Pre-publication of chapter XXVIII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXVII to XXXII form Part Eleven (How and why the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals failed) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapter XXVII has already been pre-published.
Until now, 17 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the present book; this chapter is therefore the 18th (out of 33) to be uploaded. At the end of the text, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in green color.
In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.
The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.
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Keyumars: the central figure of Islamic mysticism, as he encompasses the souls of all prophets and kings. The miniature presents a vision of the “The Court of Keyumars” and it was painted by the illustrious Safavid court artist Sultan Muhammad around 1522. Who is Keyumars? Mentioned as Gayo Maretan in the Avesta and as Gayomard in Parsi (: late Zoroastrian) texts of Islamic times, he was superbly mythologized by Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh as the First Man, the First King, and the Founder of the Pishdadian dynasty of Righteous Rulers. Keyumars epitomizes life within a mortal world, thus setting in motion the concept of eternal presence and heralding the ultimate victory of the Messiah as the New (or Last) Keyumars.
Currently, the most common encyclopedic definitions of the two terms present these two distinct activities as overlapping or describe spirituality as a part of religion; this is however wrong, if it is considered as valid for all the religions of the world. Many historical religions started as a form of systematization of spirituality and of spiritual rules and they ended up as totally materialistic, rationalistic, and juristic systems of theology. The representatives of these systems have nothing to do with spirituality; they hate the spiritual universe about which they talk too much but only to confuse and besot the rest, and in the Name of God, they commit the world’s cruelest crimes in order to defend their otherwise nonexistent right to survive.
Irrespective of posterior alterations, deteriorations and degenerations, the original fact has always been spirituality; contrarily to religion, spirituality does not need a society to be activated, performed, and experienced. Spirituality is the cornerstone and the epitome of humanity. The human being was created as a unity of soul and body, and if one of the parts of the human identity is disconnected from the other, the being is not human anymore. In the human being, the soul represents the being’s connection to the spiritual world and the body consists in the being’s bond with the material world. What material vivacity is for the body is spiritual life for the soul.
Separation of the soul from the body is called death; disconnection of the soul from the body is also a form of death, and this was hinted at by numerous leading spiritual masters, like for instance Jesus (e.g. “let the dead bury their own dead”; Matthew 8:22). Since God is the Supreme Spiritual Being and the Creator of the spiritual and the material universes, the soul of the man connects, or does not connect, to God. And this is exactly what spirituality is about: spiritual life.
In other words, whereas human society is useless, worthless and unnecessary for the human being to exist and to live, spirituality encompasses all actions, practices, exercises, efforts and techniques pertaining to the interaction between a human being’s soul and body (: heart and mind) and to the activation of a human being’s connection with the spiritual universe – and with the countless spiritual beings and hierarchies that are set in motion and operate therein. Because spirituality, namely spiritual life, is of the foremost importance in the human being’s passage from the material world, many spiritual masters, mystics and spiritually active men departed from their society or lived a secluded life; this was due to the fact that human society can be either unnecessary or even harmful to a person’s spirituality. This common phenomenon is attested in numerous civilizations, and in some of them, it takes the form of asceticism or monasticism.
The early religions in Mesopotamia (Sumer, Elam, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylon), Anatolia (Hatti, Hurrians, Hittites, and Luwians), Egypt, Cush (Sudan), Canaan, and Iran were systems that offered their apprentice priests the possibility to
a) learn and practice all levels of soul-body (spiritual/material) interaction in a human being,
b) comprehend the nature, the norms, and the dimensions of the spiritual and material universes, the stages of their creation, and the phases of their final dissolution (every Cosmogony involves a Cosmology, a Soteriology, and an Eschatology), and
c) learn and perform all types of synergy with spiritual beings and hierarchies as per the needs and the targets set.
To be properly understood, the aforementioned has to be taken into consideration in the light of the following four critical points:
i. the ‘language’ used for the spiritual initiation, formation, education and activation of the apprentice priests by the hierophants and the high priests was the archetypal Oriental Myth, i.e. the inherently created and permanently manifested, within the human being, system of spiritual perception and comprehension, communication and interaction with all other intelligences, spiritual beings, humans, animals, plants and other beings of the material universe. In and by itself, the original Oriental Myth is the complete field of symbolic semiotics that encompasses all forms of Being and Becoming, their opposites, and the correlation between Being and Non-being. In other words, it is part of the Creation, and not a human invention or perception.
ii. the spiritual exercises, practices, advance and completion of the apprentice priests took place irrespective of the spiritual/material duality of Moral Order, i.e. the Good and Evil; this does not mean that this duality is irrelevant. On the contrary, the spiritual duality was reflected on the material universe, and there were entire priesthoods that preached and practiced a counterfeit, evil spirituality at the very antipodes of the moral priesthoods, which followed the Moral Order, i.e. the Law of God.
iii. the aforementioned duality of Moral Order has a lot to do with the Fall of Man or rather the successive stages of the Fall, which are known as the Flood, the Tower of Babel, etc. within the Ancient Hebrew (Biblical) religious context, and accordingly in other, earlier or later, civilizations. These stages of gradual moral degradation caused a) the progressive disconnection of the soul from the body in most of the humans,
b) the subsequent dissociation of the human being from the spiritual universe,
c) the subordination of the immoral, counterfeit priesthoods to the fallen spiritual beings,
d) the deterioration of the conditions of material life on Earth,
e) the preservation of the spiritual potency among several sacerdotal circles during the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE, and
f) the abysmal confrontation between the moral and the immoral priesthoods as part of the clash between Good and Evil in both, the spiritual and the material, universes.
One of the repercussions of this confrontation was the compilation of counterfeit religions geared to engulf humans not only to spiritual disconnection, but also to spiritual impotence and black magic; the very concept of an ‘intermediate’ (being, priest, idol, thought or anything) between the human being and God is the epitome of black magic, as it helps transfer spiritual and material (intellectual) power from an impotent, unconscious and spiritually disconnected human being to another person that gets criminally powered at both, the spiritual and the material, levels, therefore resulting in impermissible and lawless exploitation.
Keyumars instructs his officers to combat Ahriman: this is how the preaching of all the prophets in encapsulated in one symbolic representation. Spirituality does not need volumes of otherwise useless treatises to set the norms and convey the truth about Life.
iv. at the very early days of the History of Mankind, spirituality constituted the epicenter of religion, and so it was in every teaching and practice of a great spiritual master. All true founders of religions were basically leading spiritual masters, who did not launch ‘religions’ properly speaking, but taught their disciples and preached at large the authentic spirituality (the interaction between the human being’s soul and body, and the human being’s connection with the spiritual universe) and the inherent (since the Creation) Moral Order that all humans must follow.
In fact, religion came later either in the simple form of systematization of spirituality and of spiritual rules within the context of human society where the Moral Order should prevail or in the perplex form of counterfeit religions with black magic rituals of many types, i.e. ‘cult’.
Now, if one wants to understand what spiritual potency means, one can find plenty of examples in every literature, tradition, culture and civilization. Within the context of Christianity, one can refer to the well–known excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew (17:20) in which Jesus says to his disciples the following:
“Because you have such little faith”, he told them. “I tell you, if you have faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Go from here to over there’, and it would do it, and nothing would be impossible for you”.
Among numerous other deeds, which are nowadays erroneously (and due to the aforementioned, successive falls of Mankind) considered as ‘miraculous’, spiritual potency of a human involves the following: levitation, walking on water, telekinesis, teleportation across distances, healing, total control of electromagnetic fields, bodily luminescence, control over all natural forces, movement across various points in time, transfiguration, power over fallen (or evil, demonic) spirits and hierarchies, resurrection of the dead, and heavenly travels, like those of
a) the Biblical Enoch (Islamic Idris),
b) the Biblical Elijah (Islamic Ilyas),
c) Jesus (Islamic Isa),
d) Mani, the prophet and founder of Manichaeism,
e) Kartir, the leading theologian and high priest of the Mazdaean religion during the early Sassanid times,
f) the legendary Arda Viraf of the Parsis (as described in the Arda Wiraz namag), and
g) Prophet Muhammad, i.e. the well-known Isra’ and Mi’raj (الإسراء والمعراج) nocturnal travel; about:
As the fall of human societies and the decline of the human condition intensified, spirituality was reduced tremendously and the spiritual potency of most of the priesthoods became nil, with the exception of those whose spiritual power was not theirs anymore, but that of the demons inhabiting the souls of the priests who were acting as mere servants of negative hierarchies.
The fall of Mankind is symbolized within the context of Islamic mysticism by Kay Kavus, the second king of the Kayanian dynasty; in this miniature, Kay Kavus (son of the sublime Kay Kawad (or Kay Qubad), father of the misfortunate Siyavash (or Siyavush), and grandfather of Kay Khusraw, the resolute, selfless soldier and end times’ vanquisher) is being captured by the divs, i.e. the evil spirits that work for Ahriman.
As spiritual power among humans decreased considerably and was limited among few circles of priests and mystics or in isolated cases of ascetics, the condition of human life was restricted to the material level, and then an enormous materialistic, rationalistic, and juristic literature surfaced only to verbally and nominally guide the believers to the ‘correct path’, which was of course not correct and not a path, but a catastrophic swamp and a wrong impasse. Then, the ‘faithful’ were truly left without ‘faith’, because this term originally denoted only the spiritual potency acquired by an individual (as it is clearly shown in the aforementioned example).
In fact, the spiritual connotation of the word ‘faith’ means performance of acts, which in today’s fallen world are considered ‘miraculous’, but in reality they are not. ‘Faith’ does not mean mere acceptance of a narrative; this is a devious, degenerated and corrupt meaning of this word. This materialistic, rationalistic, and juristic literature, which appeared in later periods, among decadent nations, reduced the original Oriental Myth to a meaningless narrative about past times; this contributed to the alteration of the earlier form of religion, rendering some narratives ‘incredible’ or ‘inexplicable’, due to the proliferation of the idiotic rationalism of the fallen humans. Then, the worthless believers accepted the ‘unbelievable’ stories blindly, further worsening their condition of grave faithlessness (without of course realizing the calamitous situation in which they found themselves).
This worthless verbosity of materialistic, rationalistic, and juristic character is called nowadays “theology”. This means simply that what the average Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Phoenician and Hebrew of the 10th c. BCE knew as ‘Flood’ had nothing in common with the de-mythicized and therefore meaningless idea that the average Babylonian, Egyptian, Aramaean, Jew, Greek and Roman of the 1st c. BCE believed about that critical event. The same concerns the followers of later religions today, but not the disciples and the believers of later mystics and spiritual masters who had managed to attain the lost spirituality.
The term “theology” does not therefore apply properly to the earlier sacred texts of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE; whatever their contents may have been (mythical, apocalyptic, moral, literary, etc.), the earlier sacred texts of all religions were in fact ‘texts of spiritual awakeness’ – except for sacerdotal texts compiled by immoral, counterfeit and polytheistic priesthoods.
The preservation of socioeconomic power by the theological gangs and all those, who distorted the early systems of spirituality and defiled the spiritual teachings of later mystics and spiritual masters, was their main concern. For these preposterous theologians, morality among believers did not constitute the true promise of an individual’s spiritual rehabilitation and ultimate salvation, but a means to implement their own anti-spiritual, anti-godly, material(istic) takeover of the society.
Theology therefore signifies the death of spirituality, the falsification of religion, and the degeneration of the sacred texts in the minds of the believers; for this purpose, the average believer’s mindset is aptly distorted, the earlier faith is disoriented, and the people are made unable to ever perceive and understand correctly all things spiritual. Consequently, theologically hijacked religions are tantamount to systems of mental, intellectual, educational, academic, cultural, artistic and socio-economic prison and tyranny. They apparently ended up in the putrefaction of the human being.
There is an exception to the aforementioned; it occurs when there is no established religion but conflicting theological systems, and then the various theologians act like profane philosophers trying to pull their followers to this or that theme and belief that they want to highlight and propagate. This confusing situation may trigger eventually fanaticism, but at times, the worst has been averted due to a shrewd theologian, who prevented others from presenting even worse concepts.
This is the situation that Jesus faced opposite the Pharisees and Muhammad encountered, when confronting either the Jews and the idolatrous Arabs of Hejaz or the Constantinopolitan Christian clergymen, who forced Emperor Heraclius not to accept the invitation to Islam that the prophet extended to him. In reality, spirituality was defamed as black magic within Christianity by those who turned Jesus’ teaching into a black magic shamelessly performed in his name.
All spiritual mystics had to either permanently hide themselves or to develop and diffuse various forms of lesser theological distortion, which were then labeled as ‘heresies’ by the theological gangsters. The situation turned worse when mystics and theologians developed and launched systems of Christian spirituality limited only to the initiated members of secret religious orders (which was another form of hiding). For the average people, this meant that only as a monk or the member of a secret religious order, they could perhaps reconstitute the bond between their soul and their body in themselves.
Kay Khosrow inspects his army before the eschatological battle with Afrasiab; from a manuscript of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh painted in Shiraz in 1561-1562.
Exactly the same occurred within the context of Islam, which was preached as the utmost spirituality by Muhammad and preserved as such by Ali, Hasan, Husayn and their descendants, before several mystics and transcendental masters maintained the Islamic spiritual tradition in several mystical orders. In fact, many Islamic spiritual societies attempted to reconstruct the continuity of Mankind’s historical spirituality by duly interpreting ancient sacred texts and properly decoding mystical traditions kept in various forms of popular culture across the lands occupied by the Islamic Caliphate. This explains to great extent why many aspects and elements of earlier religions and systems of spirituality have emphatically survived within the Islamic world, notably Zervanism, Mazdakism, Mazdeism, Gayomardism, Gnosticisms, etc.
The characteristic difference that separates Christianity from Islam in terms of spirituality and the incomparably higher number of mystical orders that flourished within the Islamic world can be explained by the determinant fact that Islam as religious system is almost totally devoid of ‘cult’. This absence of the historically known and typically religious cult from Islam, as Prophet Muhammad entrusted his faith to his disciples and followers, impregnated an irrevocable mark that stood as major obstacle to all efforts of degrading this system of spirituality to a profanity.
Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, epic eschatology, Islamic mysticism, traditional painting, and popular spirituality: the departure of the mother and the grandmother of Kay Khosrow for Iran (by Hossein Qollar-Aqasi): the most adverse moment in Kay Khosrow’s transcendental life.
Of course, the earliest form of theological distortion of Islam was undertaken by immoral and evil theologians who were hired by the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphs in order to justify their criminal acts and anti-Islamic practices. In Chapter XXI (The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’), I offer many examples in this regard. However, in the process of theological systematization of Islam (known as madhhab), there appeared systems of theological jurisprudence, which looked quite normal in the beginning, but later turned Islam into a system of rationalistic verbalism, juristic nominalism, and materialistic dogmatism. In their verbosity, the original spirituality was lost forever.
At a later stage, pathetic, ignorant and evil theologians considered every Muslim’s connection with the spiritual universe and God (which is Islam’s sole purpose) as their own personal interest and business, and they consequently reduced Prophet Muhammad’s preaching to a silly list of dos and don’ts (as if spirituality and religion are a schoolboy’s lesson). To best express their monstrous identity, they hijacked the madhhab (theological schools of jurisprudence) in order to instrumentalize them as tools of pseudo-religious oppression; first, they undertook vast campaigns against the Islamic sciences in order to plunge the believers into ignorance, and then, they fanaticized their idiotic, uneducated and illiterate followers at a time of conflict (notably the Crusades), turning them against various Islamic mystical orders or independent mystics.
These evil theologians, on whom today’s fake Islam is based, caused an incredible bloodshed throughout the Islamic world; however, it is essential to distinguish between
a) the early bloodshed that took place in the 7th and 8th c. due to orders of caliphs, who cared about how to secure their illegal grab of power from the early Islamic mystics and descendants of Prophet Muhammad (notably Ja’far al-Sadiq, sixth imam of all Muslims; 702-765), and
b) the later, longer and more atrocious bloodshed that covered the period between the 9th and the 15th c. and which was caused by evil theologians, who wanted to control the Muslims by plunging them into ignorance, barbarism, ignominy, and fallacious interpretation of the sacred texts on the basis of their own pseudo-Islamic theological system.
What these theologians, and more particularly the disreputable Ahmed ibn Hanbal and the cursed Ahmad ibn Taimiyyah, did was a literal Christianization of Islam; they viciously interpolated their juristic doctrines between the Man (in this case, the Muslim) and God (Allah). These theological doctrines consist in an impermissible intermediate that breaks the connection of man with the spiritual universe and God. And to do this, these Satanic theologians butchered numerous mystics whom they failed to understand in the first place. Great examples in this regard are Mansour Hallaj (858-922; lashed terribly and then decapitated) and Imadaddin Nasimi (1369-1417), who was accused as Hurufi, without however being so, and skinned alive.
Drawing therefore on earlier experience, the Safavid Order decided to take the correct measures so as to prevent the massacre of their members at the hands of ignorant pseudo-Muslims fanaticized by Satanic theologians (who may have been indiscriminately ‘qadis’, ‘sheikhs’ and ‘imams’) and shamelessly bribed or favored by Ottoman sultans. Having been launched by, and named after, Safi-ad-Din Ardabili (1252–1334) at the end of the 13th c., the Safavid Order was a band of mystics, an assembly of enlightened Muslims, and a confederation of the true faithful, who performed the royal art, carrying out acts of devotion and spiritual salvation, while engaging in diverse techniques of spirituality. They were the friends of Christians, Parsis, Yazidis, Jews, Ahl-e Haq, Tengrists, Hindus, and Buddhists.
After having operated for two centuries, at the times of the Order’s Grandmaster Shaykh Haydar (1459-1488), the Safavid Order launched another secret society, namely the Qizilbash (Kızılbaş /(قزلباش, i.e. the “red headed” (because of their red headgear); the Qizilbash functioned as the army of the Safavid Order and they duly prevented all pseudo-Muslim theologians and their cursed followers from asserting their evil power across lands that the Qizilbash controlled, thus fully defending the members of the (hereditary) Safavid Order.
Safi ad-din Ardabili surrounded by his disciples, as illustrated in a 16th-century Safavid manuscript of the Safvat as-safa
Soon after their early successes, at the end of the 15th c., the mystical order and their army branch, knowing very well that the degenerate Islamic theologians would destroy the entire Islamic world, decided to set up their own state, which would be an empire ruled by the Safavid Order and predestined to save the Islamic world from total decay, slavery and decomposition. This type of state would not be and actually was not a religious or theological state; quite contrarily, it was a secular empire ruled by the mystical order. Automatically, every pseudo-Muslim theologian and every pseudo-Islamic state, which was nominally ruled by a sultan, emir, khan or king, but essentially it was governed by the bogus-religious authorities and the evil theologians, was found at the very antipodes of Safavid Iran.
It is crucial at this point to state that when the theologians put the monarch under control in a pseudo-Muslim state, this consists in the repetition of a phenomenon known only too well within the Christian world: Papo-Caesarism. No Christian and no Muslim state can adopt the Papo-Caesarist model. Spirituality imposes imperial rule, and this means Caesaropapism. This was solemnly introduced by Justinian I throughout the Roman Empire; it is for this reason that immediately after the death of prophet Muhammad, the followers of Ali asserted that only the prophet’s cousin and son-in law could possibly be the ruler of the Caliphate. Despite Ali’s astounding spiritual qualifications, his rule would follow the Caesaropapist pattern.
As a matter of fact, there cannot be religious evaluation of spiritual matters; this reality, which was never accepted by religious authorities and theologians alike (because it would herald their deserved dissolution and ultimate disappearance), is viciously concealed behind the Western confusion between spirituality (spiritalitas or numen / maneviyat/ معنویت/ الروحانية/靈性/ духовность) and religion (religio/din/ دین/宗教/ религия). Suffice it to check the most common definitions of spirituality and religion that are available online; there one gets a clear idea of the materialistic distortion of both terms’ meaning.
Miniature created by Mo’en Mosavver: Shah Ismail I holds an audience and welcomes the Qizilbash after they defeated the Shirvanshah Farrukh Yasar; album leaf from a copy of Bijan’s Tarikh-i Jahangusha-yi Khaqan Sahibqiran (A History of Shah Ismail I), produced in Isfahan, end of the 1680s
Drawing of a typical Qizilbash soldier
Then, what is fallaciously termed as “Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam” describes in reality the mere rise of the Safavid Order in large parts of Western Asia and the effort to eliminate the monstrous, pseudo-Muslim theologians who want to rule on the basis of their false Sharia, and of their pernicious interpretations of the sacred texts. Not one Safavid Emperor called himself a “Shia” and not one Ottoman Sultan used this term for the Safavid rulers, with whom the Ottomans fought so many times, although they were all Turanians. About:
2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu
(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
CONTENTS
PART ONE. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities
A. Examples of fake national names
a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!
b) Tataria – Not Russia!
c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!
d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!
e) Khazaria – not Israel!
f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!
B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish
C. The Preamble to My Response
CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.
CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.
CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment
A. Orientalism
B. Conceptualization
C. Contextualization
D. Concealment
PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT
CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece
PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY
CHAPTER VI: The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times
CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists
CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan
CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES
CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period
CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty
CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids
PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS
CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire
CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism
CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates
PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM
CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE
CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet
CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam
CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History
PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’
CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’
PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’
CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate
PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash
PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM
CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor
PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED
CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another
CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’
CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur
CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World
CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West
CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk
PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?
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List of the already pre-published chapters of the book
Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
Pre-publication of chapter XX of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XVII, XVIII, XIX and XX form Part Six (Fallacies about the Early Expansion of Islam: the Fake Arabization of Islam) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapter XVII has already been pre-published.
Until now, 13 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 14th (out of 33). At the end of the present pre-publication the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in green color.
In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.
The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.
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Istakhri’s map: miniature from the Book of Roads and Kingdoms; Islamic Geography and Cartography are the continuation of the respective sciences of the Ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Aramaeans and Iranians
In addition to the aforementioned, an enormous effort of historical discrediting of Islam was undertaken by all sections and disciplines of Western colonial Orientalism; the systematic dissociation of Islam, of the Islamic Civilization, and of the Islamic History from the Ancient Oriental History, civilizations and religionshas been an enormous, coordinated effort to historically distort and disfigure the Islamic world in its entirety and to deceitfully present Islam as a marginal and rootless story.
Western forgers did their ingenious best to
a) dissociate Islam as religion from earlier forms of monotheistic spirituality, doctrine, faith, religion, cosmogony, cosmology, and apocalyptic eschatology;
b) disconnect the Islamic civilization from the great Ancient Oriental civilizations (Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian, Cushitic, Phoenician, Aramaean, Hebrew, Iranian and Yemenite); and
c) portray the Islamic sciences, arts, architecture, literature, moral wisdom, intellectual life, mythology, theology and philosophy as independent from and unrelated to the similar Ancient Oriental endeavors, exploits and accomplishments.
Yet, Islam as religion, spirituality, world conceptualization, intellectuality, culture, civilization and way of life is a comprehensive continuation, an investigative exploration, an overwhelming overhaul, and a consummate reassessment of the Ancient Oriental civilizations, and of their hitherto unequaled contributions to the History of the Mankind.
This historical reality was very well known indeed to all the major historians of Islamic times like Abu Ja’far Muhammad al-Tabari (839-923), Abu’l-Qasim ibn Khordadbeh (9th c.), Ahmad al-Ya’qubi (9th c.), Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani (893-945), Al-Mas’udi (896-956), Shamsaddin al-Maqdisi (945-991), Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (973-1050), Abu al-Faraj ibn al-Nadim (10th c.), Ibn Hawqal al-Nasibi (10th c.), Abu Ishaq al-Istakhri (10th c.), Sa’id al-Andalusi (1029-1070), Al-Shahrastani (1086-1153), Ali ibn al-Athir (1160-1233) and Shamsaddin adh-Dhahabi (1274-1348) to name but a few.
Map of Fars: miniature from the Book of Roads and Kingdoms of Istakhri
Map of the Persian Gulf: miniature from the Book of Roads and Kingdoms of Istakhri
Ibn Hawqal’s world map translated in English: a diagram
They all knew the truth, and they ostensibly presented Islamic History as the uninterrupted continuation of all Ancient Oriental nations and civilizations. This is only normal after all; when in the year 750 the Umayyad dynasty was superseded the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, Islam was the religion of the majority of all the people inhabiting the vast lands between the Atlantic Ocean in the West and India & China in the East.
