Part Four

Writings by Ivan Aguéli

 15

Letter from Paris

Ivan Aguéli
Translated from Swedish by Annika Öhrner and Mark Sedgwick

This letter was written by Aguéli, then aged twenty-four, at the start of his second
and longest period in Paris. It is addressed to the Swedish painter and art theorist
Richard Bergh (1858–1919), a former teacher and patron of Aguéli. It shows Aguéli
at a personal level during his early years in Paris.

Paris, October 10, 1893

Honored brother,1

It is already a long time since I decided to bother you. As you know, I have such great
difficulty in converting my ideas into action. A very clear external impulse is required
to get me going.
My good friend and neighbor Luce2 suggested to me this morning, during a somber
conversation on the bad state of my finances, a rather useful idea. To his question of
whether I could write in Swedish, I answered that I probably would if I really had to,
and then he said I should try to get a commission from some Swedish paper that pays
its employees in Paris to write correspondent articles. Not the least, as one does not
paint successfully during winter.
The season looks threatening.
I have followed political developments rather intensively since the student unrest.3
I participated, of course. Contributed with heart and soul some material to the
barricades, and enjoyed the scenery as the Guards prepared to charge. I have never in
my life had such a good time. I did not have to part my hair over my forehead. But I
will talk about this on another occasion.
Our Lord initiated that revolution just in order for me to learn how a real revolution
should be staged. Have had revolutionary fever since then. Have visited old anarchist
friends, they wondered where I have been all this time. They live in the neighborhood,
and we meet almost every day. Politics are heavily discussed.
192 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

One is rather au courant with the politics of today, and as the anarchists generally
tend not to use clichés, I believe that I can see the circumstances in a rather impartial
light. L’en dehors4 [the outsider] is the only label one can apply to an anarchist. It is a
beautiful phenomenon, anarchism. It is for certain the most beautiful in our filthy time.
Imagine a sunrise and a sunset at the same time. The dynamiters’ superb, mindful,
calm heroism; the revenge of the culture victims; the dreams of utopists, intuition, and
artists—this may be a pale light, but it embodies the first rays of the new sun. But I will
talk about anarchism another time, if you like. Does the subject interest you?
I believe that I am capable of writing rather decent articles from here on domestic
politics, and about art and literature. Not the least since I am intimately positioned
within a good journalistic milieu. Could you imagine, one of my comrades sat down
and wrote an almost anarchist article in … Figaro. It was obviously directed against
socialism, in between the lines against all parliamentarianism; basically anarchist. It
wasn’t visible, but I felt it. This is just one example out of many of finesse.
Speaking of all this about milieu, etc., to make you believe that it could happen that
he (that is to say, I) could be capable of other than folly in this regard.
If you could do me the invaluable favor of recommending me to one of your
friends from the press so that he accepts me as Paris correspondent and pays, then
I would be most grateful. I am ashamed of exploiting you in this way. Don’t believe
that I don’t realize the cynicism in demanding practical help from you, as you have
already encouraged me so much through, as a good friend, sharing matters of artists’
reflections, in order (if possible) to teach me something. I have a deuced respect for
you and your ability to express authority without being in the least authoritative.
This is what follows, in case you would think of taking on my case. My intention
is to start with several articles on the political parties in France, their importance
and influence, and their history. This to create points of departure. Additionally,
parliamentarianism and socialism as decently treated as possible. The Paris press
(foreign policy does not interest me. Just occasionally, English conditions as judged
in Paris. Ditto, l’alliance franco-russe [the Franco-Russian alliance]). I would like to
touch upon French patriotism as little as possible. One rejects it in theory, of course,
but one cannot bay at it. It may have a certain raison d’être. But patriotism in general,
militarism, the scandals of barracks, police, court, and culture, will be discussed
mercilessly.
This year appears to be rather rich with events to talk about. That is, one knows in
advance that on December 31, 1894, we will be at exactly the same place as now, viewed
in general, unless some bigger commotion happens, because it is really just commotion
that changes things, and it is only the anarchists that make the world move forward.
That is, if it is man who leads the world. But the socialists are preparing for the chamber,
and since I have good relations among ex-socialists, so-called possibilists, I will have
plenty to write about. In the art world we will soon have Gauguin’s exhibition, he
returned from Tahiti with about ninety canvases. Another exhibition with Constantin
Guys’s “Le peintre de la vie moderne” [Painter of Modern Life],5 “Exposition d’art
musulman” [Exhibition of Muslim Art].6 I want to make representative portraits of
artists and literary men, etc. I think I could write two to three articles each week,
without changing my way of life.
 Letter from Paris 193

Did I tell you that I was engaged in a symbolistic aesthetic? It is progressing. I am

quite content. The framework is splendid. Here and there good in color. The synthesis
is very simple, enlightens a rather large space, and sharp. Now and then I put in a rather
peripheric thing, pretty direct under a large principle, which gives a lot of nerve to the
rhythm in the light. I do see, however, that it is all too austere and I will change this as
much as possible, through keeping the tone somewhat female. And through exclusively
using the most common words, as intending, in this case, to be read within the words,
rather than behind them. Architecture, by the way, is so much about composition and
idea that it gains by being constructed in rough material.
Don’t you think it is beautiful to regard a synthesis as a sun with several atmospheres
within each other, the extent and nature of these, as well as their worlds, dependent on
the sun’s generative force?
You can imagine that we have a beautiful circle of friends. Rendez-vous at Félix
[Fénéon],7 an art critic who played a brilliant part in the campaign for the impressionists
a couple of years ago. Much listened to and respected in the school Pissaro-Signac-
Monet-Degas-Geffroy, Lecomte, etc. That is, the French-Parisian pure impressionistic
naturalists, lyrics, portraitists, narrateurs de la vie moderne et des actualités [narrators
of modern life and news]—aagh, what a dull phrase, forgive me. I really like him,
not the least as he is so representative. I will make a dozen portraits of him. He finds
himself very well put in some of my sketches, as do relations and friends. I cannot resist
the temptation to talk about a new-French type in formation, a type that is decent,
simple, sober, completely free from snobbery and pose. Emancipated as a social
creature, international to the limit of being antipatriotic … “Yes, it’s proved now, we
disclaim the national sentiment. All our spiritual patrons, all those I just mentioned
(Tolstoy, Wagner, Ibsen) and Carlyle and Fichte and all the music from Bach to Wagner,
from Schumann to Borodin, all foreigners; and Rosetti, and Swinburne and finally
Nietzsche, and everybody,” a hopeful twenty-year old (Mauclair)8 wrote the other day
in Mercure de France, September, in a very moderate and very solid article. Mauclair is
a highly talented and interesting fellow. Naturalist en attendant [in waiting], for lack of
something better, to avoid rascals in mysticism, which he reveres, he takes a stand for
art as a form of intuition. Respect for synthesis, but unfit for it. As esthétie [aesthetic]
rather dematerialized, however focused on personal experience. Completely lost or
dreadfully dry, except as regards what is seen or dramatic. But conscious of it and
therefore, leaving the great synthesizes aside as well as l’abstrait substantiel [the
substantial abstract], without Germanizing those who occupy themselves with it. Far
from godless, because among them a great, though bien vague [very vague] belief in
“le sens caché des choses” [the hidden meaning of things], a belief which is one of
the Prophet’s first commandments (the second or the third verse in the Qur’an if I
remember properly).9 I am convinced that his type is of the New Mankind, in its first
state. I am positive that they have the future ahead of them. Because they are (1) nice
lads (2) sensible lads that just believe in what is substantial. And that they have no clue
of the abstract substantial is not that bad; to that from the concrete substantial is just a
matter of degree. The question of time, the question of evolution, within idé-généalogie
[the genealogy of ideas], of course. And Our Lord still leads them, for the two things
just mentioned. They admire the gray shadows, winter things, twilights, they want
194 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

nature veiled, and find mists mystical. I find them interesting and rather playful. Can
you imagine, many of them are walking around believing that the light will come from
the north? There is some sense to it, since the neophyte entered the pyramid through
a little hole in the northern wall. And the northern man nowadays has some little of
the qualities that were required to present oneself in the sacred house asking to be
prepared for the first and lowest degree of initiation. By all account they are a beautiful
contrast to Satanists, spiritists, German socialist-materialists. You could imagine that
the socialists are bright birds. One of them says, completely naively in the light of the
day, and at election meetings, “Messieurs, le socialisme n’est qu’une question de ventre
et de sous-ventre” [Gentlemen, socialism is just a matter of the stomach and belly].
Damn it all. A social question that is just a food question. Damned nonsense. But let us
get back to Félix. He is one of the best of this type I have seen. Superb and great critical
intelligence. All ask for his advice, and it is so nice to see the unquestionable esteem
everybody has for him. As intelligence active, un sceptique rôdant [a skeptical wanderer,
literally wandering skeptic]. Very ironical humor. Reading verse and drama extremely
well. I stand very high in his esteem, something which encourages me greatly.
And then there is a Dutch guy who can be rude in every possible language. French,
Dutch, German, English, Frisian, Flemish, Spanish, and Malay. He has been in the land
of my dreams, Java and Sumatra, for many years. He is the funniest bastard you could
imagine. A lively little devil. You cannot look at him without laughing, especially if he
by accident happens to adopt a sincere face for a minute, and so forth.
And so many beautiful girls on top of that. And so kind as well. I paint all of them.
But unfortunately they have work and studios to attend to. One of them is extravagant.
I dare not start talking about her because then I will never stop. Every single part of
her is like a cleverly written thesis on symbolism. I see visions as I paint her. I and a
couple of good friends follow her home and if it is in the small hours, we can forget
ourselves until dawn. Then we are positioned on the floor like reverential heathens. In
silent worship. And she is on a canapé [couch] between us, happy to be a goddess, if
only for a moment, Goddess, source of light. And she shows us once her arm, her leg,
her shoulders, her neck, her breasts, naked, radiating beauty.
The sinful litterateur touches her very respectfully, and then licks his fingers. But I
think he is stupid in doing that. He would do better to hold his breath.
I need to add that none of us even touches spirits.
Read Aurier, Oeuvres posthumes [Posthumous Works], ed. Mercure de France,
15 Rue de l’Echandé, St. Germain, Paris.10 The most solid symbolist critic I have
met. Damned good criticism about Van Gogh, Gauguin, etc. It is a male brain that
criticizes, which is unusual. J.-K. Huysmans,11 you know him. He has developed in
a funny way. Have read [Huysmans’s] Là bas [The Damned], which I like a lot as
a document, less as a work of art. As I have heard, [À] rebours [Against the Grain]
is something like that as well. It is rather peculiar that the author of L’Art moderne
[Modern Art]12 has come to better thoughts. Remy de Gourmont,13 Le Latin mystique
[Mystical Latin] (ed. Le Mercure)14 is valuable, a real revelation as a book on mysticism
in poetry. Huysmans’s introduction to that volume is among the best pages I have read
on l’histoire actuelle [contemporary history], among the soundest and most sensible
after Baudelaire. Huysmans has taken on, it seems, a grand job to fight Satanism in
 Letter from Paris 195

favor of sound mysticism and real spirituality. Because there is some truth in Nordau’s
Entartung [Degeneration].15 Unfortunately, his mob-like nature cannot distinguish
between Satanism and religion. He calls all supranaturalism perversité sexuelle [sexual
perversion], bad stomach, hallucination just because one has not eaten enough good
steak, etc.16 Bloody idiot. Does the bastard not realize that the philosophy of chemistry
is phallicism, as clear as can be. One realized that already in school. And one of
Europe’s most clever poets, August Strindberg, agrees on that in many places. He must
be married to a real cow, that Nordau.
I quote the following words by Aurier in order for you to get an idea of him, words
chosen almost randomly, because I have not read him entirely, just here and there;
because that is enough, a couple of pages, to get an idea of a likable author. With some
pénétration [perspicacity]:

A work of art is a new being that has not only a soul, but a double soul (the soul of
the artist and the soul of nature, father and mother).17
The only way to penetrate a thing is love. To understand God you have to love him.
Understanding stands in proportion to love.18
The only way to understand a work of art is to be its lover, which is possible since the
work is a being that has a soul and reveals it through a language that you can learn.
It is even easier to love a work of art than a woman, since in the case of the work
of art matter barely exists, and almost never makes love degenerate into sensuality.
One might ridicule this method. If so, I will not respond.
Our soul’s most noble faculties are atrophying (through positivism).19 One has to
react. We must again nurture the highest properties [of the soul]. We must again
become mystics. We must again learn that love is the source of all understanding.
But oh, it is too late to reconquer love in all its primitive, unspoiled nature. The
sensualism of our century has made us look at woman as a piece of meat, served
to extinguish our material lust. Love of woman is not allowed anymore. The
skepticism of our century has made us see in God just a nominal abstraction that
may not exist. Love of God is no longer allowed.
One single love is still allowed, that for works of art. Let us throw ourselves into
this rescue. Let us be the mystics of art.
And if we cannot succeed in this, let us sadly return to our troughs while
sighing a last Finis Galliae—Gaul is finished.

Beautiful pages—aren’t they?

