Ivan Aguéli Study Group established in Sweden

An Ivan Aguéli Study Group has been established in Uppsala, Sweden by Mohamed Omar (b. 1976, to the left in picture), a Swedish poet and journalist with an Iranian "biological father" who converted to Islam at the age of 16.

Mohamed Omar was previously popular in Sweden as a "moderate" Muslim, but in an article in the Swedish Kultur in 2009 declared that he had become a radical Muslim in response to events in Gaza. He describes his Ivan Aguéli Study Group as "radical and Islamist, "radical in the sense that we are looking inwards and backwards in the Islamic tradition, the roots, radices, to draw strength and inspiration. Everything new must build on the old and traditional" and Islamist in the normal, political sense. Mohamed Omar's "radicalism," then, has much in common with Traditionalism. The three stated requirements for membership of the study group are to speak good Swedish (which presumably excludes certain Muslim immigrants), to respect Islam, and to "have an anti-Zionist stance."

The study group seems to be becoming a center for one variety of Swedish Traditionalism. Guest speakers have included Ahmed Valsan (to the right in the picture), the Swedish-domiciled eldest son of the important Parisian Traditionalist Sufi shaykh of Romanian origin, and Lars Adelskog, not a Sufi but a former Swedish educator who lost his job after publishing a pamphlet entitled ”Är EU en judegrej?” ("Is the European Union a Jew thing?"). Adelskog is the translator into Swedish of Guénon's The Reign of Quantity, available on his website www.veidos.se,whioch also has an English-language section, in which he explains his version of P. D. Ouspensky's Fourth Way.

For those who read Swedish, the Study group website is to be found at www.mohamedomar.org and the blog of Mohamed Omar is to be found at alazerius.wordpress.com.

My thanks to Gustaf Görfelt for help with this posting.