Evola’s Militant Professors and the East-West Dichotomy

This chapter explores the expansion of Evola’s teachings by three of his notable disciples, who aimed to establish connections between Islam, particularly Shiʿism, and Italy’s ancient and medieval history. Their objective was to transcend the perception of these religions as foreign entities, rooted in Evola’s critiques of the modern East-West divide. The three scholars in focus were Pio Filippani-Ronconi (d.2010), Adriano Romualdi (d.1973), and Claudio Mutti (b.1946). Implicitly or explicitly, they drew on the nineteenth-century notion that Shiʿism and Sufism represented an Aryan Islam in contrast to Sunnism or Bedouin Islam. Pio Filippani-Ronconi assigned exceptional importance to Persia, presenting it as the birthplace of both Roman and Islamic institutions. Harmonizing Evola’s teachings with Henry Corbin’s idealized portrayal of Persia, he reinforced convictions about the Iranian origins of various Traditionalist moral values. Ronconi argued that pre-Islamic Persia profoundly influenced both Shiʿism and Roman religious institutions. He contended that what Muslim warriors and Ismailis transmitted to the Christian Templars and the West was not just Islam but the essence of Persia’s cultural heritage. Ismailism, in Ronconi’s view, marked a revival of ancient Persia, and he claimed that Persians significantly shaped Arabic grammar, Islamic philosophy, medicine, and other disciplines. Adriano Romualdi challenged conventional definitions of the West and the East, associating the West with Aryan culture and the East with Semitism. He regarded Persians as “Westerners of the East”, considering them part of the “white race”. Aligning with Evola and Ronconi, Romualdi praised the warrior spirit of Persians, asserting that war represented an Indo-European value, while peace signified Christian mediocrity. Despite the typical association of Christianity with the West, Romualdi argued that Christianity originated in the East. Claudio Mutti, a convert to Islam, took a different intellectual path from Romualdi. Instead of relocating Persians from the East to the West, he sought to move Europe from the West to the East. Using linguistic connections between Islam and ancient Rome, Mutti substantiated these ties by presenting a mystified version of Eurasia influenced by Corbin and Carl Schmitt, with Iran playing a central role. By the late 1970s, Iran and Afghanistan, two non-Arab Islamic countries, stood against Western imperialism, challenging the notion that Arabs represented the entire Islamic world. Mutti’s perspective led him to criticize Evola’s views on Islam and socialism, as well as the portrayal of Saudi Arabia as representative of orthodox Islam. These scholars, spanning history, philology, and geopolitics, offered fresh perspectives on Shiʿism and Iran. Their belief in Shiʿism as a noble and esoteric form of Islam gained further validation with the 1979 Iranian Revolution, perceived as a long-anticipated revolt against the modern world. Notably, Claudio Mutti, through his extensive network in Traditionalist associations, played a crucial role in inspiring a wave of conversions to Shiʿism among Italians.