Remarkably one of the earliest men in the Western world to embrace Islam and enter a Sufi order was Swedish, born Ivan Aguéli aka Abdal Hadi. He is famous in Sweden as an artist (featured above) and recently shared an exhibition of impressionist painters in Stockholm with Paul Klée. His combination of art and Sufism is not unique which is why I have also featured in this post the wood art and Arabic calligraphy of a young Swede AbdelKarim Cederberg, now a resident of Andalusia, who has explored Nordic art and scripts and woven them into a kind of authentic fusion with traditionally Arabic design motifs. When I interviewed him for this blog he pointed out the significance of Aguéli and his pioneering life and work.

Ivan was born in 1867 in Sala, Sweden and died in Spain in 1917. There are various accounts of his life available but here is a brief one: 

Ivan Aguéli was a Swedish mystic, painter and student of Islam. As a painter he is acknowledged as the grandfather of impressionism, a student of an Émile Bernard, who also happened to be a close friend of Vincent Van Gogh of all people and Paul Gauguin.  He was active in anarchist circles in Paris in the 1890s and was apparently responsible for shooting a Spanish matador at a bullfight in Paris, but not fatally, for which he was briefly imprisoned. He avidly supported animal rights and feminism. A pionering 21st century man by all accounts.

Aguéli became the first Westerner to study at the famous Al-Azhar university in Cairo where he studied Islamic philosophy. He had taken the name Abdal Hadi and seems to have become a Sufi mystic, studying under a mentor figure, a Shaykh Muhammad Ilaysh. He is credited with having introduced Rene Guénon to Islam in the Ibn Arabi study group he founded in Cairo.

Aguéli died in 1917, being run down by a train at a railway junction at L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a town in Spain, near Barcelona, a town close to the French border. The circumstances surrounding his death are confusing, and some claim he was pushed. The British believed he was an Ottoman spy. We shall never know. He is buried in Sala, Sweden, his birth place where his remains were interred.

Ivan Aguéli aka
Abdel Hadi pictured left and right (top left back row)

Wikipedia has  a longer bio. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Agu%C3%A9li#Egypt

Exactly 100 years later after Abdal Hadi’s death in Spain another Swede has arrived on the Iberian peninsular namely AbdelKarim Cederborg. Explore his work here:

http://matsabdelkarim.wixsite.com/rajab

He has blended both traditional Islamic motifs and Nordic designs into a uniquely Scandinavian take on both wood carving, calligraphy and geometry. Some of his work is pictured here.