Dugin against Islam – Part III

Eurasianism, religion of Russian exceptionalism

Charles Upton [Sidi Akram]

Rajab 25, 1440 2019-04-01

Book Review

by Charles Upton [Sidi Akram] (Book Review, Crescent International Vol. 48, No. 2, Rajab, 1440)

This article is based on excerpts from Dugin against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory by Charles Upton (published December 2018).

Alexandre Dugin’s wooing of the Sufis is another of the tactics he practices in common with the Western and globalist elites. In an article titled “State-sponsored Sufism” by Ali Eteraz, which appeared in June 2009 on the website of the Council for Foreign Relations, the author, though he appears to disagree with the policy of the Western powers to groom Sufism as the spearhead of anti-Islamicist “moderate” Islam, nonetheless treats this policy as common knowledge. Eteraz observed, “According to commentators from the BBC to the Economist to the Boston Globe, Sufism, being defined as Islam’s moderate or mystical side, is apparently just the thing we need to deal with violent Muslim extremists. Sufis are the best allies to the West, these authors say; support them, and countries as diverse as Pakistan and Somalia could turn around.”

In the process of attempting to bring both Sufism and Shi‘i Iran into his Neo-Eurasian fold, Dugin unexpectedly commits an outrageous act of cultural misappropriation. In the section on The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory entitled “The Purple Archangel of Russia,” he shamelessly attempts to take possession of the spiritual being who appears in Shi‘i theosophist Suhrawardi’s The Recitation of the Purple Archangel. The Purple (or Crimson) Archangel — al-‘Aql al-Surkh — is an imaginal manifestation of the Active Intellect (‘Aql) who appears in order to conduct Suhrawardi to the summit of Mt. Qaf and the attainment of Haqiqah, the fullness of spiritual Truth. In other words, the Purple Archangel is, precisely, an Iranian Ishraqi (“Illuminist”) version of the Logos — the Logos that Dugin, in “The Metaphysics of Chaos” from The Fourth Political Theory, has already declared to be philosophically null and void. In his own imagination, however, the Purple Archangel is the true dawn of Great and Sacred Asia, which is the secret angel, the secret substance of Russia, her historical, spiritual mission spread over everything — politics, culture, sociology, our history.

Here Dugin, like the magician he is, attempts to take illegal possession of the archetypal essence of Iran — Suhrawardi being the sage who, more than anyone else, made a synthesis between the spiritual universes of Islamic and pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian Persia — doing so as an act of subtle-plane conquest in ‘Alam al-Mithal, the realm of Objective Imagination. This is an act of theft so brazen, so lacking in any normal sense of holy fear, that I don’t know what to compare it with. And in addition to being sacrilegious, it is patently absurd. I might just as well claim that Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a great American novelist, or that the real Kremlin is in Pennsylvania somewhere and the one shown in Moscow only a later copy; I have more right to do this, in fact — even though I have no right to do this at all — than Dugin has to loot the Purple Archangel of Suhrawardi.

Furthermore, above and beyond his willingness to make alliances of convenience with the takfiri apostates, Dugin cannot be a true friend to Islam because he speaks in the name of a different religion, not one of the accepted revelations sent by Allah (swt) but a pseudo-religion created by himself — though he has appropriated elements of it from many different sources, including the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. In addition, certain Western commentators have accused Dugin of having affinities with the notorious occultist, reputed Satanist, and British Intelligence agent Aleister Crowley. And the fact is that Dugin has written appreciatively of Crowley in a number of places. For example, in an essay on the late Russian musical genius Sergey Kuryokhin, he says, “The new aeon will be cruel and paradoxical. The age of a crowned child, an acquisition of runes, and a cosmic rampage of the Superhuman. ‘Slaves shall serve and suffer.’ The renewal of archaic sacredness, the newest and, at the same time, the oldest synthetic super-art is an important moment of the eschatological drama, of ‘the tempest of equinoxes.’ In his Book of the Law, [Aleister] Crowley argued that only those who know the value of number 418 can proceed into the new aeon…” Most people would think that anyone who puts in a good word for an occultist who called himself “the Beast” could not at the same time be a faithful Eastern Orthodox Christian — and, of course, they would be right.

