From Traditionalism and Sufism to “Islamic Radicalism”:

The Peculiar Case of Geydar Dzhemal (1947-2016)

Jafe Arnold

19/8/2018

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Introduction
On December 5, 2016, one of the most influential yet understudied figures in the history
of Traditionalism and Islam in the post-Soviet space, Geydar Dzhahidovich Dzhemal
(Azerbaijani: Heydər Cahid oğlu Camal, 1947-2016), passed away. The various events held in
memorial of Dzhemal were attended by a colorful array of politicians, philosophers, scholars,
authors, and activists from diverse milieus and dozens of countries, which illustrated the vast
legacy that Dzhemal left across the post-Soviet space and beyond. In Western scholarship,
Dzhemal is known in two major contexts: in the history of Russian Traditionalism and the
corresponding sub-culture 1, and the radical wing of Islamic politics in the Russian Federation.2
The relative lack of penetrative scholarship on Dzhemal and his legacy is illustrated by
the fact that his relationship to Sufism has been neglected as “unimportant”3, his role in Russian
Traditionalism has been vastly understated, his Islamic ideology has been reduced to “Salafism”,
while still others have classified him as an “Islamic Marxist.” Yet one of the most pertinent
aspects of Dzhemal is the impactful Traditionalist legacy he left as a “spiritual guide” to Russia’s
Soviet-era Traditionalists and later as a critic of both Traditionalism and Sufism who formulated
an original radical Islamic ideology. This essay seeks to highlight Dzhemal’s role in the
emergence of Russian Traditionalism and trace the pivotal concepts of his later ideology of
Islamic radicalism, a study which can serve to clarify Dzhemal’s relationship to Traditionalism as
well as inform and interconnect scholarly studies into Traditionalism, Sufism, and Islamic
politics in Russia.

Traditionalism and Sufism

In order to properly understand the place of Geydar Dzhemal in Traditionalism and Islam,
it is necessary to appreciate the legacy of Traditionalism with regards to the latter which
Dzhemal would initially embrace only to later devise a radical alternative. Traditionalism as an
esoteric current was initiated by the Frenchman René Guénon (1886-1951) in the early 20th
century and can be summarized as a “perennial philosophy” predicated on three core theses: (1)
Western modernity represents the complete abomination of the sacred values of the perennial
Tradition, and as such is the final “dark age” in the present cosmic cycle; (2) Tradition must be
recovered through re-initiation into its metaphysical paradigm and/or surviving vestiges; (3) re-

1 See Birgit Menzel, “The Occult Underground of Late Soviet Russia”, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western
Esotericism 13:2 (2013): 269-288; Marlene Laruelle, “Digital Geopolitics Encapsulated: Geidar Dzhemal between
Islamism, Occult Fascism, and Eurasianism” in Mikhail Suslov and Mark Bassin (eds.), Eurasia 2.0: Russian
Geopolitics in the Age of New Media (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016): 81-98; “The Iuzhinskii Circle: Far-Right
Metaphysics in the Soviet Underground and Its Legacy Today”, The Russian Review 74 (2015): 563–580; Mark
Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
2 See Laruelle, “Digital Geopolitics”; Gulnaz Sibgatullina and Michael Kemper, “Between Salafism and
Eurasianism: Geidar Dzhemal and the Global Islamic Revolution in Russia”, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations
28:2 (2017): 219-236; Galina M. Yemelianova, Russia and Islam: A Historical Survey (Hampshire/New York:
Palgrave, 2002).
3 Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 223.

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initiation into and the restoration of Tradition is the task of an intellectual vanguard. Guénon left
his followers with three rather ambiguous alternatives for upholding Tradition against or amidst
the modern world: (1) immersion into Oriental metaphysics; (2) conforming to an established
tradition with discernibly genuine “traditional” credentials; or (3) joining an esoteric society with
initiatic potential.4 Traditionalism after Guénon splintered into two main trajectories: the “soft”
appropriation of its perennialism in the academic study of religion, such as in the works of the
founder of the history of religions, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)5, and its “hard” allegiance in the
form of various religious and political projects. In Sedgwick’s analysis: “Guénon’s philosophy
was not especially original. It was composed of a number of elements, most of which had been
part of Western thought for centuries. His achievement was to form an entirely new synthesis out
of these ideas, and then to promote his synthesis to the point where it could be taken further by
others—by Schuon into religious organizations, by Evola into politics, by Eliade into
scholarship, and finally by Nasr and Dugin into the non-Western world.”6
Guénon himself “converted”7 to Sufism, which he considered the essential initiatic
doctrine of “Islamic esotericism”, upon moving to Cairo in 1930. Although first initiated in 1910
into the Shadhiliyya Arabiyya tariqah back in France by the first major Western Sufi, Ivan Aguéli
(Sheikh Abd al-Hadi Aqili, 1869-1917), Guénon was simultaneously involved in a vast range of
occult groups and never demonstrated any signs of a Sufi apperception until he ended up in
Cairo, where he would fully immerse himself as a Sufi belonging to the Hamdiyya Shadhiliyya
of the “charismatic” Shaeikh al-Radi.8 While Guénon stressed that his choice of Sufism was a
matter of “spiritual convenience”9, and despite the fact that he had originally written off “Islamic
esotericism” as a tradition “sociologically” inaccessible to Westerners 10, the value that Guenon
attached to Sufism in a series of later works on “Islamic esotericism”11 established a decisive
precedent of Traditionalist affinity for Sufism. Guénon's follower, Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998),
would go on to build the first and largest Sufi organization in the West 12; Titus Burkhardt
(1908-1984) would become the famous Traditionalist translator of the works of the “greatest
master of Sufism”, Ibn Arabi (1165-1240); and Schuon’s organization would attract Seyyed

4 Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 80.