His perspective on contemporary art is damned good. And I do not dare to talk
more about him, so as to end this longwinded letter.
Excellent publications: Mercure de France, primus inter pares, La jeune Belgique,
l’Ermitage, Les essais d’art libre. If you could trouble yourself with returning them to
me, I will let you borrow some issues of certain publications with interesting essays.
But as I need to return them in my turn … Pardon [sorry].
I want to make Strindberg known here. I have translated some parts of Röda
rummet [The Red Room] as bits to taste, even though they were fragments. It hurts me
196 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

to see how much admiration Ibsen gets. He does not deserve it, damn it. Strindberg
is rather European, whether his every-day is Swedish or not. And he has a certain
European value, because he has created a new temperament, something which is the
social duty of an artist, a temperament that some of the human beings of our day need
for their higher and inner life. While Ibsen, in his turn, just tries to convince doltish
Norwegian small-town dwellers to do what in France and Spain goes without saying,
at least among the non-bourgeois. Can no one really see that he only pulls very gently
at the farthest edge of our damned civilization and its connected society, which only
remains standing with great effort and is otherwise undermined internally in every
possible way? I do not give one single Ravachol20 for one dozen Ibsens. His method
as drama writer is rather solid. But do you know Les flaireurs [The trackers] by van
Lerberghe?21 There you have le théâtre symboliste [symbolist theater]. A friend read it
for me, and damn it, did I not see ghosts! I felt it in each part of my body. And yet, it
was so simple. Just an old poor woman dying, so content, and the staging was as if a
young shepherd boy had done it.
How does one become an authorized translator of Strindberg? Could you give me
his address and if possible, a recommendation? Then I can write to him and send a
piece of translation and so forth. I would just discuss about the most necessary, the
work, etc. Because I do not like him at all as a personality. And Nietzsche, and Nordau,
and German gentlemen, I am wary of. It is the Strindberg-impressionist, the paysagiste
[landscaper] in particular that I will emphasize. And the critic of society, no, the
anarchist rather. And possibly one or another of his monumental work. Röda rummet
or the archipelago novels. Other than that, my opinion on details is quite changeable,
especially negotiable. Are there any economic fla-flas [hooplas] or other formalities to
attend to, other that writing to the author? Could you be so kind and help me with this
promptly, as La Révolte and La Revue anarchiste are waiting for essays that are almost
finished, that is, translations of Strindberg.
And painting. You paint the men of the coming century and the eternal female.
Carefully rendered portraits are always good exercise. That is by the way the most
sensible I can do at the moment. It has “humanized” me somewhat. And then a
contrivance. I will paint Paris horizons from Montmartre and from the windows of
friends with a good view. I have made six good sketches and finally found the key
to the oscillations of the line in this sea of roofs, marked by lines (streets), towers,
monuments, parks, etc. My friends like them a lot, Félix keeps two of them with him. I
have found him many times in contemplation in front of them. But the first thing I do
if I see them is turn them around and place them in a corner. But I am so undecided
with the color, in this case. I have painted them gray-blue, ultramarine, and a foul
brown, just to get to draw with the brush. I have found that in order to paint I must
have either bright light or a wide horizon, or best, both. I cannot stand anyone but
kids watching me. From this summer I have a stack of sketches in color and lines as
usual, that no one understands except for me, five to six uncompleted works. I have
wasted more than twenty sessions on a motif that I am crazy about. I have not been
able to finish it. How in hell could one paint with a bunch of people around oneself,
saying one is fin-de-siècle? However, I will finish them indoors. They are some streets
in sunshine. One of my friends who has been in the tropics recognizes “le grand silence
 Letter from Paris 197

de la chaleur” [the great silence of heat] in some of them. Shall I send you photographs
of some of the portraits? And then there are some natures mortes [still lives] here and
there. C’est tout [That’s all]. Madame B’s portrait, Félix’s as well, a park at Moulin de la
Galette [on Montmartre], and a couple of “Paris-marins” [marine-style scenes of Paris]
I might send to les indépendants [the exhibition of the Salon des indépendants] next
year. We will see what the park looks like as it is ready. Madame B’s portrait is damned
suggestive as a female portrait. She is very content herself, thinks that I have made her
so beautiful. And that is a damn lie, because she is a thousand time more beautiful in
reality. It is very much alike, and her paramour, a young poet, very nice boy, is damned
content as well, and thinks there is something imprévue [unplanned, unexpected] in it.
Now everyone is happy except me. But she will pose for me with “sa frimousse” [face]
(a very beautiful word for a young, beautiful woman’s head, isn’t it) in the near future,
and then I will make something really damned good. Have you noticed how joyful it is
to paint women that remind you of girlfriends from the time when you were so much
in love that were blue flashes before your eyes as you kissed them?
You might think that it is strange to see me so épris [taken] with zeal for my work, a
positive sense eagerness to throw myself into la vie moderne [modern life]. Now I can
do it without being harmed. Now it is a rest for me. Before, that was impossible for me.
I am skeptic enough to study it without living it. Maybe that is the best way to avoid
being overwhelmed by it, to control it.
I long more than ever to get away from this damned Europe, for some primitive
land where it is very beautiful and very clear, and where polemics, dialectics, rhetoric,
politics, and socialism are unknown diseases. Where people don’t argue with one
another just for the sake of taking joy in arguing, and don’t prefer to consume each
other’s cadavers than each another’s vitality and joy in living.
How can you explain this phenomenon? I am un flaneur enragé [a passionate
loafer]. To thrive in crowded streets or in quite desolate, barely planned quarters, is
like eating good, healthy food when one is hungry. It is like having ears and eyes over
the whole body. And everything around me is as one mouth that speaks, and gente
[unknown meaning]. But I always get the impression that all these houses, these trees,
these human beings are hardly real. And that a certain noise within the street noise is
the only reality. The houses seem to me to be mostly en attendant [in waiting]. I often
surprise myself asking myself, quite seriously: “But will they not tear this barracks
down soon? It seems so thin in its colors. They are ready to dissolve in a colorless,
invisible gas at any minute.” The trees seem to me least fugitive and improvised. The
heavens and perspective are deep and motionless. This sensation is a rule for me. It
reappears in any street interior that I see and sense. That is, I have it almost every
time I walk down the street, in certain quarters I like, and in an intelligent, awakened,
observing state of mind. Very intensely if the street appears quickly. I can talk about
the Paris atmosphere the next time if you like. I don’t care for painting it. If I was
a musician or poet, I would make art of this sensation. Except we will see if I can
represent the strange sound, which is the base for all detailed sensation, in some color,
possibly copper muting a most strange, intense blue-white, sharp but completely silent.
I want to make portraits in iron, forged not cast. The tension in the face of the
townsman seems hammered in iron. Nervousness in copper, in granite, in marble exist
198 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

as well, but are rarer. I know a smith who is an artist. He makes only flowers. But of
iron and so artistic that you can feel the fragrance and the color, sometimes even the
symbolism of the flower, as you weigh it in your hand. The form is the most naturalistic
and vêtu [dressed], but a naturalism à la Corot that this smith carries with him as
a conception [an idea] of nature. The man is a genius of nature, au point de vue de
métier [from a craft perspective], seulement [only], the drawing is most correct (and a
damn good intelligence and feel. Artists wouldn’t even be able to copy this delicacy in
a drawing after his iron flowers). But ask the gentleman to make a drawing with paper
and pen, or with any damn anything except a rather heavy hammer and a piece of iron,
and you will see how anxious he gets. It is not his flowers that have inspired me to make
portrait in iron, but a friend connected me to him as result of my inclination to forge.
Some horse heads, I would also like to forge.
Could you please donner un coup d’épaule [give a push] to my friends Lindberg
or Sjögren,22 one of them, they really need to get out? And that would not be that
difficult, they are both productive as rabbits. If I am right, Mr. Zorn23 had a high
esteem for something called decorative arts. As had Mr. Hasselberg after his return
from Copenhagen.24 They have now a marvelous opportunity to show if their love
for decorative arts is something more than Platonism, which as we know they are not
much accustomed to, except in the case of the Holy Ghost, by giving travel money
and if possible something more to the young men in question. As being probably the
most promising decorators in Sweden. Of course, a bit after you, and Nordström, and
Josephson, and Count Rosen.25 I have not heard from Åkerberg.26 He has gone to hell,
it appears. Another large spirit has gone overboard. But it is true, we have such damn
talented men in Sweden. Just look at the art academy, the artists association, etc. Merde
[shit]. As you can see, I cannot stand being ironic anymore.
I will now finish this up, begging your forgiveness for having taken your attention
for such a long time. I will never do that again. In my case, bad manners or disheveled
expressions do not mean a lack of respect for the addressee. On the contrary: I am in
négligé [undress] to give the opportunity to judge whether I am an idiot or crazy. If I
am, you need to find out as quickly as possible “pour ne pas perdre son temps” [so as
not to waste your time].

With highest respect and affection

Ivan Aguéli
16 rue Cortot
(Butte Montmartre)
[Postscript omitted.]
 16

Letter from Ceylon

Ivan Aguéli
Translated from French by Nadine Miller

This letter (Figure 16.1) was written by Aguéli, then aged twenty-nine, at the start
of his second journey outside Europe, shortly after his conversion to Islam. It is
addressed to his French friend and sponsor, Marie Huot (1846–1930). It shows us
Aguéli at a personal level during his earliest years as a Muslim.

Colombo, March 21 (Tuesday), 1899

Dear Marie,

Received your letter of March 1 yesterday at the French Consulate, after having been
alerted to it by the postcard of March 3. I can’t possibly tell you how much I enjoyed it.
I have had no news from you since Port Said. Nothing at Aden. We need to keep track
of the letters we write, in order to be sure that none have gone missing. I am still at
the hotel, for another week, as I had committed myself to nineteen days. But in a few
days I shall have lodgings, a very small apartment consisting of two very large rooms,
sufficiently out of the way, for four rupees a month. It couldn’t be better. I owe this to
my Javanese [servant] who is devoted to me to an extent I shall never forget. Should
the man turn out to be a rascal it would prove my complete ignorance of physiognomy.
Still, as is my habit, I have arranged everything in such a way so that he could not
possibly harm me, if that were his intention. I have also seen his younger brother, who
is very nice, very gentle. He lives near me with his family. Will tell you later about the
native dwellings.
But how did I get to know these people here? I have told you already that in a
Muslim country, the very best recommendation is a knowledge of the Arabic language.
One day I was strolling through the Cinnamon Garden, an immense untended park in
the middle of the town. I stopped in front of a building which I took to be a mosque.
There actually was an Arabic inscription on it, which I was interested in deciphering. A
man showed up, wearing a red sarong, a European jacket, and a Malay turban of white,
black, blue, snakeskin-patterned, and asked me if I was able to read it. I told him no, I
200 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

Figure 16.1 Letter from Ivan Aguéli to Marie Huot, 1899. Original in the Ivan Aguéli
Archive of the National Museum, Stockholm.
 Letter from Ceylon 201

couldn’t, at that distance. He led me to a nearby shop and showed me a piece of Qur’an,
which I did read, to the astonishment of the onlookers. I told them that I was a Muslim,
that I wanted to go to school, to the madrasa, as it is called, and they sent me to the
director of that institution who received me well, albeit with some embarrassment. I
realize that the English are not overly pleased for the Muslims to accept converts into
their fold. On the other hand, their religion obliges them to accept them etc. etc. In
the end we went our ways, and I am very happy with the attitude of the Muslims here.
After all, in this country Islam makes its presence felt by lending a bit of taste and
spirit to their mentality. I find it a bit difficult to describe land and people to you.
Imagine a country where you encounter not a single fierce face. They are all very calm,
very gentle, very tranquil. No shouting, screeching, or jostling. There are no beggars,
none of that insistence in offering services to foreigners. Even the coolies are not
troublesome. They in no way resemble the donkey-drivers of Egypt, far from it. They
do approach you, it is true, but not all at once as a mob, and if you refuse them by
saying “no,” or preferably “illè,” they go back to their places without another word.
I’m talking of the pullers of rickshaws, charming little vehicles that take the place of
fiacres and which are drawn by nearly naked coolies. They are generally Tamils, coffee-
colored, open-faced, honest, and of a rather pleasant gaiety and contentment. Nowhere
is the filth and misery of certain corners of Cairo to be seen. There are no ruffians,
very few low-lifes. Is this the natural state of the country? I believe so; but the English
administration certainly has a lot to do with it. It is marvelous. We will speak about
it in our articles.1 Obviously, as far as their get-up is concerned, that leaves a lot to be
desired, obliging scores of people to adopt European dress styles, which is ridiculous in
all respects. You see women who would be as charming and pretty as anything wearing
horrible outfits. But I’m not going to tell you about that now, and the Christians are
not in the majority.
I have already spoken to you about the beauty of the men here. There are real
beauties among them, with long, gorgeous, dark, jet-black hair, falling upon bare
shoulders, half way down their backs. Moreover, they are very proud of this. You see
them in their corners, combing their hair, rubbing it with coconut oil, or preening
their hair which falls about them like a veil or coat with graceful, coquettish gestures.
It is a charming sight. I assure you, these people are incapable of any malice, least of all
savagery. In terms of humanity, it is perfect.
I also feel completely changed. First of all, to get worked up about things, to get
angry or to lose your temper is very dangerous, on account of the temperature. Yet it
is exquisite, beyond all description, when you are calm and half naked. No, you can be
wearing clothes, but it is absolutely essential to wear loose and flowing garments. It is
a dreadful torment to be squeezed tightly into your clothes. I refuse to do that. At the
hotel, I potter about draped in a sarong, my bedspread around my shoulders, my feet
in Arab shoes from Aden.
I can give you no better illustration of this country than by telling you that it is
full of flowers, not of architecture. There are no flowers in Arabia/Egypt, there is only
architecture. Ceylon and Egypt are complementary contrasts. I love them both, each
in its own way. In Egypt, all is power, splendor, mysticism, unreal, even infernal,
202 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

