Freemasonry, Traditionalism and the Neo-Caliphate

The Oxford Movement

A speaker increasingly popular among Muslim audiences, known as Sheikh Imran Hosein, was featured recently at the University of Moscow, hosted by Russian fascist ideologue Alexandre Dugin. Disturbingly, Hosein’s speech seems to be in support of Dugin’s vision of Russian backing for the aspirations of Muslims, which is closely connected with a long-standing British and CIA plot to create a “neo-Caliphate” as a puppet Islamic state to exercise control over the Islamic world.

As outlined in A Peace to End All Peace, during World War II, the British, in a characteristic act of bald-faced duplicity, incited the Sharif of Mecca to fight the Ottoman Empire, in return for the title of King of the Arabs if victory should result. It was a plan devised by London’s Middle East team, who were joined by Winston Churchill and Arnold Toynbee of the infamous Round Tablers. Outlining the policy was T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia”:

If the Sultan of Turkey were to disappear, then the Caliphate by common consent of Islam would fall to the family of the prophet, the present representative of which is Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca. Hussein’s activities seem beneficial to us, because it marches with our immediate aims, the breakup of the Islamic bloc and the disruption of the Ottoman Empire, and because the states the would set up would be as harmless to ourselves as Turkey was. If properly handled the Arab States would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and yet always ready to combine against an outside force.[1]

Up to that point, the British had been working to undermine the Ottoman Empire from within, by supporting the nationalistic causes of various ethnic communities and rival sects like, certain Sufi orders, and Freemasonry.[2] These actions were mainly the work of the Oxford Movement, whose sponsors were the British Royal family, and many leading prime ministers and aides, such as Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Palmerston and the highly influential Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Bulwer-Lytton, the English politician and novelist who was immensely popular during his time, was also the “Great Patron” of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), and one of the leading occultists of his day. Overseeing the movement was Scottish Rite Freemasonry, whereby missionaries were assigned to build branches of the rite throughout the Empire.[3]

Under the guidance Palmerston, who served as Prime Minister of England, Giuseppe Mazzini, who had apparently succeeded Weihaupt as head of the Illuminati, had organized all his revolutionary sects: Young Italy, Young Poland, and Young Europe.[4] In 1870, Mazzini along with Palmerston, Otto von Bismarck and Albert Pike, all thirty third degree Scottish Rite Masons, completed an agreement to create a supreme universal rite of Masonry that would arch over all the other rites. Known as the Palladium Rite, it was to be the pinnacle of Masonic power.

Pike had been assisted in the founding of the KKK by Judah P. Benjamin, the individual who gave the order for Lincoln’s assassination.[5] Benjamin was a British subject and leader of the B’nai B’rith and the Order of Zion, whose funding came from the London and Paris banking houses of Rothschild, Montefiore, and de Hirsch. According to Jeffrey Steinberg et al., in Dope Inc, the Order of Zion formed part of an underground network of subversion headed by Lord Palmerston, as Patriarch of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.[6] The Order of Zion was the elite secret arm of the masonic-style order Alliance Israëlite Universelle, whose American arm was the B’nai B’rith. The Alliance was founded in 1860, by Benjamin Disraeli, as well as Moses Montefiore and Adolph Cremieux (1796 – 1880), Supreme Council of the Order of Misraïm, as well as Grand Master of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.

One of the chief agents of the Oxford Movement was Jamal ud Din al Afghani, who despite being the Grand Master of the Egyptian Freemasons, came to be regarded as the founder of the fundamentalist reform movement of Islam known as Salafism, from which emerged the Muslim Brotherhood, the primary agents of Western policy in the Middle East.

Afghani was part of a wider circle of British espionage that was centered around the person of Abdul Qadir al Jazairi, (1808 – 1883), an Algerian national hero who led a struggle against the French invasion of their country in the mid-nineteenth century. Abdul Qadir was ultimately forced to surrender, and eventually settled in Damacus, Syria, under a generous pension from the French.

In 1860, he attained international fame when he and his personal guard saved large numbers of Christians who had come under attack by the local Druze population. As reward, the French government bestowed on him the Grand Cross of the Légion d’honneur and he was also honored by Abraham Lincoln. As well, the town of Elkaker of Iowa was named after him.

Abdul Qadir was also friends with Jane Digby and Sir Richard Burton, the famous British explorer, spy and fellow Freemason, who had been made consul in Damascus in 1869. Digby, or Lady Ellenborough (1807-1881), was an English aristocrat who lived a scandalous life of romantic adventures, having had four husbands and many lovers. She died in Damascus, Syria as the wife of Arab Sheikh Medjuel al Mezrab, who was twenty years her younger. Burton (1821-1890) is best-known for traveling in disguise to Mecca, his search for the source of the Nile, as well as a translation of One Thousand and One Nights and bringing the Kama Sutra to publication in English. Ouida reported in 1906 that “Men at the FO [Foreign Office] …used to hint dark horrors about Burton, and certainly justly or unjustly he was disliked, feared and suspected… not for what he had done, but for what he was believed capable of doing.”[7]

