Heroism Across Tradition and the Axis of Perfection

Introduction

The modern crisis is an old one in new clothes. A civilisation loses the absolute principles that once gave a human life its direction, and its institutions keep running for a while on momentum. The empires that claimed to carry an ordo rerum, an order of things, have stumbled one after another.

Two questions follow. Where would a modern person find heroic absolutes able to restore that order? And does anyone need them at all?

Julius Evola gave one answer. This essay sets his diagnosis beside the resources of Islamic myth and esoteric thought, which can accept much of what he saw and still refuse what he prescribed.

Evola’s diagnosis

Evola thought the modern world had collapsed into economics. In Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) he described a society that had shrunk life down to a quarrel between capitalist and proletarian, two faces of the same materialism. He wanted that rejected, and an integral hierarchy restored with spiritual and heroic values set above material ones.

His earlier philosophy turned on the “absolute individual” (Teoria dell’individuo assoluto, 1927): a self free of every spiritual and material constraint, in which freedom, power and realisation are one thing.

He called the sickness of the age nihilism and relativism. His cure was heroic. The hero holds his ground against modern chaos, carries metaphysical absolutes and aristocratic virtue, and makes timeless truths real through decisive action.

The problem of primordial Tradition

From any monotheist position the vision has a flaw. Evola grounds everything in a primordial Tradition he never defines closely, and every organised faith risks being dissolved into it as one more local dialect of a general metaphysical monism.

Myth, for Evola, is never folklore. It is a cipher for metaphysical order, and an Islamic reading can take much of that seriously. The universalism is where it stops. Folding Islamic belief into an undifferentiated Tradition dilutes tawhid, the oneness of God, which is the one thing Islam will not share.

Heroes of the Islamic tradition

Arabic and Islamic memory keeps a long gallery of heroes. Their stories show what transcendent virtue looks like once it is anchored in revelation. Four of them cover most of the ground.

Dhu al-Qarnayn

The “two-horned one” of the Qurʾān travels to the setting and the rising of the sun. A people threatened by Gog and Magog ask him for help, and he builds them a barrier of iron sealed with molten copper (18:83 to 98). He refuses their payment. When it is finished he calls it a mercy from his Lord, and says it will fall when his Lord’s promise comes.

He guards the order of the world and knows his wall is temporary.

Antarah ibn Shaddad

Antarah was a pre-Islamic poet and warrior of the tribe of ʿAbs, the son of an Arab father and an Abyssinian slave mother. His father would not acknowledge him until his courage in battle forced the issue. His ode is one of the Muʿallaqāt, the most honoured poems of pre-Islamic Arabia, and later popular romance made him the knight who wins his freedom and his name in a fight against injustice.

Hatim al-Ṭāʾī

Hatim, a poet of the tribe of Ṭayy, is remembered for a generosity with no floor to it. The stories have him slaughtering his last animals to feed guests. The Prophet’s biography, in Ibn Hisham’s recension, records that when Hatim’s daughter was brought to Medina as a captive, the Prophet set her free for her father’s sake, because Hatim had loved noble character.

Al-Khidr

In Surat al-Kahf, Moses follows a servant of God who has been given knowledge “from Our presence” (18:65). The servant sinks a boat, kills a boy and rebuilds a wall, and explains each act only when they part (18:60 to 82). Tradition names him al-Khidr, “the green one”. His wisdom runs past ordinary reason. It was given by inspiration, not learned.

Each of the four acts decisively, and each takes the meaning of the act from something above himself. Together they answer the vacuum Evola diagnosed without giving up what is particular to Islamic revelation.

The heroic archetype across civilisations

Heroic stories repeat everywhere. Heracles, Guan Yu, Sigurd and the knights of Arthur share one shape: a mandate from above, a series of trials, a virtue made flesh, an order restored.

Islam can recognise the archetype. It still insists that the pattern rest on a single foundation, and for Muslims that foundation is always tawhid, the indivisible oneness and transcendence of God.

The Perfect Human

At the centre of Islamic esoteric thought is the Perfect Human, al-insan al-kamil. Ibn ʿArabī developed the idea in the Fusus al-hikam, and in the early fifteenth century ʿAbd al-Karim al-Jili gave it a book of its own under that title. The Perfect Human gathers into one realised life every divine attribute a creature can carry.

Read as a hero, he guards order from the inside. His barrier against chaos is his own disciplined interior, and the spiritual stations he passes through are a campaign against the ego. Mercy moves out of him without accounting. His generosity goes past any ordinary limit. Insight keeps reaching him from beyond the edge of reason.

This is an empire within, where human action reflects divine attributes directly. In such a figure heroism is the substance of a life, and the deeds follow from it.

Jemal and divine transcendence

Geydar Jemal (1947 to 2016) was a Russian Muslim philosopher who knew Evola’s work at first hand. In the 1970s he belonged to the Yuzhinsky circle, the Moscow underground where Evola and René Guénon were read in samizdat. He turned against the metaphysical universalism he found there and argued instead for God’s absolute transcendence. A doctrine that identifies God with creation, he held, makes real action and meaningful speech impossible, because nothing would stand outside the world to give either a direction.

He went back to Surat al-Ikhlas:

He begets not, nor is He begotten, and none is comparable unto Him.

Qurʾān 112:3 to 4

For Jemal, heroism has to be turned toward a God who is truly transcendent. An impersonal metaphysical essence will not do. Creator and creation stay apart, and that gap is what makes heroism an answer to a real command.

Ibn Khaldun and the life of empires

Empires impose order from outside, through armies, politics and ideology. They fall anyway. They overreach, their ideas run out, and their contradictions catch up with them.

Ibn Khaldun watched the cycle closely. In the Muqaddimah (1377) he traced how a dynasty rises on ‘asabiyya, the solidarity of a group bound by kinship and shared hardship, and loses it within about three generations as comfort replaces discipline. On his account real order lives in the cohesion of people before it lives in institutions.

The Qurʾān names the end of that cycle istibdal, replacement: “if you turn away, He will replace you with another people, and they will not be like you” (47:38).

Islamic esoteric thought draws its own conclusion. The fundamental empire is internal, seated in a disciplined heart and an integrated self. It is the only sovereignty that survives when the outer kind collapses.

Conclusion

Islam can take Evola’s critique of modernity seriously, the nihilism and relativism and decay, while keeping heroism inside a strict monotheism that Jemal’s insistence on transcendence keeps honest. The response that comes out of this is grounded in revelation rather than an impersonal universalism, and it costs Islam none of its theological exclusivity.

The collapse of modern empires shows how little outward order is worth without inner cohesion. Evola saw the vacuum clearly. Islam answers it with an inward empire seated in the disciplined heart, and with the Perfect Human as its archetype: every heroic virtue held together and anchored in divine transcendence.

In a post-imperial age, Islam holds that the road to a meaningful civilisation runs through the recovered sovereignty of the soul, grounded in divine unity, in tawhid.

Works consulted

• Evola, Julius. Teoria dell’individuo assoluto. 1927.
• Evola, Julius. Rivolta contro il mondo moderno. 1934. Translated as Revolt Against the Modern World.
• Ibn ‘Arabi. Fusus al-hikam.
• Ibn Hisham. al-Sira al-nabawiyya.
• Ibn Khaldun. al-Muqaddima. 1377.
• al-Jili, ‘Abd al-Karim. al-Insan al-kamil.