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.

The Perennial Philosophy surveyed and compared

A recent book provides a guide to the various versions of the Perennial Philosophy, including the Traditionalist one. It is Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Publishing Company, 2024), 128 pages.

Sawyer taught religion at the Maine College of Art & Design, lectured at a range of other places including the Esalen Institute, and was a friend of Huston Smith, whose authorized biography he wrote. He also wrote a biography of Aldous Huxley. He knows Traditionalism well, but is not himself a Traditionalist, placing himself half way between René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, who he sees as unusually dogmatic, and Huxley, who—in his view—held that all truths are provisional. He lists the most important influences on his thought as Huxley, Alan Watts, Huston Smith, Frances Vaughan, Stanislav Grof, and Ram Dass.

The book’s main argument is that the Perennial Philosophy is an approach to understanding “life’s bigger questions” that is a permanent part of human thought, and that although its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s has now passed, it still answers life’s bigger questions pretty well, and is still the part of what is taught by many contemporary spiritual teachers. The key concept is the UME or Unitive Mystical Experience.

The book is written in a very accessible style with short chapters and uses many anecdotes to make its points. It is divided into three parts, “Starting Out,” “Looking Deeper,” and “Exploring Specific Topics.” “Starting Out” leads up to what Huxley called the “minimum working hypothesis,” the common ground shared by so many mystics—one way of defining the Perennial Philosophy. “Looking Deeper” takes us through the nature of being and the path to enlightenment. The “Specific Topics” explored in the last part are religion, God, enlightenment, science and knowing, law, psychology, nature and art. Then comes a chapter in “The Perennial Philosophy Today” that lists some major contemporary teachers and explores their positions on particular issues. In all these chapters, Sawyer explains the perspectives of the major Perennialist writers, including the Traditionalists, as one school among others.

The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded is an excellent introduction for the general reader, especially the seeker. It is also an interesting comparative study, though the accessible style and anecdotes that make it appealing to the general reader can become an obstacle for the more specialized reader, who is evidently not Sawyer’s intended audience. Even so, an important book, and recommended.