Burton and Digby were also close friends of Afghani’s handler, Wilfred Scawen Blunt and his wife Lady Anne, a grand-daughter of poet Lord Byron. Blunt had supposedly become a convert to Islam under the influence of Afghani, and shared his hopes of establishing a British-sponsored Arab Caliphate based in Mecca to replace the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul. When Blunt visited Abdul Qadir in 1881, he decided that he was the most promising candidate for Caliphate, an opinion shared by Afghani and his disciple, Mohammed Abduh.[8]

Burton was also an avid occultist, and like Abdul Qadir, a member of the Qadiriyya Sufi order, because “Sufism,” he claimed, is “the Eastern parent of Freemasonry.”[9] Burton was also a member of the Theosophical Society, started by Helena P. Blavatsky, who visited him in Damascus. Blavatsky was the great oracle of the Occult Revival of the late eighteenth century, whose channeled books are considered “scriptures” of Freemasonry, and who is regarded as the godmother of the New Age movement. According to historian K. Paul Johnson, Afghani was one of Blavatsky’s “Ascended Masters,” from whom she learned her central doctrines. Afghani was the reputed head of a mysterious order known as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, which exercised a profound influence over the occult societies of the period, culminating in the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) of the scandalous Aleister Crowley.

Synarchism

Jamal Aghani was in Russia in 1886, where according to Scawen Blunt, he "threw himself into the opposite camp, that of the advocates of a Russo-Turkish alliance against England."[10] Afghani joined up with Blavatsky’s publisher, Mikhail Katkoff, who was interested in organizing anti-British agitation in Central Asia and India. These activities were in alignment with the new political directions of the Great Game, that would feature actors connected to the Theosophical Society and the Martinist Order, headed by Gérard Encausse, also known as Papus. As a young man, Encausse studied Kabbalah and later joined the French Theosophical Society, and was also a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Golden Dawn.

In establishing the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix (OKR+C), which came to be regarded as the “inner circle” of the Martinist Order, Papus dreamed of uniting occultists into a revived Rosicrucian brotherhood, as an international occult order, in which he hoped the Russian Empire would play a leading role as the bridge between East and West.[11]

Papus believed that the vast Russian Empire was the only power capable of thwarting the conspiracy of the “Shadow Brothers,” and to prepare for the coming war with Germany. Papus served Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra both as physician and occult consultant. Through Papus the Imperial family became acquainted with his friend and spiritual mentor, the mystic Maître Philippe who exercised an important influence on the royal family before Rasputin. He was believed to possess remarkable healing powers, as well as the ability to control lightning, to travel invisibly. The purported forgers of the Protocols of Zion were also said to have made use of an earlier version of the work discovered by Papus.[12]

Papus had founded the OKR+C along with Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, who proposed the political philosophy of synarchism, which became the bedrock of much twentieth century fascism. Saint-Yves was Grand Master of the Martinist Order, and close to Victor Hugo and to Bulwer-Lytton’s son, the Earl of Lytton, a former Ambassador to France and Viceroy of India. Neville Bulwer-Lytton, the son of the Earl of Lytton, married Judith Blunt-Lytton, the daughter of Wilfred Scawen Blunt and Lady Anne.

It was after 1885 that Saint-Yves began to refer to an Asian origin of synarchism, after he met the mysterious Haji Sharif. Although Haji Sharif presented himself as “a high official in the Hindu church,” he had a Muslim name, and was familiar with Hebrew and Arabic. This Haji Sharif would most certainly refer to Jamal ud Din al Afghani. In 1885, Afghani was in France, and with his disciple Muhammad Abduh, he began publishing an Arabic newspaper in Paris entitled “The Indissoluble Blond,” also the name of a secret organization he founded two years earlier. Among the members of Afghani’s circle in Paris were Christian and Jewish Middle Easterners with connections to Wilfred Blunt, as well as the Egyptian-Jewish actor and James Sanua, who was a travelling companion of Blavatsky.[13]

Synarchy came to mean “rule by secret societies,” serving as priestly class in direct communication with the “gods,” meaning the Ascended Masters of Agartha, a legendary city that is said to reside in the hollow earth. Agartha was connected to the myth of Shambhala, popularized by Blavatsky as the legendary home of the Aryan race, and derived its influence from Bulwer-Lytton’s occult novel, The Coming Race or Vril: The Power of the Coming Race.

Like Shambhala, Agartha was situated in Central Asia, which connected it to the myth of the Lost Tribes of Israel, who were expected by Jews to come forth at the advent of the messiah to assist him in his conquest of the world. In Medieval times, the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel were known to the Jews as "Red Jews," and believed to reside in Central Asia, where they had been absorbed among the Turkic peoples, themselves believed to be descended from Gog and Magog.

According to Colin Gow, the legend of the Red Jews was a conflation of three separate traditions: the prophetic references to Gog and Magog, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and an episode from the Alexander Romance. In the Alexander Romance, the earliest version of which was produced in the third century AD, with the aid of God, Alexander and his men closed the narrow pass in the Caucasus by constructing a huge wall of steel, keeping the barbarous Gog and Magog from pillaging the peaceful southern lands. The wall has been frequently identified with the Caspian Gates of Derbent, Russia, and with the Pass of Darial, on the border between Russia and Georgia. An alternative theory links it to the Great Wall of Gorgan, also known as "Alexander's Wall,” on the south-eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, 180 km of which is still preserved to this day.