5See Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 109-117, 189-192, passim; see Natalie Spineto, “Eliade and
Traditionalism”, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 1:1 (2001): 62-87.
6 Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 264.
7Guénon nevertheless insisted that “whoever understands the unity of traditions is necessarily ‘unconvertible’ to
anything” - quoted in ibid, 77.
8 Ibid, 76.
9 Ibid, 77.
10 René Guénon, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines (London: Luzac & Co., 1945), 99, passim.
11René Guénon, Aperçus sur l'ésotérisme islamique et le taoïsme (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). English translation from
2004: René Guénon, Insights into Islamic Esotericism and Taoism (Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis, 2004).
12See Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 83-93, passim; Mark Sedgwick, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to
the New Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 175-176, passim.

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Hossein Nasr (1933-), one of the most prominent scholars of Sufism and Islam today. Whereas
Guénon did not read Arabic and formulated his understanding of Sufism largely on the basis of
indirect understandings of Ibn Arabi 13, later Traditionalists like Schuon, Burckhardt, and Nasr
would develop unique Traditionalist-Sufi-Islamic theologies. These and other cases would lead
to an increasing perception of Traditionalism as intimately tied to Sufism. In a telling anecdote,
Mark Sedgwick at first believed that he was studying a Western Sufi trend before he realized that
he had stumbled upon - and would be writing the first monograph on - Traditionalism.14
Traditionalism has thus been studied as an integral part of the history of Sufism in the West. 15
By the mid-late 20th century, “hard” Traditionalism, centered around the realization of
Tradition amidst/against modernity, thus developed a twofold reputation. On the one hand were
various largely apolitical groups and individuals who followed Guénon's example in professing
Sufism. On the other hand emerged a number of radical initiatives dedicated to realizing
Tradition through an anti-modern “counter-revolution.” The latter precedent was established by
the Italian Traditionalist Julius Evola’s (1898-1974) who first pursued a project of “pagan
imperialism” involving a critical engagement of Fascism, later formulated a comprehensive
“program” for a Traditionalist counter-revolution, and ultimately settled for an introspective
spiritual individualism under the slogan “ride the tiger”, leaving behind him a controversial
legacy of political movements.16 It is this twofold permutation of “hard” Traditionalism - Sufi
and radical-political - which a young Muscovite of Azerbaijani heritage interested in philosophy
and Islam, Geydar Dzhemal, would discover in the underground dissident culture of the Soviet
Union in the 1960’s.

Dzhemal and Russian Traditionalism

In the early 1960’s, the Russian dissident novelist and occultist Yury Mamleev
(1931-2015) established a bustling underground discussion club at his apartment on Moscow’s
Yuzhinsky Pereulok. This group, which came to be known as the “Yuzhinsky circle”, developed
into a cult-like collective whose members discussed illicit philosophies and literature, indulged
in still unidentified occult practices in the likes of “Dionysian initiations” and rituals designed to
achieve marazm (an induced state of mad gnosis) 17, and sought to synthesize a new
philosophico-political ideology for Russia amidst their “despair of Soviet reality.”18 The

13 Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 77.

14 Ibid, “Prologue.”
15Mark Sedgwick, “Vestlig sufisme og traditionalisme” in Mette Buchardt and Pia Böwadt (eds.), Den gamle
nyreligiøsitet, Vestens glemte kulturarv (Copenhagen: Anis, 2003), 139-51. Authorized English translation at
traditionalists.org (http://www.traditionalists.org/write/WSuf.htm).
16See H.T. Hansen, “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors”, in Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar
Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, Inner Traditions: 2002), 1-104.

Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (New Haven/London: Yale
17
University Press, 2016), 151-152; Laruelle, “Iuzhinskii Circle”, 568.
18See Mark Sedgwick, “Occult Dissident Culture: The Case of Aleksandr Dugin” in Birgit Menzel, Michael
Hagemeister, and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (eds), The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions
(München/Berlin: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2012): 273-292.

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Yuzhinsky group was supposedly drawn to Traditionalism around 1962 or 1963 by Louis Pauwel
and Jacques Bergier’s 1960 Le Matin des magiciens, which has been credited as the source of the
popular imagination of “Nazi Occultism” in particular and perceptions of the radical
politicization of esotericism and occultism in general. 19
Geydar Dzhemal, who had just been expelled from Moscow State University’s Institute
of Eastern Languages for “bourgeois nationalism”, joined the circle early on in 1967, becoming
an avid enthusiast and advocate of Traditionalism and a leading light of the reformatted group
alongside Yevgeny Golovin (1938-2010) following Mamleev’s emigration in 1973. Under
mysterious, unknown circumstances, by 1978 Moscow’s Lenin Library had accumulated 17
books by Guénon, six by Evola, 14 by Burckhardt, 12 by Schuon, and 38 by Guénon's close
collaborator Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), which Golovin and Dzhemal discovered and
devoured.20 Dzhemal, who later described himself as a “Russian with Islamic roots”21, was
particularly interested in the Islamic vector of Traditionalism, i.e., first and foremost Sufism.
Around the time that he published via samizdat his first book, a collection of 1,800 condensed
metaphysical theses entitled Orientation: North, in 197922 , Dzhemal had become one of the main
“gurus” of the group, one of whose members would remember Dzhemal and Orientation: North
as distinctly Sufi.23
The importance of Dzhemal’s role in the rise of Russian Traditionalism out of the
Yuzhinsky circle has been vastly understated by scholars, who usually mention him only in
passing alongside, and often in the shadow of, one of the most prominent Traditionalists and
Russian political figures today, Alexander Dugin (1962-), who joined the Yuzhinsky circle in
1980. However, in the first edition of Dugin’s first book, The Ways of the Absolute, which is a
summary of the understanding of Traditionalism he accrued over the Yuzhinsky years, Dugin
explicitly called Dzhemal his “spiritual guide” and an “outstanding Islamic thinker” who
revealed to Dugin “the most transcendental plan of the metaphysical and sacred cause” of
“Guénon’s mission.” Dugin credited Dzhemal’s “esoteric transcendentalism” exposited in
Orientation: North and “numerous conversations and lectures for a tight circle” with
“determining the particular structure” of Dugin’s exposition of Traditionalism.24 Indeed, not only
did Dugin himself attribute to Dzhemal decisive influence, but the Yuzhinsky group’s transition
from occult readings towards a unique ideological synthesis of Traditionalism and radical
politics, for one vector of which Dugin would become world famous25 appears to have also