passion. Here, everything is sweetness, elegance. It is like Italy with mysticism, but it is
much more elegant than Italy. No, I give up trying to describe to you the delicacy, the
lightness of touch of everything to be seen here.
I went out with a gentleman who wished to learn French by instructing me in
Sinhalese. He had offered me a room in his house for 2½ rupees. He is a professor
at the Theosophical College. At first he offered me a room for free. I did not want
to accept that, jealously guarding my independence. Finally we parted. So I went to
find my Javanese, and we chatted. This is the result of our conversation. There are
three worlds here. The English administration, the Buddhists, and the Muslims. I
leave out the different Christian sects which I don’t trust at all. The Buddhists and the
Muslims are rivals and they hardly associate with each other. Jalal, my Javanese, told
me that the Muslims here will have less trust in me if I live among the Buddhists with
whose customs, incidentally, I am not at all familiar, and whose faces inspire much less
confidence. He told me that later I could pursue all those studies there, but that I had to
begin with and give preference to Muslim studies. I found his words very sensible. So I
have made my choice, and for several reasons. The Buddhists lack style and vision; they
do not strike me as being quite honest. They have neither the politeness nor the (at least
apparent) kindness of the Muslims. I haven’t any serious recommendations regarding
them. Who is Mr. Bambery, how will he receive me? I will know in a few days. I do not
want to depend on him, even if I happen to find him agreeable. If I end up not liking
him, then that would be the last straw. Finally, Buddhism has never been my favorite
field of study. And then, an Indian who had converted to Buddhism was subjected to
their religious “patriotism” in that they alleged that he was not a born Buddhist. Yet he
belonged to the Brahmin caste. All this shows me that they are petty-minded clerics,
people I do not like. The attitude of their children was one of curiosity and sneers. So
I have no hesitation. I feel that I have no business among them, while the Muslims
may need me, they have already made that clear to me. There are some well-heeled
Muslims who do a lot for education. [Marginal notation: At Vellore, near Madras, there
is a Muslim college where you are schooled and fed for two years. But I want to do my
painting. I could still go and study there, but, you see, I want to paint.] But the main
reason is that among them I would have my freedom, without the control of the clerics.
At the madrasa or at their college, I will gain their respect, don’t you worry. Even if my
Javanese were a rascal—one must always assume the worst—I have seen enough to
know that it is among the Muslims that I must spend my days. I have often given them
the opportunity to rob me, even of rupees, as a bait, but they have always been honest.
So, if they are scoundrels, they are scoundrels possessing modesty and good judgment,
and I prefer having to deal with them.
Whatever the case, whatever happens, I have made my decision. Among them I
can study ten languages, while the Buddhists can teach me only two. Muslim studies
are my introduction to the countries I love, Arabia, Africa. They can study everything.
They are not prejudiced. They have their pride, perhaps even arrogance; if they do
something bad, I can assume they are just as likely to do some good, given their
freedom. Above all, they never exhibit contempt for the poor. When I told them that I
had to subsist on nineteen rupees a month, they did not wince, but replied right away,
“So you need a house for 4 rupees a month,” and a few hours later they had found me
 Letter from Ceylon 203

one. I continue to take my precautions, as a matter of principle. I carry my money on

me, in my belt, until I can safely deposit it. [Marginal notation: Burglaries with forced
entry are to be feared.] I will deposit my valuables with Mr. Freudenberg2 etc. etc. and
then we’ll see. No one in this country is capable of any act of violence or robbery. Some
are prone to crimes of passion. And I rely only on myself, and the English police. Then
I take refuge in Allah. Once I have taken all my precautions. A disaster will be terrible
in its consequences, but I cannot worry all the time, twenty-four hours a day; that is
extremely detrimental to one’s health.
I sense that I am also becoming mellow, calm, and determined at the same time.
My agitation, my overexcitement, my “bad character,” all of it fading away like the
darkness before the sun. When the other day I whipped these two fellows, it was slowly,
deliberately, without the slightest trace of emotion on my part. I was laughing deep
down in my heart. The effect was also overwhelming. They rolled in the dust, and I did
not see them again.3
I have discovered something that I ask you to pass on to the doctors. Health is the
feeling of transparency of the body. When diseased, the body is opaque, clogged, out of
touch with its inner feeling. The other day, I was walking by the sea, a delightful thing
to do. It is like being in a globe of crystal and of precious stones. Impossible to paint
any of that. Then I saw a Tamil in the distance, stark naked, who was splashing around
on the beach, the foam of the breakers caressing his backside. I thought that must be
a delightful sensation. I went down, took off my shoes, and walked for a few miles,
sometimes in the water, sometimes on the blazing sand. I’m telling you, the beach was
burning hot. But I felt rays of heat rising from the soles of my feet to my chest and
spreading out all over from there. It is a shame that I am no consumptive; I claim that
this is the cure. But it is necessary that it be the beach here, under this sun, in this sand.
I checked from time to time to see if I had burns on my feet. None at all. I will develop
this treatment. Please believe that this is indeed a good experience. I found out later
that the natives make their sick amble about the beach like this to strengthen their legs.
Nothing bad must be said about the Buddhists in the Encyclopédie.4 I will attempt to
make use of the situation and the exhibition next year. Best to be on good terms with
everybody.
Do not board a German ship without making sure you hold a second-class ticket;
try to get one that doesn’t include meals, and live on canned food. That works very well.
You can resupply anywhere en route. The longest stretch is seven days, from Aden to
Colombo. The cats can certainly be on board. They can have meat on board, alas, tears
come to my eyes at the mere thought of that hell. In Aden everything is good except for
the oranges. One is not fleeced there, at least not very much. And the Somalis are so
beautiful that you do not mind losing money. My notes are still at customs; next week
I will send them to you.

[Several postscripts omitted.]

Until later,
Ivan
 17

The Enemies of Islam

Abdul-Hadi El Maghrabi
[Ivan Aguéli]
Translated from Italian by Alessandra Marchi

This article was written in 1904 by Aguéli, then aged thirty-five, under his Muslim
name (Abdul Hadi El Maghrabi), early in his second and longest period in Egypt.
It was published in Il Convito/Al-Nadi, in several installments, and shows us
Aguéli’s political and religious positions during this period. It discusses Islamophobia
(islamofobia), and may well be the first ever use of a term that has since become
widely used.1

Introduction

In this column we will publish a series of articles in which we will make every
effort to be as impartial and fair as possible.2 We gave this task to our editor Abdul-
Hadi El Maghrabi, who lived for a long period of time in Europe and is an expert
on the subject, and judges people mainly on the basis of their position regarding
Islam. We will begin by dealing with a question raised by Arafate3 in its penultimate
number, a question as interesting as it is delicate, being the disdain of Europeans for
Muslims.4
Our editor says that those educated Europeans, who are not fanatics of
Protestantism or of Roman or Slavic Catholicism, nor of socialism or of any barracks
or bag philosophy, never despise Orientals save when they themselves despise their own
religion and the Shariʿa. As a matter of principle, the management shares this opinion,
and we will later demonstrate that the only true friends of the Orient are those who
want Muslims to observe their own religion. Even those who use violent methods love
Muslims more sincerely than those who do not [but] want Islam to be abandoned little
by little, using sweet means and caressing the evil instincts with which the human
heart is filled in all countries.

The Management
206 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

Why Muslims Are Detested: Islam Should Not

Be Confused with Muslims
The June 23 [1904] issue of Arafate includes a very interesting and striking article on
the bad opinion that a large number of Europeans have of Muslims in general. I find
that the author does not make a clear difference between those who are forcibly the
enemies of Islam and those who are not, yet blaming more or less rightly or wrongly a
large number of Muslims.
I do not claim that the Arafate columnist is not saying the truth, but he does not
give the whole truth that he could have given, and for this reason I want to respond to
the amiable journal, of which we all appreciate the efforts and capability. Our article is
not a refutation, but a kind of complement, because I only want to put things properly
and give the facts their right value, which, it seems to me, is a principle of elementary
wisdom. At the same time, this article will serve as a response to Arte,5 from which we
have accepted remarks with much regard, as they have been made very sincerely. An
adversary in good faith can never be an enemy.
I have myself been convinced up to the limit that has been called fanaticism, so I
know what it means to have convictions, and I find that the emotion of faith is infinitely
superior to the dogma for which it exists, and I have often seen a man who fought me
with rage until just the day before become a supporter. All I can do is to be happy to
respond to Arafate and Arte, which are antipodes.

On Islamophobia

In Europe there are people who hate both Islam and Muslims at the same time; there are
others who do not want Islam, yet sympathize with Orientals; and there are people who
love both Islam and Orientals, like the director of this journal. A last category includes
those who deeply admire Islam, the Prophet, the first Muslims and Arab civilization,
but who make a great distinction between them and the Muslims in our days, as they
do not consider them Muslims. They believe that true Islam has disappeared from the
earth and is without protagonists, having left an immense legacy of artistic and literary
beauty, an admirable monument founded on a prodigious leap of humanity; in short,
they believe that Islam no longer exists save in some precious artistic masterpiece or
in a few hundred beautiful books of mysticism, science and poetry, but never in the
hearts of the men of today.
The first category includes mainly Catholic clerics, who, by dogma, must consider
Muslims, as well as all non-Catholic Christians, damned in this world and in the next.
Indeed, there are many ignorant people who believe this damnation as evident due to
outward signs, such as the small fact that Arafate has mentioned: educated Parisians
of the bourgeois class believe that when a Muslim washes himself, the water fills with
worms. We cite this detail on the authority of Arafate because such abuse is insulting
even to those who use it; now, when such a thing happens in the middle of Paris, “ville
lumière,” what cannot happen in the midst of rural populations! There are thousands
 The Enemies of Islam 207

of Oriental Christians who have always lived among Muslims, who seriously believe
that Muslims are obliged to wash four or five times a day (ablutions) in order not to
rot! And they tell this to the Europeans, among whom there are enough fools to believe
it. Do not good Catholics believe that Jews cannot celebrate Easter according to the
rite of their religion without slaughtering a Christian child? Does there not exist a
whole literature based on these absurdities? But a Muslim who believed that this is the
opinion of the majority of Europeans would do better not to say so, because he would
risk being considered as stupid as the Catholic obscurantists.
Arafate also quotes the book of [Daniel] Kimon.6 I can say that this is not the way
Europeans are persuaded. Once the book is read, the author’s exasperation is very
amusing, and the reading ends by concluding only one thing: “Here is a gentleman
who does not like Muslims.” Enough. Such attacks always go in favor of the one who is
their target. May it please God that Muslims never have enemies!
Added to this rather grotesque category, there is a certain number of Protestant
clerics and materialists who are as fanatical as any inquisitor.7 This “English-style”
and “socialist-style” Islamophobia (islamofobia) [is] like the Islamophobia which
we discussed [above]8 that takes root in Latin countries and can be classified as
“Hispanic-Franco-Levantine type” Islamophobia, a baroque formula for a baroque
thing.
There are two more types of Islamophobia: the German type and the Russian type.
The German type is confused with the theory of inferior races: it has its origin in a
philosophical school commonly called “the philosophy of the barracks,” which aims to
prove logically and philosophically that the Aryans alone are those who have human
rights, and not all of them, but only the Germans, who are Aryans par excellence: for
this, one is German or is a Negro. It is extremely dangerous to laugh at such a theory,
since this school—systematically, logically, philosophically—establishes that Germany
has not only the right, but the sacrosanct duty to subject all the other people of the
earth, to forbid them to think, to live, to speak otherwise than in German. Luminaries
of this lovable school do not yet preach a crusade against Islam, since the emperor,
who sometimes has excellent ideas, has discovered that it is not yet a good time. It will
be for later.
However, we should not believe that all Germans belong to this ridiculous school.
There are Germans who really have common sense and wide erudition; we can just
remember that half of the best European works on Islam are in German, and that
[Hans] Barth, the German author of Droit du Croissant [The Right of the Crescent],9
wrote the best work on the Armenian and Bulgarian issues,10 which is a real treasure
trove of precious information, of which even the smallest sheds new light on those
mysterious events and their causes.
We will discuss Russian Islamophobia in detail on another occasion. It is a Byzantine
Islamophobia and simply consists in telling the Turks: “Do not believe in the Qur’an,”
it is a book that spoils your soul and body. Be Russian, that is, be like us; then you will
have everything you want. Now, everyone knows that Russians want no more than
three things: icons, vodka, and the [Cossack] nagaika [whip].
All these people are more or less clerical: the doctrines vary a little, but all these
“believers” resemble each other in deceiving themselves.
208 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

Every cleric is Islamophobic, that is obvious! About a century and a half ago all
of Europe was clerical, ergo Islamophobic, and then all possible evil was thought
about Muslims: but now times have changed a lot, especially in the so-called liberal
countries, like Italy, France, and England among the great powers, and Switzerland, the
Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries among the second-order powers. In all
these countries discussion is perfectly free and everyone has the right to expand their
ideas and theories, provided they don’t attack the honor, life, or property of citizens.
Furthermore, there are still in these countries, especially before the Armenian
turmoil, considerable elements of real Islamophilia. Now, it must be confessed that
Muslims have not taken any advantage of free institutions or Islamophile tendencies
to end once and for all the ridiculous legends which have been spread about Islam and
Muslims from a century before the crusades to the present day, legends unceasingly
revived through the biased and fabulous stories of the missionaries, the Christian
priests of the Orient.

