Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur

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.

Prof. Ali Anooshahr, speaking at the symposium “The Idea of Iran: The Safavid Era” (https://www.soas.ac.uk/lmei-cis/events/idea-of-iran/27oct2018-the-idea-of-iran-the-safavid-era.html; Center for Iranian Studies, SOAS; 27 October 2018) about the topic “Historiographical perceptions of the transmission from Timurid to Safavid Iran”, explained how historians of the early 16th c. dealt with the transition from the Timurid to the Safavid period. His speech is available here (from 8:10 until 46:19): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkvUfU2ruKM

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).

Click to access 52925088.pdf

Yasin Arslantaş, Depicting the other: Qizilbash image in the 16th century Ottoman historiography

Click to access 0006379.pdf

Yusuf Küçükdağ, Measures Taken by the Ottoman State against Shah İsmail’s Attempts to Convert Anatolia to Shia

University of Gaziantep Journal of Social Sciences 7(1):1-17 (2008)

https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/223506

https://www fas nus edu sg/hist/eia/documents_archive/selim.php

Click to access 02selimismail.pdf

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ottoman-persian-relations-i-under-sultan-selim-i-and-shah-esmail-i

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/calderan-battle

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/esmail-i-safawi

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/abul-khayrids-dynasty

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/babor-zahir-al-din

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Shaybani

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Таварих-и_гузида-йи_нусрат-наме

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaybanids

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbek_Khanate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khanate_of_Bukhara

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selim_I

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._Selim

https://www.academia.edu/79310004/Masters_of_the_Pen_The_Divans_of_Selimi_and_Muhibbi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_dynasty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babur

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babür

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baburnama

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/بابر

https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/ظهير_الدين_بابر

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Shaikh_Mirza_II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Sa%27id_Mirza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Mirza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miran_Shah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal-Mongol_genealogy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khanzada_Begum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ghazdewan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_I

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._İsmail

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/شاه_اسماعیل_یکم

Darius the Great’s Suez Inscriptions: Birth Certificate of the Silk Roads

https://silkroadtexts.wordpress.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ghazdewan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khanzada_Begum

Click to access anatm_1297-8094_1997_num_7_1_946.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eahkulu_rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eahkulu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_of_Islamic_theology#Sh%C4%AB%CA%BFa_schools_of_theology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batin_(Islam)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batiniyya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_interpretation_of_the_Quran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi_cosmology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism

https://ottoman.ahya.net/node/100

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/II._Bayezid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayezid_II

https://www.konyapedia.com/makale/3308/sehzade-abdullah-abdullah-bin-bayezit-ii

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_%C5%9Eehin%C5%9Fah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Ahmet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Korkut

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Korkut

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Mahmud_(II._Bayezid%27in_o%C4%9Flu)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinople_Observatory_of_Taqi_ad-Din

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chaldiran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Murad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padishah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_(title)#Ottoman_Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_the_Conqueror#Conquest_of_Constantinople

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sultans_of_the_Ottoman_Empire#Names

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_al-Mu%27minin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custodian_of_the_Two_Holy_Mosques

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Caliphate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqi_ad-Din_Muhammad_ibn_Ma%27ruf

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/historiography-vi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Khwandamir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habib_al-Siyar

https://www.sid.ir/en/Journal/ViewPaper.aspx?ID=709213

Click to access jaas072001.pdf

https://journals.openedition.org/asiecentrale/2866

https://journals.openedition.org/asiecentrale/499?lang=en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatefi

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/golat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghulat

Comparative evaluation

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humayun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamran_Mirza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahmasp_I

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

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5125387/

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

https://www.academia.edu/106013407/The_Fallacious_Representation_of_Achaemenid_Iran_by_Western_Orientalists

CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan

https://www.academia.edu/105841665/The_premeditated_disconnection_of_Atropatene_Adhurbadagan_from_the_History_of_Azerbaijan

CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran

https://www.academia.edu/105880180/Iranian_and_Turanian_nations_in_Achaemenid_Iran

CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran 

https://www.academia.edu/105664696/Iranian_and_Turanian_Religions_in_Pre_Islamic_Iran