19 Laruelle, “Iuzhinskii Circle”, 571; Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 221.
20Mark Sedgwick, “Additional Notes to Chapter 12”, Traditionalists (21 July 2006), (http://www.traditionalists.org/
anotes/ch12.htm).
21 See Dzhemal’s interview on Vladimir Pozner’s talk show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=0AkFqQNqfAE&t=819s).
22 Geydar Dzhemal, Orientatsia. Sever (Novosibirsk: Svarte Aske, 2013).
23 Gleb Davydov, “Vokzal. Igor Dudinsky”, Peremeny (http://www.peremeny.ru/column/view/1049/).
24 Aleksandr Dugin, Puti Absoliuta (Moscow: Arktogeia, 1989) (http://arctogaia.com/public/putiabs/).

See Marlene Laruelle, “Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the European Radical Right?” (Washington, D.C.:
25
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Kennan Institute Occasional Papers Series 294, 2006).

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happened at the same time as Dzhemal’s prominence and “guidance.” In 2013, on one of Russia's
most prominent talk shows, Dzhemal called Dugin his “former disciple.”26
Dugin’s reference to Dzhemal as an “Islamic thinker” is also indicative of the fact that
around 1980, Dzhemal, who claims to have originally been a Shi’ite27 , had joined the
Naqshbandiyya Sufi order and would take Golovin and Dugin on meditative trips to the Pamir
mountains where they visited the graves of Sufi saints. 28 At the same time, Dzhemal joined the
militant Islamic Movement of Tajikistan. In a 2015 interview, he recounted:

I went through a kind of fascination with the mystical, esoteric side of Islam. I naturally became
interested and engaged in what is called tasawwuf. That is Sufism, especially in the Pamirs, where I spent
a lot of time, had serious personal contacts with the Naqshbandiyya tariqah, saw sheikhs and [Sufi] elders.
I even maintained a personal relationship with some of them. Before I got into this milieu, I had been
acquainted with what is called in modern practice Traditionalism - that is René Guénon and Schuon. I had
been familiar with the French school of Traditionalism since sometime around 1969. Thanks to my
contacts, especially the late Yevgeny Golovin, I had read virtually the whole corpus of Guénon’s works in
French by the time I met with real [Sufi] elders…29

That in the 1980’s Dzhemal had arrived at Sufism in parallel to, through the lens or out of
the inspiration of Traditionalism is clear. What would remain unclear until the 1990’s, however,
was the extent to which Dzhemal would venture off into Islam, indeed beyond and even against
Sufism, and at the expense of his relationship with the Traditionalist current he had a major
influence within. In 1987, Dzhemal and Dugin joined the radical Russian nationalist organization
Pamyat (“Memory”) together in a first attempt at Evolian-style Traditionalist politics; however,
their expulsion from Pamyat the year later would mark the end of their joint path. Dzhemal
moved on to co-found the Islamic Renaissance Party and its journal, Taukhid (which he called a
“Russian journal of an Islamic perspective”30) in 1990, became the head of the Islamic
Committee of Russia in 1993, and by the Putin era gravitated into the opposition, ultimately
being labelled a “Wahabbist” and “Salafist" in Russian political and media discourse. Dugin,
meanwhile, would traverse a number of milieus before gaining access to the corridors of power
as a geopolitical advisor and ultimately developing his own Eurasianist movement on the radical
wing of the pro-Putin, patriotic spectrum. Although Dzhemal could still be seen lecturing
alongside Dugin in the early 2000’s at the “New University”, a theatrical lecture series designed
to propagate Yuzhinsky-style Traditionalism among Russian youth, it would become abundantly
clear that, simply put, Dzhemal chose Islam while Dugin chose Orthodoxy and Russia.

26 See footnote 21.

“Glava Islamskogo komiteta RF rasskazal, kak osoznanno prishel k islamu”, Life (26 July 2015), (https://life.ru/t/
27
%D0%B7%D0%B2%D1%83%D0%BA/831065). The majority of Azerbaijanis are Shi’ite Muslims.
28 Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 223.

“Glava Islamskogo komiteta RF rasskazal, kak osoznanno prishel k islamu”, Life (26 July 2015), (https://life.ru/t/
29
%D0%B7%D0%B2%D1%83%D0%BA/831065).
30 Geydar Dzhemal, “Russkii vybor”, Kontrudar (1 January 1994), (http://www.kontrudar.com/statyi/russkiy-vybor).

