SHAYKH ABDAL HAKIM MURAD ON JULIUS EVOLA COUNTER-CULTURE

“…so Evola is a point of reference for people who are seeking an alternative, but unfortunately because of his possibly xenophobic blindspot when it came to Europe’s “third heritage”. . . .the Heritage of Islam — Gaudí’s move was definitely in the direction of the underestimated Ishmaelite Semitism, much of his analysis is alien and difficult; but still there is much that we can find to be of value — not least because he did find an almost cosmological environment for his discourse. He believed, drawing on what he called, along with the Ginonians, Tradition. . . .that we inhabit some sort of cosmic end game. That the signs of the hour are upon us. That the current breakdown of tradition, of monarchy, of order, of hierarchy, of a sense of the sacred is an inevitable and indeed predicted presaging of the end days. He certainly saw himself as an Aristocratic hero crying in the wilderness of modern consumer blandness.”

THE PARADOX OF LATE LIBERAL-CAPITALIST SOCIETY, LIBERAL TOLERANCE AND ITS COERCIVE DISCOURSE

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad gives a lecture on Issues of Modernity, the Challenge for Muslims and the relation of Islam in modernity after the Liberal Enlightenment at the Cambridge Muslim College.

He begins the lecture speaking about Enlightenment Republicanism as a product of the Southern Italian Carbonari-Freemasons, according to his view. Then, he enters into discussion on Julius Evola and the Counter-culture movement, its adaptation by European and Ukrainian Far-right manifesting as xenophobia, and the paradox of Late Liberalism as a coercive liberal project, constricting how and in what ways we think (or should think) in terms of social and political ideas. Liberalism as the dominant political ideology, one Libertarian said, seems to be “the only ideology in the West.” The Shaykh’s lecture is an excellently thought-out lecture, that discusses the “paradox of liberal intolerance,” and challenges certain concepts of modernity and liberalism as the final political theory.

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, also known as Professor Timothy Winter, is one of the foremost public Muslim intellectuals of this era.

“Returning to Evola, Murad calls him a “prophetic yet tragic figure:” a man whose insights on modernity are useful and eerily accurate in their predictions, but tainted by fascist notions and an unfortunate negligence of Islam, “Europe’s third heritage.” Evola’s ideology, known as Traditionalism, is an anti-modernity pessimism inspired by unheeded warnings of the modern world’s fate.”

Read more on Traversing Tradition, Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad on Riding the Tiger of Modernity.