Do Modern Radicals Believe in Their Mythologies? A Comparison between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Legion of the Archangel Michael in the Light of Four Political Mythologies

Abstract

This study seeks to employ the concept of political mythology in order to test the applicability of a comparative grid applied to two discursive orders produced by one salient expression of modern Islamic fundamentalism/radicalism and by the interwar European extreme right. Narrowing the perspective, the study intends to compare the fundamental texts of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael (Legiunea Arhanghelului Mihail) by resorting to four political mythologies coined by the French historian Raoul Girardet: the Conspiracy, the Savior, the Golden Age and Unity. My hypothesis can be summarized as follows: as imaginative acts of world creation/destruction, political mythologies are structures of meaning which allow a comparative approach that preserves intact the tension between similarity and difference. Therefore, Wittgenstein's epistemological edge of the theory of ‘family resemblance’ could be amplified by the employment of political mythologies. Consequently the broad ranging cross-boundary comparisons gain systematic value without falling into the trap of rigid taxonomies. Consequently I seek to demonstrate that despite a basic structure of similarities, the fundamentalism of the Islamic Brotherhood and the radicalism of the Romanian extreme right appear in the light of political mythologies as bearing features that differ markedly from the Islamofascist paradigm.