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CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period

https://www.academia.edu/105386978/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

https://www.academia.edu/52541355/Parthian_Turan_an_Anti_Persian_dynasty

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

https://www.academia.edu/105539884/Parthian_Turan_and_the_Philhellenism_of_the_Arsacids

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CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire

https://www.academia.edu/105053815/Arsacid_and_Sassanid_Iran_and_the_wars_against_the_Mithraic_Christian_Roman_Empire

CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism

https://www.academia.edu/105117675/Sassanid_Iran_Turan_Kartir_Roman_Empire_Christianity_Mani_and_Manichaeism

CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates

https://www.academia.edu/96142922/Iran_Turan_Manichaeism_and_Islam_during_the_Migration_Period_and_the_Early_Caliphates

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CHAPTER XVII: Iran–Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th-8th c. CE

https://www.academia.edu/105292787/Iran_Turan_and_the_Western_Orientalist_distortions_about_the_successful_early_expansion_of_Islam_during_the_7th_8th_c_CE

CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

https://www.academia.edu/105713891/The_fake_Orientalist_Arabization_of_Islam

CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History

https://www.academia.edu/105565861/The_systematic_dissociation_of_Islam_from_the_Ancient_Oriental_History

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CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’

https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_

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CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

https://www.academia.edu/61193026/The_Fake_Persianization_of_the_Abbasid_Caliphate

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CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash

https://www.academia.edu/96519269/From_Ferdowsi_to_the_Seljuk_Turks_Nizam_al_Mulk_Nizami_Ganjavi_Jalal_ad_Din_Rumi_and_Haji_Bektash

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CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur

https://www.academia.edu/104034939/From_Genghis_Khan_Nasir_al_Din_al_Tusi_and_Hulagu_to_Timur_Tamerlane_

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

https://www.academia.edu/105230290/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 the Peak of the Islamic Civilization: Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

https://www.academia.edu/105267173/The_Timurid_Era_as_the_Peak_of_the_Islamic_Civilization_Shah_Rukh_and_Ulugh_Beg_the_Astronomer_Emperor

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CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another

https://www.academia.edu/105744200/Ethnically_Turanian_Safavids_and_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’

https://www.academia.edu/105770339/Spirituality_Religion_and_Theology_the_fallacy_of_the_Safavid_conversion_of_Iran_to_Shia_Islam

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Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah#Ascension_into_the_heavens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_of_Jesus

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/kartir (iii. Kartīr’s Inscriptions, Kartīr’s career and promotions; THE JOURNEY)

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/arda-wiraz-wiraz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isra_and_Mi%27raj

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Hallaj

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imadaddin_Nasimi

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. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirituality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

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:

https://www.doaks.org/resources/middle-east-garden-traditions/introduction/safavid

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/safavids

Click to access anatm_1297-8094_1997_num_7_1_946.pdf

https://asiasociety.org/education/irans-safavid-dynasty

http://www.iranchamber.com/history/safavids/safavids.php

Click to access jaas072001.pdf

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-tcc-worldciv2/chapter/safavid-empire/

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/AXGWQG8WUIK2YIQ4YNSV/full?target=10.1080%2F00210862.2019.1647096

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/new-cambridge-history-of-islam/iran-under-safavid-rule/6ECC100CDA42D7F34EEEDAA231572E24

https://journals.openedition.org/abstractairanica/4628

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/safavids-ii

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291722345_The_Khalifeh_al-kholafa_of_the_Safavid_Sufi_order

https://ghorbany.com/inspiration/persian-empires-chapter-5

http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/h17isl.html

Click to access safavid.pdf

http://www.artarena.force9.co.uk/safavid.html

The Idea of Iran: The Safavid Era

Click to access safavid-aspire.pdf

https://www.persee.fr/doc/anatm_1297-8094_1997_num_7_1_946

https://www.soas.ac.uk/lmei-cis/events/idea-of-iran/27oct2018-the-idea-of-iran-the-safavid-era.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariqa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kızılbaş

https://az.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qızılbaş

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/قزلباش

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кызылбаши

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кызылбаши_(Пенджаб)

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Сефи_ад-Дин

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Сефевиды

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_order

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_conversion_of_Iran_to_Shia_Islam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_Iran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_dynasty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qizilbash

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qizilbash#%22Turk_&_T%C4%81j%C4%ABk%22

Rıza Yıldırım, The Safavid-Qizilbash Ecumene and the Formation of the Qizilbash-Alevi Community in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1500–c. 1700

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00210862.2019.1646120?src=recsys&journalCode=cist20

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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?

