by Francesco Lamendola

Source: New Italy Academy

What three very different characters have in common makes them like the French esotericist and philosopher René Guénon (1886-1951), the British folk singer-songwriter (but of Greek Cypriot and Swedish origins) Cat Stevens (class 1948, living) and the Sicilian journalist and writer Pietrangelo Buttafuoco (class 1963, living)? This might seem like a strange question, bizarre; of those to which perhaps not even Massimo Inardi or Mrs. Longari, guests of Mike Bongiorno's TV quiz programs, they would have been able to answer. Nevertheless, the answer is very simple: they have in common the fact that the first, dal 1912, è dive into Shaykh ‘Abd al-Wahid Yahya; the second, dal 1977, he became Yusuf Islam or simply Yusuf; and the third, dal 2015, he became Giafar al-Siquilli. In other words, all three were fascinated by the Islamic religion, until you convert to the faith of Koran. And all three were exponents of a European culture that, just a few years ago, it seemed solid and well aware of itself and its tradition: respectively in the philosophical and esoteric fields, in the artistic-musical one and in the journalistic and literary one. The first was a native of Blois, on the Loire; the second was born in London; the third in Catania. All three have traveled extensively and have come into contact with cosmopolitan environments, even if in all three there is a strong rooting in their respective cultures of origin. The refined intellectual Guénon is unthinkable, or at least it is incomprehensible, outside the framework of early twentieth century France, with decadentism, symbolism, Martinism, the avant-gardes; and if it is true that the author of The crisis of the modern world (1927) and The reign of quantity and the signs of the times (1945) they can be read as the fruit of a spiritual search with a universal flavor, which draws on all the traditions of the East and the West to reach a supreme ideal synthesis, it remains undeniable that they can also be read as the response to a certain French culture, between symbolism and existentialism, gives awareness of one's crisis, interpreted as the crisis of all Western civilization. A similar discussion can be made, in a completely different area, for the folk music of Cat Stevens: in songs that have had widespread success and some of which have been taken as a symbol of an entire generation, come Wild World e Father and Son, both of 1970, Steven Demetre Georgiou, in arte Cat Stevens, the delicate sounds and the mystical vein are strongly linked to the Greek musical tradition, filtered through the cosmopolitan London environment. Finally, books like The Five Funerals of Mrs. Göring and The Dragon's Eggs betray their author's deep-rooted interest in fascism and right-wing ideologies, but also a certain Sicilian taste for the atmosphere and mentality of the Mediterranean island, which strongly characterize it in a historical-cultural and geographical sense. But who would have said that the highly cultured French esotericist would have converted to Islam; that the author of sweet melodies like the Anglo-Cypriot singer would have shown, one day, if not to share, I'm sure I don't blame her fatwa launched by Ayatollah Khomeini against the writer Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic verses (happened in 1989, during a meeting with London students), and that the impetuous, nonconformist writer and journalist from Catania, openly nostalgic for the far right, he would have decided to push his love for Sicilian tradition to embrace the faith that dominated the island in the centuries of the Middle Ages? Yet it happened; and we limited ourselves to choosing three particularly emblematic cases, among many others on which we could have stopped our attention. The question, therefore, it can't be anything other than this: what makes conversion to Islam attractive for a well-cultured European?, when one would say that everything, in the European cultural tradition, go in a totally different direction than that?

It seems to us that this is an important question, given the moment that Europe is experiencing and given the very rapid demographic growth of the Islamic element due to the ongoing phenomenon of migrations/invasions coming from the Middle East and above all from Africa. Se, Indeed, to Muslims coming from those regions, or born to immigrant parents, the conversions of Europeans to the religion of the prophet Muhammad were also added, you don't need to be a soothsayer to understand that European civilization would truly have come to an end. Adhere to Islam, Indeed, for a European, it is also equivalent to refusing, basically, its own tradition, not only in a strictly religious context, but in the legal field, philosophical, artistic, cultural. In fact, European civilization, born from the encounter between Christianity and the migrations of the Germanic peoples, It has been characterized since the first centuries by fervent theological research, for realistic art, for a gradual distinction between the legal and religious spheres, between the citizen and the believer: all things that have no confirmation in Islamic culture, dove, On the contrary, are firmly prohibited or discouraged. It is indeed difficult, if not impossible, talk about a real Islamic theology, because Islam has a very rigid and literalistic concept of the interpretation of Koran (except for some marginal groups, like Sufism; precisely those that intellectuals like Guénon liked); Indeed, if it is forbidden to discuss the Scriptures, what theology can we ever talk about? Likewise, the Islamic conception of the divine prohibits the representation not only of God, but of the same human figure, as man is made in the image of God, and therefore depicting the man might seem like an attempt, albeit indirect, to represent Allah, the inexpressible. And the lack of separation between law and religious faith implies the possibility of episodes like the one mentioned above fatwaagainst a writer deemed blasphemous, fatwa that every good believer has the obligation to respect and, if possible, execute. So, in Islamic culture, there would never have been room, and it isn't there today either, for a work like the Theological summa of Thomas Aquinas, or like the Divine Comedy of Dante (and not only for Muhammad's condemnation to hell, but precisely for the attempt to represent God) or the Last Judgment by Michelangelo, and least of all for the Code of Justinian or for the Code Napoleonic. In short, adhering to Islam implies a kind of abjuration, for a European, of all its culture and all its ideal heritage, including the idea of ​​reason, philosophical research, the freedom of thinking, the freedom of artistic expression. And even if we often see there being an abuse of this freedom, as in the case of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (which, keep case, he never allows himself to joke about just one thing: on the religion of the Holocaust), abuse that leaves us scandalized, or injured, or indignant, nevertheless, no European finds it normal that such abuses can or should be responded to in the way in which Islamic terrorists responded the 7 January 2015 (leaving aside, here, so as not to unnecessarily complicate our reasoning, but still aware of the importance of the problem, whether there was a different direction behind that bloody event).

