A few weeks ago, I was engaged in a discussion regarding a hypothetical religious evolution that may, under the correct circumstances, take root in the Western world. We light-heartedly threw a concept together that we called "Islamo-Celticism". Celto-Islamism was discarded has echoing too many unfortunate political dimensions which we had no interest in pursuing, although it would be in harmony with the indigenous Islam among Black Americans who often refer to their faith as Islamism (Not the modern political ideology) to differentiate between the more established religious structure of Islam. Islamo-Celticism on the other hand is not an Islam for those of Celtic descent (As is implied by the term Celto-Islamism) but an Islamic framework embedded within a Northern European mode of spiritual expression.
That is a nativised theology, culturally specific to an assumed receptive Celtic consciousness, or Northern European in general that would initiate a process of simultaneously attacking the internalized social conditions in which Islam demands of converts in the West while wholeheartedly and quite sincerely transposing the theology and metaphysics of the Islamic faith in harmony with a historically authentic synchronicity between dogma and immediate physical spiritual fulfillment. Critiques of Islam in the West often mistakenly attribute the often hostile perception of Islam by the Western public to a cultural problem. In fact, there is little doubt that manifestations of Islam that the public cite as most disagreeable with their sensibilities are those perpetuated by Islamic modernists. Anti-culturalists who champion a literalistic, universal movement at odds with all the civilized people of the world, not least of all Muslims! The problem isn't of a foreign culture encroaching upon the revered traditions of the peoples of Western Europe, but that a movement in the same vein as all the disastrous experiments of the 20th century is ravaging the divine revelation, which can and has expressed itself through a multitude of cultural mediums. As Frithjof Schuon says, "It is not enough to simply think of Metaphysics but to hear and see Metaphysics". And this is precisely what is being denied to Western converts to Islam.
What is it that we seek then? An Insular Islam, a Monastic-Imami tradition? One may rightly ask whether such a forced fusion of what many may claim as oppositional religious categories is not an oppressive act it itself. A modern symbiosis blind to the systemographical agenda by one category or another which is implicitly favored in such an agreement. It's certainly a legitimate concern although one rooted firmly within a modernist problematisation of local instances of Universal Faiths. Are the blurred identities of the heroic Persian figure of Rostam and Imam Ali in post-Islamic Persian epics, supplemented by trans-historical temporal heroic impulses an implicit reassertion of the superiority of Persian religion over a perceived foreign symbology? The same process is at work in the Albanian envisioning of Skanderberg, the unquestionably Christian warrior in conflict with the Ottomans as the epitomy of the Haydarian essence.We would argue that there is no assumed cultural contention at work here.
Our theology isn't rooted in nationalist appropriation of religion but in the appreciation of the localised traditions developed throughout a peoples history in revering the sacred. Islamo-Celticism, a primitive, folk-Islam embedded within
a culturally North-Western European spiritual symbology. Rather than a
superficial bi-cultural amalgam, or a liberal evacuation
of an "outdated" theology in favor of an equally burglarized native
lineage, an Islamic theology (partially suspended from a strict
sociological anatomy) ignores claims to a cultural dichotomy between two
supposed mutually exclusive symbolic modes of understanding. I remember
visiting a Bektashi Tekke in Albania and seeing the interior decorated
with the names of the Twelve Imams and various passages from the Qur'an
in Latin script. I don't know why the advent of modernism should act as a legitimate excuse to it's application elsewhere.