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 In the second edition of his Ways of the Absolute, Dugin removed all references to
Dzhemal, and situated the book as part of a trilogy on the metaphysics of Russian identity.31 The
two figures symbolically clashed in 2010 in a radio debate over Islamic terrorism in Russia.32
Nevertheless, by all accounts the two remained distant ideological associates and, on not
uncommon occasions, collaborators. Yet in Western media and scholarship, Dugin has been
devoted overwhelming priority of attention. The significance of Dzhemal and the extent to which
Dzhemal subsequently integrated (or contrasted) his Traditionalist past and Islamic allegiance in
his unique ideology of Islamic radicalism, and his derivative or resultant attitude towards Sufism,
have not been examined until now.

The Revolution of the Prophets

Dzhemal’s split with Dugin and pursuance of Islamic political projects at the onset of the
1990’s is concurrent with his emerging public critique of both Traditionalism and Sufism. This
intellectual development was preluded by Dzhemal’s first editorial introduction to the Taukhid
journal he founded alongside the Islamic Renaissance Party in 1990. Dzhemal, in typical
Traditionalist fashion, spoke of humanity being in “fatal crisis”, civilizations having lost their
respective traditions amidst Western modernity, and affirmed the planet to be on the brink of the
end of a cycle, to which even the East, “including the spiritual, symbolic, and Light-generating
East” has been subject. Dzhemal’s immediate answer to this crisis was Islam: “Islam is the
spiritual kingdom of freedom, where every true believer is involved in the heroic act of faith in
the patriarch Ibrahim because, as believers, they refuse to follow the easy, wide path of the flesh,
that is they refuse to submit to the fraud of the Enemy, to bow before Idols, to conform with the
System organized by those who, as with blood, suck the most nutritious human stupidity.” Islam,
Dzhemal proclaimed, is not only the sacred Revelation that can and must fight modernity, but
must also reject the false alternatives of “restored and modernized paganism.”33 Curiously
enough, in this advertisement of an Islamic revolution against Western modernity, Dzhemal made
no mention of Tradition, instead emphasizing only the “Abrahamic tradition” and ambiguously
warning of “paganism.” The full significance of these nuances, and their implications to the
shape of Dzhemal’s emerging ideology, would be made clear in a talk delivered in 1994, entitled
“Aryan Islam.”34
In “Aryan Islam”, Dzhemal challenged the very idea of a Primordial Tradition and
Guénon's doctrine by posing a question: “Then against whom did the prophets come into the
world?…According to Traditionalists, Tradition originates from one source, so then with what
did the prophets struggle?” Dzhemal posits that instead of one primordial Tradition, meta-history
has witnessed two “Traditions”: the tradition of the priests, which is manifestationist,

31 Dugin, Aleksandr. Absoliutnaia Rodina (Moscow: Arktogeia, 1999).

32“A. Dugin vs G. Dzhemal: Terakty v Moskve 2010 g”, Russkaia Sluzhba Novostei (30 March 2010), (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI2FOLtQzUA&t=3453s)
33 Geydar Dzhemal, “Chto takoe ‘Taukhid’”, Kontrudar (1 January 1990), (http://www.kontrudar.com/statyi/chto-
takoe-tauhid).
34 Geydar Dzhemal, “Ariiskii Islam”, Kontrudar (3 January 1997), (http://www.kontrudar.com/lekcii/ariyskiy-islam).

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emanationist, and therefore ultimately subservient to eternal cyclicality and fate, in which the
priestly caste reserves the function to indefinitely, “eternally” mediate between the positive and
negative; and the tradition of the prophets, which represents a subjective revolution against fate,
against cyclicality, against the restraints of priestly rule, which aims to realize “the absolute
victory of the subject over the objective negative, over death.” This mission, Dzhemal asserts,
has been proclaimed exclusively in the Abrahamic tradition, of which Islam is the supreme
paradigm, the truly “Aryan” religion in the sense of being “noble and chosen.” Dzhemal’s
expressions in “Aryan Islam” are highly significant: here he turned his understanding of
metaphysics and meta-history against Guénon and the latter’s “exposition of an objective
Tradition”, as having no appreciation for “subjectivity”, in favor of subjectivist, “prophetic”,
revolutionary Islam. Yet he retained the significance of the qualification of “Aryan” from the
Yuzhinsky circle’s lexicon35, and formulated much of his argument with Traditionalist
terminology or reference to Traditionalist concepts. Dzhemal again warned of “paganism”,
although this time pursued the concept further, referring both to the “corporative class” of the
priestly tradition, and Sufism, the Ibn Arabi school of which he portrayed as a pagan,
immanentist, anti-subjectivist doctrine, and the Illuminationist current of which Dzhemal
appreciated as “closer to the spirit of Islam” with the concept of wahdat ash-shuhud
(“Apparentism”, “Monotheism of Witness”, “Unity of Vision”, etc.). Dzhemal’s increasingly
formulated critique of both Traditionalism and Sufism would emerge even more expressively in
two lecture series held four years later, in 1998.
In the first series, “Traditionalism and Profanism”, Dzhemal further articulated his
concept of the “revolution of prophets”, arguing that the priestly tradition is attached to a
hierarchy which is conducive to the birth of “profanism.” Therefore, the prophetic tradition’s
mission is to overthrow this unjust hierarchy in a “religious revolution that is the solely possible,
genuine revolution.”36 The essential task is therefore “radicalism”, understood as a religious
revolution, against “traditionalism”, understood as restriction to non-subjectively observing
metaphysical and religious norms. Ultimately, Dzhemal therefore implies that the “hierarchy” of
the priestly tradition has not disappeared and been replaced by “profanity” or “modernity”, but
has merely been turned “profane”, a statement which is seriously significant as a critique of the
established Traditionalist narratives on the historical devolution of Tradition, even hinting at the
“priestly tradition” of Traditionalism being counter-initiatic.37 The prophetic religious revolution
therefore takes on the semblance of a popular revolution against unjust meta-historical and social
relations.