Who were all these people? The Berbers of today’s Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and the Sahara, the Copts of Egypt, the Cushites (‘Ethiopians’) of today’s Sudan, the Yemenites and the Omanis, the Somalis of the Horn of Africa, the Phoenicians, the Palestinians, the Aramaeans of Syria and Mesopotamia (into whom the Ancient Babylonians had been assimilated already during the Parthian times), and all the nations of Eastern Anatolia, Caucasus, the Iranian plateau, the Indus River Valley and Delta, and Central Asia. But these peoples were indeed the descendants of the ancient Oriental nations that constituted the cradle of human civilization and had already impacted all the rest, and more particularly, the backward, uncouth and uncivilized tribes that inhabited the peripheral lands of Europe in pre-Christian times.
Why the aforementioned distortion, namely the dissociation of the Islamic World from the Ancient Oriental History, was necessary for the Western Orientalist forgers and deceitful historiographers is easy to grasp. By making the Islamic Civilization, the Muslim nations, and their History look like marginal heretics or barbarians, who come from nowhere and had no past, they portrayed them as an alien element in the World History, and instead of Islam, they viciously positioned the Anti-Christian ‘Christianity’ of Rome, Western Europe, and North America, as well as the perverse, degenerate, and putrefied modern Western world, as supposedly originating from the ancient Oriental nations and as representing the mainstream of historical evolution.
To promote racial discrimination, educational-academic contamination, cultural racism, intellectual terrorism, as well as abhorrent socio-economic exploitation, the villainous pseudo-professors of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and of other similar, criminal institutions have entertained deceptive and ludicrous discussions about the hypothetical ‘influence’ of the Ancient Greek philosophers on Islamic philosophy, whereas they certainly know that there has not been such ‘influence’.
The Ancient Greek term ‘philosophy’, in and by itself, is of lowly connotation when compared to the Ancient Oriental transcendental wisdom and spiritual science. The Ancient Greek thinkers and explorers, who coined the term, had visited and studied for many years in the temples of Egypt, Babylonia and Iran. They had deployed a genuine effort to reach the Oriental wisdom, but they knew that they had failed to attain the level of their Babylonian, Egyptian, Anatolian and Iranian sacerdotal instructors. That is why they declared themselves as ‘friends of the wisdom’, and this is the real meaning of the word ‘philosophy’.
Neither the Ancient Greek temples, which were mostly dedicated to the cult, nor the various philosophical ‘schools’ that were established by the former students of the Oriental temples could possibly reconstitute a tiny portion of the transcendental wisdom and the spiritual sciences that were developed and maintained in the great Ancient Oriental temples, which were the true universities and research centers of those days.
Because the overwhelming supremacy of Oriental spirituality, mythical symbolism, wisdom, knowledge, science, mysticism and intellect was totally absent among the inhabitants of the peripheral lands of Western Anatolia and South Balkans, various Ionian. Aeolian, Attic, Dorian and other thinkers, the likes of Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato, traveled to Mesopotamia, Iran and Egypt to become there to duly educate themselves, We can therefore conclude that their thought systematization, world conceptualization, and philosophical verbalism (or at times verbosity) did not have any originality; they never advanced up to the level of Oriental spirituality, active spiritual performance, and theurgy. They were unfortunately limited in ceaseless talking, and only few among them made the exception, and they were able to perform what simple people called miracles.
Islamic spirituality, intellectuality, wisdom, knowledge and sciences constitute the continuation of the Ancient Oriental spiritual exercises, religious endeavors, and scientific-intellectual explorations. As far as the 8th – 15th c. Muslim historians, grammarians, astronomers, erudite scholars, scientists, authors, transcendental epic poets, and wise explorers are concerned, one has to point out that they resourcefully studied ancient languages, texts, sciences, religions, and arts; they certainly practiced numerous techniques of ancient spirituality, and they performed what was called ‘mysteries’. Consequently, it is normal to assume that they also studied, translated and commented on selected texts of Ancient Greek authors and philosophers. But this fact demonstrates only the existence of one extra channel of Ancient Egyptian, Assyrian Babylonian, Aramaean, Phoenician, Yemenite and Iranian impact on the Islamic civilization; it does not constitute any ‘influence’.
There were also some Islamic philosophers, who found various statements made by some Ancient Greek philosophers as quite useful elements for their argumentation and their opposition to other, slightly earlier or contemporaneous philosophers (example: the philosophical feud between Ibn Rushd and Al-Ghazali). This situation does not reflect any ‘influence’ either; it consists merely in a reference to different sources. Influence is defined as ‘the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself’.
In the case of the Islamic wise scholars and so-called philosophers, this would entail a substantive adoption (either conscious or not) of earlier preached, taught, diffused and adopted concepts, perceptions, ideals, faiths, notions, rituals, doctrines, ideas, theoretical approaches, interpretations, spiritual exercises, cultic practices or behavioral systems. However, this never occurred.
To offer an example, I would state that there is an undeniable and multifaceted influence of Mani and Manichaeism on many Islamic and Christian mystics, esoteric groups, philosophers, scholars, theologians, spiritual masters, founders of orders, etc. But there is no Platonic, Neo-Platonic or Neo-Pythagorean influence on Islam; and in few cases that may look like cases of evident influence, this is not an Ancient Greek, but an Ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Iranian, Gnostic or other influence on Islam, because there was no originality in Ancient Greek philosophy.
In fact, what happened -as continuation of the Pre-Islamic Oriental erudition, spirituality, faith and knowledge, through Late Antiquity Gnosticisms, Manichaeism and other religions, down to Islamic times- is exactly the opposite of what the colonial academics of Western Europe and North America have meticulously tried for long to totally conceal:
a) with the appearance of Islam and the emergence of the Islamic civilization, Christianity was drastically ejected out of the mainstream human civilization. For many centuries, Orthodox and Catholic Christianity represented merely a wrinkle on the surface of the Earth (just the space between France, Central Europe, Central Italy, the Balkans and Anatolia) when compared to the Islamic world.
Even more so, because despite one strong imperial administration (the Eastern Roman Empire) and a powerful religious institution (Rome), Orthodox and Catholic Christianity together stretched over an area narrower even than that inhabited by Nestorian Christians in Asia, i.e. between Mesopotamia, India, Central Asia, Siberia, Mongolia and China. Despite the enormous spread of Islam between 700 and 1100 CE, Christianity in Asia (i.e. Nestorianism) stretched over lands that were far larger lands than the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire and the lands inhabited by Christians in Western Europe.
and
b) with the overwhelming proclamation of the Satanic perversion of Renaissance, after the demise of the Eastern Roman Empire (1453) and with the long prepared, systematic dispatch of criminal gangsters and colonial murderers across the world to shamelessly commit atrocious hecatombs and tyrannically impose the Renaissance deception (under the guise of ‘Christianity’), a counterfeit religion rose to prominence across the Earth (under the name of Christianity), disfiguring the historical past in order to justify its evil purpose.
In fact, if the Eastern Roman Empire had survived and had existed longer, it would have been the only institution to authoritatively denounce the Anti-Christian crimes and genocides which were perpetrated by the conquistadores and to reject the evilness of Renaissance as totally Anti-Christian.
Pre-publication of chapter XXVI of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXIV, XXV and XXVI constitute the Part Ten {Fallacies about the Times of Turanian (Mongolian) Supremacy in terms of Sciences, Arts, Letters, Spirituality and Imperial Universalism} of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Until now, 9 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 10th (out of 33). A list of the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the end of this chapter.
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Imam Reza Mosque, Mashhad – NE Iran
Timur was not a monstrous murderer as the Western historiographers depicted him in their vicious and pernicious, and therefore absolutely worthless and totally untrustworthy, narratives. Historical texts written by Western European authors about Timur reflect only the impotency of the hypocritical, sacrilegious, pseudo-Christian, petty kings of Europe. Like Genghis Khan, Timur shared the traditional Eastern Turanian vision of Tengrist Universalism; sectarian, ethnic, and other divisions or divisive lines were meaningless, barbarian, and inhuman to him. As per his worldview, these divisions represented only the interference of Evil in the human world. Contrarily to most of the then world’s kings and to all of today’s criminal politicians and statesmen, Timur did not engage in battles and wars for his personal, tribal, ethnic or national material benefit, but for the overall, true progress of the faithful Mankind.
Beyond being a grandmaster in chess, Timur was a great mystic, a knowledgeable interlocutor, and an emperor who highly evaluated erudition, literature, philosophy, arts, architecture and sciences. If today people get confused about Timur’s religious views, this is not due to an eventual misinterpretation of historical sources, but to the present confusion between spirituality and religion. It is enough for someone to associate spirituality with religion in order to totally misperceive entire historical eras. Consequently, Western scholars have nowadays difficulty to define whether Timur was a Sunni or a Shia; this is only normal, because there are no Sunni or Shia. This forged division cannot apply in Timur’s life. In fact, like every spiritually alive man, Timur was a secular monarch. Historically, he continued the tradition of Harun al-Rashid’s Abbasid Caliphate, the practices of the Seljuk sultans, and the modus operandi of the Ilkhanate: his empire was an absolutely secular state.
Today, the term ‘secular state’ is confused with the paranoia of the post-WW II world, but in reality the ‘secular state’ has nothing to do with atheism, agnosticism, academic elitism, sacrilegious intellectualism, rationalism, materialism, hedonism, pan-sexism, and all the evil modern bogus-concepts (politics, democracy, multi-partite system, human rights, etc.), which have been associated with the supposedly ‘secular’ societies of today’s decayed and putrefied Western world. In honorable distinction from, and in total contrast with, other modern states, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey (more specifically, the 1923 Constitution and the period until 1938) had nothing to do with today’s pseudo-secular Western societies, which in reality are strictly religious, yet scrupulously masqueraded, states with Satanism as secretively and tyrannically imposed dogma.
In Timur’s empire, there was sheer distinction between spirituality and religion, and every person was allowed to believe the religious dogma that he chose; religious authorities of all doctrines had the freedom to perform the rites and fulfill the cults of their faith; and there was no interference of the imperial administration in these activities. Many Western scholars attempted to tarnish Timur’s fame by holding him responsible for the gradual decline of Nestorian Christianity, Buddhism and Manichaeism in Central Asia, Siberia and Mongolia; that is totally misplaced.
Neither Genghis Khan nor Timur were ‘personally’ responsible for this fact. Timur did not tolerate any sectarian act of violence and discrimination. The reasons for which these three religions disappeared in the aforementioned regions have nothing to do with imperial decisions of any sort; they are totally unrelated to the Genghisid and Timurid empires. As a matter of fact, Buddhism was already present in the eastern provinces of Achaemenid Iran. Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity appeared during the Sassanid times.
These three religions had followers among several nations that lived across the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, and the mountainous ranges between China, Indus River valley, and parts of Siberia (Aramaeans, Eastern Iranians, Sogdians, Turanians, Khotanese, etc.). However, the process of their disappearance was complex, gradual and slow, covering ca. 700 years (750-1450); first, the Islamic advance towards Central Asia and the Indus River valley (middle 7th c. to middle 8th c. CE) was detrimental to some nations, notably the Sogdians, who were terribly decimated.
Second, the proliferation of mystical orders, spiritual systems, dissident movements, eschatological-messianic concepts, theological schools, soteriological groups, and literary-poetical reassessments of the historical, pre-Islamic past produced an abundance of attractive alternatives for all the nations of the aforementioned diverse regions (over the period between the 8th c. and the 11th c.).
Third and more important, the overwhelming migrations that took place across Asia between the 11th c. and the 15th c. totally changed the landscape between Central Europe and Eastern Siberia; the newly arrived nomads usually accepted concepts of Islam that suited best their traditions of Tengrism and Shamanism. Then, Nestorians, Buddhists and Manichaeans proceeded to the East (i.e. China), since it was well known that settled communities of their coreligionists existed there too and they lived in peace.
Timur met many leading mystics, scholars, scientists, theologians, architects and poets of his times; his meeting with Hafez (Khwaja Shams-ud-Din Muhammad; 1315-1390), the great Iranian poet from Shiraz, was commemorated for centuries among Islamic rulers and erudite scholars, because their conversation bears witness to Timur’s ostensible ability to appreciate wit, intellect, self-sarcasm, and modesty.
Manuscript miniature depicting the encounter between Timur and Ibn Khaldun
Two pages from a manuscript of Ibn Khaldun’s al Muqaddimah
16th c. copy of Hafez’s Divan with fighting scene
Ceiling decoration of the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz
Hafez’s Mausoleum, Shiraz
Timur met Ahmad ibn Arabshah (1389-1450) during the siege of Damascus; he saved him (along with many other scholars) and then sent him to Samarqand; later, the Damascene author returned to Damascus and proceeded to Edirne / Adrianople, the Ottoman capital at the time; there he composed a voluminous historical description of Timur’s deeds and conquests (Aja’ib al-Maqdur fi Nawa’ib al-Taymur: The Wonders of Destiny of the Ravages of Timur).
One can however instantly understand why Ahmad ibn Arabshah presented a negative image of Timur, who had saved his life: writing while you are at the Ottoman payroll can never be a guarantee for objective description and impartial narrative. Had Ahmad ibn Arabshah written a true and unbiased ‘Tarikh’, the Ottoman sectarian theologians and the rancorous courtiers of Mehmed I and of Murat II would have burned the manuscripts. The Ottoman hatred of Timur and the Timurids lasted until the demise of the Caliphate – only to the detriment of the Ottoman family.
The major and most trustworthy historical biographies and sources for the life, the conquests, and the deeds of Timur are Nizam ad-Din Shami’s Zafar nameh (ظفرنامه, Book of Victory), Sharif al-Din Ali Yazdi’s Zafar nameh, and Abu Taleb Husayni’s Malfuzat-e Timuri and the associated appendix Tuzokat (which is basically the Persian translation of an earlier manuscript written in Chagatai Turkic and found in Yemen; Abu Taleb Husayni presented his work to the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in 1637).
The conquest of Baghdad by Timur depicted on the miniature of a manuscript of in Sharif al-Din Ali Yazdi’s Zafar nameh
Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi with Muhammad Amuli; folio from the Majalis al-Ushaq of Kamal al-Din Gazurgahi, which was written and decorated in Shiraz around 1560
The phenomenon that Western scholars describe as Timurid ‘Renaissance’ consists in a serious misperception of the entire historical period; the irrelevant terminology was invented to project Western concepts onto the Islamic world. In general, the term ‘Renaissance’ cannot apply either in the case where there is uninterrupted continuity or in the manifestation of newly invented concepts, ideas, forms, styles or rhythms. Truly, the 2nd half of the 14th century and the entire 15th century were a period of fully-fledged spiritual, academic, scientific, literary, artistic, architectural, cultural, intellectual, and artisan creativity and dynamism across almost all Islamic lands.
However, this phenomenon does not have any trait of revival or rebirth of an earlier experience or condition. Quite contrarily, it consists in the culmination of the Islamic genius as manifested since the days of Abbasid Baghdad, Bayt al-Hikmah, Ferdowsi, Nizam al Mulk, and Nasir el-Din al Tusi. One may eventually express a rhetorical question like the following in order to fully demonstrate the inaccuracy of the Western neologism Timurid ‘Renaissance’:
– What was interrupted, terminated, dispersed, lost or forgotten as Islamic science, art, scholarship and craftsmanship in the days of Nasir al-Din al Tusi (1201-1274), only to restart, resume, and be rediscovered, revived and reborn at the time of Timur?
The answer is very simple: nothing!
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s works, explorations, studies, and astronomical tables and catalogues were continued in the works of Jamshid al-Kashi, Qadi Zadeh al Rumi (of Eastern Roman origin), and Ulugh Beg, Timur’s grandson, third successor, and astronomer emperor. There is an undisputed continuity from the Observatory of Maragheh to the Observatory of Samarqand, pretty much like there is an absolute continuity in Islamic science, academic life, and artistic creativity from Abbasid Baghdad to Timurid Samarqand.
Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad
Aerial view of Imam Reza shrine in 1976
The tomb of Imam Reza
And there was novelty! Timurid architecture, as manifested in Samarqand, Herat, Balkh, Turkistan {Kazakhstan; the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi (1093-1166) which was commissioned by Timur himself}, Mashhad (Goharshad Mosque, built in honor of Empress Goharshad, Shah Rukh’s royal consort), and elsewhere, may have several traits that date back to Seljuk times, and may well represent the next stage of evolution from Ilkhanate architecture. However, in reality, Timurid architecture consists in an entirely different and totally new Islamic style of architecture. With their characteristically elevated, fluted domes, with their deep niches, with their impressively raised iwans (vaulted gateways), with their very typical shabestans (underground spaces), with their innovative muqarnas (also known as honeycomb vaulting), and with their inscriptions on mosaic tiles, all the Timurid mosques, madrasas and mausoleums are unique of style and known for their rule of axial symmetry.
Goharshad Mosque, Mashhad
Goharshad tomb, Herat
High place of Timurid architecture is by definition the Registan esplanade at Samarqand, a vast public square with three astoundingly monumental universities; ‘madrasa’ at the time did not mean only ‘theological school’, because theology was only one of the numerous -more than 20- academic topics taught in the madrasas. The first madrasa built in Registan was the Ulugh Beg Madrasah (construction: 1417–1420); two centuries later, the Sher-Dor Madrasah (1619–1636) and the Tilya-Kori Madrasah (1646–1660) were built at the times of the Janid dynasty (established by descendants of the Khanate of Astrakhan) in exactly the same architectural style. Subsequently, Timurid architecture influenced architectural styles in the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman empires.
Registan Square, Samarqand
Ulugh Beg Madrasah: one of the three masterpieces of Timurid Architecture in Registan
Sher-Dor Madrasah, Registan
Tilya Kori Madrasah, Registan
Many irrelevant European scholars characterized the Turanian Timurid architecture as “Persian style”, but there is nothing ‘Persian’ in it. The enormous iwans may certainly be a reminiscence of the Parthian iwans, but Parthia was not ‘Persia’; quite contrarily, the Arsacid Empire of the Parthians was called ‘Iran’ and the Parthians were not ‘Persians’ but Turanians. Similar cases bear witness to the numerous colonial discriminatory abuses and to the academic, Indo-Europeanist racism.
Bibi-Khanym Mosque, Samarqand; it was built in 1399 by the Tamerlane’s favorite wife, Bibi-Khanym, in honor of his return from the war in India
Timur and Shah Rukh patronized the arts, improving the traditional Art of the Book, sponsoring scholars, scientists and artists, and demanding exquisite illustrations of manuscripts (miniatures). Manuscript illumination became then a highly revered art and several schools (styles) were distinguished in this regard; elements of Turanian, Central Asiatic, Iranian, and Chinese artistic traditions were then blended into a new style. The Timurids in general were remembered as benefactors of scholars, poets, artists, artisans, and architects. About:
Gur-i Emir Mausoleum, Samarqand, Shah Rukh’s headstone 3rd from the left
Tanka (silvr coin) of Shahrukh Mirza (Yazd mint)
Shah Rukh’s reign (1409-1447) is considered as the Golden Era of the Timurid Empire. He ruled over the largest part of Timur’s territory and only after his nephew Khalil Sultan (1405-1409) proved to be totally unable to reign. Timur’s western territories were lost because of the chaos caused by the conflicts between the Karakoyunlu and the Akkoyunlu and following the Karakoyunlu victory over Miran Shah and the Timurid army (1408). Shah Rukh preferred to rule in peace with his neighbors and this helped the scholarly, artistic, artisan and architectural activities that burgeoned in his empire. Shah Rukh created a solid base in Herat (today’s NW Afghanistan) where many Genghisid relatives of his royal consort Goharshad lived, as they were the local administrators.
Goharshad ranked below Shah Rukh’s other Genghisid wife, Malekat Aga. However, due to her family support, to her inclination for letters, arts and public works, and because of her sense of human relations, she became a considerable factor of her imperial husband’s success. As a matter of fact, Goharshad was the daughter of a notable Genghisid prince Giath al-Din Tarkan whose honorary title (Tarkan) was initially bestowed by Genghis Khan himself upon one of his ancestors. It is therefore only normal that, after Shah Rukh invaded Samarqand and was accepted as the final successor to his father by all, he transferred the imperial capital to Herat, leaving his son Ulugh Beg as governor of Samarqand.
Herat had been destroyed by Genghis Khan (1221) but rebuilt during the Ilkhanate; however, the magnificent edifices and architectural monuments erected there at the time of Shah Rukh and Goharshad made of the city one of the Islamic world’s most splendid capitals. The erection of the Musallah complex of Herat (1417), which involved mausoleums, madrasa, mosque and five minarets, is the most important among the many monuments patronized by Shah Rukh’s royal consort. The famous shrine of Gazur Gah (an 11th c. mystic who lived in Herat and is historically known as Khwaja Abd Allah) was also built (1425) under the imperial patronage of the Timurids. And the same is valid for Goharshad Mausoleum that was built (1438) as the tomb of Shah Rukh’s and Goharshad’s son, prince Baysunghur.
Perhaps the most impressive and most colorful monument commissioned by the imperial couple was the enormous Goharshad Mosque built in Mashhad (today’s NE Iran). With a 43 m high dome, with two 43 m high minarets, and with four iwans, the mosque was always considered as one of the most impressive and most beautiful monuments of Islamic architecture worldwide.
Patron of authors, explorers and erudite scholars, Shah Rukh benefitted from the great talent of Hafez Abru, who had first been one of Timur’s most favorite scholars and authors. Abdallah ben Lutfallah (as is the full name of Hafez Abru) accompanied Timur in several military campaigns and was present in all the imperial court feasts and symposia convened by Timur. After the death of the conqueror, he entered the service of Shah Rukh, who commissioned the elaboration of numerous historical and geographical opuses, notably
i. Dayl-e Zafar nameh ye-Shami (continuation of Nizam al-Din Shami’s biography of Timur for the period 1404-1405)
ii. Dayl-e Jame’ al-Tawarih (continuation of Rashid al-Din’s Universal History by an anonymous author who covered the period 1304-1335)
iii. Tarih-e Shah Rukh (History of the reign of Timur’s son until 1414; this text was later incorporated in other historical compilations by Hafez Abru)
iv. Tarih-e Hafez Abru, which is a Universal History and Geography commissioned by Shah Rukh in 1414 (originally it was scheduled to be the Farsi translation of selected geographical treatises earlier written in Arabic, but finally it became an original opus of historical geography); it also involved a map (British Library manuscript Ms. 1577) designed after the methods of the historical Balkh School of Cartography.
v. Majmu’a-ye Hafez-e Abru, i.e. a Universal History commissioned by Shah Rukh in 1418 in order to incorporate Bal’ami’s translation of Tabari’s Tarih to Farsi and Rashid al-Din’s Universal History, which was extended by Hafez Abru until 1393.
vi. Majma’ al Tawarih al Soltani, a Universal History until 1426, written for Shah Rukh’s son Baysunghur.
Shah Rukh established good diplomatic relations with Ming China by sending an imperial delegation to Beijing in 1419-1422. Member of the delegation was Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash, who was tasked to compose the official diary, which was not saved independently down to our times, but was largely incorporated in other historical opuses. As an official account, this text was highly evaluated and therefore translated to various Turkic languages in later periods. The Timurid delegation was received with imperial honor, traditional pomp, and great joy at the Ming court. Shah Rukh created an environment of stability and peace across Asia, systematically exchanging embassies and establishing good relations also with the Sultanate of Delhi (notably Khizr Khan), the Bengal Sultanate (and particularly with Shamsuddin Ahmad Shah), the Akkoyunlu, the Ottomans, the Turanian Ormuz kingdom in the Hormuz straits (then under Bahman Shah II), and even the Mamluks of Egypt.
As the Dravidian ruler (Samoothiri) of Calicut (in the presently occupied Deccan, in South ‘India’) encountered several Timurid officials who, while returning from the Sultanate of Bengal, anchored in his harbor, he decided to send an embassy to Herat. A Farsi-speaking Dravidian Muslim led the official delegation and impressed Shah Rukh, who subsequently dispatched a Timurid delegation to Calicut (Kozhikode; 1442-1443) under Abd al-Razzsaq Samarqandi (1413–1482); the scholar-diplomat wrote an extensive report of his mission that he later incorporated in his chronicle Maṭla’-e sa’dayn va maǰma’-e baḥrayn (the rise of the two auspicious constellations and the junction of the two seas). He thus offered insight into first, the small kingdom of Calicut and the local rulers (named Saamoothiri) and second, the Dravidian Vijayanagara kingdom, because the local king Deva Raya II invited Abd al-Razzsaq Samarqandi to his court.
Shah Rukh had however to fight several battles against the Karakoyunlu (in 1420, 1429 and 1434) and the Timurid army was victorious every time. However, since Shah Rukh did not inherit the brutality of his father, his victories did not solve the problem of the constantly rebellious Turkmen and the unstable situation in the western confines of the Iranian plateau, North Mesopotamia, South Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia continued during most of the 15th c. until the Akkoyunlu managed to achieve a decisive victory (1467) over the Karakoyunlu only to be later supplanted by the Safavid Empire (1501).