On European Regard for Islam

As is known, however, there is a large number of people in Europe who know Islam
very well and who recognize its value; but it must be made clear that the cause of this
phenomenon is due in large part not to Muslims, whose sacred duty would be to make
Islam loved and respected, but to a select group of artists and scholars, among whom,
and above all among the scholars, there is a large number of Israelites.
[Above]11 I spoke about the causes of European disdain for Muslims; I spoke about
those who act by parti pris, and about whom nothing can be done. First of all, they
are clerics, whether they are believers in Christ, materialists, or Germans. I discussed
people who hate Muslims through ignorance of what Islam is. Those are at the same
time excusable and correctable; excusable above all because Muslims did not do
anything to spread the knowledge of Islam in Europe.
Now I will discuss the Orientals who make themselves hated.
Europeans designate the inhabitants of the East with three terms: Levantine, Oriental,
and Muslim. The first term designates a very special population, spread throughout the
Levant; their religion is very vague, but they have many priests, many superstitions, a
good dose of Byzantinism, but rarely of theology and devotion. They speak all languages
without knowing any one, in the sense that they know how to express their ignominy in
all the spoken idioms, but they are absolutely incapable of reading and understanding
a single line of any literary work. They have an instinctive and ferocious hatred for all
that is beauty, generosity, or mysticism. They know only one thing in life: money and
nothing else, and all means are good to succeed in getting it. They cannot conceive
another form of consciousness outside the fear of the gendarme. It is precisely these
scoundrels who inspired in that fine psychologist the Count de Gobineau so much
anxiety for the future of Europe in the Orient.12 As regards nationality, they are above
all Armenians, then Syrians, Lebanese, Coptic, Greeks, and rarely Jews, whatever the
anti-Semites say. It is useless to add that a sense of disdain is always associated with the
 The Enemies of Islam 209

term “Levantine”; the term “Muslim” in Europe does not have this meaning, except in
those circles whose members are progressively diminishing. We have already spoken
enough of them, so it is not worth to come back to this.
There are so many good memories attached to the term “Muslim”: first of all the
whole of medieval Spain—Seville, Cordoba, Toledo, Granada, the Alhambra—and
then Baghdad, Damascus, Samarkand, Delhi, Agra, Lahore, Golconda [Fort], and the
whole of flowered, artistic, poetic, and spiritual Persia. I can guarantee that outside
clerical and colonial [circles], which are two monstrosities, there is not a young man
susceptible to fantasies and to the taste of the marvelous who does not feel his heart
beating stronger at the very term “Orient,” which for him is a kind of magic formula,
which makes one see, as in a flash, a whole universe of glory and splendor.
We must not forget that the Italian [Renaissance] and Romanticism are the two
poles of modern civilization in Europe, and that outside of them there only remains
the hysterical Puritan, the German pedant, the socialist, the colonial, and the clerical,
all very ugly things. Now, Romanticism is two-thirds Oriental.
The Arabs are known in Europe above all through the Maghrebis, meaning the
Muslims of the Berber countries: Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans. Now, despite
the conquest and the strict laws against the natives, the Algerians have been able to
inspire sympathy and at the same time respect among the intellectual flower of French
society, and it seems to me that Muslims do not realize enough of the gratitude due to
them because of the good attitude taken before the winner. But the truth will come to
light one day or another.

On the Modernized European Egyptian

It is clear then that the term “Levantine” evokes great disdain, while “Muslim” does
quite the opposite, and that these two terms refer to two essentially different worlds.
However, the sad mission of Egypt has been to have merged these two incompatible
elements into one body. They wanted to combine what was essentially bitter with what
was healthy, and this has produced nothing but total corruption, since the Egyptians
themselves wanted to confuse things, and it would be in bad taste to get angry with
those who have only confused the names. Once all the symbols used to distinguish
them from Levantines have been abolished, Muslims, disturbed when they are taken
for Levantines, receive nothing but what is due to them. They would deserve something
more—that is, the disdain of other Muslims—since they put the entire Muslim world
in a bad light in front of educated Europeans, who can be very clever even without
being Orientalists. Semi-European official Egypt is by no means a line of connection
between intellectual Europe and the Muslim world, but just the opposite.
When you see a traveler who has good taste admiring the vestiges of the past but
obliged to hold his nose in front of the present, let it be known by all that the one
who makes him sick is not the good Sunni Muslim, whose behavior is always very
much correct, nor the fellah [farmer] who has many good qualities (although negative
if you wish), but the ignoble Levantine, the embodiment of all ancient and modern
210 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

baseness, together with his emulator, the modernized European Egyptian. You must
also know that when you are inspired by a great collecting cloaca, where all the rubbish
of the three parts of the ancient world meets, and when you can do nothing but despise
yourself, you must not complain.

To be continued.
[In fact, no further articles on this topic were actually published.]
 18

Pure Art
Abdul-Hâdi
[Ivan Aguéli]
Translated from French by Nadine Miller

This article was written in 1911 by Aguéli, then aged forty-one, under his Muslim
name (Abdul-Hâdi), during his final period in Paris. It was published in La Gnose
in two installments as one of a number of articles by Aguéli gathered under the
title “Pages Dedicated to Mercury (Sahaif Ataridiyah).” This article is Aguéli’s key
text when it comes to art, and is discussed by Patrick Ringgenberg in Chapter 14.
The footnotes are those given in the original, mostly added anonymously by René
Guénon, but some probably by Aguéli.

The title of this series of articles [“Pages Dedicated to Mercury, Saha’if Ataridiya”] is
in itself a commentary on the diversity of subjects we are dealing with here.1 In any
case, in no way do we wish to expound on contemporary aesthetics, but only want
to delineate the question, demonstrate the importance of pure art in esoteric studies,
outline the principles of this art, and illustrate our theory by a few brief reviews serving
as examples.
The visual arts are, as it were, the graphology of the human soul in that they are a
spontaneous if abstract disclosure of personal and superior longing. The study of these
arts is an excellent way of learning how to see, as well as of providing training in solar
logic, knowledge of which is practically indispensable for being able to devote oneself
to the metaphysics of form. In many cases this is situated between theory and practice.
Those who have read Tolstoy—who I would by no means describe as an initiate—will
perhaps remember one of the heroes in his novel War and Peace, who, when struck by
a bullet, looks up at the blue sky in utter astonishment, as if he were seeing it for the
very first time. The sensation of the luminous void, comforting and rich in thought that
ordinary words cannot convey, is in a sense the raw material from which one might
fashion an esoteric mentality. With great regret I confess my ignorance of ancient
Greek civilization, but I suppose that the philosophers of Hellenic antiquity used the
word “music” in a much wider sense than only that of signifying harmonious sounds.
By this term they may have wished to express the emotive cypher, which evokes a new
world, approximately what nowadays we might call esthesis, sense experience or the
process of perceiving. One can say that art is the passion that practices mathematics;
212 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

mind playing with matter. However, one must bear in mind that passion here stands
for mind, and that mathematics relates to matter, of which it is the perfect science.
Moreover, matter itself is a science, and science is matter. Now, whatever the preachers
have to say about it, matter as the “Great Innocent” is absolutely sacred. Above all it is
so thanks to the Holy Virgin and the Immaculate Conception, the fundamental and
indispensable dogma, without which esotericism would be nothing but an idle quietist
daydream or some form of warped addiction.a
More specifically, art offers a glimpse of “motionless time” or “the permanent
presence of the extra-temporal and undying self,” which in turn leads to the knowledge
of the fourth dimension, the esoteric importance of which it is unnecessary to dwell
upon.
Besides, in publications devoted to esoteric studies numerous people have written
about modern music. Thus I am only following a precedent, though in a more
generalized sense.
I can speak only of pure art, the only one that is of interest here. That is why I
distinguish between cerebral and sentimental art.2 The latter, which is most widespread,
produces its effect primarily by means of the viewer’s memory, by the association of
ideas, by stirring more or less confused recollections. By contrast, the former impresses
itself directly, without any intermediary, through an internal material sensing of the
beating pulse of life itself. Please note that it is the great range of its scope that accounts
for its superiority, distinguishing the abstract from the concrete, even quality from
quantity—as well as the concentration of everything between these two extremes. It
is useless trying to make people of a secular bent understand the primordial grandeur
of a realistic work of art, in which material accuracy increases in direct proportion to
the abstraction the designer of the piece achieves from his own person, and his self-
effacement in life universal.b Understanding this transcendent simplicity is a line of
demarcation separating the vulgar from the elite.
When one speaks of pulsation, one means rhythms, that is to say, an effect of
numbers.c Pure art brings to bear its astounding authority over the spirit solely by the
fact that it takes from matter only its subtleties and its immutable laws, leaving all the
rest. Actually, in the final analysis, matter is limited by time and space, both of which
are directly ruled by numbers. An English aesthete whose name escapes me once said,
“In art everything is sequence, contrast and repetition.” In this more than anything lies
the knowledge of aesthetic perception.

a
 The author has shown us Arabic texts that support his claims. These texts are not manuscripts
of dubious provenance, but rather books printed in Muslim countries under the auspices of the
religious authorities which are often hostile to esoteric ideas. It is strange that the Catholic Church
has for so many centuries been able to ignore a dogma of such importance; and what was the
remarkable event that has finally caused that neglect to be redressed?
b
 When overcome by bitterness, Cezanne used to say, “I am off to the country.” Gauguin went to Tahiti
primarily to re-immerse himself in the primitive world of simple feelings. In a way, this return to the
origins was a bath of innocence. Parisian critics could not comprehend that his journey was more
of a displacement in time than in space.
 It is through the dhikr that the dervishes assimilate certain rhythms. The dhikr is thus a type of
c

Hatha Yoga.
 Pure Art 213

When, for instance, according to the principles of the purity of art, we refuse to
see anything in a picture but color upon canvas, the esoteric cast of mind concurs
with common sense—as it always does, I might add. By this we mean to say that
picture painting must be pictorial and sculpture sculptural, etc. All feeling aroused
by the subject falls without the artistic ambit and is therefore detrimental because
inappropriate, even if it is morally correct. Anything that art expresses by means
other than eloquent proportion, i.e., numerical harmony possessing individual
and impassioned significance, is from the Devil. That is why a still life by Chardin
(vegetables, kitchen utensils) has greater artistic value than the pompous religious and
historical tableaux of our academic painters.
Whoever scorns the art of still life is not a painter. He may be a man of letters, a
poet, or whatever you like, but not a painter, for what is called “still life” on canvas
corresponds to mime in the dramatic arts.
Every act of the visual arts consists of imposing one’s impassioned or enamored
will upon three-dimensional Euclidean space with well-considered emphasis, in other
words, through drawing. In its widest and most artistic sense, this term signifies the
form, which always implies light, hence color, expressly or implicitly. The perfect identity
of drawing and coloring, as it is commonly called, is the touchstone of the artistic or
non-artistic nature of a piece, for the antithesis of line and color finds its immediate
resolution in light. One need only consider a drawing of the old masters: despite the
monochrome or the black and white it always gives us the impression of color.
Their paintings, though blackened or faded by the passage of time, always appear lit
by a sun created by God specifically for each one of them.
To summarize, pure visual art is not so much the creation of objects as it is the
establishing of personal and deliberate proportions in all directions of Euclidean space.
We shall represent each dimension of this space by its typical axis. We therefore have
three axes: the vertical, the horizontal, and the optical or visual, as I choose to call the
front to back direction, which passes from the eye to the horizon. I wish to avoid the
term “perspective,” because in current use it has only a very narrow meaning, that of
linear perspective, to the exclusion of all else. Now in art, the solar perspective, and
above all the perspective corresponding to the mental state of the affected viewer, to
mention only two, are far more important than the engineer’s perspective.
The element of mystery in art manifests above all in drawing along that axis. Its
harmony with drawing along the two other axes (the vertical and the horizontal) is
what causes line and color to melt together to form an impression of luminosity that
gives a work of art its life and magic. Its accuracy can never become the object of any
calculation, no matter how ingenious, while the drawing upon the two other planes
bears calculation and discussion up to a certain point. The profundity of a painting, that
is to say, its luminous, mental or other perspectives, arises exclusively from spontaneity
and inspiration. Either you have got it or you have not. If you have not got it, you cannot
have it, save through an unexpected act of deliverance, whereas anyone can be taught to
draw in the other two directions. Such a drawing might even possess a certain interest
beyond the pictorial. It might be literary, dramatic, psychological, whatever you like.
But from the point of view of pure art, it will never be more than a platitude, a banality.
The drawing of some of the modern masters is a mental one. The figure is not what
the material lines represent, but another, implicit one, ever so precise, which is formed
214 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

by the tendencies of these lines. It is drawing by obliquely marked out movement. A

dynamic parallelogram [Figure 18.1] will help us grasp this idea.
A and B are the lines that are expressed. They are the components of the
parallelogram; C is their resultant. It is implicit, and its direction and intensity
determine the mental figure that was the object of the artistic activity. An average
drawing has an incalculable number of components and resultants; I am just
formulating the theory.
The fundamental antithesis, the solution of which is the artist’s task, is feeling
(individual love, personality, nature) versus style (collectivity, external arrangement,
tradition). Exclusive perfection of style produces a flawless but meritless work of
art. Without feeling, there is no merit, but a personal work of art lacking style is a
confusion of merits and defects which is hardly any better than an impersonal work in
cold style. Paris wields its absolute power over all modern art only on account of the
correct balance it strikes between tradition and nature. Nowhere but in Paris does one
see supposedly romantic painters appreciating and studying the ancient masters in an
intelligent way. The most ostensibly modernist painters are at the same time the most
enthusiastic visitors to the Louvre. Tradition without initiative produces nothing but
trickery and illusion in art, mind you; whereas the secret of equaling the grand masters
of epochs more fortunate from the point of view of beauty consists of combining
initiative with method, of joining the enamored and personal study of nature with
the understanding and sense of taste engendered by age-old tradition. It is thus that
masterworks of royal allure are born, for although they are of personal style, they give
us the impression of a collective subservient to the benevolent and hieratic mandate
of a single personal and luminous will. The purest and most cerebral painters of the
nineteenth century are Daumier and Cézanne. Among our youthful contemporaries
are Picasso, Le Fauconnier, and Léger. We will return to this topic in the next issue of
La Gnose.