35 The Yuzhinsky group’s members, especially Dugin, were particularly interested in Aryan theories which they
derived from so-called “Nazi Occultist” and Ariosophist sources as well as the works of Evola and the Dutch-
German völkisch author Herman Wirth, whom Dugin discovered and highly revered. At the same time as Dzhemal’s
“Aryan Islam”, Dugin was publishing a new edition of his Mysteries of Eurasia which posited Russia to be the heir
of the Hyperborean, Aryan “archetype.” The “Aryan theme” was a particular hallmark of the Yuzhinsky circle’s
lexicon.
36 Geydar Dzhemal, “Traditsionalizm i profanizm”, Kontrudar (1 June 1998), (http://www.kontrudar.com/lekcii/
tradicionalizm-i-profanizm).
37The concept of a nominally “esoteric” of “traditional” current being in truth anti-traditional or “counter-initiatic”
formed a key cornerstone of Guénon’s outlook, at times leading to conspiratorial narratives.

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 Indeed, Dzhemal’s frequent comparisons and references to Marxist and socialist
terminologies have led some to interpret Dzhemal’s ideology as a kind of “Islamic socialism.”
Dzhemal in fact did later suggest that by virtue of “political non-conformism” there could be a
“common platform for the discourse of protest, based upon Marxism”, and he did posit that the
“monotheist revelation of the abrahamic prophets had exactly the super-task to free the caste of
warriors from the spiritual yoke”, and thus “the metaphysical grounds of the radical monotheism
should be taken as a platform” for a proletarian-style revolution.38 However, in other cases he
called for a bond with radical nationalism, a “brown-green alliance.” 39
The next step in the public evolution of Dzhemal’s revolutionary ideology featuring
critiques of Traditionalism and Sufism would manifest itself in the second 1998 lecture series
delivered at Moscow State University, “Tradition and Reality.”40 Dzhemal emphasized the
subjective prophetic revolutionary imperative as “our genuine task - to determine what reality is
for us, what tradition is for us.” He posits this prophetic mission of “those to whom belongs the
testament of the Bible, the Koran, and Gospel” whose “god-revealed religions are connected to a
completely different line, the line of the manifestation of the prophets in history, the line of
Abraham” and contrasts such to the regime of the “primordial Tradition”, which, following
Dzhemal’s earlier remarks, is a clear metaphorical insinuation of “monotheism” rising against
“paganism.” He even ventures to argue that the “the spiritual history of mankind” has been a
battle between the these two traditions which paradoxically yielded modernity/profanism. The
“permanence” and “conservatism” of Tradition is called a “block on being” and “hostile” to
“revolution”, and Tradition is accused of considering revolution “only as a functional, at a certain
stage inevitable deviation, or rather perversion…which will eventually be overcome and
extinguished by the principle that eternally triumphs over its periphery.” Thus, the endless cycle
of the eternal return prevents the realization of a final utopian revolution.
Dzhemal, clearly taking aim at Traditionalism, admits that Sufism has been claimed to be
identified with the “tradition of Islam” and that it reaches the “edge of metaphysics” but - and
here Dzhemal makes a breakthrough - Sufism, in his opinion, belongs to the very dimension of
Islam which itself has succumbed to being part of the priestly rulers and “planetary modernity.”
Seeing as how Dzhemal argued this point not in Islamic theological terms, but in his critique of
Traditionalism, this might be interpreted as a rejection of Sufism on the grounds of its
association with Traditionalism. Thus, Traditionalism and Sufism were tagged to turn out to be
on the opposite side of his revolution and revolutionary ideology of Islamic radicalism.
In an interview a year later 41, Dzhemal argued that the perennialism of Traditionalism
diverts from the primacy of the prophetic tradition, of which “Islam is a restructuring of all these
problems in a clear, final form, and the future of Islam is in primordial Islam, which must be

38Geydar Dzhemal, “The Future Class Struggle as the Destiny of the World Protest”, Open Revolt (3 March 2013),
(https://openrevolt.info/2013/03/03/geydar-dzhemal-the-future-class-struggle-as-the-destiny-of-the-world-protest/).
39 Laruelle, “Digital Geopolitics”, 93.
40Geydar Dzhemal, “Kurs lektsii ‘Traditsiia i Realnost’, prochitanny v MGU v 1998 godu”, Kontrudar (http://
www.kontrudar.com/lekcii?page=3).
41Geydar Dzhemal,“Orientatsia - Islam, ili nazad v budushchee”, Kontrudar (18 March 1999), (http://
www.kontrudar.com/vistupleniya/orientaciya-islam-ili-nazad-v-budushchee).

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realized because primordial Islam is the vanguard.” Asked whether he believed that Sufism is the
“mystical corpus of Islam”, he responded “categorically no!” and suggested that “Sufism is a
deviation, a departure from Islam” which harbors pagan elements and aspirations of establishing
a clerical caste. In other words, Sufism is the “traditionalist” undermining of “radical Islam.”
These pivotal 1998 lecture series were compiled into Dzhemal’s book, The Revolution of
the Prophets in 2003 42, in the other dimension of which he presented his revolutionary vision in
Islamic terms. The “true religion”, the “religion of the prophets” of the “Abrahamic tradition”
crowned by Islam and the Ummah that have “taken over the role of the proletariat” is said to
have the revolutionary goal “to ensure the advent of the Mahdi, the expected redeemer of Islam
who will rule before Judgement Day and lead the chosen faithful into the ‘upcoming final war’”,
in which Dzhemal sees his current role as “revolutionizing the understanding of perception,
gnosis, and discursive technologies” to “create a methodology of thought as an effective
instrument of freedom.” 43 The latter part Dzhemal clearly demonstrated in his critique of
Traditionalism, although it must also be noted that Dzhemal was acting in typically Traditionalist
fashion by trying to “direct” an established tradition. In the end, Dzhemal argued for the ultimate
value of Islam through his conceptualization of the paradigm of Traditionalist metaphysics,
positing that Guénon and his “priestly” tradition merely describes dysfunctional reality as it is,
whereas it is the “revolution of the prophets”, first and foremost the revelation of Islam, that
crowns the prophet-warrior ontological initiative to show how reality should be and to change
it.44 Dzhemal argues this in critical negotiation with Traditionalist concepts, terminologies, and
models. In all of these lectures, Dzhemal, even if he was arguing against Traditionalism, was
speaking the language of Traditionalism with Guénon as his primary (counter-)reference. His
crowning of his new ideological positions with radical, revolutionary terminology did not entail
an abandonment of Traditionalist sources and discourse.