After Timur crushed the Hurufi rebellion in 1394, the secret Kabbalistic sect launched a subversive campaign of anti-Timurid hatred and evidently conspired against the empire by placing in the Timurid court several secret members who would be later mobilized against the imperial administration. In 1426, Shah Rukh risked his life in an assassination attempt; he survived and then undertook a great effort to uproot the evil secretive sect that promoted black magic practices by attributing numerical values to letters of the alphabet and then evoking spiritual potentates. Several modern scholars, who happen to be Kabbalists and Satanists, tried therefore to tarnish the fair name of Shah Rukh and to distort the truth by accusing him of ‘anti-intellectualism’, a nonexistent term coined by evil and inhuman gangsters in order to denigrate everyone who makes it impossible for them to conduct their perverse and evil operations. This is pathetic and ludicrous; the historical truth is that Shah Rukh was the patron of artists, scholars, erudite authors and architects. And in any case, an ‘intellectual’, who gets initiated in the secrets of a Kabbalist sect, already ceases to be a human.
When Shah Rukh died at the age of 70 (1447), his firstborn son Ulugh Beg (then at the age of 53; 1394-1449) succeeded him; he was also Goharshad’s favorite son and he had acquired a remarkable experience in travels, scholarly explorations, and imperial administration. He had been the governor of Samarqand and the entire Transoxiana (Mawarannahr) since 1409 (when he was just 15). And since the early 1420s, he was an accomplished scholar, mathematician and astronomer with his own madrasa and his own observatory – the best of his time. About:
Mirza Muhammad Taraghay bin Shahrukh (mainly known as Ulugh Beg, i.e. ‘the great ruler’; 1394-1449) was the unique case of Turanian Muslim Emperor who was also a consummate scholar, a leading mathematician, and the then world’s foremost astronomer. He ruled for only two years and only after having delivered pioneering opuses, notably Zij-i Sultani (زیجِ سلطانی; the astronomical tables of the Sultan, i.e. of himself), which is a collective work of many leading astronomers working under his guidance to produce a list of no less than 1018 stars.
Ulugh Beg was an exceptional man in every sense; he had 13 wives, he spoke ca. 10 languages (Chagatai Turkic, Farsi, Arabic, Syriac Aramaic, Chinese, and several other Western and Eastern Turanian languages), and he seems to have been a prodigious young man, very knowledgeable since his adolescence; and thanks to his numerous travels, he saw great monuments, universities, libraries and centers of learning that impressed him. However, Nasir el-Din Tusi’s observatory in Maragheh seems to have impacted the young imperial traveler more than any other edifice, and this was the reason for which, after he was appointed governor of Samarqand by his father Shah Rukh in 2009, he started to turn the city into the world’s leading academic center.
Ulugh Beg, as depicted by an anonymous painter of the period 1425-50
Ulugh Beg coin; AH 852 (1448-9) Herat mint
Samarqand Observatory, constructed by Ulugh Beg in the 1420s and rediscovered by Russians archaeologists in 1908
Ulugh Beg Observatory; the trench accommodated the lower section of the meridian arc.
Mirzo Ulughbek and Ali Kushchi working in the Samarqand Observatory, as per the imagination of modern local artists
Ulugh Beg created therefore an inviting environment for scholars from various regions and countries, and that’s why many researchers, explorers, scientists and students gathered in Samarqand as early as the 1420s. Ulugh Beg Madrasa was built in the period 1417-1420, and its parts were decorated with tiles of blue, light blue and white colors that all have a great symbolism in Turanian Tengrism. Two years later, the Ulugh Beg Observatory was constructed, as we can deduce from the letters sent by Jamshid al Kashi to his own father; these valuable documents were recently (in the 1990s) found, published and translated. Jamshid al Kashi (1380-1429) was a leading astronomer who worked with Ulugh Beg in Samarqand’s imperial observatory.
Another leading scholar, who contributed to the academic works, scholarly studies, and astronomical tables and catalogues undertaken in the observatory, was Ali Qushji (1403-1474; full name: Ala al-Dīn Ali ibn Muhammad). Ali Qushji was not greatly important only because he participated in the elaboration of the Zij-i Sultani and he made many other contributions to sciences, writing numerous astronomical, mathematical, mechanical, linguistic, philological and theological treatises; he is also credited for having established a real bridge between Samarqand and Istanbul in terms of scientific-academic life, scholarly exploration, and intellectual endeavors.
As a matter of fact, Ali Qushji was one of the very few scholars of his times to have met personally with three powerful emperors, namely the Timurid Ulugh Beg, the Akkoyunlu Uzun Hasan (1423-1478), and the Ottoman Mehmed II (also known as Fatih; 1432-1481). Ali Qushji delivered personally a copy of Zij-i Sultani to Mehmed II, evidently making the Ottoman sultan envy the unequaled superiority of the great Timurid capital Samarqand in terms of science, exploration, scholarship and intellect.
Jamshid al Kashi: opening bifolio of his major opus Miftah al-Hisab
Two pages from a manuscript of Jamshid al Kashi’s Sullam al-sama’
Jamshid al-Kashi’s The Key to Arithmetic; the last page of the manuscript
Pages of a manuscript with treatises elaborated by Ali al Qushji
Other remarkable scholars, who formed Ulugh Beg’s team, were Mu’in al-Din al-Kashi and Qadi Zadeh al-Rumi (1364-1436), a leading mathematician and astronomer of Eastern Roman descent, tutor and mentor of Ulugh Beg; Qadi Zadeh was greatly renowned for his pertinent commentaries on the works of earlier Turanian Islamic astronomers, like al-Jaghmini (full name: Mahmud ibn Muhammad ibn Umar al-Jaghmini; 13th – 14th c.), Shams al-Din al-Samarqandi (ca. 1250 – ca. 1310), and Nasir ad-Din al-Tusi. Students from Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River valley, the Ganges River valley, China and parts of Siberia were flocking to Samarqand to benefit from this worldwide unique environment.
To these great scholars it took no less than 15 years to compose in Farsi the voluminous Zij-i Sultani (completed in 1437), which was the World History’s most accurate and most complete astronomical table and star catalogue up to its time. Zij is an Islamic astronomical book that presents in tabular form various parameters used for astronomical calculations of the positions of stars therein included; as it can be assumed, it takes a great deal of observation in order to establish this type of documentation.
Around 20 different Zij catalogues have been established during the Islamic times, either saved until our times or not. However, Zij-i Sultani surpasses in terms of scholarship all earlier astronomical tables, including the 2nd c. CE Ancient Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy’s Almagest (Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις – Mathematike Syntaxis; المجسطي – al-Majisti). Ulugh Beg’s outstanding masterpiece was later translated to Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and several European languages.
In 1437, ten years before succeeding his father Shah Rukh on the throne of the Timurid Empire, Ulugh Beg specified the sidereal year as being 365d 6h 10m 8s long, which is an error of +58 s as per today’s calculations. Comparatively, Copernicus in 1525 reduced the margin of the error by 28 seconds, but the 9th c. CE Aramaean Sabian astronomer Thabit ibn Qurra (whose works, translated to Latin, were the primary sources of Copernicus) had determined the length of the sidereal year as 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 12 seconds (with an error of only 2 seconds as per today’s calculations).
After Shah Rukh’s death, Ulugh Beg had to fight in order to defend his right to succession; he won in the battle at Murghab (بالامرغاب; in today’s Afghanistan/not to be confused with Murgab in Eastern Tajikistan) over his nephew Ala al-Dawla (son of Ulugh Beg’s late brother Baysunghur/ بایسُنغُر) and advanced to Herat; there, in 1448, carried out a terrible massacre of the local population, taking revenge of their support to his nephew and demonstrating his Timurid originality. Ulugh Beg’s reign was brief and unhappy; his son Abd al-Latif Mirza (1420-1450) had an enormous psychological complex of inferiority toward his authoritatively intellectual and exceptionally erudite father, and he rebelled against him. After Abd al-Latif Mirza’s victory in a battle nearby Samarqand, Ulugh Beg had to surrender (1449), but the treacherous and evil son was not pleased with this, and he had his father assassinated, when the deposed Ulugh Beg was proceeding to Hejaz for Hajj.
The patricidal Abd al-Latif Mirza (in Farsi: padarkush; پدر کش) ruled for less than a year, having the support of evil, ignorant and rancorous theologians, who hated Ulugh Beg’s scholarly integrity, intellectual genius, scientific leadership, and secular rule. However, the outright majority of the population hated the ungrateful son for his two repugnant sacrileges; few days after having his father executed, Abd al-Latif Mirza killed also his brother Abd al-Aziz. So, in 1450 the patricidal and fratricidal ruler was murdered, and then came to power Ulugh Beg’s nephew Abdullah Mirza (son of Ibrahim Sultan, who was son of Shah Rukh and also a renowned artist and calligrapher); he rehabilitated his uncle’s imperial tradition and reputation. About:
After Ulugh Beg’s assassination, the Timurid Empire was in reality dissolved. The trends of imperial disintegration, tribal split, intra-family rivalry, and military localism prevailed at a time when Uzbek and Kazakh migrations were upsetting numerous settled populations in Central Asia. The Timurid Empire underwent a real fragmentation before totally disappearing. Abdullah Mirza was not able to rule for more than a year and only in Transoxiana (Mawarannahr); Timurid princes became independent in parts of Khorasan, Fars, and Iraq-e Ajami (Zagros Mountains).
Abu Sa’id Mirza (1424-1469; son of Muhammad Mirza, who was the son of Miran Shah, third son of Timur) was able to rule (1451-1469) and reunify the central parts of his great-grandfather’s empire. He allied with the Uzbeks (notably Abu’l-Khayr Khan: 1428-1468), but he faced many rebellions from Timurid princes of several provinces that he managed to suppress in terrible tribal massacres. He even executed Shah Rukh’s widow, the legendary dowager-empress Goharshad, accusing her of plotting against him by using her great-grandson. He arranged a temporary peace with the Karakoyunlu, but entered into an ill-fated war with the Akkoyunlu (who were former allies of the Timurids) and their powerful king Uzun Hasan. Finally, in February 1469, in the battle of Qarabagh, Abu Sa’id Mirza was defeated and held captive; Uzun Hasan handed him over to his Timurid allies, who remembering his monstrosity toward Goharshad executed him. Finally, Uzun Hasan sent Abu Sa’id Mirza’s decapitated head to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt Qaitbay, who arranged a proper burial.
Various Timurid princes ruled then in Khorasan, Kabul, Balkh, Fergana, Fars, and Iraq-e Ajami, whereas Transoxiana was first ruled by Sultan Ahmed Mirza from 1469 until 1494 and later divided into Samarqand, Bukhara and Hissar. Most of the northern part of the Timurid Empire was supplanted in 1488 by the Uzbeks, who set up their khanate under Muhammad Shaybani, a Genghisid prince. Soon afterwards, the Kazakh and the Sibir (Siberia) khanates were established, seceding from the Golden Horde. At the same time, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (a great-great grandson of Timur; 1438-1506) ruled (1469-1506) in Herat, continuing the Timurid tradition in terms of patronage of arts and sciences. He thus became a source of admiration for his nephew Babur, who was later the founder of the Mughal Empire of South Asia; but Babur was none else than the grandson of Abu Sa’id Mirza and therefore great-great-great-grandson of Timur.
Last, the southern parts of the Timurid Empire were most;y incorporated into the nomadic Akkoyunlu Empire that also controlled Eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia; however, internal strives decomposed that empire too around the end of the 15th c. It was then that the mystical Safavid Order, instead of supporting or infiltrating a state, decided to launch its own empire: the Safavid Empire. They already had their own army ready however: the formidable and renowned Qizilbash. About:
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
Pre-publication of chapter XXV of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXIV, XXV and XXVI constitute the Part Ten {Fallacies about the Times of Turanian (Mongolian) Supremacy in terms of Sciences, Arts, Letters, Spirituality and Imperial Universalism} of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Until now, 8 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 9th (out 33). At the end of the present pre-publication the entire Table of Contents is made available.
Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in green color.
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Many people believe that Timur (Tamerlane) was a descendent of Genghis Khan, but this is very wrong; however, he belonged to the same Eastern Turanian Mongolian family as his remote relative who died 109 years before Timur was born (1227-1336). There is actually a distance of 5 generations (the grandfather of the great-grandfather of a person) between the greatest conquerors of Eurasia. However, Genghis Khan and Timur seem to have as common progenitor Genghis Khan’s 4th patrilineal ancestor (the grandfather), who was Timur’s 9th patrilineal ancestor, namely Tumanay Khan.
More specifically, Genghis Khan was son of Yesugei Baghatur son of Bartan Baghatur son of Khabul Khan son of Tumanay Khan. And Timur was son of Taraghai Noyan son of Burgul Noyan son of Aylangir son of Ichil son of Qarachar Noyan son of Suqu Sechen son of Erdemchu Barlas son of Qachuli son of Tumanay Khan. The time passed from the death of Genghis Khan until the birth of Timur (109 years) is approximately the equivalent of the period between the deaths and the births of the following monarchs or spiritual leaders respectively: Consul Crassus’ death and Emperor Trajan’s birth (53 BCE-53 CE), Julian the Apostate’s death and Justinian’s birth (363-482), Nestorius’ death and Prophet Muhammad’s birth (451-571) and Napoleon’s death and Elizabeth II’s birth (1821-1926).
Timur (1336-1405) was born in Shahrisabz (Шаҳрисабз / شهر سبز; Timur’s tomb was built there, but his burial took place at Samarqand), in the southern part of today’s Uzbekistan, close to the border with Tajikistan; at those days, the city was named Kesh. Timur’s family belonged to the Turanian tribe of Barlas, which had recently accepted Islam and become sedentary in Mawarannahr (Transoxiana); those lands were thought to be the epicenter of the legendary and historical Turan, and at the time of Timur’s birth, they were provinces of the Chagatai Empire. About:
Shahrisabz: ruins of Timur’s summer palace, and modern statue
Today, not one scholar raises doubt about the Turanian ancestry and identity of Timur; quite interestingly, and in full refutation of the fallacious Western Orientalist academia, it is Timur himself who rejects this, and by so doing, he gives a lethal blow to the colonially invented distinction between Iran and Turan, to the forged ethnic-linguistic-cultural disconnection of the ‘Turkic nations’ from the ‘Iranian nations’, and to the evil pseudo-universities, institutes and foreign ministries of the colonial Western countries.
Dead before 618 years, Timur speaks to us today through the words that he said personally to the Berber (and not Arab as Western forgers claim) Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), whom the great conqueror met during the siege that he laid to Damascus in 1400. When the two greatest men of those days came face to face, they were aged (in their 60s) and already world renowned among all Muslims; the fame of Ibn Khaldun had reached the great conqueror and the magnificence of of Timur’s conquests was known to all the people between the Pacific and the Atlantic. For over a month, the great scholar, who was blocked in the besieged city, was lowered by ropes from the walls of Damascus to encounter Timur. Ibn Khaldun gave extensive details about his daily encounters with Timur in his autobiography (Al-taʿrīf) and in his World History (Kitāb al-ʿibar wa-dīwān al-mubtadaʾ wa-l-khabar fī ayyām al-ʿarab wa-l-ʿajam wa-l-barbar wa-man ʿāṣarahum min dhawī al-sulṭān al-akbar).
Two years before his staggering victory over the Ottomans at Ankara (1402), Timur saved all decent and benign scholars, artists and artisans of Damascus, by evacuating them and dispatching them to Samarqand, and then he sacked the city. There was a significant historical reason for this drastic solution, and Timur duly explained his actions. In fact, he rightfully massacred the entire population in due punishment for the sacrileges earlier perpetrated by the infidel Umayyad caliph Muawiyah, i.e. the murder of Hassan son of Ali (670 CE), and by Yazid I, the son of Muawiyah, namely the monstrous assassination of Husayn son of Ali (680). Ibn Khaldun returned to Cairo to complete his works and wrote exactly what Timur told him about his ancestry.
In total rejection of the Western scholarship’s historical forgery and division between Turan and Iran, the ‘Turanian’ Timur claimed maternal descent from the illustrious ‘Iranian’ (and certainly not ‘Persian’) hero Manuchehr whose legendary deeds were superbly narrated in Farsi poetry by Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh, already 400 years before the encounter of Timur with Ibn Khaldun.
Manuchehr enthroned; from manuscript miniature of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh
Who is Manuchehr, Timur’s remote ancestor?
Supreme legendary (or apocalyptic-eschatological) king of the Pishdadian dynasty whose first king was the first man Keyumars, Manuchehr is the 7th generation descendent of the founder of the Mankind’s sole royal dynasty. There is no doubt that Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh must have been almost holier than the Quran for Timur, and he definitely knew sizeable portions by heart. The Pishdadian dynasty involves eleven kings of kings: Keyumars, Hushang, Tahmuras, Jamshid, Zahhak, Fereydun, Iraj, Manuchehr, Nowzar, Zaav, and Garshasp. As a matter of fact, Fereydun had three sons, namely Iraj (from Shahmaz, Jamshid’s daughter), Salm and Tur (the latter two from Amavaz, Jamshid’s other daughter).
Manuchehr and Afrasiab fighting against one another; from a 16th c. Shahnameh manuscript
Historical interpretations of the legends superbly narrated in poetry by Ferdowsi offer specific identifications concerning the original ancestors of the three nations that shaped World History: Iraj was viewed as the ancestor of all the Iranians (involving also North Indians and several North Europeans); Tur was considered to be the forefather of all Turanians (Chinese included); and Salm was perceived as the progenitor of all the Anatolians and Eastern Romans (and in general the ‘West’). The three half-brothers represent the mythical-historical stage of division of the surface of the Earth among them.
According to Ferdowsi’s apocalyptic legend, Salm was the firstborn, but being trepid, he avoided fighting with the dragon that attacked him and his brethren; however, the dragon was only his father Fereydun transfigured in order to test his eldest son. On the contrary, Tur’s name means ‘brave’, and this functioned as prophecy. And Iraj was given the worldly glory (termed as ‘Farr’ in Shahnameh and as ‘Khvarenah’ in Avestan, i.e. glow or fortune) as a present granted by God. For this reason, Salm and Tur made a plot and killed Iraj.
At a later stage, Iraj’s daughter gets married with Pashang and their child is Manuchehr, who takes revenge for the assassination of his grandfather. Then, Fereydun (Manuchehr’s great grandfather) abdicates in favor of his great grandson. It is evident that all these ‘events’ take place in an atemporal, spiritual universe, representing values of moral order, hierarchical intelligences, prototypal virtues, choices, deeds and consequences.
However, from that ‘moment’ (Manuchehr’s revenge) started a spiritual clash between the entities ‘Iran’ and ‘Turan’; this clash is prophesied in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh to end during the ‘reign’ of Kay Khusraw, the 3rd king of kings of the Kayanian dynasty, which was instituted after the termination of the Pishdadian dynasty. It is noteworthy that there is a difference of six (6) generations between Manuchehr and Kay Khusraw, namely Nowzar, Zaav, and Garshasp of the Pishdadian dynasty and Kay Qubad, Kay Kavus, and Kay Khusraw of the subsequent Kayanian dynasty; already Manuchehr’s ‘reign’ is symbolized as of twice perfect duration (120 years: 2×60, as per the sexagesimal system).
Before being extensively narrated and greatly praised in Ferdowsi’s poetry, Manuchehr was an illustrious hero of the pre-Islamic oral traditions; that’s why several rulers were named after this legendary figure. Coin of Manuchihr I, who ruled Fars (Persis) as vassal of the Arsacid Parthian shahs in the early 2nd c. CE (above); (below) coin of Manuchihr III of Persis (late 2nd c. CE)
The name Manuchehr, as part of the Iranian culture, went beyond the limits of the Iranian world and was used by numerous neighboring peoples; Manuchehr khan Enikolopian was an Armenian eunuch of the 18th-19th c. Fath Ali Shah Qajar of Iran.
Jabbar Farshbaf, Manuchehr; a millennia long legend that fascinates the imagination of modern Iranian artists
The above is enough to explain what Timur meant, while specifying to Ibn Khaldun that he was a remote descendant (through his mother’s side) of Manuchehr, i.e. Iraj’s grandson. Timur, a ‘Turanian’, claimed that his ancestry stretched indeed back to the grandson of the forefather of all ‘Iranians’ (Iraj) – and not to Tur, who admittedly was viewed (then and now) as the ancestor of all ‘Turanians’. This automatically means that the two terms were not ethnonyms, and they were perceived totally differently, and not through the distortive lenses of modern rationalism and materialism. In fact, with Timur claiming a clearly ‘Iranian’ origin, the vicious Orientalist distortion and fake division between Turanians and Iranians totally collapses and falls to pieces. About:
Timur’s military formation, early experience, and rise to power were very different from those of Genghis Khan; the latter spent 20 years in wars against other Eastern Turanian Mongolian tribesmen until he achieved the unification of a certain number of tribes and only after his mid-40s, he went out of the borders of the already unified confederation of Eastern Turanian Mongolian tribes. The former was initially a small band leader, who was engaged in several battles as a mercenary, before allying with different kings (khans) against their opponents.
Originating from the Chagatai Empire, Timur fought along with his khan against the Turanian state of Volga Bulgaria, invaded Khorasan and Khwarazm, increased his basic military force, and then sided with Tughlugh Timur (1329-1363), the khan of Moghulistan (Eastern Chagatai Empire) only to be rewarded with the control of the entire Transoxiana (Mawarannahr). However, very soon, he had to defend that territory against Tughlugh Timur’ son, and his victory helped him consolidate his power. When Timur’s father died, he became a tribal leader, which enabled him to combine military experience and tribal status.
Gur-i Amir (Farsi: گورِ امیر; Uzbek: Amir Temur maqbarasi; ‘the emperor’s tomb’), Timur’s Mausoleum in Samarqand; the historical monument, except for being the burial place of Tamerlane, is one the most prominent architectural masterpieces worldwide as it determined Central Asiatic, Iranian and Indian architecture for many centuries.
Having well studied the History of the Abbasid Caliphate and the stories of the impotent caliphs of the last 350-400 years of Abbasid rule (ca. 850-1258), Timur ruled in the name of the various Chagatai khans, while reducing them to total impotency. Until 1370, Timur managed to establish a strong basis of popular support at Balkh (Bactra, in today’s Afghanistan) and then eliminate his contenders. He then spent considerable time to consolidate his empire. Only after 1380 (and at the age of 45), Timur started becoming a mighty opponent to reckon with beyond the limits of Central Asia. It was then that Timur started his own conquest of the world, thus creating a smaller but surely much more homogeneous empire than that of Genghis Khan.
He first had to defend Khwarazm and Azerbaijan against the powerful Tokhtamysh (1342-1406; Tuqtamış/ Тухтамыш), the khan of the reunified Golden (Blue and White) Horde, Kipchak and Sibir or Siberia (1376-1406). Tokhtamysh had oppressed the uprising of the Turanian Christians of Muscovy (Moscow) in 1382 (there were no Russians at time; they were invented later to set up the Romanov imperial narrative), and squelching the rebellion, he burned the Turanian city of Moscow to the ground. The hostilities between Timur and Tokhtamysh started in the 1380s and the wars culminated in the 1390s.
Timur’s main achievement in the 1380s was the elimination of all the petty dynasties that had surfaced after the decomposition of the Ilkhanate and covered the lands between Euphrates and Syr Darya (Iaxartes). Obliterating divisive statelets, Timur did in the aforementioned vast region what exactly the Ottomans were doing in Western and Central Anatolia and in the South Balkans. These were converging trajectories and one day, sooner or later, the clash between Timur and the Ottomans would come. Timur proved to be merciless in the oppression of rebellions, but his attitude was deliberate. He only wanted to prevent further resistance or opposition. However, he defended and supported the spiritual, academic, educational, artistic and artisan elites, while eliminating indoctrinated religious leaders, stupid sheikhs, tribal contenders, military opponents, and their supporters to the last.
Timur throws a feast in the gardens of Samarqand
By invading Soltaniyeh (in NW Iran) in 1384, Mazandaran (Caspian Sea’s southern coast land), Maragheh and Tabriz (in Iranian Azerbaijan) in 1386, and Isfahan and Shiraz in 1387, Timur controlled the Iranian plateau. Timur’s soldiers executed the quasi-totality of the population of Isfahan (ca. 100000-120000 people). Then, Timur spent several years, asserting his rule throughout the mountains of Zagros, the Caucasus region, and Mesopotamia, and capturing Baghdad in 1393. It was then that Timur rushed to the center of the Iranian plateau to disperse the last Isma’ili remnants that had gathered there again to foment resistance.
