Spiritualism in defense of Islam

Mattias Gori Olesen recently covered the debate between René Guénon and the Egyptian intelelctual Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī (1875-1954) over modern spirituality in Al-Maʿrifa (see post here). A new article, “Taming the Animal within in Cairo: Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī and ‘Temperate Vegetarianism’” by Mariam Elashmawy (Alif 45, 2025), here, open access) revisits this debate and adds more to our understanding of Wajdī. “It is important to understand that he [Wajdī] sees spiritualism through an Islamic lens,” argues Elashmawy. Spiritualism was not an import from the modern West, as Guénon thought, but a long-standing part of Islam. “As for us Muslims,” wrote Wajdī, “the matter of the appearance of spirits is one of the most common occurrences for those close to Allah” [ie. saints/awliyāʾ]. Spiritualism, as a scientific endorsement of one aspect of Islam, could serve as a defense against the growing threat of materialism and atheism. Wajdī agreed with Guénon regarding the threat, then, but not regarding the remedy.

Kristiane Backer and the Maryamiyya

In the 1980s and 1990s, Kristiane Backer, of German origin, was a glamorous MTV presenter. She was introduced to Islam by Imran Khan, and although her relationship with him ended, her interest in Islam did not. Her 2009 autobiography, From MTV to Mecca: How Islam Inspired My Life, tells of her first encounters with Islam, her meeting with Shaykh Nazim and her conversion in the Naqshbandi milieu, and then her involvement with the Maryamiyya. Imran Khan introduced her to Gai Eaton, who introduced her to Martin Lings, who after some time became her shaykh. She followed him until his death.

From MTV to Mecca is a very personal and honest account of its author’s experiences, difficulties (often related to gender), and triumphs. We meet not only Lings and Eaton but Seyyed Hossein Nasr and many other Maryamis, all referred to with respect, never judged. Schuon is mentioned only in passing; she never met him. Others who appear in the book are never judged either, but what we read of some of the men in her life (not of the Maryamis) may provoke more negative judgments in the reader.

Backer’s autobiography shows the Maryamiyya at its best: profound, inspiring, supportive. Theological issues are occasionally visible, but never noted.

Dugin, the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, and Russian intelligence

The Center for Geopolitical Expertise (CGE, logo to left), based in Moscow and directed by Alexander Dugin’s right-hand man Valery Mikhaylovich Korovin, has just (December 9, 2025) been sanctioned by the UK government, following the lead of the EU and US. As a result, “internet access services and application stores must take reasonable steps to prevent users in the UK from accessing content, sites or applications provided by” CGE.

According to the EU, the CGE has been “involved in creating and disseminating false information by utilising artificial intelligence tools to produce deepfake videos, and supporting a network of hundreds of fake news websites. CGE is alleged to have worked closely with Russia’s military intelligence agency.” The UK agrees, identifying the “network of hundreds of fake news websites” as Storm-1516.

This is hard to verify using open sources. The CGE exists as a legal entity, and Korovin is listed as its director, but it has no internet presence. Storm-1516 is the name assigned by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center to a Russian network it detected that was involved in attempting to influence the 2024 US presidential election. The source for the connection between the two is Microsoft, according to an October 2024 NBC news report, but there is nothing about this online at the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center. One source for the connection between the CGE and Russian intelligence is a January 2024 public report by the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service, according to which “Russian intelligence agencies have repeatedly used the Centre as a cover to get involved in organising press tours” of Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.

An EU report gives two URLs for the GCE. One, cge.su, operated from 2017 to May 2024 with the CGE’s articles as a placeholder and no other content save the logo reproduced above. The other, cge.evrazia.ru, seems never to have existed, and may be a mistake for evrazia.su, which does exist and does organize tours of the “post-Soviet space,” which may well include occupied areas of Ukraine, but does not seem to be related to Korovin or Dugin.

The EU and UK information, then, may not be entirely reliable. There is certainly confusion when it comes to a related matter. Dugin’s daughter Darya was killed by a Ukrainian operation inside Russia in August 2022. She was sanctioned by the US in March 2022 and by the UK in July 2022, even though the UK had not then sanctioned Dugin himself, and did not do so until December 2025 (the EU sanctioned him in 2022, and the US in 2015). The UK then tightened its sanctions on her in 2023 and 2024, first imposing “trust services sanctions” and then a “Director Disqualification Sanction,” even though she had been dead for some time.

New Project on Traditionalist Approaches to East Asian Religions

Traditionalists have drawn heavily on Asian religions and their concepts, notably Islamic Sufism and Indian Vedanta, but also on East Asian religions such as Japanese Zen Buddhism and Shinto, and Chinese Daoism. They have adapted these concepts to their own intellectual framework in an Orientalist manner. 

