New light on the Maryamiyya, and especially on Nasr

A new book, Charles Upton’s Giving Myself Away (New York: Angelico Press, 2025), casts important new light on the Maryamiyya from the 1980s to the 2010s. Upton and his wife Jenny were for some years members of the Maryamiyya, and although Upton is critical of it, he does not hold the animus against it that some ex-Maryamis do. This makes him a  more reliable witness. He describes himself as a “'graduate' of the Traditionalist School rather than an active member,” and still maintains that “for some spiritual temperaments, the Traditionalist/Perennialists are the best possible introduction to comparative religion and traditional metaphysics.”

Giving Myself Away is a spiritual autobiography, and the Maryamiyya is only one of the American spiritual and religious groups dealt with. The book also, for example, describes the Nimatullahi Sufi Order and its gradual movement away from Islam.

What is most important for those interested in Traditionalism is what Giving Myself Away has to say about internal divisions within the Maryamiyya. The most important of these was one that developed between Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Upton once asked Nasr what the difference was between Schuon’s practice of Native American Spirituality (“Indian Days”) and “the hippies, with their fringed buckskin jackets and headbands,” and Nasr responded “I really couldn’t say,” a response that (in my view) was as close as possible to an explicit repudiation. It was Nasr who had accepted Upton’s wife Jenny into the Maryamiyya, and it became clear on one occasion that he regarded her connection as being to him, and not to Schuon. A probable outline of Nasr’s response to events in Bloomington thus becomes visible: he seems to have decided to distance himself and his own followers from developments of which he could not approve, but without causing scandals or splits.

Another division was between Nasr and Martin Lings, as after Schuon abdicated his position to the two men, they operated independently to the extent that one visitor to Bloomington was identified as a representative of Lings, that is to say not of Nasr (or Schuon). 

Huston Smith (1919-2016) initially followed Nasr, but at one point experienced a strong attraction to the Russian Orthodox Church, and asked Nasr for permission to convert from Islam to Orthodoxy. Nasr refused permission, proposing instead that Smith remain a Sufi in his esoteric practice and, if he wished, take his original Methodism as his exoteric form, a solution that Smith rejected as promoting the very syncretism that the Maryamiyya had always condemned. This led to a breach between Smith and Nasr. One might argue, though Upton does not make this argument, that Nasr saw his proposal as preferable to apostasy from Islam.

And finally Giving Myself Away clarifies the positions of Schuon’s leading Christian followers, Rama Coomaraswamy (1929-2006) and James Cutsinger (1953-2020), the former a surgeon and a son of René Guénon’s collaborator Ananda Coomaraswamy and the latter a professor of religious studies. Coomaraswamy began as a Roman Catholic but after the Second Vatican Council seemed to have surrendered to modernity joined the rejectionist Society of Saint Pius X and later moved to the even more rejectionist Society of Saint Pius V, ending as a sedevaccantist priest, maintaining that the See of Rome has been vacant since the death of Pius XII. Cutsinger joined the Russian Orthodox Church, and ran an “Ordo Mariana,” the practice of which paralleled the main Maryamiyya in focusing on the invocation of the divine name, a form of dhikr, loosely based on the Orthodox Jesus Prayer. He at one point opened a sort of Traditionalist and Orthodox Liberal Arts College, but this closed after two years. The Ordo Mariana finally ceased operation, and Upton’s view is that this was because Cutsinger lost interest in it, finally moving away from Traditionalism, as he “began to teach a range of non-traditional doctrines derived from the ‘esoterism’ of the counterculture, drawing on sources like G. I. Gurdjieff and Alan Watts.”

Many other Traditionalists appear in the book, which is warmly recommended.

Rusmir Mahmutćehajić (1948–2026)

Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, the leading Bosnian Traditionalist, died in Sarajevo on 5 April 2026.

Mahmutćehajić discovered the writings of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon as a young man. He trained as an electrical engineer, did a PhD in Italy, and taught electrical engineering in Croatia during the last period of Yugoslavia. 