During the same period, Timur had to rush to the North; there he reached Western Siberia and Tataria (the western territories of the Golden Horde that constitute today the central part of Russia), defeated Tokhtamysh in the battle of Kondurcha River (1391), burned Ryazan, and invaded all lands around Muscovy (Moscow). This campaign was one of the most remarkable military operations ever undertaken by Islamic imperial armies; Timur’s fast offensive to the North and further on to the West involved an operation of ca. 140000 soldiers, who crossed a distance of over 2700 km, progressing rapidly and for many long hours every day in the formation of a 20 km wide front. So, his soldiers complained that, due to the brief duration of Siberia’s and Tataria’s summer nights, they could not sleep enough between the evening prayer (Isha’a / صلاة العشاء; ca. one hour after the sunset) and the morning prayer (Fajr / صلاة الفجر; ca. one hour before the dawn).
In 1395, Timur returned to the North, after crossing the Caucasus region, and in the famous Battle of Terek River, he won a final victory over Tokhtamysh, destroying Sarai, the Golden Horde capital (near today’s Samara), and Astrakhan. Known as ‘Timur’s stone’, the bilingual {8 lines in Chagatai written in the old Uyghur alphabet (which was directly based on the Aramaic alphabet) and 3 lines in Arabic} inscription found at the Karsakpay mines (Western Kazakhstan) bears witness to the event, and to the commemoration of Timur’s victory, which was also mentioned in historical texts of the period, notably the Zafarnameh (‘book of the victory’) of Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi.
In 1398, Timur turned to the southeast against the Islamic Sultanate of Delhi, which controlled already most of the territory of the modern states of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh; the then ruling Turanian Tughlaq dynasty (1320–1413) had replaced the also Turanian Khalji dynasty (1290–1320), which expanded greatly the territories controlled by the earlier Turanian Mamluk dynasty (1206-1290) that was substituted to the Turanian Ghurid Sultanate (879–1215) and to the Turanian Ghaznavid Empire (977–1186). When Timur arrived in the Delhi region (1398) and the northern parts of what today is confusingly called ‘India’ (instead of Bharat or Hindustan), the majority of the local population was already Turanian of origin, due to successive nomadic migrations, military invasions, extensive clashes, and subsequent amalgamation; and so the local population has been ever since and during the modern times, despite the colonially fabricated masquerade of the fake ‘Indo-European’ India, which is not the name of a real state, but the appellation of a colonial machination based on English perfidy, economic exploitation, political tyranny, historical distortion, and utter academic evilness.
The destruction of many cities in the Indus River valley by Timur’s armies heralded the fall of Delhi, which was one the then world’s richest cities: Tulamba, Multan, and Bhatner were turned to ruins, and no less than 100000 war prisoners were massacred, before the Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah Tughluq (1394 – 1413) of the Delhi Sultanate experienced a crushing defeat in December 1398. The sultan of Delhi and his generals counted on the psychological effect that their armored elephants would have on Timur’s soldiers, but their calculations proved to be wrong.
The great conqueror was above all an inventive and resourceful warrior, who knew that even camels can prevail over elephants, if duly and timely utilized by an ingenious strategist; having loaded a great number of camels with straw well tied on them and having supervised the digging of a trench to protect his soldiers, Timur set fire to the camel-borne volumes of straw, when the enemy’s army and elephants attacked. His soldiers pushed the camels forward through use of iron sticks and the flaming camels ran crazily on the elephants, yowling in extreme pain and despair. Thus, Timur’s camels caused unprecedented chaos, hellish fire, and utmost panic to the mammals that smashed under their feet the powerless soldiers of the unfortunate sultan of Delhi.
This was the victory of the camel over the elephant or, if you prefer, the triumph of a conqueror’s intellect over a greedy caretaker’s sloth. Delhi was properly plundered to best finance Timur’s next campaigns, and the entire Bengal, the Ganges River valley, and the Indus River valley became provinces of Timur’s empire or tributary states. About:
In 1399, Timur turned westwards; after eliminating Haleb (Aleppo) and Damascus, invading the Caucasus region, and demanding submission from the Anatolian Turkmen beys (rulers) in 1399 and 1400, Timur invaded Baghdad in June 1401. The menacing alliance of the Ottomans with the Mamluks of Egypt that had the support of Venice, Genoa and the Knights Hospitaller (who controlled Izmir/Smyrna) created an alarming situation west of Timur’s empire. However, other affairs were top of the priority list for the great conqueror, namely the incessant movements of Turkmen nomads from Central Asia though the Iranian plateau, the Caucasus region, and Anatolia. Timur sided with the Akkoyunlu (آق قویونلو /Aq Qoyunlu / White Sheep confederation – initially centered around Bayburt and known for their frequent intermarriages with Eastern Roman princesses; 1378-1501) and against the Karakoyunlu (قره قویونلو / Qara Qoyunlu /Black Sheep confederation – initially they were Turkmen vassals of the Jalayrid Sultanate in Baghdad and Tabriz; 1374-1468); this was only normal: by connecting themselves with the Ottomans and the Mamluks, the Karakoyunlu caused the ire of Timur.
Within the context of 14th c. Anatolia’s fragmentation, the Ottoman Sultanate appeared to be the strongest state around 1400. But Timur’s viewpoint over the Anatolian affairs was different: he considered the Seljuks as the legitimate sultanate in the entire region, and he wanted to put an order to the Turkmen chaos caused by the numerous progressive migrations. This situation was not only critical for the developments that took then place, but also determinant for what followed, and for the imperial polarization around Anatolia and the Iranian plateau during the 15th – 20th c.
Timur besieges the historic city of Urgench (in Khawarizm/ Chorasmia, today’s Uzbekistan)
Timur about to launch a war against Tokhtamysh
Timur against Tokhtamysh; from a miniature of the ‘Facial Chronicle’ (also known as ‘the illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible’; Лицевой летописный свод) volume 11, page 251
Timur in the conquest of Baghdad (1393) from a miniature in the Zafarnameh
Timur orders a campaign against Georgia
Timur’s army attacks the remaining survivors in Nerges, Georgia (1396)
Timur’s invasion of India, 1397-1399
The defeat of Nasir Al-Din Mahmum Tughluq at the battle of Delhi 1398
Timur defeats the Mamluk Sultan Nasir-ad-Din Faraj of Egypt
Sultan Bayezid prisoned by Timur, by Stanisław Chlebowski (Станислав Хлебовский; 19th c. Orientalist Russian painter of Polish origin)
Letter dispatched by Timur to Charles VI of France in 1402
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Many people today believe that from the Seljuks to the Ottomans there has been a historical, cultural, spiritual, religious, literary and academic continuity in Anatolia. This is an enormous lie, and Timur’s perfect choice and drastic action help us fully understand how false this impression is. As a matter of fact, between the Seljuks and the Ottomans there was a disruption. About:
Timur defeated the Karakoyunlu in 1400; this brought the Akkoyunlu closer to him, and two years later, Timur conceded Diyarbakir to them. This development, in relation with the Ottoman defeat at Ankara in 1402, brought the Ottomans closer to Karakoyunlu and produced an atmosphere of enmity between the Ottomans and the Akkoyunlu. After Timur’s death, the Karakoyunlu managed to oppose successfully the Akkoyunlu for some time, but later the latter prevailed and the former were reduced to a small state in the Caucasus region.
This generated a ferocious rivalry between the then expanding Ottomans and the Akkoyunlu; the latter supported the Central Anatolian Karamanids and effectively stroke an alliance with the Ottoman Empire’s worst enemy, i.e. Venice. The escalation led to several battles between the Ottomans and the Akkoyunlu during the 15th c., and later, with the dissolution of the Akkoyunlu and the absorption of its structures within the rising Safavid Empire (established under the auspices of the homonymous mystical order), the rivalry was transformed into an Ottoman – Safavid quarrel that lasted centuries. But the conflict had basically the traits of an internal Turanian strife that metamorphosed from century to century; the Iranians represented the authentic Turanians, and the Ottomans were the corrupt renegades and the worst enemies of all Turanians. This situation was rectified only in the period 1919-1923, when Kemal Ataturk terminated the Ottoman shame, abolished the ridiculous ‘caliphate’, and reinstated Seljuk-Turanian valor and bravery across Anatolia.
Much discussion has taken place among scholars about the religious motives of all these successive conflicts which were misrepresented as supposed clashes between ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’, but this is a lie and there was no religious motivation. In reality, Timur and his successors, the Karakoyunlu, the Akkoyunlu, the Ottomans, and the Mystical Safavid Order were all Muslims, and no ‘Sunni’ – ‘Shia’ distinction applied to them, because simply there is no such distinction; it is a modern colonial academic invention that is not supported by the historical sources.
Even the scholars, who tried ceaselessly to create divisive religious lines where there is none, failed to ‘prove’ that the Karakoyunlu were ‘Shia’, and even if this absurdity could eventually be proven, it would be truly meaningless, because the Karakoyunlu sided with the Ottomans, who are portrayed today as ‘Sunni’ against the Akkoyunlu, who are also depicted as ‘Sunni’ by the fallacious Western academia.
What happened in reality behind all these successive developments was the fact that the internal Turanian strife (between Eastern Turanians and Western Turanians) and the exchange of terrible, written insults between Timur (66 years old at the Battle of Ankara) and Bayezid I (1360-1402; so 42 years old when fighting Timur, which means that there was one generation difference between the two rulers) cast an everlasting shadow on the Ottoman court’s foreign policy making. Then, even worse, Bayezid’s calamitous defeat and humiliating captivity pulled the Ottomans apart from the Turanian world and turned them to the West. Consequently, Ottoman reactions generated further deterioration and conflicts with their main Turanian neighbor, i.e. the Safavid Empire of Iran – which was an entirely Turkic state with almost no Persian population left there anymore. In the Turanian Safavid Empire, Farsi was almost exactly what Medieval Latin was in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: the language of culture and the administration.
It appears odd, but the Timurid Mughal Empire of South Asia (fallaciously described by colonial historiographers as ‘Sunni’) had clearly better relations with Safavid Iran than with the Ottomans as late as 1700, i.e. 300 years after the Battle of Ankara; this delivers a blow to the historical forgery about a ‘Sunni-Shia divide’ which was first invented by colonial academics, then projected onto colonized Muslims worldwide by the colonial administrations, and later repeated pathetically by the postcolonial ignorant, uneducated and idiotic sheikhs, imams, cadis, and muftis.
Every spiritual order and mystical school that was treated well by Timur was viewed suspiciously within the Ottoman territory, and this was not a matter of religious divergence, but of internal Turanian divisions and of imperial rancor. The case of the Safavid Order is quite telling. This mystical order was established before the birth of Osman I (ca. 1255-1323), the ancestor of all Ottomans who belonged to the Kayı tribe of Oghuz Turks. In fact, the Safavid Order was the main emanation of the Zahediyah Mystical Order, which was founded by the Turanian ascetic and mystic Zahed Gilani (1216–1301), a leading spiritual master who was born in the Iranian province of Gilan (southern coast of the Caspian Sea) but originated from Sanjan in Khorasan, a region entirely populated by Turanians at the time. Zahed Gilani was highly revered among the imperial elites of the Ilkhanate. The mystical orders of the Jelveti and the Bayrami are emanations of the Zahediyah Order. Zahed Gilani’s most distinguished disciple was Safi-ad-din Ardabili (1252-1334), an Azeri Turanian who initiated the Safavid Order {named after himself: ‘Safavid’ (صفویه) being an adjective formed out of the name ‘Safi’ (صفی)} as a distinct order although the doctrine was exactly the same as that of the Zahediyah Order.
The holy land of the Safavid Order was Azerbaijan (i.e. the Ancient Iranian holy land of Atropatene), and from there numerous mystics and ascetics traveled across great distances to diffuse the rites of the order throughout the Iranian plateau, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Central Asia and other Muslim territories. The position of the grand master was hereditary, and after Safi-ad-din Ardabili’s death, his son Sadr al-Dīn Musa (1305-1391) and his grandson Khvajeh Ali Safavi (ca. 1365-1429) oversaw the operations of the order. Timur met Khvajeh Ali Safavi and, although quite older, he was impressed by the spiritual art of the extraordinary mystic; that’s why he treated him well and offered him abundant lands to further finance the expansion of the mystical order. Following this development and the subsequent penetration of the order across the territories of the Timurids and the Akkoyunlu, the Ottomans took an inimical stance toward the Safavid Order and all its spiritual and social ramifications.
Safi ad-din Ardabili in a 16th c, manuscript of the hagiographical text Safvat as-Safa
From the moment Khvajeh Ali Safavi encountered Timur only four generations succeeded one another until Ismail I managed to supplant the Akkoyunlu and establish the Empire of the Safavid Order, which became known as Safavid Empire. These four generations are represented by the Safavid Order’s grandmasters, namely Shaykh Ibrahim (ca. 1400-1447; son of Khvajeh Ali Safavi), Shaykh Junayd (ca. 1410-1460; son of Shaykh Ibrahim), Shaykh Haydar (1459-1488; son of Shaykh Junayd), and Ali Mirza Safavi (also known as Soltan-Ali Safavi; ca. 1475-1494; son of Shaykh Haydar and elder brother of Ismail I, founder of the Safavid Empire). In today’s Azerbaijan and all the peripheral lands (Eastern Anatolia, Iran, and parts of Central Asia), these formidable mystics are highly revered, deemed saints, and constantly venerated, whereas many people bear their names (example: Heydar Aliyev, former president of Azerbaijan).
Tomb of Sheikh Junayd in Khazra, in the northern confines of Azerbaijan
Tomb of Sheykh Heydar in Meshginshahr, Iran
The emblem of the Safavid Order
The Safavid Order grandmasters were Turanian mystics, who reviled the rationalistic and materialistic approaches of the theological circles that held the Ottoman family captive for centuries, therefore generating the ceaseless Turanian fratricide wars only to the benefit of the Pope of Rome and of the Christian Empires of Western Europe. The Safavid Order grandmasters were connected by successive intermarriages with the Timurids, the Akkoyunlu, and the Eastern Romans; for instance, Ali Mirza Safavi was the son of Shaykh Haydar and Alam-Shah Begum (born Martha), who was the daughter of the Akkoyunlu Empire’s most powerful shah, Uzun Hasan, and Despina Khatun (Theodora Megale Komnene).
As they appear to have commanded enormous spiritual powers and performed miraculous deeds, their followers expressed total devotion to them; however, we cannot be absolutely sure about what several contemporaneous historiographers wrote about them at the time, namely that the members of the Safavid Order considered Shaykh Junayd as God Incarnate (‘ilah’) and called his son Shaykh Haydar as ‘Son of God’ (‘ibn Allah’). There were many antagonistic spiritual orders and theological schools at the time, and the clash between esoteric spirituality and rationalistic theology was overwhelming. The rationalistic theologians, who realized their impotency vis-à-vis the spiritual masters of the different Islamic orders, instead of concluding about how far from the essence of the true religion their worthless jurisprudential and rationalistic rhetoric had gone, used inflammatory verbalism, immoral attitude, and malicious defamatory tactics against the grandmasters of the spiritual orders. This practice turned Muslims from living faithful to putrefied carrion.
Of course, the concept of ‘God Incarnate’ is intolerable in Islam, but there are no original sources written by members of the 15th c. Safavid Order about themselves, their noble rites, and their grandmasters; consequently, the then rising rationalistic and materialistic trends among several Muslim theologians may have resulted in total misunderstanding of the Safavid Order’s spiritual terminology, which cannot be comprehended by defective, rationalistic minds. In addition, the jealousy and the envy that several ignorant theologians felt against various renowned spiritual grandmasters make of their literature an untrustworthy libel; an example is offered by Fadl-Allah ben Ruzbehan Qonyi, the legalist and rationalist theologian of the Akkoyunlu court, in his Tāriḵ-e ‘Ālāmārā-ye amini.
The point is that this whole issue goes indeed back to the times of Timur, and the Ottoman enmity toward the Safavid Order first and the Safavid Empire later was only due to the devastating defeat of Bayezid I at Ankara (1402) and to the excellent relationship established between Timur and the Safavid Order’s grandmaster Khvajeh Ali Safavi. The Ottoman – Safavid hostility, which lasted for more than two centuries (and was subsequently inherited by the also Turkmen Afshar and the Qajar dynasties of Iran for almost another two centuries), was of no ethnic and no national character. Both empires were indeed ruled by Turanians, had populations that were Turanian in their majority, and claimed the same ancestry and traditions. Not even one drop of Persian blood could be found in the reins of the Turkmen Ismail I (1487-1524; reign: 1501-1524). In both empires, Turanian (or Turkic) languages were used in the army and the administration, Farsi in poetry, literature, history and culture, and Arabic in sciences (astronomy, mathematics, medicine, natural sciences, geography, etc.). But the Ottomans reacted instinctively to all things Safavid, because even the name of the order reminded them of the humiliating defeat at Ankara in 1402.
The exchange of insults between Timur and Bayezid I involved ethnic denigration; but of course it was an entirely internal Turanian affair. As an Eastern Turanian, Timur rejected the lowly character, mentality and attitude of the settled Western Turanians; and he made his viewpoint bluntly known, fully rejecting assertions and pretensions earlier expressed in arrogant style by the pathetic Bayezid I. In fact, the Ottomans had to stop the blockade of Constantinople and turn the bulk of their forces to the east, because Timur invaded Sivas (Sebasteia) in 1401; arriving at Ankara, the Ottomans were supported by Albanian and Serbian soldiers, who fought along Bayezid’s army, as their states were vassals to the Ottomans.
Timur’s forces slightly outnumbered those of the Ottoman sultan, but this was not the determinant factor for the outstanding victory. Timur was smart enough to allow the Ottomans to advance to the east (reaching Çubuk) and to take an offensive, while part of his army ran fast southwestwards and then turned to the east, thus encircling the Ottomans. Timur counted also on his horse archers, who hit the Ottoman army terribly, and always thinking out-of-the-box, he made sure that his adversaries fail to secure water supply. To do this, some of his auxiliary forces diverted the Çubuk inlet to a reservoir, thus preventing the Ottoman soldiers from access to water; under the Anatolian plateau’s scorching summer sun, this trick had a catastrophic impact on the Ottoman army. To add misfortune to misery, Bayezid I faced desertions of soldiers and officers from his army, notably the Qarai Turks (originating from the Keraite Eastern Turanians) and the Sipahi cavalrymen of the former Anatolian beyliks; these forces joined Timur’s army.
That is why the 20th of July was always a ‘dies nefastus’ (an ominous day) for the Ottomans; actually, it was not only a defeat. It was the only time in the 600-year long Ottoman History when a sultan was held captive and died in captivity. It was also the beginning of the Ottoman interregnum, the civil war among Bayezid I’s sons, which lasted for 11 years (1402-1413). About:
After his victory, Timur proceeded to the western confines of Anatolia and invaded Izmir (Smyrna), kicking the Knights Hospitaller out of there. The entire family of Timur fought with him in the West; his sons and his grandsons were engaged in the battle of Ankara. To support the Ottomans and confuse Timur, the Karakoyunlu ruler Qara Yusuf attacked Baghdad, but after the Battle of Ankara, Timur sent forces that recaptured Baghdad under the command of Abu Bakr, son of Miran Shah, Timur’s third son, who was then the older among his two surviving sons. Timur returned to Azerbaijan, Khorasan and Samarqand where he spent some time, planning his next conquests. Since the Yuan dynasty was overthrown in China (1368) and the first emperors of the Ming dynasty expressed an interest to be involved in Central Asia, Timur set up an alliance with Eastern Turanian Mongolian forces in order to attack China. However, marching toward the east, he died in February 1405 at Otrar (also known as Farab; Kangju in Chinese) in today’s Kazakhstan’s southern provinces.
Timur’s succession was not an easy affair, because all the contenders did not agree on the matter. As a matter of fact, two of his four sons had died before him: Umar Shaikh Mirza I (1356-1394) and Jahangir Mirza (1356-1376). Few years before dying, Timur expressed his favor for Jahangir Mirza’s elder son Muhammad Sultan Mirza (1375-1403), but he also died in young age and before his grandfather. Little time before dying, Timur appointed another son of Jahangir Mirza as his successor: Pir Muhammad Mirza (1374-1407); but the heir apparent failed to garner significant support or to control the capital city of the empire, Samarqand.
There were reasons for which Timur did not want any of his two surviving sons to rise to his throne. Miran Shah (1366-1408) had an accident in the late 1380s after having fallen from his horse; this generated a traumatic brain injury and subsequent mental difficulties that were known to many people. Exploiting this situation, the Hurufi mystics (the Hurufiyyah mystical order developed an Islamic system of Kabbalah, crediting letters of the Arabic alphabet with hidden, spiritual value, after the esoteric teachings of Fazlallah Astarabadi; 1340-1394) denounced Miran Shah as the Antichrist (Dajjal), absurdly altering his name to Maran Shah (King of the Serpents). However, Timur’s third son was successful in combating them. The Hurufiyyah were duly dispersed, although some of their erroneous teachings survived among other spiritual orders. The end result is that due to the extensive defamation, Miran Shah’s chances to rule became nil. However, he contributed to the turmoil, because he supported his son Khalil Sultan (1384-1411) as successor to Timur.
Timur’s youngest son, Shah Rukh (1377-1447), was considered as too soft to be an emperor; this was Timur’s publicly expressed opinion. The reality is that Shah Rukh was a man of letters, arts, sciences, trade, diplomacy and negotiations, and that he resorted to war only when no other solution was ostensible. As a matter of fact, Shah Rukh, who was the ruler of Herat and the eastern provinces, claimed the right to his father’s throne, but in modesty and wisdom; he was not urged for a showdown with Khalil Sultan. Having accurately evaluated his nephew’s capabilities, he preferred to let him rule incompetently (as he expected him to do), so that all the people finally turn against him. This process lasted four years (1405-1409); Khalil Sultan ruled indeed as successor of Timur, but he was so incompetent that, when Shah Rukh marched against Samarqand, no one opposed him. As he was not a bloodthirsty conqueror but a wise moralist, he appointed Khalil Sultan as governor of Ray. Shah Rukh ruled for 38 years (1409-1447), contributing to what is now called ‘Timurid Renaissance’ more than his father.
The internal turmoil of the Timurid Empire caused several defeats to Timur’s successors; in 1406 and in 1408, Qara Yusuf of the Karakoyunlu marked two victories over the Timurid forces in Azerbaijan, in the Battle of Nakhchivan and in the Battle of Sardrud; in the latter, Miran Shah was killed and then his body impaled. When Shah Rukh rose to his father’s throne, the western part of the Timurid Empire was lost the Karakoyunlu, the Akkoyunlu and the Ottomans. About:
2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu
(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
CONTENTS
PART ONE. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities
A. Examples of fake national names
a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!
b) Tataria – Not Russia!
c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!
d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!
e) Khazaria – not Israel!
f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!
B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish
C. The Preamble to My Response
CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.
CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.
CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment
A. Orientalism
B. Conceptualization
C. Contextualization
D. Concealment
PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT
CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece
PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY
CHAPTER VI: The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times
CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists
CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan
CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES
CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period
CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty
CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids
PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS
CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire
CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism
CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates
PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM
CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE
CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet
CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam
CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History
PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’
CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’
PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’
CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate
PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash
PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM
CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor
PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED
CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another
CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’
CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur
CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World
CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West
CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk
PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?
Pre-publication of chapter XXIV of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapter XXIV constitutes the Part Ten {Fallacies about the Times of Turanian (Mongolian) Supremacy in terms of Sciences, Arts, Letters, Spirituality and Imperial Universalism}. The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
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The Enthronement of Genghis Khan (1206); miniature of a 15th c. manuscript of the World History, known as Jami’ al-tawarikh (‘Compendium of Histories’), of Rashid al-Din Hamadani
Few years before Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash were born, another distinct erudite Muslim scholar, pioneering scientist and astronomer, statesman and diplomat of universalistic aspirations was born: Nasir al-Din al Tusi (1201-1274). This great man’s life was a ceaseless demonstration of the scholarly-intellectual courage to view ‘borders’ as nonexistent, ‘religions’ as immaterial, ‘states’ as worthless, and ‘institutions’ as useless. He was the epitome of human genius in every sense.
Nasir al-Din al Tusi was not the elect of spiritual hierarchies like Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi; he did not have the Love for God that we attest across the poems of Rumi, but he replaced it with the love for God’s celestial creatures that he studied incessantly and in a worldwide pioneering manner. Nasir al-Din al Tusi was not a man of spiritual potency like Shams-e Tabrizi, and in contrast to Haji Bektash, he did not have great interest to actively participate in mystical orders, which however he had the chance to frequent for long, study in-depth, and comprehend their function and limits. He did not envision atemporal heroic figures and he did not conceive apocalyptic symbolisms, as he was very different from Ferdowsi and Nizami Ganjavi, but he managed to be highly appreciated and demanded by his times’ most formidable warriors, heroic conquerors, and secretive rulers. And contrarily with Nizam al-Mulk, who specified the rules of perfect governance, Nasir al-Din al Tusi used these rules to make kings’ and emperors’ governance useful to him and beneficial to mankind.