The accounts are reflected in the enigmatic figure mentioned in the Quran, named Dhul-Qarnayn, literally "He of the Two Horns.” Similarly, on Macedonian coinage of the third century BC, Alexander was typically portrayed with ram’s horns. According to Hadith, unable to pass the wall, Gog and Magog have been digging below ground ever since, but will emerge at the time of the return of the Messiah Jesus, to afflict the earth, but Jesus will pray to God to eradicate them.[14]

According to Jewish legends, the Lost Tribes of Israel were said to have been carried in the eighth century BC to a place called “Arzareth,” referring to the Araxes, a river that borders Armenia, Iran and Azerbaijan. Azraeth is also connected to Asgaard, the legendary homeland of Odin, the forefather of the Scandinavians. In the 1870s, Ernest Renan was inspired to place Asgaard in Central Asia. Another French writer, Louis Jacolliot (1837 – 1890), in Les Fils de Dieu (“The Sons of God”) wrote at the same time about a city of “Asgartha.”

Traditionalism

Papus, the most high-profile follower of Saint-Yves, worked to put the synarchist ideals into practice by fusing the various secret societies of his day. He organized an “International Masonic Conference” in Paris in 1908 at which he first met Theodor Reuss the founder of the OTO of Aleister Crowley. Reciprocally, Papus assisted Reuss in the formation of the OTO’s Gnostic Catholic Church, based on Crowley’s Book of the Law. In 1913, Papus was elected to the office of Grand Hierophant of the Rites of Memphis and Misraïm.

Papus had a particular influence on one of the most influential occultists of the twentieth century, René Guénon (1886 – 1951), who would continue to offer intellectual inspiration to much of the political right.[15] Guénon was initiated into Martinism and the Rite of Memphis-Mizraim in 1907, and the OKR+C. Guénon founded the occult school of Traditionalism, which suggests that all exoteric religions share a single underlying occult tradition. Therefore, according to Guénon, one could choose any religion as one’s outward belief, and so he chose Islam.

Guénon was initiated in 1912 in the Shadhili Sufi order, which had been involved in a scandal that included Richard Burton. The inner circle of the Shadhili met at Abdul Qadir’s residence in Damascus to meditate and pray “for enlightenment before the throne of God.”[16] Finally, as related by Burton’s wife Isabel, they become conscious of a presence among them and used to hear and see things they did not understand. Finally, they received a vision that assured them it was the religion of Christianity which they were seeking. Richard and Isabel threw their support behind the Shadhili, and attempted to secure support for their conversion. But the British government, fearing the political consequences, removed Burton from his post in Damascus.[17]

Guénon’s initiation was effected by Swedish convert to Islam Ivan Aguéli, who was also interested in Kabbalah, and performed under the authority of the friend of Abdul Qadir al Jazairi, Sheikh Abder Rahman Illaysh al Kabir, a Freemason and head of the Maliki Madhhab at Al Azhar University. As a Freemason, al Kabir also aimed to demonstrate the relationship between the symbols of Freemasonry and Islam.[18] Al Kabir was responsible for the Fatwa that launched the Urabi revolt, that ultimately provided a pretext for the British to move in and “protect” the Suez Canal. The agent-provocateur revolt was followed by a formal invasion and occupation that made Egypt a colony.

The two principle organizations behind the revolt were created by Jamal Afghani: a nationalist organization called Nationalist Liberal Party, which was assisted by Scawen Blunt, and the Mazzini-inspired Young Egypt. Both were united in their membership in Afghani’s French Masonic lodges.

When Afghani founded Young Egypt, it was mainly composed of members of the Young Turks, a Masonic political party, also known as the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), who were the primary agents for the overthrow of the Ottoman caliphate, and inspired by the ambitions of Pan-Turksim. Pan-Turkism was first called for in the 1860s by a Hungarian Zionist named Arminius Vambery (1832-1913), an agent for Lord Palmerston, who had become an adviser to the Ottoman Sultan.[19] Vambery was inspired by Alexander Csoma de Körös, who was an important source for Blavatsky, and the first in the West to mention Shambhala, which he regarded as the origin of the Turkish people, and which he situated in the Altai mountains and Xinjiang.

Vambery’s reputation in England as an expert on Muslims began with his publication of Arminius Vambery: His Life and Adventures, about his travels throughout the Middle East and Central Asia disguised as a dervish between 1862-64. Vambery also chronicled the strange vampire and other legends of the Balkans, and knew author and Golden Dawn member Bram Stoker, to whom he acted as his consultant on Transylvanian culture. The character of Professor Van Helsing in Stoker’s novel, Dracula, is said to be based on Vambery.