Figure 18.1 Abdul-Hâdi [Ivan Aguéli], Dynamic parallelogram, 1911.

 Pure Art 215

Pure Art—continued3
(For the understanding of the following, we will first summarize the first part of this
article, published in the previous issue.)
We have found a profound difference between cerebral and sentimental art. From
an esoteric point of view, only the former is of interest to us. It teaches us solar logic
and helps us develop a sense of motionless time or the permanent presence of the extra-
temporal and undying self, without which the fourth dimension is not possible.
This art, based on the emotive cypher, corresponds, in part, to classical Western
music. There are several Muslim esoteric treatises in the guise of an explanation of the
principles of Arabic grammar. The esthesis, sense experience or process of perceiving, of
sentimental art is indirect. It operates primarily in the viewer’s memory by associations
of ideas, through stirring of confused memories, atavistic or quotidian. Cerebral art
deserves to be called pure art, because the process of its perception is direct (direct
esthesis), through its ability to impress without the intervention of any alien self or
external object, solely by an inner apprehension, an internal sensing of the beating
pulse of life itself, in other words by its rhythm. Now, in any psycho-physiological
activity, rhythm is nothing but the number, the count. This is why the “dhikr” of the
dervishes [Sufis] is an essential assimilation of certain initiate rhythms. Therefore, the
first condition for a sacred or even a sacerdotal language is that it can pace itself without
much difficulty, that is to say, that its consonants and vowels find an easy balance of
their own accord. From a gnostic point of view, the importance of pure art is to link
the concrete with the abstract, quantity with quality, space with time, only through the
ultimate limit of matter, meaning, through numbers. This is what I call pure art, for it
uses only the sheer principles of matter, that which is most profound, most general and
most subtle about it. Therefore, we say that all feeling stemming from the subject falls
without the artistic ambit, hence it is harmful, on account of its irrelevance. Anything
that art tries to express by means other than eloquent proportion, in other words
through numerical harmony having an individual and impassioned meaning, is from
the Devil.
Every act of visual art consists in imposing one’s passionate or enamored will upon
three-dimensional Euclidean space by means of well-considered emphasis, in other
words through drawing, through form-giving, in the widest sense of the word. Now,
form indicates light, and light indicates colors, whether expressed or implicit. It is thus
conceivable that, given a certain elevation of the spirit, the antithesis of line versus
color may vanish into luminous perfection.
The identity of line and color is the criterion of accuracy of the solar or mental
perspective. It is the perspective of the affected viewer, and it is formed by a novel
arrangement of the three planes. Only the dominant one is what is called subjective;
the rest follow known laws.
This article addresses itself only to those who know what the mental perspective is.
Those who do not know what this means would do better to read something else. But
whoever really wants to learn about it need only study the world of Muhyiddin ibn
ʿArabi. If lacking the language skills, one may simply study Arab art. You need only
consider why ancient monuments of purely Arab architecture, even the most modest,
always appear to be larger than life. They seem to grow and expand as you gaze at them,
216 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

a kind of spreading of wings or a fan being opened. However, in the absence of Arabic
scholarship, one may just as well study the transformation that space always undergoes
at the approach of death. One need only treat with artistic attention a moment of real
and conscious mortal danger. There are many sailors and soldiers who engage in the
study of the Kabbalah; they most frequently are products of this school.
The human antithesis that the artist is called upon to resolve is that of feeling
versus style. There are various approaches to this problem, depending on the different
forms of universal opposition. To name only a few of these: there is individual love,
personality, nature, the innate gift (on the side of feeling), versus community, external
order, tradition, acquired skill (on the side of style). Without feeling, one produces
work of a banal style, impeccable, perhaps, but equally without merit. A work lacking
style results in a confusion of flaws and strengths, which is hardly better than a cold
work of style, soulless, and vaguely degraded and dishonorable.
The aim of the scrupulous artist is a personalized style, a combination of the loving
and personal study of nature and the intelligence and taste developed by the study of
the artistic past. Art is the balance between nature and tradition, not only in alchemy,
but also in aesthetics.

***

We can say that all depicted feeling oscillates between two poles, China and Spain.
China represents that element of inner feeling termed formal sequence, whereas
Spanish art transports you all at once into the novel world of the artist, the fullness of
its perspective erasing all preoccupation with the past and the future. Chinese art is
to be savored one morsel at a time. By contrast, Spanish art encloses you in a mental
atmosphere of simultaneous bursts of light. In art, China signifies time, while Spain
stands for space. I must add, however, that without the joining of both these elements
there is never any art at all, that is, no progress towards God through the union of
complementary contrasts in formal reality. Both China and Spain each provide this
union, but not in the same way: what in one is the beginning, in the other is the end.
The personality of the Chinese artist becomes evident through a sequence of tones
against an expanding and authoritative background of tradition, whereas the Spanish
artist manifests his self by simultaneously accentuating the three traditional planes
of space. Hence the emotional intensity of his art against which the shapes stand
out. In art, Italy is closer to China than to Spain, while France is closer to Spain, and
Tintoretto is the most Spanish of the great Italian artists. Many people may object
to my classification of French aesthetic perception, but here I am only speaking of
principles. One need only consider the French primitive painters to note the enormous
difference existing between them and the old Flemish, German, or Italian masters.
Only a Spanish connection can be attributed to them.
Nowhere is the union between sequence and simultaneity more complete, more
profound than in Arabian, African, and Malayo-Polynesian art. By African art I
mean not only the sculptures of Egyptian antiquity, but also that of the Berbers of
the Sudan [now known as Mali] and of the Abyssinians. Certain elements of Khmer
 Pure Art 217

art must be linked to Malay art as well. I would like to use a single name for all these
forms of beauty: equatorial art, although Egypt and Arabia are not, strictly speaking,
tropical countries. Singhalese art, antique Javanese art, and even Dravidian art must be
excluded, because a Nordic element has deflected their primitive trend.
Equatorial art is distinguished among all other art forms by a high degree of what
I can only call living immobility, which lends extraordinary significance to all its
productions—even to the most modest. It possesses a character of eternity and infinity,
which exerts the fascination of great calm upon the mind, and has much greater mind-
blowing power than the most sophisticated narcotics.
The contradictory and countermanding antithesis of this art is (modern) German
art. Despite its ecstasy, equatorial art is never sentimental; the other is always so and
cannot be otherwise. The former is always cerebral, despite the intensity of its emotion;
the other is never so. The artist of the tropics, even a savage, instinctively knows that
the balance of aesthetic perception is based on trinitarian accord, the very foundation
of the eurythmic tradition. All Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and French artists are agreed
on this matter, whereas the German artist, even though he may be a first-class scholar,
never sees more than two spatial planes. This is the only reason for their lack of success
in Paris; chauvinism has nothing to do with it, no matter what they say about it. Have
we not seen the French unduly exaggerate even the slightest musical quality of Wagner
at the expense of Berlioz?
The Purists, though quite numerous, form a homogeneous group. In spite of this,
they are by no means dogmatic, far less are they plagiarists. They may be quite distinct
from each other, but they differ to a much greater extent from other painters, as they
pursue the same end by the same path. I believe all their theories can be summed up by
saying that they seek the truth in the accuracy of light, by way of the greatest simplicity
of means. The result of this double condensation is an intense and personal theory,
and an art of frankness and lucidity. In the face of a Purist work of art, we know at first
glance who we are dealing with. The bias of its extreme clarity alone makes it worthy of
respect, if not necessarily likable, since it is never a waste of time.
In every school, there is a doctrine (theory) which points to the goal, and a discipline
(practice) which leads to the goal proposed by the theory. Let us examine both these
terms in the given case. Is pictorial truth found exclusively in the accuracy of light? I
would say that this is the case, and all French painting asserts that the most important
thing in a painting are the values, meaning the exact, and intelligent distribution of
light. Moreover, this is the architecture of space and the balance of masses in the void.
There are unformed rough shapes that convey a striking impression of reality. This
is due to the superb accuracy of certain principal values which serve as the contours
giving the objects their forms.
You may object that establishing the gradation between a white spot and a black
spot is not an occupation that engages man’s higher faculties, but here you are deeply
mistaken. Wisdom (ḥikma) is nothing but the art of setting everything in its proper
place, of giving it its correct value, of presenting it in its true light. The unconscious
(or subconscious) esoteric proclivities of the Purist painters—some of whom have
realized the admirable type of transcendental beast—have grasped the fact that this
humble manual labor, this tiny detail of nothing at all, is in fact the Great Arcanum,
218 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

the core of orthodoxy, the crown of sacred and primitive tradition. Therefore they offer
up everything to the correctness of tone. This alone proves that the first principle of
this school is absolute honesty and common sense. It is deplorable to see them treated
as jokers who are just making fun of people. People whose sole discipline consists
in turning away from anything that might muddle their predominant idea cannot be
liars. The only reproach a staunch opponent might level against them could be their
desire for too much clarity, for pushing the evidence as far as brutal nakedness. To this
attack one might respond by saying that there is paradisiacal nudity versus profane
nakedness, and that the Lady of the Well [the Virgin] can be no better clad than in a
ray of sunlight. It is good to have intelligent opponents, for they teach you in spite of
themselves.
You might also say, perhaps we do not understand well enough the relations
between the self and a conscious gradation from white to black. I maintain that the
light of the same Sun is not the same for everyone. We have (in the previous issue
of this Review) posited in principle that the artist is one for whom God seemingly
has created a special Sun. It is by bringing into evidence the light of this Sun, of his
very own personal Sun, through the efforts of a simple diligent laborer, that the artist
reaches the heights of wisdom and character. I see nothing wrong in it if he likes to
imagine that his personal Sun is really the only one existing in the Universe. It is more
a matter of his inner awareness; perhaps his quirky preoccupation with this harmless
obsession forms a part of his occupational hygiene. There are few things in modern life
that are a solace to the artist; a bit of alcoholism—figuratively speaking, of course—is
therefore a venial sin.
Simplism is the principle not only of all art but also of all activity of the spirit.
It is the seal of mastery. Cézanne with his bias towards parallel strokes, from the
upper right of the canvas to the lower left, uses it as a means for controlling a material
element of his work, this being an element that distracts searching artists from the
highest problems of painting. Neither able nor willing to remove this essential and
often rebellious material, he regulated it by confining it into conventional shapes, from
which he fashioned eloquent rhythms. By thus controlling it, he was able to easily
guide it into his technical speculations, from which were born the superb visions that
became his magnificent works of high cerebrality. The Purists of our day have taken
up and expanded on this idea, and compared to other painters, their drawing is what
algebra is to ordinary arithmetic. The reduction of all forms to geometrical figures
gives an unfamiliar appearance to their works which shocks the uninitiated. It is,
however, an ingenious system for determining with precision, not only the masses,
planes, and distances, but also the values and the chiaroscuro. Thus an indissoluble
link between line and color is obtained, which produces a rhythmic progression
directed towards the visual axis. It builds up luminous and psychic perspectives, by
which all the occult content of a work of art is made manifest. We have already saidd
that the drawing along the visual or optical axis cannot be arrived at through any sort
of apprenticeship, being the result of inspiration alone. The same is true of drawing by

d
Cf. the previous issue of La Gnose, 37.
 Pure Art 219

geometric abstraction and of mental drawing.e The latter, formed by implicit resultants
of which only the components are visually expressed, is in painting with regard to
color what in literature is “only the nuance,” to quote Verlaine’s famous aphorism.
Obviously, this system is not suitable for everyone; one needs to be very inspired and
self-assured to draw in this way.
Purist discipline makes all sentimentality impossible. But this loss on the one hand
is redoubled by the gain of cerebrality. I have seen works by Picasso wherein rays of
light have crystallized into a mosaic of precious cut stones and enormous diamonds
of extraordinary transparency. But I have also seen drawings by the same master
which are well able to stand up to those of the greatest Italians. It is through Purism
that we will eventually discover the secret of the ancient arts, Greek, Arab, Gothic,
and Renaissance. Picasso has advanced all the aesthetic sensibilities of ancient Iberia
by bending them towards the tenderness and virginity of Polynesia. Le Fauconnier
possesses all the magnificent qualities of the old primitives of France, in addition to his
modernity. Léger has taken up the aesthetic problem that haunted Ingres, who sought
the secret of Raphael. Raphael, in his turn, pursued the ideal of the Greeks. And yet
Léger has expressed all the beauty that Ingres sought, while remaining true to himself.
It goes without saying that the Purist of our day and age has taken any sort of guitar
out of the picture.
When we say that art is the union of contrasts, we mean in particular the union
of complimentary contrasts, above all that of time and space, of sequence and
simultaneity. The union of mutually exclusive contrasts is not our topic here, for it
falls not under the influence of Mercury. We can sum it up neatly and succinctly
by saying that rhythm is a sequence that unifies linear and dynamic contrasts; that
values, the contrasts between light and dark, are only rhythms towards depth of the
visual axis. That is why the perfect gradation of values immediately evokes the other
rhythms, those that advance along the other two axes, the horizontal and the vertical,
constituting form in the ordinary sense of the word. The Purists neglect the contrast
of complimentary colors for a reason, because the famous theory relating to these
has poisoned a whole generation of painters, yet it is no more than an experimental
theory. On the contrary, they pay more careful attention to the contrasts of dull and
dark colors, far more important contrasts than those of greens and reds for instance,
because they sometimes resemble a conflict between the active and the inert, or even
between life and death.
The Purist movement is the modern manifestation of the eternal principle of art for
art. Cézanne can be considered as its founder, while he himself carried on the tradition
of Chardin.