Above all, Nasir al-Din al Tusi was the Muslim, who personally controlled the various stages of the Mongol invasion and -most demanded- destruction of Baghdad (1258). Through his personal involvement as mediator or envoy, he helped the Buddhist Mongol emperor Hulagu (1218-1265) carry out the total demolition of the Abbasid capital. This historical event was not a ‘major historical development’ as many are inclined to believe today, because for many hundreds of years, Baghdad had lost its earlier importance as center of the world’s most immense and most formidable empire; in the middle of the 13 th c., the greatest capital of the Islamic world did not anymore have its hitherto unsurpassed significance as the world-center for letters, sciences, academic life, exploration, manuscript collection and translation, archivism, and arts. Baghdad was then only the shadow of the former Abbasid glory and splendor.
It has however to be underscored that the above description of the one-time Abbasid opulence was not the only way Muslims across the Islamic world viewed Baghdad at the time; the fallen Abbasid capital was also viewed as the palace of cruel rulers and unjust caliphs who imprisoned, poisoned and massacred several descendants of Prophet Muhammad and Ali, as the headquarters of deceitful potentates who misinterpreted Islam only to adjust it to their material needs and interests, and as the location of impotent, decayed ‘caliphs’ who for no less than ca. 350-400 years were more powerless than a single soldier and depended therefore on the mercy of the various secessionist emirs, sultans and shahs, who held the real imperial power in the regions of their states. In other words, for most of the then Muslims, Baghdad was not anymore a ‘glory’ but a disgusting ‘shame’.
Furthermore, long before the 13th c., numerous centers of Islamic spirituality, mysticism, letters, sciences, arts, philosophy and theology had already been established between the Atlantic Ocean and China and from the steppes of Siberia to the coast of today’s Tanzania and Mozambique. The annihilation of Baghdad’s library (with an estimate of about a million manuscripts) would not be and actually was not a detrimental and calamitous fact, as the mendacious modern Western historians and Orientalists try to depict. Spiritual, intellectual, academic, scientific, philosophical, and artistic life and creativity would continue and did indeed continue elsewhere.
In addition, very few contemporaneous Muslims ‘cried’ for the fall of the Abbasid capital; one of them was the already famous Saadi Shirazi (1210-1291), one of Iran’s greatest poets who exerted enormous impact on Iranians and Turanians. But at the time, this side was rather an insignificant minority.
Last, one must also point out that this event was not a religious war, and it was not then viewed as such, because there were many Muslims on the side of Hulagu, and of his official envoy Nasir al-Din al Tusi. They viewed the destruction of Baghdad as a God-sent present.
Colonial Orientalists shed interminable crocodile tears for the loss of what was indeed the greatest accumulation of manuscripts, written sources, and academic – intellectual heritage throughout the History of Mankind before modern times. The hypocritical Western academic attitude constitutes only a deceitful attempt and a divisive racist policy intended to generate frictions among Muslims and to turn fake entities, like the so-called ‘Arab Sunnis’ and the ‘Shia Iranians’, against one another. At the same time, the fallacious representation of this minor historical event helps produce Anti-Turanian, Anti-Turkish, Anti-Mongolian, and Anti-Buddhist hatred and rancor among uneducated, ignorant and idiotic Muslims.
In fact, any material record, any accumulation of written documentation, any library and archival institution has no value per se; humans and human life give its value to everything material. The treasures of 13th c. Baghdad’s libraries were to great extent copied and diffused from Andalusia to China. In any case, Baghdad would never again regain its 8th–9th c. position as the leading center of world’s knowledge, wisdom, science and spirituality; 500 years after its foundation, the Abbasid capital resembled, truly speaking, a mortuary.
As far as today’s ignorant and uneducated Muslims are concerned, it is extremely nonsensical and unprecedentedly shameful to express indignation for Baghdad’s destruction at the hands of Hulagu. What would actually their 18th, 19th and 20th c. ancestors have done, had Hulagu (or anybody else) not destroyed Baghdad? Judging from modern Muslims’ disgustingly materialistic approach to life and indifference for their own cultural heritage, they would have stupidly and inanely sold all these hundreds of thousands of supposedly remaining manuscripts to European and North American explorers, antiquaries, agents, diplomats, Orientalists, merchants and travelers, as they already did with what was left in other places. So, perhaps one can conclude that Hulagu’s only mistake was that he did not exterminate the entire population of the wider region to adequately purify the land, and thus prevent its putrefaction at a later age.
Nasir al-Din al Tusi was born in Tus to a theologian and jurist father; he studied in Neyshapur, Hamadan, Mosul and Baghdad. He encountered Attar of Neyshapur and Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, who was a student of Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi and a friend of Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Although he was familiar with spiritual exercises, mystical doctrines, and philosophy, Nasir al-Din al Tusi had a greater interest for medicine, mathematics, natural sciences, and astronomy. In rather young age, he was already viewed as an exemplary young scientist and scholar, and he was noticed by many known and surreptitious people.
Among the latter, the Isma’ili governor of the city Sartakht in Quhestan (: i.e. ‘mountainous land’: the southeastern part of Khorasan) invited him (1233) to work on several projects. Writing about teaching ethics to children and conversing with a high dignitary of the Isma’ili (the so-called ‘Sevener Shia’) administration, which also controlled several cities and provinces (except their headquarters, which constituted a real enclave inside the caliphate), Nasir al-Din al Tusi became familiar with the practices of governance held by mystical orders; he emphatically disliked this.
Nasir al din al Tusi with his associates and students, working in the then world’s most important observatory at Maragheh, East Azerbaijan-Iran; miniature of manuscript dating back to 1562, 300 years after the erection of the Maragheh Observatory
Two pages from a manuscript of Nasir al Din al Tusi’s ‘Treatise on the Astrolabe’ that dates back to 1505 (found in Isfahan).
Two pages from Nasir al Din al Tusi’s ‘Compendium of treatises on Astronomy and Mathematics’ from a manuscript dating back to 1279
Kitab tahrir al-usul li-Uqlidis (Commentary on Euclid’s Elements); each page with 19 lines of Maghribi script within double rules (with numerous diagrams); from: Fes (Alawi Morocco), al-Matba’ah al-‘Amirah, Khidmat al-‘Arabi al-Azraq (colophon with name of Sultan Muley Hassan), [1 Nov. 1876 CE =] 13 Shawwal 1293 H.
The Tusi couple from Vatican Arabic manuscript 319
Kitab Tahrir Usul li’Uqlidis (Elementorum Geometricorum) recension by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, first printed edition by the Medici Press (Typographia Medicea), Rome, 1594
Modern reconstruction: the dome of the Maragheh observatory
Central Tower of the Maragheh Observatory
Contemplation and Action: the Spiritual Autobiography of a Muslim Scholar – Nasir al-Din Tusi by Seyyed Jalal Hosseini Badakhchani
Nasir al Din al Tusi’s Maragheh Observatory and Library with 400000 manuscripts
Al Maragheh
Tashkent manuscript of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s treatise ‘Collection of Arithmetic’ (Jami’ al-hisab bi-‘l-Takht wa-‘l-turab), folio 120
However, he also had the experience of staying long in Alamut, the Isma’ili order’s headquarters which were located in an almost inaccessible mountainous region in Alborz, namely the range that separates the Caspian Sea from the Iranian plateau. There, Nasir al-Din al Tusi’s fame as a scientist and philosopher grew among the local Isma’ilis tremendously, and he became widely known across the Islamic world. He thus lived no less than 20 years in Alamut, being cut off from the rest of the world, but surrounded by dozens of thousands (if not more) of manuscripts.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-institutional-economics/article/nasir-addin-tusi-on-social-cooperation-and-the-division-of-labor-fragment-from-the-nasirean-ethics/866D4BA0EA8C7BA5493767E465113B63 This was a period in which the entire world was transformed into a Turanian Eurasiatic Empire. The achievement was unprecedented, but the method was known. Simply the family of Temüjin Borjigin (later known as Genghis Khan; 1162-1227) eclipsed by far the family of Seljuk. There is a slight but noticeable difference in the attitude of both families’ patriarch; whereas Seljuk fled straightforwardly to another region, Temüjin fought numerous battles before prevailing among first the Mongols and later the various Eastern Turanian (: Mongolian) nations. Whereas Temüjin was elected khan of the Mongols in 1186 (when he was 24 years old), it took him 20 years of incessant battles to prevail among all the surrounding Turanian nations, i.e. the Naimans, the Merkits, the Tatars, the Khamag Mongols, and the Keraites. Only in 1206 Temüjin became the undisputed and sole ruler of all the Eastern Turanian nations, thus controlling a sizeable nomadic empire.
Genghis Khan: from a 14th c. Yuan era Chinese album originally painted in 1278
Börte & Genghis Khan from a 16th c. manuscript: along with Hoelun Ujin, the emperor’s mother, she was the person that impacted the conqueror most.
However, long before Temüjin’s spectacular successes in the South (China) and the West (Central Asia, Western Siberia, Iran, Caucasus and Eastern Europe) took place (which occurred only after he was 50 years old), critical developments had happened to his family, and they determined the future of his offspring and the destiny of his immense empire. At a certain moment, during Temüjin’s early combats, his principal wife Börte (who was by then already pregnant) was taken captive by Temüjin’s contenders for some months. This event decisively compromised the way she was viewed afterwards; when she was liberated only few months later, she gave birth to Temüjin’s son, Jochi (1182-1227).
These circumstances did indeed cast a doubt about Jochi’s real father. Although Temüjin fully and unreservedly recognized Jochi as his first son, the story reached the ears of his other three sons (from Börte) at a later moment; this development irrevocably compromised Jochi’s chances to succession. Among Temüjin’s next sons, i.e. Chagatai (1183–1242), Ögedei (1186–1241), and Tolui (1191–1232), Chagatai announced his intention never to accept Jochi as Temüjin’s succession; to properly address the situation, Temüjin appointed Ögedei, his third son, as successor to both, remove doubts and castigate disloyalty. Jochi died few months before his father, but the aforementioned situation predetermined the future of the four brethren’s sons, and actually caused several conflicts among them and even among the younger generation, i.e. Temüjin’s grandchildren.
Basic source of information for the early stages of the Mongolian Turanian Empire is the ‘Secret History of the Mongols’; page from a 1908 Chinese edition (Mongolian text in Chinese transcription, plus a small glossary next to each column); the imperial historiographical source was written in Mongolian little time after the death of the great conqueror by an anonymous author as per the traditional imperial criteria. All surviving texts are transcriptions in Chinese characters and translations that date back to the 14th c. when the early Ming dynasty administrators wanted to offer an imperial narrative about the previous dynasty. A modern English translation of the Secret History of the Mongols can be found here: https://jigjids.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/the_secret_history_of_the_mongols_the_life_and_times_of_chinggis_khan1.pdf
‘Secret History of the Mongols’: the oldest copy preserved in Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia
Mausoleum of Genghis Khan in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China (not a personal tomb)
Temüjin was a staunch monotheist, and he observed the traditional rites of his religion, Tengrism. The early Turanian religion is a form of monotheism based on transcendental experience, spiritual exercises, utmost morality, military discipline, and universal perception of the world. Sticking always to meritocracy and combating favoritism, Temüjin was an extroverted man with great interest for the religious and spiritual beliefs of surrounding nations: he was therefore in constant contact with Buddhist monks, Manichaean Elects, Nestorian Christian clergymen, Muslim imams, and Taoist priests, being conversant in their respective faiths and cults. When he was not at the battlefield, Temüjin had also literary interests and to fight illiteracy, he introduced among Mongolians the Uyghur writing system, which had been attested as early as the 5th c. CE in Sogdian characters, being therefore of Aramaic origin.
The great expansion of Temüjin’s empire occurred in the period 1206-1227, when the situation across his realm was already stable, solid and untroubled. Until 1211, Temüjin (Genghis Khan) conquered the nomadic Tangut Empire (‘Western Xia’ dynasty), another Turanian Empire located west of Temüjin’s territory. In the period 1211-1215, invaded the Northern Chinese kingdom (Jin dynasty), sacking Zhongdu (: the old Beijing city, capital of Jin China) in the process; the North Chinese king Xuanzong fled to the South, therefore losing more than half of his territory to Temüjin. In 1218, the ever improving armies of Genghis Khan defeated Qara Kitai, another nomadic Turanian Empire that was located west of the already demised Tangut Empire. This means that for the first time in the History of Eurasia an empire controlled all the lands between Lake Balkhash (in today’s Eastern Kazakhstan) and the coastlands of Northeast Asia, also including the northern half of today’s China. By that time, Temüjin’s empire bordered with the Turanian Empire of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) that stretched from the eastern coastlands of the Caspian Sea to today’s Eastern Kazakhstan and down to the Persian Gulf and Straits of Hormuz.
Central, Southern, Northern and Eastern Asia in the early 13th century
Genghis enters Zhongdu (Beijing) in 1215; miniature from Jami al-tawarikh
The campaigns Genghis Khan in the period 1207-1225
From 1219 to 1223, an incredible thunderstorm hit Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Following the devastating defeat of Khwarazm (1221), Temüjin’s armies invaded the western parts of Central Asia and today’s Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, engaging in successive ferocious battles; in one of them, Chagatai’s firstborn son Mutukan died (in Bamian). During the next two years, Eastern Anatolia, Caucasus, Crimea, today’s Ukraine and today’s Russia’s southern half were conquered by the Turanian armies led by Temüjin’s family members and relatives. The Christian state of Kievan Rus (which is spiritually rather than ethnically related to Modern Russia) collapsed after the defeat in the Kalka River battle.
Jalal al-Din Mangburni (also known as Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah), the last of Khwarazm, crosses the Indus River trying to escape from the Mongolian forces; from a late 17th century manuscript of Jami al-tawarikh (by Rashid al Din Hamadani)
With the invasion of the multi-religious Turanian Cuman–Kipchak confederacy and following the annexation of the Muslim Turanian Khanate of Volga Bulgaria, the first two sizeable Turanian kingdoms in Europe took an end, after having lasted for more than 400 years. The khanate of Volga Bulgaria had been a Muslim state since 922 (so for more than 300 years before its demise), thus representing a major chapter of Europe’s Islamic past and identity. This highlights the fact that Islam antedates Christianity in Eastern Europe. As a matter of fact, the Volga Bulgarian ruler Almış sent an embassy to Baghdad, asking for religious instructors; in response to his demand, Ibn Fadlan (ca. 880 – ca.960) was dispatched at once to teach Islamic faith, theology and jurisprudence there. About:
Little resistance was attested following the Turanian conquests undertaken by Genghis Khan’s (:Temüjin’s) armies, and this is due to the religious-cultural tolerance that prevailed everywhere after the largest part of Eurasia was invaded and unified in about 20 years. The only significant rebellion took place in Tangut, and it was squelched by Temüjin who died next year.
Ögedei became the 2nd Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire. In the period between 1227 and 1241, he carried out military campaigns across Central Asia, Khorasan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Caucasus (1230), he invaded Korea (1231), and he completed the invasion of China (1230-1234), bringing about the final fall of the Jin dynasty. His armies carried out numerous campaigns in the wider Caucasus region (1232-1240), squelching revolts and conquering remote mountainous spots. During the period 1235-1241, Ögedei’s firstborn son Güyük Khan (1206-1248) and other relatives and generals invaded Eastern, Southeastern and Central Europe; Güyük Khan’s half-brother Kadan, Jochi’s second son Batu (c. 1207–1255) and Mutukan’s son Büri (Chagatai’s grandson) were also present in the invasions, leading armies and engaging in battles and sieges; the former territories of Kievan Rus and today’s Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and parts of Germany were swept and conquered.
Chagatai outlived his younger brother and 2nd Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire by one year; with Ögedei as Khagan, Chagatai was entrusted with the administration of a vast Central Asiatic territory, which became later known as the Chagatai Khanate and under different forms and dynasties survived until ca. 1700. With capital at Almaligh (close to today’s Chinese – Kazakh border in Eastern Turkestan / Sinkiang), Chagatai favored Tengrism over Islam, causing hostility among his country’s Muslims, whose bulk inhabited the western and southern provinces of the vast state. Quite contrarily, he tolerated Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism and Buddhism.
After participating in his father’s and older brother’s campaigns, Tolui sacrificed himself to save Ögedei from an illness caused by China’s spirits of Earth and Soft Waters; as per the description available in ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’, the earliest historical record in Mongolian language, Tolui by his own will drank a cursed potion to appease the spirits and heal his brother, therefore dying in the process.
Genghis Khan and Jochi standing in the left
Jochi Mausoleum, Ulytau-Kazakhstan
The funerals of Chagatai Khan
Coronation of Ögedei, from a 14th century’s manuscript of Rashid al-Din Hamadani’s Jami’al Tawarikh
Ögedei portrait from the times of Yuan dynasty 47×59 cm
Tolui
Mongol army captures a city of the Kievan Rus state (16th c. Russian miniature)
Among the generation of Genghis Khan’s grandsons prominent role played the following:
i. Ögedei’s sons Güyük Khan (1206-1248; 3rd Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire for the period 1246-1248), Godan Khan (1206-1251), and Kadan;
ii. Chagatai’s sons Mutukan (died 1221), Baidar (who participated in the European campaign and was present in the election of Güyük Khan in 1246), and Yesü Möngke (Khan of Chagatai Khanate for the period 1246-1252, after and before Mutukan’s son Qara Hülegü, who was twice Khan of Chagatai Khanate: 1242-1246, 1252);
iii. Tolui’s sons were the luckiest in terms of posterity and imperial prevalence. Tolui was the regent of the empire for a certain period. His historically important sons were: Möngke Khan (1209–1259) 4th Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire (1251-1259), Kublai Khan (1215–1294) Emperor of China (1st Emperor of the Yuan dynasty: 1271-1294) and 5th Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire (1260-1294; however his imperial power at this level was only nominal due to the empire’s division), Hulagu Khan (1217–1265) who was tasked by Möngke Khan in 1251 to destroy Western Asia’s remaining Islamic states, and Ariq Böke (1219–1266; known for his Nestorian Christian sympathies) Khagan of the Mongol Empire (a title with only nominal value due to the empire’s division), who clashed with Kublai Khan and finally got imprisoned and then poisoned;
The empire of Möngke Khan
iv. Jochi’s sons Orda Ichen (c. 1206–1251; participant in the invasion of Kievan Rus’ in 1237-1242) Khan of the Golden Horde Eastern Half (White Horde; 1226-1251), Batu (c. 1207–1255) Khan of the Golden Horde Western Half (Blue Horde; 1227-1255), and Berke, Khan of the Golden Horde Western Half (Blue Horde; 1257–1266), who was the first member of the Genghisid family to have become Muslim.
From the above, it can be understood that, despite the consented, appropriate and fair-minded division of Genghis Khan’s empire among his sons and grandsons, several disputes took place, and soon after Güyük Khan’s tenure as the 3rd Khagan, the supreme title shifted to the progeniture of Tolui; nevertheless, the empire was so immense to possibly supervise that Möngke Khan was practically the last to be effective as Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire.
Many depict the great events of the period 1219-1258 as a unique moment in the history of mankind, but in reality, Eurasia had indeed experienced several similar cases before. Where does the difference lie then? This is easy to answer. Contrarily to earlier spectacular invasions, which had repeatedly crisscrossed Eurasia in the past, the Turanian Mongolian invasions of the 13th c. occurred at a time when historiography had already greatly progressed. Numerous nations had developed their own writing systems and great amounts of historical records were scrupulously kept in state archives, involving state annals and correspondence, royal chronographers, etc. In addition, diverse types of ample documentation, such as literary, theological, philosophical and other texts mentioning and commenting historical events, offer a wide-angle view of the facts. That is why these events are incomparably better documented, and this makes an enormous difference.
One has however to observe a major new trait – something that finds early parallels only in the Achaemenid court of Darius I the Great at Parsa (Persepolis). For the first time after the procession of the subject nations’ representatives in the Apadana audience hall of Darius the Great’s palace occurred in the last years of the 6th c. BCE, Western nations’ defeated rulers, subjugated princes, and humiliated diplomats made headway to an Eastern imperial capital to attend a splendid event whereby they were summoned as humble servants of their superior potentates.
This sublime event of worldwide importance was Güyük’s enthronement as the 3rd Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire; it took place on 24th August 1246, at Karakorum, Güyük’s capital. The Seljuk Sultans of Anatolia, the Abbasid caliph, the sultan of Delhi, the shadowy kings of Georgia, Armenia, and Vladimir (a city 200 km east of Moscow), the king of Poland, the pope of Rome, and other marginal Western rulers sent their representatives or attended the spectacular ceremony, i.e. the Great Kurultai (‘tribal assembly’). The scenery reminds us of the famous bas-reliefs of Parsa (Persepolis) where Ionians, Libyans, Egyptians, Sogdians, Indians and others were depicted bearing tribute, present and homage to the Achaemenid King of Kings.
Letter written in Farsi and sent by Güyük Khan’s emissaries to Pope Innocent IV, demanding his submission (1246)
After Güyük Khan’s death, two kurultais were held, but his sons Naqu and Khoja did not make their case strong, and the title of Khagan passed on to Tolui’s sons, and more specifically to Möngke Khan. It is however wrong to call the events ‘Toluid revolution’, because everything occurred in full compliance with the Turanian-Mongolian tribal traditions and moral order; no revolution took place among the Turanian Mongolians; this is a Western colonial invention.
Möngke Khan ruled for eight years (1251-1259) over an area of over 30 million km2 (this is double the size of today’s Russia). The entire territory of today’s China and Vietnam, the northwestern part of today’s India, and other parts of SE Asia were invaded in the 1250s. Progressively, until the end of the 13th c., the Turanian Mongolian Empire reached the size of 37 million km2, being of course significantly decentralized into smaller structures. More than any other person among all his relatives, Möngke Khan had a genuine sense for imperial administration, taxation, systematization, organization and coordination. He definitely had to suppress various rebellions here and there, but he was not cruel and he pursued a rather tolerant approach to all the major religions of his vast empire.
Möngke Khan supported Buddhism, discussed with Christian priests of every denomination, engaged in conversations with Taoists, Manichaeans and Muslims, and although his brother Hulagu destroyed the Nizari Isma’ili enclave at Alamut and demolished Baghdad (thus terminating the Abbasid Caliphate), they both (Möngke and Hulagu) offered tax exemption to the Najaf Muslim community that had opposed for many long centuries the Abbasid cruelty and corruption. About:
As early as 1251, Hulagu was entrusted (by Möngke) with the elimination of four Islamic states: the Assassins’ domain (the Nizari Isma’ili enclave), the Abbasid Caliphate, the Ayyubid state of Damascus, and the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. Although it looks like a Buddhist’s attempt to destroy the most important of the remaining Islamic states, the demolition of the Isma’ili enclave (the state of those who are today falsely called ‘Sevener Shia’) really saved the Islamic world from an evil cancerous tumor and at the same time catapulted Nasir al-Din al-Tusi to supreme position among the top scholars, scientists and intellectuals of the world’s only formidable empire.
Kale-ye Alamut
The 26th Nizari Ismaili Imam Ala al-Din Muhammad (the Elder of the Mountain) in the Travels of Marco Polo
In 1253, Hulagu advanced westwards with no less than 20% of the entire military force of the Turanian Mongolian Empire. He crossed Transoxiana, invaded Khwarazm (Chorasmia) and Khorasan, and reinstated the imperial order. The major problem caused by the existence of the Nizari Isma’ili ‘state’ (i.e. the clandestine organization and the unreachable enclave) was that it did not function as an ordinary, regular state, but as a secretive clandestine organization with members dispersed across vast territories of the Muslim world and with an impregnable mountainous headquarters (Kale-ye Alamut, i.e. the Alamut Castle in Alborz Mountains) from where all the instructions for the members’ subsequent actions, tactics and schemes were dispatched by various camouflaged agents – at the unbeknownst of all the rest. In other words, it was the first time in World History a spiritual order attempted to get involved in the governance of the Muslim world as such. Even worse, this was not undertaken by means of frontal opposition to the caliph, like the rebellions against the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphs, but in an evidently subversive manner.