The Young Turks were created in the 1890s by a prominent Sephardic Jewish family in Ottoman Salonika (modern Thessaloniki, Greece) and an official of the Italian B’nai B’rith, named Emmanuel Carasso. Carasso was also the grand master of an Italian masonic lodge there called “Macedonia Resurrected.” The lodge was the headquarters of the Young Turks, and all the top Young Turk leadership were members. The Italian masonic lodges in the Ottoman Empire had been set up by a follower of Mazzini named Emmanuel Veneziano, who was also a leader of the European affiliate of the B’nai B’rith, as well as the Alliance Israëlite Universelle.[20]

Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman Sultan, was overthrown in 1908 in a military coup carried out by the Young Turks, who seized power over the Empire. While in power, the Young Turks ran several newspapers including The Young Turk, of which Zeev Jabotinsky was the editor. Jabotinsky was the founder of Revisionist Zionism, on which the policy of the Zionist terrorist faction the Irgun was based, and helped form the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I. He was educated as a young man in Italy, and later described Mazzini’s ideas as the basis for the Zionist movement. Jabotinsky arrived in Turkey shortly after the Young Turks seized power, to take over the paper. The paper was owned by a member of the Turkish cabinet, but it was funded by the Russian Zionist federation, and managed by the B’nai B’rith.[21]

Turkish nationalism based on the pseudoscientific race theories of Europe had become the guiding ideology of the Young Turks.[22] From the middle of the nineteenth century, the British had worked to develop an alliance between several leading Sufi orders in Turkey, such as the Bektashi who had strong associations with the crypto-Jewish community of the Dönmeh, as well as the Naqshabandi, and the Scottish Rite Freemasons of Afghani and his followers.[23]

Like the Nazis, the Pan-Turkists aspired to return to the true pagan heritage of their nation. Through the influence of the beliefs of the Bektashi Sufis, Pan-Turkism aspired at reviving shamanism as the true religion of the Turkish heritage. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks expanded on the ambitions of Pan-Turkism and tried to replace the lost legacy with a new Turkish commonwealth. The legend of Agartha was therefore promulgated by Ataturk, who sought to create a sense of nationalism to replace the religion of Islam as the primary identity of the new Turkish secular regime.[24]

The Muslim Brotherhood

Afghani’s chief pupil, Mohammed Abduh, also Masonic Grand Master of the United Lodge of Egypt, was made the Grand Mufti of Egypt, the chief legal authority in Islam, by Lord Cromer, where he instituted reforms that benefitted British imperial objectives. Abduh’s pupil, Rashid Rida, also a Freemason and a known reformer, was the mentor of Hasan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Banna’s Brotherhood was established with a grant from England’s Suez Canal Company in 1928, and over the following quarter century would be at the disposal of British diplomats and MI6 as a tool of British policy.[25]

More disturbingly, John Loftus, a former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer, discovered that Hitler commissioned al Banna to found the Muslim Brotherhood, to serve as an arm of German intelligence in the Middle East.[26] Effectively, the Nazi Party was the result of a merging of the German branch of Crowley’s OTO and the Thule Gesellschaft of Germany, whose notions of Aryan superiority were derived from the ideas of Blavatsky and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Thus the Brotherhood and the Nazis represented two branches of the influence of Jamal Afghani.

From early on, al Banna was a member of a sub-branch of the Shadhili Sufi order.[27] Many of the head lecturers of al Azhar University in Cairo have also been followers of the Shadhili. Prominent among them was a friend to René Guénon, Abdel Halim Mahmoud, who eventually served as Grand Imam of Al Azhar and became an important source of inspiration for members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his articles were published in their magazines.

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier note in their classic work, The Morning of the Magicians, that Nazism was “’Guénonism’ plus tanks.”[28] Guénon later dedicated his book The Symbolism of the Cross to al Kabir. By “cross,” Guénon meant the occult symbol of the swastika, employed by the Nazis as a symbol of their “Aryan” heritage. Guénon regarded the swastika as “a truly universal symbol.”

In addition to Guénon, two important mystics who contributed to the myth of the Sufi origin of Freemasonry were George Gurdjieff and Idries Shah who, as reported by Robert Dreyfuss in Hostage to Khomeini, worked with the Muslim Brotherhood in London. Shah’s chief associate was Gurdjieff disciple, J. G. Bennett, head of British intelligence in Istanbul. As the secretary to Gerald Gardner, one of the key representatives of Wicca, whose rituals he developed with Aleister Crowley, Shah was responsible for popularizing that European witchcraft, as well as the occult tradition in general, was derived from Sufism. Specifically, in The Sufis, Shah mentions as a source of this occult tradition the Aniza tribe, to which belonged not only Jane Digby’s husband Sheikh Medjuel al Mezrab, but most importantly, the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Shah’s claim may reveal the hidden basis for the collaboration between the West and Saudi Arabia, which has been the primary source of funding for the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities, conducted on behalf of the CIA.

Shah was also a member of the Club of Rome, a project initiated by the Rockefeller family at their estate at Bellagio, Italy.[29] The founders of the Club of Rome were all senior officials of NATO. These included Aurelio Peccei, the chairman of Fiat who was also chairman of the Economic Committee of the Atlantic Institute, and Alexander King, the co-founder, who was Director General of Scientific Affairs of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

In 1965, Shah founded SUFI (Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas), and dubbed himself Great-Sheikh, not only of the Naqshbandi, but of all Sufi orders. Several presentations were given by scientists like Alexander King to the Institute for Cultural Research (ICR), which evolved from SUFI.[30] Other visitors, pupils, and would-be pupils included the poet Ted Hughes, novelists Alan Sillitoe and Doris Lessing, zoologist Desmond Morris, and psychologist Robert Ornstein. Over the following years, Shah established Octagon Press as a means of distributing reprints of translations of Sufi classics. Several of Shah's books were discussed the Rand Corporation.[31]

At a November 1977 Lisbon conference sponsored by the Interreligious Peace Colloquium—an organization set up by Cyrus Vance and Sol Linowitz—Peccei conspired with several leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly with the well-known Iranian “court philosopher” who was highly active during the Iranian revolution of 1979, Seyyed Hossein Nasr of Teheran University, a personal friend of the Shah of Iran.[32]

Nasr is a Perennialist in the school of Guénon’s Traditionalism. Nasr was initiated into the Shadhili by Ahmad al-Alawi (1869-1934), who had been recommended to him by Guénon. Al-Alawi had founded the Alawiyya branch of Shadhili after supposedly being instructed to adopt the name for the order and himself in a personal vision of Ali, the Prophet Muhammed’s son-in-law.

