA. Europe is part of the East and should be de-Westernized. To dissociate Europe from the West, Mutti appeals to the theory of Eurasia.²⁰ People of Eurasia should make alliance against the unifying forces of USA and their Jewish puppets in the Middle East. The American Judeo-Christian thought does not have anything to do with Europe. The latter should make alliance with ancient civilizations of Eurasia. Europe was a heritage of Gengis Khan, which has been weakened by Judaic globalization and colonialism (Mutti, 2005).

Mutti currently leads a magazine entitled Eurasia that works as a bridge between Traditionalists and the academic world. In the post-Cold War era, Eurasia, with presumably scientific²¹ bases, became a reference point for the anti-US forces in Europe and Asia. Advocates of Eurasia claim that differences in cultures, languages, religions, and traditions among people that inhabit this landmass are only epiphenomenal and there is not any discontinuity between Europe and Asia. This claim reinvigorates Russia’s ambition to restore its grandiose past.²² A Mutti’s collaborator, Alexander Dugin (b.1962) (currently the most internationally well-known propagator of Eurasia), promotes the dream of a “super-national” Russian Empire that incorporates all people of Eastern Europe. To realize this dream he knew that Iran and China’s influence in the region had to be put at bay (Abbas, 2020). Therefore, Eurasia in its original Russian version considered Iran and China as potential threats to Russian hegemony over this landmass.

Corbin mystified Eurasia, enriched it with theosophist and occultist components, and produced an Iran-friendly version of it. In Iran et la philosophie and Corps spirituel, terre celeste (Spiritual Body, Celestial Land), he presented expressions such as “eurasiatic wisdom”, “geosophy”, “sacred geography”, and “interior Eurasia” that present the earth as an angle and container of magic powers. Moving toward the same direction, Giuseppe Tucci claimed that among inhabitants of Eurasia a spiritual unity could exist (Galoppini, 2017c). Mutti and Maurizio Murelli (b.1954) rehabilitated and promoted Eurasia in their journals, namely Orion and Eurasia, in which Iran occupies a crucial position in the region. Mutti recovered the theory, not only by his interpretations of Guénon, Schmitt, and Corbin, but also through Quranic exegesis. In this way he drafted a Traditionalist version of the Russian theory, according to which, the Tradition was born in the “continent” of Eurasia (Galoppini, 2017a). This idea has been buttressed by some Islamic categories: for instance, Eurasia is compared to al-barzakh²³ or what in the Quran has been considered majmaʿ al-baḥrayn²⁴ or the place of confluence between the two seas. This place hosts the confluence between the world of pure ideas and the world of sensible objects.

In this mystified cosmology, Iran has become not only a geographic but also a spiritual fulcrum of the Eurasiatic ecumene. It has become the birthplace of al-Insan al-kamil or the “universal man” in possession of the Cup of Jamshid (Mutti, 2013, p. viii). It is the land of the Hyperborean people (Mutti, 2010, pp. 15–23), whose soul, as Corbin suggests, has achieved such perfection and harmony that Iranians have become free from negativity and darkness. Iran’s soul belongs neither to the East, nor to the West (Mutti, 2013). Iranians have the blood of Sassanids in their veins and it is why they support Ali’s descendants (Mutti, 2008).

Mutti’s determined attempt at freeing Europe from the West has earned him the epithet “militant professor” (Galoppini 2017a). His combativeness has inspired many ITs. Some of them promote the French conviction about Shiʿism being the Aryan Islam of cultured people versus the Bedouin Islam of Arabs;²⁵ some others (as will be seen in the next chapter) embraced Shiʿism and have given origin to a long chain of conversions to the minor Islam in Italy.