Hulagu undertook the systematic elimination of Isma’ili governors of various regions, notably Quhistan (today’s Eastern Iran and Western Afghanistan) and Qumis (Eastern Iran between Gorgan and Dasht-e Kavir), before attacking Alborz Mountains from three different directions and finally demolishing Alamut Castle in December 1256. The events have been detailed in the Tarikh-i Jahangushay (‘The History of The World Conqueror’ /تاریخ جهانگشای), a voluminous masterpiece elaborated in Farsi by Ala al-Din Ata-ullah Juvayni (جوینی علاءالدین عطاءالله), a prominent Iranian historian (1226-1283) whose father had served as minister of Jalal ad-Din Mingburnu, the last ruler of Khwarazm, and of Ögedei Khan. Juvayni (from Joveyn in Khorasan) was also employed as an imperial administrator at Karakorum, and then he followed Hulagu in his campaign, therefore offering unprecedented insight and fascinating descriptions of the various events. Less than 14 months later, Juvayni was next to Hulagu during the siege of Baghdad. Meanwhile, Hulagu founded his new capital at Maragheh, not far from Lake Urumiyeh’s southeastern coasts
The fall of Alamut in miniatures of historical manuscripts
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s reputation ran very high at those days; that’s why he was invited to join Hulagu’s camp and become his adviser and diplomat. Hulagu was highly educated and had great consideration for scholars, polymaths, scientists, poets and authors. In total contradiction to nonsensical narratives of the modern uneducated theologians and Islamists, who are idiotic enough to portray Hulagu as an oppressor or a barbarian, the great emperor relied always on erudite academics and actually promoted the scientific research in a most determinant and resolute manner – more than any other ruler of his time. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was then tasked to negotiate with the imam of the Isma’ilis Rukn al-Din Khurshah and to convince him to submit to the imperial authority, save his family, and dissolve his order.
When demolishing Alamut Castle, Hulagu followed Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s and Juvayni’s advice, and they saved all the astronomical instruments that were found in the vast library, which had earlier functioned under the auspices of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Armillary spheres, astrolabes, manuscripts with astronomical observations and tables, books, copies of the Quran, and important documents were rescued, whereas the rest – and more in particular any literature related to the heretic faith and the malignant activity of the secretive Isma’ili order – was consumed by the fire. Hulagu indulged every scholarly and intellectual curiosity, and Juvayni narrates how he initially saved the biography of Hassan-i Sabah (1050-1124), the obscure figure credited with the rearrangement of the Isma’ili order and its transformation into an evil, secretive and terrorist organization, but after reading the evilness contained therein, he burnt it by himself!
So great Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s reputation as astronomer and astrologer was that Hulagu wanted to dispatch him to Karakorum, because Möngke demanded one leading erudite in his capital; Tusi accepted, but finally this journey was spared due to Tusi’s effective negotiation skills and successful astrological advice delivered to Hulagu. Due to Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Hulagu’s army invaded the otherwise believed impregnable Alamut Castle with few casualties; Tusi’s negotiation skills caused a certain defeatism among the ranks of the Isma’ilis, as their peaceful dispersion was promised to be tantamount to survival.
Subsequently, Hulagu consulted Tusi about the then forthcoming assault on Baghdad. This was a serious issue, because among the Turanian Mongolian army soldiers, several rumors were circulating about an eventual extraordinary disaster which would eventually befall them, if they shed the blood of the last caliph who was a descendant of Prophet Muhammad’s uncle (Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib). The rumors would have not been easily accepted, had there not been a time-honored Turanian Mongolian tradition, which prohibited the spilling of royal blood. After observing the stars and finding that the celestial conditions were auspicious, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi assured Hulagu that his victory was certain and that he would replace the corrupt and idiotic caliph on the throne of Baghdad
The Battle of Baghdad (1258)
The siege of Baghdad (Supplément persan 1113, fol. 180v-181 ca. 1430)
The events that took place outside the gates of Baghdad during the last days of January and the first days of February 1258 bear witness to the nauseating corruption and the utmost paranoia that characterized the evil dynasty, which – in the Name of Allah – persecuted and executed great numbers of descendants of Prophet Muhammad only to serve filthy interests, secure material wealth, uphold imperial power, and ensure contemptible continuity. The idiotic attitude of the last caliph Al-Musta’sim, who could not even understand that his end had come and continued living carefree like all his predecessors over the previous 300 years, fully justifies the kind of death that he underwent (wrapped in carpet and crushed by horses).
During the siege of Baghdad, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, acting as Hulagu’s chief envoy, delivered imperial messages to the senseless caliph and supervised the evacuation process, when an important part of the local population abandoned the city and surrendered. Tusi and the last vizier of Al-Musta’sim were able to save all Islamic shrines, holy sites, and monuments of Iraq, and to make the local Muslim population come to senses and realize that the end of Abbasid Baghdad was something good even for Muslims. Tusi was instrumental in convincing most of the Muslims that the Abbasid court’s pseudo-Islamic theologians were sectarian fanatics and evil blasphemers. Actually, many Iraqi cities’ populations welcomed the Turanian Mongolian armies. Such was Tusi’s success that many rumors started circulating that he had persuaded Hulagu to accept Islam and that the End of Times was about to come, since Hulagu’s armies had come from Turan (there are certain Ahadith that can be interpreted in this manner); of course, this was an exaggeration, because Hulagu died as a Buddhist.
Doquz Khatun, Hulagu’s most influential wife, was a Keraite Turanian princess that accompanied him in the campaigns to Asia’s southwestern confines. She was a Nestorian Christian (which was quite common among the Keraites) and because of this, she proved to be highly beneficial to Iraq’s Christian populations which were all Nestorians. The Church of the East (as the then Seleucia-Ctesiphon-based Nestorian Patriarchate was named) prospered indeed under Hulagu and his successors, the rulers of the vast Ilkhanate; the portion of the Turanian Mongolian Empire allotted to Hulagu comprised of all territories stretching between Indus River in the East and Sakarya River in the West (Anatolian Seljuks were a vassal state), and between Amu Daria River and the Caucasus Mountains in the North to Euphrates River in the South (totaling ca. 5 million km2).
Hulagu Khan and Doquz Khatun; miniature of a 14th c. manuscript of Jami’al Tawarikh
Thanks to the upgraded conditions of life of the Nestorian Christians in the Ilkhanate, it is not therefore strange that Nestorian Aramaean artists of those days, while depicting the Exaltation of the Cross by St. Constantine and St. Helena, depicted around the Cross the two saints of Christianity with the features of Hulagu and Doquz Khatun, thus equating them as the ‘new’ St. Constantine and St. Helena.
Because of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s extraordinary services, Hulagu rewarded him with the library of Baghdad (Bayt al Hikmah), and the great astronomer saved dozens of thousands of manuscripts and other valuable items, taking them to Maragheh, the new capital of Hulagu’s empire. Furthermore, the treasures of all the waqfs (i.e. foundations collecting donations for religious or charitable purposes) of Baghdad and Iraq were forcefully given to Nasir al-Din al-Tusi in order to enable him to finance the erection of the then world’s leading Observatory at Maragheh. Following the death of Möngke in 1259, Tusi did not need to travel to Karakorum, and then he concentrated his scientific prowess and intellectual genius on the operation of the Maragheh Observatory, on the cooperation of numerous Muslim, Jewish, Nestorian Christian, Buddhist and other scholars in that magnificent venue, and on the preparation of his Zij-i Ilkhani, an extraordinary series of astronomical tables that consisted in an official imperial document dedicated to Hulagu Ilkhan (this title was attributed to Hulagu by Kublai Khan, after he defeated their youngest brother Ariq Böke).
Hulagu Khan and Dokuz Khatun depicted as the New St. Constantine and the New St. Helena in the miniature of an illustrated Syriac Aramaic Bible of the 13th c.
Rather known for his famous ‘Tousi couple’ (a mathematical device in which a small circle rotates inside a larger circle twice the diameter of the smaller circle), Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was not the only author of Zij-i Ilkhani. The extraordinary opus was the result of a uniquely international team of astronomers and astrologers, who worked under the guidance of Tusi, involving amongst others Bar Hebraeus {1226-1286; known as Mor Gregorios Bar Ebraya in Syriac Aramaic, Ebn al-‘Ebri in Arabic and Abulpharagius in Latin, he was the chief-bishop of the Aramaean (Syriac) Jacobite Orthodox -Monophysitic/Miaphysitic- Church across the Ilkhanid Empire}, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (1236-1311), Muhyi al-Dīn al-Maghribī, Mu’ayyid al-Din al-‘Urdi, Hulagu’s Chinese astronomer Fao Munji, and many others.
Page from Bar Hebraeus’ treatise Hewath Hekmetha (Butter of Wisdom), (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Or. 83, fol. 32r)
Zij-i Ilkhani includes data and observations made during a period of 12 years, starting as early as 1260. The magnificent opus was published at the time of Hulagu’s son Abaqa Khan (1265-1282) and became the model that many posterior Muslim astronomers and astrologers followed. Later astronomical tables and texts produced in Maragheh were translated from Arabic and Farsi to Greek by Gregory Choniades, who was the student of Shams ad-Din al-Bukhari, another Turanian astronomer who had worked at the illustrious Maragheh Observatory.
Page from a manuscript of Zij-i Ilkhani
Such was the success of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Observatory that Kublai Khan, Hulagu’s brother, trying to compete in terms of imperially promoted scholarship and pioneering research, had another observatory built in China at Gaocheng in 1276 under the supervision of the famous Chinese astronomer Guo Shoujing (郭守敬; 1231–1316). Around 150 years later, Ulugh Beg, the Timurid Emperor of Samarqand, who was his time’s worldwide leading mathematician and astronomer, studied the remains of the Maragheh Observatory to build his own observatory in his empire’s capital.
Guo Shoujing
Geometric model of Chinese Astronomy
For the exemplarily universal scholar Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Bar Hebraeus, chief-bishop of the Syriac Church in the Ilkhanid Empire, wrote in his Chronography the following:
“He constructed instruments for the observations of stars, and the great brass spheres that were more wonderful than those that Ptolemy set up in Alexandria, and he observed and defined the courses of the stars. And there were gathered together about him in Maragheh … a numerous company of wise men from various countries. And since the councils of all the mosques and the houses of instruction of Baghdad and Assyria were under his direction, he used to allot stipends to the teachers and to the pupils who were with him”.
This unsurpassed example of universal scholarship, erudition and intellectual genius disturbed at the time various uneducated, obscurantist, pseudo-Muslim theologians, like Al-Safadi (1296-1363); expressing the Mamluk state’s anti-Ilkhanid propaganda, he wrote against Nasir al-Din al-Tusi deprecatory comments, which were later reproduced by the idiotic religious authorities of the decayed Ottoman Empire in their catastrophic opposition to Safavid Iran, an attitude that ruined both empires. Even worse, over the past decades, anti-Tusi inflammatory speech is tantamount to Islamic terrorism.
The only historically pertinent response to the illiterate and uneducated pseudo-Muslims, who pathetically self-define themselves as ‘Sunnis’ and incessantly regret for the ‘fall of Abbasid Baghdad’ to the ‘barbarians’ is that, only thanks to the destruction of that wretched and worthless state and city, Islamic sciences reached their culminating point at Maragheh few decades later, and then at Samarqand, in the Mughal Empire of Hindustan, and elsewhere. Speaking with sadness about the demolition of the Abbasid Caliphate’s capital is typical camouflage for either idiotic Islamist politicians or criminal suicide-bombers. About:
Hulagu died in 1265 in his capital Maragheh and was buried on an island of the Lake Urumiyeh {: ‘the non-(Eastern) Roman’, because the Eastern Roman Empire never expanded over those regions} at a location still unidentified. For over 400 years, not one ruler had achieved to control so firmly the entire region over which he reigned. Even more importantly, as he ruled one of the four parts of Genghis Khan’s vast empire, his reign greatly facilitated contacts, exchanges, and movements.
Numerous nomadic populations and pastoralists moved across vast or small distances from Eastern and Central Siberia to either China or Europe, and from Central Asia either toward Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Syria and Anatolia or in the direction of Iran, the Indus River valley and further on to the Deccan (today’s India’s South). During the 13th, 14th, 15th and the early 16th c., practically speaking all the ethnic groups and nations of Eurasia and North Africa were greatly amalgamated with the incessant waves of new comers. From Sahara and Central Europe to the Bering Strait an indivisible ethnic-cultural entity was formed only to be locally accentuated and highlighted in some regions where major ancient civilizations had been developed.
A ‘universal man’ was then effectively created, no less than 600-700 years before the so-called ‘global world order’ that was calamitously announced at the end of the 20th c. only as an atrocious and vindictive reaction against most of the people worldwide. But back in the 13th, 14th and the 15th century, the only barbarians, who made the exception across Afro-Eurasia, were the Western European pseudo-Christian monarchs and their master, namely the heretic and schismatic pope of Rome, who was anathematized in 1054 by the Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of New Rome Constantinople.
In this regard, ethno-linguistic and theological-religious diversity helped only underscore spiritual, cultural and imperial unity. In reality, the various empires and kingdoms were basically the specular reflection of one another. The major axes of differentiation were between nomads and pastorals (whereby the nomads viewed the pastorals as enfeebled) and between rural dwellers and urban inhabitants (whereby the rural populations considered the urban denizens as corrupt and degenerate).
The split of the Mongolian Empire
Hulagu’s vast empire (known basically as the Ilkhanate; 1256-1353) survived for almost 100 years after his death; taking into consideration the earlier divisions that existed across those regions and the massive migrations that occurred during the reign of Ilkhan’s successors, we can conclude that the Ilkhanate was a success story. In China, the Yuan dynasty (established by Kublai Khan) lasted also slightly less than one century (1279-1368). The Chagatai Khanate did not last much longer in its initial and integral form (1226-1347); after that term, it was decomposed and underwent several metamorphoses; its eastern part survived as Moghulistan (1347-1487), only to be later diminished and subdivided (Turfan Khanate, 1487-1690; Yarkand Khanate 1465-1705). Last, the Golden Horde survived longer, but only through early divisions (White Horde and Blue Horde) and subsequent multi-divisions (Great Horde, Crimean Khanate, Kazan Khanate, Astrakhan Khanate, Nugai Khanate, Sibir Khanate and Kazakh Khanate).
Since the times of the Ilkhanate, the entire landmass of Central Asia, the Iranian plateau, the Indus River Valley, the Ganges River Valley, Zagros Mountains, the South Caucasus region, Mesopotamia, Syria and Anatolia were practically speaking inhabited by populations of the same ethno-linguistic background and cultural identity. Since those days, the majority of the population either in Anatolia or in Iran was Turanian. As a matter of fact, the Ilkhanate could work as the ideal prototype for all posterior Oriental monarchs.
Being a paradigm in every sense, the Ilkhanate was a religiously tolerant empire whereby Tengrists, Shamanists, Nestorian, Monophysitic / Miaphysitic and Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Yazidis, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Manichaeans, and others lived peacefully under an initially Buddhist and later Islamic imperial court. The Safavids attempted to imitate and reinstate the Ilkhanate, but they failed because of their sectarianism; when at the end of the 16th c. they favored theologians instead of mystics, they heralded the final fall Iran. Contrarily, the Ottomans ignored the Ilkhanate model only to further expand to troublesome and otherwise worthless territories, which simply made their empire weaker and prompt to multi-division; the poor Ottoman choice was also the result of evil, pseudo-Islamic theological sectarianism – or to put it better sectarian opposition to Safavid sectarianism.
Abaqa Khan (1234–1282) had to engage, during his reign (1265-1282), in many battles against the Golden Horde (for control of, and prevalence in, the Caucasus region; until Berke Khan’s death in 1267), the Chagatai Empire (because Baraq Khan tried to detach Khorasan from the Ilkhanate in 1270), the remains of the Nizari Isma’ilis (that tried to reassemble), and the Mamluks of Egypt (twice: 1271 and 1281, and always within the context of wider alliances, i.e. Golden Horde and Mamluks against the Ilkhanate, the Eastern Roman Empire, Armenia and the last Crusaders). Abaqa Khan was also the son-in-law of Michael VIII Palaiologos of the Eastern Roman Empire, because he got married with the basileus’ daughter Maria Palaiologina, who was initially dispatched to become Hulagu’s wife, but arrived after the great emperor’s death. However, Abaqa Khan was a religiously tolerant Buddhist in whose coins sometimes the Christian cross was depicted under the evocation of the Christian Trinity (in Arabic). Maria Palaiologina played an important role in the Ilkhanate after the death of Doquz Khatun, Hulagu’s Nestorian wife.
Abaqa Khan’s brother Ahmed Tekuder (1246-1284) reigned for two years (1282-1284) after his elder brother died; in young age, he was baptized Nestorian Christian, but later he accepted Islam. However, he faced fierce opposition and many intrigues from the part of Abaqa Khan’s son Arghun, a Buddhist. After many battles (of purely tribal, not religious, background), Tekuder was accused of misgovernance in trial, condemned and executed.
Abaqa enthroned with one of his wives (most probably Dorji Khatun)
Three generations of the Ilkhanate in just one miniature. Abaqa on a horse; his son Arghun stands next to him under the imperial umbrella, holding his own son, Mahmud Ghazan, with his right arm.
Gold Dinar of Abaqa Khan, Isfahan Mint; obverse: (in Arabic) Al-Mulku Lillah, La Ilaha Illa Lah Muhammad Rasul – lallah Sallallahu Alayhi vasallam; reverse: Qa An Shah A’lam Ilkhan Al-A’azam Abaqa Khalada mulk allah
Arghun (1258-1291) was a pro-Christian, Buddhist emperor, who persistently tried to strike a Franco-Mongol alliance against the Muslim control of Palestine and Egypt; he did not view this in terms of religious enmity or rivalry, but clearly as an internal Turanian-Mongolian tribal contention. Any modern scholar, who disregards this reality, totally misinterprets that historical period, therefore failing to represent the main factors’ real motives and targets. Today’s Muslims and Christians, who attempt to view the then historical developments through distortive sectarian lenses, only generate problems; they create confusion to themselves, stay in ignorance, and are subsequently absorbed by fanaticism. The Mamluks were disdained by most of the Turanians (since the early Islamic times) as a disparate and disorderly element with no tribal ancestry, and this was actually a historically correct judgment.
There is no difference in this regard between the Genghisid Buddhist Arghun of the Ilkhanate, the (‘Sunni’) Ottoman Selim I, the (‘Shia’) Safavid Isma’il I, and the (‘Sunni’) Timurid Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire across South Asia. To all of them ancestry mattered; and the Mamluks did not have any. They were Turanian soldiers, who first acted individually, then made an alliance among them and formed a kind of international military class, and in the process ruled various unrelated lands, initially in the name of the caliph. So, their origin could be retraced either to all the branches of Turanian nations or to selected youngsters taken from among other nations, basically from either the Caucasus region or Egypt. However, no one takes seriously a group of experienced military warlords without tribal connection, tradition and ancestry, i.e. a group of deracinated soldiers who therefore fight for material goods and power, and not for honor. This is the whole matter. There is an extra, rather minor point. Many Mamluk originated from the Western Turanian branch of Cumans and the Kipchak, who were never taken in great esteem by the Eastern Turanians.
During Argun’s reign (1284-1291), the various posts were distributed among the emperor’s relatives; Argun’s cousins Jushkab and Baydu were entrusted with Baghdad and Mesopotamia; his brother Gaykhatu was tasked to maintain control in Anatolia, along with his uncle Hulachu. Khorasan was given to Argun’s son Ghazan and his cousin Kingshu. And the Jalayir tribesman Buqa, who helped Argun against his uncle and predecessor, got awarded with the top military and administrative positions. Argun had a close relationship and firm alliance with his powerful uncle Kublai Khan, but his mismanagement of the Ilkhanate was disastrous.
Gaykhatu (in Mongolian: Gaikhat, which means ‘surprising’) reigned for four years (1291-1295), after being the governor of Anatolia during the reign of his brother; although a staunch Buddhist (he was given the Tibetan honorific Rinchindorj, i.e. ‘diamond’), he got married also with Muslim princesses, notably Padishah Khatun who originated from the Qutlugh-Khanid vassal state, which was ruled by an ethnically Khitan dynasty in the region of Kerman. This is one more indication that in reality the Ilkhanate was a totally secular state, and that the ‘court religion’ was an individual expression of spirituality and not an imperial state order imposed on the society. Gaykhatu faced fierce opposition to his election (in the typical Turanian national assembly, the Kurultai, which was held in Ahlat, in today’s Eastern Turkey) by several disorderly elements that supported Baydu, his cousin.
Farman by Gaykhatu, dating back to 1292 and mentioning names of Shiktur Noyan, Aq Buqa, Taghachar and Sad ud-Din Zanjani
Gaykhatu enthroned: from a manuscript of Shams al-Dîn Kâshânî (Bibliothèque nationale de France; Département des Manuscrits, Division orientale, Supplément persan 1443 f.241v)
Gaykhatu’s reign was consumed in numerous internal fights, such as the uprising of Afrasiab of the Hazaraspid dynasty (a Turanian-Iranian vassal state in today’s Lorestan, Western Iran), the rebellion of several Turanian vassal states in Anatolia (notably the Karamanids, the Chobanids, the Eshrefids, and the Menteshe), and the plots of Taghachar in Iran. However, Gaykhatu was the first ruler in Western Asia and Europe to ever print paper money (Jiaochao /交钞), which was first introduced in China ca. 150 years earlier and then widely used at the times of Kublai Khan. In 1295, Gaykhatu, who despite his libertine morals liked Nestorian Christianity, was betrayed by several magistrates, who sided with Baydu, and thus his reign ended with his assassination.
Gaykhatu interrogates Shigtûr Noyan, ally & cousin of Arghun; miniature by Sayf al-Vâhidî. Hérât. Afghanistan (Bibliothèque nationale de France; Département des Manuscrits, Division orientale, Supplément persan 1113, fol. 208)
Baydu ruled only for few months in 1295, failing to oppose the centrifugal forces of the vast state where new populations had meanwhile settled, mixed with indigenous nations, and became a tool in the hands of every experienced and ambitious soldier. Born as a Buddhist, sympathizing with Nestorian Christianity, and wearing a cross, Baydu tried to befriend the outright Muslim majority of his ailing empire. However, his clash with Ghazan, Argun’s son, brought an end to his reign and life.
Mahmud Ghazan (1271-1304) was the first Ilkhan who accepted officially Islam; his reign (1295-1304) seems to be a period of stabilization in a vast empire composed of disparate elements stirred up by many newcomers. His strong advantage was that he had the chance, before rising to the throne of the Ilkhanate in Tabriz at the age of 24, to experience conditions of court plots, family betrayals, tribal rivalries, military conflicts, imperial alliances, administrative doldrums and governmental prowess during four different reigns within the span of only 13 years. He engaged in many wars against the Mamluks of Egypt in Syria and the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia. Despite his conversion to Islam, he pursued the traditional Mongolian tendency to shape a Franco-Mongolian alliance, but he also failed in this effort.
In Ghazan’s times, the traditional religious tolerance that prevailed among Mongolian Turanians and the secular nature of the Ilkhanate took a severe hit; this was not due to Mahmud Ghazan himself, but to people around him. Buddhists were persecuted, Nestorian churches were looted, and Monophysitic/Miaphysitic Christian churches were demolished. A certain portion of the Ilkhanate’s Muslims, particularly those living in Syria and Anatolia, started being fanaticized at those days, due to the false and sectarian rhetoric of the entire Islamic History’s most ominous and most calamitous figure, namely the pseudo-Muslim theologian Ibn Taymiyyah whose demented thoughts represent a form of Christianization of Islam.
Conversion of Ghazan to Islam; Ghazan was born as a Buddhist, and converted to Islam as part of an agreement upon accession to the throne.
Ghazan studying the Quran
This type of religious fanaticism was earlier attested among 4th–5th c. Christians across the Roman Empire. The evil propagators of this fanaticism, who appeared for the first time within the Islamic world during the reign of Ghazan, immediately started dividing Muslims across historically nonexistent sectarian lines. To do this, they carried out an enormous effort of falsification, misrepresenting the earlier Islamic History through use of distortive sectarian lenses. They also spread vicious hatred against previous historians, scholars, erudite polymaths, astronomers, philosophers, poets and thinkers.
Ibn Taymiyyah’s ignorant, heinous and besotted followers diffused the fallacy that they were ‘Sunni’ and that their opponents were ‘Shia’; they therefore tried to adjust the earlier Islamic History as per the needs of their evil mindset, immoral nature, sick mentality, inhuman behavior, materialistic goals, nonsensical ideas, and obscurantist theories. This evil system that had absolutely nothing to do with the true, historical Islam survived during many centuries by means of deep and ceaseless hatred for the others, and through promotion of paranoid sectarianism and evil intolerance. In fact, it was substituted to true Islam and it eradicated the religion preached by Prophet Muhammad.
Then, at the end of the 18th c., this theological system was selected by the colonial powers as a fantastic tool for the final elimination of Islam through its transformation into a monstrous political ideology deprived of any spirituality; it was then adjusted to a modern pseudo-theology and pseudo-ideology (‘political islam’), which have nothing in common with the preaching of Muhammad and the teachings of Ali. Only due to Ibn Taymiyyah’s system, second rank figures of Early Islam, the likes of Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan, Khalid ibn al-Walid, and Aisha Bint Abi Bakr, became important in the sick imagination of the fooled followers of Ibn Taymiyyah and his worthless ‘school’; suffice it to read the true historians of Islam, notably Tabari, and you find all those minor figures reduced in their real dimensions.