Nasr was a student of Guénon’s leading disciple Frithjof Schuon who established the Maryamiyya branch of the Shadhili in Europe and North America. Some of Schuon’s most eminent students include supposed converts to Islam, Titus Burckhardt and Martin Lings, best known as the author of a very popular and positively reviewed biography of Muhammad, first published in 1983. But according to Andrew Rawlinson, in Book of Enlightened Masters, Schuon was not as a pious Sufi but as a charlatan.

Shuon was also interested in Native American sacred traditions, and was adopted by a Sioux family and Crow medicine man and Sun Dance chief. The author of Against the Modern World, Mark Sedgwick discovered photos sent to him by Rawlinson, showing Shuon dressed up as a Native American chief, surrounded by young women in bikinis. Another showed Schuon naked, except for what looked like a Viking helmet. Another showed a painting by Schuon of a nude Virgin Mary, who is known as Myriam in the Quran, after which his order is named. Burckhardt expressed concerns about Schuon and episodes “involving women,” but reminded other Maryiamis that the followers of a Sheikh [Sufi master] should judge him by his teachings, not his actions![33]

In 1976, the Traditionalist views of the Maryamiyya featured prominently in the World of Islam Festival in London. It involved Queen Elizabeth II, who opened the festival, as well as the archbishop of Canterbury who received Abdel Halim Mahmoud. Exhibitions were managed by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Martin Lings, and though books by Traditionalists and Maryamiyya featured throughout, the festival generated much favourable publicity for “traditional” Islam.

Burckhardt is read by Prince Charles, and according to Sedgwick, “Traditionalist influences are increasingly visible in some of his speeches,” which explains rumors of his supposed conversion to Islam.[34] Prince Charles has also written a foreword to Lings' book on the esoteric meanings in Shakespeare's plays. Prince Charles' close friend and spiritual mentor, Sir Laurens van der Post, a friend and follower of Carl Jung, introduced him to Temenos, a publication of Schuon's followers. One of these was English poet and literary critic Katherine Raine, who studied spiritual magic with a group she identified as descended from the Golden Dawn. Prince Charles then encouraged Raine to establish the Temenos Academy, within his own Prince's Foundation.

The New Great Game

After World War II, the pretext of a Cold War with the Soviet Union was used by the US to carry out covert action in all countries of the world. CIA chief Allen Dulles devised a plan whereby on the explicit request of the Pentagon, secret armies of fascist terrorists, including many former leading Nazis, were set up across Western Europe with the coordination of NATO, known “Stay Behind” units. The most infamous “stay-behind” unit was Operation Gladio of Italy, which was responsible for the Strategy of Tension, which carried out false-flag terror operations to discredit the popular communist party, culminating in the assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades and the Bologna train station massacre of 1980.

The chief inspiration for the fascist Gladio networks was Julius Evola (1898-1974), who is recognized as the primary heir of Réne Guénon’s Traditionalism.[35] Evola reflected the synarchist belief in the authority of adepts of secret societies. According to Evola, the superior priestly class of the world of Tradition was not merely a professional priesthood, but royalty itself because, in Evola’s view, temporal power proceeded from spiritual authority.

Mussolini, being impressed by these ideas, backed Evola’s launch of the journal Blood and Spirit. Evola traveled to Germany in 1942 and obtained support for German collaboration on the publication from leading Nazi race theorists. In the post-war years, Evola's writings were held in high esteem by members of the neo-fascist movement in Italy. According to one scholar, “Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century."[36]

Julius Evola has been the primary inspiration to Alexandr Dugin, who is part of a plot involving the Turkish branch of Gladio, to dupe the Muslim peoples of Central Asia into creating a Neo-Caliphate with the support of Russia.

Although the Americans managed to defeat the Soviet Union, conflict with the two remaining powers of Russia and China for control of Central Asia is not yet over, and the New Great Game continues. And just as the occult legend of Shambhala was employed by the competing sides in the earlier episodes of the Great Game, now that the American’s have secured their hold in much of the region, so the same legend continues to be featured in the US’s actions, but now more precisely in the region said to be the location of the legendary city, Xinxiang, China.

To this purpose, the same pan-Turkism that first gave rise to the popularization of the story of Shambhala is being used by the Americans, in a covert strategy that is deceptively exploiting the notion of uniting Turkic peoples of Central Asia and under a neo-Caliphate to be ruled from Turkey.