In The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin asks, “Why do we talk about roots but not the head? This is a very serious and deep moment, because we should realise the reduction that is being made. If we realise the horizontal reduction first, and we get an unsatisfactory result, we will conclude that we should instead realise the vertical reduction, to move towards ontic roots but not ontological heights. Therefore, we should postpone such notions as the dimension of spirit and the divine, and move towards chaos and other vertical and depth-oriented concepts.”

So, we are expected to postpone God until we have found our “ontic motherland,” until we discover who we really are in ethnic and cultural and sociopolitical terms, until (that is) we discover our real identity to be — as Dugin makes clear in a number of places — the Fourth Political Theory! God, however, cannot be treated as an afterthought. You cannot say, “God, too, is good, and has His part to play. First, we must deal with more pressing matters, but when the time comes, after these matters are finished with, certainly we will get back to Him.” God cannot be part of our program, our agenda, our worldview. God does not play a part because God is the All — He is al-Wasi‘, the Boundless, the All-Embracing, the Infinite. Only those who put God first in all things, who cannot love the earth, or their lovers, or their fellow human beings, or their narod (nation; ethnic group) unless these good things are loved in the Spirit of God, can be said to really believe in Him. Therefore, when Dugin declares that narod, not God, is his absolute, as he does in more than one place, he formally and explicitly renounces Allah (swt).

In The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory he openly declares his Neo-Eurasianism to be a religion, with himself as its prophet. He says, “The Eurasian doctrine is in the first place a spiritual doctrine. In a sense it is a prophetic school. It is a point of confluence of great streams of thought, a perfectly self-sufficient doctrine that gives people everything: a meaning of life, energy for creation, and the correct orientation to love. Eurasianism is thought with the help of the heart; it is the depths of heart-based thinking. Eurasianism is an invitation to the prophetic experience. Let us remember who the biblical prophets were. They strengthened the identity of their narod, saying, ‘Awaken, Israel, awaken narod. You’ve fallen completely; you’ve completely degenerated; this is not permitted. How long can you give yourself up to your own occupations? Return to your own being.’ Do we not, Eurasianists, say the same thing? We call out, ‘O narod; O Russia; O Eurasian peoples, what are you doing? You’ve turned into such pigs! That is enough. It is time to put an end to the fall. Russia, arise!’ We are doing what the prophets did. We are returning the narod to our own identity.”

He goes on, “What else do prophets do? They restore the connection between reason and consequences. ‘Come to your senses, Edom; come to your senses, Sire; you fell away from the worship of the true God, and therefore God punished you, destroyed your walls, your city. Where is the kingdom of Babylon that stood strong? The kingdom of Babylon is no more. Why? Because they rejected the one God.’ In our time, this function corresponds to political analysis, the depths of political science [politologia].”

Dugin is having fun here at the reader’s expense. He warns us “prophetically” that the kingdom of Babylon is no more because it rejected God, and then gives us, as an example of the prophetic character of Eurasianism, a “political science” specifically conceived, in largely Heideggerian terms, without God, or which makes only a few passing references to Him, while granting a much greater role and significance — surprisingly enough — to angels, particularly angels as “political actors.” But his references to Edom are even more enlightening. The kingdom of Edom, descended from Esau as Israel was from Jacob, was the hereditary enemy of the Jews in the Old Testament. Obadiah 1:1-2 says, “Thus says the Lord God concerning Edom: We have heard a report from the Lord, and a messenger has been sent among the nations, ‘Rise up! Let us rise against her for battle! Behold I will make you small among the nations; you shall be utterly despised.’”

In other words, the Bible does not call for Edom to awake, as Dugin suggests, but for Israel to awake and destroy Edom; here Dugin’s obsession with secretly inverting the meanings of spiritual principles — though obviously not as secretly as he had hoped — is clearly in evidence. Edom is also denounced by the prophets Ezekiel (25:12–14) and Joel (3:19–21). And who might the figure be that Dugin identifies with Edom and addresses as “Sire”? Edom is a kingdom, not a king. In Judaism, Edom is another name for Esau, the earthly, material man, brother and opponent of Jacob who was to become Israel, the spiritual man; this seems in line with Dugin’s rejection of Logos in favor of Chaos in his essay “The Metaphysics of Chaos” from The Fourth Political Theory. But who is the King, who is the Sire, of Edom? Who would Edom be if it were a king?