When the Bosnian war started, he joined the Bosnian defense, arranging the provision of arms to the defenders of Sarajevo and serving in the first Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Minister of Energy, Mining and Industry and as Vice President. He resigned from the government in protest at the Dayton Agreement, which ended the war but accepted the de facto partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina into Muslim, Serb and Croat entities. As a believer in the transcendent unity of religions, Mahmutćehajić also believed in the unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which he worked with devotion after Dayton in a private capacity, though without success—the forces keeping the three entities apart were too strong for anything or anyone to counter. 

Mahmutćehajić founded the International Forum Bosnia and the journal Dijalog, wrote many articles and  books (several of which were translated into English), and played an important part in the reception of Traditionalism in Bosnia, described in Samir Beglerović and Mark Sedgwick, "Islam in Bosnia Between East and West,” for which see here. 

Of his books in English, the three most notable are:

• The Denial of Bosnia (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000)
• Bosnia the Good: Tolerance and Tradition (Central European University Press, 2000)
• Sarajevo Essays: Politics, Ideology, and Tradition (State University of New York Press, 2003)

My thanks to ND for bringing this news to my attention.

Evola's Samurai in context

A new article places Julius Evola’s understanding of the figure of the Samurai in its Italian context. It is Michele Monserrati, “The Transnational Samurai: Nation-Building and Community for the Italian Far-Right,” Japan Review 41 (2026): 255–280, available (open access) here.

Italian interest in the Samurai started after the Japanese victory against Russia in 1905, and was initially guided by the English-language Bushido: The Soul of Japan by the Japanese nationalist Inazō Nitobe (1862–1933), which understood the Samurai ethic in terms of medieval European chivalry. Bushido was translated into Italian in 1917 but many Italians had by then reimagined the Samurai in terms of the classical Roman hero, popular among Italian nationalists. There then emerged two models of the Samurai in Italy, according to Monserrati, a Shinto-inflected model that emphasized patriotism and a Zen-oriented model that that emphasized individual spirituality. The Shinto-inflected model, which the article examines in detail, was dominant until the end of Fascism, which killed Italian militarism, leaving the field to the Zen-oriented model, of which the most important proponent (though not the first) was Evola. For Evola, “the samurai’s warrior ethos represented a potential archetype for rediscovering a lost Western tradition of heroic spiritual transformation.” He “emphasized the spiritual reawakening of the individual as a condition for the heroic gesture.” This view, writes Monserrati, subsequently became popular among the Far Right, but he spends less than a page on this.

Monserrati says he is not investigating Orientalism but what he calls “the process of cultural translation.” In this case reception was positive, though inevitably molded by the circumstances and interests of the period.

Dugin and the Decolonial School

Alexander Dugin’s modernity, like that of René Guénon but more explicitly, is located in the West. Dugin therefore calls for the end of Western hegemony and the liberation of other civizational spheres. He is not alone in doing this, as has been pointed out in a recent article by Miri Davidson, an assistant professor in Political Theory at the University of Warwick. The article is “On the concept of the pluriverse in Walter Mignolo and the European New Right,” Contemporary Political Theory 24 (2025), pp. 469–489, available open access at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00732-x.

Davidson compares the views of Walter Mignolo, an American scholar of Argentinian origin and doyen of the post-Marxist “decolonial school,” with those of Dugin and Alain de Benoist, the French doyen of the “New Right.” The term “pluriverse” was popularized by Arturo Escobar, another member of the decolonial school, as an alternative to the dominant Eurocentric, conquering, capitalist worldview. It is, Davidson shows, comparable to Benoist’s ethnopluralism and Carl Schmitt’s great spaces as adopted by Dugin. Yet there is a difference, she maintains: the decolonial pluriverse is open, “composed of many related and entangled worlds which mingle and coexist with one another,” while the pluriverse of Benoist and Dugin is closed, as “culturally diverse worlds can only live a healthy existence in separation from one another.” This is probably true of Benoist, but not—at least in principle—of Dugin, for whom traditional civilizations can and should combine.