e
Ibid.
 19

Universality in Islam
Abdul-Hâdi
[Ivan Aguéli]
Translated from French by Nadine Miller

This article was written in 1911 by Aguéli, then aged forty-one, under his Muslim
name (Abdul-Hâdi), during his final period in Paris. It was published in La Gnose,
and is one of Aguéli’s key texts when it comes to Islam and Sufism, and is discussed
by Anthony T. Fiscella in Chapter 7 and, especially, by Meir Hatina in Chapter 11.
The footnotes are those given in the original.

We have attempted, under the form of a solar transfiguration of an exotic landscape, to

elaborate the doctrine of the real as “Ultimate Identity.”1 We have shown that despite
absolute unity, there are actually two realities, as seen from a disjointed, individuated,
human perspective: a collective and a personal reality. The former is acquired (imposed
or chosen), it is historical, hereditary, temporal, and pertaining to mankind. The latter
is original, innate, extra-temporal, pertaining to the sphere of the Lord. It may be
more or less obscured or obstructed, but it always exists. You cannot renounce it, it is
indestructible and inevitable, since it is the basis of everyone’s existence, that is to say,
the destiny to which any kind of spiritual and cosmic work is but a return.a The first is

a
 See the I Ching, interpreted by [Paul Louis Felix] Philastre [Le Yi: King; ou, Livre des changements
de la dynastie des Tsheou, Paris: E. Leroux, 1885], vol 1, p. 138; the 6th hexagram [gua], Song, § 150.
“The word destiny refers to the true reason for the existence of all things; failure to arrive at the
precise reason for the existence of all things constitutes what is called ‘to oppose destiny;’ wherefore
submission to destiny is considered as a return. To oppose it means not to conform in submission”
(Traditional commentary by Cheng [Yi]). “Destiny, or the Will of Heaven, is the true and correct
reason for the existence of all things” (Commentary entitled Original Meaning [Zhouyi benyi by
Zhu Xi]). I would like to add that in Chinese Muslims call themselves Huihui, which means “those
who return obediently to their destiny.” Muslim tradition maintains that Allah calls to Himself all
things so that they come to Him, willingly or unwillingly. Nothing can resist that call. That is why
in a general sense everything is Muslim. The human beings who come to Him willingly are called
Muslims in a more restricted sense. People who do not come to Him willingly, that is to say, those
who follow their destiny only by constraint, in spite of themselves, these are the unbelievers.
222 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

reality as it appears to ordinary people, meaning people in possession of their five senses
and their combinations according to the laws of mathematics and elementary logic. The
second reality is an awareness of eternity.b In the tangible world, the one corresponds to
quantity, the other to quality. Collective reality is often termed the Universal Will, but
I prefer to call it Necessity, reserving the term Will to signify personal reality. Will and
Necessity can be compared to Knowledge and Being. These terms are familiar, not only
to European thought since Wronski (as in Warrain: La Synthèse concrète, p. 169),2 but
also to an important school of esoteric Islam, followed especially in India. Knowledge
and Being literally correspond to al-‘ilm wa-l-wujūd [knowledge and presence], the two
primary aspects of the Divinity. There is little need to recall that only Will exists in an
absolute sense and that Necessity has only relative or illusory existence. All religions
and philosophies agree on this point. That is why a spiritual aristocracy can be found
everywhere. Muslims say: al-tawhīd wāhid [unity is singular], which literally and
properly interpreted means, “The doctrine of Ultimate Identity is basically the same
everywhere,” or put another way, “The theory of Ultimate Identity is always the same.”
But I wish to point out a distinct feature of Islamic teaching, the crucial importance
of the idea of Muhammad the Prophet. Will can attain to its fullness only through
Necessity; on the one hand through heavenly necessity, and on the other through the
effort of responding to the just demands of collective reality. This beneficial effort is
therefore indispensable, as a means for developing all the latent faculties of Will. The
negative inertia of the one is just as essential as the positive energy of the other. One has
as much need to receive as the other has a need to give. They therefore have a mutual
need of one another. In the rare cases when they actually operate as they should, there
will be no opportunity for them to ask which of them is better off.
In the order of romantic, humanist psychology, personal reality corresponds
somewhat to the element of Don Quixote, whereas collective reality corresponds to
Sancho Panza. Cervantes’s immortal masterpiece must be understood as an admission
of the impotence of Christianity (at least in the forms in which it is presently known
to us). Has this religion ever really been Catholic (meaning esoteric, Oriental) and
Roman (exoteric, Occidental) at one and the same time? It has never been able to be
one without detriment to the other. As for the Christians who are not beholden to
Rome, are they truly Christians? I do not know. When a religion seriously declares
that its ritual and dogma have no hidden or inner meaning, it has publicly admitted to
being a superstition, and is only worthy of being housed in a museum of antiquities.
Europe has made various attempts at merging Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into
a single person. All these attempts have failed, as the successful ones departed from
Christianity and blended into free thinking. I will mention only two of these failed
attempts, two extremes, the satanical and the grotesque: the Jesuit, and Tartarin of
Tarascon.3 I see only one Westerner capable of resolving the problem: Saint Rabelais.
But he was an initiate, and he probably knew that the solution has existed for centuries,
in the Malamatiyya. In order to illustrate our analysis, we shall compare the Malamati
with Tartarin. The former manifests Sancho Panza while hiding Don Quixote within
himself as a kind of ulterior motive that constantly haunts him, but which he never
declares openly. By contrast, Daudet’s hero externalizes the Don Quixote in the

b
See La Gnose, year 2, no. 2: 65 [Abdul-Hadi, “Pages dediees a Mercure (Sahaif Ataridiyah)”].
 Universality in Islam 223

Tartarin with his expeditions to distant lands, while their Sancho Panza, Tartarin in
flannel pajamas, remains well-hidden from everyone, except from the servant girl.
The personal and collective realities, Will and Necessity, exterior and interior, unity
and plurality, One-and-All merge in a third reality which only the religion of Islam
acknowledges, recognizes, and professes. This reality is the Muhammadan or prophetic
reality. Our Prophet was not only nabi [prophet], the eloquent recipient of inspiration,
but also rasūl [prophetic messenger], the law-giving messenger. Through al-nubūwwa
[prophesy], by his inspired eloquence, he affected the (intellectual) aristocracy, while
by al-risāla [the message], the Divine Law, he forestalled the complete decadence of the
people and their shortcomings. The fusion of the elite with the common, the aristo-
democracy of Islam, can be effected without violence and without chaotic disorder,
thanks to the particular Islamic institution of a type of conventional humanity, which
for lack of a better expression, I shall term the “average man,” or human normalcy.
Some Anglo-Saxon philosophers speak of “the average man” [in English in the
original], or the man of mediocrity, but I am not familiar enough with their theories
to venture an opinion. This type is always fictitious, never real. It acts as a neutral
and impersonal insulation that facilitates certain relations, foreseen and regulated in
advance, and makes impossible irregular contacts and overly personal relations among
people who do not wish to know each other socially. Being no one and being everyone,
with no tangible reality, always the rule, never the exception, it is only a universal
measuring device for all possible social, moral, and religious rights and obligations.
This formalism, this perfect equilibrium between various interests (material, spiritual-
material, and religious-ritual), this complete encasing of all exterior circumstances
of social and religious life, is the best promoter of Islamic propaganda. Thanks to
this, the social status of the Semitic Arab tribe, which is an ideal of justice, inclusion,
cooperation, and solidarity, was able to stretch across the entire universe.
Several sociologists, ethnographers, and poets have remarked on the perfection of
some truly primitive societies. But the virtues of the “savage” never extend beyond the
narrow boundaries of the tribe. That is why he is an ideal only in poetry. His antithesis,
present-day civilized man, hardly does any better regarding human inclusivity.
In the one, quality is developed to the detriment of quantity. In the other we have
quantity, which admittedly is something, but his quality is far from being praiseworthy.
Formalism, the introduction of the concept of the average man, allows primitive man
to reach universality without the loss of any of those precious characteristics associated
with his primeval and quasi-paradisal humanness.
It is precisely the “average man” who is the object of the Shariʿa or the sacred law
of Islam. It is very simple as long as there is no great external difference between the
elite and common folk. The basic wording is good enough. But with social progress,
the complications of life and the change in external conditions, the direct application
of the letter of the law would come to contradict the spirit of the law. The average
man has undergone a series of variations, the texts have acquired their commentaries,
and the science of jurisprudence has progressed with the demands of life. However,
the difference between the text and the commentaries is only apparent. Evolution is
natural and logical, whatever Orientalists of different walks of life have to say.
Certain prescriptions of Shariʿa law might appear absurd to European eyes. Yet they
do have their purpose. A universal religion needs to take into account all intellectual and
224 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

moral levels. Up to a certain point, the simplicity, the weaknesses, and the peculiarities
of others have a right to be accommodated. But intellectual culture also has its rights and
its requirements. Average man establishes a kind of neutrality around each individual
which guarantees all the individualities, though it also requires everyone to work for
humanity as a whole. History knows no other practical form of development of the whole
human. Experience bears irrefutable witness in favor of Islamic universality. Thanks to
Arab formulas, there exists an instrument for perfect understanding among all possible
races living between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. One can hardly conceive of
greater ethnic distances than those existing, for example, between a Sudanese and a
Persian, a Turk and an Arab, a Chinese and an Albanian, an Indo-Aryan and a Berber.
Never has any religion or civilization accomplished so much. Therefore, we can say that
there is no better agent of spiritual communication than Islam. Europe can only furnish
a material international. That is something, but it is not everything. Moreover, this
achievement is not accomplished by Christianity, but rather by the school of Western
positivistic thought, if not by free-thinking.
That is why we consider the prophetic chain of transmission to have come to an end,
to be sealed with the Prophet Muhammad, the Prophet of Arabs and non-Arabs alike,
because he is its peak, its culmination. The prophetic spirit is the doctrine of “Ultimate
Identity,” the One-and-All of metaphysics, the Universal Man of psychology, and full
humanity in social structure. This process began with Adam and reached completion
with Muhammad.