The Turkish Gladio, known as Counter-Guerrilla, have exerted great influence over the country’s Cold War history, and were responsible for numerous unsolved acts of violence. Counter-Guerrilla were responsible for the development of the Ergenekon, the name given to an alleged clandestine, Kemalist ultra-nationalist organization in Turkey, with ties to members of the country’s military and security forces. “Ergenekon” is a name deriving from a supposed Turkish legend describing it as a mythical place located in Eurasia, in the inaccessible valleys of the Altai Mountains, serving as a model for the synarchist idea of the mythical underground realm of Agartha.[37]

The Ergenekon connection to Agartha is related to the Pan-Turkism movement, which the US sought to exploit after World War II in their continuing fight against communism. The Paris-based Intelligence Newsletter reported in 1990 that they had obtained declassified strategy documents with specific reference in how the Pan-Turkism movement could be exploited strategically by the United States.[38]

US support of Pan-Turkism in bolstering Turkey’s role in NATO came in the person of a right-wing extremist named Colonel Alparsan Turks, who during World War II had been the contact person of the Nazis in Turkey. After the war, Turks made contacts with the CIA in 1948 and set up a secret anti-Communist stay-behind army in Turkey, eventually renamed the Special Forces Command, which operated Counter-Guerrilla.[39] To staff the Counter-Guerrilla, Turks had recruited heavily among the Grey Wolves, a right-wing terrorist group which he also ran.

Based explicitly on the Pan-Turkism movement, the Grey Wolves derived their name and flag from the mythological legend of the grey wolves that led the Turk peoples out of Asia to their homeland in Anatolia. The Grey Wolves’ dream is to create the “Turan,” the “Great Turkish Empire,” to include all Turkic peoples of the Central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as the Caucasus and the Uighurs' homeland of East Turkestan in the Xinjiang, China.

According to Turkish authorities, the Grey Wolves carried out 694 murders between 1974 and 1980.[40] As related by investigative reporter Lucy Komisar, the 1981 attempt on John Paul II's life by Grey Wolves member Mehmet Ali Agca may have been related to Gladio.[41]

Neo-Eurasianism

Alexandr Dugin is the suspected leader of Ergenekon.[42] But Dugin is not a Turk. He is a Russian, and the most popular ideologist of Russian expansionism, nationalism, and fascism. He was born in Moscow into a family of a high-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer, and continues to have close ties to the Kremlin and Russian military. There were many reports that Dugin’s Eurasia Movement was heavily funded by associations of retired officers of the SVR and the FSB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security services into which the Soveit KBG had been divided in 1991.[43]

Dugin likes to see himself as the inheritor of the “ancient Eurasian order,” elements of which were already present in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the secret service of the SS.[44] Like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Dugin is also a follower of Sir Halford Mackinder, seeing Central Asia as a key aspect of geopolitics, but taking the reverse view, where he sees Russia as needing to create a Eurasian block to impede American imperialism.

Dugin’s platform is the basis of the Eurasia Party which he founded in 2001. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Dugin posited that Russian civilization does not belong in the “European” category, and that the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks was a necessary reaction to the modernization of Russian society. It suggested that the Soviet regime was capable of evolving into a new national, non-European Orthodox Christian government, shedding off the initial mask of proletarian internationalism and militant atheism.

Sometimes called Greater Russia, the movement closely aligned to Pan-Turkism, and is described as a political aspiration of pan-Russian nationalists to retake some or all of the territories of the other republics of the former Soviet Union, and territory of the former Russian Empire, and amalgamate them into a single Russian state.

Dugin’s call for an alliance with Islam is reflected in his associate Gaydar Jamal, a Muscovite of Azerbaijani origin, who exemplified the relationship between Traditionalism and Islamic extremism. Once a member of Naqshbandi Sufism, Jamal was the founder of the Party of the Islamic Renaissance (PIR) in 1990. In 1992, Jamal led a splinter group towards alliances with Islamist extremists in the Middle East and with the domestic opposition to Yeltsin, in the form of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF).

Jamal’s relations with the Middle East included Hasan al Turabi, leader of the Sudanese Islamic Front. In 1991, after he left Saudi Arabia for his opposition to Ibn Baz’s Gulf War Fatwa, bin Laden first went to Pakistan and back to Afghanistan, before finally settling in Sudan. General Omar Hassan al-Bashir had taken power in a military coup in 1989. Just a few months later, at a Muslim Brotherhood meeting in London, it was decided that Sudan would be a new base for the Islamist movement, and a Muslim Brotherhood leadership council of nineteen members was subsequently established in Khartoum under Turabi, who would emerge as the real power in the Sudanese regime.[45] According to bin Laden biographer Roland Jacquard, Turabi visited London in 1992 and was a guest at the Round Table’s Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA).[46] In addition, Turabi seems to have Masonic connections. When their relationship had broken down, and after Turabi had foiled an attempted coup by him and his party, Bashir denounced Turabi as being sponsored by “Zionists and freemasons.”[47]

Jamal’s PIR was replaced by the Islamic Committee of Russia (ICR), which became part of a network of radical Islamic movements under Turabi’s leadership, which included Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon.[48] According to Jamal’s own admission, in 1999 the ICR formed a united front with the Movement in Support of the Army, Defence Industry and Military Science, an independent opposition group aligned with the CPRF and run by the chairman of the Duma State Security Committee.

