If Europe creates a vacuum, sooner or later he will convert. But not to the Gospel
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. Read More
