A Philosophy of Radical Politics: Revolutionary Gnosticism and the Case of Salafi-Jihadism

Many philosophers and sociologists have used the category of revolutionary Gnosticism to frame different modern and contemporary ideologies and social movements. Revolutionary, or political, Gnosticism is a category introduced in the academic debate by the political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) in order to investigate the two main ideologies of the 20th-century, Nazism and Communism. After Voegelin, many other scholars started to use this explicative category, deepening its implications with ancient Gnosticism and applying it to cast new light on modern mass movements ideologically oriented. The present research aims at adopting revolutionary Gnosticism to frame Salafi-jihadism in a new and innovative way. In fact, Islamist terrorism, despite its constant referring to traditional doctrines, is an ideology that shows many elements that are alien to Islamic orthodoxy. Thus, the objective of the research is to read Salafi-jihadism as an ideology born from the encounter of the more inflexible and literalist Islam and the communistic ideologies from the West where it was revolutionary Gnosticism. Therefore, Salafi- jihadism would be a new metamorphosis of a thousand-years old force, Gnosticism, which is a mutant energy that has recycled itself in disparate cultural contexts and philosophical atmospheres. Corollary of this research is the demonstration of the heterodoxy of radical Islamism in relation to traditional Islam.