Another example of the meeting of Traditionalism and radical Islam is Claudio Mutti, whose works have been promoted by Dugin. Mutti was also apparently a friend of Luc Jouret, the founder of the notorious Solar Temple mass suicide cult with links to Gladio.[49] Mutti, a one-time follower of Franco Freda, converted to Islam through the influence of Guénon, which he discovered through his study of Evola. From 1971 onwards, Freda had been put on trial several times, notably for involvement in the Strategy of Tension. Although eventually acquitted he spent several years in jail for the crime of “subversive association.”

Mutti had taught Romanian and Hungarian at the University of Bologna, before losing that job when he also had to serve a prison term for his terrorist activities. Mutti founded the publishing house Edizioni all’Insegna del Veltro, which published the works of Evola, Nazi ideologue Johann von Leers, Nazi occultist Savitri Devi and Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. When he converted to Islam, Mutti took the name of Omar Amin, in honor of Johann von Leers, Goebbels’s former anti-Semitic propaganda expert, who had taken the same name before him on his own conversion, when heading Gamal Nasser’s anti-Jewish broadcasting service in Egypt.[50]

Mutti was also appointed Emir in the notorious Murabitun Movement, founded by a Scottish convert to Islam named Ian Dallas, a.k.a. Sheikh Abdalqadir al-Murabit. Dallas is also a member of a branch of the Shadhili Sufi order, also descended from Ahmad Al-Alawi, Guénon’s friend who initiated Schuon into the order. Dallas celebrates Hitler as a “great genius and great vision,” praises Wagner as the “most spiritual of men among men in a age of darkness,” and regards the black stone of the Kabbah in Mecca as the Holy Grail. In 1990, he held a symposium in honor of the occultist Ernst Junger, one of the fathers of Nazi ideology, and which ended with a Masonic ceremonial. Also in attendance was Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered LSD, associated with the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.[51]

Dugin’s ideas, particularly those on “a Turkic-Slavic alliance in the Eurasian sphere” have recently become popular among certain nationalistic circles in Turkey, most notably among alleged members of Ergenekon. The most prominent figure is Dogu Perinçek, the leader of the Workers Party, and an associate of Dugin, who in 2008 was arrested on suspicion of being a member of Ergenekon. Perinçek combines Kemalism with Marxism but is also a neo-Eurasianist, meaning that he strives towards an alliance between Turkey, Russia, Iran and the Central Asian republics against the Western hemisphere.[52]

Despite its claims of presenting an obstacle to American imperialism, Neo-Eurasianism is aligned with recent American designs in Central Asia, through the assistance of the network of Fethullah Gülen and his links to Counter-Guerrilla, who have been fronting for the CIA in the radicalization of Central Asia, involving drug trafficking, money laundering, the nuclear black market, and false-flag terrorism. The Pan-Turkism ideals espoused by Gülen, as an ostensible project of creating a pan-Islamic Caliphate to be ruled from Turkey, is merely part of America’s post Cold War strategy to control Central Asia with the aim of containing Russia and China.

Coordination with the Gülen movement is tied to recent plans to confront China through the support of an independence movement of the Uighurs, a Turkic and predominantly Muslim minority of Xinjiang, in northwestern China. In other words, the supposed location of Agartha. The CIA plotting came to a head in July 2009, with a series of violent clashes that erupted between Uighurs and the Chinese state police and Han Chinese residents in Xinjiang. As was also stated in 2004, with regards to the separatist moves over Xinjiang, according to TurkPulse: “One of the main tools Washington is using in this affair in order to get Turkey involved in the Xinjiang affair is some Turkish Americans, primarily the Fetullah Gülen.”[53]

The majority of the information pertaining to these covert activities has been revealed by FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, on Iranian state-owned Press TV, that the US was on intimate terms with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, using them to further certain goals in Central Asia, right up until 9/11.[54] Her highly astute observation is as follows, in full:

You’ve got to look at the big picture. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the super powers began to fight over control of Central Asia, particularly the oil and gas wealth, as well as the strategic value of the region.

Given the history, and the distrust of the West, the US realized that it couldn’t get direct control, and therefore would need to use a proxy to gain control quickly and effectively. Turkey was the perfect proxy; a NATO ally and a puppet regime. Turkey shares the same heritage/race as the entire population of Central Asia, the same language (Turkic), the same religion (Sunni Islam), and of course, the strategic location and proximity.

This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.

This is why I have been saying repeatedly that these illegal covert operations by the Turks and certain US persons dates back to 1996, and involves terrorist activities, narcotics, weapons smuggling and money laundering, converging around the same operations and involving the same actors.

And I want to emphasize that this is “illegal” because most, if not all, of the funding for these operations is not congressionally approved funding, but it comes from illegal activities.

And one last thing, take a look at the people in the State Secrets Privilege Gallery on my website and you will see how these individuals can be traced to the following; Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—and the activities involving these countries.

Originally published here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180913204346/http://www.conspiracyschool.com/blog/freemasonry-traditionalism-and-neo-caliphate

[1] Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, p. 43.

[2] Joseph Brewda, "Palmerston launches Young Turks to permanently control Middle East,” Schiller Institute/ICLC Conference, February 1994. [http://www.schillerinstitute.org/conf-iclc/1990s/conf_feb_1994_brewda.html]

[3] Dreyfuss, Robert, Hostage to Khomeini, New Benjamin Franklin House; 1st edition (June 1981) p. 113.