So the question remains: Why? Because a European, with two thousand years of history behind it, with two thousand years of Western civilization (two thousand eight hundred, if we start fromIliad of Homer) should throw away this very rich tradition, to embrace a much younger religion (according to the Islamic calendar, which starts from 622 d.C., this year we are in 1440) and which presents so many prohibitions and denials of its original tradition? Evidently, this has something to do with Europeans' loss of love for European culture; with a feeling of emptiness, of dissatisfaction, of restlessness, and also with a sense of frustration and disappointment for the lack of answers to the great existential problems. Emptiness attracts fullness: a civilization cannot live in the desert of its own values; sooner or later its members feel the need to fill that void with a "full", with new values, seeing as the old ones have proven themselves impotent or insufficient. Ora, European society has consciously cultivated emptiness for a long time, that is, rejection and self-contempt , and courts every form of nihilism and intellectual and moral disorder; it was logical to expect that, at some point, there would have been a reaction and people would return to asking for more nutritious food to face the journey of life. L’islam, young religion, in some respects it appears to quite a few Westerners (and not just them) as a political and social ideology, even before as a set of supernatural beliefs, e, in this sense, provides an answer to the hatred they feel towards their own culture; in a certain sense, as the equivalent of what it meant, in the 70s of the last century, join some small group of the far left (or the far right) and actively militate for the destruction of the existing state of affairs. Solo così si spiega il fatto che alcuni giovani, e specialmente alcune ragazze, hanno ritenuto cosa giusta e buona, dopo essersi convertite all’islam, partire per la Siria o per qualche altro Paese islamico e ricevere un addestramento militare, in vista di una lotta armata contro i “crociati”, ossia contro i cristiani. E non si tratta solo di figli e figlie d’immigrati della seconda o terza generazione, ma anche di europei, figli di europei, che sono venuti a contatto con l’islam in maniera indiretta, tramite letture, conoscenze personali o frequentazione di siti informatici. Right, si tratta – per ora – di piccoli numeri, o comunque di numeri relativamente modesti: ma è doveroso prendere buona nota di certi fenomeni sin dall’inizio, se esistono, come in questo caso, the conditions for them to grow and become increasingly frequent phenomena.

However, the problem of self-dislove, by the Europeans, needs to be analyzed better. The tradition that Europeans (and Westerners) moderns hate, it is precisely the Christian tradition, not the humanistic one, secular, rationalist, scientist, enlightenment, positivist, developed in recent centuries. Indeed this civilization, human-centered, has arisen, historically and ideologically, as opposed to Christian civilization, centered on God. And the culmination of this anthropocentric parable was reached when, il 24 March 2017, speaking to Parliament (Masonic and anti-Christian) of Strasbourg, Mr. Bergoglio stated verbatim that Europe's hope consists in putting man at the centre. The man, not God: said by a pope. And yet the secularist culture, materialistic, masonic, it has largely failed: it has not delivered on any of its great promises: it did not bring men peace, nor well-being, nor safety, nor justice, nor even freedom, if not at the price of very heavy ones, continuous limitations and interference by external powers in the lives of citizens. These citizens see themselves threatened even in the things most strictly necessary for life, from a material and spiritual point of view: the work, savings, the possibility of being baked correctly, a school system that promotes and does not mortify intelligence, a healthcare system created in the interest of the people and not of pharmaceutical multinationals (see the business of mandatory vaccines), a religion that gives certainties and hopes, not that it continually demolishes certainties and instills intolerable doubts about the destiny of men: ultimately, a little hope for the future, a little faith that life is worth living, get married, look for a job, bring children into the world. Without these minimum certainties, society becomes chaos, if not downright hell. However, this is precisely the situation in which Europeans have found themselves in recent years, and certainly not by chance or in an inexplicable and unpredictable way, but precisely as a result of economic mechanisms, financial, political and cultural that are specific to modernity and that today, simplifying, they go by the name of globalization. So, the situation is this: Europe, for a long time, he hated his Christian roots; he tried to build a new and different civilization, Masonic and anti-Christian: but it built nothingness and fell into a relativism which is only the antechamber of the most radical nihilism. With nihilism, but, you can't live; and here the question arises again: the question of meaning, of horizons, of hope. And who to turn to, in the cemetery of truths and values ​​that Europeans, from themselves, they created, if not to another spiritual tradition, since materialism has failed, hedonism has a bitter aftertaste and rationalism has nothing to say about the most pressing question of all, what will become of us with death? Judaism is not interested in making proselytes, because it is the faith of a people who consider themselves chosen by God: it is not, it has never been and never will be a great universal religion. Hinduism and Buddhism have a certain fascination, but they seem to have a culture that is too different from the European one: and Europeans have become too weak and lazy to want to undergo the stress of taking as their guide a culture of which they don't even know the essentials. They are also satiated with philosophy, because they now identify philosophy with that relativism and weak thought from which they are fleeing. What's left, so, if not Islam? Which is already coming to meet them in the persons of immigrants, so numerous that they want their mosques and their "cultural centers" next to the now half-empty churches…