Geydar Dzhemal on RSN RADIO (JULY 26, 2015)
T. DVIDAR: What brought you to political Islam?
G. DZHEMAL: First of all, the understanding that Islam cannot be non-political. I went through some fascination with the mystical, esoteric side of Islam. Naturally, I was interested in and engaged in what is called “tasawwuf.
“ T. DVIDAR: Is this Sufism?
G. DZHEMAL: Yes, this is Sufism, especially since in the Pamirs, where I spent quite a lot of time, I had serious personal contacts with the Naqshbandi Tariqa, I saw sheikhs, I saw Ustazs. I even maintained personal relationships with some of them. And before I got into this environment, I got acquainted with what is called traditionalism in modern practice. This is Rene Guenon, this is Shuon. I have been familiar with the French school of traditionalism since about 1969. And thanks to my contacts, in particular, the late Evgeny Golovin, by the time I met with real live ustases, I had read almost the entire main body of Guenon’s works in French. Although it must be answered that Guenon wrote almost nothing about Islam in the 12th year, he wrote about traditionalism, metaphysics, and his examples were mostly from Shirk. This is paganism. But this is a special feature of traditionalists, that they focus on a certain core of ideas that are not peculiar to Islam, but are attributed to Islam by people who bring these ideas there. Simply put, in the history of Islamic philosophy, as in the history of Christianity, there was a period of dominance of Platonic Greek thought. Hellenism has taken over thought in the Islamic world. The Neoplatonists became so influential that if you take the work of an Islamic scholar of that time, who was following this path, and compare it with the European Neoplatonist, it would be as if it was written by the same author. You can swap them. The difference is only in style, and the language is different. This is not Islam. And ultimately, I came to the conclusion that Islam, and the entire Abrahamic tradition in its pure core, purified from distortion, was sent to humanity in order to free it from the mainstream of universal human thinking, universal wisdom, because this wisdom is the truth, a statement of what is, but not true. That is, it is not true in a spiritual sense.
Geydar Dzhemal on RSN RADIO (JULY 26, 2015)