Alt-Right Traditionalists Are Equally At Home at a White Supremacist Rally in Charlottesville As They Are At A Sufi Shrine In South Asia
By
Owen Bennett-Jones
05 Jan 2021
GIVEN
President Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’, imposed right at the start of his presidency,
it’s perhaps unsurprising that many Pakistanis believe his administration was
always hostile to Islam.
But in War
for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Far
Right, US academic Benjamin Teitelbaum reveals that some of ideologues around
Trump, including Steve Bannon, have unexpected views about non-Christian
faiths, including Islam. Teitelbaum conducted 20 hours of interviews with
Bannon in the course of which he asked him if he would ever consider becoming a
practicing Sufi. Bannon replied hesitantly: “[I]t depends on where your journey
takes you… in perfecting your being, which to me is the journey.”
Bannon, it
turns out, is very familiar with the Traditionalist school of thought.
Traditionalists mourn the predominance of reason over religion. They favour
spirituality over materialism and ancient truths over progress. The source of
many of these ideas was a French Muslim convert, Rene Guenon, who died as Abd
al-Wahid Yahya in Cairo in 1951. Guenon rejected the idea of continual progress
in favour of a belief, drawn from Hinduism, in cycles. He believed human
history passes through a golden age followed by silver, bronze and dark ages
before returning to a virtuous, theocratic golden age in which society is
organised hierarchically with priests at the top followed by warriors,
merchants and slaves, in that order. Today, Traditionalists believe most people
are in a state of slavehood in which phenomena such as democratisation,
feminism, the establishment, liberals, the European Union, socialism and
capitalism have flattened the hierarchies and sucked society dry of
spiritualism, thereby reducing people to being nothing more than consumers.
To understand
why Catholic-raised Bannon and others like him think there might be something
to learn from Islam, it is necessary to understand where Traditionalism can
lead them. While Guenon embraced Islam, he saw it as just one path to
understand the original core religion — the Tradition — which for the most part
has been lost, but fragments of which can still be glimpsed in many of the
world’s great faiths and worship practices. Think of something akin to ‘the
Force’ in Star Wars. Traditionalists have also sought truths in Buddhism,
Hinduism and even the occult.
Some
American Traditionalists believe that the conservative US heartland has held
onto spiritual values long lost by those other Americans consumed by
materialism, and that to unleash the spiritual potential of these members of
the working class (or is that the white working class?) it is necessary to
bring down society as it is currently organised. As Lenin argued, destruction
will lead to reconstruction or emancipation. But none of this is to say that
American Christianity is the only repository of virtuous values: paths to
enlightenment can be found elsewhere. To that extent Traditionalism can be
interpreted as encouraging religious tolerance. But others have gone in very
different directions, relying on Traditionalist thought to underpin white
supremacism and fascistic ideas in which warriors are celebrated and the
hierarchy Traditionalists favour is determined by skin colour and gender.
Until
recently, Traditionalism was an obscure set of beliefs restricted to a few
fringe voices on the far right. Then suddenly Traditionalists, or at least
those familiar with and interested in its ideas, found themselves in positions
of power. Besides Steve Bannon in the US, there was Putin adviser Aleksandr
Dugin, a Rasputin-like figure whose Russian nationalism is so extreme he was
banned from the US after allegedly calling for genocide in Ukraine. With a
background in exotic mysticism, he created his National Bolshevik Party to draw
on both fascism and communism to oppose the US, and has apparently visited
Pakistan in search of anti-American allies. In Brazil, there is Olavo de
Carvalho, a one-time communist turned adviser to President Jair Bolsonaro. De
Carvalho set up what was claimed to be a branch of Sufism in Brazil, modelled
on a Traditionalist-inspired, scandal-prone community or cult in Bloomington,
Indiana. His advice to Bolsonaro is to break Brazil’s links with China which
some Traditionalists see not only as inherently hostile to the Judeo-Christian
West but also as an emerging globalising force, seeking to inherit rather than
overturn the US role in the world.
So next
time you see a Gora at a Sufi ceremony, just think: he or she may be a
curious UN employee or Western journalist just taking a look. They could be the
latest travellers on the hippy trail of the ’60s, heading East in search of
enlightenment. But it is also just possible that they are alt-right
Traditionalists, equally at home at a white supremacist rally in
Charlottesville as they are at a Sufi shrine in South Asia.
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Owen
Bennett-Jones is author of The Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in
Pakistan.
Original
Headline: Far right faith
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan