Following the publication of an article of mine about Kazakhstan’s chances to bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians and to resolve the Palestinian problem once for all, a Muslim friend wrote to me, asking me to expand on the reasons for some of my proposals. He also made a comparison between Israel/Palestine and Cyprus, and he suggested that for both cases he would support a two-state solution. The present article is my reply to his questions and points about Cyprus. My previous articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (including subtitles and units) and links to them you will find at the end of the present article.
I. Cyprus & Palestine: an Island with one Nation & a Land with two Nations
I find the two cases distinct, and under any circumstances whatsoever I would never compare a land (Palestine) to an island (Cyprus), but my friend started his brief letter with the following sentences: “the solution is two states in Palestine and two states in Cyprus. In Cyprus, there are two peoples, not one. Ethnically, there are no ‘Cypriots’; there is no ‘Cypriot’ nation. The term ‘Cypriot’ is local/geographical, not ethnic / national. In Cyprus, there are two great nations, Greeks and Turks, and some tiny minorities”. Saying this, he drew a parallel between Palestine and Cyprus; but this is wrong.
In Ottoman Palestine, before 1882 (the very beginning of the Zionist ‘Aliyah’ project), Palestinians constituted the quasi-totality of the local population, whereas several tiny minorities lived in peace among them: Turkish Ottoman administrators, Druzes and Jews. With the arrival of the European (mostly Ashkenazi) Jews, the composition of the local population started gradually changing.
It is noteworthy that the arrival of those populations was approved by the Sultan and the Ottoman authorities (until 1917), accepted by the Palestinians in the beginning, fully supported by the English colonial gangsters, strongly opposed by the Palestinians with the passing of time, but originally rejected by the only who knew and understood: the Sephardic Jews of Palestine, who represented an authentic line of continuity between Late Antiquity and Modern Jews.
II. 2nd millennium BCE Alashiya (Cyprus)
Quite contrarily, Cypriots were always there. The original name of the island was Alashiya; this is attested in 2nd millennium BCE Assyrian-Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Ugaritic Canaanite, and Linear B Mycenaean texts. The king of Alashiya is mentioned even in the Amarna Letters; the island was part of the territory of the Hittite Empire for several hundreds of years. Mentioned in the text of Wenamun, early 11th c. BCE Alashiya was ruled by Queen Hatiba – which is the earliest known name of local ruler. As personal name, it is determinately Semitic.
The word ‘Cyprus’ is Semitic too, as it denotes the ‘coast’ or the ‘shore’ in Canaanite and Phoenician. Ethnically, all the Cypriots are Canaanites-Phoenicians entirely identical to today’s Lebanese. The sparse Achaean settlements could not and did not change the irrevocable Semitic Phoenician ethnic and cultural identity of Alashiya-Cyprus.
Papyrus with the text of Wenamun in Egyptian Hieratic
III. Vicious, colonial falsification of the History of Cyprus
The History of Cyprus has been extensively tampered with by prepaid pseudo-scholars, bogus-academics, and clownish professors who were on the payroll of London-based Greek ship owners, who were ordered by the Apostate Freemasonic lodge of England to monstrously disfigure the historical realities and to shamelessly portray Alashiya’s History as “Greek”. This fallacy would exacerbate the vicious political myths that were diffused by idiotic politicians and treacherous statesmen in Greece, who -thinking that they would ‘unite Cyprus with Greece-‘ brought disaster, bloodshed and interminable conflict. These were the stupid victims of the English colonial liars and crooks who did not give a damn for the lives of the Cypriots, the Turks, and the Greeks.
Statue of Baal (12th c. BCE) unearthed in Enkomi, Famagusta; to deny the Semitic-Canaanite identity of the island, the biased archaeologists did not name the statue correctly, but gave it rather an exotic appellation, namely ‘horned god’!
The fallaciously called ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ is a fake term invented to distort the History of the Oriental Empires; it consists in the invention of a factoid, which is then extrapolated from a marginal and unimportant region (the Anatolian Sea, which is also known as the Aegean Sea) and extended to describe the major centers of advanced civilization, namely Mesopotamia and Egypt, where it does not apply at all! The fabricated term is biased and absurd. It is impermissible to use terms that apply to an unimportant periphery in order to narrate the History of the lands of the great empires and the peoples who developed the major civilizations. In simple words, since there is no ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ in Mesopotamia, there is no ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ as a major historical circumstance; it is a marginal phenomenon that concerns peripheral lands to Mesopotamia.
Tjekker (Teucri) and Peleset (Philistines-Palestinians) fighting against the Egyptians and Pharaoh Ramesses III at the Battle of Djahy (ca. 1178 BCE); from the reliefs of the walls of the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, Luxor West
The so-called ‘major wave of Greek settlement’ (1100-1050 BCE) was not Greek and was not major; it was in fact ‘Western Anatolian’, and it did not affect Cyprus in particular. In fact, it was the side effect of the invasions of the Sea Peoples, who had nothing to do with ‘Greeks’, but actually destroyed the Achaean (‘Greek’) fortresses and brought an end to the Hittite Empire and its ally, the Mycenaean kingdom.
IV. 1st millennium BCE Cyprus
Cyprus was integral part of the Sargonid Assyrian, Nabonid Babylonian, and Achaemenid Iranian empires; as such, it was entirely disconnected from all the developments that took place in South Balkans during the 5th and the 4th centuries BCE. Cyprus was closer to the Seleucid Empire of Syria, but was always part of the Ptolemaic Empire of Egypt; this fact that reflects the survival of cultural rivalries of the past (Hittite Anatolia, Assyrian-Babylonian Mesopotamia, Egypt).
The gradual diffusion of Alexandrine Koine in Cyprus does not justify any claim of Hellenization; the various settlements of Arcadians did not change the Semitic-Canaanite ethnic identity of the Cypriots. The Romanization and the Christianization of the island constituted two processes, which -in spite of the crucial changes that took place there during the Late Antiquity- consolidated the ethnic unity of the Cypriots, who became part of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Ivory game board (detail) found at Enkomi, Famagusta; evident imitation of the Assyrian royal art by the artists of the local king who is depicted in hunting.
V. Cyprus as part of the Eastern Roman Empire
Cyprus was religiously and administratively important, and this is highlighted by the position of the bishop of Cyprus whose Church was proclaimed autocephalous in the First Council of Ephesus (431 CE) and by the outstanding privileges that Emperor Zeno (reign: 474-475 and 476-491) accorded to Archbishop Anthemius (488 CE). It is interesting that the Patriarchate of Antioch repeatedly failed to incorporate Cyprus into its dominion.
Furthermore, Cyprus was never part of an Eastern Roman ‘theme’ (administrative division), as it consisted in an entirely independent one. The partly Islamization of the island was a slow and rather unusual process which involved an Eastern Roman and Umayyad condominium (688), The Eastern Roman Reconquista (965 CE) took an end with the Crusades (1191), the much loathed (by the Cypriots) Knights Templar, the Lusignan rule (1192-1489), and the Venetian rule that lasted until the Ottoman conquest (1571). The few Ottoman settlers were military officers who entered into mixed marriages, thus having no major impact on the ethnic composition of the local population.
Agia Napa monastery, Cyprus (12th-18th c.)
Hala Sultan Tekke (or Mosque of Umm Haram), Larnaca (16th–18th c.)
VI. Conflicts in 20th c. Cyprus: due to the colonial manipulation of the anti-Turkish Greek racists
In fact, the Turkish Cypriots are Cypriots who accepted Islam; because of this, they did not need to further speak Cypriot Rumi, which was the local dialect of the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire. Today, this language, which erroneously called ‘Modern Greek-Cypriot’, is quasi-unintelligible to all the inhabitants of Greece, who lost their Eastern Roman (Romeiki/Rumi) identity and language, as they were forced -within the secessionist Greek state- to learn the fabricated Modern Greek ‘Standard’ language. On the other hand, Turkish-Cypriot has several differences from Ottoman and Modern Turkish.
Cyprus could have reached independence, unity and neutrality, had the nationalist, extremist and suicidal idea of ‘Enosis’ (unilateral union of Cyprus with Greece) not prevailed among the Greeks and the Greek Cypriots.
With the 15th July 1974 coup the Greek state breached the order in Cyprus, thus offering the chance to Turkey to intervene as a warranty power; the Turkish military intervention followed secret English directives. In Nicosia, the division line (‘Green Line’) cut the city into two parts in a way that offered to the Embassy of England the exclusive privilege to have access to both sectors of the divided island. Actually, it had been designed back in the 1960s by an English military officer as a provisory ceasefire line to separate armed groups of the Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots.
All the accusations of Turkey for the so-called ‘military occupation of the northern part of the island’ by the ridiculous Greek politicians, statesmen, corrupt journalists, chauvinist pseudo-academics, and racist bogus-intellectuals are nothing more than the most convincing proof of their high treason and the best confirmation of their subordination to foreign countries’ interests. By deliberately taking adamant and unrealistic positions, they make it sure that the problem is never resolved and people in Greece are thus fooled, fanaticized and sentimentally manipulated.
In an article published in Greek in Exormisi (‘Sortie’; then daily newspaper organ of PASOK in Greece) on 18th April 1990, I was the first to publicly demand the official Greek recognition of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The ignorant, idiotic, pathetic, corrupt and ludicrous political microcosm of Greece, by rejecting to pay heed to my unmistakable advice, only worsened the position of the country, as they demonstrated worldwide that they are miserable autistics or mentally defective morons. Whether you like it or not, the international community is not a primary school, and the states are not naïve pupils; there are no excuses for mistakes made and for acts breaching the international law, which is the consecration of the Law of the Jungle. For the silly Greek politicians and diplomats it is therefore ludicrous to endlessly complain for something that Greece caused in the first place, by launching the 15th July 1974 coup against President Makarios.
I don’t reject the idea of two states on the island of Cyprus; on the contrary, I fully supported it in the past, back in the 1990s, when Turkey was not an ailing state with paranoid crooks and pseudo-Islamist gangsters in the government. However, this is a matter of local governance. A confederal state could also be viable and successful. Turkish Cypriots have always been staunch Kemalists, as they accept only a secular form of state, while also rejecting the presence of idiotic Islamist Anatolian settlers. Today, a confederal, bi-communal, secular state in Cyprus would make sense. The solution of two states on the island would surely push the small states to unwanted conditions of dependence on Greece and Turkey respectively, and this is something that neither Greek Cypriots nor Turkish Cypriots would like.
VII. Greek & Turkish Cypriots’ enemies are Greece, Turkey and England
As it often happens in all the postcolonial states, the opposition to the absurd and disastrous Greek governmental position as regards the Cyprus problem is carried out also by the colonial powers’ stooges who are employed in order to diffuse other wrong ideas, thus placing the average Greeks in front of a fake dilemma. The steady, incessant generation of fake dilemmas is the method by which colonial powers rule their former colonies.
Consequently, ignorant journalists, being on the payroll of the London-based Greek ship owners and the US-based Greek Diaspora, propagate absurd ideas and vicious concepts, publishing scores of nonsensical articles to fool the average readers. In doing so, they support the current position of Greece’s ailing government on the matter. To be exact, the leftist approach taken by the most reviled government of Greece with respect to the Greek-Turkish relations and the respective position of Turkey’s Islamist gangsters are calamitous for both countries’ vital interests. The same is valid for the ‘new’ Greek approach to the Cyprus problem. It is not strange to qualify the Greek government’s positions as ‘leftist’; although masqueraded as conservative, the New Democracy party has always implemented a Trotskyist agenda.
In his letter, my Muslim friend quoted an article from Anihneuseis portal (see links below) in which the author expressed the following absurd question:
– Why should Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots be forced to live together? The Turkish-Cypriots will never ‘return’ (sic!) as minority to a state that is basically in the hands of Greek-Cypriots.
This paranoid statement reflects the stupid ideas of corrupt Greek journalists and analysts who write in order to reproduce the Islamist propaganda of Turkey, being on the payroll of the criminal Islamist regime of Ankara. Turks have to overthrow the Islamist regime at once, close down all pseudo-Islamist schools and bogus-tariqas, and get their country back from the colonial cholera of AKP. And Greeks have to remove the present government as soon as possible, before it makes of the country Europe’s best example of population replacement.
Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots loved living together until the moment the criminal stooges of England started diffusing among Greeks and Greek Cypriots the evil concept of ‘Enosis’ (Union) between an entirely non-Greek nation (Cyprus) and another equally non-Greek nation, which has been tyrannically ruled for 200 years within the dictatorial pseudo-state of ‘Greece’, undergone a spiritual genocide, and turned from real Christian Orthodox Eastern Romans into deluded and besotted bogus-Greeks, i.e. expendable stuff for the anti-Christian and anti-Islamic policies of the Western colonials of France, England and America.
The easiest response to the aforementioned, totally absurd, question is that Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots will love living together again as soon as they have the courage to speak sincerely to one another, agree on basic confidence-building measures, block reciprocally every type of Turkish and Greek interference, replace the Turkish soldiers with a UN peace keeping force, and ban every discussion about Hellenism, Greek impact on the History of Cyprus, and ‘Union’ with Greece. It goes without saying that Standard Modern Greek must be banned from the primary, secondary and tertiary education in the so-called ‘Greek-Cypriot’ sector (which must be renamed ‘Eastern Roman sector’), whereas Turkish Cypriot linguistic and cultural particularities must be strengthened in the completely secular education of the Turkish Cypriot sector.
Actually, there is no minority in a bi-zonal state; and this perspective of pacification, unification and rehabilitation of Cyprus is the red cloth for the bull. The criminal colonials of England intend to perpetuate the problem, causing many successive transformations to the same issue, in order to remain the only power to locally pull the strings. A united, confederal, bi-zonal state of Cyprus void of interference will have every right to close down the English military bases, terminating the colonial presence on the island once forever.
VIII. Cyprus, Egypt, and the true parallel: two communities in one nation
In fact, with respect to the two communities of Modern Cyprus, there is only one parallel that can be drawn; this is with Egypt. Reminiscent of the ancient impact and involvement, the socio-cultural conditions in the Valley of the Nile and on the island of Cyprus do enable us to establish an analogy.
Egyptians are one nation with two ethnic-religious communities: Christians and Muslims. The former speak Coptic and the latter use a Modern Arabic dialect as a means of everyday communication. However, both communities are indigenous Egyptians or if you prefer Copts (Christian Copts and Muslim Copts). Egyptian Muslims are not Arabs or other foreigners who came to settle in the Valley of the Nile; they are historical Egyptians (Copts) who gradually after 642 CE started accepting Islam; because of this, they did not use Coptic language anymore and they forgot it.
Similarly, Cypriots are one nation with two ethnic-religious communities: Christians and Muslims. The former speak Cypriot Eastern Roman (Rumi) language (which is falsely called Greek Cypriot) and the latter use a Turkish dialect slightly different from Standard Modern Turkish as a means of everyday communication. However, both communities are indigenous Cypriots. Cypriot Muslims are not Turks or Turkmen who came to settle in the island. The Ottoman soldiers who settled in Cyprus were very few. The bulk of the Turkish Cypriots are Cypriots who either entered into mixed marriages or accepted Islam during the Ottoman period.
Earlier articles about the Palestinian-Israeli problem (titles, subtitles, units and links):
Palestinians vs. Israelis: 11 Hidden Historical Truths about a Futile War
I. No Religion subsists without Moral, and no Nation exists due to Fake History II. 11 Points of Historical Clarification about the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Point 1: the Israelis are not ethnically Hebrew Point 2: the Israelis are not religiously Hebrew Point 3: ‘Judaism’ is not identical to the Ancient Hebrew religion Point 4: Jews represented an apostate minority of the Hebrews Recapitulation Point 5: the last historical state of the Jews was named Judah / Judaea, not ‘Israel’ Point 6: there is no right to the Promised Land for the Jews Point 7: the entire Old Testament is a posterior fabrication full of distortions Point 8: among today’s so-called ‘Jews’ only 10-15% are truly Jews: the Sephardi Point 9: today’s so-called ‘Jews’ are not ethnically Jewish: the Ashkenazim Point 10: Reform Judaism is not Judaism Point 11: Modern Hebrew (Ivrit) is a fake, constructed, non-Semitic language
Israelis vs. Palestinians: 6 Concealed Historical Truths about the Lost Wars
I. The Spiritual and Moral Conditions of National Resistance II. 6 Points of Historical Clarification about the Israeli- Palestinian Conflict Point 1: Palestinians are not Arabs, but victims of Arabization and Pan-Arabism. Point 2: The Aramaean and Philistine Past of the Palestinians Point 3: The Sea Peoples and the Peleset-Pelasgian-Cretan Ancestry of the Palestinians Point 4: Palestinian Islamists and Israeli Zionists: Criminal Accomplices in the Formation of a Deracinated Nation that functions as Expendable Material Point 5: Lack of Self-criticism brings Disaster, Death and Damnation Point 6: the Interminable Failures of the Palestinians
Pre-publication of chapter XIX 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. Chapters XXVII and XXVIII have already been pre-published.
Until now, 21 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the present book; this chapter is therefore the 22nd (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 gray 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.
References made to entries of the Wikipedia offer average readers a starting point for their research; they do not signify acceptance and approval of their contents.
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Certainly, the Safavid Empire was not the first Islamic state established by a mystical order; but earlier states launched by mystical orders were either set up in small and remote territories as form of local resistance against the Islamic Caliphate like the Babakiyah (Khurramites) or organized as a secret subversive movement coordinated from mysterious, faraway, unreachable and impregnable headquarters, like those of the Hashashin Isma’ilis (known as Assassins in Western literature). In this regard, at the level of governance, the main difference between the Safavids and the Isma’ilis was the fact that the latter did not try or even plan to proclaim an empire, whereas the former, even before solemnly announcing their empire, felt that they had the task to entirely reshape the Islamic world.
Selim I
Ismail I Safavi
Babur
The Safavid Order had the apocalyptic, eschatological and messianic feeling that their task would be the only way to save the Islamic world; they felt that they had the divinely bestowed obligation to institute a secular empire across the Islamic world, which would be based on spiritual values, moral virtues, cultural traditions, and epic revival. The name of the empire was no lees imperial than the following expression: “the Realm of the Outspread Universe of Iran” (ملک وسیعالفضای ایران /Molk-e vasi-ye fezaye Eran); one understands automatically the importance of Ferdowsi’s epic narrative and the cosmological dimension that Safavid spirituality gave to the state that the venerable members of the Order launched. The term ‘Iran’ does not denote either the territory of a nation/ethnic group or the land controlled by a state; all these divisive, nonsensical, modern notions were nonexistent at the time. In the very beginning of the Safavid times, the term ‘Iran’ was not even used.
The most important historians of the early Safavid times were Ghiyath ad-Din Muhammad Khwandamir (Habib al-Siyar; Khulasatu-l Akhbar; Dasturu-l Wuzra), Abdallah Hatefi (Khamsa), Amini Haravi (Futuhat-e shahi), Fazli Khuzani Esfahani (Afzal al-tawarih), and Fazl-Allah Khonji Esfahani (Tarih-e alamara-ye amini).
It is interesting to herewith include selected excerpts from Prof. Anooshahr’s well-founded speech, notably (11:30 onwards/no editing involved):
“There was no idea of something called Iran in this transition period”.
“The word ‘Iran’ only shows in Amini’s book twice; once is paired with Turan; and then immediately afterward, when the Rumi (: Roman) envoy shows up on behalf of the Ottoman Emperors”.
“As far as the people of the time were concerned, the actual participants in these events, they had no idea of Iran, and this was not because they were alien or unpatriotic, in fact they were non-patriotic, because there is no patriotism; this was because they had a radically different idea of territory than we do today. So, in our modern conception, people are defined as a nation, they own the land that they live on, and this land has a particular characteristic that is shared between it and all the people”.
“When Amini writes about territory, he sublimates it by using the Quran and comparing it to heaven; he does not connect it to any kind of territorial identity at all”.
“The establishment of Twelver Shi’ism, based on this text, does not seem to be that important. And then the establishment of a kind of Ancient Persian Empire is actually not on their agenda”.
As a matter of fact, Safavid Iran was the entire universe for the members of the Safavid Order, and as such it had no ethnic/national dimension or character and no religious identity. Spirituality was all that mattered. Even more importantly, it was not proclaimed only to encompass the territories that the Safavid emperors finally controlled, as Western Iranologists perniciously suggest, perversely viewing the Safavid empire’s territory as simply a larger ‘version’ of the modern pseudo-state of Iran. For the members of the Safavid Order, “Molk-e vasi-ye fezaye Eran” had the divinely entrusted task to contain the entire circumference of the Islamic world.
Four major monarchs between Rome and China
Between Rome and China, four persons, who played a determinant role in the final formation of major empires and in the final delineation of their borders, were born between 1450 and 1487. In chronological order they are as per below:
i. Muhammad Shaybani (Muhammad Shaybani Khan or Abul-Fath Shaybani Khan; 1451-1510), grandson of Abu’l-Khayr Khan, and Genghisid founder of the Khanate of Bukhara (1500), one of the empires that were formed after the split of the Golden Horde and demise of the precarious Uzbek Khanate; he evidently did not make any distinction between a) Turanians and Iranians (which shows the extent of the completed ethnic Turanization of Iran) and b) those who are fallaciously called today ‘Shia’ and ‘Sunni’ by colonial Orientalists, diplomats or statesmen and Islamic terrorists and extremists alike.
Muhammad Shaybani; 16th c. portrait painted by the famous Iranian artist Kemaleddin Behzad
The fight between Shah Ismail I and Muhammad Shaybani (1510); from the manuscript Tarikh-i alam-aray-i Shah Ismail (the world adorning History of Shah Ismail)
Bukhara; Chor-Bakr burial place constructed under Muhammad Shaybani (1505-1510)
The state of Muhammad Shaybani
ii. Selim I (سليم اول / Yavuz Sultan Selim; 1470-1520), grandson of Mehmed II and son of Bayezid II; he ruled the Eastern Roman Empire only for eight years (1512-1520), but he was by far the most important sultan of the 600-year long dynasty for having expanded the Ottoman territories more than any other. Then, there was no ‘Ottoman Empire’; not one man used that term at the time. The term ‘State of the Ottoman family’ (دولت عليه عثمانیه / Devlet-i ‘Alīye-i Osmaniyeh) was introduced centuries later. Selim I was the Padishah (پادشاه), i.e. the ‘Great King’, thus bearing an Iranian title that goes back to the early Achaemenids who antedated him by two millennia. Selim I was also (βασιλεύς Ρωμαίων / Imperator Romanorum / قیصر روم / Qaysar-i Rum, lit. “Caesar of the Romans”) like his father and grandfather after 1453, because Mehmed II claimed the title after conquering Constantinople, George of Trebizond endorsed the claim, considering Mehmed II as emperor of the world, and Gennadius Scholarius, Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, fully recognized the title.
The state of Selim I was also viewed by others as the Roman Empire (in the sense of the Eastern Roman Empire, because the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist in 476 CE). From the aforementioned speech of Prof. Ali Anooshahr, I quote another excerpt here (exactly after 12:07 in the above mentioned video and link):
“I am referring to what we call ‘the Ottoman Empire’; but if the topic today is to look at how people perceived their own territoriality, then we shouldn’t call it ‘the Ottoman Empire’, because they didn’t call it that way; they called it ‘the Roman Empire’ (ruled by the Ottoman family)”.
Selim I was not styled “Commander of the Faithful” (أَمِير ٱلْمُؤْمِنِين / ‘Amir al-Mu’minin) for most of his reign, and when he could claim the title, the majority of his subjects rejected it for him. The same concerns the later and minor title “Servant of The Two Holy Cities” (خَادِمُ الْحَرَمَيْن / Hadimü’l-Haremeyn), which is somewhat a historical novelty introduced only as late as the 12th – 13th c. Last, it is only after 1517 that Selim I was accepted as ‘Caliph’ throughout his realm and dependencies.
Selim I (Yavuz Sultan Selim); portrait painted by the Ottoman artist Nakkaş Osman (16th c.)
The territorial expansion of the Ottoman Sultanate (focus on Anatolia and the Balkans)
Portrait (end of 18th-beginning of 19th c.) painted by the Christian Orthodox Eastern Roman artist Konstantin Kapıdağlı (Κωνσταντῖνος Κυζικηνός; Konstantinos Kyzikinos)
Ottoman Empire around 1520
Miniature from the 16th c. manuscript Hüner-nāme; I, Library of the Topkapi Palace Museum
The Ottoman Empire in 1875
Sultan Selim I and the Grand Vizier Piri Mehmed Paşa
Selim I portrait painted by Aşık Çelebi
Painting showing Selim I during the Egypt campaign, Army Museum, Istanbul
Portrait of Selim I painted by Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari); Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Staatsgalerie in der Residenz Würzburg
From the personal belongings of Shah Ismail that were captured by Selim during and after the Battle of Chaldiran. Topkapi Museum, Istanbul
iii. Babur (ظَهير اَلَدّين مُحَمَّد – Zahīr ud-Dīn Muhammad; 1483-1530) was the eldest son of Umar Sheikh Mirza, the Timurid governor of Ferghana who was the son of Abu Sa’id Mirza; consequently, Babur was the great grandson of Abu Sa’id Mirza’s father, Sultan Muhammad Mirza, governor of Samarqand for some time, whom due to an unknown reason Babur did not even mention in historical boon Babur-nameh. This implies that Babur was the great-great grandson of the father of Sultan Muhammad Mirza, Miran Shah, who was the third of Timur’s four sons. So, Babur was the great-great-great-grandson of Timur.
If he is basically known through his nickname (‘tiger’), this happens because he truly deserved it. Babur became the ruler of Ferghana at the age of 11 (in 1494), and he was an outstanding and exceptional adolescent in every sense. In his rather brief but most eventful life that had unprecedented ups and downs, Babur had to incessantly fight hard for long and in a most adventurous and often thunderous manner, undertaking campaigns, laying sieges, and winning battles, but also losing his capitals. He was defeated by Muhammad Shaybani, and he spent years in humiliation and poverty without a real shelter.
However, he managed to capture Kabul (1504) and to control parts of today’s Afghanistan; he then benefited from Ismail I’s victory over Muhammad Shaybani (1510), recaptured Samarqand, and prepared his army for the major campaign and the greatest success of his life, namely the invasion of the Indus River and the Ganges River valleys, the demolition of the Delhi Sultanate, and the foundation (1524-1526) of the Mughal Empire (1526-1858). So, triumph came at last to this intellectual soldier and philosopher-conqueror. By all means, Babur would have made -in a terrible historical irony- the perfect son to Timur himself!
iv. Ismail I Safavi (1487-1524) was none other than the son of Shaykh Haydar, the Grandmaster of the Safavid Order and the founder of the Qizilbash military order. It is noteworthy that his maternal grandmother was none other than Despina Hatun, i.e. Theodora Megale Komnene, of John IV of Trebizond, who became Muslim to get married (1458) with Uzun Hassan, the Aq Qoyunlu sultan, whose daughter Martha (mainly known as Alamshah Halime Begum) -in very young age- got married (1471) with Shaykh Haydar.
However, tribally and imperially, Ismail I’s lineage was not as important as the ancestry of Muhammad Shaybani, Selim I, and Babur, but his spiritual-mystical backing was incommensurately stronger; people of different origin, occupation and location could instantly rush to his support and give their lives personally for him. And his great military advantage was his unpredictability, which was due exactly to his spiritual-mystical backing. His opponents would never know from where his fighters would surface to protect him and defend his cause.
Contrarily to Muhammad Shaybani who had the youth of a regular soldier, and to Selim I who spent years in palatial intrigues as he was his father’s third son, Ismail I was an exceptional youngster like Babur; but his father’s spiritual potency made an enormous difference. This is difficult to assess properly today, but in the circle of the Anatolian-Caucasus-Iranian-Central Asiatic members of the Safavid Order and the Qizilbash fighters, Shaykh Haydar was believed to be God Incarnate (elah) – in the spiritual (not theological) connotation of the word. This meant nothing less than an absolute faith as per which the infant Ismail, long before establishing the Empire of the Safavid Order, was believed to be ‘ebn Allah’ (Son of God).
Western colonial historians and Orientalist forgers, in their incessant effort to distort the historical reality of the Safavid times, select deliberately anti-Safavid authors of those days, like Fazl-Allah Khonji Esfahani, take their premeditated narratives at face value, attach to them several fake, pseudo-Islamic theological concepts, such as the ‘ghulat’, and portray the Safavids as ‘Shia extremists’ or ‘antinomians’ (another fake term), which is absolutely absurd. As said in the previous chapter, there cannot be religious evaluation of spiritual matters; this means that every attempt of theological interpretation of a spiritual term or expression is a failure already before it is stated. In fact, there are no ‘ghulat’ at all.
This term is a neologism, which is attributed by modern scholars to various mystics and spiritual masters (of different Islamic periods), who were misunderstood in their times by their theological critics. The perverse colonial interest in promoting the ‘ghulat’ bogus-literature and in using the fake term for people, who were not called ‘ghulat’ in their times, is due first, to the Western academics’ distortive effort to generate the nonexistent ‘Sunni vs. Shia’ divide, and second, to the Western intellectuals’ vicious attempt to portray several Muslim mystics and spiritual grandmasters as ‘heretics’, whereas the difference between Islam and Christianity hinges exactly on this point, namely that there cannot be ‘heresy’ within Islam.
Ismail I was undoubtedly an extraordinary youngster who lived in strict mystical seclusion for five years (from 7 to 12), before appearing as almost the Islamic Messiah (Mahdi). It is necessary to straightforwardly clarify at this point that this term has a totally different meaning in spirituality and in religion (or theology). Meanwhile, the bright and exceptional apprentice was communicating with several members of the Safavid Order and the Qizilbash army though a sophisticated network of agents that was too difficult for others to identify, let alone put under control.
For Ismail I Safavi’s early stage of life (during those five years), there were certainly several parallels between his concealed existence and that of Muhammad ibn al-Askari, the Twelfth Imam (who was born in 869 and finally disappeared in his Major Occultation in 941). However, only theological misinterpretation of spiritual activities and narratives could lead to the wrong assumption about an eventual identification of Ismail I with Muhammad ibn al-Askari. Not one member of the Safavid Order was confused in this regard.
After having lived his childhood in the forests of Gilan, he appeared to his brethren and followers at 12 (in 1499), he achieved an unexpected, great victory over the Shirvanshah ruler Farrukh Yassar two years later (1501), and he was crowned king at 14. Thus, he was catapulted to power in the most exulting terms, whereas his merry, exuberant and legendary entry to Tabriz was followed by endless feasts, imperial banquets, endless consumption of wine, and fabulous erotic delights.
He who says that wine (or alcoholic drinks in general) is prohibited in Islam is either a conniving Westerner (diplomat, statesman, agent or academic) strongly motivated by his vicious hatred of the true, historical Islam or an idiotic puppet of the Western powers, i.e. an ignorant and idiotic, fanatic and extremist, Islamist sheikh, who – as per the Satanic orders of his Western masters – believes that “Islam is the Quran and the Hadith”. Quite contrarily to this fallacy, the extensively misinterpreted and calamitously misunderstood sacred texts of Islam do not represent even 0.001% of the existing voluminous literature (in classical Islamic languages, namely Arabic, Farsi, various Turkic languages, and Urdu), which has to be first studied, then correctly perceived and plainly comprehended before one attempts to read the Quran and the Hadith. No holy text exists without exact conceptualization and comprehensive contextualization.
The sacred texts of Islam (similarly with those of every other religion) cannot be accurately and succinctly understood per se except in the light of literary, spiritual, historical, theoretical and scientific texts of the Golden Era of Islam. The same occurs in Christianity; without the Patristic Literature (Patristics or Patrology, i.e. the texts written by the Fathers of the Christian Church) no one can possibly understand correctly the New Testament, the Old Testament, and the true, historical Christianity. The fallacy, as per which anyone today can understand the Gospels and the other sacred texts of Christianity without the Patristic Literature, is a deviate, Protestant – Evangelical distortion.
The aforementioned four Muslim emperors were all authors, poets and highly educated and cultured monarchs. Muhammad Shaybani composed his Bahr ul Huda, a theological, moral treatise, being widely known as a consummate polymath and an erudite scholar who highly valued books, manuscripts, epics and arts. Selim I wrote poetry in Farsi and Turkish under the penname Mahlas Selimi. Babur excelled in prose; he elaborated his own biography in Chagatai Turkic; the legendary Babur nameh (Book of Babur) is a major historical source for the History of Asia during the 15th and 16th c.
Ismail I Safavi composed spiritual poetry in Turkish and Farsi under the penname Khatai, i.e. ‘the one who makes mistakes’; in and by itself, this fact constitutes the complete confirmation of the aforementioned statement, namely that there cannot be religious evaluation of spiritual matters. Confessing one’s own mistakes -by selecting a name that makes this reality so explicitly known- is full indication of humanity; a perfect human accepts that he/she makes mistakes. By using this penname, Ismail I fully demonstrated that the term ‘ebn Allah’ (Son of God) attributed to him was not meant in a rationalistic theological way but in terms of spiritual symbolism, which is absolutely unfathomable to juristic, rationalistic and materialistic theologians.
In the existing manuscripts (preserved in Tashkent and Paris) of Ismail I Safavi’s poetry, there are ca. 260 qasidas and ghazals, quatrains, morabbas, mosaddas, and three mathnawis (different types of Islamic poetry); two of his mathnawis are quite lengthy, namely the Dah nameh and the Nasihat nameh. Bektashis in Anatolia and the Balkans, as well as the Shabaks in Mesopotamia, extensively recite Ismail I Safavi’s poetry in their spiritual sessions down to our days.
The interaction of those four great emperors was not trouble-free, peaceful and bloodless; at times, it even took a dimension of extreme monstrosity. During the period 1497-1504, Babur and Muhammad Shaybani were repeatedly engaged in battles against one another, particularly for the control of Samarqand. Muhammad Shaybani proved to be Babur’s real nemesis, but both of them captured, lost and recaptured Samarqand several times. As Babur had a small basis of support in Central Asia, he undertook a most adventurous campaign in 1504, and with few men he captured Kabul, making of the area his new base. He made an alliance with a distant relative, namely the ruler of Herat Sultan Husayn Mirza Bayqarah; but Muhammad Shaybani chased him from there too.
As Muhammad Shaybani was an ally of the Ottoman family and of Bayezid II, the father of Selim I, he concentrated his efforts in the East and Southeast, against the Hazara Turanian nomads in Khorasan (currently located in central Afghanistan) and the Kazakhs. In fact, his campaign against the Hazaras was a disaster, because first his cavalry had many casualties and second the war against the Hazaras produced a major reaction among the Qizilbash, because many members of the military order were of Hazara origin. Then, Ismail I Safavi, who had spent many years, invading and dismantling the Akkoyunlu state and its last remaining forces in Iran, Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia, and Mesopotamia, turned against Muhammad Shaybani. Then, in the Battle of Merv, the Qizilbash army, after devising a trick (i.e. a feigned retreat), ambushed and slaughtered an almost double Uzbek force.
The excesses after the Qizilbash victory were exorbitant; Muhammad Shaybani’s corpse was cut to pieces and parts were sent to be in public display in many cities; his skull ended up as a gold-plated cup for Ismail I. The cup was later sent to Babur himself, and the same occurred to one of Muhammad Shaybani’s wives, namely Khanzada Begum, who was Babur’s elder sister. These gestures started an era of cooperation between Ismail I, who had just risen to prominence, and Babur whose army and the Qizilbash fought side by side against the Uzbeks at the Battle of Ghazdewan (1512); however they were defeated there, and this event marked the end of Babur’s dream of recovering his father’s kingdom at Ferghana. For some time, Babur accepted Ismail I as his own emperor, while he was struggling to impose his rule in the mountains between Central Asia and the Indus River valley.
Opposing Ottoman allies at the Battle of Ghazdewan, Babur (today portrayed as a ‘Sunni’ by colonial Orientalists) became an ally of Ismail I Safavi (currently labeled as a ‘Shia’ by European and American historical forgers) and therefore an enemy of Selim I (nowadays described as a ‘Sunni’ by Western academics). The reality is totally different: Ismail I was a spiritual mystic, who became the ruler of a secular empire controlled by the army (Qizilbash) of his mystical order (Safavid), whereas Selim I was a palatial intrigue man controlled by evil theological circles and people who caused divisions, civil wars, internal strives and terrible bloodshed in the Eastern Roman Empire (of the Ottoman family). Then, in striking opposition with both, Babur was an intrepid, intelligent and opportunist, yet formidable, soldier entirely motivated by the dream to create an empire greater than his father’s and Timur’s.
The spread of Qizilbash force, movement, worldview, mentality, and lifestyle among Anatolian pastoralists was overwhelming in the 1500s. It triggered its own dynamics, which was not controlled anymore by the Safavid Order and the newly established Safavid Empire. The mystical order of Şahkulu was the perfect continuation of many long centuries of Anatolian Islamic spirituality and mysticism; it was energized by the introduction of the Qizilbash concept (an army for a mystical order that would establish a secular universal empire).
Ismail I Safavi in an incident from his campaign against Shirvan; he is charging down a mountain in pursuit of the King of Shirvan; miniature from the manuscript Shahnama-i-Ismail (Tabriz style), ca. 1540 (MS Add. 7784, f.46v. British Museum, London); his distinctive turban has twelve folds representing the twelve Imams of whom Ali ibn Abi Taleb was the first.
The Aq Qoyunlu tribal khanate (1378-1503) around 1475, i.e. 25-30 years before it was defeated and incorporated with the Safavid Empire
Miniature from a 17th c. manuscript with mystical representation of Sheikh Safi ad-din Ardabili (1252-1334) blessing the young Shah Ismail I; gouache heightened with gold on paper. The historic mystic is depicted at the top of a minbar in the mosque holding a Qur’an and blessing Shah Isma’il (identified in small brown script) who stands on a lower step of the same minbar, surrounded by courtiers and elders.
Ismail I Safavi offers an audience to the Qizilbash, after they have defeated his opponent Shirvanshah Farrukh in 1500; miniature from Bijan’s Tarikh-i Jahangusha-yi Khaqan Sahibqiran (A History of Shah Ismail I), which was written in Isfahan in the late 1680s. The painting was created by Muin Musawwir, a famous artist who also illustrated six editions of the Shahnameh.
Ismail I Safavi and his soldiers cross Kura River in the Caucasus region
Ismail I Safavi defeats Sultan Murad, the last ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu, near Hamadan in 1503.
Miniature from a manuscript of Bijan’s Tarikh-i Jahangusha-yi Khaqan Sahibqiran (A History of Shah Ismail I), which was written in Isfahan in the late 1680s. It was painted by or in the style of Mu’in Musavvir; gouache heightened with gold on paper. Ismail and his courtiers are depicted on horseback while hunting.
The fight of Ismail I Safavi against the Dulkadiroğulları in Southeastern Anatolia
Ismail I Safavi watches his soldiers defeat the Musha’sha (المشعشعية) messianic leader Sultan Fayyad in Khuzestan; from the miniature of a manuscript of the late 1680s.
Representation of the Battle of Merv between Shah Ismail and Shaybani Khan; fresco in the Chehel Sotun Palace in Isfahan
Ismail I Safavi’s envoy Ganbar Agha appears before the last Aq Qoyunlu ruler Sultan Murad; miniature from a manuscript of the 1670s
Representation of the Battle of Chaldiran (1514); fresco in the Chehel Sotun Palace in Isfahan
The helmet of Ismail I Safavi
The Şahkulu Spiritual Movement
However, the Anatolian mystical order was not stricto sensu created by the Safavid Qizilbash. Many Western Orientalists totally misinterpret the role, the scope, the targets and the motivations of the founder and grandmaster of the eponymous order; Şahkulu (also known as Shah Qoli Baba or Shah Kulu or Shah Quli or Karabıyıkoğlu, i.e. the son of the man with black moustache) was certainly not a Safavid puppet who attempted to subvert or infiltrate the Ottoman state; this misinterpretation is absurd. Şahkulu was an Anatolian original.
In this regard, colonial academics totally distort everything, even the real meaning of Şahkulu’s name! It is true that in Turkish, this word means ‘the servant of the Shah’; however, this is not meant in a theological and rationalist manner, but with a purely spiritual connotation. Şahkulu was indeed the ‘servant’ of the ‘Shah’, but according to the terminology of an Islamic mystical order, ‘Shah’ is God. In fact, even worse lies and incredible distortions are published by Western colonial historians as regards the bloodshed, the persecution and the oppression of the Anatolian Qizilbash by the usurper of the Ottoman throne Selim I. The reason for these lies is evident: on the misrepresentation of the historical events that took place in Anatolia during the dramatic period 1510-1512 hinge both, the entire falsification of the Ottoman History and the fallacious theory that “the Ottomans were Sunni and the Safavid Iranians were Shia”. In addition, Western historians tried systematically to obscure the fact that the Ottoman ruling class followed Maturidi theology, whereas the uncontrolled but intentionally tolerated majority of the madrasas and the imams were impacted by Ash’ari concepts.
As a matter of fact, the so-called Şahkulu İsyanı (rebellion), which was not an uprising but a messianic fervor, and the subsequent events, namely the battle of Chaldiran (1514) between Selim I and Ismail I, bear witness to the gradual rise of a pseudo-Islamic theological school at Istanbul (under the Hanafi madhhab coverage). Those indoctrinated and ignorant sheikhs progressively destroyed the Ottoman Empire with their absurd inhumanity and obdurate idiocy, which invariably took the form of nonsensical argumentation, strict anachronism, theological rigidity, verbal rationalism, worldly materialism, and nonsensical involvement in the governance of the expanding empire. Their worst and most catastrophic trait however was their explicit revilement and utmost hatred of Islamic spirituality (Batin/ باطن; Batiniyya/ باطنية; these terms literally means ‘inner’ and ‘esotericism’, but they have nothing to do with Western esotericism/mysticism).
These Istanbulite theological circles were not powerful at the time, but gradually, during the 16th c., they managed to prevail within the Ottoman court; their achievement was the destruction of Taqi ad-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf’s Islamic Observatory of Istanbul in 1580 – an event that marks the irrevocable death of the Islamic Civilization. In 1510-1512, the same theological circles plunged Anatolia in terrible bloodshed; this was due to their determination to oppose the prevalence of Şahkulu Qizilbash spirituality. That’s why these pseudo-Muslim theological circles always represented the ‘enfant gâté’ of Western academics: they constituted indeed the perfect guarantee for the destruction and the disappearance of Islam, because they could be (and they were) easily induced by Western colonial agents to trigger interminable divisions and fratricidal wars among the Muslims.
Selim I was not predestined to become a sultan, as he was the fourth among the eight sons of Bayezid II. Şehzade Abdullah was the first among Bayezid II’s eight sons, but he died young in 1483; Şehzade Şehinşah was the Ottoman sultan’s fifth son and he was very well educated and militarily strong, but he never gained the support of the Ottoman bureaucracy, administration and theological nomenklatura. Although governor of big cities and loved by the people of Karaman, he died in 1511 for unknown reasons, possibly poisoned by some vicious Ottoman theologians. Born in 1465, Ahmet (known as Şehzade Ahmet; 1465-1513) was the second son of Bayezid II; born in 1467, Korkut (known as Şehzade Korkut; 1467-1513) was the third son of Bayezid II. Şehzade Mahmud (1475-1507), the younger brother of Şehzade Ahmet, died in 1507 for undefined reasons. Seventh son of Bayezid II was Şehzade Alemşah (1477-1502) who also died in 1502 or 1503 for unspecified reasons.
Compared to Şehzade Ahmet and to Şehzade Korkut, Selim I (born in 1470) was a far cry and an unimportant prince, even more so since Bayezid II’s favorite candidate to his succession was Ahmet. However, the Ottoman court had always been a matter of Istanbulite palatial intrigues, intra-family fights, and endless fratricides, pretty much like those occurred during the Eastern Roman times in God-damned Constantinople. Bayezid II (1447-1512; his reign started in 1481) had to fight to secure his succession, because Cem Sultan (1459-1495), his younger brother, laid claim to the throne. Selim I was an insubordinate, rebellious, idiotic and absolutely unworthy son, who was manipulated by the evil Istanbulite theologians as to how to plot, cheat and connive against his own father. This is what the pseudo-Islamic madhhab (jurisprudential schools) and theological schools were reduced to at those days – and ever since down to our days.
Selim I rebelled against his father not for any other reason, but because the vicious theological circles of Istanbul, which are nowadays mistakenly called ‘Sunni’, wanted to use him against the spread and the rise of the Şahkulu Anatolian spirituality. The succession to the throne of Bayezid II was only the pretext. In fact, Ahmet (Şehzade Ahmet) did not only have the right of primogeniture, but also his father’s consent and favor; that’s why the disloyal son and puppet of Istanbul’s evil theologians Selim I had to ceaselessly plot against his father.
In addition, there was a confusing and disastrous tradition in the Ottoman family, as per which among the dying sultan’s sons, whoever reached the dead monarch’s bed first would (or could eventually) become his father’s successor. A clear sign of the chaotic situation that prevailed in the Istanbulite palace of the disorderly, lawless and faithless family was the disastrous fact that, in order to make sure that the eventually insubordinate crown princes and the other princes would not fuel a rebellion against the sultan, the Ottoman rulers used to send their sons to faraway provinces in order to serve there as local governors – which in turn reduced their chances to successfully plot. This meant that distance mattered greatly at those days!
Ahmet was the governor of Amasya in Northern Cappadocia (675 km from Istanbul), Korkut was the governor of Antalya (then called Teke, in Pamphylia) in the southern coast (640 km from the capital), and Selim was the governor of Trabzon (1060 km from his father’s palace). In that ridiculous situation, everyone was preparing for the forthcoming confrontation; it was therefore normal that Ahmet rejected his father’s appointment of Suleyman (son of Selim I, who became later known as Suleyman the Magnificent) as governor of Bolu, because of the small distance that separated the tiny and insignificant city from the Ottoman capital (only 260 km). Suleyman was then sent to the Ottoman Crimea (Kefe or Kaffa or Caffa; today’s Feodosia).
Incessantly plotting, Selim asked his father to appoint him as governor in a sanjak in Rumeli (: Balkans). Bayezid II rejected this bizarre demand because the Ottoman sanjaks in the European territory of the empire were smaller, more recently acquired, and unfit for princes. This fact shows that Anatolia was always the central and most important part of the Ottoman state, as it was of the Eastern Roman Empire in earlier periods.
Involving foreigners in acts against his father’s decisions and affairs, Selim asked the help of the Tatar Khan of Crimea and he was finally appointed as governor of the pashalik of Belgrade (then named in Turkish as ‘Semendire Sancağı’, i.e. Sanjak of Smederevo), which is located at a distance of 900 km from Istanbul. However, instead of staying at the headquarters of his administrative province, the disloyal, immoral and faithless Selim approached Istanbul, and then Bayezid II had to fight against him and defeat him in August 1511. Selim escaped to his Tatar friends in Crimea, but at the same time, the Şahkulu spiritual movement and the ensuing messianic fervor took disproportionate eschatological dimensions in Anatolia, and the sultan tasked Ahmed to impose order and discipline through the Ottoman Empire’s eastern provinces.
As a matter of fact, there was never a Şahkulu rebellion, contrarily to what most of the historians claim nowadays. There was instead a passionate messianic fervor and the Ottoman attempt to suppress the spiritual movement was met with resistance. This situation cannot be termed as ‘rebellion’, because there was no intention for rebellion among the members and the followers of the Şahkulu mystical order. They did not want to overthrow any authority or to impose themselves as the rulers. As every spiritual movement brings forth liberation and salvation, a large number of people across Anatolia viewed in the Şahkulu movement and in their Qizilbash army the promise and the perspective of a better life free from the Ottoman family’s incompetence and incessant butchery and bloodletting; but this was not tantamount to public disobedience or disorder.
As spirituality enables the faithful to understand the real purpose of this life and of the Hereafter, the Şahkulu members, followers and army knew quite well that the Ottoman princes had absolutely no legitimacy to possess the wealth they garnered and to hold the positions they had. In terms of spirituality, states do not exist or are not needed; these evil social structures have absolutely no value and no authority for any spiritual mystic and any spiritually-awakened person.
Şahkulu Qizilbash army raids on cities, on Ottoman treasures, on imperial caravans, and on regional administration centers started therefore becoming very frequent around 1510. It is essential for both, experienced historians and erudite readership, not to evaluate those developments with today’s average Western mentality and approach; there was nothing illegal in those acts. They were absolutely just, moral and lawful; even more importantly, they were viewed as such by the outright majority of the Anatolian populations. In any case, ‘lawful’ is only the ‘just’ and the ‘moral’, in striking contrast to the modern Western societies and their lawless laws, criminal nature, and evil states that are all doomed to perish.
The historical reality was as simple as that: the Qizilbash soldiers were not thieves; quite contrarily, the Ottoman princes, administrators and theologians were crooks. Şehzade Korkut’s caravan was attacked once, whereas the beylerbey of Anatolia (Anadolu) was defeated, when he tried to engage the Şahkulu forces in battle. Then, Bayezid II realized that his empire was about to crumble in Anatolia; he therefore sent Şehzade Ahmet (1511) and the Grand Vizier Hadım (: eunuch) Ali Pasha in order to protect his, his family’s, and his gang’s lawless interests. I severely criticize the Ottoman sultan because he was ruling his realm as a disgrace; when a ruler is not just, moral and lawful, it is the plain right and duty of every person to take justice in his hands.
The dispatch of Şehzade Ahmet happened at the same time, when Bayezid II was fighting against his lawless, faithless and rebel son Selim; this was a development Şehzade Ahmet had to keep a close eye on. During the battle against the Şahkulu forces (near Kütahya), Şehzade Ahmet tried therefore to close a personal deal and an alliance with Şahkulu Karabıyıkoğlu himself; in other words, he attempted to gain his support, as well as that of his movement and of the Qizilbash army for the succession to the Ottoman throne. This would be an excellent solution for all, namely the local populations, the Anatolian Qizilbash, the messianic mystic, and the heir of the Ottoman throne.
Şehzade Ahmet’s attempt to ascend to power with the support of the Şahkulu movement, if it brought forth great results, would make of the Ottoman Sultanate {then still called ‘(Eastern) Roman Empire’} a perfect copy of the Safavid Empire: a Turanian Empire ruled by a spiritual order. This would trigger exceptionally positive and truly propitious changes across the Islamic world, entirely revivifying Islamic spirituality and terminating the catastrophic theological indoctrination, which finally prevailed and gradually destroyed the Islamic World totally.
Of course, Şehzade Ahmet was not a mystic and he acted only out of his personal interest. Şahkulu Karabıyıkoğlu tried then to gain him to his own cause; however, the affair was very risky, and unfortunately the news leaked. Then, Şehzade Ahmet had to persuade Hadım Ali Pasha that the scope of the negotiations was other, ask him to continue the battle against the Qizilbash army, and run to major Anatolian cities to gain wider regional support for his ascension to the Ottoman throne. The correct place for this was Konya, the leading center of Anatolian spirituality.
The forces of Hadım Ali Pasha pursued the Şahkulu Qizilbash army and after several minor engagements, in the battle of Çubukova (Eastern Cappadocia), both Şahkulu Karabıyıkoğlu and Hadım Ali Pasha were killed (July 1511). However, the Qizilbash force was not dispersed and remained actively powerful. Having prevailed over his rebellious son Selim in August 1511, the embattled Bayezid II had to deal with the chaotic situation of his empire in Anatolia. As Şehzade Ahmet controlled Konya and disobeyed his father’s order to return to his position, Bayezid II believed that the true reason for the spread of the Şahkulu movement was Ismail I; this was a very wrong conclusion, because the Anatolian Qizilbash force was totally independent from the Safavid state. Actually, in the ensuing exchange of royal correspondence, Ismail I totally rejected any involvement in the Şahkulu events in Anatolia; he even went on to explicitly condemn the Anatolian Qizilbash attitude and practices.
Meanwhile, Şehzade Ahmet attempted to advance to Istanbul and dethrone his father, while Selim was in Crimea; however, he failed to advance, as he was blocked by the imperial guard before Bursa. At the same time, Selim gathered a Tatar force and, relying on the Istanbulite theologians’ and bureaucrats’ timely messages and direct support, returned to Istanbul in April 1512 and dethroned his father; no less than a month later (26 May 1512) Bayezid II died dishonored in shameful exile (in Dimetoka, today’s Didymoteicho/Διδυμότειχο on the Turkish-Greek border).
The confrontation between Şehzade Ahmet, who had gathered Qizilbash support in the meantime, and Selim I took place in April 1513 near Bursa, and after an initially indecisive clash, Şehzade Ahmet was defeated and killed. Although Şehzade Korkut had accepted his younger brother’s reign in 1512, Selim I had him killed too, in 1513. An extraordinary purgatory took then place against all the remaining nephews of Selim I, so that the bloody reign of the Ottoman butcher may not be endangered in any way; this would also concern particularly Şehzade Murad, the son of Şehzade Ahmet, who was viewed by the outright majority of the Anatolian population as the rightful heir to the Ottoman throne. However, Şehzade Murad was clever enough to escape to Eastern Anatolia, which was totally out of Ottoman control, communicate with Ismail I, get his support, and coordinate with other Turkmen and Qizilbash forces in order to oppose and eventually overthrow Selim I.
The terrain of the Şahkulu movement
Full of hatred, rancor and hysteria, Selim I carried out an unprecedented ‘white terror campaign’, killing dozens of thousands of civilians under the fake pretext of supporting the Qizilbash army; numbers vary in several historical sources, but an estimate of 50000 people would not be far from truth. This extraordinary bloodshed took place in only one third of today’s Turkey’s territory, namely Western Anatolia. Subsequently, a great number of captives were sent to Rumeli (European provinces of the Ottoman state) and finally settled in Mora Eyalet (ایالت موره; Eyalet-i Mora, today’s Peloponnese in southern Greece).
After the previous description, it becomes clear why, in today’s absurd, disastrous, anti-Turkish and pseudo-Islamic regime of Turkey, one can find journalists who still remember the illustrious Şahkulu movement, having however shaped a disastrously mistaken opinion about it. The so-called ‘political islam’ was indeed fabricated by the French, English and American Orientalists in order to entirely replace the traditional knowledge of the Muslims about the true historical Islam; for this project, an entirely fake History of the Islamic World was scrupulously written, taught and propagated by thousands of Western Orientalist forgers over the last 200 years.
The Islamic forgery of the Western academics did indeed match the ideological forgery that is known as ‘political islam’: they proved to be the two sides of the same coin. The scope of Western Islamology (or ‘Islamic Studies’) was exactly to come up with narratives, which would offer venues to all the Islamists and to the stupid Muslim followers of ‘political islam’ to misperceive the Şahkulu movement (and generally, the entire History of the Islamic World) and to thus shape a totally distorted idea about this topic (and about thousands of other topics). This was done in order to engulf all the Muslims in a totally false perception of the History of the Islamic World, and in an absolutely compact ignorance of their past and heritage.
The fallacious contextualization of the history of the Şahkulu movement had therefore started long before the English secret services selected the ignorant street seller Erdogan for the position to which they raised him, duly fooling the Turkish military, academics, politicians, and businessmen. As he functioned as the prefab puppet of the worst enemies of the Muslims, a false reading of the History of Islam spread throughout Turkey (as it had already been the case in all the other Muslim countries which, contrarily to Turkey, were colonized). As a matter of fact, nowadays all the worthless theologians and disreputable sheikhs of Diyanet (Turkey’s so-called ‘Directorate of Religious Affairs’) are the equivalent of the uneducated, idiotic and evil theologians of the times of Selim I.
A typical example of historical distortion concerning the Şahkulu movement in today’s Turkey is offered by the shameless villain and crook Murat Çolak who published a ridiculous article in the local newspaper of Kahramanmaraş (formerly Germanikeia) ‘Maraş Gündem’ on the 16th July 2018 under the nonsensical title “FETÖ’nun Tarihsel Kökleri Şahkulu İsyanı ve 15 Temmuz” (The historical roots of FETO organization, the Şahkulu Rebellion, and July 15), which is an allusion to the failed coup of the 15th July 2016. Useless to add that there is no connection at all between the Şahkulu movement (not rebellion) and Fethullah Gülen, the notorious leader of the said organization; https://www.marasgundem.com.tr/makale/fetonun-tarihsel-kokleri-sahkulu-isyani-ve-15-temmuz-16277
The war between the Ottoman state and the Safavid Empire had become inevitable, because the unprecedented killings and the Istanbulite anti-Anatolian malignancy caused an even greater reaction among all the populations of Anatolia, Turanian or not. Selim I and Ismail I exchanged several insulting letters prior to the historic Battle of Chaldiran (August 1514) and some of them have been preserved down to our times. They only bear witness to their reciprocal rejection, without however using the colonially-imposed (starting with the 19th c.) false terms ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’. About:
Rıza Yıldırım, Turkomans between two empires: the origins of the Qızılbash identity in Anatolia (1447-1514).
An objective assessment of the four Turanian rulers whose Iranian education and culture was evident may lead us to devastating conclusions. Finding themselves in different environments, they failed to go beyond the limits of their ‘worlds’. Still, this was imperative for the survival of their respective realms, taking into account what was happening in the Western confines of Asia, namely the pseudo-continent of Europe, which is Asia’s most worthless, most troublesome, and most barbarian peninsula. Consequently, we have to consider them as the initial reason for the collapse of their states, despite the fact that these empires lasted long and fell after 350-400 years. The sole exception is certainly Babur; but he also failed to effectively convey to his offspring and successors the mindset, the predisposition, the attitude, and the ensuing behavior which undeniably helped him transform his Central Asiatic failure into an Indian triumph.
The really embarrassing part of the conclusion is the ascertainment that all four rulers were very civilized, highly cultured, and impressively educated; it goes without saying that I use these terms with the connotation they had at the time, and not the meaning that they have in our fallen, corrupt and putrefied world. They all failed to assess the serious problems that existed in the Islamic World during their lifetime and they proved to be unable to detect the lethal threats that were mounted against their empires and more generally the entire Muslim World. Again, the only exception is Babur, because the time between his conquest of the Sultanate of Delhi and his death is truly brief.
With the exception of Ismail I Safavi (1501-1524), all the rest experienced a rather brief period of reign. Muhammad Shaybani ruled for 10 years (1500-1510); Selim I reigned for only 8 years (1512-1520). And Babur was the sovereign of an empire only for 4.5 years (April 1526-1530). One can truly be astounded with their narrow horizons, naïve approaches to governance, profane understanding of reign, and simplicity in worldview.
Muhammad Shaybani was the living intersection of all things Iranian and Turanian; from his paternal side, he belonged to the lineage of Shayban (also written as Shiban) who was the fifth son of Jochi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan; Jochi was the ancestor of all rulers of the Golden Horde. This means that Muhammad Shaybani was indeed associated and concerned, one way or another, with all the states that came out of the split of the Ulus Jochi (as the Great Empire of the Golden Horde was named at the time), namely the Kazan khanate, the Crimean Khanate, the Qassim Khanate, the Astrakhan khanate and the Nogais.
Muhammad Shaybani was almost 30 years old at the time of the renowned Ugra standoff (1480), when the emperor of the ailing Great Horde failed to impose his dictates on the formerly tributary statelet of Muscovy; Akhmat Khan of the Great Horde and Ivan III of Muscovy, facing one another from the opposite banks of Ugra River, hesitated to cross the river and start fighting, This rather bizarre event is generally considered as the beginning of Muscovy’s independence from the Golden Horde.
From his maternal side, Muhammad Shaybani was the cousin of Janibek’s son Kasym Khan (reign: 1511-1521), the great Kazakh ruler, who expanded his khanate at the detriment of the Bukhara Khanate. Furthermore, according to the historical treatise “Tavarikh-i guzida-yi nusrat-namah” (Chagatai: تواریخ گزیده نصرتنامه ; Таварих-и гузида-йи нусрат-наме), which was elaborated by Alla Murad Annaboyoglu in the early 16th c. (ed. V. P. Yudin/В. П. Юдин, Alma Ata 1969), Munk Timur, i.e. Muhammad Shaybani’s great-great-great-great grandfather, was married to the daughter of a Turanian descendant of Ismail Samani (849-907; reigned after 892), the founder and first ruler of the Samanid dynasty of Eastern Iran, one of the states that seceded from the Abbasid Caliphate while also recognizing the caliph as the head of all Muslims.
In spite of the aforementioned, briefly presented, background, Muhammad Shaybani remained always a sectarian and tribal ruler. Despite the fact that he was unbiased in his approach to people, although he did not discriminate among Iranians and Turanians (therefore viewing them as one nation), and in spite of the fact that he was truly tolerant in his stance towards Muslim mystics, theologians, members of various tariqas, and followers of different madhhab, he clearly proved to be a treacherous subordinate (to Sultan Ahmed Mirza, a Timurid), a cruel oppressor of the Kazakhs, a disastrous ally to khanate of Moghulistan, a distant and useless friend to Bayezid II, and a consummate plunderer. His poor judgment relied on tribal lineage, family affairs, and petty calculations; this resulted in vindictive deeds, sheer opportunism, and day-to-day governance. He would not be a match for any strong strategist who intended to create an empire. Hating all the Timurids, he defeated Babur several times, but he did not prevent him from establishing one of the world’s greatest empires of all times.
Muhammad Shaybani’s silly head had a well-deserved end; the skull served as a lovely drinking goblet in the hands of Ismail I Safavi. One can even assume that, although it was graciously bejeweled, the goblet was thrown to the ground many times, during those fabulous feasts and banquets of Tabriz – just for fun!
Among these four monarchs, Ismail I Safavi was certainly the best prepared to reign; but he was still acting as a semi-nomad pleased with what was available in nature around him. During his early years in the throne of Tabriz, he used to spend time, camping in the mountains and hunting for several months; there was no urgency to conquer lands and territories. The expansion of his empire was slow and it took the form of a joyful endeavor instead of a serious state affair, scrupulous programming or a major expansion stratagem. There were certainly many wars, notably against the Shirvan kingdom (in part of today’s Azerbaijan), the Kartli and Kakheti kingdoms of Georgia that became vassal states, and the Aq-Qoyunlu nomadic sultanate that was entirely eclipsed, but there was no methodical undertaking in this regard. Not a care in the world!
Within few years, the empire of Ismail I Safavi replaced the Aq-Qoyunlu tribal confederacy, but there were no second thoughts, no back thoughts, and no serious observations, let alone monitoring, of developments, state affairs, and relations among neighboring states. To offer an example, not one Iranian magistrate in the court of Ismail I Safavi took note that two Kakheti Georgian embassies had been dispatched by Alexander I to Ivan III of Muscovy (in 1483 and 1491) as soon as the tiny statelet stopped paying tribute to the Golden Horde.
Ismail I Safavi and his spiritual brethren, namely the members of the most ancient and most venerable Safavid Order and the combatants of the Qizilbash contingent, acted out of free will and spiritual illumination. They did not need to even name their empire; at the beginning; the structures of state were rudimentary, and there was no bureaucracy at all. Ismail I Safavid was indeed closer to Cyrus the Great than Shapur I was. Living the epic moments superbly narrated by Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi and others, performing the spiritual exercises of Saif ad-Din Ardabili, and staying in cities only during the cold winter months of the Iranian plateau, they gave the impression that wars consisted merely in short break times of a peaceful eternity that they enjoyed. Fearless to die in battle, knowledgeable about the Hereafter, and devoted in their vow, they were less envious, possessive and worldly than most of the soldiers of their time. There was no need for a rational plan for war, because this is genuinely evil; there was impulse for war instead – which is genuinely human.
This situation may perhaps appear as confusing and unpromising to many people, but it is not. Of course, it is normal for a mystical fighter to believe that due to the synergy between his soul and body, he is indomitable and invincible; this conviction is basically correct and true. However, it takes a very high degree of moral discipline and of self-restraint for the spiritual potency and the inherent impulse of the fighter to be exacted and exerted. Quite unfortunately, Ismail I Safavi’s spiritual master and mentor, Hossein Beg Laleh Shamlu, tolerated a great degree of self-gratification, self-complacency, and even exuberance; he was lenient with the rising emperor, his brethren, and his guards. This did not bode well for the ruler, his army, and his empire. Compromised moral is tantamount to weakened spirituality and emollient attitude conditions human integrity.
This explains perfectly well why, after his defeat in Chaldiran (1514), Ismail I Safavi collapsed and lived the rest of his life ashamed, in sadness, despair, lamentation and uncontrollable alcoholism; in reality, there was nothing to be sad for. During the battle, the Iranians were about to mark a thunderous victory, being provenly better trained to fight; the Ottomans won only because they started using gunpowder artillery that the Iranians did not have. Even worse, the Ottoman army was about to be cut to two pieces, because the Janissaries did not accept to fight against and kill their Muslim brethren. Actually, the Ottoman soldiers who used the cannons that they had transported with greatly difficulty also murdered Ottoman Janissaries. However, a mystical fighter with compromised moral and self-indulgent attitude certainly collapses after a defeat; quite contrarily, a mystic strongly experienced in ascetic self-denial never feels sorrow, frustration and depression – ever after an extreme adversity.
Having to fight against monstrous criminals, rancorous establishments, bloodthirsty rulers, rancorous enemies, inhumanely cruel soldiers, professional serial killers, and greedy armies that sailed off to intentionally perpetrate genocide in Mexico and to circumvent Africa by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, the Safavid elite was rather living in a dream that turned out to become a nightmare for Iran and for the almost the entire world. Iran had always been a major empire with long maritime tradition; Achaemenid Iran is credited with the merge of several earlier regional trade routes that had existed for millennia; this was due to the unmatched, royal administrative genius of Darius I the Great (522-486 BCE).
Darius the Great’s contribution to the emergence of the east-west trade network was twofold: a) the establishment of the Royal Iranian Road and b) the circumnavigation of the Arabian Peninsula and the direct maritime connection of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea with the Persian Gulf. Oman was always an Iranian satrapy; and during the Sassanid times, Iran invaded also Yemen, which was a focal land for the world trade between East and West. However, this background was entirely lost and the Safavid elite did not care at all about the maritime presence and strength of their empire despite the fact that in the beginning of the 16th c., Iranians still controlled an important part of the commerce between East and West, having always been an important constituent of the Islamic times’ navigation and trade. But for all the people around Ismail I Safavi, treasures were to be mainly collected from lands conquered and cities pillaged.
For the case of Ismail I Safavi, one is however tempted to think that the historical heritage itself rather than the various individuals and the ruling elite resurrected the Iranian Empire under the Safavid dynasty. The spiritual exercises of the Safavid Order, their ruminations, their cordial illuminations, and their angelic invocations seem to have electrified the Soul of Iran as incantated by Ferdowsi; but their impious self-indulgence confused the serenity of their souls and made it sure that their pledge was predestined to doom.
Selim I shared the same ideas as Ismail I Safavi and Muhammad Shaybani about a state’s chances to acquire wealth; this was not due to cultural tradition (as in Iran) or to geomorphological impact (as in Central Asia). The state that Selim I -through plots, family disloyalty, treason, and shameful banditry- managed to put under control stretched from Central Anatolia to Belgrade; this had been the usual, typical domain of the Constantinopolitan βασιλείς (basileis; emperors) from the 7th to the 12th c. The official name of the state was invariably ‘Eastern Roman Empire’, and this was the will of all the successors of Mehmet II. But quite unfortunately, the ill-fated Ottoman Sultanate was controlled by a criminal, pseudo-Muslim family, which was manipulated by idiotic theologians, sectarian sheikhs, and a bogus-Islamic authority, the sheikh-ul-Islam (also written as Shaykh al-Islam). The sultans wanted, quite absurdly, to represent the Eastern Roman imperial tradition, while remaining the petty warriors (غازى; ghazi), who relied on worthless and unnecessary razzias (غزية), i.e. military expeditions of greedy barbarians; this meant that they were a 14th c. state in a 16th c. world; this situation could not possibly have a successful exit.
The immediate descendants of Mehmet II continued ruling their realm in a most ineffective manner that included very contradictory elements, practices, concepts and procedures, which produced endless tensions. On one side, the devshirme (دوشیرمه; devshirme; lit. ‘collecting’), i.e. child levy, and the janissary infantry elite (یڭیچری; yeniçeri) gave the Ottoman sultan (and, after 1453, emperor) the real tools to create a formidable empire similar to that of Justinian I. But on the other side, the obscure, nefarious and ominous presence of a body of execrable theologians and their increasing, onerous and catastrophic impact on the sultan gradually turned the Ottoman sultanate to a sort of Papo-Caesarist realm, whereas for the Eastern Roman Empire (of which the Ottomans wanted to make their state the living continuity) the Caesaropapist model of rule had to be the sole, paramount and permanent concept of imperial order.
The existing anachronistic elements, the tensions ensued from the contradictory dynamics, the ruinous hatred unleashed by the blind, dogmatic and cruel sheikhs and sheikh-ul-islams, and the vindictive stance of many sultans (as well as of other members of the Ottoman family) triggered unprecedented reactions. In their outright majority, the populations, either Christian or Muslim, reviled the cursed state of the Ottoman family (دولت عليه عثمانیه; Devlet-i Aliye-i Osmaniye), whereas the wretched family in a vicious and most anti-Islamic manner disrespected the humans that God had entrusted to them. This situation led to real worsening of the living conditions, sheer deterioration of the state structures, and grave decrease of government effectiveness.
The Ottoman Sultanate never managed to acquire a well-structured administration; that’s why it was never a strong empire that could methodically elaborate a program of expansion or Reconquista. Islamic spirituality was besmirched, attacked and later prohibited; the worthless Ottoman bureaucracy was a burden; the wars declared against neighboring empires were due to sectarian or arbitrary motives; and the only sound element in the empire was the janissary elite.
A mere comparison of the Roman and the Ottoman possessions in Africa helps everyone realize how absurd, precarious and inconsequential the rule of the Ottoman sultans was. On the Black Continent, the Ottomans controlled an area more sizeable than the largest Roman dominions there. The Romans never managed to advance successfully south of Egypt and to conquer the Cushitic (i.e. Ancient Ethiopian) Kingdom of Meroe in today’s Sudan; but they controlled the African North up to the coasts of today’s Morocco.
The Ottomans invaded Egypt (1516-1517) to disband the Mamluk state, and then they progressively extended their rule over the entire coast of North Africa, thus including Algiers (1518), Benghazi (1521), Tripoli (1551) and Tunis (1574) in their domain; the Ottomans were invited and acclaimed by the indigenous populations that were mostly Muslim (only according to Western colonial propaganda, the Ottomans ‘colonized’ North Africa), and until the time these lands were incorporated into the Caliphate, the Ottoman Emperor was acknowledged as the caliph – which already made of these lands real dependencies of the Constantinopolitan Muslim ruler. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1554) and Murat III (1576), two Ottoman military expeditions were undertaken in Morocco, ending with the capture of Fez.
In Eastern Africa, the Ottomans sent detachments and corsairs to defend the Somalis against the Portuguese (in the 1520s-1540s), having excellent relations with all the Somali sultanates, notably Adal and the Ajuuraan Empire. In fact, by recognizing the caliph at Constantinople and by mentioning his name first in the Friday prayer, all Muslim African sultanates and emirates recognized the Ottoman Caliphate, thus becoming effectively mere dependencies of the Caliphate. That’s why there was no real need for an Ottoman invasion of the Western Africa, Sahara (the Songhai, Mali, Hausa-Zaria, Kanem-Bornu, Wadai, Funj, Darfur, and other realms), and Eastern Africa. Located south of the Mısır eyaleti (as the province of Egypt was named in Ottoman Turkish), the Habeş eyaleti (i.e. the province of Abyssinia) comprised the coastal lands of today’s Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, and parts of today’s Somalia and Ethiopia). The Adal Somali sultanate shared therefore borders with the Ottoman Empire.
But exactly because of the highly de-centralized condition of the Muslim African world, it was totally impossible for them to establish a major, functional force ready to repel colonial attacks. Even worse, the Ottoman dominions in North Africa never became a serious matter of governmental concern and there was never a real effort to organize, systematize and standardize the integration of the African vilayets into the Ottoman state. Certainly, the Ottoman Empire controlled vast territories in Africa; but because of the aforementioned problems, these lands were a burden rather than an advantage and an asset. In this regard, Selim I’s attack against the Mamluk state and his subsequent invasion of Syria, Palestine, Arabia and Egypt, after the victory he marked over Ismail I Safavi in Chaldiran, proved to be a complete waste of the Ottoman military resources.
Bayezid II’s disloyal son was not prepared to become an emperor and that’s why he was a miserable opportunist without a clue of strategy; he could not understand what truly makes an empire strong, wealthy and sustainable. With respect to the expansion of a state, he did not know which lands are necessary and which are not; even worse, he did not observe -let alone study- patterns and models of expansion from the History of the Islamic Caliphates and Empires.
Selim I was a blind, indoctrinated idiot, who -after his victory in Chaldiran- lost the unique opportunity to promptly invade Iran, merge the two Turanian and Iranian empires, and then attack the Sultanate of Delhi. I have however to admit that he did not have the correct education, the shrewd mindset, and the accurate perception of the reality to possibly think strategically and act accordingly. The Iranian plateau and the valleys of Hindustan (India) and Bengal were far more important than the sands of Arabia and the waters of the Nile.
Had he attempted to establish one empire from Danube to Ganges, he would have followed the example of Timur (Tamerlane); at the same time, he would have created a uniquely wealthy empire able to possess the inexorable resources and the technical infrastructure needed to oppose and defeat the Western colonial kingdoms.
Babur makes Humayun his successor (1530); miniature from a manuscript of the Akbarnameh (created ca. 1602-3)
Babur treated by doctors during a serious illness, in 1498; while recuperating, Babur had a relapse and his condition became critical; for four days he could only take water dribbled into his mouth from a piece of cotton, and for several days he could barely speak.
In his Baburnama (Book of Babur), the founder of the Mughal Empire describes his struggle first to assert and defend his claim to the throne of Samarkand and the region of the Fergana Valley. After being driven out of Samarkand in 1501, he sought to create his headquarters in Kabul and then in northern India in Delhi. In this miniature from a manuscript of the Baburnama, Babur meets Sultan Ali Mirza near Samarqand.
Scene from Babur’s wars; from a miniature of the Farsi edition of Baburnama (translation by the Mughal courtier Abdul Rahīm in AH 998, i.e. 1589-90)
Babur from the miniature of manuscript of Baburnama currently in the Museum of Oriental Art (Государственный музей Востока), Moscow
Vasily III, ruler of Muscovy (1479-1533; reigned after 1505), son of Ivan III and Sophia Palaiologina, receives the ambassador from Babur; miniature from the 19th volume of the Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible (Лицевой летописный свод Ивана Грозного)
The Mausoleum of Babur (Bagh-e Babur, i.e. Babur Gardens) in Kabul
Khusrau shah swearing loyalty to Babur; miniature from the Baburnama copy in Moscow
Babur receiving Baqi Beg Chaghaniyani, a Turkistani Qipchaq, in his encampment on the banks of the Amu Darya (Oxus); Baqi was a loyal supporter of Babur contrarily to his brother Khusraw shah, whom Baqi brought to pledge allegiance; however, at a later moment, Khusraw shah proved to be a traitor once more. Miniature from a manuscript now in the British Library (Or. 3714, f. 35v); it was painted by the Mughal artist Bhem Gujarati.
Miniature from a Baburnama manuscript now in the National Museum, New Delhi; squirrels, a peacock and peahen, demoiselle cranes and fishes
Babur was exempt of sectarian ideas, tribal mentality, and worthless theological prescriptions; of the Western colonial powers he had minimal knowledge, if any. Deep in his heart and mind he had apparently the wish and the dream to prove himself worthy of his glorious past; for this reason, he needed to establish himself somewhere, i.e. to set up the headquarters of his forthcoming empire. Samarqand was an ideal location; but there he failed repeatedly. Babur’s life was not that of a great emperor, because prior to the invasion of the Delhi Sultanate, his realm was always small and constantly under attack.
Continuously moving from place to place with his few but loyal and devout soldiers, Babur was however an indomitable adventurer, an indefatigable soldier, an excellent tactician, and a great strategist. The greatness of the Mughal Empire, which was far wealthier than the Ottoman Empire, Iran, Russia, Holland, England and even Louis XIV’s France, was basically due to its founder Babur. As it is known, he died rather young (at 47). If he had lived as long as his great ancestor Tamerlane (69), the History of Asia would have certainly been markedly different.
Great rulers are those who prepare well their successors; to do so, they have to endlessly convey to their heirs their way of thinking, their approach to facts, their reaction to developments, their world perception and worldview, and -last but not the least- their method of governance. This is often a long enduring process; it is not always sure that the elder son of a ruler is fit to it. For this reason, we often observe a ruler’s predilection for his second or third son. For Babur this dilemma did not exist; Humayun (همایون/lit. ‘auspicious’ in Farsi; born as Mirza Nasir-ud-Din Muhammad; 1508-1556) was his firstborn (being also son to Babur’s favorite wife Maham Begum), and he proved to be a loyal, shrewd and very knowledgeable heir.
Babur apparently imparted his first son with many of his crucial personal traits and great abilities, notably his mobility, agility, flexibility and adaptability. That’s why Humayun managed to survive, although he was inexperienced at the beginning of his reign, when he faced many challenges, particularly from his half-brother Kamran Mirza and from Sher Shah Suri, a villainous and heinous scoundrel who set up a divisive but temporary rule. All the same, Humayun recaptured his empire with the help of Ismail I Safavi’s son Shah Tahmasp I (طهماسب; 1514-1576), and later consolidated and even expanded his realm. About:
However, Babur did not achieve to pass onto his son and successor a superb quality that was the top trait of Timur’s and Genghis Khan’s idiosyncrasy; this consists in a rare moral expertise and spiritual dexterity to invariably disdain and undervalue material achievements of one’s own and to thus infallibly maintain the original impulse toward a great vision permanently alive. Genghis Khan and Timur were indelibly motivated by their vision to unite the world; Babur was stimulated by his first target to re-establish the great empire of his ancestors, but he did not stay long on the throne of Agra (1526-1530).
With him died the vision of a universal empire. Humayun had to fight all his life long to eliminate threats and challenges and, when everything was put under control, he did not enjoy his throne more than few months before dying at 48, due to an accident. When Akbar I (أكبر; born Abu’l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad; 1542-1605; reigned after 1556) was crowned, very little was left from the original vision of his grandfather, Babur. Akbar I expanded greatly his realm and, after a certain moment, he shifted his interest to the North with the intention to extend his borders up to the ancestral lands in Central Asia; but by the end of the 16th c., it had become very clear to Akbar I that it was impossible to incorporate Samarqand and the Ferghana Valley to his empire.
To the early instability of the Mughal Empire and to Akbar I’s effort to expand in Central Asia testify the incessant changes of the Mughal capital: Agra 1526-1540, Agra 1555-1571, Fatehpur Sikri 1571-1585, Lahore 1586-1598 (reflecting Akbar I’s move to the North), Agra 1598-1648 and Delhi 1648-1857. In fact, Akbar’s death marks the end of every Central Asiatic venture of the Mughal rulers.
The Mughal Empire expanded greatly across the Asiatic South, notably the Deccan; it impacted considerably the formation of Muslim sultanates in Southeastern Asia and the islands of today’s Indonesia. All the same, the Gurkanian (گورکانیان; lit. ‘the sons-in law’), as the Iranians called the Mughal emperors due to an old Turanian tradition, only corroborated the unchangeable verdict of History, namely that from Central Asia, Iran, Mesopotamia and Anatolia great military expeditions to faraway lands have often been and can actually be undertaken successfully; but no ruler has ever launched a campaign and a conquest of major parts of Asia, starting from the Valley of Indus and the Valley of Ganges. (The same is also valid for the Yellow River and the Yangtze River valleys.)
Having a truly complex mindset, a very wealthy, composite and perplex culture, and a spiritual impact on their reasoning, the Mughals, the Safavids and the Ottomans could never understand how simple, low, and profane the intentions, attitudes, and mindsets of the colonial bandits, soldiers, merchants, academics and agents were. Had they perceived accurately the level of the colonial purposes and objectives, they would have early reacted against the Western barbarism, cruelty and monstrosity; but they were not able to lower their intellect in order to deal with petty things. They mistook the Western inhumanity for foolishness; their mistake allowed the Western colonials to achieve their targets. How could it have been otherwise? Occam’s razor, if described to a Mughal, Safavid or Ottoman erudite scholar, would have been considered as totally nonsensical, puerile, absurd, and typical for savages. That’s why English, French, Dutch, and American savagery plunged all these civilized lands to poverty, wars, genocides, and interminable destructions down to our days. About:
The simplicity principle in perception and cognition
Blue Mosque, Istanbul: the most representative Ottoman architectural masterpiece
Masjid-e Shah / The Mosque of Shah, Isfahan: the most representative Safavid Iranian architectural masterpiece
Taj Mahal, Agra: the most representative Mughal architectural masterpiece
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FORTHCOMING
Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey
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 VII: The Fallacious Representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists
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 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 XXVII 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, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI and 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.
Until now, 16 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 17th (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 gray 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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Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Ali Qapu Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Western historiography enters a stage of exorbitant falsification when attempting to reconstitute the History of the Safavid dynasty of Iran (1501-1736). What stands at the forefront of the Western forgery and distortion of the History of Iran during the said period is the theory that the Safavid dynasty was ‘Shia’, and also that they ‘converted’ the Turanian population of 16th c. Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. Of course, such fictional conversion never took place, and the Safavid rulers would reject the fake division of Islam into two denominations, since they always proclaimed their Islamic authenticity and integrity, fully refuting the concept of a ‘divided Islam’.
However, this fake division is instrumental for the colonial distortion of History, because on this fallacy hinges the entire Western involvement in the Orient and the conflicts that the criminal and evil states of England, France and America generated across Afro-Eurasia. In order to fully and irreversibly embed the vicious divisive scheme of a supposedly bi-polar Islamic world revolving around two rival empires, namely the ‘Sunni’ Ottomans and the ‘Shia’ Safavids, the Western Orientalists, agents, explorers, diplomats, and statesmen invented the fallacy of the so-called “Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam”.
Of course, at the time (: early 16th c.), the Western colonial powers did not have the chance to impose their false version of History on the Ottomans and the Safavids; they even had not developed Oriental studies properly speaking in their already established pernicious universities. At the time, History was in the making. The only thing that the colonial empires could do, and which they viciously did, was to frame the divisive plot and to pull their diplomatic strings in order to trigger as many Ottoman – Safavid wars as they could. The distortive interpretation and the evil misrepresentation of these facts would come later – in due course of time.
And the malignant fallacy ‘happened’ truly when it ‘should’ have; when the collapsing Ottoman and Iranian empires were eroded through colonial infiltration and evil subversion, then the colonial gangsters and the 19th c. Orientalists started carrying out the projection of the already preconceived forgery onto the Western powers’ local stooges, who by means of shameful bribery and high treason (termed as ‘scholarships for studies in Western Europe’) started diffusing pathetic nonsense and bogus-academic lies in their respective countries only to fit the needs of their masters, namely the colonial powers. At the last stage, the monstrous and murderous forgery of France and England was presented as “History” worldwide only because their colonial empires subjugated almost the entire world and imposed the racist Anglo-French intellectual-academic contamination.
So, the historical forgery that the Western academic murderers have been teaching for over two centuries in their bogus-universities as “Oriental History” is merely the coverage of their inhuman deeds, which plunged Afro-Eurasia into ceaseless local and regional wars, countless rebellions, and two world wars. But the original concept behind the inhuman diplomacy of England and France was already there at the beginning of the 16th c., when they started fallaciously calling Iran, namely a totally Turanian country, “Persia”; this was preposterous. Soon afterwards, they started also naming the Ottoman Empire “Turkey”, which is another expression of their evilness and forgery, because the Ottoman Empire was in reality the most anti-Turkic state in World History.
No less than eight (8) times the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran came to war during the period of 235 years of Safavid rule over Iran. Actually, the wars started in 1514 and ended 1736 with the fall of the Safavids; of course, the historical fact of 8 wars does not mean in this case only 8 years consumed in wars! Most of these wars lasted many years. And actually, the Ottoman-Iranian wars did not end with the demise of the Safavid dynasty. Wars were resumed at the times of the Turanian Afsharid dynasty of Iran (1736-1796) and also during the period of the Turanian Qajar dynasty of Iran (1789-1925). So, from 1514 until 1823, in only 309 years, the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Empire made eleven (11) wars one upon the other. In total, during 309 years, the two empires were engaged in wars against one another for no less than 81 years. About:
If one takes also into consideration the fact that both empires made many other wars with numerous neighboring empires (such as the Mughal Empire, the lately risen Russian Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) and several colonial kingdoms (Spain, Portugal, France, England, etc.), one concludes easily why the two empires gradually collapsed. Furthermore, taking into account first, the diplomatically instigated and deliberately machinated twelve (12) wars between the Ottomans and the Russian Empire, which took place during a period of 350 years (1568-1918) and lasted for no less than 57 years, and second, the five (5) wars between the Iranians and the Russians, which occurred over the span of 177 years (1651-1828) and kept going for 19 years, one can plainly assess the evilness of the divisive intrigues that the Western European colonial diplomats instigated across Afro-Eurasia, and the unprecedented bloodshed that they caused.
Gate of Felicity (Bâbüssaâde), Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Imperial Hall with the throne of the sultan, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Central Hall, Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Open recess (iwan) of the Yerevan Kiosk, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Scene from the Surname-ı Vehbi, located in the Topkapı palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Battle of Chaldiran (1514); Grand painting at the Chehel SotounPalace (despite the fact that the battle ended with Ottoman victory), Safavid Isfahan
The Third Courtyard of the Topkapı Palace in the Ottoman Constantinople, as depicted in a miniature of the Hünername, 1584
Paintings in the main hall of the Chehel Sotoun Palace,Safavid Isfahan
All the wars, which were machinated and instigated by the colonial English and French diplomacies, needed a sophisticated coverage, e.g. some fake reasons, which would ‘explain’ or ‘justify’ to anyone why these wars happened (or ‘had’ to happen). To be convincingly fake, these reasons were based on a total distortion of the identity of both empires, the Ottoman and the Safavid; these distorted identities, which ‘explained’ the Ottoman – Safavid wars to the average public opinion in Europe at the time, became later the vertebral column of the fallacious Western Orientalism and its entirely fake branches, namely Turkology and Iranology.
To describe the extent and the depth of the Western Orientalist fallacy, suffice it that I herewith state the following: a major topic for Turkologists to study should become the Safavid Empire of Iran as a Turanian state, because it was ethnically a Turanian Empire whereby the outright majority of the population used to speak diverse Turkic languages as their native tongues.
Similarly, a major topic for Iranologists to study should become the Ottoman Empire, because an overwhelmingly Iranian culture permeated the state to such extent that, when Mehmet II entered Constantinople on 29th May 1453 and proceeded to the Palace of the Eastern Roman Emperors, the first words that he uttered were neither in Ottoman Turkish nor in Medieval Greek nor in Arabic, but in the classical, literary language of all Turanians, i.e. in Farsi.
The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes;
the owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.
These verses written c. 180 years before the conquest of Constantinople (1453) by the great Iranian poet Saadi (known as Saadi Shirazi, 1210-1291) reveal
– the absolutely identical nature of the Turanians and the Iranians,
– the common cultural background of all Iranian and Turanian nations,
– key elements of the Iranian-Turanian apocalyptic and soteriological eschatology,
– the last moments of the ailing Iranian rule (Chosroes: the last major Sassanid emperor Khusraw Parvez; 570-628), and
Mehmed II, by uttering these verses, clearly indicated that he viewed his victory in terms of Iranian-Turanian culture and eschatology, before all the other eventual or hypothetical parameters involved in the topic (Palaeologi-Ottoman imperial family rivalry; Christian-Muslim religious conflict; Eastern Roman-Turkic ethnic quarrel; economic interests).
In fact, there should have never existed Turkology and Iranology within the context of Western Orientalism, if this unit of academic disciplines were to serve the true purpose of exploration and search for the historical truth. The reason is simple: Turan and Iran have always been an indivisible historical – cultural entity.
However, the false portrait of the Ottoman and the Safavid empires, which had been systematically produced by the 16th c. colonial powers, involved two dimensions of distortion of the reality, namely religious and ethnic. Then, 19th and 20th c. French and English academics and explorers misinterpreted the 16th c. Ottoman – Safavid wars that their countries’ duplicitous diplomats had instigated as of both, religious and ethnic, reasons; and in both cases, these scholars lied, pretty much like today’s Orientalists lie when presenting, teaching and propagating the following forgery: “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids”.
In fact, at the beginning of the 16th c., with the exception of Eastern Iranians (namely the Tajik / Dari speaking populations), there was not one Persian ethnic alive; Iran had already been almost entirely Turanized at the ethnic-linguistic level. Farsi was a highly respected and widely used language of Literature, History, Spirituality, Art, Architecture and Culture that all the educated people felt obliged to learn in young age at the various madrasas of the cities, the towns and the villages of Iran. But in reality, Farsi was at the time a dead language like Latin in 16th c. Germany.
Only later and mainly during the 20th c., following the aggressive and extensive English involvement and the shameful colonial rule of Iran, which was carried out by local puppets, a ‘new’, systematized ‘modern education’ was imposed on all Iranians, the true, traditional Iranian History (based on Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi and many other illustrious epic poets) was forcefully and calamitously replaced by the fake, materialistic, atheistic and evil Iranian ‘History’ of the Orientalists, and Farsi became obligatorily the meaningless ‘national’ language. These tasks have been completed by the pathetically ignorant, uneducated and charlatanesque soldiers, who were later called “Pahlavi dynasty shahs”.
The Universal Empire of Iran disappeared, and a fake, nationalistic, ‘Persian’ pseudo-kingdom was established only to implement the ensuing culturally anti-Iranian and ethnically anti-Turanian, nationalist tyranny. It was a villainous Freemasonic plot and eschatological conspiracy against Iran, involving many ulcerous English, French, American and other enemies of Imperial Iran, who postured as ‘friends’ of ‘Persia’ or ‘admirers’ of the ‘Persian civilization’. They only wanted to fool the Iranians and to insult Iran diachronically, after the absurd and abominable example given by ancient rascals like Herodotus and Aeschylus.
While the rocambolesque and even wacky Pahlavi pseudo-dynasty was in power, the criminal English colonials prepared their substitute, namely several pseudo-theologians, who composed pathetic theoretical systems, triggered absurd religious fanaticism, and engulfed the entire Iranian nation in colonial dilemmas and utmost confusion of political nature. Farsi, as the language of the systematized Western education, was indeed revivified particularly among the incessantly increasing urban populations, who started forgetting their native tongues, notably Azeri, Turkmen and other.
During the time of the Pahlavi bogus-Iranian ‘shahs’ (1925-1979), a ‘white’, nationalist terror was imposed on the misfortunate nation; the use of other languages was strictly prohibited. However, this linguistic revival is a fake, and it looks like an awakening of the mummy. The people, who speak Farsi as a native language in today’s Iran, are of Turanian ethnic origin in their outright majority; even worse, their culture is entirely Turanian–Iranian, and their most celebrated rulers and beloved emperors are all Turanians, like Shah Isma’il I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty.
This does not mean that there are not several genuine Iranian languages spoken today in Iran by native speakers; of course, there are many: they speak Baluch, Lori, Bakhtiari, Gorani, Faili, Kalhori, Gilani, Laki, Talysh, etc. But these ethno-linguistic groups represent rather small minorities in Iran. These populations are certainly of Iranian ethnic origin, but they share the common Iranian-Turanian culture with all the populations of Turanian ethnic origin in Iran and in many other countries.
The present situation in Iran looks strange and absurd to all the local victims of the diffusion of Western propaganda of educational-academic-intellectual character; in fact, the systematic propagation of the erroneous Western notion of ‘nation’ or ‘ethnic group’ triggered only troubles and conflicts. This noxious development relates to the inhuman intellectual perversion that is called ‘Enlightenment’ in the Western world. This consists in intellectual darkness and educational paranoia that caused numerous wars over the past 250 years.
For millennia, various ethnic groups -Iranian and Turanian- speaking different languages, shared always their common culture and tradition without feeling or caring about the unsubstantiated and otherwise nonexistent, fake borders and the evil division lines that the 18th c. Western European concept of ‘nation’ produced worldwide. This historical reality of Turanian-Iranian indivisibility was irrevocable within the universal Iranian Empire, which was the supreme blessing of God and the best present that the divine world had bestowed upon Mankind.
Whatever fallacy the Western Orientalists may eventually invent and include in their often nonsensical bibliography falls apart in the light of all historical sources and texts. If the modern Western academia and intellectuals cannot understand the true reality, this is due to their degenerate minds, the advanced rottenness of their decomposed educational and social structures, and the nauseating putrefaction of their moral core.
Then, the fabrication of the fake divide “Turks vs. Persians” helped the criminal colonial powers spread divisions among the Turanians of Western, Central, Southern and Northern Asia, and the Caucasus region. The parallel creation of the fake divide “Sunni Muslims vs. Shia Muslims” was instrumental in plunging the entire Islamic world in permanent strife. Then, the combined fallacy “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids” is an explosive mixture geared to prolong and perpetuate the catastrophic division of all the populations living between the Bosporus and the Indus River Delta.
However, if they destroy the evil deeds of the local puppets of the Anglo-Saxon colonial governments, these populations could triumphantly unite in a secular super-state of ca. 450 million people and thus become the new superpower and Western Asia’s real locomotive of nations. Alternatively, if the existing colonial divisions are allowed to further exist, they can trigger new fratricidal wars among the Turks, who are culturally Iranian, and the Iranians, who are ethnically Turks.
For all the aforementioned national divisions and historical distortions to be duly presented and propagated worldwide by the Western historical forgers in a complete manner, a key point had to be invented: the supposed Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. This Orientalist fallacy hinges of the misrepresentation of the mystical Safavid Order, which founded an entire empire for themselves: the Turanian Empire of Safavid Iran.
However, the falsification of the identity and the deeds of the Safavid Order would never be successfully undertaken worldwide, if the entire Western world was not already totally confused about two totally different issues, which were systematically presented to the average people of all the Western countries as supposedly ‘one’ by their religious, academic and intellectual authorities alike: spirituality and religion.
Nevertheless, spirituality and religion are totally distinct activities of the spiritual and the material hypostases of the human being.
Sultanahmet Square in Ottoman Constantinople: the Eastern Roman hippodrome and Obelisk of Theodosius, which was transported from Luxor
Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Safavid Isfahan
Procession of the guilds in the hippodrome as per a miniature of the Surname-i Vehbi (1582)
Naqsh-e Jahan, the imperial square in Safavid Isfahan
—————- BLUE MOSQUE, OTTOMAN CONSTANTINOPLE —————-
Blue mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii): built between 1609 and 1617
Blue mosque, part of the interior decoration
Blue mosque, the mihrab (center) and the minbar (right)
—————– SHAH MOSQUE, SAFAVID ISFAHAN —————————-
Shah Mosque (Masjid-e Shah): built between 1611 and 1629
The winter hypostyle
The dome
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FORTHCOMING
Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey
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 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?
Россия, Украина и мир-IV: Континентальные империи и морские державы – фальшивые друзья и единственный враг россиян
Or how the Romanov collapsed only to the benefit of Serbs’ and Greeks’ Evil Elites
Или как Романовы рухнули только в пользу злых элит сербов и греков
Contents
I. Prof. Huntington’s entirely misunderstood Book
II. The Serbian Delusion of Russians
III. The Clash of Civilization? A Mirage come True
IV. Spirituality & Universalism: Divine Earth vs. Unholy Sea
V. Civilized Continental Empires vs. Barbarian Sea Powers
VI. Continental Empires, Sea Powers, and Divisive Traps
VII. The ‘Greek Orthodox’ Delusion of Russians
Содержание
I. Совершенно неправильно понятая книга профессора Хантингтона
II. Сербское заблуждение русских
III. Столкновение цивилизаций? Сбывшийся мираж
IV. Духовность и универсализм: Божественная Земля против Нечестивого Моря
V. Цивилизованные континентальные империи против варварских морских держав
VI. Континентальные империи, морские державы и разделительные ловушки
VII. ‘Греческое православное’ заблуждение русских
Since the conflict in Ukraine affects the entire world, it is essential at this point for me to shift the focus and shed light on two issues that should attract the attention of the Russian leadership, because these thorny matters can turn out to be disastrous traps. When a major readjustment of the world’s strategic balance takes place, it is essential for a rising alliance of nations not to fall into colonial traps set before 200 years in order to ensure continuity of the Western world’s prevalence.
The worst trap that can be set to the rising challengers of the international status quo is the deceitful appearance of a fake friend, i.e. a colonially fabricated state, which appears to be friendly, familiar or able to become a trusted partner of the emerging competitor. But in reality, due to the fact that this state is fully instrumentalized, controlled and maneuvered by the colonial powers, it inevitably functions as a real energy-consumer, mindblower or even ultimate destroyer of the aspiring super-power.
In fact, for the faithless crooks, who rule the colonial countries of the West, it is easy to use religion to make a purposefully fabricated and duly instrumentalized state simulate the ‘friendly’ force and, in the process, generate calamitous engagements for the emerging power.
I. Prof. Huntington’s entirely misunderstood Book
Prof. Huntington’s overwhelmingly notorious and extremely fallacious book on the purported Clash of Civilizations (1996) was -thank God- quite early known to me; the same is valid for the evil intents and purposes that are hidden behind it. One has to recall however that the book had become first famous as a lecture in 1992 and as an article in 1993.
I quite often remember the wonderful, long discussions that I entertained about it in Istanbul (between 1993 and 1997) with my excellent -alas, deceased- Turkish friends, namely the famous film director Halit Refig (Halit Refiğ; 1934-2009) and the leading Kemalist intellectual and economist Prof. Erol Manisali (Erol Manisalı; 1940-2022).
Although they were fully aware of the dangers that such a nefarious book entailed for Turkey (and for many other countries, by the way), I always believed that my friends underestimated its impact, because they did not read the deceitfully written book in the proper manner. The same conclusion is also valid for Francis Fukuyama’s apparently nonsensical but definitely revelatory book about the End of History (1992). Most of the people worldwide have misunderstood these two books, which have functioned like the pillars Boaz (בֹּעַז) and Jachin (יָכִין), ushering us into the era of the Mankind extermination.
Still today, many Russians and many other countries’ natives fail to realize how these two books, as vicious tools in the hands of immoral and heinous rascals, shape and will shape the world, until the moment someone, who achieved to access their true, mystically embedded and secretively encrypted meaning, manages finally to fully outmaneuver them. I am therefore irrevocably convinced that, for this to be done, one needs to read these two blasphemous books in reverse.
Look now at the unprecedented extent of the feat: although Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (1989) against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988), a book that did not herald the eradication of Islam and the extermination of Mankind, the supreme guide (رهبر معظم ایران /rahbar-e moazam-e Iran) of the unfortunate nation (and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) failed to issue two new fatwas for the above mentioned books, which were written by far more ulcerous enemies of the Islamic religion and the Muslim nation.
Nonetheless, the same deep regret and absolutely deprecatory evaluation should be expressed as regards today’s Sunni muftis, imams and theologians, who fail to assess the true nature of the world in which they have been hitherto allowed to live. All these fools, instead of making sense of the terribly disastrous plots that have been mounted against all Muslim nations, seem to be happy enough to perpetually live in the rhythm of the famous song ‘Let’s forget about tomorrow’ (initially sung as ‘Forget domani’ by Katyna Ranieri in the 1964 film The Yellow Rolls-Royce), hypnotizing their misfortunate followers, while also incapacitating all the Muslim states.
Where does Russia stand in this regard?
As a matter of fact, the two ominous books contain approaches and considerations, world views and conclusions that do not bode well for the Russian Federation, the Russians, and Orthodox Christianity. Notions of all these elements we are able to already detect in the ongoing conflict that the Russian administration correctly and accurately named ‘Special Operation’ (специальная военная операция), and not ‘war’.
But do they understand that only the outcome of a conflict is the kaleidoscope of all intents and purposes? As I have never discussed with any of them personally, I don’t venture to respond; however, it is true that when the magistrates and the potentates of a country fail to accurately evaluate the numerous dimensions of a conflict that their enemies invent or ponder over, they sooner or later end up with a defeat. The ensuing debacle can at times be of colossal proportions like the fall of the Romanov dynasty (1917), which was undeniably the top achievement of Russia’s best friends (namely England and France) during WW I.
For the time being and on the basis of his recent articles and interviews, I have the feeling that Dmitri Medvedev has a very correct and very accurate perception of the Ukrainian conflict’s multilayered dimensions; but did he read the aforementioned impious books in reverse? This is crucially essential to ask now, because the Russian Federation faces indeed an existential threat at a moment the Russian leadership has not yet decided to threaten the very existence of Russia’s enemies. This situation -in and by itself- creates already a problem.
Threats are not always visible; sometimes, invisible threats emanate from a state’s ostensible friends. This is so, because sea powers (the likes of England, France and the US), being indisputably inferior, can never win over continental empires in a true and honest military confrontation. That is why they customarily resort to cheating; they thus undertake all types of ruse, deceit, and plot. Their external relations and international involvement constantly and systematically require an outstanding array of theatrical practices.
Their secret masters have actually trained, educated and guided the academic, intellectual, political, economic, and military leadership of all those states to act accordingly. Unfortunately, those who fail to read texts in reverse cannot possibly understand, being thus predestined to inevitably lose and disappear. The epitome of the colonial decision-making, practice, policy, diplomacy and intrusion is the maxim ‘all the world’s a stage’ (from William Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’: Act II Scene VII Line 139). General introductory reading:
Nicholas II failed to save his throne and prolong his dynasty, because he naively accepted the external appearance of certain situations and he failed to unveil the trap set by the scheming Western European powers, i.e. the Serb-Russian alliance or, if you want, the Alliance of Orthodox Nations. To defend his fake friend, namely the French puppet named ‘King of Serbs’, the last Romanov terminated his illustrious dynasty. This does not mean that in 1914 the King of Serbia (Peter I of Serbia/ Пётр I Карагеоргиевич; 1844-1921) said lies to the Russian ambassador, Baron Nicholas Genrikhovich Hartwig (Nikolaus von Hartwig/Николай Генрихович Гартвиг; 1857–1914: assassinated by means of magical invocation on the 10th July, i.e. 12 days after the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo). No! Peter I of Serbia did not pretend to be a friend of Russia, while being an enemy.
At the time, the King of Serbia was sincerely a friend of the Russian monarchy – as a person with feelings, thoughts, opinions and considerations; but he could not see, feel or detect how he functioned, placed on the European chessboard by his ‘gods’, namely all the various French statesmen, politicians, diplomats, military officers, agents, ‘advisors’, academics, intellectuals and businessmen who had created Serbia in the first place (from 1804 until the Ottoman recognition of the Kingdom of Serbia: de facto in 1867, de jure in 1878, and involving diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire were established in 1886). {I don’t mention herewith the short-lived Kingdom of Serbia (1718–1739), because it was an Austrian-Hungarian fabrication.} Since Day 1, the entire Serb military, political, economic, and academic-intellectual leadership followed the path of their predecessors, i.e. the early 19th c. rebels who were duly utilized by France as expendable material against the Ottoman Empire; in fact, it was sort of ‘Arab Spring operation’ of those days. Thus, the entire establishment of Serbia functioned inevitably as a trap, first for the Serbs themselves and subsequently for the Russians.
It was therefore inevitable that the Serbian royal and political class foolishly believed the pro-Serbian feelings of the French criminals. However, the undeniable fact is that, exposed to many great powers, the Serbians could never function properly as a tiny, independent nation around Belgrade. The colonial trap was later strengthened with the formation of the Pan-Slavic movement, notably after the Prague Slavic Congress was first held in 1848.
Things turned worse, because various local stooges of high rank (generals, ministers and academics) were deceitfully flattered with their calamitous initiation in the filthy rites of French and English Freemasonry (and the ensuing financial benefits), and they therefore willingly worked for the interests of their masters, i.e. the French and the English colonial gangs, without understanding or imagining the extent to which they contributed to the engulfment of their country. They helped further diffuse the unnecessary, divisive and catastrophic Anti-German Pan-Slavic delusion either in Russia or in Serbia.
The three emperors meeting at Skierniewice on 15 September 1884: an Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, Ottoman, Iranian and Chinese alliance at the end of the 19th c. would save the entire mankind from two world wars, one cold war, and numerous other conflicts.
At the end of the whole process, Nicholas II failed to detect the masterfully prepared Serbian trap that the French had long prepared against their ally whom they so much loathed. How could it happen otherwise? So many of the last czar’s prime ministers, ministers and generals were Freemasons and members of French Freemasonic lodges that they totally obscured Nikolai II Alexandrovich’s sight and vision; their endless, unreserved and sophisticated lies, plots, fake promises, dissimulated proclivities, and insidious activities helped only fool the Russian monarch.
When it comes to the creation of states in Europe, what matters most is the location that these fabrications have on the European chessboard. The ‘gods’ (or creators) of these fake states know how to play the game of non-reversing mirrors very well, when creating these commodities. This means that they know the correct position where they have to locate their tools, which are named ‘states’; this has nothing to do with ‘historical nations’. Why? Because the criminal scoundrels that govern the sea powers do not want to either support or revive historically known ethnic nations; they only fabricate civic nations to which they merely provide the fake story, i.e. the absolutely false and ludicrous narrative that their stooges locally teach as the supposed ‘history of the glorious ancestors’.
So, we can conclude that the French produced (or literally ‘gave birth to’) Serbia at a spot where it could never function as a proper ally of Russia. Why this is so we can easily assess! By establishing an alliance with the microscopic (or rather nanoscopic) ‘nation’ of Serbia, Imperial Russia would be forced to occasionally clash with other major continental empires, notably Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Caliphate (and later Imperial Germany), which was absurd for Russia, disastrous for Christian Orthodoxy, and calamitous for all the nations that lived in peace in the wider region.
This conclusion can be thoroughly corroborated following the consultation of the proper maps. Compare the territorial increase of Serbia from 1912 to 1918 and the territorial loss of Russia during the same period! Serbia’s population increased from 2.9 million to 4.5 million in 1914 and to 12 million in 1918; the tiny Danube kingdom with an area smaller than 35000 km2 in 1912 became a sizeable state with an area ca. 250000 km2, i.e. slightly less than that of Italy, a major European power! Contrarily, Russia lost vast territories with the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (3 March 1918; Брестский мирный договор). This disaster occurred only due to the trap set by France and England to the Russian czars; the trap’s name was ‘Serbia’; Pan-Slavism was merely the Marketing campaign of the trap.
The territorial gains of Serbia between 1912 and 1918
Europe in 1914
Russian borders at the time of Brest Litovsk treaty (3 March 1918)
Russian territorial losses as per the Brest Litovsk Treaty
How should we therefore read books and texts in reverse, timely spotting traps and adequately outplotting the degenerate sea powers?
III. The Clash of Civilization? A Mirage come True
Prof. Huntington’s story is not a historical book at all; every simple reader can understand this, because it is well known that, throughout 5-6 millennia of Human History, there has never been a ‘clash of civilizations’. On the 17th September 2005, writing for the portal Buzzle, I totally deplored the nonsensical effort of Turkey and Spain to establish a ridiculous organization in hypothetical, yet idiotic, opposition to the said book. The title was “The Clash and the Alliance of Civilizations: too much ado for nothing!”; the article has been widely republished, commented, quoted, referred to, and … misunderstood. You can find this article here:
The rather brief, 2300-word article starts from a very simple, undeniably correct, point that the quasi-totality of the readers of Huntington’s story were fooled enough not to take into consideration. However, I must admit that, quite deceptively, the trap was set beforehand, thanks to the book’s title itself! I therefore found it compulsory to start my article from the primordial point and to refute the falsehood, which is included in the Prof. Huntington’s devilishly misleading title.
My article’s first unit focused on «‘Clash of Civilizations’: an irrelevant and a-historical concept.».
The article’s three other units were the following:
«The Divide ‘East vs. West’ is an Orientalist, Colonial Aberration»
«Impossibility of Clash of Civilizations in Our Era»
«There can never be an ‘Alliance of Civilizations’!»
My approach was quite simple; you can never oppose something that does not exist. This is correct at all times, except you are as stupid and as the pathetic as Erdogan, who -due to his nauseating ignorance, detrimental lack of education, and sly yet mean character- fell in the trap and, quite ludicrously, added fuel to the fire – only to the detriment of his own country.
Here you have comments about my article, and my denunciation of some of them:
Why do I claim that there have never been any clashes of civilization anytime, anywhere, and under any circumstances whatsoever?
Civilization is commonly defined as a high “stage of human social and cultural development and organization” or “any complex society characterized by the development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system)”
People, societies, nomads, states, hordes, tribes and armies never made war one upon the other, because of ‘civilization’ or due to difference of civilization; even in cases as per which (through a racist viewpoint – and this is absolutely impermissible for humans to accept) «barbarians waged war on a supposedly ‘civilized’ kingdom», the war never occurred because the barbarians envied the supposedly ‘civilized’ kingdom or the latter wanted to ‘civilize’ them. What was at stake was either of spiritual-religious-moral nature or of economic motives; in many cases, it was a matter of survival. However, this means that there was never a truly speaking ‘clash of civilizations’.
Religious wars are of very diverse nature, and quite often they are fought only for material benefits and royal prestige, but they never constitute ‘wars’ (or a ‘clash’) of civilization. This is so because, in any historical period, religion constitutes only a small fraction of the civilization of a nation; this means that if you describe a ‘clash of religions’ as ‘clash of civilizations’, you will end up in an over-generalization without purpose. And as it is very well known, many times religious wars occurred between people who had the same civilization.
Jehu of Israel bows in front of Shalmaneser III of Assyria from the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (858-824 BCE): Assyria’s wars with other Oriental states was not a ‘Clash of Civilizations’.
The Roman Emperor Valerian, captive after his defeat at Urhoy-Urfa/Edessa of Osrhoene (260 CE) is depicted as kneeling in front of the victorious Iranian Emperor Shapur I (215-270; ruled after 240) in the bas-reliefs of Naqsh-e Rustam. The Iranian-Roman wars were not a ‘Clash of Civilizations’.
Taizong (598-649; reigned after 626), founding Emperor of the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), gives audience to the Tibetan ambassador Gar Tongtsen Yulsung (painting by Yan Liben).
King Suvarnapuspa of Kucha (600-625 CE) as depicted in Kizil Cave 69 (Eastern Turkestan/Xinjiang); he was a vassal of the Western Turkic Khaganate. Chinese Emperor Taizong’s war against Kucha was not a ‘Clash of Civilization’.
Naval battle scene between the Eastern Roman fleet and the attacking navies of the combined Eastern Roman rebel (Thomas the Slav) and Islamic imperial forces; the event took place in 821-823. The Eastern Roman fleet makes ostensible use of the Roman fire (πυρ ρωμαϊκόν/pyr rhomaikon) that the Western European mendacious academics deliberately distorted as ‘Greek fire’. The numerous wars between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphates did not constitute a ‘Clash of Civilizations’, even more so because almost every time numerous dissidents from either sides fought with the enemy of their state.
The Battle of Chaldiran (depicted at the Chehel Sotoun Pavilion in Esfahan) between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran (1514) was not an episode of the otherwise nonexistent ‘Clash of Civilizations’.
Then, why did Prof. Huntington give a so bizarre title to his book?
This is exactly what only astute and perspicacious readers can assess; in other words, this is up to those who can read the text in reverse. It is again the same game of non-reversing mirrors; Prof. Huntington projected onto the past what he guided experts, statesmen, military officers, diplomats, politicians, academics, intellectuals, agents and others to create in the future.
In other words, he made all of his gullible readers (involving heads of state, premiers, ministers, ambassadors, professors, and others) ‘see’ in the past something that never existed, because he merely fabricated a mirage (or Fata Morgana) that he placed in the future.
In other words those, who are properly instructed as to how to read and implement the book contents, will produce a situation (namely the clash of civilizations) that the idiots (like Erdogan and many other heads of state, prime ministers, etc. all over world) will -very mistakenly- view as the comeback of an earlier state of affairs. But, as I said as early in 2005, no clash of civilization has ever existed in the past.
Then, the answer to the earlier question is very simple:
Prof. Huntington did not give a bizarre title to his book. The clash of civilizations that he wrote about is merely the clash of civilizations that he wanted to generate in the future in a way to trigger numerous wars in many parts of the world to the benefit of his financiers. To do so, he fooled most of his readers that the clash of civilizations had already taken place whereas this is not the case.
IV. Spirituality & Universalism: Divine Earth vs. Unholy Sea
Once deeply and fully comprehended, Prof. Huntington’s book is a harmless amount of paper waste that anyone can use for whatever purpose one may choose; recycled is better than read.
All the same, I have to state that governments, administrations, establishments, military academies, diplomacies, academic institutions and mass media all over the world must take into account, when they define their decision-making, the fact that the outright majority of bureaucrats, magistrates and officers in the UK, US, NATO and other Western countries have already been formed and educated in the darkness and the negativity of this prejudicial book. A primary task for governments in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Central-Eastern Europe is therefore to outmaneuver the evil plan encrusted in the lines of the scheming professor’s traveler’s companion to the Hell.
If World History is studied in the light of Spiritual Ontology, the definition of the major continental empires as creative forces of the Earth will help explorers and investigators realize the true but deceitful nature of the modern world and identify sea powers as destructive forces of the Sea. Today’s major powers in Asia, namely China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Iran, are in reality the offspring of the main historical empires that successively developed illustrious civilizations whose achievements are still unmatched by the Western sciences and technologies. The same is valid for several outstanding states in Africa and Latin America. For all of them, it is surely imperative to explore the methods of creative governance that their forefathers employed and to follow in their footsteps.
Continental empires are expanding structures that reflect human societies in their creative dimension. History, as we know it, was formed exclusively by continental empires; to them the various seas were (and could only be) the periphery, which would eventually be used in a positive and creative manner. The Achaemenid Empire of Iran offered a groundbreaking example in this regard; by re-opening the Ancient Suez Canal (also known as the Canal of the Pharaohs), the Iranian imperial authorities offered themselves another transportation means in order to ensure communication between the satrapy of Egypt and Fars (: Persia), Iran’s mainland and imperial headquarters. This was a creative innovation indeed. About:
To make a striking contrast between the virtuous continental empires and the evil sea powers, I have now to offer a dramatic comparison; when the Iranians intended to further pursue the expansion of their already vast empire and to invade Egypt and Cush (Napata in Ancient Sudan, i.e. the historical Ethiopia), they undertook (under Kambujiya/Cambyses; reigned 530-522 BCE) a land invasion of the Valley of the Nile – and not an overseas maritime expedition. The Iranian occupation of Egypt ushered Egyptians into an era of peace and this was a very positive development, particularly if we take into consideration the terrible divisions that the country had known for centuries even before the three Assyrian invasions, 150 years earlier.
Achaemenid Iran: from Ukraine to Sudan and from Albania to Tibet
Iranians could invade Egypt by circumnavigating the Arabian Peninsula but they knew that this would certainly have an ominous end; imperial expansion is far more important an attempt than mere transportation. Uniting lands under a universal scepter is a divine blessing; sending messages and transporting merchandises sold or purchased elsewhere are ordinary human activities. You can never compare the former to the latter. This worldview or world conceptualization was common among all the important nations of the Antiquity. The valorization of the Earth derived from critical passages of their holy books; it was a matter of Cosmogony and Cosmology.
On the other hand, the inferiority, transience and profanity of the Sea (: Salt Waters), the marginal role that it had to play in human affairs, and the preservation of life far from it were also key topics of the most civilized ancient nations’ holy books. In striking contrast with Ether, Soft Waters, Earth and Air, the Sea represented only an unholy element of chaos, disorder, uselessness and unholiness. For the Ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Cushites, Hittites and Iranians, the seas were the threatening barbarian periphery; no divine attribute was given to this element. It is irrevocably imperative that, when it comes to human affairs, namely prophecy, eschatology, and soteriology, there is no Salvation in the Sea. The impure element will be canceled and, by definition, it has no place either in the Original Paradise or in the Kingdom of the Heaven.
If we leave Spiritual Ontology and History of Religions aside, we can conclude that the ensuing historical fact proved to be that islands never generated civilizations; on the contrary, they merely reflected the civilizations developed in the lands in the vicinity of which these islands happened to be. It is noteworthy that, only in later periods (1st millennium BCE) and among less advanced civilizations (namely the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Romans, etc.), we attest divinities of the sea. Indicatively I add that the Ancient Yemenites (Sheba, Awsan, Qataban, Himyar and Hadhramaut), who developed a great continental civilization while also engaging in extensive maritime activities, colonizing Somalia, Socotra, and the Eastern African coast land, and sailing to India and beyond, did not worship any major divinity of the sea. This assessment only reconfirms my earlier statement that, contrarily to the holy element of Soft Waters (later mythologized among Greeks and Romans as the ‘Ocean’, i.e. the Soft Waters stream that surrounds the Earth), the Sea (Salt Waters) is an impure and profane element.
Consequently, we can realize why sea powers do not and cannot become proper empires. This is so, because they lack land continuity; accordingly, people living in islands cannot fathom the concept of universal empire, which exemplified all major historical empires. Yet, universalism (or ecumenism) is conditio sine qua non for the foundation of a real empire, and this fact became well known as early as the World History’s first empire, namely that of Sargon of Akkad, before 4500 years. It goes without saying that all empires started first as small kingdoms, and all theoretical considerations appeared after a significant land expansion. This means that land invasions are in reality enthralling methods of spiritual initiation for every good king and for his gallant soldiers and armies. Violence is holy, whereas absence thereof is profane and destructive.
The first empire of World History and the beginning of Universalism: the Akkadian Empire of Sargon of Akkad
Among all the major historical empires, the Roman Empire constitutes an oddity. Although it undeniably expanded across vast lands in Europe, Africa and Asia, in spite of the fact that it willingly attempted to be positioned in the series of historical empires that originate from Mesopotamia (translation imperii), and notwithstanding its apparent, continental character, it ended up with the formation of a truly bizarre imperial structure around a sea: the Mediterranean.
The Roman Empire under Octavian Augustus
The Roman Empire under Trajan
As such, the Roman Empire was the materialization of a rather counterfeit universalism, because the earlier empires and their theoretical backgrounds made full abstraction of the sea. Imperial considerations matter greatly for Russia today, because the Eastern Roman Empire functioned as a pertinent continental empire, fully detaching itself from the already briefly described Roman particularity, and in the process, epitomizing (as New Rome) what Third Rome (Muscovy-Russia) would, could and should be. About:
V. Civilized Continental Empires vs. Barbarian Sea Powers
To make a clear distinction between civilization and barbarism, we can compare the Achaemenid Iranian conquest of Egypt (525 BCE) with the Spanish invasion of Mexico; there is an enormous difference between the two events that are separated from one another by more than 2000 years. The first event did not cause even one thousandth (1/1000) of the bloodshed caused in Mexico by the Spanish colonial monsters that were fully conscious of the fact that they fought with detrimentally superior weapons (firearms).
Plainly acting as a continental empire, Achaemenid Iran fully respected the Ancient Egyptian population, civilization and local administration. The Achaemenid shahs were depicted as typical Egyptian pharaohs with complete Egyptian hieroglyphic names and in Ancient Egyptian art form; the Iranian satraps’ close cooperation with the major sacerdotal colleges (notably the Iwnw-Heliopolitan priesthood) ensured continuity for the local civilization, peace and freedom for the Egyptian people, prosperity for the imperial administration, and seamless integration of Egypt in the empire. Later, the Iranian pattern of local rule, provincial administration, and peaceful annexation was maintained by the Ptolemies and the Romans. It was an undeniable success of religious tolerance, socio-behavioral distinction, and cultural persistence.
The Achaemenid Emperor Kambujiya (Cambyses), depicted as Egyptian, kneels in front of Apis.
Darius I the Great as depicted in Iran (Behistun reliefs)
All five Pharaonic names of Darius I the Great in Egyptian hieroglyphics
The Iranians did not force the Egyptians to become Zoroastrians, contrarily to the monstrous and evil attitude of the Spanish conquistadores who executed scores of innocent, imperially proud, and spiritually superior Mexicans, who did not accept to change their religion and become ‘Christian’. The Iranians did not demand of the Egyptians to learn Old Achaemenid Iranian, write in cuneiform writing, accept the Iranian culture, and adopt the Iranian customs and way of life. Furthermore, the Iranians did not impose a loathsome tyranny on the Egyptians.
Quite contrarily, the cruel Spanish rule over Mexico caused an unprecedented genocide (in the name of Jesus), whereas those who survived had to learn and write Spanish, accept the obnoxious Castilian culture, and imitate the cruel behavior of their conquerors; however, even in that case, they were viewed as an inferior race and treated with incommensurable contempt. This concerned even the mestizos, every offspring of mixed race (Mexican/indigenous and Iberian).
The death of the Aztec King Moctezuma, depicted in the ‘Florentine Codex’, which is an opus of 12 volumes written by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. The original title was ‘La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España’ (The Universal History of the Things of New Spain)
Aztec ruler Xicoténcatl and Hernán Cortés from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala
Nuño de Guzmán & Tlaxcalan allies conquering Michoacan
The Battle of Olumba; 7 July 1520
Cortés and his wife, the treacherous indigenous woman La Malinche, meet Moctezuma Tenochtitlán, 8 November 1519
La Malinche carrying arms in the Battle of Tepotzotlán (1520), from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala
The battle of Otumba, 7 July 1520
“La noche triste” (the sad night); 1 July 1520: when Hernán Cortés and his gangsters, along with their native allies, were defeated and driven out of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, losing two thirds of their force.
Fully functioning as a sea power, pseudo-Christian Spain (considered as heretic by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople at the time) disrespected the populations that the conquistadores enslaved overseas, spreading for the first time in World History racism outside the limits of Western Europe. Intentionally, viciously and bestially, the 16th c. Spanish Jihadists {this is the correct term!} destroyed a civilization incomparably higher than theirs in every sense. The criminal gangsters dismantled every sense of local administration and imposed Spanish criteria, measures and concepts, therefore decimating the local populations and extending their bias, bigotry, hatred of the other, cruelty and inhumanity across other continents. About:
The Spaniards set the pattern for the other Western Europeans who imitated their barbarism; I am herewith referring to the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch and the English. We can certainly discern variances of colonial practice, but this fact does not change in anything the appalling nature of the Western European racism, odium and inhumanity. The French were worse than the Spaniards, and the English proved to be worse than the French, because they wanted to “make the world England” – which is the most racist tenet ever uttered in Word History.
Closing this brief description, I have however to add that the Ancient World’s major sea powers, namely the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, were not known for similar cruelty; we don’t have any textual source or archaeological evidence to support such claim.
All the same, there was certainly an abominable model that the spiritual masters of the conquistadores, i.e. the apostate popes of Rome and the Renaissance intellectuals, certainly had in mind before sending the conquistadores to butcher the civilized indigenous populations of the lands that they colonized.
It consists in one of the World History’s bleakest pages of utmost barbarism, inhuman monstrosity, and repugnant cruelty. The abhorrent deed that served as model for the conquistadores was perpetrated by a tiny, racist and uncivilized state that the Western colonial countries have always exalted. Quite interestingly, during the Christian Eastern Roman imperial times, the past of this abominable and outrageous statelet was deplored and detested, as it was considered an outcast of the civilized world.
Paranoid gangster, blasphemous atheist, and barbarian Pericles (495-429 BCE) was an ignominious perpetrator of series of crimes against the Mankind; however, for the needs of the villainous agenda that provided for the corruption of the modern world, he was shamelessly and absurdly depicted (1852) as an exemplary statesman (Pericles’ Funeral Oration / Perikles hält die Leichenrede) by the German painter Philipp Foltz, a Freemason. It was this cruel beast’s partners, colleagues, associates, pupils and followers, who carried out the genocide of the Melians. The History of Ancient Greece is a monstrous fabrication undertaken by lewd Modern European intellectuals, mendacious academics, and obscene pseudo-artists.
This statelet is Athens, i.e. the Mediterranean basin’s most disgusting ignominy. Only in modern times, the sea powers’ criminal and racist academics and statesmen turned Ancient Athens’ pedophilia, sexual anomaly, perversion and disgusting darkness into absurdly applauded felony. During the Peloponnesian War, which was a tribal butchery that lasted almost three decades (431-404 BCE) and constituted Ancient Greece’s greatest ‘contribution’ to World History, Athens (a sea power and corrupt republic) opposed the Kingdom of Sparta (a minor continental power).
As Melos Island (a tiny independent statelet) sided with Sparta (due to their common Dorian origin), the Athenian fleet sieged the misfortunate island (416 BCE) and in the process, due to the heroic stance of the local population, the cruel and inhuman Athenian soldiers executed the entire male population to the last, also selling the women and the children as slaves. Of course, as it always happens with sea powers, Athens was unconditionally vanquished and the cursed city was set ablaze by the victorious Spartans, but the cruel Melian genocide remained in World History as the best example of Greek barbarism and sea power inhumanity.
The fact that this horrible deed did not prevent Western European intellectuals and academics from lauding and extolling Ancient Athens clearly demonstrates their biased nature and evil character. As Renaissance intellectuals and Catholic monks were well versed in Thucydides, who authored his biased narrative about the war, must have noticed the merciless attitude of the Athenian rascals. They subsequently presented it as an example to the uncouth and ruthless conquistadores whose deeds fully demonstrated that sea powers can never be civilized. About:
As regards the so-called Ancient Greece, i.e. the meridional periphery of the Balkan Peninsula south of Ancient Macedonia and Ancient Illyria, one has to admit that the great exposure to the sea, the lack of a major river, and the absence of vast plains or a plateau prevented the region from becoming the cradle of a major civilization. That’s why it was always a marginal region for all the empires in which it belonged: the Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Caliphate.
VI. Continental Empires, Sea Powers, and Divisive Traps
Whereas continental empires expand on land, sea powers disembark in faraway lands only to spread chaos and diseases, perpetrate massacres, and destroy cultures and civilizations. After the first stage of Modern European colonialism, which helped demonstrate the Western European gangsters’ cruelty at the material level, three sea powers (France, Holland and England) created enormous colonial ’empires’ in Asia and Africa, carrying out massive spiritual genocides. If the sudden collapse of the great continental empires of Mexico and Peru was due to the unmatched superiority of the Spaniards in terms of weapons (firearms), the disintegration of the Asiatic continental empires was in fact never completed (thank God!).
As there was no more armament superiority, the sea powers employed ruse and deception against the Ottomans, the Safavid-Afshar-Qajar Iranians, the Great Mughal Empire, and Qing China. Only China managed to resist, in spite of the Opium Wars, and of the partly occupation (or colonization) of Chinese coast lands. When the sea powers attempted to oppose Imperial Russia from further expanding in Central Asia, started the Great Game, which continues down to our days.
The most commonly known trap that sea powers invented and implemented against the continental empires is the divisive practice, which is rather known thanks to the Latin maxim ‘divide et impera’ (‘divide and rule’). This practice was early attested in the Antiquity among continental kingdoms fighting for prevalence in a wider region of secondary importance where many smaller states and nomads lived; the ancient kings and emperors used their armies for lands of crucial importance (against main opponents) and their diplomacies for region of lesser significance.
Since the 16th c., sea powers’ deceitful practices against the great Asiatic continental empires involved the formation of trade companies on the territory of the targeted states, the dictation of trade terms, the instigation of numerous local rebellions, the invention and establishment of fake states, notably Afghanistan, the utilization of religious leaders against kings and emperors, the support of locally dissident voices, the preaching of divisive beliefs, the diffusion of controversial ideas, the propagation of the Western European modernism and behavioral system, and the activation of endless wars among the major continental empires (Ottoman Empire vs. Russia, Ottoman Empire vs. Iran, Russia vs. Iran, Iran vs. Mughal Empire, Russia vs. China).
When an Italian painter (Stefano Torelli) depicts Catherine’s Victory over the Ottomans (1772) in this manner, it is high time for Russians to find out what went wrong; Russia should have made common front with the Ottomans, the Iranians, the Mughal and the Chinese against the colonial powers of the West.
Alexey Danilovich Kivshenko (Алексей Данилович Кивше́нко; 1851-1895) portrays Nizhny Novgorod dragoons pursuing the Ottoman army on the road to Kars during the Battle of Alaca-dağ (Aladzha/Авлияр-Аладжинское сражение) 3 October 1877; the Russian-Ottoman wars were reciprocally detrimental.
Miniature from the Süleymanname shows the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent advancing on Nakhchivan (1554) in one of the numerous Ottoman-Iranian wars that were detrimental to both continental empires.
Official copy of the treaty of Erzurum, between the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran (1823); Iranian manuscript, black ink on paper, leather binding 19.7 by 13.4 cm, 21 leaves plus 2 flyleaves, 11 lines to the page, written in nasta’liq script with keywords picked out in red, catchwords, margins ruled in gold, camel-coloured leather binding and outer hard cover with ribbon. It consists in an account of the peace treaty made between Iran and the Ottoman Empire; the author is Mirza Muhammad ‘Ali, chief secretary and private steward to Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza. In the beginning of the 19th c., the incessant wars between the Ottomans and the Iranians had already lasted for about 300 years and brought both empires to the brink of collapse.
Nader Shah Afshar of Iran invades the Mughal Empire (Hindustan); in this painting, he is depicted mounting his horse at the sack of Delhi 1738-1740. The war between two major Asiatic continental empires had calamitous impact on both.
The negotiations prior to the sack of Delhi by Nader Shah Afshar of Iran, as depicted in the miniature of a historical manuscript.This disastrous war was beneficial only to the sea powers (England, France and Holland) that found it easier to pursue their infiltration in either empires.
Alexander II and Naser al-Din Shah Qajar in St. Petersburg (1873); when the major continental empires stopped warring against one another, they were already gravely weakened and confused enough to fall victims of the plots mounted by the sea powers.
From the French publication ‘Le Petit Journal’, 23 April 1916: the Russian in Esfahan. The disastrous pro-Serbian and pro-Greek choice of Nicholas II cost him his throne. During the First World War, the Qajar Empire of Iran collapsed and was divided into ever shifting zones of influence and occupation: Russian, Ottoman and English. The problem is that the Romanovs collapsed in 1917, the Ottomans disappeared few years later, and the English managed to overthrow the Qajar dynasty in 1925, imposing as shah of Iran an ignorant and uneducated soldier who did not know even the history of his own country. English Orientalists gave him his supposedly royal name: Pahlavi. All three continental empires paid dearly for the mistakes they made for hundreds of years.
Russian delegates (鄂羅斯国/E-luosi-guo) in Beijing in 1761 From 万国来朝图 (: all nations came to court), which is a monumental painting (3×2 m) depicting foreign delegations paying visit and tribute to Emperor Qianlong.
The Treaty of Livadia (里瓦幾亞條約/Liwaji ya tiao-yue) signed between Russia and China in Crimea, on 2 October 1879; although Russia returned a part of Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang) that it had occupied, the treaty was viewed as so detrimental (currently described by the Chinese authorities as ‘unequal treaty’, like many other similar treaties that Qing China was forced to sign in the 19th c.) that the Chinese ambassador Chonghou (崇厚), when he returned, was accused of high treason and condemned to death. Only the international reaction, his successor’s success in the renegotiation of the treaty terms, and the signature of a new Russian-Chinese treaty led to a decision change which enabled him to pay an indemnity and retire.
In the 19th c., when the Great Game started, the sea powers managed to infiltrate among many small nations that belonged in different continental empires, utilize numerous individuals, educate numerous rebels (by means of ‘studies’ in Western universities), promise national independence to the supposedly ‘oppressed’ nations of the continental empires, etc. Aptly utilizing religious or linguistic affinities, the colonial agents managed to create alliances between an imperial administration and representatives of several indigenous nations in another continental empire, notably Czarist Russia and the Armenians, Aramaean Nestorians (falsely called ‘Assyrians’), Eastern Romans (Rumlar/Romioi), and Pontus ‘Greeks’ (: Eastern Romans) of the Ottoman Empire.
Then, by seemingly making the Russians imagine that their infiltration inside the Ottoman Empire increased (whereas the Western colonials definitely controlled these minorities by means of bribery and corruption), they turned them against another major continental empire, i.e. the Ottoman Caliphate. But this development was beneficial to the sea powers’ agenda and catastrophic for both Eurasiatic empires. About:
Long before Nicholas II, many other czars committed disastrous mistakes for the continental empire that they had to solidly maintain and properly expand. It was absurd for Russians to support anti-Ottoman activities and rebellions of the Eastern Roman Orthodox subjects of the Caliphate. Russia’s monumental failure was plainly demonstrated in 1917, but we have first to analyze the reasons and to offer several examples, before examining the disastrous results that the Romanovs brought upon their heads with their ‘Greek Orthodox’ delusion.
The term ‘Greek Orthodox’ is an ahistorical, deceitful, modern construction; there was never such nation or people or church for the very simple reason that for all Christians, before and after all the theological disputes and the schisms, ‘Greek’ was a shameful and profane name and entity as an idolatrous, polytheistic and utterly blasphemous nation. Actually, there was never an ancient Greek nation, and -more importantly- there was never an ancient Greek state, be it a kingdom, a tyranny, a tribal union or an ignominious ‘republic’. ‘Greece’ was merely a geographical notion to describe the South Balkan confines south of Mount Olympus; ‘Greeks’ (‘Hellenes’) was a noxious recapitulative term applied to a group of tribes (Achaeans, Ionians, Aeolians, and Dorians) that lived among other populations (Pelasgians, Illyrians, etc.), which were not considered ‘Greeks’. Furthermore, numerous foreign slaves, notably Scythians, lived in some cities-states.
Homer was therefore not a ‘Greek’, but an Ionian of Anatolia, culturally unrelated to South Balkans; yet, when he used a recapitulative name for the participants of the naval military expedition against Troy (Taruisha), he basically called them ‘Danaans’. In the external, Oriental historiographical sources (Hittite, Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Old Achaemenid Iranian, Ancient Hebrew, etc.), we never attest a recapitulative term about all these marginal tribes. This is normal, because the plethora of the historically unimportant and meaningless Ancient Greek ‘statelets’ never united in one kingdom. ‘Greeks’ (Graeci) is merely a posterior, Latin name by which the Romans designated this collection of tribes and clans. Useless to add that to the Romans Graecia (Greece) was geographically, ethnically, culturally, linguistically, spiritually and socio-behaviorally very different and absolutely distinct from Macedonia, Illyria, and Thrace in the Balkans, and from Lycia, Caria, Lydia, and Phrygia in Anatolia.
The fabricated narrative that the mendacious Western European academics forged about ‘Ancient Greece’ does not include any element of historical truth; that’s why most of the people today do not know that the outright majority of the Ancient Greeks accepted to be part of the Iranian Empire and did not oppose the Iranian armies when they advanced south of the vassal state of Macedonia. The so-called glorious moments of Ancient History, namely the likes of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea, are pathetic lies about some blasphemous idiots who dared oppose the advice of the Oracle at Delphi (Ancient Greeks’ foremost shrine) not to oppose the Iranian army.
The so-called Ancient Greeks were so disparate tribal elements that, despite Alexander the Great forced most of them to unify under Macedonian scepter, after his death, they continued living in the disorderly and haphazardous manner of theirs, being impossible to incorporate in any of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Attalid Anatolia (Pergamon), Seleucid Syria or Ptolemaic Egypt (although Antiochus III the Great attempted to achieve it in 192-188 BCE, only to be stopped by the expanding Romans). Simply, Ancient Greeks were unfit to civilize. That is why the Romans, extending their control throughout South Balkans in the middle of the 2nd c. BCE, were forced to decimate them, notably during the conquest of Corinth (146 BCE).
Attalid Anatolia, Seleucid Syria, Macedonia, and the disparate, chaotic and worthless ‘Greek’ states of South Balkans around 200 BCE
The Seleucid advance which triggered the Roman interference: Western Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula at 192 BCE
The Roman-Seleucid wars
Annexed to Rome, Greece became a rather unimportant province strongly characterized by population movements (local populace relocating elsewhere and foreign populations settling in the lands south of Macedonia), aggressive invasions, and spiritual-religious-cultural Orientalization. The name ‘Greece’ was forgotten and that is why the lands south of Macedonia became part of the Roman province of Macedonia (147 BCE). The lands of ‘Greece’ were later detached from the senatorial propraetorial province of Macedonia by Emperor Octavian Augustus, during a major administrative re-arrangement (27 BCE); they formed a separate Roman province, but they were named Achaia. This shows that, even as a geographical term, ‘Greece’ was an obsolete name.
Of course, one has to add also that the descendants of the Ionians and the Aeolians in Western Anatolia inhabited several other Roman provinces, notably Asia (129 BCE; established after the dissolution of Attalid Pergamon), Bithynia and Pontus (63 BCE), Galatia (25 BCE), Cappadocia (17 CE), Lycia and Pamphylia (43 and 74 CE), Pontus (62 CE), and Commagene (72 CE), being however ethnically, linguistically and culturally amalgamated with numerous other Anatolian nations, the Iranian settlers of the Achaemenid times, the Roman ruling class, and the remnants of various invaders, notably the Galatians. This means that, in the 1st and 2nd c. CE, those Anatolians were entirely disconnected in every sense from the historical process that took place in South Balkans (‘Achaia’, not Greece).
With the Edict of Caracalla (212 CE; ‘Constitutio Antoniniana’) all the free citizens throughout the empire (‘Provincia Achaia’ included) were declared ‘Roman citizens’. This overwhelming imperial change irrevocably put the tombstone on the remainder of the ‘Greek’ tribes either in Anatolia or South Balkans; this is so because it proved that they were imperially or politically extinct. Then, the groundbreaking edict was enthusiastically accepted across the empire; this fact demonstrated that, except the Romans (who were amalgamated with most of the nations of the empire), no other nation existed west of Euphrates and east of the Iberian and Mauretanian coasts of the Atlantic Ocean.
In other words, no other tribe, people, ethnic group, religious community or nomad clan had retained their moral integrity, their cultural identity, their socio-behavioral values, and their imperial or political world view intact up to the point of forming an independent kingdom or empire. They had all gradually been entirely Romanized. By 212 CE, if Greeks had ever existed, they would have vanished.
Later on, the Greek speaking populations in the South Balkans were repeatedly decimated during the numerous catastrophic invasions (first wave: 300-500 CE; second wave: 500-700 CE). During the same period, due to their obdurate rejection of Christianity as the sole official Roman religion and to their obstinate attachment to their absurd polytheism, they caused an unprecedented massacre of the pagans among them. ‘Hellen’ or ‘Graecus’ (Greek) ended up meaning ‘profane’, ‘villainous’, ‘promiscuous’ and ‘blasphemous’ during the period of the Eastern Roman Empire (down to 1453). The inhabitants of the surviving part of the Roman Empire called themselves ‘Romans’ {Ρωμαίοι – Ρωμιοί; أروام (Arabic); رومیان (Farsi); Rûmîler & Rumlar (Turkish)}, denying with abject indignation that they had any relation with the ‘Hellenes’ or ‘Graeci’. About:
In the terrible imperial and religious confrontation that pitched Rome against New Rome (Constantinople) already before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 CE) but more openly after Rome discarded (752) the institution of Constantinople-selected/approved popes of Rome (which was imposed by Justinian I in 537), the pejorative term ‘Hellene’/’Graecus’ became a crucial tool in the hands of the impious and blasphemous, anti-Christian popes of Rome, who attempted to utilize various barbarians (notably the Frankish Merovingians and Charlemagne) in order to oppose the Eastern Roman Empire, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the prevailing Caesaropapism.
As part of his Reconquista, Justinian I appointed three popes successively and instituted the Constantinopolitan imperial selection and approval of every pope of Rome; the practice was respected in Rome from 537 until 752. Roman popes were then of Anatolian, Syrian, Balkan or Sicilian ancestry or had the experience of the apocrisiarius (papal liaison to the emperor) or the inhabitants of Byzantine-ruled Greece, Syria, or Sicily.
Following the two schisms (Photian schism: 863-867; East-West schism: 1054), the launch of the Crusades (1095), and the Latin conquest and sack of Constantinople (1204), in order to fully discredit the Eastern Roman Empire and to posture as the sole religious authority among Christians, the Latin (: Western European) pseudo-Christian ‘Catholic’ occupiers and looters of the Eastern Roman Empire extended the use of the term ‘Greeks’ for their Eastern Roman Christian Orthodox subjects. The abominable, Satanic rule of the Latin conquerors was fully overthrown (1261), but the scheming Catholic heretics had managed to establish a strong foothold in parts of Romania (Ρωμανία; as the official name of the Eastern Roman Empire was in Eastern Roman language) and to form small groups of theological lackeys and local stooges, who became known as ‘Enotikoi’ (Ενωτικοί; pro-Union). It goes without saying that the papal puppets tried to diffuse the pejorative name, but they failed to achieve any substantive results until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Sultanate (1453) and the end of the Ottoman rule in South Balkans (early 19th c.).
With the removal of the Christian Orthodox Eastern Roman obstacle, the apostate, Anti-Christian, Catholic Church launched the projects that it had already prepared for about 250-300 years: Renaissance and Colonialism (the totally mischievous term ‘Discovery of America’ must be considered as an obsolete falsehood). Part of the Renaissance intellectual-scientific-artistic fallacy concerned Ancient Greece; it was indeed the fabrication of an entirely ahistorical, misleading and delusional narrative which did not represent but distort the historical truth, which was contained in historiographical sources and documented in the archaeological material record. The intentionally distorted representation of Ancient Greece was coined ‘Hellenism’ in disparaging contradiction to the use of the term that Ancient Ionians, Aeolians and others made of it.
Typical example of Renaissance painting with reference to a very distorted representation of an Ancient Greek mythological topic of dire, Anti-Christian content; the Calumny of Apelles by Sandro Botticelli (1494-5) is an evil artwork in which Repentance is depicted as a vicious witch and Truth is portrayed as a nude prostitute. The excuse for this monstrous achievement is offered by Lucian, a 2nd c. CE Aramaean author who described a painting by the 4th c. BCE Ionian painter Apelles.
During the Late Antiquity, Ionians described as ‘Hellenism’ the tendency of some people in Anatolia and Syria (Cappadocians, Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Jews) to appear dressed after the ‘Greek’ fashion and to adopt the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Ionians, Athenians and Macedonians living in cities founded by Alexander the Great and his successors. But during the Renaissance, ‘Hellenism’ defined the falsehood that anti-Christian Western European intellectuals, fraudsters, academics and crooks invented, fabricated and believed about Ancient Greece.
The villainous forgery of Hellenism was quite useful to the Satanic gangsters who killed millions of Mexicans and Peruvians; it helped diffuse scores of profane topics, concepts, illusions, sick passions, evil desires, immoral behaviors, anti-Christian attitudes, and an absolutely putrefied world conceptualization at the very antipodes of Christianity. By merely marketing these mental and intellectual contaminations as ‘civilization’, the so-called Renaissance ‘humanists’ started distancing themselves from the faith that they deceitfully presented as still theirs. They thus produced a polarization that gave birth to other movements like Classicism, Enlightenment, etc., which further contributed to the corruption of the Western world and, through colonialism, to the degeneracy of the rest of mankind. In this manner, the formation of the modern faithless, worthless and useless societies was completed, only to fully corroborate the various calls that we now hear for eugenics, population control, and reduction of the world population to 500 million or 50 million people.
All this was totally unknown to the Muscovites, the Tatars, and the populations of Novgorod, Astrakhan and Sibir (Siberia) back at the time of Ivan IV the Terrible. To them, Constantinople was merely Tsargrad (Царьград), the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (Восточная Римская империя), even more so because Gennadius Scholarius (Геннадий Схоларий) ensured the translatio imperii, making of Mehmet II the successor of Constantine XI Palaeologus, who was the last of the Palaeologi dynasty (Палеологи). Tsargrad means literally ‘the city (gorod/город) of Caesar’ (i.e. the Roman Emperor), thus fully demonstrating that to the Russians the realm that the Ottomans conquered in 1453 was purely, entirely and indisputably Roman.
Ivan III of Moscow, as depicted by the 19th c. Russian painter Aleksey Kivshenko (Алексей Данилович Кившенко)
Neither Ivan III of Moscow nor his second wife Sophia Palaiologina would accept as a ‘work of art’ Sandro Botticelli’s infamous painting ‘The Birth of Venus’ (c. 1484–1486)
The dispute around the term lasted no less than 450 years, ever since Sophia Palaiologina (born Zoe; 1449-1503/ Софья Палеолог), niece of the last Eastern Roman Emperor, married Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow (1440-1505 / Иван III Васильевич) in proxy marriage (1 June 1472; in the Old St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome) in presence of Gian Battista della Volpe, diplomat and adventurer in the Muscovite service in the 15th c., who became rather known as Ivan Fryazin (Иван Фрязин). Sophia, accompanied by a pontifical custody led by Ivan Fryazin, reached Moscow (Muscovy) on 12th November 1472 and later gave birth to many children, notably Vasili III of Moscow (Василий III Иванович/1479-1533), who was the father of Ivan IV the Terrible. The dispute ended with the abdication of Nicholas II (15th March 1917) and the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate (1st November 1922), because -for ca. 470 years- one of the titles of the Ottoman sultans was Qaysar-i Rum (روم قیصر).
We therefore conclude that Ivan the Terrible knew only Romans and Eastern Romans, and wanted to position Muscovy as continuity to Tsargrad; of ‘Greeks’ he probably never heard. The same is true for most of his successors and for the first of the Romanovs. Only after the rapprochement with European dynasties that Peter I attempted, numerous academics, artists, and architects started moving from France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Denmark and England to Russia. They diffused what was then called ‘European civilization’, involving the tenets of Renaissance, Classicism and Enlightenment, including Hellenism.
The rise of the proponents of Westernization at the time of Catherine II became a real threat to the Russian Orthodox identity; this generated several reactions, notably the Pochvennichestvo (Почвенничество) movement, the supporters of the so-called Slavophilia (Славянофильство/however, the term is not accurate), the fervent defenders of traditional Russian values, such as Sobornost (соборность), Obshchina (община), etc., and -last but not least- a monarchical conceptualization of Russia as Orthodoxy, Autocracy & Nationality (Православие, Самодержавие, Народность).
Ilya Glazunov (Илья Сергеевич Глазунов; 1930-2017), Timeless Russia (Вечная Россия), 1988: a modern visualization of the Pochvennichestvo (Почвенничество) movement’s ideals
A.S. Lysenko (А.С. Лысенко; born 1974), Stalingrad 1942 (Сталинград 1942). Move with the Icon (Ход с Иконой). The painting shows the arrival of the Patriarch of All Rus’ in the autumn of 1942 in Stalingrad. The patriarch traveled along the entire front lines in Stalingrad and blessed the troops for victory. For many defenders of Stalingrad, this was the last blessing and communion in life, because. they stood to die. A little-known fact is that for a dangerous trip to Stalingrad, the Patriarch, according to the Decree signed by Stalin, was awarded the military order “The Order of the Red Banner of Battle”. The traditional Russian values survived during the Soviet period and have forcefully emerged throughout the society over the past 30-32 years. About the painter: http://www.academia-maki.com/members/korr/lysenko-as
Illarion Pryanishnikov (Илларион Михайлович Прянишников΄; 1840-1894), Easter Procession (Крестный ход). Orthodoxy as popular religion stands at the very top of the monarchical conceptualization of Russia.
However, this reaction was not enough to eliminate the diffusion of the historical forgery that the biased Western scholars undertook in 18th and 19th c. Russia. Then, in the case of the so-called Greek Revolution of 1821 and the subsequent formation of the tiny pseudo-state ‘Greece’ (by the English and the French colonials) Russia made exactly the same mistakes as in the case of Serbia. The Russian diplomats, statesmen and czars were fooled enough to possibly believe that the descendants of the Eastern Romans could make ‘Greeks’ resurrected after almost 1500 years!! Even worse, the imperial elites failed to fathom that, if the English and the French wanted to perform the rebirth of the Ancient Greeks, as a blasphemous act of Black Magic, this simply meant that they intended to utterly destroy Orthodoxy and Christianity in general.
Failing to realize that the only descendants of the Ancient Ionians and Aeolians, surely amalgamated with numerous other nations, were located in Ottoman Anatolia and that the inhabitants of the South Balkan Ottoman provinces were ethnic Slavs amalgamated with Vlachs, Albanians, Italians, Turks, Egyptians and Berbers, the czars contributed greatly, at their own detriment, to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. The imperial Russian elites could not realize that to defend their interests, as a continental empire, they had to side with the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran. The only beneficiaries of the numerous Russian-Iranian and the Russian-Ottoman wars were England and France. When it comes to the tiny state of Greece, this became the embodiment of colonially educated and prepared elite that govern their country according (not to the local, national interests but) to the needs of their colonial masters.
It is ironical but, by helping the tiny Greek state first exist and second expand, the Russians damaged their own chances to ever reach their secret and mystical targets: Tsargrad (Constantinople) and Jerusalem. The Russian Church of Mary Magdalene (Церковь Святой Марии Магдалины) on the Mount of Olives symbolized that vision; constructed in 1888 by Alexander III, the splendid edifice with the typically Russian gilded onion domes epitomized all the Russian Orthodox eschatological claims.
Jerusalem, The Dome of the Rock and the Russian Church of of Mary Magdalene (Церковь Святой Марии Магдалины Гефсимания): the end target of every Russian Orthodox eschatology
As a matter of fact, the Russians were far closer to both locations than their rivals (the English) were; they could reach there first. But to do so, they should ally themselves with the Ottomans and strengthen the Ottoman Empire against the evil erosion carried out by the French and the English. And this is the merciless strike that Fate delivered to the naïve Czar Nicholas II who thought it possible to ally Holy Russia to the filthiest and most execrable realm on Earth, namely England; although he wanted to reach Jerusalem first, he was arrested and imprisoned in his own country, when the profane general Edmund Allenby entered the old city of Jerusalem on 11th December 1917. Russia was plunged in the Marxist-Leninist abyss, when England achieved its largest territorial extent.
Allenby enters Jerusalem; Russians paid dearly for their mistakes. Irrespective of their religions, continental empires must unite. This is a spiritual imperative.
This disaster will come again, if Russia’s present ruling elite and administration make the same mistake and fail to realize that the worst enemies of Holy Russia are (not the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Germans, the French, the Israelis or the Americans but) the English. It is only England (along with London’s various paraphernalia, i.e. the pseudo-states of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) that turns the US, NATO, and also EU against Russia. The reason is very simple; in full agreement with their Satanic eschatological agenda, the English want to prevent Holy Russia-Third Rome from becoming “a blessing on the Earth” (Isaiah, 19:24). To cancel the English agenda, Russians must remove Shakespeare from their education.
II. Skillful Western European Falsification of Russian History
A. Erroneous contextualization of Archaeology of Northern Asia
B. Deliberate use of overlapping terms: Northern Asia, Siberia, and Scythia
C. Prehistory and Ancient History of Northern Asia are subject to modern borders and to the meaningless attempts for ‘national archaeology’
D. Failure to discern Northern Asia in its entirety and true dimensions
E. Deliberate, multifaceted distortion of the Asiatic Turanian Migrations
F. Minimization of the cataclysmic presence and prevalence of the Turanian nations throughout Eastern Europe
G. European academia-backed biases: malignant disregard of the spiritual value of Kievan Rus, and absurd focus on ethnic, racial and linguistic considerations
H. Erroneous focus on Kievan Rus and disastrous neglect for Volga Bulgaria
I. Concealment of the historical reality of the Turanian (‘Tatar-Mongol’) period
Russia, Ukraine and the World-III: the need for a New UN or how UK, US, France and NATO must be defenestrated from the world (28 March 2023)
III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians
IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials
V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials
VI. What Russia and China must do
Introduction
Fourteen years ago, on 4th December 2007, I published an article under title ‘Russia, Islam, and the West’, which -within few days- was officially (ИноСМИ / Inosmi) translated into Russian (‘ Россия, ислам и Запад’). I wanted to briefly elaborate on how things would develop and to also identify possible allies for Russia within the so-called ‘Islamic World’.
As the translated version of the article was extensively reproduced, I noticed that it was also well understood. Example: the great portal Centrasia (www.centrasia.org), while republishing the Russian translation, added an over-title for the use of its readers to state the following: “Экспансия западного мира не столько решала проблемы, сколько распространяла их вширь” (The expansion of the Western world did not so much solve problems as spread them in breadth). Indeed, there could not be better summary of my article’s contents. The over-title was indeed an excellent reflection of my original perception and ultimate conviction, namely that the West wanted to use the senseless Islamic World against Russia.
In that article’s last part, I put a title that appeared very odd, even to several Egyptian and other African friends of mine (at the time, I was living in Cairo): “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. In that part, I explained why only these two countries could possibly be Russia’s allies against the Western colonial contamination that threatens the entire world. The reason for this statement is that only these two countries had maintained until that time a correct sense of historical-cultural identity and an imperial-level establishment and diplomacy. As a matter of fact, the rest of the so-called Islamic world is constituted by fake states-puppets of the colonial powers (from Morocco and Nigeria to Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia); unfortunately, the uneducated, ignorant, and idiotic elites of these neo-colonial structures never realized what ‘national integrity’ means.
I. Fake states of fake Arabs and fake Muslims
This is so because, by describing these states as ‘puppets’, I don’t only suggest that the local governments receive and execute orders dictated by the Western colonial capitals (Paris, London, Washington D.C., etc.), often being also blackmailed by them in the most obscene manner, but I also specify that these states were entirely pre-fabricated by the colonial elites and administrations to the slightest detail.
What I imply by mentioning the ‘detail’ is simple: not only the location of the false and troublesome (notably in the Halaib triangle) borderline between Egypt and Sudan was decided by the English colonials long before the two modern states came to exist (in order to offer their successors in the colonial institutions and governments the chance of future manipulation of either local ‘governments’), but also the lack of railway connections between first Cairo and Khartoum and second Suez and Port Sudan had been programmed before the beginning of the 20th c. So, colonialism means also ‘deeds carried out with long-term perspective’; actually, it does not occur in a wide array of sectors of social activities, but across the board.
Neo-colonial governments in Algiers, Riyadh, Baghdad, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere were totally deprived of any substantive nation-building tools; entire nations were stripped of their historical-cultural identity, and their elites -which used to have idiotically been sending their children to ‘study’ in French, English, US, Canadian and Australian universities- were plunged into a scrupulously elaborated delusion that turned them into pure and permanent servants of their former colonial masters.
Even worse, all Muslim, African and Asiatic nations have been scrupulously disconnected from one another, and thus, to study Egyptology and Coptology a Nigerian has to move to England or America, whereas a Moroccan willing to specialize in Assyriology or Iranology needs to pursue university studies in France. Similarly, Muslims in Senegal and Sierra Leone have no idea about Islamic History, Art History, Architecture, Sciences, Wisdom, Spirituality and Literature in Central Asia, whereas Egyptian and Syrian Muslims know nothing about the great Islamic dynasties that ruled Eastern or Western Africa and the existing Islamic monuments there. In other words, the fake neo-colonial structures have been totally disconnected from one another at the intellectual, academic, cultural, educational and scientific levels, each of them being calamitously tied to its former colonial center.
The aforementioned unprecedented ignorance and reciprocal disconnectedness was complemented by colonially promoted confusion and darkness. When it comes to the confusion that prevails among Muslims worldwide, the first point to mention is the materialistic evaluation of human interests, which is an entirely anti-Islamic trait and an alien element among historical Muslim societies that revolved around axes of spiritual, intellectual and scientific endeavors.
The short-sighted materialistic viewpoint on the human endeavors and interests was projected by the colonial elites onto the local Muslim populations and it permanently destroyed the Islamic moral order, eliminating all cultural values that had prevailed for many long centuries (in several cases for more than a millennium) and turning therefore all Muslims into miserable replicas of corrupt Westerners. The very use of money, the existence of the Banking system, the shameful fallacy of the so-called ‘Islamic Economics’, and the economic structure itself of today’s Muslim countries are an anathema against prophet Muhammad.
The colonially promoted confusion took also the form of a pathetic race for ‘socioeconomic development’, involving the catastrophic deformation of the traditional urban landscape throughout the Islamic world. As -generation after generation- young students were pushed to Engineering and Economis, all the neo-colonial structures and the corrupted or demented pseudo-Muslim societies were even more strongly tied to the Western colonial capitals.
Last, backwardness, obscurantism and darkness were diffused in the form of false theories, disruptive ideologies, and nonsensical theologies; by believing in the Pan-Arabic falsehood, hundreds of millions of non-Arab Aramaeans, Yemenites, Copts (Egyptians), Sudanese Cushites, and NW African Berbers were permanently prevented from achieving proper nation-building. By embracing Nasserism, Baathism and other catastrophic schemes, dozens of millions of people engulfed themselves in wars, conflicts, bloodshed, abject poverty, and irreversible misfortune.
And by accepting the pathetic, anti-Islamic doctrines of today’s totally uneducated and deeply ignorant pseudo-theologians and bogus-imams, African and Asiatic Muslims were diverted from Islamic spirituality, wisdom, moral, sciences, intellect, education, religion, culture, and civilization. Even worse for them, they were diverted to a trivial and pathetic, bogus-Islamic theological indoctrination of which all the foundations, all the elements, all the concepts, all the parts, and all the words had been previously examined, considered, authorized and approved by the Western Orientalist colonial academia, before being projected onto the local masses due to the determinant commitment of the military, administrative, diplomatic and political gangsters who controlled the vast lands of the Mughal Empire, the detached territories of the Ottoman Caliphate, the colonial puppet state of Pahlavi Iran, as well as many other earlier Muslim sultanates, khanates and emirates.
Wherever there was a sound, secular, culturally original, socially strong state, as in the case of Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia, the criminal English, American, Canadian, Australian and French diplomats employed all possible means to diffuse the fake Islamic theologies, the nonsensical political doctrines, the absurd politicization of the Muslim societies, and the villainous ideologization of the deliberately kept-ignorant masses. In total negation of today’s fake Muslim societies, there cannot be politics in a historical Muslim society; and there was no politics in both, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia.
In other words, all the present dimensions of social-intellectual-educational-political life in today’s fake Muslim countries had been pre-fashioned by the colonial powers in order to permanently function detrimentally against all their users, adherents, admirers, supporters and followers onto whom they were projected systematically, tyrannically and criminally. I expanded on this topic in my article titled ‘Why Former Ottoman Provinces cannot become Proper States’ that I published before 10 years: https://www.academia.edu/26064731/Why_Former_Ottoman_Provinces_cannot_become_Proper_States_By_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis?auto=download
CHINA, INDIA, RUSSIA, IRAN AND TURKEY: THE WORLD’S FIVE MOST IMPORTANT CONTINENTAL EMPIRES FIRST CANNOT BE REVIVED AND SECOND CAN PROSPER ONLY AS SECULAR STATES
Ming dynasty Emperor Zhu Houzhao (朱厚照; 1491-1521)
15th c. painting of the Forbidden City
Forbidden city Beijing
Qing China map 1820
Qing dynasty Emperor Kangxi (康熙帝; 1661-1722)
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Superior to the paranoid lunatic Ottoman Selim I and stronger than the lascivious Ismail Safavi, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad rather known as Babur (1483-1530) was the founder of the Mughal Empire; incomparably the most adventurous, the most impulsive and the most intellectual emperor of his times.
EmperorHumayun (1508-1556) and his son Akbar
Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) receiving the four-year old Abdul Rahim following the assassination (1561) of his father Bairam Khan, who was Akbar’s leading general and mentor: miniature from the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), which was commissioned by Akbar as the official chronicle of the reign. It was written by Abu’l Fazl between 1590 and 1596, illustrated between c. 1592 and 1594.
Diwan-i-Aam (Hall of Public Audience) in the palace of the Great Mughal Emperor in Agra
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‘Moscow under Ivan the Terrible’ (1902) is a famous painting by Apollinary M. Vasnetsov; the 19th-20th c. impression that the Russians had about the beginning of the tiny Muscovy principality before 350 years was very inaccurate, erroneous, and biased. This is so, because they projected their own ideas on their own past that they viewed through the binoculars of their distorted education and historiography.
Mikhail Romanov (1596-1645) and his father, the patriarch Philaret, distribute alms, in an illustration of the first Romanov coronation. From the Coronation Album of Mikhail Fedorovich; the manuscript “The Book of the Election to the Highest Throne of the Great Russian Tsardom of the Great Sovereign Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail Fedorovich of All Great Russia Autocrat” was produced in Moscow few decades after the event (in 1672-1673). From the 1856 reprint edition.
Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg; when Russia ceased to be Russia and started imitating Western Europe corrupt pseudo-kingdoms, insidious academics, fake intellectuals, and uncivilized politicians, the divisions and the discords started. Peter I and Catherine II are the true reason of the fall of the Romanov.
When you have Western European theater, opera and dance in a theoretically Christian Orthodox Empire, sooner or later your contaminated state will collapse; Nicholas II could not save anything (here in his coronation along with Alexandra Feodorovna, 1896).
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Shah Tahmasp I of Iran & Emperor Humayun of the Mughal Empire Hindustan enjoying Nowrouz festivities, as depicted on the Chehel Sotoun palace in Esfahan
Shah Abbas I the Great (1571-1629)
The imperial Naqsh-e-Jahan (‘The Image of the World’) square in Esfahan, Safavid Iran’s most flamboyant capital
Safavid Iran, 1511
General view of the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Shah Mosque (below), and the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (in the middle), Isfahan
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Stupid Ottomans! They abolished the only valuable military units they had, namely the Janissaries; the absurd development took place at the time of the idiotic Sultan Mahmoud II (1785-1839). Instead of killing all the uneducated, ignorant, dark and pathetic sheikhs, muftis, qadis and imams that contaminated and destroyed the Ottoman Empire with the fallacy of their anti-Islamic “sunnah”, Mahmoud II closed down the illustrious Bektashi Order and the formidable Janissary elite infantry, thus issuing the death warrant of his otherwise wretched state. Today, people confuse two totally different terms: ‘Ottoman Empire’ and ‘Ottoman Civilization’. All factors of the Islamic civilization in the territory of the Caliphate were indeed persecuted by the pathetic, corrupt, cruel and villainous Ottoman dynasty. As it used to be said at the time, to be a member of the Ottoman family you had to have killed your brother! The ominous empire was the World History’s most anti-Turkish state.
Topkapı sarayı at the time of Selim I (1512-1520)
Official ceremonies in the Ottoman palace were a spectacular and costly affair that was impermissible in an absurd state ridiculously governed by pathetic, biased and ignorant theologians who took their stupid theology as tantamount to the religion of Islam.
Topkapı sarayı (طوپقپو سرايى) in Ottoman Constantinople; the historical name ‘Istanbul’, which was attested in sources for more than 100 years before the fall of the Eastern Roman imperial capital (1453), became the official name of the city only thanks to Kemal Ataturk. The absurd measure of turning Ayasofya Museum to a fanciful pseudo-mosque for political circus automatically cancels the popular city name and imposes the re-introduction of the old name that was the official appellation when the monumental edifice was operating as a real mosque (1453-1923).
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II. Turkey and Iran: the two exceptions
The two most notable exceptions from this chaotic and nefarious situation have been Turkey and Iran; the Turkish exception is entirely due to the greatness of the scope and the depth of understanding of Kemal Ataturk, who was one of the very few minds to timely, accurately and plainly identify the colonial goals. The founder of Modern Turkey had understood that Islam as religion was already defunct during his time and that the uneducated, ignorant and worthless Muslims of the early 20th c. were to be re-educated from scratch and on the basis of their own culture in order to later rediscover the true historical Islam in all its width, depth and height.
Kemal Ataturk knew that all that the criminal colonial imperialists of France, England and America wanted to do was to aptly utilize and duly instrumentalize the uneducated and silly Muslims of his time, turning them to fully operable tools of Western hegemony. The basic tools of this instrumentalization were the following:
– the deceitful ideologization (theologization) of the Islamic religion,
– the execrable politicization of the Muslim societies,
– the Orientalist falsification of the History of all Asiatic and African nations, and
– the linguistic, educational, academic and cultural subordination of all, Muslim and non-Muslim, Oriental nations to the Western European and North American barbarism and inhuman model of life, which was produced in Western Europe starting with the Evil Renaissance and diffused worldwide due to the genocidal colonialism
But theology is not religion; today’s fake Muslims do not believe Islam as religion, but pseudo-Islamic theological systems that contain a modern and ahistorical bogus-interpretation (i.e. a misinterpretation) of the values of Islam, thus fully eliminating Spirituality and turning Moral from a profound understanding of virtues to a silly obedience of other humans, which is “shirk” (شرك) according to the dogma of Islam.
It goes without saying that the aforementioned situation (or condition of being) does not only consist in religious deviation for Muslims but also constitutes supreme humiliation and final demise for any nation. Kemal Ataturk was triumphantly confirmed by all the historical developments that followed his death.
The uneducated, ignorant and stupid Muslims of Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, etc. fell exactly into the trap of their utilization and instrumentalization by the West; from 1948 to 1967 to 1973, the fake Muslims of the wider region did indeed function as fully programmed automatons. More they hated the Zionists, stronger the state of Israel became. This does not mean that the Zionist state is rightful and correct; it is not. But this does not matter (or does not play any role) anymore, when the Aramaean Muslims of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine and the Coptic Muslims of Egypt are so wrong as to become dehumanized automatons focused on wrong choices that can bring only grave deterioration and final destruction.
Having no national identity, believing in a pseudo-theology (that they mistook for religion), being truly disconnected from one another, being totally unaware of one another’s historical past and cultural heritage, and acting -at the political level- like conveniently submissive monkeys of the Westerners, these fake Muslims do not have a chance in the billion to ever win. Automatons do not win; humans do. Automatons act as per their pre-fashioned mechanism and then get decomposed to pieces.
The Iranian exception was basically due to the earlier imperial tradition (Safavid, Afshar and Qajar). The English interfered in Iran in the early 20th c. in a multifaceted and multilayered manner. They deposed the true, imperial dynasty and imposed an ignorant soldier as ‘king’, after duly cheating, bribing and corrupting him; this poor and uneducated guy did not even know the historical Iranian name ‘Pahlavi’ and its meaning, but the academic instructor and tutor, whom his colonial masters assigned to him, gave him this name as ‘royal family name’ – which constitutes the most shameful and most disgraceful stigma of Iranian History.
The reason for the English intervention in Iran in the late 19th and early 20th c. is still unknown to most people worldwide. For many long centuries, the evil Anglo-French diplomacy, vicious colonial trickery, and incessant machinations pitched the silly Ottomans and the naïve Iranians in interminable wars that weakened both empires; even worse, when Constantinople and Isfahan/Tehran did not fight against one another, most probably one of the two ailing empires made a war with the Russians. This unprecedentedly disastrous series of developments occurred despite the fact that both, the dynasties and the populations of the two empires, were Turanian in their majority and the local culture in both realms was a millennia long Iranian-Turanian amalgamation.
But with Kemal Ataturk turning the world’s most anti-Turkic empire (namely the wretched Ottoman Empire) into Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, the path was open for the much needed merge of the two great states into one; but this eventuality (that had been fully materialized by Tamerlane in 1402) was the real horror of the Western colonial powers for no less than four centuries (1500-1900).
The reason of the colonial fear was the fact that the Ottoman state and the Iranian Empire were equally Iranian and Turanian at the same time; in either case, the majority of the local population was Turanian, whereas the popular culture and tradition constituted an amalgamated Turanian (nomad / military-martial) and Iranian (settled / academic-intellectual) common heritage. So, by intervening colonially in Iran, the English intended to
– devilishly ‘Persianize’ Iran (an attempt that had no historical precedent),
– reduce the universal-ecumenical Empire of Iran into a ‘national Persian kingdom’, and thus
– transform untouchable Iran into a malleable ‘Persia’.
By so doing, the evil colonials knew beforehand that they would trigger enormous reactions from the part of Azeris, Turkmens and others, who would never accept ‘their’ Iran (so, a Turanian-Iranian entity) to be degraded into a Farsi (‘Persian’) state.
However, not even an interference of this scale was enough for the English and the French to fully control developments in Iran. As the English occupied the formerly Ottoman land of Mesopotamia (Aram-Nahrain or ‘Iraq’), the colonial conspirers mobilized several naïve Shia religious leaders and turned them against the puppet soldier king Reza, whom they had imposed on his fake throne in the first place.
As the colonial ‘explorers’, ‘advisers’ and ‘friends’ pushed the idiotic, credulous and unsuspicious Reza to westernize Iran and to stupidly send his son, the crown prince Muhammad Reza, to Switzerland for ‘studies’ (which would also further westernize him: 1931-1936; at the age of 12-17), they instigated anti-royal hatred among the silly ayatollahs and the other useless religious leaders, whom they urged to react against the ‘atheist’ king Reza, whom they had raised to power for a start. This has always been the criminal nature of the Western colonial evilness: you don’t only raise a silly puppet to prominence and power; you also prepare the puppet’s opponents and eventually the puppet’s murderers.
The situation went out of control, when the soldier’s son, after being educated as crown prince in Switzerland, proved to be a perspicacious successor to the much undeserved throne of Iran. As a matter of fact, and clearly to his credit, Muhammad Reza, by noticing the conflicting agendas of the various colonial powers and by identifying tremendous discrepancies in the ultimate goals of the major lobbies of power (or secret societies) in the Western World (Jesuits, Freemasons and Zionists), understood a large and critical part of the overall scheme, took therefore his role seriously, and following the path of Kemal Ataturk, attempted to modernize Iran in order to make it truly competitive to Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and the major Western nations. This was exactly what the evil Western colonials did not want to happen, because Kemal Ataturk has always been the man whom they hated most and for a good reason: if there were another 3-4 men like the founder of Modern Turkey, as perspicacious as he was, as determined as he was, and as audacious as he was, then the entire colonial rule would crumble in Asia, Africa and Europe, ultimately and rightfully plunging the Western World into the well-deserved final implosion and irreversible decomposition. That’s why Iran’s position has severely degraded since 1979 and the so-called ‘Islamic revolution’.
III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians
It could not happen otherwise, because the nonsensical theory published by Khomeini and known under the name ‘Velayat-e Faqih’ {‘the Governance of the (Islamic) Jurisprudents’} did not exist (and consequently was not practiced) earlier, throughout the History of Islamic Caliphates; it is a modern concept, although many efforts were made to attach some historical credibility to it. As far as the so-called ‘Shia Muslims’ are concerned, quite unfortunately, this theory was the effective counterpart of the ‘Political Islam’ that the colonial Orientalists, diplomats and politicians diffused among /imposed on the so-called ‘Sunni Muslims’. I use the expression ‘so-called’, because in reality the distinction into Sunni and Shia Muslims is also fake, but this is not a topic on which I can further expand here. About: https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_
The degradation of Iran’s position at the international level was stopped to some extent (not because an improvement was made in the unfortunate realm ruled by a puerile elite that failed to identify the anti-Iranian and anti-Turanian schemes of the Western colonial gangsters but) due to rather external factors. Despite the fact that Turkey followed a different trajectory, also Ankara’s position at the international level started gradually being severely degraded in 2002-2003, when the Western colonial fabrication ‘AKP’ was forcefully imposed on Turkey’s political life by direct and multileveled Western colonial interference.
The Turkish generals were constantly, boldly and gravely threatened by the US, NATO, EU, UK, and other governments and international bodies not to intervene, not to undertake a -much needed- coup, and not to cause the -much demanded- physical death of the disreputable US-UK-Israel puppet Erdogan, Turkey’s silliest, most ignorant, most uneducated, most pathetic, and most ludicrous prime minister and president.
The fact that Turkey’s Islamists came to and stayed in power only due to systematic Western colonial support clearly shows their absolutely non-Muslim, evil nature, and their servile character, which is the epitome of the disbeliever, the unfaithful and the perfidious. It also heralds the forthcoming destruction of Turkey, because this is the ultimate goal of the Western colonials, who brought the stupid Islamists of the AKP to power in order to duly, effectively and irrevocably utilize them for their plans.
Having a decomposed, divided and useless army (due to ceaseless post-2016 purges), a collapsed economy, half a trillion external gross debt, and a current account deficit of $36.7 billion in 2020, Turkey will need more than a decade to recover from the nonsensical and paranoid governmental policies of the idiots, who imagined it possible to govern a 21st c. country with oral utterances of a prophet who lived before 1400 years and with the prescriptions of a holy book manifested to indigenous people in Hejaz 300 years after the Roman Empire became Christian.
What is even worse for the brainless humanoids that support Turkey’s impossible Islamization is the fact that Muslim kingdoms and empires during the Islamic times were not governed (and did not have to be governed) on the basis of the Shariah in the way today’s uneducated and ignorant Muslim theologians understand this very vague and currently misinterpreted term. Quite contrarily, many times caliphs and sultans ruled against the Islamic Law; this is a vast topic that goes out of the scope of the present article, but at this point, I want only to indicate the original mistake and the defective approach to which are due the false interpretations and the erroneous conclusions of almost all modern Muslim theologians.
IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials
Instead of duly studying and carefully examining what truly occurred during all the periods of Islamic History and subsequently concluding thereupon, today’s fake Muslim theologians theorize on the basis of various historical texts (Quran, Hadith, Fiqh, Kalam), which by definition they cannot understand in their original, correct and accurate contextualization. When you hear silly people using this style of wooden language «theologian X said: ‘about this topic prophet Muhammad said that’», you can be sure that you have in front of you an idiot duly utilized by the colonial powers in order to harm all interlocutors who would accept such fully unrealistic purposes, positions and pretensions.
This is so, because whatever prophet Muhammad (or any other individual, prophet, high priest, mystic or layman) said does not truly matter; what really matter are the moral principles, the spiritual concepts, and the divine values that are contained in what the prophet (or any other person) said. Actually, words have worth only as expression of principles, concepts and values; otherwise they are absolutely empty, meaningless and useless.
Why the use of wooden language consists in an absurdity possible to be perfectly utilized by one’s own enemies is easy to understand; the safe losers are always the ignorant, the idiotic, and the unrealistic people, as they can be easily entrapped.
First, it is a matter of idiocy to imagine that, by using citations, one can replace 1400 years of History. Citations are tantamount to nothing; only diachronic practices reveal what Islam has been.
Second, only due to lack of proper education can one think that one may be able to understand any text written or words uttered before 1400 years in the exact sense and with the correct connotation that they had at the time; this is so irrespective of language, ethnic origin, religion, literature and culture. Connotations of words always change, and this is nothing ignorant theologians can possibly speak about. Now, the much needed task to identify the specific connotation that a word had when used within a specific text would demand the skills of honest and consummate scholarship, but unfortunately there cannot be acceptable scholarship in cases of indoctrination.
Third, the easiest persons to manipulate are always the imbeciles, who believe in a doctrine, while abstracting its elements and giving to the doctrine’s terms the meaning that they want (which did not exist historically) or can (due to their ignorance and lack of education). Such unsophisticated people usually attribute to their doctrine’s words absolute value, whereas the only absolute value is that of the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind each word’s original meaning.
However, due to their crudeness, these people cannot imagine that, before duly comprehending the meaning of a word, they have to recover first the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind it. So, they end up projecting their own, debased personal beliefs and conclusions onto the texts that they mechanically read (or at times learn by heart) without ever reaching the true meaning of the texts’ contents; but this process is well known to colonial academia.
Consequently, these persons convert their own personal misery into a permanent fight for egoistic self-confirmation and self-justification, and the abstractly taken elements of the doctrine that they believe in have unfortunately -in reality- only a subliminal psychological importance to them.
The hysterical screams of today’s fake preachers, sheikhs and imams during the Friday prayer khutbahs (sermons) are not a matter of Religion to be studied, but of Psychology. The same is valid for the various heretical pseudo-Christian pastors of the West, namely the Evangelicals, the Baptists, the Mormons and their likes.
There is no religion that forces the believers to scream hysterically; only theological-ideological indoctrination can cause this devious and disastrous behavior. However, this form of pseudo-Islamic indoctrination is what the colonial powers want to achieve among today’s fake Muslim preachers, sheikhs and imams, because only under these circumstances they can easily manipulate these miserable people subliminally.
This subliminal passion fully detaches these people from down-to-Earth reality, rendering them pliable enough for all those, who -for one reason or another- want these ignorant and misfortunate persons to fight for their unrealistic purposes, thus causing enormous damages to themselves, to their societies, and to their country’s national interests, institutions, and governments.
And that’s why Turks must drastically and resolutely remove Erdogan and AKP from power at all costs and as soon as possible. Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey is not a fake state like Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia or Saudi Arabia; and -as I already said- it cannot be ‘Islamized’. If a pseudo-Islamic dictatorship is imposed in Ankara, Turkey will simply cease to exist.
As soon as the basic traits of the state will be altered and stop functioning, Turkey will be dangling in the vacuum. This will not turn the entire structure into ‘Islamic’, as the corrupt and besotted Islamist slaves of the US, NATO, EU and UK believe before and after making their cursed and useless prayers. After the alteration of Turkey’s basic traits, the state will soon disappear, as it will have been canceled. The entire country would then suddenly find itself under the status of the Treaty of Sevres. The decomposition, which will ensue, will be far worse than that of the Ottoman Empire or, more recently, of the USSR; it will rather look like the present case of Yemen.
V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials
So, more than 15 years have passed after I published the aforementioned article, but I still stick to my conclusion: “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. This is still valid, not because the two countries improved their standards and strengthened their positions, but mainly due to the fact that many other Muslim countries totally collapsed and fell into chaos or fully capitulated to the evil elites of the Western World. Many countries still existed back in 2007, but do not exist as such anymore: Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Sudan. And many other countries, like Turkey and Iran, saw their power waning: Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. However, the situation of Turkey and Iran no longer concerns Ankara and Tehran only, due to the considerable changes that occurred at the international level with respect to the world balance of power.
Internal conflicts accentuated the growing social tension in the US; the refugee crisis plunged EU and UK into an impasse; despite the undeniable mistakes made in the Ukraine crisis (2013-2014 and 2022-2023) and in parallel with the successes marked in Syria (2015-2023), Putin managed to re-establish an impressively rehabilitated Russia at the epicenter of international relations; India and Brazil made themselves felt in the world affairs; Germany remained the sole economic power of EU; and China was transformed into one pole of the bipolar system that seems to prevail for the time being. Despite Beijing’s continuous affirmation of its dedication to a forthcoming multipolar world, we still do not -properly speaking- attest such a situation. It rather seems that many powers would find a China-US bipolar world good for them, at least for some time.
Turkey and Iran, under similar conditions, can cause serious trouble – not only if pitched against one another, but also if transformed into an obstacle on a country’s way to rising to prominence. The same is also valid for the fate of all other Muslim countries; an eventual dismemberment of just one of them or also a potential war between two of them can dramatically affect the interests of a major power. For the time being, Russia, China and Iran have managed to establish an alliance at many levels, involving also Tehran’s recent adhesion to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (as a full member state). About: https://www.academia.edu/53029736/From_the_Great_Game_to_the_Final_Game_Iran_Full_Member_State_of_the_SCO_as_the_Greatest_Event_of_the_21st_Century_text_pictures_and_legends_
Contrarily to Iran, Turkey followed an erratic path for all intents and purposes. After having been a fully accredited, modern Western state and society (thanks to Kemal Ataturk), Turkey got contaminated after 2002 by Islamism, anachronism, extremism, radicalism, obscurantism and self-destructive hysteria to significant extent. But as a Muslim country, Turkey is the sole NATO member state. This hiatus consists in a tragi-comical situation that can no longer exist; it leads to extinction.
In a rather recent article published in Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s foremost newspaper, on 21st September 2021, the distinguished Prof. Dr. Erol Manisali (1940-2022), a leading Kemalist intellectual and academic, made an extraordinary comparison; his article’s title was quite indicative in this regard (Erol Manisalı, AKP’nin ‘Osmanlıcılığı’, İngilizin ‘Brexit’ine mi benziyor! / https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/erol-manisali/akpnin-osmanliciligi-ingilizin-brexitine-mi-benziyor-1870529): «Does AKP’s ‘Ottomanism’ look like the ‘Brexit’ of the English?»
Prof. Manisali was absolutely right; Brexit was disastrous indeed for England, and Ottomanism (also known as Neo-Ottomanism) is definitely calamitous for Turkey. However, Prof. Manisali still clarified several points in which Brexit is (and is made) less disastrous than the forgery and the paranoia of Ottomanism. On the other hand, it is true that the two options have indeed something in common. Both political concepts constitute a form of retreat or isolation that can end up in seclusion and implosion.
VI. What Russia and China must do
In the present article, I don’t intend to examine the troubles that will be caused by so virulently unrealistic purposes. I will come up with another article to examine the catastrophic perspectives that inconsistent, nonsensical and pathetic doctrines like Neo-Ottomanism, Neo-Safavism, Neo-Mughalism, Neo-Czarism, and Neo-Qingism may eventually cause if given some consideration and trustworthiness. Here, I intend to discuss the dangers ensuing from the subtle and smart utilization of such delusions that the crumbling Western colonial powers may make. For the Russian and Chinese aspirations to establish a multipolar world, these dangers may be lethal. That is why I will also suggest several measures that Moscow and Beijing must take; in addition, I propose the introduction of these methods to several other countries.
Before all the rest, it is essential for many people worldwide to understand how the colonial powers of Western Europe and North America managed to survive. Both, the EU and the US seem to be collapsing and disintegrating nowadays; NATO has already been described as ‘dead’ by a member state’s head! And after five centuries of English colonialism, two world wars, one cold war, an unnecessary adhesion to the EU, and a final Brexit, England looks like a 15th c. country in a 21st c. world. The 15th century was a terrible period indeed for Western Europe, which was a barbarian periphery that experienced many wars and lost much blood in the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). At the very end of the 15th c., Western Europe was plagued with so many problems that the local kingdoms would irrevocably implode and disappear, if they did not expand colonially.
This reality must be carefully observed today by Chinese and Russians alike, because similar situations do not exist in their own national past. Consequently, the presently ailing Western states may well manage to survive by repeating exactly the same method, i.e. by exporting their own problems to others; their tactics in Ukraine do clearly confirm my assessment. Certainly, this involves more wars, more conflicts, more bloodshed, and greater risks; but the paranoid Western elites do not try to avoid them! Quite contrarily, they try to trigger them.
The silly but dangerous AUKUS bellicose rhetoric is just one example. It is absurd to take the Western political propaganda about ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ at face value. They did not want to impose ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. They are criminal enough to want to trigger only the situation that the entire world has clearly attested in the aforementioned misfortunate countries. The same can also happen eventually to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Algeria, Indonesia, and so on.
This means that the ensuing dangers are real and great, because the pulverization of numerous countries will cancel the long propagated dream of a peaceful multipolar world and significantly modify the scope of the historically founded and humanely prepared, multiply beneficial strategy One Belt One Road (OBOR/一带一路). How can Russia and China react to the chaotic plans of the Western World? To this question I will respond in the next part of this series of articles.
I. Ошибочное восприятие Сталина у большинства людей сегодня
II. Ошибочное восприятие Второй мировой войны современными обывателями
III. Настоящая Ялтинская конференция
IV. Большая игра никогда не заканчивалась
V. Добрые намерения и злые цели
VI. Рузвельт и Сталин: как Авраам Линкольн и Александр II
VII. Настоящий, скрытый Сталин: опытный мистик
VIII. Посол Турции говорит о жизни Сталина в Артвине и Стамбуле
IX. Сталин в Османской Анатолии: 1911-1912 гг.
X. Турецкий государственный деятель Риза Нур отметил, что Сталин понимал турецкий
XI. Культурный фон Сталина: искажен и неизвестен большинству людей
XII. Митраистское иранское культурное наследие Грузии и Сталин
XIII. Длинная, тяжелая тень Сасанидов
XIV. Несмываемая печать на исламе: иранское интермеццо
XV. Переплетенное исламское и христианское культурное наследие Грузии, и Шота Руставели
XVI. Русские переводы Руставели и псевдонимы Сталина
XVII. Археологические раскопки и открытия востоковедов до пребывания Сталина в Анатолии
XVIII. Текстовые источники информации о Митре и митраистских мистериях для Сталина
XIX. Духовность, религия, эсхатология, сотериология, вымирание человечества и Сталин
XX. Основные темы духовных исканий Сталина в Анатолии – 1. Тавроктония и Распятие
XXI. Основные темы духовных исканий Сталина в Анатолии – 2. Митраическая троица, христианская троица, духовность и Сталин.
XXII. Основные темы духовных исканий Сталина в Анатолии – 3. Солнечная природа митраизма / Непорочное рождение из скалы.
XXIII. Как сталинские митраистские медитации в Анатолии сформировали его принятие решений
1. Войны понтийского царя Митридата VI с Римом.
2. Митраистские пираты Киликии в борьбе с Римом: осквернение Греции и Сталин.
3. Посещал ли Сталин величайший в мире монумент Митры в Немрут-Даге?
4. Митраистские медитации Сталина и антисвященническая позиция
5. Митраистская версия ассирийско-вавилонского Гильгамеша: Вератрагна и его связь с Гераклом в Немрут-Даге
6. Митраистская анатолийская имперская духовность против скандинавской мифологии: Сталин против Гитлера
XXIV. Рим, Новый Рим, Третий Рим, и Сталин
XXV. Митраизм, христианство, Сталин и антихрист
Table of Contents
I. The erroneous perception of Stalin among most people today
II. The erroneous perception of WW II by average people today
III. The true Yalta Conference
IV. The Big Game never ended
V. Good intentions and evil purposes
VI. Roosevelt & Stalin: like Abraham Lincoln & Alexander II
VII. The real, hidden Stalin: an experienced mystic
VIII. A Turkish ambassador speaks about Stalin living in Artvin and Istanbul
IX. Stalin in Ottoman Anatolia: 1911-1912
X. Turkish statesman Rıza Nur noted that Stalin understood Turkish
XI. Stalin’s cultural background: distorted & unknown to most
XII. The Mithraic Iranian cultural heritage of Georgia & Stalin
XIII. The long, heavy shadow of the Sassanids
XIV. An indelible stamp on Islam: the Iranian Intermezzo
XV. The intertwined Islamic & Christian cultural heritage of Georgia, and Shota Rustaveli
XVI. Rustaveli’s Russian translations and Stalin’s pseudonyms
XVII. Archaeological excavations and Orientalist discoveries prior to Stalin’s sojourn in Anatolia
XVIII. Stalin’s textual sources of information about Mithra and the Mithraic mysteries
XIX. Spirituality, Religion, Eschatology, Soteriology, the Extinction of the Mankind, and Stalin
XX. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 1. Tauroctony and Crucifixion
XXI. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 2. Mithraic Trinity, Christian Trinity, Spirituality and Stalin
XXII. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 3. Solar nature of Mithraism / Immaculate birth from the rock
XXIII. How Stalin’s Mithraic meditations in Anatolia formed his decision-making
1. Pontus’ King Mithridates VI’s wars with Rome
2. Cilicia’s Mithraic Pirates in fight with Rome, the desecration of Greece, and Stalin
3. Did Stalin travel to visit the world’s greatest Mithraic monument at Nemrut Dagh?
4. Stalin’s Mithraic meditations and anti-sacerdotal stance
5. The Mithraic version of the Assyrian-Babylonian Gilgamesh: Verethragna, and his association with Heracles in Nemrut Dagh
6. Mithraic Anatolian Imperial Spirituality vs. Nordic Mythology: Stalin vs. Hitler
XXIV. Rome, New Rome, the Third Rome, and Stalin
XXV. Mithraism, Christianity, Stalin and the Antichrist
The idea that most of the people around the world have about Stalin is entirely false. This is due to the fact that atheists, materialists, Marxists-Leninists, liberal socialists, socialist-democrats, evolutionists and all the trash of Anglo-Saxon and Ashkenazi Khazarian pseudo-intellectuals and bogus-academics have first perceived, then interpreted, and last analyzed/presented Stalin and his historical role through the most erroneous, Trotskyist misunderstanding/distortion of the Georgian-origin Soviet statesman. But Stalin was an unconditional transcendentalist and a remarkable mystic.
Mithraic Tauroctony from a Mithraeum in Syria (currently in the Israel museum in Jerusalem): a mythical-religious topic early conceived by evil forces as purely eschatological symbolism
Human sacrifice: dead bodies wait for cremation in Dresden after the bombardment of the ‘Allied’ forces.
I. The erroneous perception of Stalin among most people today
According to this irrelevant story, Stalin (1878-1953) was a resolute materialist, a convinced Darwinist, a devoted Marxist-Leninist, and a heartless dictator who decimated entire nations, before purging the old guard of Communist-Bolshevik partisans, relocating populations, and sending millions to jail. There is only little truth in all this. In fact, Stalin was as realist as Kemal Ataturk; he therefore had to appear to others in the way he did in order to succeed Lenin and eliminate Trotsky. Many may agree with the last sentence, stating that this is part of the well-known History.
But there is also the ‘Other History’; the one that is unknown, because it did not happen. This is, in other words, the negative reflection of the reality. All the same, because this ‘other’ or ‘unknown’ History did not happen, this does not mean that it was not attempted. And indeed many secret and known organizations and ‘societies’ tried to prepare several developments which finally did not occur. It is essential for a true Historian to know well these failed attempts; in fact, he only then understands History as the Absolute Sphere that contains the outcome of all the desires, feelings, thoughts and attempts of the humans.
II. The erroneous perception of WW II by average people today
The unhappened History would trigger indeed far more spectacular developments than what the so-called WW II did – if it happened; part of the evil plan that Stalin triumphantly averted was that Trotsky would succeed Lenin and stay for some time in Moscow, incessantly planning his ‘global’ revolution, which so well reflects the paranoia, the deviance and the putrefaction of today’s ‘American’ (in reality: Anglo-Saxon and Ashkenazi Khazarian) Left. Today, few people can guess the monstrous and inhuman tyranny that comes after the eventuality (May God forbid!) of the American Left’s prevalence.
On the contrary, we know very well what would have happened, had Stalin failed to eliminate Trotsky; it is very simple. Hitler would have invaded, destroyed and demolished the Soviet Union, implementing in the 1940s what Victoria Nuland, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the American Left trash intend to carry out now: the complete decomposition and dismemberment of Russia. This is so because, as Charles de Gaulle always knew, the USSR was in reality ‘Russia’. If the above statement seems incredible to you, this is only due to the fact that, via a mental mirror game, the true Nazis made the world believe that Hitler was a Nazi and the paragon of Nazism.
As a matter of fact, Hitler was only the Venice Ball mask of Nazism.
The true Nazis were those who fully instrumentalized and utilized Hitler, detaching him from the spiritual tutorship of the great mystic Rudolf von Sebottendorf and usurping the Thule Gesellschaft from the very founder of the society, who had to flee to Turkey. Hitler was merely one of the tools of the true Nazis, i.e. the Anglo-Saxon and Ashkenazi Khazarian Satanists, who were identical then to Trotsky and today to the American Left.
III. The true Yalta Conference
This reality was encrypted in the eschatologically dramatic and historically tragic painting elaborated by Vitaly Komar (Виталий Комар; born 1943) and Alex Melamid (Александр Меламид; born 1945) in 1984 under the title ‘The Yalta Conference’ (Ялтинская конференция). The painting was repeatedly decoded in a distorting manner and duly misinterpreted in order not to disturb those who are embarrassed every time their criminality is revealed in the daylight and every moment they realize that their irrevocable end is about to befall on their wretched heads.
Of course, the painting raises plenty of serious questions; but if -as many forgers and cheaters pretend- the supposed meaning of the painting is that Hitler prevailed by fooling the (three) participants of the illustrious Yalta Conference, then why one of the participants is missing (W. Churchill)? The answer is simple: England was the epicenter of Nazism, the real producer of Hitler, and the true planner of all of his movements. Then, Churchill does not appear in the painting, simply because he was not fooled, being rather in the know. About:
I don’t intend to discuss either the (crypto-) Nazi English fabrication of Hitler in the 1920s or the apocalyptic painting in the present article. I need only to state at this point that -as historian- I don’t consider the so-called ‘WW I’, ‘WW II’, and ‘Cold War’ as independent episodes or isolated facts, but as an uninterrupted continuity of the evil, Nazi, Anglo-Saxon and Ashkenazi Khazarian colonial plans against Prussia / Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Czarist Russia, Qing China, the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, and the Mughal Empire. It is a clash that has lasted for more than 300 years under various forms, and certainly the most enduring, frontal opposition until now took place between the Anglo-Saxon pseudo-states (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.) and (Monarchical-Communist-Republican) Russia.
When it comes to Imperial Germany, the real moment of victory of the ‘Entente cordiale’ was not the abdication of the Kaiser (November 1918), but the rise of Hitler (January 1933).
When it comes to Imperial Russia, the real moment of victory of the ‘Entente cordiale’ was not the abdication of the Czar (March 1917), but the rise of Lenin (October / November 1917).
Pseudo-Nazi (or only partly and reflectively Nazi) Germany was geared to be the tool of the final split of the Russian Empire. Many people have failed to notice (let alone understand) that this was already attempted during the period November 1917-November 1918. Numerous ‘lands’ and nations declared independence quite early, notably Ukraine, Finland, Lithuania, Moldova, Belarus, Estonia, Poland and Latvia.
Furthermore, several other republics declared their independence in 1918, although most of them did not last for long: Tuvan People’s Republic (Тувинская Народная Республика), Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (закавказская демократическая федеративная республика), Kuban People’s Republic (Кубанская Народная Республика), Idel-Ural State (mainly a Tatar state named Ural-Volga state in Tatar; Урало-Волжский штат), Kaluga Soviet Republic (Калужская советская республика), North Ingria or Republic of Kirjasalo (Республика Северная Ингрия или Кирьясало); similar phenomena took place also in Central Asia, notably the Turkestan Soviet Federative Republic.
V. Good intentions and evil purposes
It would be correct and accurate to observe that the theoretical foundations on which these developments (secessions) took place can be retraced back to the famous essay by Stalin ‘Marxism and the National Question’ (1913) and to the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia (Декларация прав народов России), which was one of the earliest documents signed by the revolutionary government only on the 15th November 1917, just 8 days after the October Revolution (7th November or 25th October 1917, according to the Old Calendar).
In fact, if the demolition and the split of Imperial Russia into a total of 40-50 states did not occur in the period 1918-1922, this is due mainly to two factors:
First, the evil colonial forces realized that this was quite premature, because they did not possess local stooges and docile pawns among all the nations and the states that would emerge. In this case, they would be met with eventually nasty surprises.
Second, Lenin and the Soviet government feared that many seceded nations could eventually fall into the hands of monarchists, republicans, local landowners, various reactionary pseudo-religious leaders, and private businessmen; even more so, since they had to face a Civil War in many parts of the Empire.
All the same, this early experience must have been a very good lesson for Stalin, who apparently realized that anyone’s best intentions can always be used for the worst purposes, notably by inhuman, evil and criminal forces and secret organizations. It is very clear that during his many years in power, Stalin acted differently, promoting centripetal forces.
What good is it for all the nations and the ethnic groups of the world to accept the equality among the peoples, to ensure free development of all national minorities and ethnographical groups, and to recognize the right of every people to free self-determination, national sovereignty, and even secession and formation of a separate state, if all this serves ultimately the interests of evil, inhuman monsters that will be able -through use of deliberate fraud and extremely sophisticated lies tailored as per the ignorance of every local leader, elite and nation- to exploit this situation in order dominate these seemingly independent nations and to totally enslave them by means of corrupt pawns, involving bribed gangs, clownish politicians, bogus-academics, pseudo-intellectuals, lawless legislators, fraudulent judges, infidel religious ‘leaders’, treasonous military officers, nationally calamitous diplomats, criminal businessmen and untrustworthy ‘statesmen’ like those of today’s Greece, Cyprus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, etc.?
VI. Roosevelt & Stalin: like Abraham Lincoln & Alexander II
The main fact is therefore that Stalin effectively averted the -much desired by the Nazi rulers of England- disintegration of Russia (USSR) in 1941 – something that Trotsky would prove unable to do. How did Stalin manage to do that? Many people fooled by Western propaganda would answer this question by mentioning details of the Lend-Lease Act that US President F. D. Roosevelt signed on 11th March 1941. This is only partly true; even worse, those who think that the US ‘saved’ Soviet Union do not know the true nature of the US-UK relationship at the time; they actually confuse it with the present circumstances. Yet, we know that, on plenty of occasions, Roosevelt humiliated Churchill in their meetings.
In fact, the American aid helped Soviet Union to avoid heavier casualties and longer war. And the personal relationship between Roosevelt and Stalin was parallel to that between Abraham Lincoln and Czar Alexander II. The villainous English hated the American and the Russian rulers on both occasions.
The evil English hysteria unleashed: in a cartoon from the London Punch magazine (1863), the Russian Czar and the American President are depicted as tyrants, under the paranoid label “Extremes meet”; Abraham Lincoln addresses Alexander II with the words: “I see that we are both in the same situation: you are with your Poles, I am with the southern rebels”. From: https://историк.рф/journal/15/aleksandr-avraam-i-drugie-ofitsialnyie-litsa-6f.html
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Consequently, the main question stands before us: how did Stalin manage to save the USSR and to avert the defeat and demolition of the Russian Empire (which was then named Soviet Union’)? I would simply respond to this question with just few words:
– With his great spiritual force!
VII. The real, hidden Stalin: an experienced mystic
This may sound bizarre to many. But surely not to Alexei Alexandrovich Menyailov!
This Russian mystic and intellectual (Алексей Александрович Меняйлов; born in 1957) has already researched the topic and published several books about Stalin, fully counterbalancing the earlier mentioned, Trotskyist disfigurement of the Soviet statesman and the conveniently naïve idea of an atheist, materialist, evolutionist, Marxist-Leninist Stalin. Menyailov’s books have titles that speak for themselves; I will only mention here a few.
Сталин: посвящение Волхва (Stalin: the Consecration of the Magician)
Сталин: Путь волхвов (Stalin: The Way of the Magi)
Сталин. Прозрение волхва (Stalin. The Enlightenment of the Magician)
Сталин. Тайны Валькирии (Stalin. Secrets of the Valkyrie)
Сталин. Культ девы (Stalin. The cult of the Virgin)
In his many books and videos, Menyailov revealed a totally different and spiritually powerful Stalin in striking contrast to the nonsensical portrait and disinformation, which prevailed in this regard for long. With respect to Stalin’s spiritual force and material achievements, the Russian author focuses on the young Georgian’s years in exile and on the Shamanist-Tengrist initiation rituals in the Siberian taiga (boreal forest) to which the arrested revolutionary was introduced after he escaped from the prison and during his period of hiding; those were apparently Stalin’s true formative years. Certainly, Alexei Alexandrovich is not the only to dig in this direction. As the topic is vast, I don’t intend to further explore it within the limits of the present article.
VIII. A Turkish ambassador speaks about Stalin living in Artvin and Istanbul
One element that can shed more light on Stalin’s spiritual formation is the period of almost 24 months during which the Soviet leader seems to have disappeared from all screens (1911-1912). In fact, after the middle of 1910 and until the beginning of 1913 (when Lenin’s disciple traveled to Vienna), Stalin’s biography has been mainly a matter of purely theoretical reconstruction. For someone known to have constantly escaped jails, any illegal border-crossing appears to be a minor issue, particularly if we speak about mountainous terrains and pre-electronic times.
The topic of Stalin having spent one or two years in the Ottoman Empire is not new; individuals, journalists and ambassadors have spoken about that in the past. I will now mention only a few – merely on indicative basis.
The veteran Turkish diplomat Ender Arat, speaking to the journalist Şenol Çarık in an article-interview about one of his books, mentioned Stalin’s presence in Artvin, in today’s NE Turkey. As a matter of fact, the former Turkish ambassador’s remarkable book highlights selected episodes from the sojourn of many worldwide important people in Turkey (or earlier in the Ottoman Empire); indeed, many famous Russians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Germans, and Austrians lived in Turkey during a certain period of their life.
Ender Arat’s book is titled ‘Türklere Güvendiler – Tarih Boyunca Türk Topraklarına Sığınanlar’ (They Trusted the Turks – Those who have taken Refuge in Turkish Lands throughout History); it was published by Tarihçi Kitabevi in 2016 and republished in 2020. It can be found here:
Despite the fact that the said book concerns numerous famous persons, who resided in Turkey for some time, the interview-article’s title revolves exclusively around the Soviet statesman:
Stalin’in bilinmeyen Artvin dönemi (Stalin’s unknown period in Artvin)
The interview-article was published on 8th March 2016 under the subtitle:
Emekli Büyükelçi Ender Arat, tarih boyunca bu topraklara sığınanların kitabını yayınladı (Retired Ambassador Ender Arat has published the book about those who took refuge in these lands throughout history)
The excerpt about Stalin is rather brief, but it also makes state of his travels up to Istanbul.
Mesela Stalin daha Stalin değilken, Gürcistan’dayken, Artvin’de bir köye gelip domuz avlıyor, İstanbul’da domuz satıyor.
An English translation reads:
For example, when Stalin was in Georgia, at the time he was not called Stalin, he came to a village in Artvin and hunted wild boars, and then he sold them in Istanbul.
Ambassador Arat refers to the time Stalin had not yet been given this illustrious nickname by Lenin, and he was then known merely through his Georgian name and surname Ioseb (Joseph) Dzhugashvili (also spelt Jughashvili; Иосиф Джугашвили). It is only after 1913, at the age of 35, that the young revolutionary started being called ‘Stalin’.
The aforementioned brief mention would be almost entirely immaterial without the reference to Istanbul where Stalin used to travel and sell the skin of wild boars that he had hunted; this is so because at the time Artvin was part of the Russian Empire.
When the Russian army occupied Artvin during the Russian-Ottoman War of 1877-1878, there was an exodus of Ottoman populations and an influx of Georgian and Armenian newcomers; Artvin belonged then to the Batumi region (область), i.e. the same province where Stalin used to reside after 1901. The Adjara capital functioned indeed for him as a true gate to the Ottoman Empire.
IX. Stalin in Ottoman Anatolia: 1911-1912
There have been many other testimonials as regards Stalin’s movements and sojourn in parts of the Ottoman Empire – for the same always period, i.e. from some time in the second half of 1910 until some moment in 1912.
In an article posted on 20th September 2007, the Russian portal Islam News (https://islamnews.ru/news-7368.html) reproduced a feature (Сталин провел два года в Турции и знал турецкий язык, i.e. ‘Stalin spent two years in Turkey and knew Turkish’) that had been earlier published in the magazine Most, which was a periodical issued at the time by the Russian-Turkish Association of Friendship and Entrepreneurship. According to the publication, I. V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin) smuggled his way to Anatolia and hid there for two years in the village of Tashburun (today inhabited by ca. 2000 people), Akyazi district, Sakarya region.
Living in the house of his friend from Batumi, Vezir Yurt (apparently an Adjarian, i.e. Georgian Muslim), Stalin needed to cross a distance of about 190 km to reach the Ottoman capital.
According to the same portal, “Nejmi Colak, one of those who knew him (: Stalin) in Turkey, says that at that time he (: Stalin) used the surname Beriyashvili”. This is quite plausible, as Stalin was already known for his numerous pseudonyms and various nicknames; trying to appear as having an unusual surname, the paradoxical émigré apparently fabricated this hypothetical family name out of a basically Mingrelian family name (Beria or Berya, like that of the famous Soviet statesman Lavrentiy Pavlesdze Beria; 1899-1953) conventionally Georgianized with the addition of the surname ending –shvili. Stalin’s absolutely extraordinary father, who was literate and multilingual (something extremely rare for a shoe maker), may have introduced -thanks to his Ossetian origins and Mingrelian acquaintances- his young son Ioseb Besarionisdze (later Russianized as Iosif Vissarionovich) to some of his Mingrelian friends or colleagues.
In any case, when it comes to Stalin, all things Mingrelian are in reality a constantly recurring matter, particularly if we also take into account the notorious ‘Mingrelian affair’ (Мингрельское дело), a story stupendously invented to best inculpate several Soviet officials due to their contacts with Western diplomats.
The portal Islam News states that the testimonial about Stalin’s biannual residence in Tashburun is due to Kemal Yurt, who was (back in the middle 2000s) over 80 years old; he was the son of Stalin’s friend and refugee from Batumi Vezir Yurt in whose house Stalin stayed. Vezir Yurt and Stalin had known one another in Batumi and they were constantly in contact.
Stalin in young age; painting by Irakli Moiseevich Toizde (1902-1985; Ираклий Моисеевич Тоидзе) About:
Kemal Yurt noted that, in one of the letters written by Stalin a year after his return to Russia (1913) and dispatched to Vezir Yurt, the Communist activist expressed the desire to move to the Ottoman Empire again. Kemal’s father dissuaded him from going, writing: “You are already known here. Don’t come or they’ll kill you”. It is however noteworthy, as a sort of ‘parallel lives’, that Vezir Yurt was elected headman of the village, and he held this position for many years, when his old friend was the sole ruler of the USSR.
The same story was published under the title ‘Stalin Türkiye’de saklanmış’ (Stalin hid in Turkey) in the high circulation Turkish daily Hurriyet on 21st April 2005.
X. Turkish statesman Rıza Nur noted that Stalin understood Turkish
The same article provides two more independent testimonials of people whose relatives and ancestors had encountered the young Georgian fugitive and later recognized him, when the Turkish newspapers started publishing pictures of the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR (after 1922). The fact that Stalin spoke and understood Turkish is also revealed by an episode narrated by a very bizarre and controversial Turkish physician, writer, politician and statesman Rıza Nur (1879-1942).
Early elected as deputy (from Sinop) in the second term of the Ottoman Parliament (Meclis-i Mebûsan; 1908), Rıza Nur was also elected in the first and the second terms of the Turkish Parliament (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi). He took office in several ministries (notably he was Minister of Health for the period 1921-1923), and he participated in the Moscow Treaty (Moskova Antlaşması, 1921) and the Lausanne Treaty. Openly self-declared as homosexual and known for his endless demands for unusually bold reforms, Rıza Nur clashed with many crypto-Islamists around Kemal Ataturk and he was finally forced to leave Turkey in 1926. He then lived in England for several years, taught Turkic languages and Turkology, authored several articles and books, entrusted his biography to the British Museum (so that it is published posthumously), and he was ultimately allowed to return to Turkey, after Kemal Ataturk’s death (1938), due to the persistent English diplomatic demands.
Moscow Treaty
The disreputable and squalid rascal, criminal and traitor Kadir Mısıroğlu (1933-2019), a clownish humanoid widely acknowledged as MI6 informer, agent and pawn known for his demented, execrable, and treacherous Neo-Ottomanist propaganda, was secretly entrusted by the British Museum with the treacherous and insidious task of publishing in Turkey Riza Nur’s biographical book in order to intentionally generate intellectual-educational- social-political turmoil. Of course, the book was duly and automatically banned in Turkey, because the liberal ideas and narratives of the author would eventually tarnish the image and the heritage of Kemal Ataturk among idiotic average people who would consider the founder of Modern Turkey as intolerably tolerant toward Rıza Nur, a man who explicitly and blatantly stated that he was ‘feeling like a woman’.
Rıza Nur wrote that, when he was sent (along with Yusuf Kemal and Ali Fuad) by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey to Moscow to conclude the border treaty (which became known as Moscow Treaty) and to get, if possible, financial help, the Turkish delegation failed to find common ground with Georgy Chicherin (Георгий Васильевич Чичерин; 1872-1936), the then Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. They then decided to meet with Stalin, whom they considered a more efficient person, although Stalin did not hold an important position, being merely People’s Commissar for Nationalities of the RSFSR (Народный комиссар по делам национальностей РСФСР; 1917-1923) and People’s Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate of the RSFSR (Народный комиссар рабоче-крестьянской инспекции РСФСР; 1920-1922). At this point, one must take into consideration that Stalin became Secretary General (Генеральный секретарь ЦК КПСС) only in 1922; even worse, Stalin’s military command (1918-1921) was at times controversial and he was repeatedly accused by Trotsky and Lenin for ‘strategic mistakes’ in the Polish-Soviet war, during which Stalin appeared to be defiant, disobeying orders to transfer his troops and to assist Tukhachevsky (Михаил Тухачевский) in attacking Warsaw.
According to Rıza Nur’s narrative, immediately before the meeting, Stalin witnessed an argument among the Turkish delegates, who spoke in Turkish. One of them was shy enough to ask financial help from the Soviet government, which too had to face many problems, wars and local uprising, and said: “I can’t ask the Communists for money, ask for it yourself”. Rıza Nur was more resolute and replied pointing out that they do not ask the money for themselves but for their motherland; he then went on stating that “the one who asks is equivalent to one beggar, and the one who does not give is equivalent to two beggars”. Upon hearing this, Stalin smiled, in an indication that he had understood it all, and subsequently greeted them. The border agreement was concluded as the Turkish delegation wanted it to be, and Stalin agreed with the Turkish demand for some financial help (something that Lenin was already willing to offer to Kemal Ataturk as early as 1920). Details:
XI. Stalin’s cultural background: distorted & unknown to most
Most of the people worldwide have a very erroneous idea also about Stalin’s cultural, intellectual, educational, literary, and ethnographic background. They view Stalin as a Russian of the end of the 19th c. and of the beginning of the 20th c., but this is fully wrong. It would be certainly worse to view the young Stalin as a European, even up to the (minimal) degree that average Russians were Europeanized or westernized in the last three or four decades of Imperial Russia. Only the Russian elites were then partly Europeanized; I say so, because there was an Orthodox Russian part of the Czarist elite, which rejected with vehement indignation and absolute disgust any sort of Europeanization or Westernization.
Georgia was indeed part of the Russian Empire, but Georgians were very different from the Russians in every sense. Georgians are Christian Orthodox, but for the early Christian period of their past, they were Monophysites (or rather Miaphysites), which makes them far closer to the Armenians, to the Aramaeans of Syria (and, in any case, originally Iberia/Georgia depended on the Patriarchate of Antioch), Mesopotamia and Phoenicia (Lebanon) and to the Copts of Egypt than to the Russians or the Eastern Roman Orthodox peoples (Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Albanians, etc.).
Only their rivalry with the also Monophysitic (or Miaphysitic) Armenians and the embarrassing attempt of the latter to get involved in the administration of the Georgian Church pushed -after many long centuries- the Georgians to accept Constantinopolitan Orthodoxy and to organize two events to subsequently denounce and utterly reject the Armenian Church:
– the Third Council of Dvin (in 607), and
– the council of Ruisi-Urbnisi (in 1103).
Perhaps most of today’s Russian priests, monks and theologians would pronounce these Georgian toponyms with some difficulty, but Urbnisi, a historic site known for its majestic monuments and outstanding role in the History of Georgia, is located only few kilometers away from Gori, the city where Stalin was born.
Although an integral part of Oriental Christianity, Georgian Orthodoxy has only the name common with the Eastern Roman, the Early Slavonic and the Modern Russian churches. On the contrary, the Georgian Church is culturally and historically closer to the Monophysitic and Nestorian Aramaeans of Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, as it is clearly demonstrated by a multitude of historical sources, notably the famous story of the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers. Since the term ‘Assyrian’ may appear odd, I have to herewith clarify that the Nestorian Church or rather Patriarchate, was first based in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, then in Abbasid Baghdad, and later in Qudshanis, near today’s Hakkari (SE Turkey), and it was named (in Syriac Aramaic) after the historical land of Assyria: Edta Atureta d-Madenha, i.e. ‘Assyrian’. This occurred in spite of the fact that it was initially an entirely Aramaean Church before numerous Asiatic nations, notably Sogdians, Turkic nations, Mongols and Chinese, accepted Nestorianism.
The story of the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers, who preached Christianity in Georgia, and the theological and liturgical foundations of Georgian Christianity were among the topics that Stalin studied scrupulously for five years (1894-1899) in the Russian Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi (at the age of 16-21). Reacting against the Russian priests who were teaching there, Stalin realized very well (and in young age) the value of national identity and the importance of cultural integrity. He never became a Russian. This means that even fewer were the chances of him ever becoming a Europeanized or westernized intellectual and activist – let alone a European or Western.
It is not only with respect to Christianity that Stalin was an entirely (and consciously) Oriental (and not Muscovite, Kievan or Constantinopolitan, let alone Catholic or Protestant) young intellectual; Georgia’s Antiquity is irreversibly intertwined with that of Iran. For a large part of their Ancient History, Georgians lived in an Iranian imperial province (satrapy). This may appear natural, since the entire Caucasus region, Anatolia, the southern part of today’s Ukraine, Crimea, most of today’s Romania and Bulgaria, involving Thrace and Macedonia, were also parts of the Achaemenid Iranian Empire (550-330 BCE), pretty much like today’s Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, Indus Valley region, and the Arabian Peninsula’s coastlands of the Persian Gulf. In fact, pre-Islamic Georgia was independent from Iran only when the Empire was weak, notably during the Arsacid Parthian dynasty (250 BCE – 224 CE).
This historical reality is quasi-entirely concealed in the forgery published by the Nazi Wikipedia as ‘History of Georgia’:
XII. The Mithraic Iranian cultural heritage of Georgia & Stalin
Thank God, there was no Wikipedia at the time of Stalin; but all the monuments, the historical texts, the inscriptions, the traditions, the legends, the myths and the epics were there. The historical past of Georgia has nothing to do with that of Ancient Rome, except for some Roman military expeditions which were parts and episodes of the interminable Roman-Iranian conflict. Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, the Universal Imperial concept and discipline of Iran (of which Georgia and the entire Caucasus were an integral part), and the legacy of the Achaemenid dynasty have always been part of Georgia’s history, culture and heritage; the same is valid for the terrible civil wars, which were caused (as early as during the reign of Kabujiya/Cambyses II in the late 6th c. BCE) by the evil and polytheistic Mithraic Magi, who opposed the monotheistic imperial rulers of Achaemenid Parsa (Persepolis),
The aforementioned is valid for the comprehensively Iranized (or Orientalized) Macedonian kingdom of Pontus that controlled parts of Georgia (Iberia). It is also noteworthy that the monarchs of that kingdom fully abandoned their earlier culture and religion, and they were solemnly named after, and sacramentally blessed by, Mithra (Mitra; also known as Mehr). That’s why they wholeheartedly propagated their new religion throughout Anatolia and across the surrounding seas. More importantly, ruling in the name of Mithra, Pontus King Mithridates VI (135-63 BCE) supported the Cilician Mithraic pirates, who caused terrible damage to the Roman interests, desecrated the most important temples of the blasphemous barbarians of Greece, and duly profaned the peak sanctuary of Mt. Olympus, i.e. Ancient Greeks’ supposedly holiest place.
Mithraism is an integral part of the Georgian identity. The House of Mihran (i.e. the dynasty of the Mithraic faithful nobles), which was one of the seven royal houses of Iran, is at the origin of the kings of Aluank (Caucasian Albania; basically known as Ardhan in Parthian and as Arran in Middle Persian), of the kings of the Armenian Gardman, of the kings of the Armenian Gogark, and of the Chosroid dynasty of Georgia (which was based mainly in Kakheti). The Georgian (Iberian) Chosroid kings (Khosrovianni), who accepted Christianity (337 CE), ruled from 284 CE until 580 CE as vassal kings of the Sassanid emperors of Iran (even after the death of Vakhtang I in 522 CE); their offspring offered an Iranian royal continuity in Caucasus down to the Guaramids and the Nersianids (who ruled as erismtavari, ‘great dukes’ in parts of Georgia from 588 until 786, with intervals of Islamic occupation), as well as to the Bagrationi (the Georgian Bagratids), who ruled from 888 CE {when king Adarnase IV (ca. 870-923) took power over part of Georgia} until 1810, when the Russians canceled the Treaty of Georgievsk, which was signed in 1783, and abolished the Georgian Monarchy. This was the true historical past of Stalin and this is what he learned as his own national past, thanks to his home and school education.
The first Chosroid monarch, Mirian III of Iberia (277-361; reigned after 284 as vassal), bears a Mithraic name, as Mirian in Georgian is the equivalent of Mihran. The name of the dynasty is due to the (non-ruling) father of Mirian Chosroes (Khusraw), and this is a typically Iranian name of high spiritual, universal and imperial connotation. The Georgian Chronicles (Картлис цховреба /Kartlis Tskhovreba), which were composed first in the 8th c., make state of his conversion to Christianity (337 CE), following the ministry of Nino, a female Cappadocian monk; his second wife, queen Nana of Iberia, accepted the Christian faith first. All three were canonized in Georgia as Equal-to-Apostles (motsikultastsori/равноапостольный); in spite of the evident Christianization, the Chosroid dynasty is filled with rulers bearing Iranian names and venerating Mithraic concepts, symbols and traditions. Perceiving the historical developments within the correct contextualization, one can safely state that the Christianization of Georgia and Armenia consisted merely in the evangelization of a part of the wider Iran. And Stalin’s mother was a devout Christian, well versed in the theological dogma, and very knowledgeable in Ecclesiastical History. About:
In fact, the vast symbolic, liturgical and spiritual thematic, which was transferred from Mithraism to Christianity, thus totally disfiguring the teachings of Jesus, helped perpetuate the presence of Ancient Iranian spiritual, religious and cultural concepts within Georgian Christianity. This fact concerns also several other religions that were formed or diffused and prevailed in the region, Islam included. Of course, Stalin was not an Orientalist, neither did he study Orientalism to know these topics in detail, but he was inevitably impacted by them as I will explain below. This definitely makes of him an original Oriental. About:
We have to demonstrate a similar historical understanding for the role that the flamboyant Sassanid Empire of Iran (224-651 CE) played in the formation of the Georgian soul, tradition and spirituality. In fact, the country was an Iranian province and, despite its apparent Christianization, the cultural life was entirely Iranian. The Sassanid reassessment of Zoroastrianism, as undertaken by Kartir (a major high priest, a revered mystic, and a great religious and imperial reformer who lived during the 3rd c. CE), brought about
a) a striking contrast to, and virulent rejection of, Mani and his religion (Manichaeism),
b) an unprecedented and divinely consecrated heroism,
c) a formidable effort to make of the Achaemenid ancestors of the Iranians the legendary and exemplary figures of a Divine Order (without involving though a typical ancestor veneration),
d) a universal vocation, role, and mission of Iran to save the world within an eschatological context, and
e) a paramount change in terms of religious intolerance, military brutality, imperial commitment, and behavioral determination. This overwhelming transformation has left enormous traces in Iran, Caucasus, Central Asia, and many other parts of the Turanian-Iranian world throughout the ages.
In fact, no other empire in the world could have served as better paradigm to both, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, than the Sassanid Empire of Iran. The Roman Empire did not develop or represent any mythical or legendary reference to the ancestors of the Romans except for the very limited attempts of Virgil, Horace or Ovid; even these poets did not envision any universal role, let alone vocation, for the Romans.
The Roman poets, who recalled the Roman national past, retracing it up to Aeneas and Troy, who attempted to reveal human wisdom in rhymes, and who envisioned human and divine interaction, were not sacerdotal masters, spiritual mystics or universal hierophants able to possibly position Rome in terms of Cosmogony, Cosmology, Eschatology and Soteriology. They were low-level talented artists, who wrote for merely personal or social purposes to please the Roman elite around them. In fact, for the worldwide standards of a truly universal empire, the Roman Empire is a most failed state – either you examine its pre-Christian period or you focus on the Eastern Roman imperial model.
Hitler’s references to the Nordic mythical context and Stalin’s calls for the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная война) and exultations of the heroes of the motherland (герои родины), despite their great dissimilarities, are culturally closer to the Sassanid Iran than to the, spiritually impotent and intellectually weak, Roman Empire where Art acquired value per se, due to the total absence of true spirituality, sacerdotal potency, divine order, and universal appeal.
The extraordinary centripetal dynamics launched by Kartir triggered also centrifugal forces; Mazdak, a 5th c. – early 6th c. Iranian priest, the worldwide first to evangelize a Communist society, unleashed a thunderous religious attack against the Sassanid establishment, before failing and being banned. But both movements motivated and galvanized several generations of formidable opponents to the Omayyad and the Abbasid caliphs, leading people to either military resistance (like the Khurramites) or secession {like in numerous cases attested during the period of Islamic History that is known as ‘Iranian Intermezzo’, a term aptly introduced by the Russian Orientalist Vladimir Minorsky (1877-1966)}.
All the above was of vital importance for the History of Georgia and, more particularly for the survival of Georgian Christianity. In a way, the continuance of the Christian kingdom of Georgia depended basically on its Iranian nature, character and affiliation. As Iranian periphery, Georgia (like Armenia) was occupied during the early Islamic invasions. Resistance against the caliphates of Damascus and, after 750 CE, Baghdad was multifold throughout the territories of the Caliphate:
a- Islamic (notably led by the descendants of Ali ibn Abi Taleb who were the only rightful pretenders to the title of Caliph),
b- Iranian spiritual and cultural (involving notably the Khurramites who were sort of Neo-Mazdakites), and
c- Christian (mainly in Georgia and Armenia).
XIV. An indelible stamp on Islam: the Iranian Intermezzo
In fact, it is the success of the Iranian spiritual and cultural resistance that brought about groundbreaking results as early as 200 years after prophet Muhammad died (632 CE). In fact, the Abbasid Caliphate was vast and difficult to rule (from Morocco to the borders of China and from Siberia to Mozambique); the Caliphs had to care mostly about their survival because the outright majority of Muslims virulently opposed them. That’s why centrifugal forces were early developed and formidable militants of Iranian ancestry, culture and faith seized sizeable mountainous or remote lands and, one way or another, seceded from the Abbasid Caliphate.
This overwhelming phenomenon took various forms; sometimes a local feudal lord, who remained Mazdean for 70 or 80 years after the Islamic invasions, accepted Islam nominally, helped militarily the governor who was sent from Baghdad, and then gradually reduced him to impotency, making him unable to prevent the seizure of power at the local level. This was the case of the Samanid rulers (819-999), who imposed Iranian-Turanian culture and language over a large part of NE Iran and Central Asia, while being ceremonially Muslim.
Another example was the Tahirid dynasty (821-873), which was launched by Tahir ibn Husayn, an Iranian of noble descent who served the Caliph al-Ma’mun in his fight against his brother al-Amin only to be rewarded with the governorship of first Mosul and then Khorasan. First from Merv and then from Neyshapur the Tahirids ruled independently, only nominally accepting the authority of the Caliph at Baghdad.
And this was in fact the manner through which the Abbasid Caliphate totally collapsed already 100 years after its rise (750 CE); in fact, by the middle of the 9th c., the ruler at Baghdad was a powerless figurehead merely receiving news about ‘his’ provinces, which were controlled -in his name- by various Iranian and Turanian combatants whose culture was markedly Sassanid Iranian, although they nominally acknowledged Islam as religion.
The Samanids, the Tahirids, the Saffarids of Khorasan (861-1003), the Sallarids of Caucasus (919-1062), the Ziyarids of Northern Iran (931-1090), and above all the Buyids (934-1062), who held the Abbasid Caliph captive in his palace in Baghdad, ruled all lands between Syria and Pakistan, and used the Sassanid title ‘Shahanshah’, actively promoting the reinstatement, the rehabilitation, and the reinvigoration of all Sassanid ideals, virtues, principles, values and concepts. At the same time, an Iranian origin family, the Barmakids (Бармакиды/برمکیان), managed to obtain great power as advisers of the imperially inexperienced Abbasids, thus gradually transforming them into culturally Iranian caliphs of Muslim faith. In parallel, and as part of the imperial emancipation of the Abbasid family, Aramaeans and Iranians transferred their libraries and schools to Abbasid Baghdad, thus forming the greatest center of science, learning, research, translation and wisdom in the then world, namely the Bayt al Hikmah (بيت الحكمة/ Дом мудрости).
Only because the aforementioned developments caused the central Abbasid force to vanish into thin air, was it possible for the Caucasian Christian kingdoms of Georgia and Armenia to be reconstituted in the late 9th c. It is to be however reminded that these two seceded kingdoms constantly fought against one another. For all these reasons, one has to realize that, before the arrival of the Seljuks, the borderlines of the different kingdoms or emirates that were located between the Eastern Mediterranean coast lands, the Persian Gulf shores, the Indus River Valley, and Central Asia were moving like the sand of the desert. About:
When it comes to the wider Caucasus region, of major importance for developments that took place in Georgia and Armenia is the establishment of the Sajid dynasty (889-929; Саджиды / ساجیان). Muhammad ibn Abi’l-Saj Devdad was the founder of the dynasty, as he benefitted from his father’s fight against the already mentioned legendary rebel Babak Khorramdin, the leader of the Khurramites. Muhammad’s father, Abu’l-Saj Devdad (after whom the dynasty is named) was a Sogdian from Osrushana (Уструшана/اسروشنه) in Transoxiana (in today’s Uzbekistan), who served the Abbasid Caliphs in many battles, first against the Khurramites (837 CE) and later against other dissidents and rebels during the 9th c. Although he was appointed as governor of Khuzestan (today’s SW Iran), he joined forces with the Saffarids because of the spectacular disintegration of the Caliphate, which convinced numerous experienced military rulers that they could contain or even subdue the Caliph.
Similarly, the rise of the Mazyadid dynasty in Shirvan (in today’s Azerbaijan) under Haytham ibn Khalid in 861 further weakened the Abbasid ability to possibly bring the Caliphate’s Northern provinces under control. The historically Iranian title Shirvahshah (شروانشاه) was reintroduced and, after the Mazyadids, the later branches of the same dynasty, i.e. the Kasranids and the Darbandis, ruled large parts of the Caucasus region from 861 until 1538 (witnessing many ups and downs).
One must bear all this in mind in order to understand how the Georgian Bagrationi dynasty and the Armenian Bagratids (880-1045) were able to establish their small kingdoms in the 880s. One has also to add that, in the vicinity of Caucasus, few pre-Islamic Iranian dynasties survived for centuries after the Islamic conquests in the southern coastland of the Caspian Sea, i.e. the quasi-inaccessible northern valleys of the Elburz mountain range; the Dabuyids (a dynasty originating from the Sassanid Emperor Kavadh I) controlled that region (known in Farsi as Tabaristan / طبرستان) from 642 until 760, whereas the Karenids (also known as Qarivand) controlled the western parts of Tabaristan (currently named Mazandaran) from 550 until the 11th c., constantly fighting against the Abbasids.
XV. The intertwined Islamic & Christian cultural heritage of Georgia, and Shota Rustaveli
The aforementioned brief description helps also understand another fundamental aspect of the Georgian culture; this has to do with a deep cultural exchange and interrelationship between Muslims and Christians that took place in the Caucasus region, in Anatolia, in Central Asia and many other parts of the Islamic world. As Christians and Muslims interacted within the domain of the Iranian Civilization, a remarkable phenomenon of cultural flocculation was produced, which prevented acculturation from happening – thank God! In fact, this situation cancels totally the racist Western notion and theories of ‘acculturation’.
Acculturation is defined as ‘assimilation to a different culture, typically the dominant one’. Assimilation is described as ‘a two-way process in which the majority culture is changed as well as the minority culture’. Quite contrarily, flocculation is ‘a process by which a chemical coagulant added to the water acts to facilitate bonding between particles, creating larger aggregates which are easier to separate’.
In fact, to establish a parallel with the aforementioned definitions, Georgian Christianity and Iranian Culture did not ‘meet’ within the land of the Islamic Caliphate. Such an approach would be very superficial and erroneous. In reality, Christianity and Islam encountered one another within the soft waters of Iranian Culture and Civilization. Referring to the above definition, the ‘water’ was the Iranian Civilization, the particles were ‘Christianity’ and ‘Islam’, and the ‘chemical coagulant’ was common cultural life itself.
Then, without any change in the religious dogma, without any compromise in liturgical matters, and without any renunciation of their Christian past and identity, Georgians were greatly impacted by the Sassanid Iranian Cultural Renaissance of the 9th – 10th c., which stimulated poets, mystics, spiritual masters, and visionaries to reassess, reinstate and recompose the Iranian Imperial Universalism in Kartir’s heroic and divine terms, while also incorporating prophet Muhammad and his Islamic preaching within the eternal recapitulation that is now called World History. The narration of noble and heroic deeds of early, divine dynasties became then revelatory of the human condition, because the various aspects, the braveries and the sins, of many different kings and heroes could be poetically sculpted in order to create new, diachronic hyper-characters, who were able to encapsulate in one ‘person’ the achievements and/or the weaknesses of many.
The first Iranian Muslim to excel in these universally Iranian epics was Ferdowsi (فردوسی; 940-1025); his absolutely misunderstood, grand opus Shahnameh (شاهنامه) is not a merely chivalric romance, as fallacious English Orientalists constantly pretend, but a unique, supratemporal epic in which the superb poet elaborated multilayered heroic characters reflecting the past and heralding the future. For the Muslim world from the Balkans, Russia (and Tatarstan), Anatolia and the Caucasus region to India, Central Asia, and Siberia, Ferdowsi (Фирдоуси) impacted the culture of the Iranians, the Turanians and many other nations as much as prophet Muhammad did, whereas his fabulous epic Shahnameh (Шахнаме; more than 100000 verses) was astutely considered as ‘second Quran’ in terms of divine revelation.
Ferdowsi had an enormous impact on the language, the education, the literature, the popular religion, the culture and the spirituality of many nations; one century later, the national poet of Azerbaijan Nizami Ganjavi (نظامی گنجوی/Nizami Gəncəvi / Низами Гянджеви; 1141-1209) reproduced many of the legendary topics that Ferdowsi narrated, giving fully eschatological context to his portraits of the Sassanid Emperors Bahram V (420-438) and Khusraw II (590-628) and of Alexander the Great in his masterpieces Haft Peykar (هفت پیکر; ‘Seven Beauties’), Khosrow and Shirin (خسرو و شیرین), and Eskander Nameh (اسکندرنامه; ‘the Book of Alexander’) respectively. Amir Khusraw Dehlevi (1253-1325; امیرخسرو دهلوی), the father of Hindavi Literature (in the subcontinent), emulated these topics in the late 13th and the 14th c.; he was not only the national poet of Hindustan, but also a leading mystic and an accomplished musician who merged the traditional Iranian, Arabic, Turanian and Indian singing into what has been known as Qawwali (a devotional song of Muslim mystics). About:
What Nezami Ganjavi did in Azerbaijan and Amir Khusraw carried out in India, Shota Rustaveli (1172-1216; شوتا روستاولی / Шота Руставели) accomplished in Georgia. The national poet about whose life little is known composed the famous epic ‘The Knight in the Panther’s Skin’ (Vepkhist kaosani), which is truly flooded with Iranian themes, concepts, values, names, heroic deeds, mythical-eschatological connotations, and brave, honest characters. In fact, the main hero of the epic (the knight Tariel who wears the panther’s skin) is the Georgian literary emulation of Rustam, one of the foremost Iranian legendary heroes about whom Ferdowsi and all the other great poets and mystics composed thousands of verses. This is easy to conclude, when one takes into account that Rustam used to wear babr-e bayan (بَبْرِ بَیان), namely a magical, ever-lasting suit made of the skin of a tiger or leopard or panther, which makes the person that wears it invisible and invulnerable to weapons, fire and water.
It is not possible to expand on this topic within the limits of the present article, but it is essential to state that this enthralling epic poem reflected and determined the Georgian identity, culture, traditions and values. The Georgian national epic is at the middle of the dogmatic distance between Islam and Christianity; there are references to the Old Testament, the Gospels, and the Quran, but most of the characters are Muslims. This is so because in the 12th and the 13th c. there was no real antagonism between the two religions among people living in the Caucasus region. Every trouble started much later, and only after the calamitous infiltration of numerous Catholic and Protestant missionaries, English and French colonialists, and villainous, racist academics who deliberately spread hate, discord, enmity and rancor; it was then that a historical revisionism was attempted by the small part of the Georgian elite that was westernized (with the help of their foreign -mainly French and English- masters).
In fact, these vicious Western missionaries, academics, ‘explorers’, agents and diplomats, who reached there with perfidious mentality, evil intentions, and insidious targets, incited the Georgian priests to burn and destroy all manuscripts of Rustaveli’s majestic epic under the pretext that ‘it was not Christian’, but in reality because it very much defined and consolidated Georgian soul as entirely Oriental, and absolutely clear of the Greco-Roman contamination that these Western gangsters intended to diffuse instead.
XVI. Rustaveli’s Russian translations and Stalin’s pseudonyms
All this and much more was indeed part of Stalin’s culture, education, religious traditions and world conceptualization. It is well known that Stalin loved very much the aforementioned masterpiece of the National Georgian Literature and he wanted to make it widely known to Russians. Only in the period 1935-1940, there were four (4) complete poetic translations of the epic in Russian (Konstantin Balmont, 1933; Georgy Tsagareli, 1937; Shalva Nutsubidze, 1937; Panteleimon Petrenko, 1938). And for a lavish celebration of Rustaveli’s 750th birthday, celebrated in 1937, the Bolshoi Theater was chosen as the correct venue.
Quite interestingly, there was an earlier (actually the first) Russian translation of the epic and even an independent book (of biographical content) about Rustaveli, which was written by the translator himself (also in Russian). The translation (Барсова кожа-Грузинская поэма Шота Руставели / Panther skin–Georgian poem by Shota Rustaveli) was published in Tbilisi in 1888. Three years earlier (1885), also in Tbilisi, the book was published under the title: Шота Руставели – Грузинский народный поэт (Shota Rustaveli – Georgian popular poet).
The author and translator was a renowned journalist with a career spanning over the 19th and the early 20th century. Son of a Polish officer (of the Czarist army) and of a Georgian lady, he was born in the Caucasus region in 1837 and he died around 1912, after having authored several books and been the editor-in chief of various important publications. All the same, his translation and book remained unknown to almost all; they were out of reach for most of the 20th c.; the sole reason for the confiscation and the concealment of these publications seems to have been a rather mysterious, personal involvement of Stalin himself.
– Why does a ruler decide to literarily ban a book about the national poet of his own fatherland and the translation of the poet’s grand opus – particularly if this leader so much adores this poet and finds great pleasure in repeatedly reading the illustrious epic?
The late Prof. William Vasilievich Pokhliobkin (Вильям Васильевич Похлёбкин; 1923-2000) believed that he found the reason; either he is right or not, the fact is that the Czarist officer’s son, author and Russian translator of Rustaveli, was named Evgeniy Stepanovich Stalinsky (Евгений Степанович Сталинский). And for Prof. Pokhliobkin, the reason for the removal of Stalinsky’s publications from every public library and bookshop is the fact that Stalin wanted to hide the true origin of his own (and most famous) pseudonym, which was an abbreviation of the translator’s name.
Speaking about Stalin’s pseudonyms, we can discover other traces of Iranian cultural impact. One of his earlier pseudonyms was Koba; many believe that the young rebel selected this pseudonym for him, after identifying his role in real life as that of the homonymous hero of a novel written by the Georgian writer Alexander Kazbegi (1848-1893; Александр Казбеги). In the novel Patricide (Отцеубийца), Koba is a character-embodiment of justice, truthfulness and respect for women; a Caucasian bandit, who has no respect for any authority, defends the poor, and takes revenge on wrongdoers, the hero of the novel fascinated the mind and imagination of the young Joseph Dzhugashvili. About: (Russian translation) https://www.litres.ru/aleksandr-kazbegi/otceubiyca/chitat-onlayn/
The aforementioned interpretation of the origin of the pseudonym Koba is only partly true; in reality, the Georgian novelist used a name that was historically known to Georgians. This was the Modern Georgian rendition of the name of the Sassanid Emperor Kavadh I (pronounced Qubad in Farsi: قباد یکم /Кавад I/473-531; ruled 488-496 and 499-531), who was one of the greatest Sassanids, even more so because he supported the revolutionary, Communist, high priest and visionary Mazdak and his groundbreaking reforms that he wanted to initiate in order to entirely overhaul the socio-economic structure of the Empire.
After eight (8) years of controversial rule, Kavadh I lost his throne due to his extraordinarily brave and adventurous character and because of his determination to adopt the ideas and the concepts of someone, who wanted to confiscate the lands and the fortunes of the landowners, i.e. the imperial nobility, and to distribute the national wealth proportionally to all the subjects of the Empire; even the women should be common to all men as per Mazdak’s teachings, which were put to use for some time. All the same, escaping to Turan and getting reinforcements, the toppled monarch managed to quickly return and to rule for more than three decades, also invading (partly) the vassal kingdom of Chosroid Georgia (Iberia); but Kavadh I had to permanently forget Mazdakism, which was definitely the World History’s first conceptualization and implementation of a Communist society.
Kavadh I’s historical importance pales indeed, if it is compared with the sublime, universal significance of his legendary counterpart, namely Shah Kay Kawad of the ‘mythical’ Kayanian dynasty that Ferdowsi prodigiously envisioned and marvelously narrated in his majestic epic Shahnameh. And such the spiritual, moral and imperial importance of Ferdowsi’s epic characters was that, many centuries after the national poet of Iran died, Seljuk sultans of Rum in Anatolia were named after Kay Kawad (notably Kayqubad I).
The Georgian Chronicles do not mention Mazdak, but the greatest Islamic historian al-Tabari (839-923; Ибн Джарир ат-Табари / الطبري) wrote extensively about the controversial imperial reformer in the 5th volume (out of 40 volumes of the recent English edition) of his History of the Prophets and the Kings (تاريخ الرسل والملوك/Tarīkh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk); in this part of his text (or volume of the publication), the illustrious historiographer, theologian, mystic and scholar covers mainly the History of the Sassanid Empire. As Tabari was widely known, read and quoted not only among Muslims but also by Syriac Aramaean, Georgian and Armenian scholars, historians and various writers, it is certain that his narratives were shared among several non-Muslim populations. It makes therefore sense to assume that Stalin’s pseudonym Koba reveals key aspects of his Georgian and therefore Iranian cultural background.
XVII. Archaeological excavations and Orientalist discoveries prior to Stalin’s sojourn in Anatolia
If I expanded so much on Stalin’s national, socio-cultural, educational, intellectual and spiritual background, it is because it is essential to understand who exactly the young man truly was. When Joseph Dzhugashvili at the age of 33 decided to escape from the czarist prisons and to secure a calm place for survival, meditation, spiritual exercises and practices, he was not at all a European or a Westerner with knowledge of, or interest in, Dante, Pascal, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Goethe, Lamartine, Fichte, Victor Hugo, and various other cornerstones of the Modern Western European intellectual life. He was an Oriental, a Caucasian, culturally very familiar with Anatolian and Iranian Muslims, with Turanian mystics, with Iranian epics, with Asia (and not with Europe), and with a legendary reconfiguration of the Pre-Islamic Antiquity and of the Divine, Imperial Universe (Ferdowsi, Nizami Ganjavi, Shota Rustaveli, etc.).
Anti-czarist projects and activities were certainly a common ground between Stalin and Lenin, his 8 years older mentor, whom the young Georgian met in 1905, but in reality, when it comes to education and culture, the main two Soviet sovereigns had very little in common during their first 33 years of life. It is very clear that Lenin and Stalin did not have the same reading of Karl Marx. Lenin was a Marxist, and Stalin was a Leninist; but Stalin was a Marxist only in the sense that he was a follower and a disciple of Lenin. More importantly, Stalin did not view Lenin in the way Lenin viewed Marx.
Stalin’s time of visit to Ottoman Anatolia coincided with an overwhelming colonial movement of academic-intellectual explorations, mainly undertaken by French, English, Belgian and Dutch scholars, who generated a treacherous antagonism in order to benefit from the work of their German, Austrian, Italian, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Swiss and American competitors; this occurred because the latter did not realize that what they were doing only contributed to the -fabulously beneficial to the colonial powers of France, England and Holland- academic, educational, cultural, intellectual, artistic and spiritual colonialism, which is now known as ‘Orientalism’.
Orientalism was not an accurate representation of the Ancient Oriental, Oriental Christian, and Islamic civilizations, but a monstrous, deliberate, systematic and racist distortion of the historical reality that the criminal colonial academia intentionally adjusted to their already elaborated inhuman forgery, which they called ‘Greco-Roman Civilization’, ‘Judeo-Christian culture’ or simply ‘Western world’. It is clear that the inhuman forgers wanted to pull Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, Qing China, and all the lands that they had already colonized (notably the vast Mughal Empire of South Asia, the sultanates of SE Asia, and Africa) into their bogus-historical revisionist dogma that started with the Renaissance and expanded ever since,
a) criminally usurping the local and/or regional cultural identity of hundreds of millions of people,
b) shamelessly substituting their cultural identity with a fake,
c) physically exterminating dozens of millions of people in different manners, and
d) totally revising, altering and disfiguring the earlier History of the Mankind.
Due to the aforementioned practice, hundreds of archaeological, historical, linguistic and philological projects were undertaken, ancient scripts deciphered, monuments and sites unearthed, languages studied – and ferociously misinterpreted, falsified, and at times concealed only to justify the evilness of the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon racism and to vindicate the fabricated myth of Hellenism, the constructed falsehood of Catholic Christianity, and the Anti-Oriental, Anti-Asiatic and Anti-African paranoia of the colonial elites.
Numerous important archaeological sites were then excavated in the already colonized territories of Egypt, Greece, Sudan, India, Tunisia, etc., throughout the ailing Qajar Empire of Iran, and notably in the still vast territory of the Ottoman Empire without however the idiotic sultan Abdulhamid II (1842-1918; reigned from 1876 to 1909, being a nominal figurehead afterwards; عبد الحميد ثانی / Abdülhamid II / Абдул-Хамид II), the most pathetic and useless of all Ottomans, understanding anything. The unfathomable historical resources of his country were being stolen, the pre-Islamic past of his empire was uncovered only to be distorted and adjusted to heinous plans, and the silly trash Abdulhamid II was still smiling to the ambassadors of France and England! Even worse, the discoveries were popularized, discussed and introduced into educational manuals, always as per the forged representation that each Western explorer and scholar established.
Newspapers were spreading the news of each and every archaeological exploration and excavation which was tantamount to material discovery and intellectual-academic-spiritual disguise and cover-up.
Before Stalin crossed the Ottoman Empire from its northeastern confines to the northwestern fringes, the following major sites were explored and unearthed in Mesopotamia: Nineveh in 1842, Nimrud (ancient Kalhu) in 1845, Ur in 1853-1854 (and again later in 1922-1934), Khorsabad (Dur Sarrukin, the capital of Sargon of Assyria) in 1855, Babylon in 1899, Assur (the main Assyrian capital) in 1903, Hatra (the famous Aramaean caravan-city, one of the most important stations on the Silk Roads; surveyed by Walter Andrae of the German excavation team working in Assur from 1906 to 1911), Uruk in 1912-1913, and many other sites – without forgetting the very spectacular monuments of Taq-i Kasra in Al Mada’in (the Sassanid capital Tesifun / Ctesiphon) that the French explorers Eugène Flandin and Pascal Coste visited in 1851 and confessed about the stupendous imperial gate: “the Romans had nothing similar or of the type”.
By that time, in Iran, many sites were already explored and excavated too; Parsa (Persepolis), known as Chehel Minar (چهل منار /i.e. forty minarets) during the Islamic times, was one of the most visited (by Western Europeans) sites; various travelers from Europe reached there in 1320, 1474, 1568, and 1602, whereas in 1618 the Spanish ambassador (to the court of the Safavid Shah of Iran Abbas I/1571-1629; reigned after 1588) García de Silva Figueroa was the first to associate this location with the great Achaemenid capital that was known as Persepolis in Ancient Greek and Latin sources. Pasargad (the early Achaemenid capital) was first explored by the German Ernst Herzfeld in 1905, whereas Shush (Susa), an Elamite and later an Achaemenid capital, was explored in 1851, 1885-1886, 1894-1899, and then systematically excavated by the French Jacques de Morgan (1897-1911).
Not far from Hamedan (the Ancient Median capital Hegmataneh / Ekbatana), the splendid site of Behistun (Bisotun) had become world-famous even before it was excavated (initially in 1904) by Leonard William King and Reginald Campbell Thompson (sponsored by the British Museum); this happened because the famous rock reliefs and inscriptions of the Achaemenid Darius the Great were copied and published by the German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr in 1764 and then used by the German Georg Friedrich Grotefend to decipher the Old Persian cuneiform script. He deciphered 35 cuneiform signs of the Old Achaemenid in 1802. Later, Sir Henry Creswick Rawlinson studied and fully deciphered the script in 1838. Without the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid, it would be impossible for Rawlinson to decipher the Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, and later for others to read the Hittite script which enabled us to have access to the most important and the most original Anatolian literature of pre-Christian times. Last, quite interestingly, the German spiritual-scientific society Ahnenerbe, which used Hitler for their non-Nazi, highly secretive projects, explored Behistun too – in 1938. And to the Georgians, the northwestern parts of Iran were like their backyard.
Again in the Ottoman Empire, Rekem/Petra (the capital of the Nabataean Aramaean state, which controlled most of the territory of today’s Jordan) was first explored in 1907, whereas the Nabataean royal necropolis Hegra (Mada’in Saleh) was visited by the famous German explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812 and by Charles Montagu Doughty in 1876. Early in the 20th c., the site was expected to be duly explored {because of the vicinity of a station built for the Ottoman Hejaz Railway (that was constructed between 1901 and 1908), which passed through the site}; but it was quite unfortunately never explored, let alone excavated, before the year 2000, due to the rise of the barbarian Wahhabi pseudo-Muslims and their allies, namely the criminal Saudi puppets of UK and US. These obscurantist forces carried out the anti-Ottoman revolt of 1916, destroyed the station and the railway, and stupidly prohibited all excavations in their hitherto illegally occupied territory.
In the region of Anatolia, three major sites attracted explorers, archaeologists and scholars. The ruins of Hattusha, the capital of one of the world’s most formidable military forces, i.e. the Hittite Empire, were discovered (in Boğazköy, near Yozgat) in 1834 by the French Charles Texier. The first excavations started in 1893 and, after 1906, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) excavated the site thoroughly until 1951 (almost uninterruptedly), unearthing 25000 cuneiform tablets written in Hittite, Assyrian-Babylonian, and other ancient Oriental languages. Most of the tablets were found already in 1906 by Hugo Winckler and Theodore Makridi, an Ottoman-Turkish archaeologist of Greek origin. This extraordinary archaeological treasure, known as the Boğazköy Archives, opened the way for the decipherment of the Hittite by the Czech Orientalist Bedřich Hrozný whose first solid conclusions were published in 1915. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/hattusha-excavations-continue-for-more-than-a-century-176616
It is noteworthy that Hattusha/Boğazköy is located on the historical road between Constantinople/Istanbul and Theodosiopolis/Erzurum that Stalin took to move from Artvin to Adapazarı. It is therefore very probable that he visited the site of Anatolia’s first empire and he watched the enormous, massive walls of the Hittite capital, although by that time no one knew that in 1596 BCE the Hittite king Mursili I (1620-1590) undertook from that very location the longest military expedition ever undertaken until his time, and after crossing 2000 km, he destroyed Babylon.
Of lesser importance was the discovery of Hisarlık by Heinrich Schliemann, who started excavating there in 1870 and found what is believed to be the Ancient Anatolian city of Tarwisha or Wilusa that the Ancient Greeks called Troy or Ilion. After the death of the amateurish, fraudulent and surely untrustworthy Schliemann, Wilhelm Dörpfeld continued the excavation of the site and published his findings.
Far more important than the excavation of Hisarlık (Troy) was the discovery of cuneiform tablets near Kayseri (Caesarea of Cappadocia) around 1880. After an amount of them was bought by the British Museum, Ernest Chantre started excavating for two seasons in 1893; Hugo Grothe continued in 1906, and then Hrozný unearthed more than 1000 cuneiform tablets (in Assyrian-Babylonian), which document in detail the deeds of the Assyrian karum (trade post) in Kanesh (or Nesha), in today’s Kültepe (20 km SW of Kayseri), for the period 2050-1750 BCE. As a matter of fact, the great Assyrian entrepôt and trade community constitutes the world’s earliest known instance of international trade; the topic was elucidated by my former professor, the Assyriologist Paul Garelli in his thèse d’État ‘Les Assyriens en Cappadoce’ (Paris, 1963).
Eclipsing the aforementioned sites, the most outstanding discovery that took place in Anatolia in the late 19th c. is that of Nemrut Dağı (Немрут-Даг / Mount Nemrut). The monumental site at the peak of the 2130 m high mountain is apparently the foremost Mithraic sanctuary ever found; it was established out of three enormous terraces (eastern, northern and western) located around a tumulus (with height of 49 m and diameter of 152 m), namely the tomb of Antiochus I of Commagene (69-34 BCE). The burial chamber has not yet been discovered, but due to the inscriptions found, we know that the magnificent king explicitly boasted to descend from Darius the Great (through his father’s family) and from Alexander the Great (through his mother’s family).
Turning point in the diffusion and the transplantation of Mithraism from Central Asia and Iran to Greece, Rome and Europe, Mount Nemrut sanctuary features five enormous and several other smaller statues and reliefs in each of its terraces (the northern is lost due to an earthquake). The majestic marble sculptures represent (from left to right):
Apollo-Mithra-Hermes-Helios (spiritually the preponderant deity of the sacred place),
Tyche-Commagene (Fortune, as embodiment of the Iranian Mithraic goddess Anahita, identified with the kingdom of Antiochus I),
Oromazdes (the Iranian God Ahura Mazda linked with the Ancient Greek god Zeus),
Antiochos I of Commagene (as divinity), and
Artagnes (the Iranian god Verethragna associated with the Ancient Greek hero Hercules), with one eagle and one lion on each side of the five enormous statues.
The site was first studied by the German engineer Karl Sester in 1881, then explored by Otto Puchstein of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (German Archaeological Institute) in 1882, and finally studied by an Ottoman-German team (under the Ottoman archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey and the sculptor Osgan Effendi who started working there in 1883). Thanks to the discovery of a long inscription in Ancient Greek many historical, religious and spiritual points were elucidated, and the general public read the results of the excavations and the associated research already in 1890.
XVIII. Stalin’s textual sources of information about Mithra and the Mithraic mysteries
– Beyond all the archaeological and epigraphic discoveries that were published in newspapers and magazines, what were Stalin’s sources of information about Mithras, Mithraism, Mithraic mysteries, and Mithraic spirituality?
Stalin was not a historian or an archaeologist by formation; but he advanced much in his formation of Christian theologian in the Russian Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary, as I already said. This means that he must have greatly benefitted from the library of that academic institution and the advice of highly educated men like
a) the famous archimandrite Seraphim Mesheryakov (Серафим Мещеряков / born Яков Михайлович Мещеряков; 1860-1933), who was the rector of the famous Tiflis Theological Seminary, member of the Georgian Imeretian Synodal Office (1893-1898) and later became an active member of the Obnovlenchestvo (Обновленчество / Renovation) movement, and
b) the bishop Hermogenes (Germogen) Dolganev (Гермоген Долганёв / born Георгий Ефремович Долганов; 1858-1918), who was inspector (1893-1898) and rector (1898-1901) of the Tbilisi Seminary; this brave man opposed Imperial Russia’s westernization and moral decay, facing Rasputin personally and even threatening him in an effort to contain his evildoing. However, by the time he was promoted as rector of the Tbilisi Seminary, the young Joseph Dzhugashvili may have already shaped his personal opinion about the historical role of Christianity and the true essence of the forces which -from Rome- imposed Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Then, he apparently envisioned another future for himself, and ceased to be interested in the Seminary; consequently, the bishop Hermogenes decided to finally expel him.
In the Seminary, Stalin must have probably become acquainted with a great number of apologists and Fathers of the Christian Church, like the Carthaginian Tertullian (155-220; Тертуллиан) and Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390; Григорий Богослов), who wrote much about the Mithraic mysteries, as well as the beliefs and the cults of the Mithraists, who then (2nd – 4th c. CE) appeared to be the greatest rivals of, and the most formidable challenge to, Christianity.
When it comes to Tertullian (who wrote in Latin), there have been several 19th c. Russian translations that Stalin may have read in his youth: the first bishop Athanasius of Moscow translated the ‘Apologeticus pro Christianis’ in 1802 (Квинта Септимия Флорента Тертуллиана Защищение христиан против язычников. / Пер. еп. Афанасия. М., 1802. 230 стр.); the lieutenant-general Igor V. Karneev (Егор Васильевич Карнеев; 1773-1849) published his translation of selected works of Tertullian in four parts (1847-1850; the last two parts posthumously/available online: http://www.odinblago.ru/tertulian_1/); and in the 1910s, N. N. Shcheglov (Н. Н. Щеглов) and Archbishop Basil Bogdashevsky (Архиепископ Василий; born Дмитрий Иванович Богдашевский) published another Russian translation of the apologetic, dogmatic and polemical works of Tertullian.
With respect to Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the major Fathers of the Christian Church, there have been Russian translations of his works already in the second half of the 18th c., notably the publication of Fr. Turgenev in 1783 and that of archbishop Irenaeus (Архиепископ Ириней; born Иван Андреевич Клементьевский) in 1798 (involving 13 homilies). However, it is more probable that Stalin used the 6-volume, edition (complete works of Gregory of Nazianzus) of the Moscow Theological Academy (Московская духовная академия; 1843-1848); this edition, slightly abridged, was reprinted in 1912 by the Publishing House P. P. Shoikin (in Sankt Petersburg). It is available online: http://www.odinblago.ru/sv_grigoriy_t1/
Remarkable textual evidence about the diffusion of Mithraism throughout the Mediterranean, narratives concerning the adoption of Mithraic cults, concepts and symbols by the nations of the Roman Empire, and descriptions of the penetration of Mithraic esoteric mysteries among the Roman society the young student Stalin may have got while reading texts of several authors of the Late Antiquity. Authors like the Phoenician Porphyry (Порфирий), the Greek Plutarch (Плутарх) who was the high priest of the Oracle of Delphi, Ancient Greece’s holiest temple, the Roman Dio Cassius (Дион Кассий), the Carthaginian Lactantius (Лактанций), and the Upper Egyptian Nonnus (Нонн Панополитанский) expanded on various topics associated with Mithraism. The same is valid for a very particular Egyptian, who stands literally between the two worlds, namely Early Christianity and the Egyptian Memphite Theology of Ptah: Origen (Ориген).
Russian translations from the Ancient Greek and Latin texts existed already at the time; Stalin may well have found them in the Seminary Library and discussed them with his instructors. Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’ (and most importantly the Life of Pompey where the Greek author documents the desecration of the most important temples of Ancient Greece by the Mithraic pirates of Cilicia, who imposed Mithraism throughout Western Anatolia, Southern Balkans, and Southern Italy) were translated in 1814-1821 by Spyridon Yurevich Destunis, the Ottoman-origin, Christian Orthodox Russian scholar, author and diplomat (1782-1848). https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Плутарховы_сравнительные_жизнеописания_славных_мужей_(Плутарх;_Дестунис)
There was also the translation (Жизнеописания Плутарха) published in 1862 by Vladimir Guerrier (1837-1919; Владимир Иванович Герье), a French-origin Russian historian and academic.
However, I believe that it is more probable that Stalin used the then most recent Russian translation of the ‘Parallel Lives’, which was prepared in 1889 by Vasilii Alexeevich Alexeev (Василий Алексеевич Алексеев; 1863-1919) under the title Жизнь и дела знаменитых людей древности (Life and deeds of famous people of the Antiquity):
As regards Lactantius, the first Russian translation dates back in the 18th c.; it was published by Ivan Nikitich Tredyakovsky (Иван Никитич Тредиаковский) in 1783, whereas Igor V. Karneev (Егор Васильевич Карнеев) produced, in the middle of the 19th c., a very much criticized (for linguistic inaccuracies) translation of Lactantius’ works in two volumes (1848).
Origen’s works were repeatedly translated to Russian during the 19th c., notably by Ivan Nikolaevich Korsunskiy (Иван Николаевич Корсунский) in 1884, 1886 and 1897; I. N. Petrov’s translation appeared in 1899 (И. Н. Петров, Творения Оригена), whereas Leonid Ivanich Pisarev (Леонид Иванович Писарев) published (Kazan, 1912) Origen’s famous work ‘Against Celsus’ (Κατά Kέλσον / Contra Celsum / Против Цельса), which is available online: https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Origen/protiv_celsa/
There may have been no Russian translations of the complete works of Dio Cassius, Nonnus, and Porphyry at the end of the 19th c. and the beginning of the 20th c., but as a Seminary student, Stalin was in the propinquity of several priests, theologians and monks, who were well versed in Ancient Greek and Latin and knew the modern bibliography. They could have narrated to their student all the stories of Mithraic content that are included in the works of these authors, notably Porphyry’s ‘On the caves of the nymphs’. About:
XIX. Spirituality, Religion, Eschatology, Soteriology, the Extinction of the Mankind, and Stalin
The core of every religion revolves around a specific and detailed vision of Cosmogony, Cosmology, Eschatology and Soteriology, therefore constituting a diachronic view of the History of the Mankind; this view is expressed in absolutely mythical terms through use of codified symbols that reveal to every human mind what the human soul can perceive out of the spiritual universe.
As a particular vision of the Truth, no religion can be communicated in rational terms, because human ‘reason’ is the epicenter of the Human Fall, and consequently every ‘reason’ or ‘logic’ destroys the Truth. It cannot be otherwise; as it is a purely mental -non-spiritual- activity, ‘reason’ is indeed handicapped from its inception. It therefore can never perceive the Truth, because reason is material, whereas the Truth is spiritual of essence.
The Fallen Man’s challenge is that, either he likes it or not, he exists for the Truth and not vice versa; it is therefore the Fallen Man’s task to subdue, contain, and eventually eliminate ‘reason’ in order to achieve illumination, unite with his soul, and attain spiritual-corporeal synergy. The revelations that every religion’s codified symbols can offer are always there. You don’t need the high priest of Ishtar in Assyria in person to initiate you in the perception of the realities permanently encoded in the Assyrian monotheists’ symbols; you can do it by yourself. Suffice it that you empty yourself from all unnecessary misperceptions, useless biases, egoistic elements, and unsolicited assumptions that the Fallen World into which you came was devilish enough to force you to make or develop.
Every moral code included in a religion is in reality appended to the interpretation of its codified symbols; that is why the monotheistic and polytheistic priesthoods, in their ceaseless fight, which shaped Human History, developed themes and added narratives as regards the deeds of God (or of the gods). Through these narratives, the different priesthoods reflected or projected spiritual patterns, motions, movements, conditions, motivations and attitudes onto the souls of their followers. In the light of this reality, any insane researcher could describe all the religions as simple psy-ops, but this is preposterous; this is so because you can never define the original fact or situation by taking any posterior, altered, and distorted fact or any unfortunate circumstance as a point of reference. The beginning point is always the original one – not the ulterior, decayed and degraded one. Modern times’ psy-ops are launched by demented materialists, who have no clue about the spiritual universe, let alone its laws, rules and realities.
But by reflecting spiritual patterns, movements, motivations and attitudes onto the souls of their followers, the ancient priesthoods drew them closer to the Divine or to the rejection of the Divine (: the fallen hierarchies). So, if one is foolish enough today to take an ancient religion as psy-ops, he must realize that the so-called ‘psy-ops’ had fundamentally targets of spiritual nature. Priesthoods turn humans to either good or evil; negative spiritual forces may be always there and they stand for temptation or deception, but humans yield to temptation, being induced at a moment of weakness. That is why what really matters is what you do (or what everyone does), not what the others are able or foolish enough to devise; every human is fully capacitated to timely outmaneuver or outfox the most negative, the most vicious, and the most monstrous plot or trap.
When a polytheistic priesthood unleashes negative patterns, motions, movements, conditions, motivations and attitudes -via absurd themes and evil narratives-, a huge flux of terrible calamity is directed against their followers and believers; then, the good character and the gallant morals disappear, civilization moves away from its original roots, and various forms of inhumanity, barbarism, vulgarity, cruelty and corruption start to appear. A debased, barbarian society is a good tool in the hands of an evil sacerdotal or ‘royal’ elite: these are the lawless societies, the devilish priests, and the ignoble rulers that we so often encounter throughout Human History.
– What are fallen hierarchies, negative spiritual forces, polytheistic priesthoods, and negative patterns, motions, movements, conditions, motivations and attitudes?
I believe that the term ‘rejection of the Divine’ is the best response to the above question. Any form, intension, predisposition or scope that denies the Creation and the world that it encompasses (in its own terms) is a repudiation of the Creator and an ostensible effort to move from the status of ‘Being’ to that of ‘Nonbeing’. It is the absurd ‘existence’ of someone or something who/that -in reality- does not want to ‘exist’.
And this entire affair is something that the Mankind had always to deal with, because the quintessence of every eschatology is about ‘Being’ and/or ‘Nonbeing’; the scope of every soteriology is about ‘Being’. That is why there cannot be religion without eschatology and soteriology. All these stories started very early with the antediluvian split of the originally united, monotheistic, priesthood; that fact was a sheer interference of the fallen hierarchies into the human condition. And this fact was first (before the Flood) prophesied and later (after the Flood) mythologized as the dismemberment of the Osirian body.
Quite unfortunately, this entire affair will end in a very bad manner because, for
– for the monotheistic priesthood, ‘eschatology’ means the ‘struggle of the good people to ideally preserve the condition of Being’, but
– for the polytheistic priesthood, ‘eschatology’ means the ‘struggle of the good people to ideally bring about the condition of Nonbeing’.
This ubiquitously manifested polarization takes an even more atrocious appearance, because for the polytheistic priesthood ‘soteriology’ means the achievement of ‘Nonbeing’. In other words, the Salvation of the Mankind is its total extinction and disappearance.
This is very clearly stated in Manichaeism, the religion that Mani solemnly preached in Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the 19th April 240 CE, just one week after the coronation of the Sassanid Iranian Emperor Shapur I (12th April 240 CE) to whom Mani dedicated his book ‘Shabuhragan’ (which means ‘the book of Shapur’).
Manichaeism was reviled by Christians and Muslims alike for many long centuries; its monastic aspect must have been seen as an impact on Christianity by Stalin. An absolutely non-heroic faith of self-denial like Mani’s spiritual-religious system must have not attracted Stalin. On the contrary, it is quite possible that it looked quite disgusting and inhuman to him.
But the fact that the polytheistic priesthood intends to produce an unprecedented sacrifice of the Mankind at the End of Times (a long lasting conflagration as per the terms of Manichaeism), in order to bring about the instinctively pursued target, i.e. the human annihilation, can also be identified within the context of many religions, Mithraism included. And this is what the young student of the Tbilisi Seminary must have sensed. On the other hand, the continuance of the ancient priesthoods down to our times under the form of religious orders and secret societies was also apparent to him.
The means by which the polytheistic Mithraic priesthood of Central Asia prefigured the extinction of the Mankind was the narrative about Mithras slaying the Bull or, to put it according to the original expression, Mithras killing the Celestial Bovines. That deed was a sacrilege.
XX. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 1. Tauroctony and Crucifixion
Tauroctony (bull-slaying) is a particularly revolting theme; in real terms, it is a divinely unwanted and therefore unnecessary sacrifice. Its origin dates back to the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, and its first mention is attested in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh in which the two friendly but different heroes, Gilgamesh (identified with the Biblical and Islamic Nimrud) and Enkidu, slay a bull. All the same, in later periods, the monotheistic priesthoods of Assyria did their ingenious best to conceal the topic and that is why, in replacement of the historical truth, they mythologized Gilgamesh as a lion hunter.
When the theme of bull-slaying was introduced by the early Iranian-Turanian Magi in Central Asia, it caused terrible friction and the benevolent Magi kicked the evil ones out. The theme was banned among the majority of the local mystics and tribal spiritual leaders; furthermore, there is no mention of it in Tengrism, Shamanism, and the earlier forms of Ancient Iranian and Ancient Indian religions; as a matter of fact, the sacralization of the cow in the Hindu beliefs is also an extreme reaction to this very ancient mythical topic. Zoroaster too erased every trace of the topic, which is not mentioned in the Avesta, and that is why the Iranian Magi of the Achaemenid times (550-330 BCE) hated so much the emperors, who were strictly aligned with the monotheistic dogma of Zoroastrianism. Mithra in Zoroastrianism is merely the solar aspect of the only god: Ahura Mazda. Reversely, Ahura Mazda in Mithraism is an obsolete deity, similar to the ‘dei otiosi’ (inactive gods) of the Ancient Romans. At this point, I need to add that labeling Zoroastrianism, a fully monotheistic dogma, as ‘dualism’ is a cover-up of the blasphemous polytheistic priests of Anti-Christian (‘Catholic’) Rome.
As the evil and inhuman, Mithraic sacerdotal college proceeded to the West and reached the Iranian plateau, one cultural vestige was left in Central Asia only to survive down to our days: buzkashi, a collective sport in which horse riders attempt to grab the decapitated carcass of a goat and hold it for as long as possible or ride with it to the finish line. However, in reality, buzkashi is a form of substitute to the bull-slaying; and as such, it remains until today a cherished tradition among numerous people in many countries in Asia. The Biblical and Quranic traditions relate also to a well-known substitute to an unnecessary sacrifice: a lamb instead of Isaac (as per the Biblical tradition) or Ishmael (according to the Quranic textual references). Similarly, a substitute for Stalin in Anatolia was the practice of boar hunting, which was, literally speaking, ‘bull-slaying in reverse’.
At the very beginning of the Sassanid times (first half of the 3rd c. CE) a nobler sport was invented in Iran, in replacement of the buzkashi among the imperial elite: chowkan (چوگان/chowgan in Farsi). Indicative of where the line of distinction between Civilization and Barbarism lies, the Sassanid imperial game was introduced in the Eastern Roman Empire as tzykanion and a majestic tzykanisterion (a special stadium for this sport) was erected in New Rome-Constantinople as early as the reign of Theodosius I (408-450). But this culture failed to be further diffused west of the Balkans where the bull-slaying theme was propagated only to stay down to our times in the form of the Corrida de toros (bullfighting).
Fugitive in the Ottoman Empire, Joseph Dzhugashvili must have spent much time, contemplating the real meaning of tauroctony and examining why, in striking contrast to Anatolia, Caucasus, Iran, Central Asia, Russia and Siberia, this theme was widely diffused, promoted, propagated and cherished in the Western parts of the Roman Empire, while being also mentioned by several ancient authors.
Tauroctony is the eschatological dimension of Mithraism. In this sacrilegious act, the evil spiritual force of Satan, i.e. Mithra, wants to exterminate the Mankind, which is symbolized as a ‘Bull’. In different eschatological conceptualizations established by monotheists, there is a constant reference to the end clash between the ‘Good’ and the ‘Evil’; quite contrarily to that approach, in all eschatological conceptualizations that were established by polytheists, there is no end clash at all. There is a dead end. In Manichaeism, there is a universal conflagration. In Mithraism, there is a mass killing, that of the ‘Bull’. The concept of the Celestial Bovines reflects the early spiritual force and omnipotence with which the Man was created. The Man has been created as ‘Celestial’; not ‘Earthly’! This irrevocable transcendental reality was later echoed by Jesus in his ‘Kingdom of the Heaven’.
What makes us equate Mithra with Satan? One of the easiest possible responses relates to Mithra’s true position: initially, he was always subordinate to Ahura Mazda (or Oromazdes in Commagene). There was never a form of Mithraism in which Mehr or Mitra would occupy the position of Ahura Mazda in the Early Iranian religion or in Zoroastrianism. Mithra’s statue was not placed at the center of the five statues that we encounter in Nemrut Dagh’s three terraces; the central statue was clearly that of Oromazdes (Ahura Mazda). But within the purely or entirely Mithraic environment (i.e. in the Western part of the Roman Empire), Ahura Mazda was inactive and apathetic, pretty much like the ‘Father of Greatness’ in Manichaeism. In fact, Mithra was never the God of an original religion. He was always the god of the alteration, the disfigurement and the corruption of an original religion; that is why he can be equated with the Demiurge of Manichaeism and of the various Gnostics, with the Satan of the Biblical and the Quranic texts, and with the ‘Ruler of this world’ as per Jesus’ words (Gospel of John, XIV:30).
These analogies can be very easily assessed and understood at the simple linguistic level; when Mani wanted to name the ‘demiurge’, who created the structure of the present world, he used in Middle Persian two words that mean ‘living spirit’ (: Mihr yazd), thus involving one of the two names of Mithra (Mehr and Mitra).
The young Joseph Dzhugashvili must have understood in Anatolia the very crucial significance of the fact that the evil Magi, who intend to finally exterminate the Mankind in order to service their Master, failed to diffuse their main theme in Iran, India, Central Asia, Caucasus and Anatolia, but they were successful indeed in flooding the Italian Peninsula and the western part of the Roman Empire with Mithraea filled with representations of the tauroctony. In fact, in every Mithraeum, the most sacred part (which corresponds to the ‘holy of the holies’ of a Christian church) was decorated with a bull-slaying relief.
The theme of Tauroctony in a Mithraeum was supplanted by the concept of the Crucifixion in a Church. When Stalin was in Anatolia, more than 10 years had already passed after he left the Tbilisi Seminary; his originally negative conclusions about Christianity must have been nuanced in Anatolia. Simple observation shows that, throughout the lands where Oriental Christianity prevailed, there had never been any representation relating to the bull-slaying topic.
Then, this observation may have revealed to the young inquisitive explorer the reality hidden from the eyes of the entire world, which was then at the eve of what is now called WW I. The evil sacerdotal force that wanted to annihilate the Mankind since times immemorial, after having failed to control Mesopotamia, Iran, Central Asia, Caucasus and Anatolia, migrated to Rome where they formed a strong foothold, then diffused the tauroctony theme, and later replaced it with the Crucifixion cult, thus shifting from the Mithraic narratives to the Christian apologetics.
Stalin must have had an idea about the schisms (869 and 1054) between the Eastern Roman Orthodox Church and ‘Catholic’ Rome; he knew that the reason for the final collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire was the Anti-Constantinopolitan hate, rancor and malice of Rome. This must have had cataclysmic impact on his perception of extant threats against Russia, the Orient, and the entire Mankind.
If ‘New Rome’ (Constantinople) opposed and rejected Rome up to the point of a mutual excommunication, this simply meant that Rome had ultimately ceased to be ‘Rome’ and therefore the only true Rome was ‘New Rome’, since Rome had turned out to be a -properly speaking- Anti-Rome.
If the Roman (in reality: ‘Anti-Roman’) sacerdotal force managed to finally destroy ‘New Rome’, this fact clearly meant that they would attempt to do exactly the same with the ‘Third Rome’, i.e. Russia, because Moscow postulated to be the successor of the Eastern Roman Empire.
And if Rome (in reality: ‘Anti-Rome’), after the two schisms, did not care much about the fact that Constantinople chose the appellation ‘Orthodox’ for the Eastern Roman Church, this demonstrates that they truly did not show a genuine interest in the true Christian faith, but only in the manipulation of the Christian populations (if possible all of them: ‘Catholic’) as per their own real and concealed plans. After all, the persistence of the ‘Roman’ (in reality: ‘Anti-Roman’) Church in the use of the cognomen ‘Catholic’ for themselves in reality fully encapsulated their millennia long aspiration to entirely entrap, deceive and annihilate the Mankind.
This helps us understand that, as early as 1912, Stalin may have been able to perceive the lurking dangers and accurately identify their origin. He was then better placed than Czar Nicholas II to assess the extent to which Russia’s position in the world was seriously endangered by the Mithraic – Anti-Christian force which ruled from Rome. It is true that the imperial authorities reacted strongly to the Jesuit infiltration which was undertaken as early as 1907 with the formulation and diffusion of Imiaslavie, a heretic spiritual-religious theory and movement as per which the ‘name of god’ is ‘god’ himself! This sort of name exultation ends up in evildoing in the name of God.
Certainly, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church denounced the treacherous belief; in June and July 1913, Russian naval forces disembarked in Mount Athos to impose the decision and to arrest the heretics, injuring many and killing few monks, but this was merely a small local and temporal reaction.
Quite contrarily, and seeing things in a wider context, Stalin may have anticipated, even before these events in Mount Athos, the notorious Jesuit-demonic spectacle at Fatima (Portugal) in 1917 and the subsequent postulation as regards the so-called Consecration of Russia, which is tantamount to Russian enslavement to the Anti-Christian rulers of Rome, who have long been preparing the forthcoming tauroctony and extermination of the Mankind.
In the light of Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations, Russia emerges de facto as the frontal opponent of the sacrilegious pseudo-Christian forces, which need first to desecrate Russia in order to achieve their blasphemous plan providing for the extinction of the Mankind. Even more importantly, on the basis of the aforementioned, the young fugitive, who had already been enthralled by mythical figures, legendary characters, and novel heroes like Koba, must have first identified his role, his destiny, and his calling: he had to properly defend the simple, good and innocent people, to duly fight the evil priests who wanted to sacrifice the Mankind, and to ultimately defeat the tool of the Papo-Caesarist elite. From that moment on, Stalin -similarly to both, his heroic paragon in the novel and the illustrious Sassanid Emperor Kavadh I in real History- was a fully committed Caesaropapist, absolutely conscious of his task and scope. He would do everything to rise in power and he would kill as many as needed to prepare Russia for battle in order to avoid Russia’s unnecessary sacrifice, desecration and extinction.
But would he have the support of Tyche-Russia, just like Antiochus I of Commagene, who was in company of Tyche-Commagene at the peak sanctuary of Nemrut Dagh? Only his further initiation in other Mithraic mysteries would tell.
XXI. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 2. Mithraic Trinity, Christian Trinity, Spirituality and Stalin
Many religions contained trinities in their Cosmogony, therefore automatically projecting this element onto their cosmologies, eschatologies, and soteriologies, and thence further on, onto the lives of their believers and their societies. This point has nothing to do with monotheism or polytheism; in monotheism, every trinity is perceived as reflecting different aspects of the Divine Being, whereas in polytheism, the three parts of the trinity are rather viewed individualized.
Technically speaking, the eventual mention of several ‘gods’ in the sacred texts of a religion does not necessarily make of it a ‘polytheist’ system, because these ‘gods’ may have been viewed as aspects or emanations of the One God. Reversely, the strict reference to one ‘god’ does not make of a religion a ‘monotheistic system’, because eventually basic parts of the dogma and the cult or -even worse- ulterior theological interpretations may be of absolutely polytheistic nature, concept and character.
These two words of Greek etymology (‘monotheism’ and ‘polytheism’), which are of ample use nowadays, are indeed very simplistic and quite wrong; in fact, they should be rather avoided and respectively replaced by the terms ‘sacred (or divine) faith’ and ‘profanity’ (or blasphemy). Only clear terms of spiritual connotation can accurately denote the nature of the Divine and that of the opposition to the Divine; in this regard, simply ‘rational’ or ‘technical’ terms should not be in use, because in reality they consist in sheer abuse.
As per the Ancient Sumerian and Akkadian (Assyrian-Babylonian) representation of the Divine Order, Anu, Enlil and Ea (ENKI in Sumerian) formed an early trinity that reflected God’s control over the Sky (or Heaven or Ether), the Air, and the Soft Waters respectively, and its reflection on every human being. This is not a form of ‘polytheism’, but the way of the early Sumerian and Akkadian sacerdotal colleges to accurately describe the nature and the consequences of the divine arrangements with which the humans were created to comply. The early Mesopotamian priests, back in the 4th millennium BCE, did not have the need of prophet Muhammad to castigate the Roman and Constantinopolitan priests, who viewed the essence of Ether as an independent ‘person’ (‘Holy Spirit’) and considered it possible that a human being could eventually be ‘God’. Every faith and every preaching reflect the time, the needs, and the context of its proclamation.
Similarly, in the Ancient Egyptian Iwnw (Heliopolitan) dogma, which was composed as Cosmogony, Cosmology, Eschatology and Soteriology at the same time, there were two trinities: Osiris-Isis-Horus and Isis-Horus-Seth.
The former reflected the pattern ‘father-mother-son’ at its transcendental and symbolic dimension, while it also heralded the typical tradition of the Pharaonic families (in which very often princes married their sisters). It was -in its conception- a supratemporal narrative of the History of the Mankind from A to Z, with focus on the predestination of Man, i.e. his victory over the Evil, the cancellation of the Evil’s deeds, and the ultimate reacquisition of the spiritual potency with which Man was initially created.
The latter was of entirely eschatological content, as it detailed the End Clash in terms far more extensive than in any other religion’s sacred texts; within this context, Isis absolutely portends the ‘Woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars’ (Revelation by John 12:1), her ‘child’ (which is interpreted as ‘Jesus’ by Christians) being actually a reflection of Horus, whereas the ‘beast coming out of the sea’ (Revelation by John 13:1; which was interpreted as the ‘Antichrist’ by Christians) consists merely in a later version of Seth (or -to transfer the topic within the context of Hittite Anatolian Eschatology- of Ullikummi, the ‘monster that rises from the sea’ only to be defeated by Tasmisu, the Hittite Horus or Messiah or Christ or Mahdi, etc.).
It is not necessary for a monotheistic priesthood to endow its creature, i.e. the dogma, the cult, and the theological interpretation of its religious narrative, with a trinitarian form; in many ways, this is rather an assumption expressed by modern scholarship, and not a distinction explicitly made by ancient believers. Quite contrarily, for a polytheistic priesthood, a trinitarian system has a particular use: as it also follows the pattern ‘father-mother-son’ at its simple, sociological-anthropological order (in a reverse effort to totally destroy the Divine Order ‘as above so below’ and to turn it to an Evil scheme ‘as below so above’), the trinitarian system comprises very long and extensive narratives, through which it de facto alters the original form of the religion.
These narratives help expand the cultic endeavors among the faithful exponentially. The increased cultic endeavors contrive, after black magical patterns, the believers to further engage in material acts that dissociate them from their souls and spiritual tasks, therefore transforming them into mere slaves of their priests. Larger the cultic part of a religion is, stronger its polytheistic character becomes. At the end, this fake, putrefied form of ‘religion’ has absolutely nothing to do with the spiritual universe; all it has to do is about practicing homicidal acts, namely the spiritual-intellectual-cultural subordination of the faithful to the priesthood. This evil development fully engages the so-called priesthood in the true governance of the society or country, transforming it into an undeserved, unsolicited and treacherous dictatorship. Then, this status of ‘religion’ was correctly specified by Karl Marx as ‘the opium of the people’ (‘das Opium des Volkes’) in 1843 (in his Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie / Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right); but no original religion was ever like that.
The first ostensibly trinitarian dogma in the World History of Religions is the Ancient Egyptian Theban polytheism, which was a middle of the 2nd millennium BCE religious-theological construction of the Memphite polytheistic priesthood of Ptah; this system was an attempt to put together a state religion of absolutely Papo-Caesarist function. Amun of Thebes, as per the earlier Ancient Egyptian monotheistic religions {the Iwnw / Heliopolitan system (known as ‘Ennead’) and the Hmnw / Hermupolitan faith (known as ‘Ogdoad’)}, was a profane and evil abomination. That is why the illustrious reaction against the evil Theban polytheistic priests was of so strong Caesaropapist nature; it was superbly undertaken by the magnificent mystic, spiritual master, art theoretician, and poet, Pharaoh Akhenaten (reign: 1354-1336), who finally closed down all the temples and proclaimed Aten as the sole God, therefore prohibiting anthropomorphism in the Egyptian Art.
The Theban Trinity Amun-Mut-Khonsu of which we first hear around the 16th c. BCE (with the rise of the 18th dynasty) caused enormous friction among the people and was rejected by the royal family; the process was very long and caused a terrible religious schism and a disastrous civil war after which Egypt (: Kemet in Ancient Egyptian) never recovered. It destroyed the spiritual life of the Ancient Egyptians, rendering them unable to properly perceive the dynamic symbols that had been established by means of sophisticated composite, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, representations. Only due to the abomination of the Theban Trinity was the Roman poet Juvenal able 16-17 centuries later to pertinently articulate his historic question:
– Quis nescit, Volusi Bithynice, qualia demens Aegyptos portenta colat? (‘Who knows not, O Bithynian Volusius, what monsters demented Egypt worships?’ / From Satire XV ‘An Egyptian Atrocity’)
However, Juvenal could have never fathomed the original form of the Ancient Egyptian religion and spirituality; he merely encountered its most decayed form. One has also to add that the Theban Trinity Amun-Mut-Khonsu was constructed in order to later empower the profane polytheistic priests to develop the blasphemous theory of Theogamy, which they first did in the case of Hatshepsut to justify her impious, illegal and anarchic rule. The concept that God can possibly enter into a sexual intercourse with a human (and in Hatshepsut’s case, her mother Ahmose, the Great Royal Wife of Thutmose I) by taking the material form of a human (and in this case, that of Hatshepsut’s father) is a spiritual sacrilege.
Mithraism is a trinitarian religion, with Cautes and Cautopates forming a Solar Trinity with Mithra. A trinitarian god would be such a profanity in Iran and Central Asia that it would automatically cause capital punishment. Within the entirely monotheistic environment of Zoroastrianism, as it is reflected in the Mihr Yasht (Mihr yašt), the Zoroastrian Mithra (i.e. an entirely solar divinity-aspect of Ahura Mazda’s Benevolence and Justice) was mythologized as accompanied by two minor deities (or divine attributes), namely Rashnu (Rašnu) and Sraosha (Sraoša). But within the religious-magical environment setup by the Magi, the minor divinities were promulgated to the auroral (Cautes) and vesperal (Cautopates) hypostases of Mithra, who represented the meridian aspect of the heliocentric cult.
The Mithraic Trinity gives a temporal dimension to the faith and the cult of the Mithra worshippers; religiosity is then appended to the daily rhythm of life and vice versa. The need of the Magi to fully control the life of their adepts ended up with the emergence of the earlier nonexistent concept of Time. That’s why, while establishing the Mithraic Trinity, the evil mystics and enemies of Zoroastrianism had to also drag Zurvan (‘zruvan’ in Avestan Persian means ‘time’) to the forefront of their cult. They thought that the deity of ‘endless time’ (‘zervan akarana’) would secure a cutting-edge superiority over Ahura Mazda. For this reason, within the Roman Empire, the overwhelming prevalence of Mithra brought Saturn / Cronos back to active cult (whereas earlier they belonged to the ‘dei otiosi’ of the respective pantheons), as a terminal revenge and elimination of the worthless younger ‘generation’ of Jupiter / Zeus.
Due to the strictly divided segments of diurnal and nocturnal periods of time, the Mithraic Trinity helped the Mithraic Magi therefore create societies of the foremost militaristic discipline, and it is not by coincidence that the otherwise small Mithraic Kingdom of Pontus happened to be an important military power and a mighty opponent. Cautes-Mithra-Cautopates was a god suitable for pirates, like the Cilician pirates, who desecrated the worthless temples of the Ancient Ionians, Aeolians and Dorians, including the peak sanctuary at Mount Olympus in Thessaly. Trinitarian (‘triplasios’ in Alexandrine Koine) Mithra was fit for harshly fighting soldiers and combatants; that is why entire Roman legions were initiated to the Mithraic mysteries, methodically praying before sunrise, after sunset, and at noon.
Christian Trinity has no foundation on a single word uttered by Jesus. However, the least studied topic in this regard is what the Christian Trinity is not. Despite the numerous parallels that can be drawn between elements of several Ancient Egyptian religions and the basic dogmas of the Christian religion, it is very clear that a trinity scheme of the type ‘Amun-Mut-Khonsu’ did not find its position within the corpus produced by the Fathers of the Christian Church; there was never a scheme ‘God-Virgin Mary-Jesus’ among the founding dogmas of Christianity. We cannot however state that it would be so undesirable, especially if we take into consideration the absurd terms of extreme veneration of Virgin Mary by the heretic Catholic Church (‘Assumption’ instead of ‘Dormition; and in general, the so-called ‘four dogmas’ of Catholic Mariology). About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assumption_of_Mary
We can therefore assume that, in spite of the slow rise of the trinitarian dogma within Christianity, the theoretical foundation of the Christian Trinity (as we know it) by St. Basil bishop of Caesarea, and basically through his book ‘On the Holy Spirit’, which was written in 374 CE, must have displeased several groups of monks who tried to deny that the Holy Spirit was God, thus becoming widely known in the Eastern Roman Empire as Pneumatomachi {‘fighters against the (divinity of the Holy) Spirit} and in the Western Roman Empire as ‘Macedonians’ {namely followers of Macedonius I bishop of Constantinople (from 342 to 360)}, the main source of inspiration.
If we now take into consideration the fact that the so-called Apostles’ Creed (a 6th or 7th c. CE forged document that was totally ignored by all Eastern Roman authorities) mentions Virgin Mary in its 3rd verse (after God the Father and Jesus, who are referred to in the first two verses, and after the Holy Spirit, which is stated in the first half of verse 3), we understand the nature of the intentions and the extent of the machination. The text reads as follows (Latin and English translation):
“Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae, et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominum nostrum, qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria Virgine, …” (“I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived from the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary,…”)
In other words, only the Cappadocian Fathers, notably St. Basil of Caesarea and St. Gregory of Nazianzus, prevented Christianity from becoming a mere replica of the Ancient Egyptian Theban trinity, by propelling the Holy Spirit to a level of inevitable and irreversible dogmatic formality. But if conspiring heretics were to take control of a major Christian center, in any deviate re-assessment of Christianity (as it happened in the Renaissance and Modern Times), the issue of the constituent elements of the Christian Trinity would certainly be tackled again. And this is what happened with the evil idol of the so-called Pietà that was created by Michelangelo at the end of the 15th c.
Stalin must have realized that the paradoxical character of the Christian Trinity was merely the provisory result of an enormous theological effort to avert a detrimental religious fall. But the evil forgers of the Marianist absurdity were always waiting in the wings. Understanding the functionality of all the different forms of religious, social (: different classes), governmental (: triumvirate), political (: separation of powers) and geographical-topographical (: directions of orientation) trinitarianism must have been a major issue for Stalin to explore during his two years in Ottoman Anatolia.
XXII. Major themes of Stalin’s spiritual quest in Anatolia – 3. Solar nature of Mithraism / Immaculate birth from the rock
The early priesthoods attempted to systematically and overwhelmingly identify the ‘Hand of God’ everywhere and that is why they soon came up with hymns exalting the Omnipresence of the Divine. The sun would apparently not escape from their efforts; for this reason, it was soon portrayed as an evidence of the Love of God, as a symbol of the Justice of God, and as a proof of the everlasting Omnipotence of God.
With respect to the sun, its life-giving force, and its position in the Heaven, different world conceptualizations and world views led to diverse narratives and descriptions; in Egypt, Ra was initially and almost always adored as Ra-Horakhty (Ra as ‘Horus of the Two Horizons’), which definitely identified him as the Lord of Heaven. In Sumer and Akkad (and later in Assyria and Babylonia), Shamash (also known as UTU in Sumerian) could not possibly be propelled to that level of divine aspect, because the earliest monotheistic currents revolved around Anu (AN in Sumerian), the sole Lord of the Kingdom of the Sky (Ether); as a matter of fact, nothing and nobody could possibly be equated with the undisputedly Only God after the completion of the Creation (7th Day).
Why Shamash, similarly to Ishtar, was mythologized as ‘offspring of Sin’, i.e. the Mesopotamian symbol of the moon, would take long to explain at this point, but it was certainly a later invention and interpolation. However, it is essential to clarify here that ‘divine procreation’ was then perceived rather as ’emanation’ among the Sumerian and Akkadian priesthoods. The subordination of a divine aspect (or ‘god’ for the polytheists) to another divine aspect (or ‘god’) was a later phenomenon in Mesopotamia; it reflected only the earliest form of religious juxtapositions and/or wars, thus underscoring the spiritual identity of every royal order and state.
Mithraism is the earliest religion in which the sun itself appears as the sole and undisputed ruler of the divine world; no parallel can therefore be established between the Ancient Egyptian Aton (: the sun disc taken merely as a symbol of the Only God) of the 2nd millennium BCE and the Iranian Mithra of the 1st millennium BCE. Mithraism was always the very antipodes of what Atonism had been. Another odd trait accompanied this insolent solar ‘god’ from the beginning: Mithra was never a creator-‘god’. He was always irrelevant to the Creation; although he was later said to be the Creator, there has never been a single narrative in this regard. This was normal, because in fact the evil Magi extracted the solar symbolism of Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism, made it an independent divinity, and thus fabricated their ‘god’. In other words, the Universe had already been created before Mithra appeared. As the Satanic Magi did not want to subordinate Mithra (also known as Mehr) to the God of the Achaemenid Iranian imperial religion, they had to urgently and slyly invent something about Mithra’s mystical emergence into being. This need led them to the inevitable trickery of the ‘Immaculate Conception’; so, Mithra came out of a rock (or of a tree, eventually the Tree of Life).
In Central Asia and Iran where the Shamanic, Tengrist and Zoroastrian monotheistic traditions were very strong as early as the 1st half of the 1st millennium BCE, the representation was initially prohibited (Achaemenid times), subsequently tolerated (Arsacid period), and finally limited (during the Sassanid dynasty) to forms like that of the Taq-e Bostan reliefs. Quite contrarily, in spiritually impotent, culturally poor, and morally degenerated environments like that of the Roman Empire, the profane representation of the ‘little child’ as a ‘god’ being born (similarly to the verses of the Christian Nativity Kontakion: “since for our sake the eternal God was born as a little child!”) is attested in the numerous Mithraic Nativity reliefs, like that of Dieburg-Heddernheim which is found today in the Kreismuseum Dieburg (V 1247). Modern scholarship failed to comprehend that Mithraism (which conclusively pre-modeled Roman Christianity) spread and prospered in Rome and Europe, only because it was systematically, skillfully and forcefully expelled from Iran.
A heliocentric mystery religion with a ‘god’ coming from nowhere is apparently the correct tool in the hands of an evil priesthood attempting to effectively concoct the promulgation of Satan as the ‘master of this world’. The Mithraic Magi did not have the intellectual plasticity of the Late Antiquity Gnostics to merely define Mithra as the Demiurge; but this is what Mithra was in reality. After all, Porphyry (De Antro Nympharum / Περί του εν Οδυσσεία των νυμφών άντρου / On the Cave of the Nymphs, 11) says it explicitly: “For Mithra, as well as the Bull, is the Demiurgus and lord of generation”. Mithra was a substitute for Satan-Demiurge! Only Satan (and for all Gnostics, the ‘Demiurge’) came to existence in an already created world. However, by adding the Immaculate Conception theme to the solar version of Mithraism, the evil Magi believed that they achieved the stage of perpetual recapitulation of their master’s setting and rising. This assumption will be proven wrong at the End.
After all, who can possibly be a ‘god’ that is being born, except a ‘god’ that is not?
Then, periodicity guarantees the permanence of sacerdotal rule in a state that expands through acculturation of neighboring populations exactly like the sun warms the land progressively. That is why this version of Mithraism could not be imposed but in a spiritually and imperially impotent state surrounded by barbarians and other uncivilized nations – a sacerdotal state, I mean. Finally, this is what only Justinian I understood: the prevalence of Mithraic Rome (if not fully averted) would gradually turn the Oriental State (Eastern Roman Empire) into a pseudo-empire, i.e. an evil Papo-Caesarist abomination at the instance of Rome.
Then, the fall of the Western Roman Empire would be followed by the collapse of the Oriental State, and the ‘patriarch’ of New Rome Constantinople would diffuse a Fake Christianity to the barbarians who would interminably fight among themselves only ad maiorem ‘dei’ gloriam. For this reason, Justinian carried out his vast legislative work, forcefully imposing on Rome the institution of Constantinopolitan popes, i.e. heads of the Roman Church selected and approved by the Emperor of the Eastern Roman State. Thus, Justinian became ultimately known as the most ostentatious embodiment of Caesaro-papist statesmanship of the Christian and Islamic times.
Mithras’ Nativity in the cave is not attested explicitly in the historical sources, but there is an implicit description in Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs; the two-entrance cavern that Porphyry described as formed on the axis North-South was the location of Mithraic initiation. Using as pretext Homer’s mention of the Cave of the Nymphs in the 13th book of the Odyssey, Porphyry expanded on the use of caverns by Mithraic esoteric orders for the initiation of their members. It is noteworthy that the candidates descended into the cavern from the northern gate and, after the initiation, ascended from the southern gate; they entered as ‘men’ and they left as ‘gods’. This becomes very clear in the 12th paragraph:
“Since, however, our terrene habitation is more northern, it is proper that souls which are born in it should be familiar with the north wind; but those that exchange this life for a better, with the south wind. This also is the cause why the north wind is, at its commencement, great; but the south wind, at its termination”.
The Mithraic cave was believed to be a miniature of the entire universe (viewed by all ancient nations as a ‘globe’ or ‘sphere’ – of which the plane that intersected the center of the sphere was the surface of the Earth); since the Mithraic initiates were ‘born’ there, it is quite plausible for us to assume that there was also located the rock from which Mithra emerged in his immaculate birth. More:
This undeniably chthonian birth comes in extremely striking contrast with the celestial epiphany which is attested in the case of Jesus and John the Baptist; actually, Jesus and his disciples did not spend time in caverns. However, the driving force behind Roman Christianism attempted to associate Jesus’ birth with a cave, and so they did with his entombment. If the New Testament and the Patristic Literature keep Jesus clear of anything chthonian, the unnecessary and unsought Catholic orders of monks did their ingenious best to continue their Mithraic initiations in caves. And here you have the unique absurdity of the filthy Anglican pseudo-Christianity to continually maintain Jesus close to caves:
Stalin must have early understood that there were indeed many different versions of Mithraism, and that heliocentric culture and solar imperial identity in some of their incredibly diverse forms can help increase the strength of a society considerably. The young Georgian refugee, being at the same time an explorer and an initiate, seems to have duly assessed and meticulously investigated several key issues pertaining to spirituality and governance. His conclusions may have effectively armored him well ahead of the epic battle for which he probably felt that he had to prepare himself.
XXIII. How Stalin’s Mithraic meditations in Anatolia formed his decision-making
1. Pontus’ King Mithridates VI’s wars with Rome
Adept of Mithra, the great Anatolian king, who claimed imperial descent from Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Alexander the Great, and Seleucus I Nicator, was the standard bearer of a very different version of Mithraism that was totally unrelated to the typical Mithraic religion of the Roman Empire. Betrayed by the Anatolian Magi, Mithridates VI (135-63 BCE; ruled after 120 BCE) was an exceptional king, who demonstrated that, in combatting the wicked, it is always possible to turn the evil to good. Antiochus I of Commagene (86-38 BCE; ruled after 70 BCE) seems to have followed the same path. But few decades later, the Roman Emperors, acting differently, failed to prevent Rome from becoming home to an uncontrolled sacerdotal college, which by utilizing the fools and by eliminating the opponents effectively grabbed the power at the right time.
The completely and permanently different trajectories of the imperial/governmental authority and the sacerdotal dominance must have early become clear to Stalin; his conclusions were at the origin of his rather anti-sacerdotal (than anti-Christian or anti-religious) stance. In fact, he did not want to eliminate Christian Orthodoxy, but to make it so marginal that the Anti-Christian and pseudo-Christian Roman Catholic Church would find it worthless to infiltrate.
2. Cilicia’s Mithraic Pirates in fight with Rome, the desecration of Greece, and Stalin
The well-known history that Plutarch narrated in his Parallel Lives (Life of Pompey, 78-106) about Mithridates VI’s close allies, i.e. the noble pirates of Cilicia (who combatted the Roman Republic), contains an important revelation. The following excerpt is quite enlightening:
“Nor was it merely their being thus formidable that excited indignation; they were even more odious for their ostentation than they were feared for their force. Their ships had gilded masts at their stems; the sails woven of purple, and the oars plated with silver, as if their delight were to glory in their iniquity. There was nothing but music and dancing, banqueting and revels, all along the shore. Officers in command were taken prisoners, and cities put under contribution, to the reproach and dishonor of the Roman supremacy. There were of these corsairs above one thousand sail, and they had taken no less than four hundred cities, committing sacrilege upon the temples of the gods, and enriching themselves with the spoils of many never violated before, such as were those of Claros, Didyrna, and Samothrace; and the temple of the Earth in Hermione, and that of Æsculapius in Epidaurus, those of Neptune at the Isthmus, at Tænarus, and at Calauria; those of Apollo at Actium and Leucas, and those of Juno, in Samos, at Argos, and at Lacinium. They themselves offered strange sacrifices upon Mount Olympus, and performed certain secret rites or religious mysteries, among which those of Mithras have been preserved to our own time, having received their previous institution from them. But besides these insolencies by sea, they were also injurious to the Romans by land; for they would often go inland up the roads, plundering and destroying their villages and country-houses”.
Supported by Mithridates VI and several other kings of Anatolia and of the Caucasus region, the Cilician pirates desecrated the main sacred places of Ancient Greece, a territory claimed and occupied by the Roman Republic. The contrasting attitudes of the Roman authorities and the Oriental kings are impressive; an imperial realm does not engage orderly forces and armies in a disorderly element, such as the sea. In this regard, there are few exceptions in the Antiquity and the Christian-Islamic times. Imperial armies fight only on land, which is the main element that helped humans develop their civilizations. There were never original cultures or civilizations grown in the sea, which is a location that humans can only cross and never live in. As a matter of fact, all the cultures that may have spread on islands originated from nearby lands.
Contrarily to the Oriental kings, to the spiritual order of their temples, and to the moral discipline maintained in their kingdoms, the disorderly Roman state used their orderly and official armed forces (their army and navy) and a leading Roman statesman and general (Pompey) to oppose the disorderly forces, i.e. the Cilician pirates. The tremendous difference must have been sensed by Stalin. The disorderly expansionist tendency of the Roman Republic, which unequivocally heralded the ulterior collapse of the Roman Empire, ended up with the calamitous formation of an unsustainable and absurd state around a sea (namely the Mediterranean Sea). This was a unique case in the World History. Even in its greatest extension, the kingdom of Pontus did not encompass all the lands around the Black Sea.
States are not established around seas or with regard to seas; with the brief exception of the Ottoman Empire, there was never a state that included all coastal lands of the Black Sea within its territory. All the same, one has to admit that the said region was rather marginal to the Ottoman Empire, and its annexation was never crucial for the existence of the Caliphate. No state controlled all lands around the Red Sea except the Ottoman Empire, but again this fact was not the reason of its existence. Only the Mongol Turanian Empire occupied all lands around the Caspian Sea, but again this occurred for a rather brief period of time and it was of lesser importance for both, its structure and aspirations. Last, never a kingdom put under control all the coastal lands around the North Sea, the Baltic Sea or the Arabian Sea.
These observations may have led the young refugee Iosif Dzhugashvili to the correct conclusion as regards both, the fate of the Roman Empire, and that of all modern efforts to revive it. So, to the very normal question “what went wrong with the Roman Empire?” he must have answered:
– the expansion of Rome was apparently not a noble imperial exploit, but a villainous ‘republican’ affair. Instead of expanding, a Republic must simply cease to exist in the first place.
Straightforwardly, Stalin would be considered a ‘Eurasianist’ today; it is easy to understand that his Mithraic contemplations and considerations during his time in Ottoman Anatolia made of him an entirely committed Eurasiatic continentalist. Stalin rejection of Trotskyism, and of the nonsensical theory of world revolution (the so-called ‘permanent revolution’), originates from the core of a Eurasiatic conviction. Stalin’s effort to extend Soviet Union’ influence in post-WWII Eastern Europe is the reasoning care of a Eurasiatic strategist.
Stalin’s Eurasiatic conviction can be noticed particularly in the Fourth Moscow Conference (9th-19th October 1944), and even more specifically in the so-called Percentages agreement. In that secret and informal agreement, Eastern Europe (from Poland to Greece) was divided into two spheres of influence between Churchill and Stalin. At the time, Greece was being abandoned by the Germans (they left Athens on 11th October 1944); the entire country was almost totally under the control of the Communist rebels, but Stalin did not care at all about that space (and the Russian sphere of influence was finally fixed at 10% there). Quite contrarily, the Soviet ruler evidently attributed greater importance to the territories of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Hungary. Stalin’s reluctance to include Greece in the Soviet block after WW II is sheer consequence of his Eurasianism, and this world view and approach date apparently back to the time he spent in Ottoman Anatolia.
3. Did Stalin travel to visit the world’s greatest Mithraic monument at Nemrut Dagh?
From Adapazari, Stalin could have easily taken the train (Ottoman railways) to Adana and thence continued by simple transportation means to Adiyaman (330 km) and Kahta (365 km), which were the correct basis for an expedition to Nemrut Dagh.
However, this is unlikely, because the tendency to visit archaeological sites was very limited at the time; in addition, it was the result of Western mentality and lifestyle. More importantly, although it is undeniably rewarding to meditate and contemplate in a specific location (and more particularly in a site with ancient monuments), this was not Stalin’s main vocation and target. All the same, articles about the site were easily found in the Ottoman press at those days, and he may have noticed some of them, also closely examining the pictures. At this point, it is essential to take into consideration the fact that Stalin was not a historian, a historian of religions, an archaeologist or a philologist, and he never wanted to become one.
As a mystic and practitioner of spiritual exercises, Stalin wanted to accurately identify the diverse spiritual origins of imperial governance; he needed to fully and deeply comprehend the specific analogies between the types of spiritual motivation, the forms of religious narratives, the styles of governance, and the patents of social organization; he desired to discover where his mystical prototypes, his spiritual paragons, his models of legendary heroism, and his moral standards originated from. Last but not least, he wished to identify earlier examples of rulers who fought effectively against the same Iniquity, Injustice, and Inhumanity that he wanted to combat. Mithraism offered a vast documentation to explore in this regard and what land could be more advantageous for this spiritual challenge and mental exploit than Anatolia?
The scope of Stalin’s explorations and investigations was of sentimental, mental, intellectual and spiritual of nature. It involved endless ruminations, cogitations, considerations, and comparisons of systems of thought, of systems of faith and of systems of governance. This was the only way for him to identify the continuity of sacerdotal intentions, practices, choices, propaganda patterns, and end targets, thus identifying correctly his enemies and retracing their ancestral line (at the mental, intellectual, and spiritual levels).
Before his travel to and sojourn in Ottoman Anatolia, Stalin had already collected enough knowledge, sufficient data, critical experience, and great exposure to the realities of his world. He therefore needed a period of time to work on this material, reassess everything, and make most of his education; in other words, he had to turn the accumulated documentation into an efficient system of interpretation that would help him not only face challenges but also anticipate plots and threats. He had to identify the enemies of the vast empire that had every chance to effectively become the real Ark of Mankind at the height of the most critical upheaval in World History: Russia. As there were several centers of power that targeted Russia at the time, he had to also prioritize among his foes.
4. Stalin’s Mithraic meditations and anti-sacerdotal stance
Stalin had early understood that Christianity was nothing more than a theatrical banner under which the worst enemies and the most opposite forces gathered in order to dissimulate their enmity and conceal the conflicting spiritual motives of their theological treatises; that’s why he left the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary. Mithraism and its variants from Central Asia to Iran to Rome offered him the keys to clearly see what had happened long before Russia and Kievan Rus were incepted as realms and how it continued down to his days. Only by retracing the origins of these opposite forces could Stalin accurately realize what was at stake, identify the real players, and conclude as to how he would act. He had already sensed that evil forces intended to split and pulverize the major Eurasiatic Empire; he wanted to effectively oppose them and ultimately destroy their dreams. That’s why he settled for some time in Anatolia, somehow making the time stand still – at least for him.
Then, in addition to what I already pointed out in chapter XX about Stalin’s views on Nicholas II, Imiaslavie, and the Anti-Christian Roman Church, I have to state that his own career and decisions bear witness to the fact that he considered Vatican (and the Jesuits who control the Curia) as the no 1 enemy of Russia (and the Soviet Union) not in terms of ideological rivalry but eschatological agenda. Stalin did not view the Catholic effort of infiltration in Russia (and, after 1917, the villainous, Satanic plan providing for the Consecration of Russia ‘to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ according to the blasphemous Jesuit terminology related with the so-called ‘Fatima Marian apparitions’) in terms of dogmatic or doctrinal juxtaposition (Orthodox – Catholic). It was clear to him that this was a dangerous attempt to further extend the Satanic Papo-Caesarist concept worldwide, therefore canceling Russia’s possibility to act as the real Ark of Mankind. It was purely eschatological.
Stalin’s strong anti-sacerdotal stand was justified by the treacherous and idiotic acts of several fools like the Russian Orthodox bishops of Ulyanovsk (then Simbirsk) and Omsk, who sent an absurd open letter to Benedict XV (papal tenure: September 1914 – January 1922) to denounce the persecution of Orthodox Christianity in the Soviet state. This was an outrageous attempt. In their despair, instead of undertaking a courageous and thorough self-criticism, these bishops -acting in extreme panic- seemed to have disregarded the following facts:
a- the pope was never the head of Christianity, particularly after the schisms (867 and 1054);
b- the head of Orthodox Christianity was the patriarch of Constantinople;
c. Vatican openly and provenly hated the Russian Empire in the first place, and this was indicated on many occasions, and more recently at the time in the cases of the Imiaslavie heretic dogma and the Fatima delusions;
d. in any case, Vatican could not exercise any influence on the Freemasons and the Zionists, who controlled most of the early Soviet partisans and statesmen; and
e. their act was a real attempt of high treason, as they appealed for help to Russia’s worst enemy (the ‘holy see’ was the moving force behind the anti-Russian stance of Austria-Hungary and Imperial Germany and the formation of the pre-WW I alliances).
The absurd letter was due to despair, fear, and total absence of insight; the Orthodox bishops in reality invited a declared enemy to ‘save’ the territory that the enemy intended to destroy. Stalin must have reasonably been deeply exacerbated and extremely enraged; the act was tantamount to betrayal of one’s own land for the sake of an institution promoting a faith at the very antipodes of one’s own faith; sheer madness.
It was therefore only normal for Georgy Chicherin, the Soviet Foreign Minister, to turn down the disreputable suggestions of Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII), who wanted to make a bargain and provide food procurement in exchange of a compromise involving a moderate Soviet stance toward religion (notably with respect to the ordination of priests and the religious education). The total failure of the secret mission of Michel d’Herbigny (1880-1957) to Soviet Union (1926-1932) was the result of Stalin’s adamant position as regards the Roman Catholic Church.
Many people have read and retained Winston Churchill’s mention of Stalin’s conversation (on the 24th May 1935) with Pierre Laval (only weeks before the latter become the French premier for a second time); according to the narrative, in response to the French statesman’s demand for some concessions or even gestures toward the pope (then Pius XI), Stalin sarcastically responded by asking the famous question: “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?”. Footage and pictures from the visit:
It is essential at this point to explain that this sarcasm has been widely and severely misinterpreted. It does not show contempt for Vatican; on the contrary! Simply, the response-question reveals the techniques of a typical political dialogue in which the truth is never said – let alone shown. By minimizing Vatican’s importance, the Soviet ruler appeared as a naïve guy unable to accurately estimate the formidable power that every pope has had. These words served greatly as smokescreen fully concealing Stalin’s intentions, knowledge and understanding. This is the way typical politicians engage in discussions: the epitome of hypocrisy. As a matter of fact, the best way for outsiders to duly assess what politicians mean when speaking in public is to always accept as true the exactly opposite of what they say.
And this is what actually happened; after pursuing a policy of untrustworthy, hypocritical and penetrative ‘dialogue’ with the USSR between 1958 and 1978, the Vatican -although entirely deprived of army divisions- declared unequivocal war in 1978 on, and marked an irrevocable victory in 1991 over, Soviet Union. This fact was not the result of Marxist-Leninist ideological failure or the consequence of Soviet economic inefficiency; it was merely the direct and disastrous outcome of the Soviet leaders’ inability to deeply analyze Stalin’s choices and decisions and to continually and unquestionably implement them further on.
5. The Mithraic version of the Assyrian-Babylonian Gilgamesh: Verethragna, and his association with Heracles in Nemrut Dagh
Any heroic and legendary symbol or prototype of overwhelming fighter and fellow-combatant for Justice and Truth would certainly fascinate Stalin; I already expanded on the topic in the units XV and XVI. An outstanding divinity of the earliest stage of Iranian-Turanian religion was Verethragna; the heroic life and the legendary exploits of the early nomadic fighters demanded a valiant example and the divine approval of a life dedicated to audacious deeds, bravery and intrepid character. The markedly indomitable lands of Siberia and Central Asia would certainly not allow any weak, shy and cowardly men to survive; frail persons and invertebrate societies indulging in pusillanimity, timidity, risk aversion, and luxury simply disappear in any harsh or adverse natural environment.
It was therefore only normal that this gallant attitude had to be retained within the context of Zoroastrianism; that is why Verethragna was praised as the divine aspect of Victory. In the Yasht 14, which is also known as Bahram Yasht (as the name was transformed over time in Middle Persian), there are several expressions of worship, eulogies and exaltations of Bahram (Verethragna). As an aspect of Ahura Mazda, Bahram was triumphant over demons, evil men, and Angra Mainyu (Ahriman; i.e. the Zoroastrian ‘Satan’), thus demanding praise (from his adepts) of his glory and of his superiority. For this reason, his name became that of six Sassanid emperors, and more importantly of Bahram V (400-438; reigned after 420), who was notably known as Bahram Gur (the ‘onager’) and was later taken by the most illustrious Iranian epic poets of Islamic times as the perfect embodiment of the Messiah and Savior at the End of Times, thus being identified with the Avestan Saoshyant.
Although Verethragna’s association with Fereydun (by modern Western scholarship) is wrong, the heroic character of both legendary figures must have attracted Stalin’s imagination and sentimentalism. Whereas in Mesopotamia and Syria, Babylonian and Aramaean priesthoods made an equation between the controversial historical-mythical figure of Gilgamesh and Verethragna, in Anatolia, the kings of Cappadocia, Pontus, and Commagene established parallels between the Iranian divinity and both, a rather ulterior form of Heracles and an Oriental aspect of Ares, coining the name Artagnes (Hellenization of Verethragna). This shows that, in the different versions of Anatolian Mithraism, the heroic element and dimension were retained, in striking contrast to the Roman Mithraism where Verathragna/Artagnes vanished, eventually absorbed by Mithra himself. Apparently, for the Mithraic Magi, the end target did not include any heroic character. This means simply that they intended to bring forth a non-heroic society of fully subservient slaves.
The presence of Verathragna/Heracles in Nemrut Dagh must have been noticed by Stalin as an indication of the different stages and metamorphoses that the Mithraic polytheistic priesthood underwent in its flight to the West. In fact, the eschatological aspect, which was still indispensable to the Magi in Central Asia, Iran, Caucasus, and Anatolia (so that they are not be rejected by the local populations), was ultimately replaced by the ominous sacrifice (the tauroctony theme) in Syria, Greece, Rome and Western Europe. In this manner, independent from the very tight control of the Iranian emperors, the Mithraic Magi -once settled in Rome- made it very clear that the final ‘salvation’ that they intended to offer to the Mankind was the Hell on Earth (namely the extinction of the human race).
Then, the Crucifixion from firm belief of the early Christians turned out to be the inalienable patent of the formula that the crypto-Mithraic Jesuits will use at the End of Time to effectively carry out their abomination; if Jesus was crucified to ‘redeem our sins’ before 2000 years, the Antichrist will soon demand from his believers to collectively ‘commit suicide and thus achieve redemption’. It sounds absurd, but it has already been staged managed; the Waco massacre in Texas (carried out under the false Christ David Koresh) did not take place for nothing. When the 51-day siege by the FBI ended, with 86 casualties (19th April 1993), it was Easter Monday morning (after the Orthodox calendar). Next time a similar event happens, the magnitude of the scale is going to be incommensurate.
And this concludes the case of Stalin and the unjust accusations that many expressed against him and his systematic elimination of opponents. Heroism and militarism saved the Mankind for millennia, preserving in life the outright majority of the humans. Every law, every theory and every discussion against violence constitute the most viciously inhuman monstrosity; they herald the extinction of the Mankind. It is not during the wars and the conflicts, the civil wars and the purges that the quasi-totality of the Mankind will go extinct; it is during no war that the wickedest plan will be implemented. And all the ongoing controversies about the necessary depopulation are merely the preamble of a hitherto unseen calamity that the real rulers of the Anti-Christian, fake Rome have systematically programmed long ago. Negative narratives can be effectively transformed into beneficial lessons and virtuous teachings can forcibly be transmuted into malevolent plans. Then, only the prey makes the real difference; whereas Mithra killed a bull, Verethragna/Heracles (Artagnes) hunted and killed a boar. And this was Stalin’s best known occupation in Ottoman Anatolia.
6. Mithraic Anatolian Imperial Spirituality vs. Nordic Mythology: Stalin vs. Hitler
Neither Stalin nor Hitler had great consideration for or good opinion of the Jesuits and the Anti-Christian Roman Catholic Church; however, Stalin had far greater margin of maneuver against Vatican. This is so first because Stalin lived in a country where the Roman Church’s impact had always been minimal ever since Emperor Theodosius I made of Christianity the only legal and official religion (380 CE) of the Roman Empire. In addition, Stalin accepted an ideology that totally rejected all the religions as the “opium of the people”, thus totally emancipating himself from any possible papal affiliation and/or connection. Quite contrarily, Hitler lived in a country that had been totally controlled by Rome for almost a millennium before undergoing a devastating religious schism (Luther and Lutheranism), which left ostensible traces until today. Adopting Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ theories, as well as Lenin’s interpretations and attempts of practical implementation, would be tantamount to political career terminator for Hitler in Germany.
Contrarily to Hitler, Stalin did not rise to power by fascinating the masses, founding a political party, and defending his theories and world views. Although the two rulers are comparable when it comes to governance, they differ enormously with respect to their beginnings. As regards his ascent to power, Hitler is certainly more comparable to Lenin; the former was more impulsive, whereas the latter -markedly more systematic and coherent- appeared to be at the same time a rationalist thinker and sentimental orator. Stalin was less vociferous than both; a group of subordinates was always the typical environment for both, Lenin and Hitler, whereas Stalin rather dwelled in loneliness.
Stalin and Hitler had their own visions, ideals, beliefs, Weltanschauungen (world conceptualizations), and -above all- mythical and legendary systems of reference. The latter could not fully and methodically present in public his views and faith; this would be tantamount to outspoken rejection of Christianity, and he would face enormous opposition. The former could not utter a single word of his esoteric beliefs, because this would demonstrate that he was not a Marxist-Leninist.
Hitler’s system of reference was evoked quite often, and then smoothly publicized among the masses, although there were always around the Führer several top Nazi statesmen who were practicing Catholics and Protestants. However, this system of reference was never clearly presented; and many are fully convinced that Hitler’s ideals, visions, beliefs and system of reference were never accurately outlined in his own mind. I find this approach very close to the reality. Apparently, he was not a prophet, he was not a proper mystic, and he was not an eloquent visionary. Being fully impartial, one has to admit that, although evidently Messianic, Hitler did not know where to lead his nation even if wars did not take place; this automatically makes of him a false Messiah or rather a model for a posterior False Messiah. His dysfunctional approach to humanity resulted in rejection of a vilified ‘other’ than in construction of (or advance toward) a truly new, ‘ideal’ society. Lenin was far more radical, resolute and effective in terms of social change. Then, one is led to conclude that Hitler only used the legends he frequently echoed without truly believing them.
Hitler momentarily fascinated the popular imagination during his speeches, but the end destination was a very nebulous, and therefore ill-defined spiritual-material environment that comprised the Brothers Grimm (die Gebrüder Grimm), Wagner’s operas, Germanic mythology and folklore, elements of Norse eschatology, various Celtic and Teutonic cults, several aspects of occultism mixed with Pan-Germanic romanticism, Guido von List’s Wotanism, all the calamitous traits of Nietzsche’s nihilism, and an idealized Hyperborean utopia. This was ominously detrimental for two reasons: Hitler did not possess the intellectual stamina to possibly master these vast and disparate resources in order to fuse selected elements into a coherent new vision, and -even worse- the ensuing confusion could not lead either the Führer or das Volk (the people) anywhere. It is impossible to match identitarian governance (race superiority and contempt for few selected and targeted races) with obfuscate ideals. That’s why the Roman Catholic Church did not view Hitler as a real religious threat.
Stalin’s system of reference was totally unknown to all; this situation freed his hands, because his real intentions were not known to others. In fact, historical materialism and scientific materialism functioned perfectly well as a true smokescreen for Stalin. Many refer to the anti-religious campaign undertaken in the USSR during the period 1928-1941 in order to ‘demonstrate’ that Stalin was truly an atheist. This approach is quite misplaced; in fact, without understanding it, all those, who accuse Stalin of atheism, are Darwinists and materialists. This is so, because these people take things in absolute forms and do not examine systematically what was the ‘religion’ (or every ‘religion’) that Stalin tried to uproot. In fact, starting with the Renaissance in Western Europe, through worldwide colonial expansion, and due to the systematic diffusion of all aspects of Modernism, almost all the traditional religions disappeared or were corrupted in Modern Times. Deprived of any spirituality, stripped of their popular reception, left without their earlier vivid and vast cultural context, and compromised with philosophies, theories, sciences, political ideologies, republican states, political discourse, and the ensuing overwhelming immorality, modern times’ ‘religions’ are empty, meaningless systems. By eliminating these spiritually and culturally dead systems, one only helps rekindle spirituality, morality, intuition and, last but not least, true communication with one’s soul and thence with the spiritual world.
There is however a critical differentiation between Hitler and Stalin that we have to take into account when comparing their spiritual, religious, cultural and intellectual backgrounds with their state/government/party activities: Hitler was acting as a Messiah (and he may even have thought that he was a Messianic figure); Stalin was not! This played a key role in the outcome of their confrontation. When one of two opponents mistakes himself for someone else and the other has an important degree of self-knowledge, a tremendous advantage is being formed in favor of the latter. Many people will ask how this relates to Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations in Ottoman Anatolia. This is simple.
Focusing on eschatological issues during his Mithraic meditations, Stalin must have realized a simple reality hitherto disregarded by most people worldwide; there cannot be a Messiah in a non-Messianic time. The eventual ordeals and upheavals of any society, nation or even continent are not enough to turn those days into a Messianic era properly speaking. Disasters took place during WW I and greater destructions were carried out during WW II, but the 1930s and the 1940s were not the period a Messiah could possibly appear. In striking contrast with Hitler at the cultural, educational and theoretical levels, Stalin had an Oriental background to which he added a certain knowledge of the Western world viewed through Marx’s, Engels’ and Lenin’s lenses. But, Hitler was the natural product of the Western world.
Stalin could understand what Hitler could not: the Christianization of the Roman Empire was not a universally important development. It was significant only for a small part of the surface of the Earth, namely a) all the lands located west of Eastern Europe and Russia, Caucasus, Euphrates, and the Red Sea, and b) all the regions north of Sahara. However, this area did not determine World History; the most critical developments that took place on Earth did not happen there.
Having a sufficient understanding of the History of Asia and duly taking into consideration other continents (Africa, America), Stalin could successfully reckon the very limited impact that 4th c. CE developments in Rome had on the rest of the Earth. What made them ‘important’ was the ulterior Western European expansion. But the Messianic Times would come only when this expansion would reach the farthermost confines of the Earth. But this was not the case in the 1910s or the 1930s. So, Hitler was not a Messiah, but an expendable fool.
Thanks to Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations and meditations in Ottoman Anatolia, there was a considerable difference between the Soviet ruler and Hitler in terms of spiritual and intuitive strength. This has to do with their respective systems of reference; Hitler was fond of Norse spirituality, faith, mysticism, folklore, heroic narratives, legends and mythology, whereas Stalin was attracted to Georgian epics, Iranian Islamic legends, Sassanid imperial heroism, Shamanic-Tengrist spirituality, Anatolian Mithraic mysticism, ant-Roman piratic bravery, and Eastern Roman Caesaropapism. The German Führer was an enthusiast of the Nordic superman, whereas the Georgian Soviet Comrade Secretary General was a devotee the Iranian-Caucasian superman. However, at the end, the former relied on a very materialistic approach, namely Nietzsche’s Übermensch, whereas the latter trusted primarily Ferdowsi’s Fereydun and Rustaveli’s kingdom of Phridon, fully delving into the spiritual realm.
Norse spirituality: not an imperial system
In fact, there are two major points of essential differentiation in this regard; first, Norse spirituality, mysticism, epics, heroic characters, mythology, cult and popular religion were not parts of an imperial culture and tradition. Their narratives, the plots, the exploits, and the values reflect a non-imperial system of governance that suits rather nomadic populations of the North in full mutation. This spiritual, moral, legendary and cultural system does not fit an empire; in other words, Hitler believed or evoked a system that could never become an imperial religion. It was pointless and absurd for him to intend to popularize an absolutely nomadic system of values among settled populations of an industrially advanced society. Simply, it could not work that way. On the contrary, if Hitler identified Mithraism as ancestral religion of the Germans (this was actually true, taking into consideration the diffusion of the Mithraic cults throughout all parts of Germany), he would be more successful in his attempts.
This situation must have been very obvious in the eyes of Stalin; as a matter of fact, it must have also been quite reassuring for him. Noticing the fundamental mistakes perpetrated by an adversary is always re-comforting. Under no circumstances must have Stalin worried about Hitler possibly winning the war; this situation can be very well examined at the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa (i.e. Nazi Germany’s attack against Soviet Union on 22nd June 1941). Many Soviet statesmen, partisans and military officers denounced Stalin’s supposed indifference or gullibility or carelessness, but they were absolutely wrong. The Soviet ruler merely stuck to his deal (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; 23rd August 1939), therefore fully implementing the famous maxim ‘pacta sunt servanda’, honoring his signature, and highlighting his Mithraic moral commitment. In his earliest Iranian form, the Zoroastrian Mithra is also a divinity supervising, protecting and blessing covenants, pacts and oaths. In striking contrast to Hitler, Stalin did not even try to unveil his spirituality, faith, intuition and conviction in public; the reason for this is simple: it is up to a Prophet or a Messiah to do so, not up to mystic.
Anatolian Mithraism, Norse Mythology, and their different solar ideologies
The two rulers’ systems of reference were markedly different as regards their solar aspect and dimension. Stalin’s Mithraic imperial heroism constituted a far wealthier, stronger and brighter source of meditation than Hitler’s Norse heroism. In fact, Norse mythology is a system of spirituality, faith and legend with weak solar traits. Whereas one can eventually establish some parallels between Ahura Mazda and Odin, the main god of the Norse faith and mythology, all other concepts of divinity are greatly different. A very particular element of the Norse religion is the prominent position of Thor (son of Odin), who symbolizes the thunder. This has no parallel in Zoroastrianism and in Mithraism. It is quite interesting that, although in the Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian religion, which exercised remarkable impact on Zoroastrianism and the Achaemenid Iranian court, the divine aspect of the thunder was revered as Adad, in either the Zoroastrian faith or in the Mithraic spirituality, this theme is totally absent.
In general, within the context of a religion, the sheer prevalence of the Thunder is tantamount to the subordination of the Sun. This is a rather polytheistic tendency. In the Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian religion, Adad (also kniown as Hadad and as Ishkur) was early mythologized by the Babylonian priests of the first half of the second millennium BCE as ‘son of Sin’ (i.e. the divine aspect of the Moon) and therefore ‘brother of Shamash and Ishtar’ (namely the divine aspects of the Sun and Venus respectively). But the rise of monotheistic tendencies in the Neo-Assyrian times (1363-609 BCE) left Adad in the backstage and brought Ishtar and Shamash to the forefront.
Within the context of Norse and Germanic mythologies, in total contrast to all Mithraic cults, Sol (or Sunna/Sohne) is a female divinity of second or third rank. Mythologized as daughter of Mundilfari, Sol is the sister of Mani (i.e. the Moon), who was considered as a male divinity. Even worse, in Norse eschatology, during the catastrophic events named Ragnarök (the Norse version of the End Times), the Sun (Sol) is expected to be killed by a wolf, although this will happen after she gives birth to her daughter, another Sun that will replace her. This tragic narrative was not a forgotten fairy tale for the early 20th c. Germans; it was the nucleus of Richard Wagner’s celebrated opera Götterdämmerung. Making of these topics the core of a popular ideal and culture is tantamount to ethnocide; to establish the correct parallel, I would say that the propagation of this sober and apocalyptic theme among the educated urban populations of Germany was tantamount to adopting a different Christian Liturgy of the Word (in the Christian churches) in which the reading of the Gospel would be replaced by that of the Book of Revelation.
Wherever the solar divinity is female, the solar imperial ideology is weak. Among the Hittites of Anatolia, one of the most formidable nations of the Ancient Orient, the solar divinity (Arinna) was mythologized as female. The Hittite Empire did not have solar aspects in its imperial doctrine. There can certainly be empires with no solar aspect in their imperial world view and doctrine; but a strong solar dimension in the imperial doctrine contributes to the state’s cultural radiation and land expansion.
At the end, I have to add that, contrarily to Mithraism, the Norse cult and mythology has also a strong maritime dimension; as the god of the sea and the wealth, Njord was mythologized as the father of Freyja and Freyr, two important divinities. But if Njord was necessary to the small coastal communities of some Scandinavian sailors and fishermen, he was certainly impermissible and disastrous for any great empire of Eurasiatic aspirations. The religions of great empires never include gods of the sea; even in the case of the Roman Empire that was, as I already said, a truly bizarre state formation and an exception in World History, Neptune never occupied a position of central importance. As a matter of fact, Mithraic priests and adepts always reviled the sea. When Tiridates I of Armenia traveled to Rome to be crowned by Nero and to initiate him in the mysteries of Mithra, as he was a high priest, he traveled by land, because the Mithraic sacerdotal hierarchs never exposed themselves to the salt waters. Further readings: https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/2578/stern.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations and meditations in Ottoman Anatolia fully enabled him to acquire a wide angle view of the identity of Russia as Third Rome and to realize what was/is at stake in this regard. This sounds odd to many who view the Soviet ruler as an atheist and a materialist, but behind this convenient façade was hidden a spiritual fortress that few people would be shrewd enough to discern. Many will reject my previous statement and contend that the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church and the total absence of religious cults and of spiritual references in the Soviet Union fully prove that Stalin did not want Third Rome to exist. This last assertion gets a totally different meaning, if one duly completes it.
Yes, Stalin did not want Third Rome to exist in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The plain statement has however a completely different meaning.
Meditating on the striking differences between Anatolian Mithraism and Roman Mithraism was quite revelatory for Stalin. It was also crucial for his personal and deep understanding of Holy Russia (Святая Русь / Sviataya Rus), of the country’s historical role, and of the difficult, dangerous relations that the country would always have with Rome.
The Anatolian-Caucasian Mithraic kingdoms, notably Pontus, Commagene, Armenia and Iberia, similarly with the Empire of Parthia (Arsacid Iran; 250 BCE – 224 CE), were not states that reflected the ideals and the targets of the Mithraic Magi in any way. Although the local priesthoods accepted a preponderant role for Mithra, they systematically attempted and achieved to shift the focus of interest toward monotheistic Zoroastrian concepts and imperial continental ideals of purely Caesaropapist nature. Thus, the Mithraic Magi flight continued further to the west, and they found the ground that they needed in Rome.
Following the abandonment of Mithraism and the promotion of Christianity, the rivalry between Republican Rome and Royal Anatolia was transformed into an opposition between Papo-Caesarist Rome, capital of the Western Roman Empire, and Caesaropapist New Rome-Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The foundation of New Rome by Constantine the Great occurred at the very moment the Roman Mithraic priesthood abandoned Mithraism and adopted Christianity. It was apparently an uncontrolled development that displeased enormously the new pseudo-Christian Roman establishment; in reality, when the Mithraic sacerdotal college, which had opposed the Achaemenid emperors Cambyses and Darius I the Great, achieved its target to put Rome under control, another Rome arose in force: a Second Rome or the New Rome.
Stalin must have understood that a tremendous issue of authenticity and identity was thus formed; when an entity emerges bearing the name of another, the first point that everyone wants to know is which of the two is the true, the original one. The quest for the original Rome dragged the two capitals’ establishments to wars and conflicts. It was a subtle confrontation at all levels: imperial, spiritual, religious, theological, liturgical, cultural, artistic, intellectual, administrative, socio-economic, and military. The pre-Christian rivalry within the context of Mithraism pre-fashioned the rivalry between Rome and New Rome to great extent.
In fact, 600 years after Mithridates VI, Justinian I -due to his exceptional spiritual force, Reconquista, legislation, decrees, administration, and imperial practices- took revenge on
a) Pompey the Great who had finally won over the Mithraic pirates,
b) the part of the Roman establishment that assassinated Caesar, and
c) the seditious, pseudo-Christian sacerdotal Roman establishment, i.e. the spiritual-intellectual descendants of the Iranian Mithraic Magi.
This priesthood was the responsible for the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, because the papal regime did not want any imperial authority to challenge the religious sovereignty of the pope (which is the essence of Papo-Caesarism). As a matter of fact, the imposition of popes approved by the Eastern Roman Emperor (from 537 to 752; namely the Caesaropapist period of Rome) prevented New Rome – Constantinople from collapsing and enabled the Oriental State to endure no less than 700 years after the termination of the practice introduced by Justinian I. During the said period, New Rome also proved to be indomitable by the pope of Rome, because the Anti-Christian Latin kingdom of Constantinople proved to be short-lived: 1204-1261. About:
Stalin could better assess Russian History in the light of the aforementioned; he knew that it was the papal establishment that, after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II (1453), took good care to dispatch Sophia Palaiologina (born Zoe; 1449-1503), niece of the last Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, to Moscow (via Lübeck, Tallinn, Pskov and Novgorod) in 1472 (with great custody and following a great number of deliberations, plots, ceremonies and agreements) to her husband, Ivan III (1440-1505; ruler after1462) duke of Moscow, as his second wife. Ivan Fryazin (Иван Фрязин) was the Muscovite ruler’s proxy in the marriage in absentia, which took place on the 1st June 1472 in Rome (at the Old St. Peter’s Basilica). This fact makes of Constantine XI Palaiologos’ niece the mother of Vasili III (1479-1533; ruler after 1505) duke of Moscow and the grandmother of Ivan IV the Terrible (1530-1584; ruler after 1533 and ‘czar’ after 1547), who significantly expanded the small territory of the Muscovite state, turning it to a kingdom, which claimed continuity from the Eastern Roman Empire (the title ‘czar’ being the Russian translation of ‘Caesar’). About:
Stalin cared for History only up to the point of assessing the identity of the sacerdotal colleges that pull strengths, manipulate petty rulers, produce historical events, use lands, take advantage of adepts, confuse enemies, divide peoples, destroy kingdoms, and employ every trickery to change the world according to their plans, while hiding behind religions, theological systems, spiritual practices, and mysterious cults.
If the Mithraic priesthood, which first prevailed in Rome and subsequently adopted the early Christian belief only to gradually distort it (4th to 15th century) and then straightforwardly challenge it (by means of the Renaissance and the Classicism), reviled so deeply New Rome and the ostensibly Caesaropapist Eastern Roman Empire, then why did they attempt to revive Constantinople in a way, by making of Moscow the Third Rome?
Following a convincing response to this question, one can certainly understand better the labyrinthine tactics that the Roman Catholic establishment implements wherever a conflict takes place or does not; for sacerdotal colleges that have been perennially renewed through member initiation, the targets are irrevocable, the parts of the schedule can last centuries, and duplicity has always been the method to fool the others. Rome did not help Third Rome to emerge -after the fall of New Rome- for good but for bad purpose. It appeared good, of course, in the beginning; but this was deceitful.
Those who intend to control the world and for this purpose they sent Spaniards to decimate Mexicans and Peruvians cannot possibly have good intentions for anyone; they do not create partners, but they fabricate tools and puppets. Stalin’s typically realistic approach must have most probably driven him to the conclusion that Third Rome (Moscow or later Russia) was only a good tool against the Mongols and the Muslims for the papal perfidy. After they would use Third Rome against Islam, they would invent ways to penetrate Russia, infiltrate the Russian Orthodox Church, and corrupt the Russian people. They had already done it against the Roman Empire; they would not hesitate to repeat their method, eventually devising new tricks and delusions. And they ultimately perpetrated the same tactics against Russia.
The above thoughts must have been the result of Stalin’s Mithraic Anatolian contemplations; apparently he concluded that the Russian Orthodox Church of the last decades of the czarist establishment was good for nothing. It could be easily penetrated and it was an ostensible target of the Roman Catholic Church. So, Stalin’s task should be to guarantee conditions of incomparable impermeability and to seal Russia off against any attempt or attack.
So, it was clear that the true, final, ultimate Third Rome had not yet come. Stalin’s work should be to ensure that, when the time would be ripe, the Third Rome would rise to save the world from the Anti-Christian Roman perfidy of the unconditionally Mithraic sacerdotal college. Others would certainly ask one more question:
– Why on Earth would Rome target Russia so systematically?
Stalin would not need to spend time to find out the response; he knew very well that, by infiltrating among Russians, by consecrating Russia to ‘the Immaculate Heart of Virgin Mary’, and by corrupting the local populations, the Mithraic priests would merely effectuate a triumphant return to the land from where their millennia-long adventure started: Central Asia and Siberia.
Stalin would definitely stand on the way; after all, every persecution that the Catholic Church underwent in Nazi Germany was tacitly accepted by Vatican in the (secret) hope that Hitler would invade the entire Soviet Union. The work of the Mithraic sacerdotal college would then be much easier.
XXV. Mithraism, Christianity, Stalin and the Antichrist
Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations and meditations in Ottoman Anatolia fully empowered him to discern the true identity of the worst enemies of Christianity, Russia, and the Mankind: the sacerdotal college that fused Iranian Mithraism, Egyptian Memphitism, and Manichaeism into one faith that they presented under a Roman Christian mask. Finally, they launched the Renaissance intellectual, socio-educational, cultural and theoretical system of tyrannically imposed deception and falsehood, while also re-organizing their institution to appear as ‘Societas Jesu’ (Jesuits) over the past five centuries. Thanks to his inquisitive mind and method, Stalin understood the entirely Anti-Christian character and nature of the Roman Catholic Church and the deep-seated hatred that the Jesuits harbored against Orthodox Christianity, as well as against other cultures and civilizations. Due to his early conclusions, the Soviet ruler was able to effectively oppose Hitler, vanquish Nazi Germany, and deliver a terrible blow to Vatican and the Catholic Church’s interests and presence in Eastern Europe.
However, Stalin knew that WW II was only a small episode in a long enduring, historic rivalry; he would not see the final outcome in person. In the period 1939-1945, opposite sacerdotal colleges siding on both sides of the front only readjusted their forces, preparing for a new conflict. Jesuits, Freemasons and Zionists would soon start another combat duly utilizing their resources against one another. Stalin was not fooled with stories like Hitler’s purported death; neither did he undermine the notorious Operation Paperclip (1945-1959), i.e. the US intelligence program, which involved the transportation of more than 1500 leading German scientists, specialists and experts to the US for government employment. In fact, this operation did not consist in mere utilization of German Nazi scholars by the US establishment; it was rather an outstanding boost of the hidden pro-Nazi (or, if you prefer, the crypto-Nazi) part of the deep American state.
Last but not least, Stalin was aware of the fact that, after the defenestration of Rudolf von Sebottendorf from Thule Gesellschaft (that he had founded), a Satanic English pseudo-Freemasonic lodge put Hitler under total control, also using other stooges around him and thus fully short-circuiting him. In fact, the only really Nazi state was the UK; it simply appeared anti-Nazi, while being crypto-Nazi and testing its stooges and puppets, namely all those who openly appeared as Nazis without ever realizing whose tools they truly were. The abdication of Edward VIII (1894-1972; reign: 20th January-11th December 1936) was due to the fact that he had been publicly exposed as openly pro-Hitler, thus fully revealing UK’s totally Nazi nature and maladroitly conditioning his country’s margin of maneuver. But, by being the ultimately Nazi country (due to the evil deeds of the apostate Anglo-Zionist Freemasonic lodge), England devolved in reality to papal vassal state being adequately utilized by Rome.
Despite their Anglican identity and past, their strong anti-papal rhetoric, and their purported affiliation to Freemasonic lodges, the English were deceived due to the slow and subtle infiltration of the apostate Freemasonic lodge which subordinated today’s fake Freemasons to the pope and the Jesuits. That’s why England supported and guided Hitler in his first steps (after Rudolf von Sebottendorf’s defenestration from Thule Gesellschaft), contained him through use of many spies planted around him, and finally turned him against the USSR – which was an act straightforwardly against Germany’s natural, historical, objective, and inalienable interests. This fact does not mean however that all the anti-Nazi forces were resolutely destroyed and ultimately eliminated within Germany; there were powerful organizations, like Ahnenerbe, which carried out critical and everlasting deeds under a Nazi mask; thus, these secret societies deceived Hitler, his administration, and his masters (England’s fake Freemasons and Vatican’s Jesuits).
When it comes to the warring parts of WW II, one must therefore conclude that the true opponents were the USSR and the UK. That’s why so many deliberations took place notably involving the four conferences held in Moscow; it is noteworthy that, in the Fourth Moscow Conference (1944), which lasted more than 10 days (!!! ??? !!!: 9-19 October 1944) and in which President F. D. Roosevelt was represented by the US Ambassador Averell Harriman, the latter was not present (as he was not invited) in the deliberations between Stalin and Churchill about the notorious Percentages Agreement. This means that the post-WW II situation in Europe was decided upon exclusively by UK and USSR. About:
With the above, I have completed my brief presentation about the far reaching consequences of Stalin’s Anatolian Mithraic contemplations and meditations, their momentous importance, and their paramount contribution to his successful defense of USSR (Russia). Only one last question is now left to be answered:
– To what extent can Stalin’s conclusions from his 2-year long Anatolian sojourn be beneficial to us today?
It is essential for many Russians and other people worldwide to spend some time, exploring the use that they can make of Stalin’s perception of the realities of this world. In fact, nothing ended with the termination of hostilities in 1945. There is only an absolute reality that all the fooled and deceived people worldwide must now open their eyes and accept, before it is too late for them.
Germany is still in the state of war with more than fifty nations; as a matter of fact, not a single peace contract has been signed since 1945. Germany cannot therefore be blamed for any governmental and international decision taken by the entirely unrepresentative governments imposed on the German nation by the true Nazis, who kept hiding themselves behind the worthless jargon of ‘politics’, ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘civil rights’, etc. The duplicitous and biased jargon is fully revealed, when it comes to the word ‘nation’.
Whereas, for the crypto-Nazi governments of post-1945 UK and France, ‘Estonia’, ‘Latvia’, ‘Lithuania’, ‘Ukraine’, ‘Moldova’, etc. are nations that deserve to have their own state and be separated from the USSR (or Russia), quite contrarily, Occitania, Brittany, Euskadi (Bask land), Catalonia, Elsaß-Lothringen, and Corsica in France and Scotland, North Ireland, and Wales in Britain ‘must’ remain occupied territories, endlessly targeted with spiritual genocide by the respective capitals, Paris and London, that are fully controlled by the crypto-Nazi apostate Freemasonic lodge.
Similar duplicity, bias, false jargon, and historical forgery occur when it comes to ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘civil rights’, etc. The same applies to international legalism: after the criminal colonial powers England and France imposed their evil world order due to their military and technological superiority over 19th c. Asiatic and African nations, states and empires, they aptly invented the worthless pseudo-notion of ‘International Law’ – only to defend their lawless, absurd, and inhuman deeds. The paranoid deniers of violence are the cruelest tyrants who carried out the most violent, the most genocidal, and the most Satanic plans for no less than 500 years (1453-1945).
After successfully infiltrating the 18th–19th c. US establishment, the colonial powers turned the US from a consciously anti-colonial state to a subservient tool. They have therefore excessively utilized this state for their own benefit, while also blaming and defaming it; every anti-Americanism started either in Paris or in London. However, one has to be shrewd enough to understand that behind every ‘Vietnam’, there is a state called ‘France’; and similarly, behind every ‘Afghanistan’, there is a realm named ‘England’.
Deeply engulfed in their delusions, the fake Freemasonic lodges and the anti-Jewish Zionist congregations fail to understand how intelligently they have been utilized and instrumentalized by the Jesuits; in reality, although their plans appear to be quite opposite to those of the Roman Satanists, in reality they only contribute to the advance needed for the hidden plans of pseudo-Christian Rome to come to surface. The petty eschatological plans of these societies will apparently fail and their foretold failure is exactly the cause of the friction that we notice today worldwide.
Stalin must have apparently anticipated what the final game would be like; he soon realized that the Mithraic priesthood of the Magi did not jump onto the bandwagon of Christianity for nothing. On the other hand, Manichaeism would be the true eastern (Asiatic) counterpart of an early ascended Roman (i.e. false) Christianity. With their version of fake Christianity being unhindered throughout the Roman Empire, with Manichaeism prevailing in Iran and Asia, and with a Renaissance-style science emanating from the Sassanid University at Gundeshapur (or Jundishapur), the mankind would soon enter in an eschatological orbit that would bring the end around the year 1000 CE.
But then, the plan started to go wrong; first, the high priest Kartir was very watchful and he promptly blocked the diffusion of Manichaeism in Iran. Second, St. Basil, bishop of Caesarea, -with his ingenious theological consolidation and with the Holy Spirit solemnly declared as the third person of the Trinity- irrevocably prevented the rise of Marianism within Christianity. Third, Emperor Justinian felt the danger more clearly than anyone else and he masterfully managed to fully impose Eastern Roman order and Constantinopolitan popes in Rome for more than 200 years. Fourth, while preaching Islam, prophet Muhammad made state of the situation that prevailed among Christians; there were faithful believers and evil infidels among them.
The Magi were therefore forced to postpone their eschatological plans and the propagation of the delusional science that would usher the world into the End Times. These historical facts may not have been clearly studied or assessed by Stalin, but the prevented-postponed delusion and the Jesuits’ eschatological trickery were apparently clear to his eyes. When there is an absolute contrast between a divine missionary, who calls for the Kingdom of Heaven, and a sacerdotal college that systematically exploits the divine missionary’s revelations and preaching for their material benefit, we have a frontal clash between two diametrically opposed moral standards, world concepts, and spiritual paths; the termination of this conflict is actually called ‘End Times’.
Fighting against the Truth and the spiritual heroism of so many luminaries in order to maintain the unjust and evil order that suits their interests, the Mithraic Jesuits of the Anti-Christian Rome will ultimately be forced to come up with a fake savior, who would confirm every single point of their iniquity and viciousness and whom they would present as the true ‘savior’, ‘Messiah’ and ‘Jesus Christ’. To fully service him, they would also need to create a Third Rome as a fake challenger to the fake Messiah; this would be the solemnly announced (in Fatima; 1917) consecration of Russia by the Anti-Christian Church of Rome. In other words, the Jesuits would do to Russia what the apostate Anglo-Zionist Freemasons did to Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the spiritual and the material universes, everything is the reflection of its opposite and all the beings consist in the double refraction of their spiritual prototypes; by solemnly targeting the land of Russia, the Jesuits reveal its exceptional importance and the outstanding role that it will play in the period of upheaval that is commonly called ‘End Times’. But by prompting the fake, the Jesuits will only precipitate the apparition of the real Savior; then, their firm anti-Russian predisposition unveils the location where the main opponent of their fake savior will be manifested in. Stalin’s Mithraic contemplations and meditations in Ottoman Anatolia did not enable him only to effectively oppose Hitler and his secret mentors; they also made him sensible enough to potentially foresee that from the same land and from a position analogous to his, another person, who was not then in life, would oppose and vanquish the Jesuit Antichrist.
In the mystical cave that our Earth -under the Firmament- is, Russia represents the Northern Gate. The forthcoming upheaval period (or ‘End Times’) is tantamount to initiation for the survivors. And as the Phoenician-Aramaean mystic Porphyry said before 1700 years, the initiates enter from the Northern Gate as ‘men’ only to undergo the initiation rituals and exit from the Southern Gate as ‘gods’. Then, the very few survivors, who will discover their presently lost divinity during the unparalleled adversities and difficulties of the ‘initiation’, will emerge in the New Day to live on a New Earth, under a New Sky, and without any sea. Jesuit Rome or, if you prefer, Babylon the Great will have disappeared.
Or why I defended Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 against the thoughtlessly irascible Muslims
When a Muslim writes an Obituary for the Catholic Church’s sole Pope Emeritus…
Table of Contents
I. From Joseph Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI
II. The theoretical concerns of an intellectual Pope
III. Benedict XVI: A Pope against violence and wars
IV. Manuel II Palaeologus and the Eastern Roman Empire between the Muslim Ottoman brethren and the Anti-Christian Roman enemies
V. The unknown (?) Turkic mystic interlocutor and the Islamic centers of science and reason that Benedict XVI ignored
VI. Excerpt from Benedict XVI’s lecture given on the 12th September at the University of Regensburg under title ‘Faith, Reason and the University–Memories and Reflections’
VII. The problems of the academic-theological background of Benedict XVI’s lecture
VIII. Benedict XVI’s biased approach, theological mistakes, intellectual oversights and historical misinterpretations
IX. The lecture’s most controversial point
X. The educational-academic-intellectual misery and the political ordeal of today’s Muslim states
Of all the Roman popes who resigned the only to be called ‘Pope Emeritus’ was Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI (also known in German as Prof. Dr. Papst), who passed away on 31st December 2022, thus sealing the circle of world figures and heads of states whose life ended last year. As a matter of fact, although being a head state, a pope does not abdicate; he renounces to his ministry (renuntiatio).
Due to lack of documentation, conflicting sources or confusing circumstances, we do not have conclusive evidence as regards the purported resignations of the popes St. Pontian (235), Marcellinus (304), Liberius (366), John XVIII (1009) and Sylvester (105). That is why historical certainty exists only with respect to the ‘papal renunciation’ of six pontiffs; three of them bore the papal name of ‘Benedict’. The brief list includes therefore the following bishops of Rome: Benedict V (964), Benedict IX (deposed in 1044, bribed to resign in 1045, and resigned in 1048), Gregory VI (1046), St Celestine (1294), Gregory XII (1415) and Benedict XVI (2013).
I. From Joseph Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI
Benedict XVI (18 April 1927 – 31 December 2022) was seven (7) years younger than his predecessor John Paul II (1920-2005), but passed away seventeen (17) years after the Polish pope’s death; already on the 4th September 2020, Benedict XVI would have been declared as the oldest pope in history, had he not resigned seven (7) years earlier. Only Leo XIII died 93, back in 1903. As a matter of fact, Benedict XVI outlived all the people who were elected to the Roman See.
Benedict XVI’s papacy lasted slightly less than eight (8) years (19 April 2005 – 28 February 2013). Before being elected as pope, Cardinal Ratzinger was for almost a quarter century (1981-2005) the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was the formal continuation of the Office of the Holy Inquisition, and therefore one of the most important sections (‘dicasteries’; from the Ancient Greek term ‘dikasterion’, i.e. ‘court of law’) of the Roman administration (‘Curia’).
A major step toward this position was his appointment as archbishop of Munich for four years (1977-1981); Bavaria has always been a Catholic heavyweight, and in this regard, it is easy to recall the earlier example of Eugenio Pacelli (the later pope Pius XII), who was nuncio to Bavaria (and therefore to the German Empire), in Munich, from 1917 to 1920, and then to Germany, before being elected to the Roman See (in 1939). Before having a meteoric rise in the Catholic hierarchy, Ratzinger made an excellent scholar and a distinct professor of dogmatic theology, while also being a priest. His philosophical dissertation was about St. Augustine and his habilitation concerned Bonaventure, a Franciscan scholastic theologian and cardinal of the 13th c.
II. The theoretical concerns of an intellectual Pope
During his ministry, very early, Benedict XVI stood up and showed his teeth; when I noticed his formidable outburst against the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, I realized that the German pope would be essentially superior to his Polish predecessor. Only in June 2005, so just two months after his election, he defined relativism as “the main obstacle to the task of education”, directing a tremendous attack against the evilness of ego and portraying selfishness as a “self-limitation of reason”.
In fact, there cannot be more devastating attack from a supreme religious authority against the evilness of Anglo-Zionism and the rotten, putrefied society that these criminals diffuse worldwide by means of infiltration, corruption, mendacity, and simulation. Soon afterwards, while speaking in Marienfeld (Cologne), Benedict XVI attacked ferociously all the pathetic ideologies which indiscriminately enslave humans from all spiritual and cultural backgrounds. He said: “absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism”. This is a detrimental rejection of Talmudic Judaism, Zohar Kabbalah, and Anglo-Zionism.
It was in the summer 2005 that I first realized that I should study closer the pre-papal past of the Roman Pontiff whom St Malachy’s illustrious Prophecy of the Popes (12th c.) described as ‘Gloria olivae’ (the Glory of the olive). I contacted several friends in Germany, who extensively updated me as regards his academic publications, also dispatching to me some of them. At the time, I noticed that my Christian friends already used to question a certain number of Cardinal Ratzinger’s positions.
But, contrarily to them, I personally found his prediction about the eventuality of Buddhism becoming the principal ‘enemy’ of the Catholic Church as quite plausible. My friends were absolutely astounded, and then I had to narrate and explain to them the deliberately concealed story of the Christian-Islamic-Confucian alliance against the Buddhist terrorism of the Dzungar Khanate (1634-1755); actually, it took many Kazakh-Dzungar wars (1643-1756), successive wars between Qing China and the Dzungar Khanate (1687-1757), and even an alliance with the Russian Empire in order to successfully oppose the ferocious Buddhist extremist threat.
Finally, the extraordinary ordeal of North Asia {a vast area comprising lands of today’s Eastern Kazakhstan, Russia (Central Siberia), Northwestern and Western China (Eastern Turkestan/Xinjiang and Tibet) and Western Mongolia} ended up with the systematic genocide of the extremist Buddhist Dzungars (1755-1758) that the Chinese had to undertake because there was no other way to terminate once forever the most fanatic regime that ever existed in Asia.
Disoriented, ignorant, confused and gullible, most of the people today fail to clearly understand how easily Buddhism can turn a peaceful society into a fanatic realm of lunatic extremists. The hypothetically innocent adhesion of several fake Freemasonic lodges of the West to Buddhism and the seemingly harmless acceptance of Buddhist principles and values by these ignorant fools can end up in the formation of vicious and terrorist organizations that will give to their members and initiates the absurd order and task to indiscriminately kill all of their opponents. But Cardinal Ratzinger had prudently discerned the existence of a dangerous source of spiritual narcissism in Buddhism.
III. Benedict XVI: A Pope against violence and wars
To me, this foresight was a convincing proof that Benedict XVI was truly ‘Gloria olivae’; but this would be troublesome news! In a period of proxy wars, unrestrained iniquity, and outrageous inhumanity, a perspicacious, cordial, and benevolent pope in Rome would surely be an encumbering person to many villainous rascals, i.e. the likes of Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, and many others so-called ‘leaders’. The reason for this assessment of the situation is simple: no one wants a powerful pacifier at a time more wars are planned.
At the time, it was ostensible to all that a fake confrontation between the world’s Muslims and Christians was underway (notably after the notorious 9/11 events); for this reason, I expected Benedict XVI to make a rather benevolent statement that evil forces would immediately misinterpret, while also falsely accusing the pacifist Pope and absurdly turning the uneducated and ignorant mob of many countries against the Catholic Church.
This is the foolish plan of the Anglo-Zionist lobby, which has long served as puppets of the Jesuits, corrupting the entire Muslim world over the past 250 years by means of intellectual, educational, academic, scientific, cultural, economic, military and political colonialism. These idiotic puppets, which have no idea who their true and real masters are, imagine that, by creating an unprecedented havoc in Europe, they harm the worldwide interests of the Jesuits; but they fail to properly realize that this evil society, which early turned against Benedict XVI, has already shifted its focus onto China. Why the apostate Anglo-Zionist Freemasonic lodge would act in this manner against Benedict XVI is easy to assess; the Roman pontiff whose episcopal motto was ‘Cooperatores Veritatis’ (‘Co-workers of the Truth’) would apparently try to prevent the long-prepared fake war between the Muslims and the Christians.
IV. Manuel II Palaeologus and the Eastern Roman Empire between the Muslim Ottoman brethren and the Anti-Christian Roman enemies
And this is what truly happened in the middle of September 2006; on the 12th September, Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany; the title was ‘Glaube, Vernunft und Universität – Erinnerungen und Reflexionen’ (‘Faith, Reason and the University – Memories and Reflections’). In the beginning of the lecture, Prof. Dr. Ratzinger eclipsed Pope Benedict XVI, as the one-time professor persisted on his concept of ‘faith’, “which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole”, as he said. In a most rationalistic approach (for which he had been known for several decades as a renowned Catholic theologian), in an argumentation reflecting views certainly typical of Francis of Assisi and of Aristotle but emphatically alien to Jesus, Benedict XVI attempted to portray an ahistorical Christianity and to describe the Catholic faith as the religion of the Reason.
At an early point of the lecture, Benedict XVI referred to a discussion that the Eastern Roman Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (or Palaiologos; Μανουήλ Παλαιολόγος; 1350-1425; reigned after 1391) had with an erudite Turkic scholar (indiscriminately but mistakenly called by all Eastern Roman authors at the time as ‘Persian’) most probably around the end of 1390 or the first months of 1391, when he was hostage at the Ottoman court of Bayezid I. In the historical text, it is stated that the location was ‘Ancyra of Galatia’ (i.e. Ankara).
This Eastern Roman Emperor was indeed a very controversial historical figure; although undeniably an erudite ruler, a bold diplomat, and a reputable soldier, he first made agreements with the Ottomans and delivered to them the last Eastern Roman city in Anatolia (Philadelphia; today’s Alaşehir, ca. 140 km east of Izmir / Smyrna) and then, after he took control of his ailing kingdom thanks to the sultan, he escaped the protracted siege of Constantinople (1391-1402) only to travel to various Western European kingdoms and ask the help of those rather reluctant monarchs (1399-1403).
At the time, all the Christian Orthodox populations, either living in the Ottoman sultanate or residing in the declined Eastern Roman Empire, were deeply divided into two groups, namely those who preferred to be ruled by Muslims (because they rejected the pseudo-Christian fallacy, evilness and iniquity of the Roman pope) and the fervent supporters of a Latin (: Western European) control over Constantinople (viewed as the only way for them to prevent the Ottoman rule); the former formed the majority and were called Anthenotikoi, i.e. ‘against the union’ (: of the Orthodox Church with the Catholics), whereas the latter constituted a minority group and were named ‘Enotikoi’ (‘those in favor of the union of the two churches’).
V. The unknown (?) Turkic mystic interlocutor and the Islamic centers of science and reason that Benedict XVI ignored
Manuel II Palaeologus’ text has little theological value in itself; however, its historical value is great. It reveals how weak both interlocutors were at the intellectual, cultural and spiritual levels, how little they knew one another, and how poorly informed they were about their own and their interlocutor’s past, heritage, religion and spirituality. If we have even a brief look at it, we will immediately realize that the level is far lower than that attested during similar encounters in 8th- 9th c. Baghdad, 10th c. Umayyad Andalusia, Fatimid Cairo, 13th c. Maragheh (where the world’s leading observatory was built) or 14th c. Samarqand, the Timurid capital.
It was absolutely clear at the time of Manuel II Palaeologus and Bayezid I that neither Constantinople nor Bursa (Προύσα / Prousa; not anymore the Ottoman capital after 1363, but still the most important city of the sultanate) could compete with the great centers of Islamic science civilization which were located in Iran and Central Asia. That’s why Gregory Chioniades, the illustrious Eastern Roman bishop, astronomer, and erudite scholar who was the head of the Orthodox diocese of Tabriz, studied in Maragheh under the guidance of his tutor and mentor, Shamsaddin al Bukhari (one of the most illustrious students of Nasir el-Din al Tusi, who was the founder of the Maragheh Observatory), before building an observatory in Trabzon (Trebizond) and becoming the teacher of Manuel Bryennios, another famous Eastern Roman scholar.
The text of the Dialogues must have been written several years after the conversation took place, most probably when the traveling emperor and diplomat spent four years in Western Europe. For reasons unknown to us, the erudite emperor did not mention the name of his interlocutor, although this was certainly known to him; if we take into consideration that he was traveling to other kingdoms, we can somehow guess a plausible reason. His courtiers and royal scribes may have translated the text partly into Latin and given copies of the ‘dialogues’ to various kings, marshals, chroniclers, and other dignitaries. If this was the case, the traveling emperor would not probably want to offer insights into the Ottoman court and the influential religious authorities around the sultan.
Alternatively, the ‘unknown’ interlocutor may well have been Amir Sultan (born as Mohamed bin Ali; also known as Shamsuddin Al-Bukhari; 1368-1429) himself, i.e. none else than an important Turanian mystic from Vobkent (near Bukhara in today’s Uzbekistan), who got married with Bayezid I’s daughter Hundi Fatema Sultan Hatun. Amir Sultan had advised the sultan not to turn against Timur; had the foolish sultan heeded to his son-in-law’s wise advice, he would not have been defeated so shamefully.
Benedict XVI made a very biased use of the historical text; he selected an excerpt of Manuel II Palaeologus’ response to his interlocutor in order to differentiate between Christianity as the religion of Reason and Islam as the religion of Violence. Even worse, he referred to a controversial, biased and rancorous historian of Lebanese origin, the notorious Prof. Theodore Khoury (born in 1930), who spent his useless life to write sophisticated diatribes, mildly formulated forgeries, and deliberate distortions of the historical truth in order to satisfy his rancor and depict the historical past according to his absurd political analysis. Almost every sentence written Prof. Khoury about the Eastern Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate is maliciously false.
All the same, it was certainly Benedict XVI’s absolute right to be academically, intellectually and historically wrong. The main problem was that the paranoid reaction against him was not expressed at the academic and intellectual levels, but at the profane ground of international politics. Even worse, it was not started by Muslims but by the criminal Anglo-Zionist mafia and the disreputable mainstream mass media, the likes of the BBC, Al Jazeera (Qatari is only the façade of it), etc.
I will now republish (in bold and italics) a sizeable (600-word) excerpt of the papal lecture that contains the contentious excerpt, also adding the notes to the text. The link to the Vatican’s website page is available below. I will comment first on the lecture and the selected part of Manuel II Palaeologus’ text and then on the absurd Muslim reaction.
VI. Excerpt from Benedict XVI’s lecture given on the 12th September at the University of Regensburg under title ‘Faith, Reason and the University–Memories and Reflections’
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on – perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara – by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.[1] It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor.[2] The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between – as they were called – three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point – itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole – which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις – controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”[3] The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (σὺνλόγω) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”.[4]
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.[5] The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.[7]
Notes 1 to 7 (out of 13)
[1] Of the total number of 26 conversations (διάλεξις – Khoury translates this as “controversy”) in the dialogue (“Entretien”), T. Khoury published the 7th “controversy” with footnotes and an extensive introduction on the origin of the text, on the manuscript tradition and on the structure of the dialogue, together with brief summaries of the “controversies” not included in the edition; the Greek text is accompanied by a French translation: “Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman. 7e Controverse”, Sources Chrétiennes n. 115, Paris 1966. In the meantime, Karl Förstel published in Corpus Islamico-Christianum (Series Graeca ed. A. T. Khoury and R. Glei) an edition of the text in Greek and German with commentary: “Manuel II. Palaiologus, Dialoge mit einem Muslim”, 3 vols., Würzburg-Altenberge 1993-1996. As early as 1966, E. Trapp had published the Greek text with an introduction as vol. II of Wiener byzantinische Studien. I shall be quoting from Khoury’s edition.
[2] On the origin and redaction of the dialogue, cf. Khoury, pp. 22-29; extensive comments in this regard can also be found in the editions of Förstel and Trapp.
[3] Controversy VII, 2 c: Khoury, pp. 142-143; Förstel, vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.5, pp. 240-241. In the Muslim world, this quotation has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation. I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion. In quoting the text of the Emperor Manuel II, I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between faith and reason. On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic.
[4] Controversy VII, 3 b–c: Khoury, pp. 144-145; Förstel vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.6, pp. 240-243.
[5] It was purely for the sake of this statement that I quoted the dialogue between Manuel and his Persian interlocutor. In this statement the theme of my subsequent reflections emerges.
[6] Cf. Khoury, p. 144, n. 1.
[7] R. Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue, Paris 1956, p. 13; cf. Khoury, p. 144. The fact that comparable positions exist in the theology of the late Middle Ages will appear later in my discourse.
VII. The problems of the academic-theological background of Benedict XVI’s lecture
It is my conviction that Benedict XVI fell victim to the quite typical theological assumptions that Prof. Dr. Ratzinger had studied and taught for decades. However, the problem is not limited to the circle of the faculties of Theology and to Christian Theology as a modern discipline; it is far wider. The same troublesome situation permeates all the disciplines of Humanities and, even worse, the quasi-totality of the modern sciences as they started in Renaissance. The problem goes well beyond the limits of academic research and intellectual consideration; it has to do with the degenerate, rotten and useless mental abilities and capacities of the Western so-called scholars, researchers and academics. The description of the problem is rather brief, but its nature is truly ominous.
Instead of perceiving, understanding, analyzing and representing the ‘Other’ in its own terms, conditions and essence and as per its own values, virtues and world conceptualization, the modern Western European scholars, researchers, explorers and specialists view, perceive, attempt to understand, and seek to analyze the ‘Other’ in their own terms, conditions and essence and as per their own values, virtues and world conceptualization. Due to this sick effort and unprecedented aberration, the Western so-called scholars and researchers view the ‘Other’ through their eyes, thus projecting onto the ‘Other’ their view of it. Consequently, they do not and actually they cannot learn it, let alone know, understand and represent it. Their attitude is inane, autistic and degenerate. It is however quite interesting and truly bizarre that the Western European natural scientists do not proceed in this manner, but fully assess the condition of the object of their study in a rather objective manner.
In fact, the Western disciplines of the Humanities, despite the enormous collection and publication of study materials, sources and overall documentation, are a useless distortion. Considered objectively, the Western scientific endeavor in its entirety is a monumental nothingness; it is not only a preconceived conclusion. It is a resolute determination not to ‘see’ the ‘Other’ as it truly exists, as its constituent parts obviously encapsulate its contents, and as the available documentation reveals it. In other words, it consists in a premeditated and resolute rejection of the Truth; it is intellectually barren, morally evil, and spiritually nihilist. The topic obviously exceeds by far the limits of the present obituary, but I had to mention it in order to offer the proper context.
It is therefore difficult to identify the real reason for the magnitude of the Western scholarly endeavor, since the conclusions existed in the minds of the explorers and the academics already before the documentation was gathered, analyzed, studied, and represented. How important is it therefore to publish the unpublished material (totaling more than 100000 manuscripts of Islamic times and more than one million of cuneiform tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, Canaan and Anatolia – only to give an idea to the non-specialized readers), if the evil Western scholars and the gullible foreign students enrolled in Western institutions (to the detriment of their own countries and nations) are going to repeat and reproduce the same absurd Western mentality of viewing an Ancient Sumerian, an Ancient Assyrian, an Ancient Egyptian or a Muslim author through their own eyes and of projecting onto the ancient author the invalid and useless measures, values, terms and world views of the modern Western world?
As it can be easily understood, the problem is not with Christian Theology, but with all the disciplines of the Humanities. So, the problem is not only that a great Muslim scholar and erudite mystic like Ibn Hazm was viewed by Benedict XVI and Western theologians through the distorting lenses of their ‘science’, being not evaluated as per the correct measures, values and terms of his own Islamic environment, background and civilization. The same problem appears in an even worse form, when Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Hittite, Iranian and other high priests, spiritual masters, transcendental potentates, sacerdotal writers, and unequaled scientists are again evaluated as per the invalid and useless criteria of Benedict XVI, of all the Western theologians, and of all the modern European and American academics.
What post-Renaissance popes, theologians, academics, scholars and intellectuals fail to understand is very simple; their ‘world’ ( i.e. the world of the Western Intellect and Science, which was first fabricated in the 15th and the 16th c. and later enhanced progressively down to our days) in not Christian, is not human, and is not real. It is their own delusion, their own invalid abstraction, their abject paranoia, and their own sin for which first they will atrociously disappear from the surface of the Earth (like every anomalous entity) and then flagrantly perish in Hell.
Their dangling system does not hold; they produced it in blood and in blood it will end. Modern sciences constitute a counter-productive endeavor and an aberration that will terminally absorb the entire world into the absolute nothingness, because these evil systems were instituted out of arbitrary bogus-interpretations of the past, peremptory self-identification, deliberate and prejudicial ignorance, as well as an unprecedented ulcerous hatred of the ‘Other’, i.e. of every ‘Other’.
The foolish Western European academic-intellectual establishment failed to realize that it is absolutely preposterous to extrapolate later and corrupt standards to earlier and superior civilizations; in fact, it is impossible. By trying to do it, you depart from the real world only to live in your delusion, which sooner or later will inevitably have a tragic end. Consequently, the Western European scholars’ ‘classics’ are not classics; their reason is an obsession; their language and jargon are hallucinatory, whereas their notions are conjectural. Their abstract concepts are the manifestation of Non-Being.
VIII. Benedict XVI’s biased approach, theological mistakes, intellectual oversights and historical misinterpretations
Benedict XVI’s understanding of the Eastern Roman Empire was fictional. When examining the sources, he retained what he liked, what pleased him, and what was beneficial to his preconceived ideas and thoughts. In fact, Prof. Dr. Papst did not truly understand what Manuel II Palaeologus said to his Turkic interlocutor, and even worse, he failed to assess the enormous distance that separated the early 15th c. Eastern Roman (not ‘Byzantine’: this is a fake appellation too) Emperor from his illustrious predecessors before 800 or 900 years (the likes of Heraclius and Justinian I) in terms of Christian Roman imperial ideology, theological acumen, jurisprudential perspicacity, intellectual resourcefulness, and spiritual forcefulness. Benedict XVI did not want to accept that with time the Christian doctrine, theology and spirituality had weakened.
What was Ratzinger’s mistake? First, he erroneously viewed Manuel II Palaeologus as ‘his’ (as identical with the papal doctrine), by projecting his modern Catholic mindset and convictions onto the Christian Orthodox Eastern Roman Emperor’s mind, mentality and faith. He took the ‘Dialogues’ at face value whereas the text may have been written not as a declaration of faith but as a diplomatic document in order to convince the rather uneducated Western European monarchs that the traveling ‘basileus’ (βασιλεύς) visited during the period 1399-1403.
Second, he distorted the ‘dialogue’, presenting it in a polarized form. Benedict XVI actually depicted a fraternal conversation as a frontal opposition; unfortunately, there is nothing in the historical text to insinuate this possibility. As I already said, it is quite possible that the moderate, wise, but desperate Eastern Roman Emperor may have discussed with someone married to a female descendant of the great mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi (namely Bayezid’s son-in-law, adviser and mystic Emir Sultan). Why on Earth did the renowned theologian Ratzinger attempt to stage manage a theological conflict in the place of a most peaceful, friendly and fraternal exchange of ideas?
This is easy to explain; it has to do with the absolutely Manichaean structure of thought that was first diffused among the Western Fathers of the Christian Church by St Augustine (in the early 5th c.). As method of theological argumentation, it was first effectively contained, and it remained rather marginal within the Roman Church as long as the practice introduced by Justinian I (537) lasted (until 752) and all the popes of Rome had to be selected and approved personally by the Eastern Roman Emperor. After this moment and, more particularly, after the two Schisms (867 and 1054), the Manichaean system of thinking prevailed in Rome; finally, it culminated after the Renaissance.
Third, Benedict XVI tried to depict the early 15th c. erudite interlocutor of the then hostage Manuel II Palaeologus as a modern Muslim and a Jihadist. This is the repetition of the same mistakes that he made as regards the intellectual Eastern Roman Emperor. In other words, he projected onto the ‘unknown’, 15th c. Muslim mystic his own personal view of an Islamist or Islamic fundamentalist. Similarly, by bulldozing time in order to impose his wrong perception of Islam, he fully misled the audience. As a matter of fact, Islam constitutes a vast universe that Prof. Dr. Papst never studied, never understood, and never fathomed in its true dimensions.
In fact, as it happened in the case of the Eastern Roman Emperor, his interlocutor was intellectually weaker and spiritually lower than the great figures of Islamic spirituality, science, wisdom, literature and intuition, the likes of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Al Qurtubi, Mohyi el-Din Ibn Arabi, Ahmed Yasawi, Al Biruni, Ferdowsi, Al Farabi, Tabari, etc., who preceded him by 150 to 500 years. But Benedict XVI did not want to accept that with time the Islamic doctrine, theology and spirituality had weakened.
The reason for this distortion is easy to grasp; the Manichaean system of thinking needs terminal, crystallized forms of items that do not change; then, it is convenient for the Western European abusers of the Manichaean spirit to fully implement the deceitful setting of fake contrasts and false dilemmas. But the 15th c. decayed Eastern Roman Orthodoxy and decadent Islam are real historical entities that enable every explorer to encounter the multitude of forms, the ups and downs, the evolution of cults, the transformation of faiths, and the gradual loss of the initially genuine Moral and vibrant Spirituality. This reality is very embarrassing to those who want to teach their unfortunate students on a calamitous black & white background (or floor).
All the books and articles of his friend, Prof. Theodore Khoury, proved to be totally useless and worthless for the Catholic theologian Ratzinger, exactly because the Lebanese specialist never wrote a sentence in order to truly represent the historical truth about Islam, but he always elaborated his texts in a way to justify and confirm his preconceived ideas. Prof. Khoury’s Islam is a delusional entity, something like the artificial humans of our times. Unfortunately, not one Western Islamologist realized that Islam, at the antipodes of the Roman Catholic doctrine, has an extremely limited dogmatic part, a minimal cult, and no heresies. Any opposite opinion belongs to liars, forgers and falsifiers. As a matter of fact, today’s distorted representation of Islam is simply the result of Western colonialism. All over the world, whatever people hear or believe about the religion preached by Prophet Muhammad is not the true, historical, religion of Islam, but the colonially, academically-intellectually, produced Christianization of Islam.
Fourth, in striking contrast to what the theologian Ratzinger pretended through use of this example or case study (i.e. the ‘discussion’), if Benedict XVI shifted his focus to the East, he would find Maragheh in NW Iran (Iranian Azerbaijan) and Samarqand in Central Asia. In those locations (and always for the period concerned), he would certainly find great centers of learning, universities, vast libraries, and enormous observatories, which could make every 15th c. Western European astronomer and mathematician dream. But there he would also find, as I already said, many Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and other scholars working one next to the other without caring about their religious (theological) differences. This situation is very well known to modern Western scholarship, but they viciously and criminally try to permanently conceal it.
This situation was due to the cultural, intellectual, academic, mental and spiritual unity that prevailed among all those erudite scholars. Numerous Western European scholars have published much about Nasir el-Din al Tusi (about whom I already spoke briefly) and also about Ulugh Beg, the world’s greatest astronomer of his time (middle of the 15th c.), who was the grandson of Timur (Tamerlane) and, at the same time, the World History’s most erudite emperor of the last 2500 years. However, post-Renaissance Catholic sectarianism and Western European/North American racism prevented the German pope from being truthful at least once, and also from choosing the right paradigm.
IX. The lecture’s most controversial point
Fifth, if we now go straight to the lecture’s most controversial point and to the quotation’s most fascinating sentence, we will find the question addressed by Manuel II Palaeologus to his erudite Turkic interlocutor; actually, it is rather an exclamation:
– «Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached»!
This interesting excerpt provides indeed the complete confirmation of my earlier assessments as regards the intellectual decay of both, Christian Orthodoxy and Islam, at the time. Apparently, it was not theological acumen what both interlocutors were lacking at the time; it was historical knowledge. Furthermore, historical continuity, religious consciousness, and moral command were also absent in the discussion.
The first series of points that Manuel II Palaeologus’ Muslim interlocutor could have made answering the aforementioned statement would be that Prophet Muhammad, before his death, summoned Ali ibn Abu Taleb and asked him to promise that he would never diffuse the true faith by undertaking wars; furthermore, Islam was diffused peacefully in many lands outside Arabia (Hejaz), notably Yemen, Oman, Somalia, and the Eastern Coast of Africa. In addition, there were many Muslims, who rejected the absurd idea of the Islamic conquests launched by Umar ibn al-Khattab and actually did not participate.
We have also to take into consideration the fact that, in spite of the undeniable reality of the early spread of Islam through invasions, there has always been well-known and sufficient documentation to clearly prove that the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, the Copts of Egypt, and the Berbers of Africa, although fully preserving their Christian faith, preferred to live under the rule of the Caliphates and overwhelmingly rejected the Eastern Roman imperial administration, because they had been long persecuted by the Constantinopolitan guards due to their Miaphysite (Monophysitic) and/or Nestorian faiths.
On another note, the Eastern Roman Emperor’s Muslim interlocutor could have questioned the overall approach of Manuel II Palaeologus to the topic. In other words, he could have expressed the following objection:
– «What is it good for someone to pretend that he is a follower of Jesus and evoke his mildness, while at the same time violently imposing by the sword the faith that Jesus preached? And what is it more evil and more inhuman than the imposition of a faith in Jesus’ name within the Roman Empire, after so much bloodshed and persecution took place and so many wars were undertaken»?
Last, one must admit that the sentence «Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new!» would have been easily answered by an earlier Muslim mystic of the Golden Era of Islam. Actually, this statement is islamically correct and pertinent. The apparent absence of a spectacular response from the part of Manuel II Palaeologus’ Muslim interlocutor rather generates doubts as regards the true nature of the text. This is so because he could have immediately replied to Bayezid I’s hostage that not one prophet or messenger was sent by God with the purpose of ‘bringing something new’; in fact, all the prophets from Noah to Jonah, from Abraham to Jonah, from Moses to Muhammad, and from Adam to Jesus were dispatched in order to deliver the same message to the humans, namely to return to the correct path and live according to the Will of God.
Related to this point is the following well-known verse of the Quran (ch. 3 – Al Imran, 67): “Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but he was (an) upright (man), a Muslim, and he was not one of the polytheists”. It is therefore odd that a response in this regard is missing at this point.
It is also strange that, at a time of major divisions within Christianity and more particularly among the Christian Orthodox Eastern Romans, the ‘unknown’ imperial interlocutor did not mention the existing divisions among Christians as already stated very clearly, explicitly and repeatedly in the Quran. Examples:
“You are the best community ever raised for humanity—you encourage good, forbid evil, and believe in Allah. Had the People of the Book believed, it would have been better for them. Some of them are faithful, but most are rebellious”. (ch. 3 – Al Imran, 110)
“Yet they are not all alike: there are some among the People of the Book who are upright, who recite Allah’s revelations throughout the night, prostrating in prayer”.
(ch. 3 – Al Imran, 113):
To conclude I would add that elementary knowledge of Roman History, Late Antiquity, and Patristic Philology would be enough for Benedict XVI to know that
– in its effort to impose Christianity on the Roman Empire,
– in its determination to fully eradicate earlier religions, opposite religious sects like the Gnostics, and theological ‘heresies’ like Arianism,
– in its resolve to exterminate other Christian Churches such as the Nestorians and the Miaphysites (Monophysites),
– in its obsession to uproot Christian theological doctrines like Iconoclasm and Paulicianism, and
– in its witch hunt against Manichaeism, …
… the ‘official’ Roman and Constantinopolitan churches committed innumerable crimes and killed a far greater number of victims than those massacred by Muslim invaders on several occurrences during the early Islamic conquests.
So, when did the Christian Church encounter Reason and when did it cease to be ‘unreasonable’ according to the theologian Pope Ratzinger?
One must be very sarcastic to duly respond to those questions: most probably, the Roman Church discovered ‘Reason’ after having killed all of their opponents and the so-called ‘heretics’ whose sole sin was simply to consider and denounce the Roman Church as heretic!
If Benedict XVI forgot to find in the Quran the reason for the Turkic interlocutor’s mild attitude toward the hostage Manuel II Palaeologus, this is a serious oversight for the professor of theology; he should have mentioned the excerpts. In the surah al-Ankabut (‘the Spider’; ch. 29, verse 46), it is stated: “And do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in a most kindly manner”.
Similarly, the German pope failed to delve in Assyriology and in Egyptology to better understand that the Hebrew Bible (just like the New Testament and the Quran) did not bring anything ‘new’ either; before Moses in Egypt and before Abraham in Mesopotamia, there were monotheistic and aniconic trends and traits in the respective religions. The concept of the Messiah is attested in Egypt, in Assyria, and among the Hittites many centuries or rather more than a millennium before Isaiah contextualized it within the small Hebrew kingdom. Both Egypt and Babylon were holy lands long before Moses promised South Canaan to the Ancient Hebrew tribes, whereas the Assyrians were the historically first Chosen People of the Only God and the Assyrian imperial ideology reflected this fact in detail. The Akkadian – Assyrian-Babylonian kings were ’emperors of the universe’ and their rule reflected the ‘kingdom of Heaven’.
If Etana and Ninurta reveal aspects of Assyrian eschatology, Horus was clearly the Egyptian Messiah, who would ultimately vanquish Seth (Satan/Antichrist) at the End of Time in an unprecedented cosmic battle that would usher the mankind into a new era which would be the reconstitution of the originally ideal world and Well-Being (Wser), i.e. Osiris. There is no Cosmogony without Eschatology or Soteriology, and nothing was invented and envisioned by the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Romans that had not previously been better and more solemnly formulated among the Sumerians, the Akkadians – Assyrian-Babylonians, and the Egyptians. There is no such thing as ‘Greco-Roman’ or ‘Greco-Christian’ or’ Greco-Judaic’ civilization. Both, Islam and Christianity are the children of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
And this concludes the case of today’s Catholic theologians, i.e. the likes of Pope Benedict XVI or Theodore Khoury; they have to restart from scratch in order to duly assess the origins and the nature of Christianity before the serpent casts “forth out of his mouth water as a river after the woman, that he may cause her to be carried away by the river”. All the same, it was certainly Prof. Ratzinger’s full right to make as many mistakes as he wanted and to distort any textual reference he happened to mention.
X. The educational-academic-intellectual misery and the political ordeal of today’s Muslim states
Quite contrarily, it was not the right of those who accused him of doing so, because they expanded rather at the political and not at the academic level; this was very hypocritical and shameful. If these politicians, statesmen and diplomats dared speak at the academic level, they would reveal their own ignorance, obscurantism, obsolete educational system, miserable universities, nonexistent intellectual life, and last but not least, disreputable scientific institutions.
The reason for this is simple: not one Muslim country has properly organized departments and faculties endowed with experts capable of reading historical sources in the original texts and specializing in the History of the Eastern Roman Empire, Orthodox Christianity, Christological disputes and Patristic Literature. If a Muslim country had an educational, academic and intellectual establishment similar to that of Spain or Poland, there would surely be serious academic-level objection to Benedict XVI’s lecture. It would take a series of articles to reveal, refute and utterly denounce (not just the mistakes and the oversights but) the distorted approach which is not proper only to the defunct Pope Emeritus but to the entire Western academic establishment; these people would however be academics and intellectuals of a certain caliber. Unfortunately, such specialists do not exist in any Muslim country.
Then, the unrepresentative criminal crooks and gangsters, who rule all the countries of the Muslim world, reacted against Pope Benedict XVI at a very low, political level about a topic that was not political of nature and about which they knew absolutely nothing. In this manner, they humiliated all the Muslims, defamed Islam, ridiculed their own countries, and revealed that they rule failed states. Even worse, they made it very clear that they are the disreputable puppets of their colonial masters, who have systematically forced all the Muslim countries to exactly accept as theirs the fallacy that the Western Orientalists have produced and projected onto them (and in this case, the entirely fake representation of Islam that theologians like Ratzinger, Khoury and many others have fabricated).
If Ratzinger gave this lecture, this is also due to the fact that he knew that he would not face any academic or intellectual level opposition from the concerned countries. This is so because all the execrable puppets, who govern the Muslim world, were put in place by the representatives of the colonial powers. They do not defend their local interests but execute specific orders in order not to allow
– bold explorers, dynamic professors, and impulsive intellectuals to take the lead,
– proper secular education, unbiased scientific methodology, intellectual self-criticism, free judgment, and thinking out of the box to grow,
– faculties and research centers to be established as per the norms of educationally advanced states, and
– intellectual anti-colonial pioneers and anti-Western scholars to demolish the racist Greco-centric dogma that post-Renaissance European universities have intentionally diffused worldwide.
That is why for a Muslim today in Prof. Ratzinger’s lecture the real problem is not his approach or his mistake, but the impermissible bogus academic life and pseudo-educational system of all the Muslim countries. In fact, before fully transforming and duly enhancing their educational and academic systems, Muslim heads of states, prime ministers, ministers and ambassadors have no right to speak. They must first go back to their countries and abolish the darkness of their ridiculous universities; their so-called professors are not professors.
Here you have all the articles that I published at the time in favor of Benedict XVI; the first article was published on the 16th September 2006, only four days after the notorious lecture and only one day after the notorious BBC report, which called the Muslim ambassadors to shout loud:
I have known the late Prof. Dr. Erol Manisalı (20 July 1940 – 29 October 2022) for exactly 35 years, i.e. for more than half of my lifetime. All our parents, grandparents and ancestors originated from Anatolia, but when we met, he had a Turkish and I had a Greek passport. We both had studied at home and in Western Europe, but he had started and advanced in his career, as he was 16 years older than me. It was therefore normal that he (at the age 47 in 1987) excited the professional imagination of a 31-year old researcher like me. What made our encounter an extraordinary, colorful and creative experience was the extremely unusual circumstances under which it started.
I- How we met one another
After a long historical-ethnographic research trip, following a series of war front missions of journalist interest, and in the aftermath of travel by bus through Tabriz and Erzurum to Ankara and by train to Istanbul, I used to spend a few days there; this was a customary attitude, every time I moved from Syria or Iraq or Iran or Pakistan back to Greece in order to further proceed to (then West) Germany, submit another chapter of my thesis, and return, again via Greece, to the Orient. In Istanbul, I worked for many long hours in the libraries of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Istanbul and the Institut français d’études anatoliennes where my earlier notes were drafted into chapters of my thesis.
Then, after a dinner in Istiklal Caddesi, I used to go to Etap Marmara Oteli in Taksim Square for a cup of coffee and further study of my notes until midnight; in addition, in the hotel’s news stand, I used to check Turkish and international newspapers and magazines. There, I bought for the first time an English medium monthly named “Middle East Business and Banking” (MEBB). The publisher’s name was Erol Manisali; this is the prehistory of my relations with my badly missing friend.
The articles were pertinent and comprehensive, covering a wide range of topics and fields. I still remember some names of contributors, except that of the publisher: Mümtaz Soysal and Tansu Çiller. Several years before they became the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister of Turkey, few people in Turkey knew these academics. That is why I decided to call and meet Prof. Manisali next time I was in Istanbul, even more so because the magazine premises were not far from Istiklal Caddesi.
From our first meeting we both realized that, although we had experienced different paths in life, we were in distinct fields of specialization, and we were involved in divergent activities, there were two very strong common denominators in our relationship: our total attachment and dedication to the high land of Anatolia and our unwavering conviction that Kemal Ataturk was not only a military genius, the liberator of Anatolia from the colonial armies of Italy, France and Greece, and the savior of the Turks from the Ottoman yoke and disgrace, but also the perfect model of thought, the best example of correct judgment, and the absolute arbiter of the pertinent approach to practically speaking anything.
Our collaboration took first the form of contribution of several articles to the MEBB; I wrote about Iran, Greece and other Oriental countries of which I had a firsthand knowledge, because I had already lived there, after having first studied their past and monuments. My criticism of the catastrophic mismanagement of Greece by the Neo-Nazi cholera of PASOK was devastating; it also constituted an alarming warning about the rise of crypto-Nazi elements and racist rascals, the likes of Vlassis Agtzidis and Michalis Charalampidis, who had already started in the early 1980s to spread the paranoid falsehood about the so-called ‘genocide of the Pontic Greeks’. ‘Erol bey’, as I used to call him, was listening to me carefully. He used to attribute all the inconsistencies and the pathogenic situation of Greece to the long prevailed ‘monarchic-fascist’ establishment of the misfortunate South Balkan country and to the dominant role played by the Greek Orthodox Church there.
II- Hellenism, as Archaeolatry, is worse than Religion or Theology
I explained to him that the situation was different; the religious establishment had made a compromise with the pro-Western politicians, statesmen, academics and businessmen, but the latter were entirely fraudulent. Necrolatrous, archaeolatrous, Neo-Nazi in its absurd claims to a delusional Ancient Greek superiority, racist in its pretention of Greek ethnic continuity, criminal in its historical falsification, and fascist in its tyrannical manner of eliminating opponents, imposing bogus-historical dogmas, and even constitutionally banning private universities from Greece, the so-called pro-Western political establishment of Greece, in all its aspects (ultra-right, conservative, liberal, social-democrat, socialist, communist, etc.), is the disreputable caricature of a gang of ignorant cannibals, who ‘came’ to Europe only to participate in the Venetian masquerade ball that is called ‘European Union’ as the nephews of Pericles and Thucydides. Absolutely clownish, sick and inane….
Erol bey was truly astounded; he could not comprehend the derailment of the Modern Greek pseudo-Left. “There is no Left in Greece”, I told him and continued: “Papandreou is far closer to Mussolini than to Léon Blum”. At a later date, I said the plain truth: “in Greece, the Left is irrevocably Neo-Nazi”! Erol bey was befuddled. I insisted saying that, under their charlatanesque mask, the so-called Greek leftists of every denomination (believe it or not, it is a ‘religion’ to them!), i.e. the Socialists, the Communists, the pro-Berlinguer pseudo-Communists (ludicrously called as ‘those of the interior’!), the Trotskyists, the Maoists (actually, there were never Stalinists in Greece, and this says a lot!), the silly supporters of Mao’s widow, the Anarchists, the Utopian Socialists and all the other disorderly elements, were -all- indoctrinated racists.
The oxymoron of the Neo-Nazi Greek Left involves supremacists, who believe that the Ancient Greeks were superior to the great nations of the Ancient Orient. The Neo-Nazi Greek Left is constituted by non-educated or falsely educated, South Balkan idiotic barbarians, who want to breed a ‘purified’ race of so-called Hellenic god-men to annihilate the ‘impure’ Mongols (which is a deprecatory term), Turks (who often happen to also be called ‘Mongols’ with viciously disparaging intentions), Macedonians (a ‘bizarre’ nation, which -as per the intellectual leprosy of the Modern Greek Left- does not speak a ‘language’ but an ‘idiom’!! ?? !!), Bulgarians, Albanians, Turk-Albanians (which is insidiously derogatory), Vlachs (this ethnonym is also an insult in Modern Greek), ‘Gypsies’ (the Romani are heinously vilified in Greece), and others.
“Such their racist paranoia is that an ignorant and filthy prostitute wrote a book to criminally pretend that the gods of Ancient Egypt were …… ‘Greeks’, namely the supposed ancestors of today’s ‘Greeks’. This unprecedented racial discrimination will surely lead them to annihilation and extinction, but before that, it will all explode”, I told Erol bey. “Or implode”, he answered immediately. Elucidating and brief!
III- Racist, Crypto-Nazi Publishing Houses of ‘Modern’ Greece
When Erol Manisali heard me speaking about these topics for the first time, he was kind enough not to show that he did not fully believe me; I realized that this was normal. It is actually impermissible that a so heinous, inhuman, vicious Neo-Nazi state exists. The fate of that country was certainly not my concern, as I was pursuing my researches and explorations in other, far away countries, but I always want to offer an accurate description and a vivid image of a place, of a society and of a state that I happen to know.
As I realized that Erol bey’s knowledge of Greece was truly incomplete or superficial, I decided to come up with historical refutations of several samples of ‘books’ published in Greece; in the process, I translated selected excerpts to be fully convincing about the obsolete, dangerous and ominous character of the Neo-Nazi Greek state. By reading the racist, nonsensical, and paranoid statements, assertions and descriptions made within books, magazines, reviews and newspapers in Greece, Erol Manisali and all the other readers of my articles would surely and actually did realize that the sick and degenerate country in the Balkan Peninsula’s southernmost confines was not only a backward and tenebrous structure, but a perilous contamination.
This decision led to the publication of several articles that shed light on the topic. The hysteric reaction of the uncouth and uneducated pseudo-academic gangsters of Greece’s universities against the solemn, all-European publication (1989-1990) of the illustrious book elaborated by Jean-Baptiste Duroselle ‘Europe: A history of its peoples’ (a historical manual which was translated into all the European languages except Greek and has ever since been taught in all the schools of the EU member states except those of Greece) only corroborated my earlier presentations and analyses. Erol Manisali started being more watchful, because the paranoia of the Neo-Nazi political establishment of Athens, which was expressed on this occasion, was a clear indication of a grave sickness. About:
IV- Erol Manisali: his character, mentality, intellect, and culture
Erol bey had a unique ability to accurately perceive and understand topics that were unknown to him or out of his academic field and also to instantly foresee correctly their eventual repercussions. Economist of formation, he understood the nature of modern politics and did not wish to participate. He evidently needed more time for reflection and less time for action; but his strong point was always the raising of public awareness and the popularization of specialized topics. No one could beat him at this; he was a scholar for the people, and not an orator for secluded venues.
He was a very exceptional and -at the same time- a very ordinary man, happy to always explain complex situations to others, offering the correct conceptualization and the comprehensive contextualization. In addition, he was excellent in fully identifying the essentials and the basics or, if you want, in clearly discerning the skeleton of an affair. As he was a pragmatist, he knew what should be expected, what should be undertaken, and what should not become a matter of concern as regards an issue.
About Greece, Erol bey was feeling pity; the case would apparently implode.
About Iran, Erol bey was feeling horror; the case would inevitably explode.
We both anticipated the collapse of the Soviet Union; he was viewing the topic as an expert in geostrategic studies, pondering on possible axes of alliance that would be formed afterwards. To me, the person, who heralded the fall of the USSR, was Ayatollah Khomeini. I understood that as early as 1979, when I was in Paris for postgraduate studies.
For Erol Manisali, the ‘comeback of the religions’ was an incomprehensible disaster or a form of paranoia. I would never describe Erol bey as an atheist or agnostic; as we were both what the French call ‘Voltairiens’ (and not at all ‘Rousseauistes’), I could say that his genuine Muslim tradition made Erol bey believe, as Voltaire describes in his masterpiece ‘Le Monde comme il va’ (The world as it goes/ch. 12 last paragraph) for the celestial angel Ituriel, that the Almighty “résolut de ne pas même songer à corriger Persépolis, et de laisser aller le monde comme il va” (“decided not even to think of correcting Persepolis, and to let the world go on as it goes”).
To me, Erol Manisali was a far more ingenious and a far more ingenuous Muslim than all the ignorant, uneducated, and fanatic theologians, the worthless sheikhs and imams, the useless qadis and muftis, who turn religion into a filthy political affair, confuse it with theology, and shamelessly defend as supposedly the ‘Islamic Faith’ the criminal interests of every uneducated, greedy rascal and evil gangster who happens to govern a country.
Erol Manisali knew that religion is every individual’s personal affair. I used to convey to him the latest news from Iran: ‘so many people decapitated’, ‘so many people left the country’, ‘so many Iranians were in the bus to Ankara’, ‘the Iranians started calling Istanbul as Iranbul’; we were laughing, because the city at the Bosporus had become second home for the wonderful people who wake up in the shadow of Elburz (البرز) or Zagros (کوههای زاگرس) – at almost 2000 m above sea level! But, sometimes, my news and pieces of info from Iran were scary and macabre.
V- Turkey and Iran
The following story shook Erol bey; it is what an Iranian friend from Tehran’s lavish northern suburb of Shemiran (شمیران) told me about a desperate and misfortunate family among his neighbors. After they sent their two children to the US (also smuggling out of Iran the largest part of their wealth), the couple applied for a permission to travel to the UK. As it was customary at the time, the Iranian authorities did not allow the wife of my friend’s friend to travel; this was the way the ‘religious’ state’s officials intended to ‘keep’ fleeing Iranians at ‘home’. Of course, the regime of the Ayatollahs was not anymore ‘home’ to those guys; so much they reviled their state.
Without having a clue about basics in aviation, the husband issued his flight ticket and sent his wife via cargo, after he duly packed her in an enormous wooden box properly prepared for the circumstance. He bribed as many employees of the airport’s cargo section as needed, and he unsuspiciously traveled to London only to take the huge package to his hotel on the next day. After seeing his wife dead (she had apparently frozen in the airplane’s cargo section), he jumped out of the hotel window, thus committing suicide. This is the cursed face of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and it cannot be otherwise, anytime a stupid or bribed (by the UK or US) sheikh, politician or general intends to set up a bogus-religious state in today’s world. Erol Manisali and I terribly deplored the situation.
Quite often, I conveyed to Erol bey the progress of my explorations and publications, as well as the news and the discussions that I had with friends in the Institut français d’études anatoliennes and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Istanbul. The director of the former (for the period 1991-1994) was the great historian Jacques Thobie, who was a friend of Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and heard therefore with great interest the details and the consequences of the plea that I had published in Greece in favor of the History of the French academician. The same was valid for the German prehistoric archaeologist Harald Hauptmann, who headed the latter.
VI- The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as the Right and Just Solution, and the Hero Rauf Denktaş
In 1994, our cooperation took another dimension, as Erol bey invited me to speak in the Onuncu Uluslararası Girne Konferansı (Tenth International Kyrenia Conference) and on that occasion, I had the honor to meet the great hero of the Turkish Cypriot nation, President Rauf Denktaş (1924-2012). My speech can be found here:
My participation in the conference offered me the opportunity to observe the net superiority of the Turkish academic class over the execrable liars and viciously racist bogus-professors of the ill-fated Modern Greek state. I also enjoyed spending several hours in Erol Manisali’s garden; several other visitors and I had the chance not only to speak with the political elite of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), but also to admire Erol’s architectural masterpieces and free time achievements.
If he was not a widely acclaimed academician, a state advisor for presidents and prime ministers, and an avidly read author and columnist, Erol bey would make a great gardener and an excellent masonry master.
VII- The Paradisiacal Gardens of Erol Manisali
The garden was an important element of Erol Manisali’s Weltanschauung. I still remember that, in presence of a friend from Ankara, while discussing about the form of an ideal mansion for each of us, he said that he would love to live in a domicile surrounded by a sizeable garden filled with antiquities, columns, inscriptions, fallen capitels and other monuments; this would make him feel more vividly the weight of History, he said. I found that statement as the unequaled expression of an intellectual with very wide horizons and with an all-encompassing calling; so despite his Istanbulite consciousness and notwithstanding his apparent Constantinopolitan heritage, Erol bey was indeed a Roman original.
I visited him several times in his Girne bahçe, and once my father and I paid a visit to his house in Levent; as the weather was good in that mid-May Istanbulite evening, we sat in the garden. Erol bey and his wife were sipping their favorite whisky, and I enjoyed a wonderful French cognac; so, my father was the only to consume a Turkish product: Boğazkere wine! The conversation was in Turkish and our hosts admired how fluently and correctly my father was speaking Turkish, almost 60 years after he had left Istanbul with his family.
Apparently, I was less fluent than the rest, and Erol bey (with whom I used to speak in English to fast discuss the topics of our agenda) asked me why I did not speak as fluently as my father. I found an immediate excuse:
– Ben Türkçe çatır patır biliyorum!
As they all exploded in laughter with this self-deprecatory confession, I felt the need for an instant comeback to the linguistic garden of my grandfather. So, at once I remembered one of his numerous sayings that I first heard when a child!
– Olursa çat pat, olmazsa aç yat!
That was incomparably my best evening in Istanbul!
And this highlights the Oriental, non-elitist, cosmopolitanism of Erol Manisali; that wonderful evening could have taken place in Istanbul before 300 years, in Esfahan before 400 years, in Delhi before 500 years or in Samarqand before 600 years. There was nothing to remind the absolutely fake, sick, rotten and evil cosmopolitanism of the French-controlled Alexandria of the early 1800s. This was the state that Kemal Ataturk created: the adaptation of technology, science, economy and education to the local needs of development and competitiveness was promoted in parallel with the absolute rejection of Western diseases, colonial mindsets, and imperialist-elitist mentalities.
VIII- Erol and his Popular-Cultural Cosmopolitanism
Culture-based national identity, moral integrity, popular religious tradition (not theological absurdities), legendary values, and egalitarian governance (which means de facto one party system) were cherished in Kemal Ataturk’s exemplarily free society and laic state where no one was a slave to the fake god of every ignorant and uneducated sheikh, whereas every inhabitant of the country was an integral personality that did not need ‘guidance’ from any stupid mufti or a kleptocratic ‘Diyanet’ that today looks rather like a Ponzi scheme.
Then, when the colonial, elitist cosmopolitanism prevails (as in Alexandria), the misfortunate local society gets divided along prefab lines: the subservient and docile Westernized elite (that totally lost its identity and integrity) vs. the heinous, ignorant and lunatic mob, which is guided by the idiotic sheikhs.
Quite contrarily, in Kemal Ataturk one-class society, the non-elitist cosmopolitanism helps people better communicate with foreigners, appreciate different cultures, and comprehend the multicultural nature of our world in its correct dimension: Russian culture is to be found in Russia, Chinese culture is dominant in China, and Iranian culture prevails in Iran. No need for abnormal amalgamation, scheduled agendas, dirty politics, fake stories about waves of refugees, and illegal business for thuggish middlemen, who exploit hundreds of millions of people in the name of their fake Allah.
For all this and much more I am deeply indebted to my departed friend; the way he revealed the political establishment of Modern Turkey to me was not only an outstanding guide but also the method that I applied in order to understand how other states in the region function and why so many failed states exist in areas earlier detached from the Ottoman Empire and colonized by the Anglo-French criminals. My current understanding of the troublesome conditions that prevail in so many countries between Mauritania and Indonesia, my constant comparisons among numerous states, my at times surprising conclusions, and my often confirmed expectations are due to his mentorship and to the initiation that Erol Manisali offered me into the world of politics and public administration.
IX- Erol Manisalı, Halit Refiğ & I: the Triumvirate of All Visions, Designs & Discussions
As it could be expected, we also disagreed many times – notably about Kemal Ataturk and the proper governance with which he endowed the new state. Erol bey was always an adamant supporter of the Constitution of 1960. Quite contrarily, for me, Turkey means the 1924 Türk Anayasası (Turkish Constitution) or if you prefer it in the then terminology ‘Teşkilât-ı Esasiye Kanunu’, which was ratified on the 29th October 1923. About:
I cannot complete my obituary without mentioning our friendship, exciting meetings and long discussions with the long lamented friend Halit Refiğ (5 March 1934 – 11 October 2009), one of Turkey’s foremost film directors, film producers, academics and writers, who was a long date friend of Erol Manisali. To the great chagrin of their beautiful, elegant, highly cultured, and very knowledgeable wives, I was able to prolong our fascinating evening conversations until very late.
When various Eurasiatic approaches to the middle 1990s’ developments were put on the table, the worldwide role of Turkey was mentioned as the sole possible obstacle to the nightmarish scenarios that were underway. Halit and Erol had a very accurate perception of the then forthcoming disastrous developments, which only started with what is now known as 9/11. Halit was anxious about the consequences on the US foreign policy that the notorious book by Prof. Samuel Huntington ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ would have. I rejected the book as a totally evil falsification of World History, convincingly stating that there had actually never ever been any ‘clash of civilizations’ throughout World History.
Erol said that what mattered most from all this stuff was the axis of strategic alliance that would emerge after the chaos that the cursed book would entail: either a South-North axis from Saudi Arabia to new states that would emerge from the (then anticipated by many) implosion of Yeltsin’s Russia (Chechnya, Dagestan, Tatarstan, etc.) or a West-East axis from Turkey to Kyrgyzstan and China.
Halit pointed out that the ‘clash of civilizations’ was merely a smokescreen term for a forthcoming clash of religions (or ‘worlds’), which would trigger a barbaric, extremist and fake ‘Islamization’ of all the secular Muslim countries and of several Christian countries as well; he described the agenda as an ‘English plan for the Islamization of world’. I replied that this plan was real and well-known for its viciously anti-Islamic scope (because it was truly standing against the Islamic Heritage, Civilization and History), but it should not be called that way, but rather the ‘English plan for the homosexualization of Islam’.
Halit laughed approving of my statement, but I insisted that it was not a figure of speech, and I drew on existing literature, notably the notorious book ‘The Homosexualization of America’ that Dennis Altman had published in the early 1980s. The atmosphere became quite sober, and I went on saying that, following the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Soviet Union, considerable changes were made worldwide, and this would not bode well for Turkey, if the intention of the ruling class was to keep the country within the then borders (which are still the same today in 2022). In other words, to survive, Turkey had to indispensably expand its borders – to the east, not to the south, not to the west.
X- Post-1989 Turkey’s ‘Quitte ou Double’: Win the Horse or Lose the Saddle!
To prevent potential traps and dangers, the country had to urgently adopt a sustainable expansion plan and become the vicar of Kemal Ataturk’s secular state and laic ideas to the entire Muslim world. Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, namely states that were steadily promoting Islamic obscurantism, had to face lethal challenges and disappear.
But for Turkey, priority no 1 was Iran, a country that was very weak at the time, due to the long duration of the Iran-Iraq War. The absurd and fake Iran of the Ayatollahs had to be dissolved, following a well-staged border episode, only to be historically-culturally ‘reinvented’. Turkey should fast annex South Azerbaijan, territories in the Zagros Mountains, and the northern plateau from Zanjan to Tehran to Gorgan.
Soon afterwards, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan could unite with Turkey, thus ushering us to a new era, namely the rise of a vast, multilingual Turan-Iran confederacy, with Turkish and Farsi as the two official languages and with a descendant of the Qajar dynasty playing a role.
This would later lead to an overwhelming attack on, invasion and annexation of the fake state of Afghanistan on which a strictly secular establishment would be imposed; subsequently, the return of the then exiled king Mohammed Zahir Shah (1914-2007) would end the paranoid regime of the Taliban gangsters. Only this bold plan would cancel the evil plans that were underway, I concluded. Halit and Erol were listening very carefully; they were regretting that few people could then think in Turkey out-of-the-box.
Erol and Halit offered me a wealth of knowledge and critical insight into the period of İsmet İnönü (president from 1938 to 1950), Celâl Bayar (president from 1950 to 1960), and Adnan Menderes (prime minister from 1950 to 1960), when Kemal Ataturk’s state was first assaulted by the evil Anglo-Saxon diplomats, Orientalist academics, and agents, as well as by their imbecile puppets, namely the various Islamist and/or crypto-Islamist politicians. We three deplored the aforementioned incompetent and disgraced statesmen.
XI- The Dark Shadow of All Bureaucrats
Intellectuals of high caliber, Halit and Erol were some of the best academics of Turkey. They had a very difficult task though; they had to force statesmen and politicians, generals and magistrates to think out-of-the-box. The Turkish state had become a cumbersome bureaucracy that was quite suitable for some politicians to easily use for their personal benefit. But a bureaucracy can accept all the filthy lies of a criminal English agent, like those of Nicholas Fishwick, the rascal who wanted to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic in the way they eliminated Lady Diana and her fiancé. About:
More than a year before that abhorrent crime that took place in Paris (to ostensibly prevent the mother of the second in the line of succession to the British throne from becoming the Muslim wife of a commoner), I met Nicholas Fishwick in the British Consulate of Istanbul only to listen to his paranoid suggestions about England being a ‘friendly country’ to Turkey and that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus ‘should not’ be internationally recognized. Poor thing! The miserable guy was on crutches, because he had broken his leg in a football match; I told him with all due contempt that this sort of ‘friends’ can be found in the market, and that Cyprus is none of England’s stupid business. However, if I had been a Turkish bureaucratic apparatchik, my response would have been different. This situation ended up in Turkey with an Islamist government because all ignorant street sellers are the best MI6 operatives, even without knowing it.
It could be even worse; in the USSR, this situation ended up with the dissolution of the Communist establishment, a process that started with the appointment of Yuri Andropov as the 4th Chairman of the Committee for State Security (KGB) on 18 May 1967. By penetrating one another, the CIA and the KGB ended up becoming one organization; this crucial development is pertinently narrated by the comprehensive and highly insightful article that was recently published by the leading Bulgarian journalist and connoisseur Krassimir Ivandjiiski here: https://strogosekretno.com/323/12/33-години-от-преврата-на-10-ноември-1989-г-неговите-кулиси-и-незаглъхващи-последици.html
There were apparent similarities between the state of Kemal Ataturk and that of Lenin; to my eyes, the Soviet state was in reality weaker as structure, and that’s why it did not last more than 74 years. Its weakness consisted in the inflexibility and the unrealistic dogmatism of USSR’s magistrates and administrators; this attitude was spread the administration. The filthy parasites, i.e. the public sector’s employees, always use theories, theologies, dogmas and doctrines to secure their existence; this process turns them from humans to execrable insects.
For this trash, every new idea, every new approach, every new interpretation, every effort to think out-of-the-box and every attempt to make others function mentally and intellectually in this manner constitutes a lethal danger and has therefore to be instantly eliminated. This pseudo-Kemalist bureaucracy accepted politely Erol Manisali’s incessant suggestions, advice and admonitions only to calmly put them in a drawer and never implement them. That’s why one can establish the parallel between Russia’s Communists in the early 20th c. and Turkey’s Islamists in the early 21st c. Neither did the former reflect Marx’s ideas, nor did the latter represent the Quran and prophet Muhammad’s Hadith. Then, this development is not the result of an intruding foreign power’s interference but the inevitable imprint of the fate.
XII- Erol Manisali: Cassandra’s Distressing but Inevitable Truth
Erol Manisali was a man of honesty, decency, lucidity and farsightedness. Although I came to meet and know personally great Turkish scholars and explorers, politicians and thinkers, I do believe that he was the greatest of all because his texts reflect better the realities of his time. Had he wished to establish a balance between reflection and action, he would have made the most successful Minister of Treasury and Finance (Hazine ve Maliye Bakanı) or the most popular, and the most pedagogical, Prime Minister. But his passion for comprehension, authorship, analysis, explanation and education prevented him from eclipsing the entire political establishment of Turkey in the venue where Erol Manisali would have been most respected: the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi).
My memories are abundant but the space of an obituary is frustratingly limited. You can never write a book for an obituary and you can never contain Life in just 5000 words; even more so, if you need to describe the life of a so multitalented, erudite scholar.
If Erol Manisali lived before 500 years, his work would be similar to that of Matrakçı Nasuh; and what does it matter if Erol bey did not draw maps? His texts elucidated his topics as plainly as Matrakçı Nasuh’s designs highlighted the urban order of Soltanieh, Tabriz, Baghdad and so many other cities.
And if Erol Manisali lived before 1500 years, they would probably call him Procopius because the author of the History of the Wars, the Buildings, and the Secret History reflected the same values and demonstrated the same virtues as my departed friend in our time; both of them did not spare any criticism for the rulers of their times.
Erol the Turk, Erol the Constantinopolitan, Erol the Roman; how can I summarize his colossal legacy in few words? I think that three verses from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (lines 1240-1242) represent Erol Manisali’s insight, hindsight and foresight best, either his foolish opponents like it or not – only uttered by Cassandra:
What does it matter now if men believe or not?
What is to come will come. And soon you too will stand aside,
to murmur in pity that my words were true.
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See also:
Filistinlilerin Giritli Kökeni, Prof. Erol Manisalı ve ben
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