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.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Ishraq is a philosophical and mystical school of though established by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (d.1191).
- 3.
His full name was Pio Alessandro Carlo Fulvio Filippani Ronconi. For convenience, I will refer to him as Ronconi.
- 4.
It is Iacovella’s commemorative edited volume published a year after Ronconi’s demise.
- 5.
Ghulāt is a category coined by Twelver Shi’a heresiographers and attributed to those Shiʿa groups that exaggerated about Imams and described them with divine qualities.
- 6.
A pro-Alid group among ghulāt, called by mediaeval heresiographers as Mukammisa or Pentadists (Pentad means a group of five). They considered Salman as the bab (lit. gate) who always appeared with Muhammad (Daftari, 2015).
- 7.
Nusayris, present in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, consider Ali as Godhead. Among them Salman has a special position.
- 8.
In this Quranic verse, God offers the amānat (lit., trust) or responsibility to different creatures such as heavens, earth, and mountains. None of them accepts this responsibility except for human being who becomes God’s trustee on the earth.
- 9.
Since the first Islamic centuries, some ghulāt (e.g. Salmaniyya, Nusayriyya, Mukammisa) attributed supernatural characteristics to Salman. The later became a prophet, a bab (lit. gate) to the Prophet, or even a divine being. His extraordinary longevity allowed him to witness Moses and Aron, Christ, and eventually Muhammad. Hence, he was a link among Abrahamic religions. He possessed divine knowledge of the ancients and transmitted it also to Muhammad; therefore, he is even compared to Angel Gabriel (Moosa, 1987; Emadi Haeri, 1396/2017).
- 10.
Corbin in the En Islam Iranien (Inside Iranian Islam) presented Salman as Qwaysis, namely the one who was initiated without pole. Salman was a mediator between the pre-Islamic and Islamic cultures of Iran. He was the Persian consigliere of Muhammad and his best companion.
- 11.
Here Ronconi reverberates Renan’s conviction about the Arabian Islam. Renan dissociated the scientific achievements of Abbasids from Arabs and attributed them to Sasanides and Greeks (see Nash, 2014, p. 4).
- 12.
This is the title of a volume in Pahlavi or Middle Persian language, presumably written toward the end of the Sassanid Empire that encompasses the Zoroastrian cosmogony.
- 13.
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg (1892–1946) was a Nazi theorist and ideologue.
- 14.
He was one of the ideologues of the Third Reich. By the end of WWII, he went to Egypt and converted to Islam.
- 15.
- 16.
Mutti reaffirmed the content of this article in a webinar on 21 April 2023 in occasion of the coincidence of Id al-Fitr and Rome’s birth anniversary (Centro Studi Internazionale Dimore della Sapienza, 2023).
- 17.
Jesus described in this gospel is similar to his Quranic image (a non-crucified messenger of God, who announces the arrival of Muhammad).
- 18.
The Nazi author and Freda’s friend.
- 19.
www.claudiomutti.com/index.php?url=6&imag=1&id_news=130 (accessed 4 February 2021).
- 20.
The genesis of Eurasianism can be traced back in the works of Russian philologist Nikolaj S. Trubetzkoy (d.1938), historian Georgij V. Vernadsky (d.1973), the geographer and economist Petr N. Savicky (d.1965), the Orthodox pastor Georges V. Florovsky (d.1979), and the philosopher Pierre Souvtchinsky (1892–1985). In 1925, Trubetzkoy published a book translated in English as The Legacy of Gengis Khan, where he claimed that Eurasia was both geographically and anthropologically one single unit. This idea was then re-elaborated by the Soviet ethnologist and historian Lev N. Gumilyev (d.1992) who contested the hegemony of the Atlantic forces over the rest of the world (Mileski, 2015).
- 21.
The absence of ethnographic or historical evidence that should have testified the actual or representational unity of masses that occupied these lands has left Eurasia as a mere hypothesis. Hence, Eurasia instead of heuristic use has utopian function (Testa, 2015).
- 22.
Throughout the last century, the theory from its initial scientific nature became utopian and politically compelling (Testa, 2015; Lagutina, 2020). Following the fall of the URRS, Russians had to “rethink the catastrophe” (Laruelle, 2002, p. 71) and re-claim their former influence on that landmass. The Russian advocates of the theory stress Russia’s anti-Western spirit.
- 23.
Lit., Limbo, barrier. It is an Arabic word that, in Islamic eschatology, signifies the space that separates the living from the Hereafter.
- 24.
Lit., the confluence of the two seas. Here, it means that Eurasia is the place where different religions encounter.
- 25.
Daniele Perra is a Mutti’s collaborator in the Eurasia magazine. In an article he sustains the Zoroastrian roots of Shiʿism and the fact that Shiʿism is the Islam of cultured people versus the Islam of Nomadic Arab tribes of the Arabian Peninsula (Perra, 2020).
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Mirshahvalad, M. (2024). Evola’s Militant Professors and the East-West Dichotomy. In: Crises and Conversions. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55877-1_4
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