Islamic Radicalism
By the time of his 2004 compilation, The Liberation of Islam45, and his 2005 “The
Islamic Project: The Battle for History” for the Islamic Committee of Russia’s research project
which he headed46, Dzhemal had synthesized and laid the foundations for his ideology of Islamic
radicalism. Dzhemal developed several layered theses of this revolutionary ideology, namely: (1)
only Islam has preserved the revolutionary prophetic tradition; (2) as such, Islam is locked in a
geopolitical and meta-civilizational war against the “New American World”; and (3) Russia can
and must become the site of a spearheading Islamic revolution. Dzhemal therefore labelled

42 Geydar Dzhemal, Revoliutsiia prorokov (Moscow: Ultra Kultura, 2003).

43 Sibgatullina and Kemper, “Salafism and Eurasianism”, 226.
44Yevgeny Kauganov, “Dzhemal protiv Genona: opyt fundamentalnoy kritiki”, Arktogeya: filosofsky portal (15 June
2011), (http://arcto.ru/article/1563).
45 Geydar Dzhemal, Osvobozhdenie islama (Moscow: Umma, 2004).
46Geydar Dzhemal, “Islamskii proekt: borba za istoriiu” in Geydar Dzhemal (ed.), Nauchnaia gruppa islamskogo
komiteta, Islamskaia intellektualnaia initsiiativa v XX veke (Moscow: Umma and Sotsialno-politicheskaia mysl,
2005): 5-12.

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himself a “patriot of Islamic Russia” and argued that Russia must “rediscover its authentic
Eurasian mission by growing closer to Islam.”47 In Laruelle’s words, Dzhemal thus “pioneered a
unique Islamic geopolitics that links calls for an Islamist political revolution with Russia’s
mainstream geopolitical narrative on Eurasia and references to far-right esoteric theories that he
cultivated since his time as a Soviet dissident.”48 In Sibgatullina and Kemper’s assessment,
Dzhemal became the “best-known mouthpiece of radical Islam in the contemporary Russia
media world.”49 While his doctrine, which Dzhemal sought to promote throughout media,
political activism in Islamic organizations, as well as in international contacts, at times politically
and legally clashed with Russian policies (he often praised acts of terrorism), it is believed by
scholars to have overall remained within the boundaries of Russian political discourse given its
emphasis on a Russian-aided anti-Western revolution.50
Dzhemal’s Islamic radicalism claimed to transcend divisions within Islam by pointing to
the fundamentally unifying, eschatological mission of Islam in three theses. Firstly, Dzhemal
asserted: “The world order is in no sphere acceptable to Islam insofar as Islam’s goal is the end
of history and the victory of the Mahdi who ‘will imbue the world with justice the same as it has
hitherto been filled with oppression.’”51 This “world order” is said to be of “Satanic forces which
are using the human factor and ruling society” and is opposed by an Islam whose mission is “the
creation of an alternative world government.” To this end, secondly, Sharia is a “means” of
separation from the modern world for some, “not an end’, as laws themselves are ultimately to be
overcome; Sharia is a means of “awakening” Muslims to their conscious task, “a set of orders for
an army on its march to battle…but an army does not exist for its orders.” With this, Dzhemal
was evidently aiming to avoid sectarianism and clericalism and unite Muslims into a “class”
opposed to “the world order’s elites.” Finally, in the third thesis, Dzhemal argued that “political
Islam” must develop a “political theology” functioning as both a guiding ideology and a
realization of “participation in the Holy Spirit from which Allah separated Adam.” At the
forefront of this political project, Dzhemal put the “Muslim diaspora” or Muslims in “culturally
foreign spaces…[who] are at the forefront of Islamic intellectual development.”52 This Islamic
project thus necessitated a theological and political doctrine capable of mobilizing its
“revolutionary” prophetic potential, producing “‘heroic elites’, people with a militant psychology
who will become the basis of the future ruling class in the Islamic umma.” 53 These “mujahideen”
are called to lead the Muslim community in uprisings against “illegitimate religious authorities”
and establish a shura (“council”) that would “give power to the people, who could then unite all

47 Laruelle, “Digital Geopolitics”, 93.

48 Ibid, 82
49 Sibgatullina and Kemper, “Salafism and Eurasianism”, 219.
50 See Laruelle, “Digital Geopolitics”; Sibgatullina and Kemper, “Salafism and Eurasianism”.
51Geydar Dzhemal, “3 tezisa politicheskogo islama”, Kontrudar (8 August 2012), (http://www.kontrudar.com/lekcii/
3-tezisa-politicheskogo-islama).
52 Sibgatullina and Kemper, “Salafism and Eurasianism”, 223.
53 Ibid, 227.