[4] Monsignor George Dillon, Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked. (London: Britons Publishing Company, 1950) p. 89.

[5] John A. Bingham, Special Judge Advocate, "Trial of the Conspirators for the Assassination of President Lincoln Delivered June 2-28, 1865, before the Military Commission of the Court Martial of the Lincoln Conspirators," War Department Records, Section Monograph 2257, Official Transcript; cited in Dope Inc. p. 25.

[6] Konstandinos Kalimtgis, David Goldman and Jeffrey Steinberg, Dope Inc.: Britain's Opium War Against the U.S, (New York, The New Benjamin Franklin House, 1978), p. 25.

[7] Ouida, “Richard Burton,” Fortnightly Review, (June 1906).

[8] Johnson, Initiates of Theosophical Masters, p. 81.

[9] F. Hitchman, Burton, Vol. I, p. 286.

[10] Edward G. Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905-09, (London: Frank Cass, 1966.) pp. 403.

[11] Mehmet Sabeheddin, "The Secret of Eurasia: The Key to Hidden History and World Events," New Dawn, No. 68 (September-October 2001).

[12] Cesare G. De Michelis. The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, trans. Richard Newhouse, (Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004) p. 115.

[13] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, p. 124-125

[14] Tirmidhee, Abwaab al-Tafsir: Soorat al-Kahf (Hadeeth 5160), 8/597- 99. Ibn Maajah, Kitaab al-Fitan, (Hadeeth 4080), 2/1364. Ahmad, Musnad, 2/510, 511.

[15] “The Spiritual Fascism of Réne Guénon and His Followers.”

[16] Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography, (Da Capo Pres, 1990), p. 527.

[17] Thomas Wright, The Life of Sir Richard Burton, (The Echo Library, 2010), p. 130.

[18] “Abder-Rahman Elîsh El-Kebîr,” Wikipedia, French edition.

[19] Joseph Brewda, "Palmerston launches Young Turks to permanently control Middle East,” Schiller Institute/ICLC Conference, February 1994.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Marc David Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010) Kindle Edition

[23] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, p. 140.

[24] Gareth Jenkins, “Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation” (Silk Road Studies, August 2009). [PDF]

[25] Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, p. 49 and 51.

[26] “The Muslim Brotherhood, The Nazis and Al-Qa'ida,” Nexus Magazine, Volume 12, Number 6 (October - November 2005).

[27] Hassan al-Banna, Mudhakkarat al-Da‘wa wa-l-Da‘iya (Cairo 1951), p. 20.

[28] The Morning of the Magicians, (London: Souvenir Press, 2001) p. 172.

[29] See Robert Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini.

[30] Elizabeth Hall, “At Home in East and West: A Sketch of Idries Shah,” Psychology Today 9 (2): 56 (July 1975).

[31] Idries Shah (Presenter), “One Pair of eyes: Dreamwalkers,” BBC Television, (19 Dec 1970).

[32] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini.

[33] Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, p. 153.

[34] Ibid., p. 214.

[35] Paul Furlong, Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola. (London: Routledge, 2011) p. 110.

[36] Franco Ferraresi, “The Radical Right in Postwar Italy,” Politics & Society, 1988 16:71-119, p. 84.

[37] “The Ergenekon dictionary.” Hürriyet Daily News(July 27, 2008.

[38] Ganser, Nato’s Secret Armies, p. 226.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Albert J. Jongman, Alex Peter Schmid, Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, & Literature, pp. 674.

[41] Lucy Komisar, "The Assassins of a Pope.” Albion Monitor(June 4, 1997).

[42] Gareth Jenkins, “Ergenekon Indictment Dashes Hopes Of Final Reckoning With Turkey’s ‘Deep State’.”Eurasia Daily Monitor (Jamestown Foundation) 5 (144)(2008-07-29). Retrieved 2008-11-15; Maman, Kamil (2008-11-26). “Ergenekon is a tiny piece of the deeper state, says Mihri Belli.”Today's Zaman. Retrieved 2008-11-25. "Ergenekon must merely be a part of the counter guerrilla that they discarded. The main body is still active.”

[43] Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, p. 235.

[44] Peter Edel, “Alexander Dugin and the teachings of traditionalism,” Today's Zaman (15 November, 2010).

[45] Labeviere, Dollars for Terror, p. 103.

[46] Roland Jacquard, In the Name of Osama Bin Laden, (Duke University Press Books, 2001) p. 32.

[47] Opheera McDoom, “Darfur governor links Khartoum plot with rebels,” Sudan Tribune (September 24, 2004).

[48] Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, p. 258.

[49] Jim Keith, Mind-control, World Control, (Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997), p. 193.

[50] “Neofascismo e Islam,” Online Gnosis: Rivista Italiana di Intelligence, (n. 4/2005).

[51] Othman Abu-Sahnun the Italian, “The Murabituns & Free Masonry,” Murabitun Files.

[52] Peter Edel, “Alexander Dugin and the teachings of traditionalism,” Today's Zaman (15 November 2010).

[53] “Turkish-American Relations with the Second Bush Team,” Turkpulse.com (November 9, 2004).

[54] “US on 'intimate' terms with extremists in Central Asia,” Press TV (August 1, 2009).