***

The word Islam is an infinitive of the causative verb aslama, to give, deliver, hand over.4
There is an ellipsis: li-llāhi (to God) is understood; al-Islāmu li-llāhi therefore means:
to hand oneself over to Allah, that is to say, to obediently and consciously follow one’s
destiny. So, since man is a microcosm, composed of all the elements of the universe,
it follows that his destiny is to be universal. If his superior faculties are dominated by
inertia, he is not following his destiny. As a religion, Islam is the path of unity and
totality. Its fundamental dogma is what is called al-tawhīd, that is unity, or the action
of unification. As a universal religion it comprises degrees, but each of these degrees
is truly Islam, which is to say that any aspect of Islam reveals the same principles. Its
formulas are exceedingly simple, but the number of its forms is incalculable. The more
numerous its forms, the more perfect the law. A person is a Muslim when he follows
his destiny, that is, his basic reason for existence. Since everyone carries his destiny
within himself, it is evident that all discussions about determinism or free will are
pointless. Islam, even in its exoteric form, is beyond this question. That is why the
great scholars never wanted to make any statement on this subject. It is impossible to
explain to an ordinary man how God does everything, how He is omnipresent, and
how every man carries Him within himself. All this is clear to the man “who knows
himself ” (man yaʿraf nafsahu), that is to say, his ego, his own self, and who knows
that all is vain but “the perception of eternity.” The ex cathedra pronouncements of the
mufti [jurisconsult] must be clear and comprehensible to all, even to an illiterate negro.
He has no right to give his opinion on anything but on a commonplace of everyday
 Universality in Islam 225

life. Besides, he will never do so, all the more so as he can avoid questions that exceed
his area of competence. It is this clear, well-known limitation between Sufi questions
and problems of Shariʿa which allows Islam to be esoteric and exoteric at one and the
same time without ever contradicting itself. That is why Muslims who understand their
religion never have any serious conflicts between knowledge and faith.
Now, the formula of al-tawhīd, or of monotheism, is the commonplace of Shariʿa. It
is entirely up to you personally what range you assign to this formula, for this depends
upon your Sufism. All you are able to deduce from this formula is more or less good,
provided, however, that your conclusion does not abrogate its literal meaning. For then
you would be destroying the unity of Islam, meaning its universality, its ability to adapt
and conform to all mentalities, circumstances, and times. Its formalism is essential; it
is not superstition, but a universal language. As universality is its principle, and the
purpose of Islam, and as on the other hand language is the means of communication
between beings endowed with reason, it follows that the exoteric formulas are as
important to the religious organism as are blood vessels to the animal body. I have
embarked on this subject mainly in order to demonstrate that “intelligence” (inter +
legere, al-‘aql), I mean universal intelligence, resides in the heart, the center of the
circulation of the blood.
Sentimentality has nothing to do with this location, since it has its own place in
the mucous membranes of the intestines, when it occupies its correct place within the
physiological organization.
Intelligence and discernment are the two principal aspects of human reason. The
one forms the concept of unity, the other that of plurality. Sound reason possessing
both these faculties, perfected to their highest degree, can thus conceive of the idea of
a Being which is One-and-All: but that Being is not the Absolute, which lies beyond
all intellectual processes. When you know that you can proceed no further, you have
arrived at the limits not only of knowledge but also of all that is knowable, scibile.
The admission of unknowability is cognizance of the Infinite (al-‘ajz ‘an [darak] al-
idrāk idrākun5 [The failure to attain perception is itself perception]). It is the only kind
there is, granted, but you will arrive at a disclosure of mysteries in affirming that this
is no paradox or merely a figure of speech, but a form of real knowledge, fertile, and
ultimately sufficient. Anything that is only exoteric inevitably leads to skepticism. Now,
skepticism is the point of departure for the elect. Beyond the limits of the knowable,
there is still scientific progress, but its insights turn entirely into negatives. They are all
the more productive, since they expose our poverty (al-faqr), that is to say, our need
of heaven. Aware of our needs, we will know how to formulate our requests. I speak of
requests, not of prayers, because one has to avoid at all costs anything that resembles
any sort of clergy. All that matters is to know how to ask, for in that case heaven is like
nature, which always responds with the truth when it is asked properly, but only then.
A chemical or physical experiment produces a revelation. If badly executed, it will
lead to error. Heaven will always grant a gift when it is asked as it ought to be asked. It
gives nothing or even harm when the request is badly made. This is an effect of divine
mutuality, or of the law of universal catadioptrics.c

c
According to one hadith, life is organized according to lex talionis, the principle of retaliation.
226 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

Sentimental moralists, Christians, Buddhists, and others have glorified humility.

Very well, but being humble or not is of no significance, since we are all nothings. They
have made a virtue of humility, a goal, whereas it is only a means, an exercise, a sort of
training. It is nothing but a small station along the way, where one may stop according
to the requirements of the voyage. Vanity is a stupidity. Humility at the wrong moment
can be just as stupid.
We have already seend that the Muslim credo [No ilaha (god) save Allah] begins
with a negation, followed by an affirmation. Both what I deny and what I affirm bear
the same name, A-L-H; however, in the first case, it is indeterminate (36) and in the
second case it is determined (66). I mean that the vague, indefinite is nonexistent,
but that the definite is what is real. Considering only the shape of the letters, it is a
transformation of the infinite, represented by the straight (vertical) line [of the letter
alif ‫( ]ا‬A), into the indefinite, represented here by the circle [of the letter ha ‫( ]ه‬H),
passing through the angle [of the letter lam ‫( ]ل‬L). In the case of the affirmation of the
definite, the angle (L) is repeated twice.
The greatest part of practical esotericism concerns destiny, the identity of self
and non-self, and the art of giving, based on the teachings of the faqirs [lit. “the
impoverished” or “the poor” also a common epithet for Sufis]. The order consists of
following one’s destiny obediently and consciously, which means to live, to live one’s
entire life, which is that of all lives, that is to say, to live the lives of all beings.e
Life is indivisible; what makes it appear to be divisible is that it is susceptible to
gradation. The more the life of self identifies with the life of non-self, the more intense
living becomes. The fusion of self into non-self takes place through the more or less
ritual, conscious, or voluntary gift. It is easy to understand that the art of giving is
the principal arcanum of the Great Work. The secret of this art consists in absolute
disinterestedness, in the perfect purity of the spirit in the act, i.e., of the intention; in the
complete absence of all hope of return, of any sort of recompense, even in the world to
come. The action must in no way resemble an exchange of goods. Consequently, it is
more perfect, more pure, to give to one who appears weak or inferior than to one who
is on an equal footing, or more powerful. From an esoteric point of view, to give to a
species far removed from one’s own is better than giving to one’s fellow men. That is why
the attraction of the opposite, the taste for the exotic, a love of animals, and a passion
for the study of nature are such indications of an esoteric disposition. The celebrated
poet Abu’l-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri,6 whom some consider a heretic, materialist, or freethinker,
in reality holds a very high rank in the spiritual hierarchy of esoteric Islam. To focus
on humanitarianism is therefore a social-sentimental error. A basic reduction of one’s
psychic and nutritional egoism is enough to be perfect in a social context, for all civic
virtues are only more or less successful policies, that is to say, advantageous. It is actually
impossible to do good to humanity without some ulterior utilitarian motive. Charity

 
d
La Gnose, year 2, no. 2: 64, and no. 3: 111 (errata in no. 2) [Abdul-Hadi, “Pages dediees a Mercure”].
 I am not referring to the theory of Ibsen: to live one’s life. Those who have not the courage, who
e

haggle over their pleasure, are ill prepared to receive esoteric ideas. Ibsen, Tolstoy, Nietzsche etc. are
all very respectable people, I in no way deny this, but they have no traditional value. Moralists of
local influence, they can interest us only as minor provincial prophets.
 Universality in Islam 227

towards one’s own kind is an obligation, an act of precaution, or of lofty foresight. It can
hardly contain anything enacted “only for God.” Sentimentality always leaves a stain of
egoism on anything undertaken in its name, be it only adorning oneself in attractive
motivations for simple actions. The Malamatiyya always find a set of bad reasons before
carrying out any acts of goodness they are called upon to perform.
Good done to an animal draws us even closer to God because our egoism is less
invested in this, at least in ordinary situations. The mental shift is greater, achievement in
the universal soul is further removed. You attach yourself to human beings, they become
attached to you for all sorts of practical reasons. The attachment of a human being to an
animal is of a higher order. In addition to this, it is very instructive, for according to the
formula: x is in relation to you as you are in relation to your cat, you can discover a great
many secrets of destiny. It is true that the action of the animal-lover is of great usefulness
from a sidereal point of view; but even to merely understand this usefulness, your egoism
must already have evolved considerably in the realm of the transcendental. A man who
perceives that the powerful judge him just as he himself judges the weak, such a man is
no longer in need of a spiritual guide. He is definitely on a good path, in the process of
becoming the Universal Law himself by beginning to incarnate inevitability. He may be
in need of technical instruction in order to evolve more quickly, but since he knows how
to give without conducting some kind of business transaction, he already has his own
private heaven. It would therefore be quite inappropriate to accuse of selfishness those
who cultivate a love of animals for an astral purpose, for instance in order to ward off
what in the internal order is called “misfortune,” or to restore as much as possible the
paradisiacal state of primordial humanity.f These are the people who know something,
and who employ their knowledge in order to obtain an earthly happiness which the
tradition regards as lawful.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the Grand Arcanum is the art of giving.
The absolutely pure and disinterested gift is the perception of nothingness in its
practical implementation. This crystallized perception is the touchstone—the best—
for verifying Existence in the Absolute. This precious instrument of investigation from
beyond can be very simple in its appearance, it may be rustic, even coarse, but it is
instantly spoiled when touched by a single atom of sentimentality. One may quote
Saint Rabelais, but one can never be cautious enough regarding Christian (in the
ordinary sense) or Buddhist theories.
The reader who has been kind enough to follow me thus far without fatigue or
irritation can easily comprehend that the humanitarian gift is the proper assessment
of our material advantages and disadvantages. In fact, anyone can see that it is helpful
for all if everyone possesses what is essential for a life worthy of a human being. True
charity begins at the level of the beast; it continues on to that of plants, but beyond that
initiatory knowledge is required. This knowledge leads to alchemy, which is human
charity towards stones and metals, i.e., towards inorganic nature. The climax of such
charity is to donate one’s Self to simple numbers, for the Universe is thereby maintained

 Muslim tradition speaks of a time when wild animals did not flee from man; they began to flee him
f

only after the fratricide of Cain. Prior to this event they sought his nearness for reassurance and
protection in the great peace that emanated from him.
228 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

through one’s rhythmical breathing. I venture so far as to indicate that cosmic charity
progresses in a reverse order to that of material evolution, as it is commonly called.
Thanks to the perfect harmony between the esoteric and the exoteric established by
Islam, we can speak of it any which way, that is to say, Islam bears being propagandized,
even its esoteric aspects—at least to a certain extent. Propaganda strengthens it,
enriching it from a purely intellectual point of view. Admittedly, several branches of
the Islamic sciences did not develop until several non-Arab peoples had joined the
fold of Islam. Observing this phenomenon, a number of Orientalists have attributed it
to a juxtaposition of the Aryan or Turanian spirit to the Semitic Arab mentality.7 This,
however, is erroneous.
The seeds of these sciences were already contained in Islam in its early form. As Islam
allowed for rationalism and freedom of thought, it sustained the obligation of making
itself comprehensible to newcomers, to assume a form that suited their mentality. This
process was accomplished through a collaboration of students and teachers. Questions
provoked answers. The rational sciences and scholastics of Islam were born from the
external need to formulate the subconscious. The Arabs brought nothing new to the
foreigners. All they did was to transform a bit of their gold into silver, so to speak, with
the unique aim of simplifying relations among peoples.
I urge students of Kabbalah to kindly note that through teaching others one teaches
oneself, from a purely scientific point of view; the internal is enhanced through the
external work; heaven gives to you just as you distribute among creatures the little you
already possess. But one needs to know how to do this.
Let it be said right at the outset that the term altruism is an empty word; it should
be banned from metaphysical discourse, because that “other” [alter] does not exist.
There is not the slightest difference between you and the others. You are the others, all
others, all things. All things and all the others are you. We are only mutual reflections
of one another. There is but one life, and all individualities are only inferences of the
destiny that radiates in the crystal of creation. The identity of self and non-self is the
Great Truth, just as the realization of this identity is the Great Work. If, in the case
of a robbery, you cannot understand that you are the robber at the same time as you
are the robbed; that, in case of murder, you are simultaneously the murderer and the
victim; if you do not blush from shame or guilt at the account of a monstrous, novel,
and inconceivable crime that you have never in your life been tempted to commit; if
you do not even minimally feel that you had something to do with the earthquake
in Turkestan or the plague in Manchuria, then you had better give up your esoteric
studies, because you are wasting your time.
More than anything else it is the criminal collectivity which demonstrates that
isolated action hardly exists at all, and that it is difficult to distinguish between one
person and another. I am not saying that all men are the same, but I am saying that
they are all “the same.” Let us consider a sequence of events. Have you ever noticed that
a general suspicion, albeit unjustified, gives rise to sufficient evidence of guilt around
an alleged perpetrator? It happens all the more quickly in the event that he is innocent
or has absolutely no knowledge of the crime committed. If he is guilty, but intelligent,
he can create a negative aura around his person, a negative and determined aura,
which repels the collective aura that threatens to overwhelm it. It is easy to see how the
 Universality in Islam 229

moral aura of a group slowly gathers around the nerve center of society, condenses and
assumes human form, most often that of the perpetrator of a crime. But this criminal
is only the striking hand. The true origin of the action is found in the group. Arguably,
the group has not engaged in any action, but it has caused something to happen, which
amounts to the same thing. That is why there are no innocents.g
When I state that everyone is guilty, I am not pleading for the acquittal of the
criminal. Even less am I advocating generalized punishment. Esotericism has nothing
to do with a code of law, which, no matter how bad, is a natural product of history and
of society. Man can only exercise human justice. Divine justice will always remain a
mystery for him. Wishing to handle this justice is, in our view, one of the most serious
crimes which man can commit. I would like to quote a few examples. Robbery and
murder are crimes, at least in principle; therefore, the robber or murderer must be
punished according to the current conventions of the society, but that is all. Once he
has undergone his punishment you are free to shun him or to consort with him. You
can refuse to give him your daughter in marriage, etc., but if you say that this man is
evil, that he deserves hellfire, etc., then you are worse than he is, because you wish to
set yourself up on the throne of God. You want to judge him in an area into which no
one has any insight.
Another example: you condemn prostitution, and you are not at all wrong in doing
so. Still, you cannot condemn the prostitute, unless there is a public breach of decency.
Her crime is nothing but a crime of reaction. In terms of current society, the man is
the interior, the cause, and the woman is the exterior, the effect. Woman sells her body,
because man sells his soul. You can apprehend the one, but the other, the truly guilty
one, escapes all pursuit, since he is anonymous and legion. We must limit ourselves to
judging the facts alone. It is impossible to judge conscience.
One last example: the outrageous acquittals of crimes of passion. Some people want
to see in this a sign of amorality. It is nothing of the sort. They are only statements of
the court’s incompetence. The scrupulous judge avoids pronouncing on cases of which
only God can have knowledge.
Universal consciousness is becoming more and more fatalistic. A long time ago
people used to say, “People get only the governments they deserve.” A good government
cannot rule a villainous people; it would have to be corrupted if it wished to hang on
to power. Day by day, the great truth of the logic of events is better understood: that
man is always judged after his own laws, that is to say, according to the laws which he
imposes on beings that fall under his vital influence. There are subtle links between
the executioner and the victim, as they are both two aspects of the same actuality.
Everyone can understand that poor people exist on account of the rich; that there
are ignorant people because of the learned; that there are depraved people because
the virtuous leave much to be desired. Many Islamic saints have repined at having
received the gift of second sight. They have perceived too many extraordinary things
in the minor events of everyday life. Those who seek superhuman faculties outside the
order are naive. When sorcerers’ apprentices incur no more than intellectual or moral
derangement, it is because God has shown them kindness.