While the South Asian and Middle Eastern connections and influences of Traditionalism have been relatively well researched, the East Asian dimension has received less attention. Figures such as Julius Evola (who produced two “translations” of the Daodejing, among others) and second-generation Traditionalist Seraphim Rose engaged substantially with East Asia. Orientalist tropes of Japanese religion and culture are conspicuous in several Traditionalist projects, living on in popular culture to this day.

The project “Traditionalist East Asia” therefore explores how Traditionalist thinkers have approached East Asia and its traditions, and how these continue to influence various religious and political discourses, sometimes in highly controversial ways, to the present day. Topics covered range from the contemporary appropriation of Zen by the Far Right and perennialist images of Japan in American counterculture to the mid-twentieth-century exchange of concepts of race and empire.

This three-year project has commenced at the University of Vienna and the University of Graz with funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project is led by Lukas K. Pokorny (University of Vienna) and Franz Winter (University of Graz). The postdoctoral researchers are Moritz Maurer (University of Vienna) and Marleen Thaler (University of Graz). The research collaborator is Davide Marino (University of Göttingen).

New Book on the Reception of Traditionalism in Germany

Guest post by Moritz Maurer, University of Vienna. 

Felix Herkert has just published Die integrale Tradition. Rezeptionsgeschichte der traditionalen Schule im deutschen Sprachraum (The Integral Tradition: A History of the Reception of the Traditional School in the German-speaking world), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2025.

With this monograph, which is partly based on the author's earlier works, Herkert aims to address a major gap in research on Traditionalism: its reception in the German-speaking cultural sphere. He focuses on what he sees as the core of the Traditionalist school, the works of René Guénon (1886-1951) and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), the latter understood as the most prominent thinker who adapted Guénonian thought in his later work. Julius Evola (1898-1974) is mentioned several times but not systematically investigated.

Sadly, it is hardly an unbiased piece of scholarship. It lags behind the current state of the art, especially in the historical field, which is often given too little space. This seems partly due to ideological reasons, as Mark Sedgwick's works are dismissed as "biased" (pp. 24, fn. 20; 49-50), while preference is given to questionable “scene” literature. 

Part 1.1 provides very brief biographies of (more or less) notable Traditionalists. The biography of René Guénon (1886-1951; pp. 11-24) provides an informative overview of Guénon's Traditionalist works. After a short discussion of terminology, part 1.3 offers a detailed overview of relevant publications, translations and relevant journals.

Chapter 2 unfolds the reception of the Integral Tradition in the German-speaking world. Probably the most interesting case is that of the German philosopher Leopold Ziegler (1881-1958; pp. 69-95). As Herkert points out, it was Ziegler who coined the term "integral tradition," which is commonly used in German, in 1936 (already on p. 45, fn. 48). Ziegler temporarily became a kind of pupil of Guénon, to whose work he was introduced by Siegfried Lang (1887-1970) and André Préau (1893-1976), most likely in 1931. Herkert describes the relationship as initially one of enthusiastic acceptance, which then gave way to appreciative distancing. In the following section, Herkert gives an interesting overview of Ziegler’s Traditionalist monographs Überlieferung (Tradition, 1936), Apollons letzte Epiphanie (Apollo’s Last Epiphany, 1937), and Menschwerdung (Becoming Human, 1948). Other noteworthy examples he touches on are Walter Heinrich (1902–1984), a member of Othmar Spann’s intellectual circle, and the New-Right author Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner (1939–2011), who drew especially on Evola and Guénon in his later Christian-perennialist writings.

In section 2.2, Herkert follows rather loose connections to Traditionalism which can be found in the work of various other intellectuals. While many of these passages are interesting in themselves, the connections remain largely at the level of vague references or rather critical contact. The sources themselves are often rather enigmatic, such as the few, if sometimes euphoric, statements by Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) about Guénon. The next section follows the so far largely overlooked relationship between researchers of Indian art history from German-speaking countries and Traditionalism.

A major weakness of the second part is the author’s neglect of essential secondary literature. For example, the recurring theme of the Reich omits any reference to Richard Faber’s extensive work: These gaps undermine the section’s scholarly depth.

In his Conclusion, Herkert notes that the few German Traditionalist writings are mainly Christian, linked to Romantic philosophy, and more philosophical than initiatory. Here, this reader is happy to follow him. Some conclusions, however, seem speculative—such as attributing the limited reception of Traditionalism to its incompatibility with the Federal Republic’s democratic consensus. Nevertheless, the study opens a valuable field for further research.