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Muslims and implement the activities of the ‘Party of God’”, including in Russia.54 Muslims are
invited to form “systems of jamaats (communities or religious cells) to spread among the
Muslims of Russia and infiltrate the country’s political and administrative structures…He
compares these jamaats to the earliest Bolshevik Soviets and sees them as the carriers of the
revolution.”55
These positions of Dzhemal combined a revolutionary, including Soviet and Marxist
lexicon with existing concepts of political Islam, especially Salafist attitudes, in a synthesis that
aimed to overcome divisions in the various branches and schools of Islam through syncretism.
For example, he rejected the Sunni concept of elected leadership while recognizing Hazrat Ali
and siding with ijtihad in Shiist legalism; he offered his own interpretations of the Quranic
concept of ummatan wasatan, uneasily operated in Shii-Salafi political contexts such as the
Islamic Committee of Russia, drew inspiration from the Iranian Revolution and Ayatollah
Khomeini while rigorously criticizing their clericalism, all the while incorporating the Iranian
Islamic sociology of Ali Shariati (1933-1977), and on various occasions Dzhemal called himself
an “enemy” of Sunni, Sufi, Shii, and Qom. Further, Dzhemal tried to bridge Shiism and Sunnism
by positing similarities, despite his recognition of Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, which theoretically would
connote Sunnism. These are just some of the many peculiarities which scholars have noted.56
Dzhemal thus strove to promote a pan-Islamic revolutionary ideology based on the “authentic
core” of the prophetic tradition of Islam and a unifying opposition to the “world order” which
could allow for different Muslim schools and concepts to be contextualized and syncretized in a
subjective, voluntaristic project. Dzhemal’s radicalism and certain of his doctrinal positions have
led scholars to call him a Salafist. However, this mistreats Dzhemal’s language and apperception.
If Dzhemal was at essence merely a Salafist, he could have formulated his criticism of Sufism in
typical Salafist terms. 57 But, as we have discerned, Dzhemal’s anti-Sufi position was tied to and
formulated along the lines of his critique of Traditionalism, through which he developed his
Islamic radicalism. Finally, his Islamic radicalism as a whole was based on a critical assessment
of Traditionalism and his “prophetic tradition.”
The shape and face of the enemy “world order” were formulated in Dzhemal’s
geopolitical orientations for Islamic radicalism. Scholars have recognized that on this front
Dzhemal struggled with distinguishing his vision from that of Aleksandr Dugin and the
Eurasianist school.58 Dzhemal assigned the Russian Federation the role of breaking away from
and challenging the American-led Western world order, to which he argued that Russia must
form a new alliance with the Islamic world - or else be faced with the wrath of Islamist unrest.
Dzhemal did, however, at times attempt to appease Russian institutions by denying
“Islamization” in favor of a “geopolitical alliance” which he couched in terms of being “Ottoman

54 Sibgatullina and Kemper, “Salafism and Eurasianism”, 228.

55 Laruelle, “Digital Geopolitics”, 91-92.
56 Laruelle, “Digital Geopolitics”; Sibgatullina and Kemper, “Salafism and Eurasianism”.
57Joas Wagemakers, “Why Salafis Have Anti-Sufi Attitudes”, Oasis (21/6/2017), (https://www.oasiscenter.eu/en/
why-salafis-have-anti-sufi-attitudes).
58 Sibgatullina and Kemper, “Salafism and Eurasianism”, 228.

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geopolitics” in line with Russia’s “Byzantine legacy.”59 While Dzhemal frequently criticized the
realities of Russian geopolitics, he accepted the overall narrative of Russia leading an “axis of
resistance” to Western hegemony, stressing the need for further linking up with Islamic states, for
which Dzhemal advocated a Russian-Iranian alliance including Hezbollah, supporting Assad’s
Syria, opposing Israel and the Gulf states, and other policies which Russia has arguably since
pursued. Dzhemal deemed al-Qaeda a US invention, while he remained “constructively critical”
of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which he likened to a “symbol of Sunni revolt”
against both the United States and what he saw as the corrupt Iranian alternative, and which he
compared to the “first proletarian actions” in the 19th century.60 Overall Dzhemal’s geopolitical
orientations thus fit neatly in both of the larger contexts of Islamic movements’ calling for justice
in international relations and the rhetoric and general scheme of Russian Eurasianism. To a
certain extent, Dzhemal’s largely Eurasianist but critical geopolitical lines thus formed a kind of
subjectivist, “perennial prophetic potential” mirroring the links he sought to form in his Islamic
liberation theology. Through this meta-civilizational, spiritual, geopolitical dual with the West,
Dzhemal believed that Islam can realize its full force and potential, ultimately culminating in an
Islamic world order.
As he continuously formulated this Islamic revolution in theology and geopolitics,
Dzhemal’s critique of Traditionalism and Sufism acquired definitive contours which he would
pronounce just before his death. In a philosophical dialogue entitled “What is Traditionalism?”
live-streamed 43 days before his death 61, Dzhemal equated Traditionalism to a kind of “pagan”
metaphysics reproducing a 2,000 year old “perennial philosophy.” He called Guénon the
“mouthpiece of the Traditionalist club” which promoted a “discourse on the crisis of the modern
world” and “wanted to saddle the powerful force of modernity through Sufism and the tariqah”
insofar as such was intuitively felt to be a “gigantic passionary62 force” by virtue of its
semblance of radicalism. Julius Evola is mentioned as “a second version of Traditionalism” that
adhered to “openly pagan positions.” By virtue of its metaphysical principles, Dzhemal
philosophized, radicalism comes into conflict with both the pagan metaphysics of
“Traditionalism” and conservative “traditionalism.” Thus, he stated: “The conflict which has
been going on within Islam is a reflection of the profound historical conflict between radicals
and traditionalists.”
Dzhemal definitively proclaimed: “Besides Islam, for ordinary people of the whole world
- not only Muslims - there is no other defense, there is no other ideological vindication. Because
Islam is founded on the concept of principle ontological justice as an absolute and indivisible
human right…True Islam…has since the very beginning challenged global tyranny, and has been

59 Laruelle, “Digital Geopolitics”, 93.

60 Ibid, 91.
61“Razgovory s Dzhemalem. Chto takoe traditsionalizm?”, Mediametrics Live (23 September 2016), (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfoG1FVPxFI).
62The terms “passionary” and “passionarity” were coined by the Eurasianist scholar Lev Gumilev whose rise
chronologically parallels the rise of the Yuzhinsky circle and its offshoots.