For this reason, the ignorant and sectarian followers of Ibn Taymiyyah deliberately disregarded Tabari, which is far more valuable than the Quran and the Ahadith for the History of the first three centuries of the Islamic Era; consequently, today’s fake Muslims, who are the perfect tools of the English and the American secret services, fully misinterpret the Quran (because they don’t rely on Tabari’s Tafsir) and conceal many facts and aspects of the historical truth that are to be found in Tabari’s Tarikh, while offering ridiculous excuses for their absurd propaganda and sectarian evilness.
Ghazan and his wives at the court; from the miniature of a 13th c Mongol manuscript
Seal of Mahmud Ghazan, over the last two lines of his 1302 letter to Pope Boniface VIII. The seal was given to Ghazan by the sixth Great Khan (Emperor ChengZong of Yuan; also known as Temür Khan). In Chinese (王府定國理民之寶) it reads “Seal certifying the authority of his Royal Highness to establish a country and govern its people”. There are two lines vertically overwritten on the seal; the text is Mongolian and the writing is the Old Uyghur script, which was formed on the basis of Aramaic (from the Vatican Archives).
Based on his experience, Ghazan realized that too many powerful noblemen, court advisers, and military warlords constituted a potential danger for any emperor; he therefore eliminated many people around him at the top of the imperial hierarchy. He maintained excellent relations with Yuan China and the Great Khans, while also improving his relations with the Golden Horde; however, he had to engage in battles against the Chagatai khans in Central Asia and to fight with the Mamluks in Egypt. He also faced strong opposition within his empire, but he was able to squelch the revolts of Baltu, Nawruz, and Sulemish. His war against the Mamluks consists in an extra proof that conflicts among the major states of those days mainly did not have religious motives. Ghazan allied with Georgia, Armenia and the Crusaders against the Mamluks, and advanced in Syria, but in the last war between the Mamluks and the Ilkhanate (1299-1303), he failed to invade Egypt.
Mahmud Ghazan, in striking difference with several religious, administrative and military authorities of his empire, was a religiously tolerant ruler and had special interests for the arts, the sciences, the letters; he sponsored every exploration and innovation. Due to his own interest and thanks to his own support, a World History was then elaborated -for the first time in the history of mankind- by Rashid al-Din Hamadani, a Jewish Iranian multilingual polymath and author. Its title shows the nature of the enormous composition (in three volumes) of which only a part was preserved until today: Jāmi’ al-tawarikh (جامع التواريخ / lit. the ‘gathering of histories’, i.e. the collection of earlier written chronicles). It is the first historiography that was based on historical sources of so diverse peoples and civilizations as Iran, Turan, China, the subcontinent, North Africa, and Western Europe
Mahmud Ghazan tolerated all Islamic spiritual orders and schools of philosophy and theology, exempted Christians from taxes, rebuilt Christian churches, preserved the Mongolian oral traditions, and offered safe passage to his empire’s Buddhists who wanted to move to Tibet. Being a multilingual, he supported improvements in technology, arts and crafts, introduced new measures, coinage, administrative methods, and fiscal policy, and reformed his empire’s military organization.
Öljaitü (1280-1316) was the last of all important successors of Hulagu, succeeded his brother, and reigned for 12 years (1304-1316). Not only he represents the Ilkhanate’s religious tolerance and secular character better than any other Ilkhan, but he also seems to have been the man who changed more religions in his life than any other person anytime anywhere! He was born Buddhist; he later accepted Christianity (1291-1295; being baptized as Nikolya – Nicholas); then in 1295, he adhered to Islam, and while an emperor he stopped siding with theologians, who are mistakenly portrayed as ‘Sunni’ today, and wholeheartedly embraced the spiritual faith and the teachings of Muslims, who are currently considered to be ‘Shia’ (those terms were not used at the time and in any case are totally invalid). After he became Muslim, his official imperial name was Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad Khudabanda Öljaitü Sultan
Khan Öljaitü accepts the Yuan China ambassador; miniature from Majma’ al-Tavarikh
Öljaitü supported the sciences, the letters, and the arts, subsidized the works of the Maragheh Observatory, tried hard to establish peace among the four emperors, i.e. the descendants of Genghis Khan (Ilkhanate, Golden Horde, Chagatai, and Yuan China), managed to squelch uprisings in the areas of today’s Afghanistan and North Iraq, advanced in Syria against the Mamluks, invaded Damascus, and in 1315 started an invasion of Hijaz in order to exhume and desecrate the corpses of Abu Bakr and Umar, who were viewed as the true traitors of Prophet Muhammad by the majority of his empire’s Muslims. More importantly, he founded a splendid new capital, Soltaniyeh (southeast of Tabriz), where one can still visit today his mausoleum, which is worldwide acknowledged and admired for its superb dome and impressive architectural structure.
The Letter of Öljaitü to Philippe le Bel, written in classical Mongolian script, bears the Chinese seal reading “真命皇帝天順萬夷之寶”, which was bestowed by Emperor Chengzong of Yuan China. The huge roll measures 302×50 cm.
Translation of Öljeitu’s message by Buscarello de Ghizolfi, on the back side of the letter (visible here)
Öljaitü’s son Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan (1305-1335) ruled for almost 20 years (1316-1335) after his elder brothers and father died. Although very young, Abu Sa’id managed to win over the invading armies of the Golden Horde near Mianeh in Southern Azerbaijan (1319). He was viewed as a ‘hero’ (Baghatur in Mongolian), but he had to face in 1322 the rebellion launched by the infamous mystic named Chupan, who declared himself to be the Mahdi (i.e. the Islamic Messiah) in the Caucasus region. He tried to improve relations with the Delhi Sultanate, the Mamluks, and Venice (commercial treaty of 1320). Known also as al-Sultan al-Adil (the Just Sultan), he composed music, wrote poetry, and was a rarely educated and cultured monarch; that’s why Ibn Battuta wrote very flattering comments about him.
The Ilkhanate times were a transformative period for all the lands between Central Asia and Anatolia; after the 13th c., there was no Persian element left across the heavily Turanized Iran, except the language (Farsi); but Farsi had already been the language of Culture and Poetry of all Turanians. Anyway, after the dissolution of the Ilkhanate and down to our times, in reality “Iran” has been “Turan”, and “Turan” has been “Iran”.
However, after his death and after the one year reign of Arpa Ke’un, the Ilkhanate was dissolved and replaced by a multitude of small states. The territory of Hulagu’s empire was divided among the Muzaffarids, the Kart dynasty, the Chobanids, the Injuids, the Jalayirids, the Sarbadars, the Mihrabanids, the Artukids, the Ayyubids, the Eretnids, the Candar, the Karamanids, and many other tiny kingdoms. This was the situation, when a great conqueror and unifier was born (in 1336): his name was Timur. He was a mighty Chagatai warrior, although one of his legs was shorter than the other; that’s why in Farsi, he became rather known as Timur-i Lang (Tamerlane). About:
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu (Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
Pre-publication of chapter XXIII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapter XXIII constitutes the Part Nine (Fallacies about the Golden Era of the Islamic Civilization). The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
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Known rather through his cognomen (‘Paradisiacal’) and his kunya (teknonym: Abu’l Qassem, i.e. ‘father of Qassem’), Ferdowsi was born (ca. 940) in Tus (Khorasan, NE Iran) around the time Muhammad ibn al-Askari, son of Hasan al-Askari and 12th Imam, went into his Major Occultation (941). The apocalyptic eschatological fascination of those days is explicitly shown in Ferdowsi’s own name, because the quest for the Paradise is the epitome of every reliable Messianism (: Soteriology) and Eschatology.
Ferdowsi is a worldwide unique case of highly venerated poet whose work is absolutely immense and whose known details of life are incredibly minimal; although he was historically referred to as the leading epic poet, erudite sage, and unsurpassed master of Farsi (and there have been several historical biographies of him), we don’t know even his real name. Judging from his son’s name, Ferdowsi (940-1020) was a Muslim, but there stop all the important biographical details that we know. In fact, Ferdowsi’s life is enveloped in mystery and legend similarly with the contents of his monumental and sublime epic; we know however that he had a great Turanian sponsor: the formidable Conqueror and Emperor Mahmud Ghaznavi (971-1030; the founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty), who invaded the Indus Valley, Punjab and the Ganges Valley, unifying territories that stretched between the Caspian Sea and today’s Bangladesh.
Ferdowsi mausoleum, Tus – Iran
Ferdowsi’s unsurpassed masterpiece, the Shahnameh (: the Book of the Kings) is the world’s largest epic totaling more than 100000 (one hundred thousand) verses. In terms of Iranian Literature, it was not the first epic composed under this title. Thanks to his historical biographies, we know that Ferdowsi started the composition of the enormous opus in 977, initially viewing it as the completion of a similar effort earlier undertaken by another Iranian poet, Abu Mansur Daqiqi, who did not have the chance to advance his Shahnameh much before being assassinated. However, Ferdowsi’s epic differs greatly from all the other Shahnameh epic poems or prose compositions in many ways; although similar narratives have been attested in other Iranian and Islamic epics, Ferdowsi places his heroes in an atemporal field of semiotics whereby they function as symbols of spiritual ideas, moral principles, and eternal values.
Was Ferdowsi a ‘Sunni’ or a ‘Shia’? The question sounds irrelevant; although it is evident that he was a Muslim and a strong monotheist (which also applies to several forms of pre-Islamic Iranian religions), Ferdowsi does not contain the slightest portion of reference to the Early Islamic History into his legendary opus.
Is pre-Islamic Iranian-Turanian History reflected in Ferdowsi’s epic? In a way, yes! But it is an ahistorical reference to a series of dynasties that modern Iranologists, philologists, specialists in Comparative Literature, historians and historians of religions, experts in Mysticism Studies and Symbolism try in vain to accommodate within the scholarly known frame of the Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sassanid dynasties. This is however quite impossible a task to carry out; and Ferdowsi is the only reason for this. Although there is not a single indication that Ferdowsi divided his masterpiece into ‘periods’, the entire Shahnameh is divided, on the basis of typical literary analysis, into three sections: mythical age, heroic age, and historical age.
As per this – absolutely wrong – categorization, all the aforementioned pre-Islamic Iranian dynasties belong to the third section (historical age). But more than two thirds of the enormous epic’s verses are dedicated to the narration of episodes of the so-called ‘heroic age’. An analysis of Shahnameh goes beyond the scope of the present book, but with the above brief description I wanted to point out that Ferdowsi mainly focused on pre-Achaemenid eras and that his intention was to illuminate the spiritual ideas and the human valor that predestined historical Iran-Turan to be what we know through regular historical documentation that it was. Despite the numerous distortive presentations and worthless analyses, if one stays close to Ferdowsi’s verses, one concludes easily that, as per the illustrious poet and mystic, Iran-Turan constitutes an indivisible world.
Was Ferdowsi a Persian or a Turanian? This question in and by itself reveals total ignorance of Iranian and Turanian History, Culture and Civilization. The undisputed and definitely unequaled mastership of Farsi to which the majestic composition of Shahnameh bears witness does not make of Ferdowsi a Persian. Across the ages, many Turanians excelled in Persian poetry. Ferdowsi’s origin from Khorasan (a region traditionally inhabited by Turanians and Persians alike) and his close relationship with the great Turanian Emperor Mahmud Ghaznavi show that it is quite plausible that Ferdowsi was a Turanian. Mahmud Ghaznavi vanquished the Samanid state (995-999) pretty much like the Seljuk Turks had destroyed the Buyids half a century later. Consequently, we can conclude that Ferdowsi ostensibly sided with Turanian institutions and rulers against Persian states and kings.
There are also some other indicators that must be taken into consideration, as regards Ferdowsi’s identity: although his legendary narratives reflect the foremost values of the Achaemenid Civilization and represent the Zoroastrian conceptualization of the Universe, the contents of Shahnameh do not stringently correspond to the world of Parsis, namely those among the Sassanid times’ Persians who managed to escape the Islamic onslaught and survived in Iran and in India, preserving a posterior form of Mazdeism (and Zoroastrianism) that we presently call ‘Parsism’. Several PhD-level dissertations can be elaborated to properly demonstrate that on many critical issues Ferdowsi’s viewpoint on the pre-Islamic Iran and the Parsis’ traditions pertaining to the Sassanid (and earlier) past differ greatly.
In Shahnameh, one cannot find the slightest support for the Parsi faith, let alone of the Parsis’ anti-Islamic feelings. There is not a single sign that Ferdowsi saw his grand opus as an Iranian ‘comeback’ (let alone ‘revenge’), as an instigation of pre-Islamic Iranian ‘patriotism’ among Iranian Muslims or as anti-Islamic fascination and mobilization. On the contrary, throughout Shahnameh, there are incessant references to Turanian gallantry and passion, bravery and confusion, unity and division, crime and punishment, discipline and order, mysticism and divination, honesty and treachery, clarity and confusion.
The Iranian – Turanian epic presents a magnificent equilibrium among all tendencies and characters, trends and exploits, attempts and regrets. Shahnameh attains a spherical perfection, contains no pointless element, locates all elements in their correct place whereby everything meets its reverse reflection and all spirits are accompanied by their opposites. All this is put in perfect Farsi, in lines of 22 syllables, in rhyming couplets (masnaviyat), and in metre 1.1.11.
Where does Ferdowsi stand among his time’s mystics, orders, kings and warriors, erudite scholars and theological jurists?
Was he close to late Sassanid Zervanism? Certainly not as much as Tabari, a fully accredited Islamic exegete and theologian, founder of a major madhhab, and the Islamic world’s supreme historian! Tabari dedicated the introductory chapter of his voluminous History to a theoretical analysis of the Time (: Zervan or Zurvan, a late Mithraic figure that was the central god of a late branch of Mithraists). But Ferdowsi started his epic with Keyumars (Gayomard of the late Zoroastrian texts), the first man and first king (Pishdad dynasty); this approach makes of royalty the first human virtue.
Was Ferdowsi close to the late Sassanid followers of Gayomard? Not quite! His focus on the recapitulation of themes related to heroic combats gives us the impression that Ferdowsi envisioned a dynamic universe in which Cosmogony and Eschatology consisted in an indivisible entity of spiritual and material order based on a permanent movement back and forth between Being and Becoming.
From all the major groups of early Muslims and from all the followers of then extant Iranian religions, the Khurramites, the Parsis, the Manichaeans, the Mazdakists, the so-called Twelver Shia, the Isma’ilis, between the Mazdeists and all the rest, Ferdowsi seems to be equidistant.
The same attitude appears in the Shahnameh; between the Turanian Afrasiab and the Iranians Siyavash and Kay Khosrow, Ferdowsi pursues a narrative that does not favor any of the combatants, while presenting brave deeds and mythical facts as the straight result of the great legendary heroes’ spiritual choices and divine providence.
In fact, Ferdowsi is to be found at cosmic distance from all his contemporaneous mystics, poets, erudite polymaths, historians, scholars and theologians. Next to him, all the rest appear infinitesimal. That’s why we can safely claim that within the wider context of Islamic Civilization across Eurasia only Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh proved to be as influential a book as the Quran. The great epic impacted all the Islamic nations, ethno-linguistic groups, mystical orders, intellectuals, poets, authors, and artists so irrevocably that, from the beginning of the 11th c. onwards, it would perhaps be more accurate, instead of speaking of Iranians and Turanians, to start referring to them as Ferdowsians. About:
Kay Qobad (Kay Kawad) on his throne; a leading figure of the Kayanid dynasty that was transcendentally constructed by Ferdowsi
In fact, one cannot speak about the Seljuk Turks, before briefly presenting Ferdowsi’s Cosmogony within the Islamic world. This is so because the Seljuk dynasty, along with the Ghaznavids, proved to be the first and the most enthusiastic adepts and supporters of the heroic worldview narrated by Ferdowsi, of the spiritual ideas revealed in Shahnameh, and of the moral values respected by the great heroes of the legendary, atemporal and apocalyptic Pishdadian and Kayanian dynasties. In fact, only this phenomenon, i.e. the Ghaznavids’ and the Seljuk Turks’ wholehearted acceptance and overwhelming promotion of the Universe as reassessed by Ferdowsi, makes of the grand master of Farsi Literature the national poet of all Turanians.
Quite contrarily to the historical facts, the criminal Western Orientalists depict a terribly tarnished and viciously distorted image of this reality; as per their false and nonsensical interpretations, the Seljuk Turks accepted Islam through Persian culture. This is as idiotic as an eventual, irrelevant assumption according to which a (fully hypothetical) educational jury was supposedly awaiting at the northeastern Iranian borders for the Seljuk Turks to come, and then upon their arrival, they told them: “pass your Ferdowsi exam, and come-in”! So pathetic and ludicrous is the Western Orientalist approach to the topic! Things did not happen that way, and this reality shows that it is absolutely absurd and utterly calamitous for any Turkic and Iranian nation to accept the presence of Anglo-American institutions in their territories or to allow their nationals to study in Western universities or even to visit West European, North American, and Oceanian countries.
The heroic, legendary, cosmological and eschatological order revealed by Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh was the basic oral culture of all Turanians and Iranians, Persians included, for millennia. Simply, this cultural background was not (and could not be) the religious dogma of Zoroastrianism (and of its subsequent forms, i.e. Arsacid Zendism and Sassanid Mazdeism) as attested in the holy texts of that religion and in the imperial inscriptions of the faithful Kings of Kings.
The fallacy of Modern Western Humanities, as developed in the racist, colonial, criminal pseudo-universities of Western Europe and North America, is due to the paranoid (but intentionally implemented) method of compartmentalizing the historical truth and the exploration thereof; this occurs in total contradiction to the universal, comprehensive and holistic approach and method (of viewing and examining the historical truth) that prevailed among all the great historical civilizations (whereby there was no compartmentalization). This vicious method leads colonial historiographers to the distortive division of topics into separate ‘academic fields’: history, archaeology, philology (‘literature’), linguistics, history of religions, ethnography and social anthropology, philosophy, history of arts, history of sciences, architecture, and so on. Consequently, this makes researchers separate their various study topics between “written cultures” and “oral cultures”; but by so doing, they totally misperceive and misrepresent entire historical periods.
As a matter of fact, Ferdowsi did not ‘invent’ (or ‘envision’ or ‘conceive’ or ‘devise’ or ‘create’) his narratives; he only managed to compose them in an incomparably genuine and superior poetic manner. All the terms, names and ideas of Shahnameh’s stories antedate Ferdowsi for about 1500 years – to say the least; this is something that all Orientalists accept. But they fail to see that these terms, names, ideas and stories constituted the oral culture of all the Iranians and the Turanians long before the heliocentric fallacy of Mithras was first propagated among them in the first half of the first pre-Christian millennium. Ferdowsi wrote down this millennia-long Turanian and Iranian oral anti-Mithraic cultural tradition in a literarily majestic manner. And by doing so, he did not ‘give’ the Seljuk Turks their culture (which was already theirs and their ancestors’), but the wings that they needed to conquer the world and implement their millennia long values and virtues as reinstated in the Quran and reinterpreted in the Shahnameh.
Of course, there is a reason the colonial historiography appears to have some success in plunging readers into deceitful schemes, distortive narratives, and nonexistent popups; if you are naïve enough to believe that the Seljuk Turks came from the North Pole or the Moon, then you will certainly accept the fallacy of the so-called Seljuk acculturation in Iran, and you will start believing the nonsense of the Turanian nations’ ‘persianization’. But the Seljuk Turks were neither in the North Pole nor in the Moon! In fact, they had been -for several centuries- just on the other side of the Islamic Caliphate’s northeastern border. And for cultures, for nations, for faiths, and for civilizations, there are no borders; even more importantly, borders do not apply to oral cultures.
Even more absurdly, “border historiography” cannot exist across the Silk Road; by ‘stopping’ their premeditated and therefore fallacious description of historical facts at the borders of the various modern states, the criminal Western pseudo-historians intentionally implement their evil political axiom ‘divide et impera’ throughout Humanities. This is the way most of the people worldwide have been deceived in this regard.
For several centuries, the ancestors of the Seljuk Turks lived within the wider Yabyu (English: Yabghu) territory within the land of the Oguz/Oghuz (Oğuz) nomads’ state. Its location stretched across vast territories of the modern states of Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and (to smaller extent) Uzbekistan. Yabyu spanned east of the Khazar Khaganate (or Khanate), between the Caspian Sea and Aral Lake, and north of the border of the Islamic Caliphate. The forefather of the Seljuk Turks was a formidable Oghuz combatant named Seljuk, who served also in the Khazar army, before clashing with other Oghuz warriors, migrating to southeast (around the year 980), and settling in Transoxiana (Arabic: Mawarannahr / ماوراءالنهر), next to Syr Darya (Iaxartes) river. At that original stage, the ‘Seljuk Turks’ (i.e. the family of Seljuk) were less than 1000 people in total.
Seljuk made an alliance with the Samanids (a mainly Persian kingdom) and fought against the Kara-Khanids, a Turanian Khaganate, mainly known as the House of Afrasiab (آل افراسیاب / which means that they were named (as early as the 9th c.; so before Ferdowsi) after the most important Turanian hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The development was not good for the Seljuk family, and Seljuk’s grandsons Tughril and Chaghri had to further migrate (ca. 1040) to the South (Khorasan). The son of Mahmud Ghaznavi, Mas’ud I of Ghazni, tried to prevent them from advancing, and the battle of Dandanaqan (near Merv in today’s Turkmenistan) opened the way for the Seljuk rise. Tughril’s and Chaghri’s victory (1040) was tantamount to Seljuk prevalence in Khorasan. Ten years later (1050), Tughril invaded Isfahan and established the Great Seljuk Empire.
However, only to prove the inalienable, indissoluble, and indelible nature of the Turanian–Iranian civilization and identity, the early Seljuk success across the Iranian plateau would have no historical continuity and impact without the astounding contribution of a Persian original: Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi, who is rather known through his incredible title ‘Nizam al Mulk’ (:”Systems of Royal Governance”). Nizam al Mulk (1018-1092) was born two years before Ferdowsi died, but his inclination and genius covered a totally different field than that of the greatest epic poet of World History. Originating from Khorasan, Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi left his position at Ghazni, the capital of the Turanian Ghaznavid Empire and entered the service of the Seljuk Turks (1043); there he was entrusted, among other tasks, with the education of Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri (mainly known as Alp Arslan), i.e. the son of Chaghri and nephew of Tughril, the founding sultans of the Seljuk empire.
The assassination of Nizam al Mulk
Consequently, the rise of the Seljuk Empire is entirely due to the wise advice, the outstanding guidance, and the governance systematization introduced by Nizam al Mulk, a Persian; of course, all this would prove to be useless without the Seljuk bravery and thunderous attacks. One can call the Seljuk Empire a ‘Turanian’ (or ‘Turkic’ state); but it was equally ‘Iranian’ – notwithstanding the historical forgeries of the Orientalist gangsters of the Anglo-American universities.
Nizam al Mulk is perhaps the person, who studied best the infinite intrigues that occurred on daily basis among all the rulers who enjoyed some portion of power due to the already discussed phenomenon of the Abbasid Caliphate’s fragmentation. Highly respected and incessantly consulted by Tughril, Chaghri and their children, Nizam al Mulk methodically guided them in the splendid attempt to terminate the Abbasid Caliphate’s fragmentation. First, they consolidated their control across the northern part of the Iranian plateau until 1046-7. In 1048, they attacked an Eastern Roman – Georgian army near today’s Pasinler (or Hasankale), east of Erzurum, in the less publicized but historic battle of Kapetron. After ensuring a great capital for themselves at Isfahan (1050), in the Iranian plateau’s southern part, Tughril invaded Baghdad (1055), terminated the Buyid dynasty, and (according to modern Turkish Islamist bibliography) ‘liberated’ the Abbasid Caliph; this is however not accurate because it was not possible anymore to restore the original power of the Abbasid Caliphate. The Abbasids remained a weak and impotent dynasty for another 200 years.
Nizam al Mulk set up a series of academies named after him, ‘Nizamiyah’; his major opus Siyasatnameh (‘the Book of the Governance’) was the basic manual that was taught, discussed, and in-depth understood there, after the completion of an entire basic circle of studies. The numerous Nizamiyah academies that the indefatigable Nizam al Mulk founded in various parts of the expanding Seljuk territory were not similar either to the earlier appeared jurisprudential madhhabs or to the regular madrasas (theological schools).
