Traditionalist takes over at the Biennale

The (slightly ironic) appointment of the Italian Traditionalist Muslim Pietrangelo Buttafuoco (pictured) as president of the distinctly avant-garde Venice Biennale draws attention to the career of a major figure on the Italian Traditionalist scene and a prolific writer.

Buttafuoco was born in Sicily in 1963 into a family that supported the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), in which he himself became active as a young man. It is not clear when he became a Traditionalist, but in 2001 he published a collection of his articles as Fogli consanguinei (Kin Pages) with the Edizioni di Ar, which was run by Franco Freda, an Evolian who had created a Gruppo di Ar named in honor of the Gruppo di Ur to which Julius Evola had once belonged. Buttafuoco also contributed to a volume on Evola and Spengler published by the Edizioni di Ar in 2004. He became known as a Muslim in 2015, but had probably converted earlier, to judge from his literary output, discussed below. He is a Shi’i, and so, presumably, a member of one of the groups studied by Minoo Mirshahvalad in her Crises and Conversions: The Unlikely Avenues of "Italian Shiism”, discussed in an earlier post here. He stresses the Muslim history of Sicily, and took the name Giafar al Siqilli (the Sicilian) in honor of Jafar ibn Muhammad, the conqueror of Syracuse in 878.

Buttafuoco has published at least one novel or book of essays most years since 2002. Many of these focus on Sicily. The novels are usually historical and quite dramatic and/or romantic, and several feature Islam. One of his non-fiction books is pure Traditionalism, and some others deal with Islam.

From our perspective, Buttafuoco’s most interesting period was 2005-2011. In 2005, his first novel, Le uova del drago. Una storia vera al teatro dei pupi (The Dragon's Eggs: A True Story at the Puppet Theater) was set in wartime Sicily, where the “dragon’s eggs” were eleven Muslim militiamen of various nationalities, under the authority of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who fought bravely against the Allied invasion together with Italian Fascists and a glamorous female German spy. Two years later came L'ultima del Diavolo (The Devil’s last woman, 2008), which Buttafuoco described as “the first Muslim novel in the Italian language.” It switches between the time of the Prophet Muhammad, based on the sira, and the present day, in which the Devil is trying to organize the seizure of documents about the monk Bahira in order to prevent the Christian legitimization of Muhammad, against some Russians who want to bring Orthodox Christians and Muslims closer. The Americans are allied with the Devil. L'ultima del Diavolo is a sort of Islamic Dan Brown with a definite ideological message. I wonder whether Alexander Dugin has read it.

Buttafuoco’s Traditionist book, Cabaret Voltaire. L'Islam, il sacro, l'Occidente (Cabaret Voltaire: Islam, the Sacred, the West) was published in 2008. It attacks modernity and the false worship of rationality and science and the illusions of freedom and democracy in true Guénonian fashion. It further argues that Islam is misunderstood as a result of what is written in the “false liberal” and American-dominated press, and is in fact where one can still find “the sacred, the primordial forces of nature, the original bond.”

Following this came a somewhat different type of book on woman and how to seduce them, Fìmmini. Ammirarle, decifrarle, sedurle (Women: Admire them, decipher them, seduce them), before Buttafuoco returned to Sicily in 2011 with Il lupo e la luna (The Wolf and the Moon), in which a young Sicilian is captured by the Turks and brought up by the Sultan as a military commander. He later returns to Sicily and comes into conflict with his faithfully Catholic brother.This novel is evidently inspired by the life of Giovanni Dionigi Galeni (d. 1587), a not a Sicilian but a Calbrian who was captured, converted to Islam, and ended up as Grand Admiral of the Ottoman navy.

2011 marks the end of Buttafuoco’s most Islamic period. Only two of his later novels and essays in 2012-2023 mention Islam. Il feroce Saracino. La guerra dell'Islam. Il califfo alle porte di Roma (The ferocious Saracen: The War of Islam, The Caliph at the Gates of Rome, 2015), argues against terrorism, seen as an aspect of a struggle within Islam between good and bad Muslims. This is a view with which most experts would mostly agree, but that is not so obvious for the general public. Sotto il suo passo nascono i fiori. Goethe e l'Islam (Flowers bloom under his footfall: Goethe and Islam, 2019) was written together with an Italian Muslim theologian, Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre (b. 1987), and covers Goethe’s encounter with Islam, ending with his (alleged) conversion. The title is taken from a line in his “Mahomets Gesang” (The Song of Muhammad, 1817/21). Goethe is a favorite of those who want to strengthen Islam's roots in Europe.

It is not clear that Buttafuoco has succeeded in making the Italian right more sympathetic towards Islam. It is clear, though, that his Islam has sometimes been a problem for his own political career. After the MSI in which he started his political career had become the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) in 1995 and the AN had merged into Silvio Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL), Buttafuoco joined the Lega Nord, previously allied to the AN. Giorgia Meloni, later Italian Prime Minister, who had also been a prominent member of AN and PdL, is said to have vetoed Buttafuoco’s attempt to stand as the Lega Nord candidate for the post of Governor of Sicily in 2015, given that having a Muslim stand for that post would send all the wrong signals. Keeping a little quieter about Islam may have improved Meloni’s view of Buttafuoco when it came to the Bienale.

My thanks to TR for bringing Buttafuoco to my attention.

A Traditionalist Initiatic Novel

In his new book on Serbian literature and esotericism 1957–2000 (Српска књижевност и езотеризам 1957–2000, vol. 2 in the series Подземни Ток, Belgrade: Službeni Glasnik, 2020), Professor Nemanja Radulovic of the University of Belgrade devotes a chapter entitled “Portrait of a Traditionalist” to the Serbian painter, essayist, novelist and political commentator Dragoš Kalajić (1943-2005), already discussed in a previous post here, based on a 2020 article by Branislav Jakovljević. 

Radulovic adds a lot of detail to Jakovljević’s article, covers the whole of Kalajić's career, and helps answer the question I asked at the end of my last post: what Kalajić’s distinctive contribution to Traditionalist thought was. 

Radulovic argues convincing that whenever René Guénon and Julius Evola differed, Kalajić followed Evola, and also that where de differed from both Guénon and Evola was in his emphasis on the Slavs as the bearers of tradition. Here and in his views on international relations he comes close to Alexander Dugin who, according to Radulovic, he knew, and whose politics he echoed during the 1990s and 2000s, though it is unclear to what extent he was influenced by Dugin and to what extent he came to similar conclusions independently. 

What appears as Kalajić’s distinctive contribution to Traditionalism, however, was his “initiatic” novel Kosmotvorac (Cosmocreator; Belgrade: Beletra, 1989), cover pictured above. This, as Radulovic shows, is very much built on an Evolian view of things. It is set in the future and deals with the trial of members of the defeated Ordo explorarum (Order of Explorers), which is based on the actual Order of Templars, and led by an Elder Yalomed, a reverse anagram of the name of the actual Templar Grand Master (Jacques) de Molay. One of the monks of the Order is even called Alovej, J. Evola in reverse. 

The Ordo explorarum teaches that there is a divine spark in man, and seeks to replace the diversity of manifestation with original unity. Its members “preserve the doctrine of the restoration of the primordial state, the seeds of which they are to carry into the next cycle.” They also represent the male principle of order against the gynecocratic government, which defeats them, and is then itself defeated in a terrorist attack aided by alchemy. Kosmotvorac is, in Radulovic’s view, an initiatic novel not just because it tells of an initiatic journey, but also because it seeks to alter the reader.