!13
fighting for this for 14 centuries.”63 Thus, from his metaphysical manifesto, Orientation: North,
to his final media pronouncements, Dzhemal had traversed a path from Traditionalism and
Sufism to sole identification with his “Islamic radicalism” as the “only ideological vindication.”
The relationship between and evolution of these threads of Dzhemal’s grammatological fabric is
in need of scholarly clarification.

Conclusion
Although by the end of his life Geydar Dzhemal rejected and radically criticized
Traditionalism, Dzhemal originally played a significant role in the formation of Russian
Traditionalism. He not only supplied Traditionalist literature and mentoring to the Yuzhinsky
circle, but also initially engaged both the Sufi and radical political precedents of “hard
Traditionalism”, before he gradually developed a fundamental critique of Traditionalism and
formulated his own ideology of Islamic radicalism. Does this ultimate trajectory mean that
Dzhemal should ultimately not be studied as a Traditionalist or in the context of Traditionalism?
This is a question which requires some nuanced clarification to serve further historical and
discursive research.
Dzhemal’s Islamic ideology was ultimately incompatible in metaphysical and theological
terms with the precedents set by Traditionalists themselves, particularly Sufi “converts”. He
explicitly rejected Sufism and refused the emanationist and manifestationist metaphysics of
Traditionalism as “pagan” in favor of a radically creationist Islam armed with a subjectivist
volition and revolutionary lexicon. However, this ideological trajectory is not alien to the history
of Traditionalism in principle. The synthesis established by Guénon in the early 20th century was
taken in a number of directions by different thinkers and projects - in the direction of a
Traditionalist-Sufi movement with a perennial theology by Schuon, “pagan imperialism” by
Evola, Eurasianism by Dugin, etc. Although the end result of Dzhemal’s intellectual
development was an anti-Traditionalist Islamic ideology, he arrived at such from Traditionalism
and in negotiating Traditionalist concepts, consistently referencing Guénon as his primary
counterpoint. Moreover, Dzhemal’s explicit addressing of what he saw as “ambiguities” or
“illogical syllogisms” in Guénon’s concepts in a certain extent reflects the general trend of
Traditionalists’ attempting to cope with or overcome the ambiguities left by the French
intellectual. On these grounds, separating Dzhemal from both his early history with
Traditionalism and the history of Traditionalist ideas as a whole threatens to obstruct scholars
from understanding the logic through which Dzhemal eventually sought to distance himself from
Traditionalism as the “priestly tradition” in favor of the “prophetic tradition” of which he saw
Islam as the greatest harbinger. Dzhemal’s Islamic radicalism is therefore a unique product of
and response to his understanding of Traditionalism.
Secondly, Dzhemal’s critique of Sufism went hand in hand with his critique of
Traditionalism. This calls for further study into the relationship between 20th century
Traditionalists and Sufism. It is crucial to recall that the historical affinity between some 20th
century Traditionalists and Sufism was a choice, not a dogma. Although his followers might have

63“Geydar Dzhemal o sufizme i Traditsionny Islam” (6 February 2016), (https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=RrUOytuu0qg).

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misinterpreted such, Guénon himself was clear that his “conversion” to Sufism was a matter of
“spiritual convenience”, and his elaborations on “Islamic esotericism” were rather provincial,
making up only one aspect of his corpus and legacy. Nevertheless, existing scholarship has
showed just how intertwined Traditionalism and Sufism have been, or at least perceived as
having been. If Traditionalism and Sufism were so close by virtue of the initiative of
representatives of the former that rejecting one necessitated rejection of the other in order to
address Islam as a whole, then this phenomenon has not yet been fully explored by scholarship.
Thirdly, Dzhemal’s ideology and career deserve contextualization and closer study in scholarship
on Islamic politics and theology, particularly in the unique context of Islam in Russia. Dzhemal’s
unrealized aspirations might fit into Yemelianova’s observation that Russia’s integral Muslim
mosaic has yielded “hopes of pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic solidarity” that have interacted with
post-Soviet realities to produce doctrinal splits within Muslim communities without transforming
into a “clash of Christian and Islamic civilizations.”64 In the very least, Dzhemal’s radical Islamic
advocacy within Russia’s public and political sphere is a testimony to the long-standing
historical co-existence of Russians and Muslims that has persisted alongside (or despite) attempts
by Muslim actors to formulate separate ideologies and identities appealing to Islam. 65
Dzhemal stood at a junction of Traditionalism, Islam, and Russian politics which
promises a fruitful interdisciplinary case study. Here we have sought to prepare some of the
theoretical groundwork for such by attempting to clarify Dzhemal’s relationship to
Traditionalism and illustrate the evolution of his ideology of Islamic radicalism. Further research
will only be informative if it elucidates Dzhemal’s intersection of these ideas and currents and
refrains from severing one dimension of his intellectual trajectory in favor of another.

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