The graduates of every Nizamiyah acquired first a spherical, encyclopedic knowledge, and at a second stage, an excellent command of the diverse methods of a successful administration of the state (one could vaguely compare them to various modern ‘national schools of administration’). Nizamiyah graduates could man the Seljuk administration and deliver spectacular results, due to the innovative and resourceful mindset that they were taught to build and thanks to their persistence on avoiding bureaucracy. Despite his indisputable imperial and administrative genius, Nizam al Mulk was also a combatant, and – contrarily to the worthless and corrupt, modern bureaucrats – he often accompanied his shahs in their campaigns.
Nizam al Mulk was ostensibly against the group of Isma’ilis and their system of secretive and elitist governance. In his book, he expanded on them; this however does not make of him a ‘Sunni’, as modern forgers pretend. He and his Seljuk emperors were Muslims, who did not accept either secretive governance or the particularities of various eschatological, messianic groups like the Isma’ilis (today mistakenly named ‘Sevener Shia’) or the apocalyptic adepts of the Ahl al Bayt (today erroneously called ‘Twelver Shia’), who expected the imminent reappearance of the 12th imam. This is an extra proof that throughout History there is no such sectarian division and false identification as “Turkish Sunni” and “Iranian Shia”; this is a colonial lie and a shameful Orientalist forgery.
All the same, because of the colonially imposed (during the 19th and 20th centuries) sectarianism, which prevails among today’s deceived and disoriented Muslims, Nizam al Mulk is totally unknown among African Muslims and Saudi-impacted Muslims in Southeast Asia, because he is idiotically viewed as “Iranian and therefore Shia”. This externally imposed pseudo-historical dogma is enough to reveal the criminal nature of the colonial countries France and England, of their successor state (USA), and of the various associated structures, like Canada and Australia.
The rise of the Seljuk Empire was the result of great bravery, heroic fascination, and superb imperial administration that greatly contributed to arts, letters, sciences and spirituality; but it was practically speaking the affair of one family. Few victories were enough to catapult the Seljuk Turks to world predominance between China and Rome. This was due to their wisdom, universal culture, and ability to compose out of many diverse elements; they therefore became a pole of major attraction. Within the general context of Modern Turkology, most of the researchers are specializing in the Ottoman Empire (eventually because of the abundance of historical sources) and have a certain predilection and admiration for the Ottomans, who also functioned as one family – only to the detriment of the Empire that they acquired and that they inherited. But this scholarly attitude is very subjective, highly sentimental, and therefore wrong.
In reality, the Ottomans were superior to the Seljuk Turks only quantitatively. They controlled larger territory and they lasted longer; that’s true. But if one examines the data qualitatively and evaluates comparatively, one easily concludes that the Seljuk were remarkably superior to the Ottomans. However, their undeniably inherent weakness, which consisted in numerous internal conflicts and in incessant, yet unnecessary, family divisions, antagonisms and rivalries, predestined them to fast decay. In fact, the Seljuk Golden Era lasted ca. 100 years: from the dissolution of the Buyid dynasty (1055) to the death of Ahmad Sanjar (1157). After that term, the Seljuk Empire split to several sultanates. The most remarkable among them was certainly the Sultanate of Rum, but that was an Anatolian state, not a major empire across Eurasia. All the same, the History of Mysticism and Spirituality in Seljuk Anatolia eclipsed the Imperial History of that branch of the Seljuk family.
Even Alp Arslan (1063-1072) and Malik-Shah I (1072-1092), who represent the top of Seljuk power, had to engage in battles to eliminate contenders to their throne, and the contenders were none else than their formidable uncles, Kutalmish and Qavurt respectively. Thanks to Nizam al Mulk, Alp Arslan organized a mixed form of feudal empire, at the same time sedentary and nomadic, and for this, he was praised by many Persians like Saadi Shirazi, whereas with the rising sectarianism of the 13th c. he was terribly scolded by Turanians like Shams al-din ibn Kızoğlu (Sıbt İbnu’l-Cevzi). Thanks to Nizam al Mulk’s concepts and Alp Arslan’s rule and practices, a great process of Turanian sedentism across Iran, India, Caucasus, Anatolia and Syro-Mesopotamia was initiated only to strengthen the local populations and transform the Central Asiatic and Siberian nomadism. More importantly, this ingenious idea and brilliant execution introduced -across a vast region- a new social system of mutual social interdependence among sedentary and nomadic populations, thus fortifying the states that would rule these populations. Many populations that still preserve their nomadic nature and traditions across the vast lands from the Mediterranean to the Indus River and from the Persian Gulf to the Tian Shan Mountains and the Siberian permafrost reached the regions where they currently live in the period between the arrival of the Seljuk Turks and the rise of Mughal Empire.
Contrarily to Orientalist deceitful schemes and deliberate misinterpretations, Malik-Shah I did not clash with the dangerous Isma’ili enclave of Hassan al Sabah (1050-1124) in Alamut and in various surrounding locations in the Alborz Mountains because of a hypothetical ‘Sunni’–’Shia’ dispute or an ethnic Persian–Turanian conflict. Simply, as a student of Nizam al-Mulk, he fully accepted and implemented his tutor’s and adviser’s recommendations as regards the nature of the imperial administration and state.
First of all, the small and perfidious Isma’ili state constituted real dynamite in the foundations of the Seljuk Empire; second, the treacherous nature of the Assassins consisted in permanent threat for all the local populations that wanted to live in peace across the Seljuk territory, and not in ceaseless strives. Above all, Malik-Shah I rejected the concept of elitist rule and the existence of spiritual orders with material aspirations. Unfortunately, his successors proved to be quite incompetent and totally unable to face the challenges that they encountered. Because of them and due to their internal discord, the Seljuk Empire was not prepared to oppose the Crusades that started at that moment. For a period of 26 years (1092-1118), four monarchs ruled the vast state that was gradually being decomposed; their incompetence triggered the secession of various lands that formed independent sultanates under the control of various members of Seljuk’s family.
Ahmad Sanjar (1118-1153) was the luckiest of the sons of Malik-Shah I, because he managed to defeat successive invasions from the Kara-Khanids (Afrasiab) of Central Asia, the Ghurids of Khorasan, and the Ghaznavids of the Indus River Valley; however, he faced a crushing defeat at the hands of the Siberian Turanians of Kara Khitan (at the Battle of Qatwan; 1141) and a disastrous uprising among his fellow Seljuk tribesmen (1153). After Ahmad Sanjar’s death, the Turanians of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) conquered the northeastern part of the Seljuk Empire, whereas the vast territory was finally divided among the Seljuk sultans of Hamadan and Baghdad, the Seljuk sultans of Kerman, the Seljuk emirs in Syria, and the Seljuk sultans of Rum (i.e. Romania-Ρωμανία: the Eastern Roman Empire). The endless internal strives of the Seljuk dynasty are no 1 reason of the Crusaders’ success in the Orient. In 1157, Muhammad II ibn Mahmud (1128–1159), Sultan of Seljuk Empire from 1153 to 1159, failed to conquer Baghdad, despite the siege that he laid to the city; this shows that the Great Seljuk state was already weak and that tensions often existed between Baghdad’s impotent caliphs and the various monarchs who ruled in his name.
The Seljuqian-e Rum (1077-1308 / سلجوقیان روم) lasted longer and became the forerunners of the Iranian-Turanian oral culture and the standard bearers of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in the most important regions of the Eastern Roman Empire. If you only have a look at the list of the Seljuqian-e Rum monarchs for a moment, you come to realize that their spiritual world and their imperial identity originated from the all-encompassing Turanian-Iranian Universe of Shahnameh: among the 18 sultans, who ruled during a period of 231 years, there were three (3) named Kayqubad, two (2) named Kaykaus, and three (3) named Kaykhusraw. This means that almost half of this dynasty’s rulers named themselves after the most illustrious legendary Iranian kings of the Kayanian dynasty, which represents the focal point of Ferdowsi’s sublime Iranian-Turanian epic poetry.
Throughout Human History, we have known a great number of historical kings, who posthumously entered the world of the legend; but the Seljuqian-e Rum were the only to incarnate the legend and to make out of the realm of the spiritual intuition and the transcendental vision an undeniably historical reality. This fact irrevocably marked the central position that they occupy within the indivisible Iranian-Turanian world. About:
The prevalence of the Seljuqian-e Rum in Anatolia transformed this land into the high land of Islamic Civilization, Spirituality and Mysticism. Pretty much like the Islamic world’s gravitational center shifted from Arabia to Mesopotamia with the foundation of Baghdad and the establishment of the Bayt al Hikmah in the middle of 8th c., the Islamic world’s center of imperial power, mysticism and spirituality was relocated from Iran and Caucasus to Anatolia in the late 12th and early 13th c. For many centuries, Anatolia had lost its worldwide radiation; after the end of the Eastern Roman Isaurian dynasty (717-802), the defeat of the Iconoclasts (842), and the downfall of the Paulicians (dispersed in 872 and massively relocated in 970), Anatolia was in ramshackle. The overwhelming rejection of the evil Constantinopolitan theology by the quasi-totality of the Anatolian population irrevocably predestined their future and facilitated the forthcoming Islamization. The spiritual successors to the Iconoclasts and the Paulicians were to be the Mevlevis, the Bektashis, and above all the Qizilbash. The indigenous, traditional Anatolian mysticism predetermined the historical evolution.
The beginning of the Seljuk prevalence in Anatolia is entirely due to Kilij Arslan I (1092-1107; Kılıç Arslan / قِلِج اَرسلان), the first Seljuk to have Konya-Iconium as capital. He managed to defeat three Crusader armies and to secure a sizeable portion of Anatolia for his expanding state. He was a great warrior and an illustrious mystic. However, many scholars want to deliberately forget the fact that the two names of this sultan became the emblem of the Iranian Safavid Empire 400 years later! If this sounds somewhat strange, the English translation of the two names will be enough to clarify the case: “Kılıç Arslan” means “the sword holding lion”. See the emblem:
However, the main part of the preparatory work for the rise of Seljuk Anatolia was done by Rukn al-Din Mesud I (1116-1156; Rükneddin Mesud /ركن الدین مسعود) who was able to defeat two Crusader armies (led by the German Conrad III and the French Louis VII) in 1147 and 1148 and to welcome the adhesion of significant portion of the local Eastern Roman population to Islam. Even illustrious members of the Comneni / Komnenos imperial family, like John Komnenos Tzelepes (grandson of the Eastern Roman Emperor Alexios I Komnenos) who married Rukn al-Din Mesud I’s daughter, became Muslim around the middle of the 12th c.
Rukn al-Din Mesud I’s son and successor, Izz ad-Dīn Qilij Arslān bin Masʿūd (rather known as Kilij Arslan II (1156-1192; Kılıç Arslan / عز الدین قلج ارسلان بن مسعود) represents a very successful consolidation stage of the Seljuqian-e Rum; his critical victory at Myriokephalon (SW Turkey: between Isparta and Konya) in 1176 sealed the end of Eastern Roman presence in Anatolia. Kilij Arslan II, who claimed to be a far relative of Heinrich der Löwe (German prince of the Welf family and Teutonic Knight), expanded at the detriment of the Turkmen Danishmends and the Eastern Roman, but, despite his alliance with Saladin, proved to be unable to possibly stop Frederick Barbarossa’s Third Crusade; however, the numbers speak for themselves: for 76 years, the Seljuqian-e Rum were under only two kings – which is tantamount to great stability.
To the court of the Seljuqian-e Rum started flocking numerous Muslim mystics, spiritual masters, erudite polymaths, theologians, interdisciplinary scholars, great architects and artists, philosophers, leading medical doctors, poets, and other prominent intellectuals of those times. Konya had gradually become a major pole of attraction for the world’s leading wise men. In fact, Seljuk Anatolia eclipsed all other parts of the world in terms of spirituality, mysticism, letters, arts and sciences. This is not strange; despite the great confusion caused by colonial Orientalists and Western Medievalists, who elaborate a distortive and highly politicized representation of this historical period by focusing on the Crusades and the bloodshed caused by Papal Pseudo-Christianity, the 13th c. proved to be above all the peak of the Golden Era of Islamic Civilization.
Those were the times when Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209; today celebrated as the national poet of Azerbaijan), based in South Caucasus, composed his illustrious epics Khusraw and Shirin (1177-1180), Eskandar-Nameh (: the Book of Alexander the Great; 1196-1202), and his apocalyptic eschatological masterpiece Haft Peykar (: the Seven Beauties; 1197), in which he detailed the troubles of seven major lands of civilization that will rise at the End of Time, when a formidable punishment will be adjusted to the evil perpetrator of crimes against those nations. The sublime epic is monstrously misinterpreted by materialistic Western pseudo-academics as “erotic poetry”, because those corrupt and worthless forgers cannot understand what apocalyptic symbolism is all about. The seven nations / lands of civilization are personified by
– Furak (or Nurak; India),
– Yaghma Naz (China, described as the land under the “Khaqan of the Turks”),
– Naz Pari (Turanian Central Asia, named ‘Khwarazm’/Chorasmia),
– Nasrin Nush (Russia, which is in reality Tatarstan, i.e. the Land of the descendants of the Rouran Touranian Khaganate),
– Azarbin (or Azareyon; Africa – called Maghreb, but viewed generally as the ‘West’)
– Humay (the Eastern Roman Empire’s lands), and
– Diroste (Iran, described as the House of Kay Ka’us, an illustrious Shah of Fardowsi’s heroic Kayanian dynasty whose deeds cover the largest part of Shahnameh).
Miniature from a manuscript of Nizami Ganjavi’s Haft Peykar: Bahram Gur in the Turquoise Pavilion with Azarbin, the personnification of Maghreb
Quite indicative of the Rum Sultanate’s court’s proclivity to mysticism, Turanian heroic tradition, and attachment to Ferdowsi’s epic genius is the fact that, only 14 years after Nizami Ganjavi wrote the incomparably revelatory Haft Peykar and only 2 years after he died, the new Seljuk sultan of Rum, Kaykhusraw I’s son, was named Kaykaus I (1211-1220). It was a time of extensive intermarriages with the Eastern Roman imperial family of the Comneni / Komnenoi. Kaykhusraw I (1192-1196 and 1205-1211) was fluent in Roman (‘Medieval Greek’) language and had evidently double Turko-(Eastern) Roman culture.
Kaykaus I’s mother was an Eastern Roman princess, daughter of Manuel Komnenos Maurozomes (Μανουήλ Κομνηνός Μαυροζώμης), who was an Eastern Roman nobleman. Ala ad-Din Kayqubad bin Kaykavus (1220–1237; Alâeddin Keykûbad / علاء الدين كيقباد بن كيكاوس) was the most illustrious sultan of the entire Seljuqian-e Rum dynasty. At the times of his son and successor Kaykhusraw II (1237-1246) starts the fall of the Anatolian Seljuk imperial power, basically due to the religious rebellion of Baba Ishak (1240-1243) and the Mongol victory at the battle of Köse Dağ (1243) where Baiju Noyan (appointed by Ögedei Khan) prevailed. As a matter of fact, this battle is the Seljuk equivalent of the Ottoman defeat in Ankara (1402) by Timur (Tamerlane).
In 1204, one of the most influential dignitaries of the Anatolian Seljuk court invited Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi (1165-1240; full name: Abu Abd Allah Muḥammad ibn Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn Arabī), the Islamic world’s foremost mystic and spiritual master, to Anatolia; Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi’s Futuhat al Makkiyah (: ‘the Mekkan Initiations’) is the greatest text of spiritual revelations (effectuated as result of successive initiations experienced under the guidance of supreme spiritual beings – not after the human fashion) that was ever written in the History of the Mankind. The incredible size (560 chapters or 37 volumes totaling ca. 10000 pages of modern books) of this unique masterpiece of spirituality matters very little when compared to the enthralling contents, which go up to the level of mystical communication with a) the souls of beings that were alive and inhabited the Earth during several generations prior to ours, and b) supreme hierarchies of spiritual beings, intelligences, spirits of elements, and numerous ethereal potentates.
h ttps://ibnarabisociety.org/futuhat-al-makkiyya-printed-editions-claude-addas/
Born in Andalusia’s coastal city of Murcia to parents of Arab and Berber origin, Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi studied in Seville, met and discussed extensively with Ibn Rushd (Averroes), worked as secretary in the city governorate, and undertook incessant travels across North Africa, Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Anatolia. His travels’ most determinant stages took place in Mecca (where he wrote his celebrated masterpiece), in Mosul, in Damascus, and in Eastern Anatolia where he met the students of the great mystic Abdal Qadir Gilani (1078-1166), who was one of the leading mystics of an earlier generation and also the founder of the Qadiriyah mystic order.
Opening pages Konya manuscript Futuhat, handwritten by Ibn Arabi
It is interesting to notice the details of the theological and jurisprudential affiliation of that great mystic, who was born in Gilan (i.e. Caspian Sea’s southwestern coast) and lived most of his life in Baghdad and in various other locations of Mesopotamia. He was a descendant of Hasan ibn Ali, the second imam and grandson of Prophet Muhammad, but did not belong to Ja’far al-Sadiq’s madhhab; however, if one sees the world through today’s colonially imposed, sectarian and distortive lenses, Abdal Qadir Gilani should have been a Ja’fari. In fact, the great mystic and ascetic was a Hanbali and follower of the jurisprudential school that is nowadays said to be (whereas originally it was not) the most ‘anti-Shia’ or ‘anti- Ja’fari’.
The Qadiriya order had many followers in Anatolia and later in the Balkans, although its diffusion from Mesopotamia to China, to Somalia and to Western Sahara regions was spectacular. The sectarian viewpoint in this regard is posterior and it started with the catastrophic distortion of Ibn Hanbal’s doctrine by the vicious theologian Ahmed ibn Taimiyya whose pseudo-Islamic theology represents a sort of Christianization of Islam. The propagation of his fake Islamic ideas triggered obscurantism, ignorance, and utter hatred for the sciences and the arts among the Muslims; as a consequence, extreme fanaticism prevailed among the gradually decayed, spiritually debased, and increasingly ignorant Muslims of later periods (late 14th – early 16th c.), and then the Safavid reaction (as of 1501) to this situation only added oil to the fire.
Ala ad-Din Kayqubad (Kayqubad I) held in great esteem and sponsored numerous mystics, erudite scholars, poets, architects, artists and spiritual masters. His court was also frequented by very exceptional figures like Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162-1231), a great spiritual master, alchemist, physician and polymath, who explored antiquities at both, the spiritual and the material, levels, thus being an early, Muslim Egyptologist.
Following Kayqubad I’s invitation, the great mystic, theologian and jurisprudential scholar (of the Hanafi madhhab) Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad (1151-1231), a Persian originating from Balkh/Bactra (Khorasan), arrived and settled in Konya with his entire family in 1228; this event would have an everlasting impact down to our days. The entire Seljuk royal family was fond of the newly arrived scholar and mystic, who had earlier faced negative treatment from Ala ad-Din Muhammad II of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) in whose state Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad used to live. Khwarazm was a Turanian state with constant problems with the Seljuk sultanates, and the main reason Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad had problems with his shah was the fact that in Khwarazm’s court the most influential mystic and theologian was Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, the scholar who invented the concept of Multiverse (: the parallel existence of many Universes) and with whom Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad had terribly clashed. It was therefore only normal that, to flee the Mongol invasions and to get rid of Ala ad-Din Muhammad II’s enmity and disgrace, Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad found a subterfuge in Seljuk Anatolia. The everlasting impact is due to the prodigious poetry composed and the mystical exploits performed by his son, Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Rumi, who is also known as Mawlana or Mevlana.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273; جلالالدین محمد رومی) surpassed by far his father’s fame, literary mastership, mystical experience, intellectual acumen, spiritual ingenuity, and posthumous fame, being one of the Islamic world’s foremost mystics, poets, and holy men. Bringing spiritual activities at the epicenter of material life, Rumi turned dance into active meditation, and thus made of Anatolia the worldwide epicenter of all later Islamic mysticisms. He is considered as the founder of the Mevlevi Spiritual Order (the ‘tariqa’ of the ‘whirling dervishes’), although it is very clear that his son and his disciples founded the Order after Rumi’s death. In younger age, he was fascinated with the literary masterpieces of the mystic Sana’i Ghaznavi (1080-1141); remarkable influence on Jalal ad-Din Rumi was also exerted by his father, by the famous Persian Khorasani mystic and poet Farid ud-Din (1145-1221; known as Attar of Neyshapur), and by Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi. But the close companionship he had with Shams-e Tabrizi (1185-1248), a supreme spiritual hierophant and mystic, was the most determinant factor of his spiritual advance, mystical comprehension, sublime poetry, and whirling dance conceptualization as meditation technique.
Did Jalal ad-Din Rumi actually meet Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi?
This question has been raised by many modern scholars, although on the basis of several historical sources there is clear evidence that they first met during Rumi’s first arrival to Damascus, and later again during Rumi’s formative years there. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that several disciples of ibn Arabi (notably Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi) were companions of Rumi and that Shams-e Tabrizi knew personally ibn Arabi very well. In addition, several literary patterns and terms testify to a spiritual, intellectual and philosophical connection, despite the fact that the essence, the contents, and the forms of both masters of Islamic spirituality and mysticism differed greatly, pretty much like their respective quests, explorations, devotions, spiritual exercises, and transcendental experiences did.
Mausoleum of Jelaleddin Rumi Mevlana, Konya – Turkey
Rumi was a human, who discovered the divine world through love and through strict imitation/repetition of Prophet Muhammad’s manner of life; Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi was a man contacted by spiritual hierarchies, entrusted with the revelation of spiritual occurrences, and endowed with unique qualities to describe in human words unfathomable situations comprehended only through spiritual initiation. An enlightened man like ibn Arabi could never be strictly bound to only one religion.
Closer to Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi was indeed Haji Bektash (1209-1271; Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli / حاجی بکتاش ولی); born in Neyshapur (Khorasan), he was a descendant of Musa Kazim, the 7th imam and son of Ja’far al-Sadiq. He fled westwards because of the Mongol invasions and he arrived in Seljuk Anatolia in the late 1220s or early 1230s. He belonged to the Ja’fari jurisprudential tradition (madhhab), which is quite normal as he retraced his ancestry to the 6th imam’s son. Given his Arab ancestry, it is ridiculous to entertain discussions about his ethnicity (Persian or Turkic) as Western nonsensical Orientalists do; Haji Bektash was certainly acculturated among all Iranians and Turanians between Central Asia and Anatolia. However, this issue can allow us to better assess the locally prevailing ethnic and cultural environment; if a person of Arab descent, like Haji Bektash, living in Khorasan, preferred to bear a Turkish name, i.e. Bektaş, this means that we cannot afford anymore to consider that vast NE Iranian region as exclusively Persian (as fallacious colonial Orientalists do), but as predominantly Turanian. In his young age, Haji Bektash was apparently fascinated with the mystical poetry of the Turanian spiritual master, mystic, and Hanafi theologian Ahmed Yesevî (1093-1166; قوجا احمەت ياساۋٸ), the founder of Yasawiyah (Yeseviye) order.
The oldest painting of the Muslim mystic Haji Bektash Veli
Modern forgers and Western impostors try to associate Haji Bektash with the Qalandariyah Order (which is wrong) and with Baba Eliyas al-Khorasani, another Khorasani mystic who had settled in Anatolia and instigated the Babai revolt that was led by Baba Ishak in 1239. That’s totally false, because Haji Bektash, despite his Batiniyya approach to Islam’s holy scriptures (as per which all holy scriptures have ‘external’ and ‘internal’-mystical meaning), reprimanded the Isma’ili enclave in Iran, denounced Baba Ishak’s plot for the establishment of a Crypto-Christian state in Amasya (Anatolia), and condemned Baba Ishak’s infamous pretensions that he was a ‘prophet’. As a matter of fact, Haji Bektash was greatly esteemed by everyone in the Anatolian Seljuk court where they appreciated his contribution to the combat against the rebellion and to the refutation of anti-Islamic concepts among Turanian nomadic settlers in Anatolia. All the same, the early Bektashi Order accepted in their lodges (khanqah) many earlier adepts and followers of Baba Ishak, who had repented and regretted, and numerous participants in the failed rebellion. The Bektashi Order played later a determinant role in the formation of the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate and in the relations between the Ottomans and the Safavids.
The Seljuk Turks managed to assimilate among them a great number of Anatolian, Eastern Roman populations. This topic is critical in understanding later historical developments in the region. Whereas the Achaemenid Iranians failed to plainly assimilate Anatolia during their rule (546-330 BCE) and finally only later (during the Seleucid and Roman times) we clearly attest an undeniable Iranian cultural impact on the various Anatolian kingdoms, the Rum Sultanate proved to be far more efficient in rapidly shaping a diverse yet inclusive Anatolian Muslim identity which revolves around the Iranian-Turanian epic traditions and legends and an Islamic interpretation of the Eastern Roman Christianity. About:
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