Davidson makes another interesting point, that both versions of the pluriverse imagine hegemony erasing difference. This, she argues, misunderstands the nature of imperialism, which “does not only homogenise and erase difference—which it certainly does on a cultural level—but also constantly and relentlessly produces difference in the form of striated, hierarchical, and often essentialist ethnic, racial, national, and sexual identities.”

An interesting article, which shines a new light on Dugin’s theories, and also (though Davidson does not say this) shows the limits of classification in terms of “left” and “right.”

Black Nationalist Traditionalism: Kémi Séba

The Pan-African “influencer” Kémi Séba (see photo, originally Stellio Gilles Robert Capo Chichi) has applied the Traditionalist framework to Africa. In his Philosophie de la panafricanité fondamentale (Philosophy of fundamental Pan-Africanism, Editions Fiat Lux, 2023). Séba identifies the deceptive "progress" of modernity with the West and primordial virtue with Africa, the birthplace of humanity. The West appears superior only according to the criteria of modernity; according to Traditionalist criteria, it is the African peoples that are superior, with their knowledge of the true tradition.

Séba was born in France to Beninese parents in 1981, and first came to public attention in France as leader of the “Tribu Ka” (Ka Tribe), a Black Nationalist organization that was dissolved by the Council of Ministers in 2006 because it incited to racial hatred (primarily antisemitism). Séba was subsequently imprisoned in 2008 for reconstituting a dissolved group. He then discovered the work of René Guénon, and converted to Islam, though he does not generally emphasize a Muslim identity—he does not use a Muslim name, and on videos says “peace be upon you” in French rather than Arabic.

In 2011 he moved from France to Senegal, where in 2015 he founded an NGO, Urgences Panafricanistes (Panafricanist Emergencies). More importantly, he became increasingly well known on social media, which is his main platform—and nowadays is quite a sufficient platform in its own. In 2017, he was invited to Moscow by Alexander Dugin, with whom he has subsequently enjoyed good relations, returning to Russia several times. His French citizenship was removed in 2024. He is reported to have been expelled from Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Guinea, and to travel on a diplomatic passport issued by Niger. He has recently been active in his parents’ country of origin, Benin, where he was at first blamed for involvement in a failed 2025 coup attempt, but then stood for election as president in 2026—the election is due on 12 April.

Séba’s Philosophy of fundamental Pan-Africanism explains that the true “war of the worlds” is the war between traditionalism (sic) and modernity (chapter two). The “global black population” is the “guardian of the first tradition” (chapter three). Black peoples had a “metaphysical unity” that appears in various forms across Africa but is clearest in ancient Egyptian religion—Séba follows the model proposed by the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986), according to who the Egyptians were of Black African origin, migrating northwards. In contrast, we now have “the West, the kingdom of modern people, the elect of the age of iron” (chapter four). Humanity has passed from Zep Tepi (ancient Egyptian: first time) to the age of Isfet (ancient Egyptian: chaos)—that is, the Kali Yuga, a phrase he does not use. One result is “Negrophobia, the guiding thread of the end of times” (chapter five), given the inability of Westerners to contemplate the representatives of “the original world.” This did not apply to Guénon, given his “traditionalist initiatic spiritual reform.”

What is needed is “globalized quilombanité” to replace globalized neoliberalism (chapter six). Séba derives the term quilombanité from the Portuguese term quilombismo, coined by the Afro-Brazilian politician Abdias do Nascimento (1914–2011) from the term quilombo, used in Brazil to denote a settlement of escaped slaves. Quilombismo is a form of liberatory communitarianism based on Afro-Brazilian or African culture. Séba added to the socio-economic model of Abdias the formation of “traditionalist initiatic centers” based in the “spirit of the primordial age.” To achieve all this, a metaphysically based sociology and geopolitics are required (chapter seven): a sociology based on tradition, and a geopolitics that breaks Western global dominance. In this last point, we perhaps see the influence of Dugin.

There is surprisingly little Islam in the Philosophy of fundamental Pan-Africanism, but a lot of Traditionalism. The book has been well received on Amazon.fr, with 87% of 200 readers giving it five stars. A (badly) machine-translated English version of a talk about the book given by Séba has attracted 550,000 views on YouTube. Both Séba and the book are far from marginal, then.