g
All impersonal or anonymous crime is, a priori, collective crime.
230 Anarchist, Artist, Sufi

***

The law of universal poverty (al-faqr) is therefore a principle of Islam. Each one of us
is poor (faqīr), we are all poor (fuqarā’), because we are all in need of the Creator or
of creation, most often of both. As one needs to give in order to receive, it follows that
the great curse consists in no longer being able to do good, to have lost one’s right of
exercising charity. When you give, you need to give more humbly, so that the beggar
does not receive the alms from your hand.8
Above all, Islam is clearly distinguished from all religions, civilizations, or
philosophies by its concept of collective reality. All enlightened beings know that
collective reality is a fiction, and enlightened Muslims know this just as well, if not
better. Consequently, in order to follow the Prophet, he does not withdraw into the
desert, but pretends to take the world seriously. There is a hadīth [report of a saying of
the Prophet] which enjoins working for this world as if we thought to live for a thousand
years, while also working for the other world as if we expected to die tomorrow. In
Islam, the doctrine of identity and unity is better developed than in other systems
of thought. Its precious esoteric-exoteric quality derives mainly from its concept
of collective reality as an indispensable agent for the transformation of personal
reality into human universality or prophetic reality. Christianity and Buddhism
reject collective reality with suspicion and horror, and attempt to develop Universal
Man in devout stillness. Thus they differ qualitatively from Islam, as well as in their
psychological aspect. Quantitatively, Islam differs from esoteric Brahmanism in that
it is more expansive. Brahmanism is only local, at least from a practical point of view,
whereas Islam is universal. It differs from anti-doctrinarian positivism in its formal
and metaphysical aspect. It is in direct opposition to German philosophy, which has
completely distorted the idea of government by confusing the feudal system with the
aristocracy. Everywhere else but in Germany responsibility is the measure of nobility:
the nobler you are, the more responsible you are, and vice versa. According to Shariʿa,
the crime of the free and the nobleman is judged more severely than that of the slave
or the ignorant. Unfortunately, the feudal system everywhere has managed to arrange
things in such a way as to ensure its impunity, but even so it can be distinguished from
nobility, whereas in Germany, feudality is the only precondition to aristocracy. The
strong man in power is held in no way accountable for one to whom an inauspicious
fate has allotted an inferior position.
On the other hand, Islam has many points of comparison and contact with most
other systems of belief or of social organization. It is neither a mixed nor a new religion.
The Prophet expressly states that he has invented nothing whatsoever as far as dogma
or religious law is concerned. He has only restored the ancient and primeval faith. That
is why there are so many similarities between Taoism and Islam. This assertion is not
mine, but one that has been made by famous Muslim and Chinese authors. Taoism
differs in no way from Islam except in that it is exclusively esoteric, whereas Islam is
both esoteric and exoteric. That is why its doctrines can be propagandized, while those
of Taoism cannot. Islam embraces both neophytism and adepthood, whereas Taoism
acknowledges only the latter of these two forms of expansion.
274 Notes for Pages 187–194

of the Spiritual in Art (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013); Janis Lander, Spiritual Art and Art
Education (New York: Routledge, 2014).
43 Some of the works created by the students are to be seen on the School’s website
(www.psta.org.uk; Accessed June 18, 2019). One will also read there the ideals of
the School, directly inspired by the Traditionalists, and whose aim is—in the words
of Prince Charles—“to continue the living traditions of the world’s sacred and
traditional art forms” (https://www.psta.org.uk/about/hrh-the-prince-of-wales;
Accessed June 18, 2019).
44 Sorgenfrei, “The Great Aesthetic Inspiration,” 1–25.
45 This is particularly striking in the field of premodern Islamic arts, as mentioned
by Burckhardt, Nasr, Ardalan, Michon, Critchlow and Lings. On a sometimes
undifferentiated vision of Islamic cultures, inherited from nineteenth-century
Orientalism, Traditionalists have projected a generalizing metaphysical
interpretation, which occasionally ignores ancient sources that shed light on
the meaning of certain arts. See Ringgenberg, Les théories de l’art dans la pensée
traditionnelle, 645–61, and, Ringgenberg, L’ornement dans les arts d’Islam (Tehran/
London: Candle & Fog, 2013), 147–66, 225–60.

Chapter 15
1 Richard Bergh (1858–1919), Swedish painter and art theorist, friend, teacher, and
patron of Aguéli. Bergh had lived in France, in Paris and Grez-sur-Loing, was a
leading member of the Swedish Opponents and a co-founder of Konstnärsförbundet
(the Artist’s Union) in 1886. The original of this letter is in the Richard Bergh
archive at the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm. The letter was published in Swedish in
Axel Gauffin, Ivan Aguéli: Människan—Mystikern—Målaren, (Stockholm: Sveriges
Allmänna Konstförening, 1940), vol. 1, 101–8. This publication is the basis of this
translation.
2 Maximilien Luce (1858–1941), French impressionist painter and anarchist.
3 In early July 1893, a student demonstration against the conviction of one student
escalated into conflict with the police and one death, after which the students occupied
the Quartier latin for several days, building barricades and attacking properties.
4 Artistic and anarchist weekly published between 1891 and 1893.
5 Le peintre de la vie moderne was a collection of essays devoted to the work of
Constantin Guys (1802–92), a French painter, by Charles Baudelaire in 1863. Aguéli
may be referring to a posthumous exhibition of the work of Guys.
6 An “Exposition d’art musulman” was held at the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris in 1893.
It focused on the decorative arts, drawing on a number of private collections.
7 Félix Fénéon (1861–1944), French art critic, journalist, and anarchist.
8 Camille Mauclair (1872–1945), French poet, novelist, art historian, and literary critic.
9 Aguéli is referring to the third verse of the second chapter of the Qur’an, which is
there described as a guidance for “those who believe in the unseen [ghayb].”
10 Albert Aurier (1865–92), French art critic and publisher, a selection of whose
writings were collected and published after his death. The importance of Aurier for
Aguéli is discussed elsewhere in this book.
11 Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), French novelist, writer, and art critic.
12 A collection by Huysmans published in 1883.
13 Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915), French novelist, art critic, and symbolist. A friend
of Huysmans.
 Notes for Pages 194–205 275

14 Le Latin mystique. Les poètes de l’antiphonaire et la symbolique au Moyen Âge

[Mystical Latin: The Poets of the Antiphonary and Symbolism in the Middle Ages].
Preface by J.-K. Huysmans. Paris: Mercure de France, 1892.
15 Max Nordau (1849–1923), Austrian-French journalist and writer. His Entartung
attacked the decadence he found in contemporary culture, especially French culture,
especially in art and in spiritism.
16 Nordau had trained as a physician.
17 This and following excerpts are taken from Aurier, Oeuvres posthumes (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1893).
18 Aguéli has lightly edited the original, which reads: “The only way to penetrate a thing
is love. To understand God you have to love him; to understand woman, you must
love her; understanding stands in proportion to love.” Oeuvres posthumes, 201.
19 “Through positivism” is Aguéli’s summary of a part of the original that has been
omitted. The original reads: “Our soul’s most noble faculties are atrophying, In one
hundred years we will be beasts whose only ideal is the easy satisfaction of our bodily
needs; we will have reverted, through positive science, to pure and simple animality.”
Oeuvres posthumes, 202.
20 Misspelled as “Ravachal.” Ravachol was François Claudius Koenigstein (1859–92), a
French anarchist bomber, executed in 1892.
21 Charles van Lerberghe (1861–1907), Belgian symbolist poet.
22 Frans Lindberg (1857–1944), Swedish artist who studied decorative arts in Berlin,
and C. Arthur Sjögren (1874–1951), illustrator and book designer.
23 Anders Zorn (1860–1920), Swedish painter and sculptor, a former teacher of Aguéli
in Stockholm.
24 Per Hasselberg (1850–94), Swedish sculptor.
25 Karl Nordström (1855–1923), Ernst Josephson (1851–1906), and Georg von Rosen
(1843–1923) were all well-known Swedish artists. Nordström was Aguéli’s first
teacher and promoter.
26 Knut Åkerberg (1868–1955), Swedish artist and friend of Aguéli, who studied in
Paris 1890–2. In fact he had not gone to hell, and enjoyed a long career as an artist in
Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.

Chapter 16
1 Proposed articles for the Encyclopédie contemporaine illustrée, a journal edited by
Huot’s husband, for which Aguéli wrote at various points in his life.
2 Probably Philipp Freudenberg (1843–1911), a successful merchant who was the
German consul in Colombo.
3 Aguéli is evidently referring to defending himself against a attack by robbers.
4 This is the Encyclopédie contemporaine illustrée.

Chapter 17
1 The first known use of the term in French was in 1910, and the first known use in
English was in 1923. For early uses see Fernando Bravo López, “Towards a Definition
of Islamophobia: Approximations of the Early Twentieth Century,” Ethnic and Racial
Studies 34, no. 4 (2011): 556–73.
2 Published in Il Convito, July 17, 1904: 1; July 31, 1904: 1; and August 14, 1904: 1.
276 Notes for Pages 205–225

3 Arafate. Revue islamite mensuelle (Arafat: Islamist Monthly Review) was a French-
language journal published in Cairo.
4 The original uses the short paragraphs typical of popular journalism. These have
sometimes been amalgamated into longer paragraphs in this translation. Subtitles
have been added.
5 An Italian periodical published, in Italian and French, in Alexandria and later in
Cairo at the end of the nineteenth century.
6 Daniel Kimon, La Pathologie de l’Islam et les moyens de le détruire, étude
psychologique (The Pathology of Islam and the Means to Destroy It: A Psychological
Study) (Paris, NP: 1897).
7 The following section was published in Il Convito, July 31, 1904.
8 The original reads not “above” but “in the previous issue.”
9 Hans Barth (1862–1928), German journalist. Le droit du croissant (The Right of the
Crescent) (Paris, H.C. Wolf, 1898).
10 Aguéli is referring to what the European press generally saw as massacres of
Bulgarian and Armenian separatists. These are discussed in Hans Barth, Türke, wehre
dich! (Turk, Defend Yourself) (Leipzig: Rengersche Buchhandlung, 1898).
11 The following section was published in Il Convito, August 14, 1904. The original
begins not “Above” but “In the previous issue.”
12 Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), French diplomat and writer, remembered for his
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races)
(Paris, Firmin-Didot frères, 1853–5).

Chapter 18
1 Published as “L’Art Pur” in La Gnose 2, no. 1 (January 1911): 34–8.
2 In effect, abstract and concrete art.
3 Published as “L’Art Pur (suite),” in La Gnose 2, no. 2 (February 1911): 66–72.

Chapter 19
1 Originally published as “L’universalité en l’Islam,” La Gnose 2, no. 4 (April 1911):
121–31. The reference here is to an earlier article of Aguéli’s, “Pages dédiées au Soleil
(Sahaif Shamsiyah)” (Pages Dedicated to the Sun), published in La Gnose 2, no. 2
(February 1911): 59–66.
2 Francis Warrain, La synthèse concrète. Étude métaphysique de la vie (Paris: Société
d’éditions contemporaines, 1906; reprinted Paris: Chacornac, 1910). Warrain
(1867–1940) was a sculptor who drew on the work of the Polish neo-Pythagorean
philosopher and mathematician Josef Hoëné-Wronski (1776–1853) who was much
appreciated by Éliphas Lévi.
3 Tartarin of Tarascon was the anti-hero of a novel of the same name by Alphonse
Daudet.
4 In fact, it is a verbal noun of Form IV, which is indeed often causative.
5 Aguéli misses one word from this famous hadith, though the meaning remains intact.
 Notes for Pages 226–230 277

6 Abu’l-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri (973–1057) was a controversial Arab poet who appeared to

criticize exoteric Islam while himself following extremely ascetic practice.
7 Aguéli is here referring to the theory, once popular, that distinguished Aryan
spirituality from Semitic legalism, and thus assigned a Persian, Aryan origin to the
spirituality of Sufism, contrasted with the legalism of Arab, Semitic Islam.
8 This is widely understood to be sunna, proper behavior, in Islam.