—————————————————  

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 

https://www.academia.edu/105664696/Iranian_and_Turanian_Religions_in_Pre_Islamic_Iran

—————————- 

CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period

https://www.academia.edu/105386978/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

https://www.academia.edu/52541355/Parthian_Turan_an_Anti_Persian_dynasty

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

https://www.academia.edu/105539884/Parthian_Turan_and_the_Philhellenism_of_the_Arsacids

———————————   

CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire

https://www.academia.edu/105053815/Arsacid_and_Sassanid_Iran_and_the_wars_against_the_Mithraic_Christian_Roman_Empire

CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism

https://www.academia.edu/105117675/Sassanid_Iran_Turan_Kartir_Roman_Empire_Christianity_Mani_and_Manichaeism

CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates

https://www.academia.edu/96142922/Iran_Turan_Manichaeism_and_Islam_during_the_Migration_Period_and_the_Early_Caliphates

———————————-

CHAPTER XVII: Iran–Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th-8th c. CE

https://www.academia.edu/105292787/Iran_Turan_and_the_Western_Orientalist_distortions_about_the_successful_early_expansion_of_Islam_during_the_7th_8th_c_CE

CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

https://www.academia.edu/105713891/The_fake_Orientalist_Arabization_of_Islam

CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History

https://www.academia.edu/105565861/The_systematic_dissociation_of_Islam_from_the_Ancient_Oriental_History

—————————————   

CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’

https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_

——————————————  

CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

https://www.academia.edu/61193026/The_Fake_Persianization_of_the_Abbasid_Caliphate

——————————————– 

CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash

https://www.academia.edu/96519269/From_Ferdowsi_to_the_Seljuk_Turks_Nizam_al_Mulk_Nizami_Ganjavi_Jalal_ad_Din_Rumi_and_Haji_Bektash

————————————————  

CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur

https://www.academia.edu/104034939/From_Genghis_Khan_Nasir_al_Din_al_Tusi_and_Hulagu_to_Timur_Tamerlane_

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

https://www.academia.edu/105230290/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 the Peak of the Islamic Civilization: Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

https://www.academia.edu/105267173/The_Timurid_Era_as_the_Peak_of_the_Islamic_Civilization_Shah_Rukh_and_Ulugh_Beg_the_Astronomer_Emperor

—————————————– 

CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another

https://www.academia.edu/105744200/Ethnically_Turanian_Safavids_and_Culturally_Iranian_Ottomans_two_identical_empires_that_mirrored_one_another

———————————————————————-

Download the chapter (text only) in PDF:

the-fallacy-of-the-safavid-conversion-of-iran-to-shia-islamDownload

Download the chapter (with pictures and legends) in PDF:

the-fallacy-of-the-safavid-conversion-of-iran-to-shia-islam-pictures-legendsDownload

Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another

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.

———————– 

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman%E2%80%93Persian_Wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsharid_dynasty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qajar_dynasty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Russo-Turkish_wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Persian_Wars

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 Sotoun Palace (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

Chehel Sotoun Palace frescoes; Safavid Isfahan

Tiled room inside Harem, Topkapı palace, Ottoman Constantinople

Muqarnas of Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan

Imperial Gate (Bâb-ı Hümâyûn) Topkapi Palace, Ottoman Constantinople

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

– the Turanian revival of Iran (Afrasiyab).

(Tarih-i Ebu’l Fatih, Istanbul, 1330, p. 57)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saadi_Shirazi

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

——————————————————–  

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?

—————————————————  

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 

https://www.academia.edu/105664696/Iranian_and_Turanian_Religions_in_Pre_Islamic_Iran

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CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period

https://www.academia.edu/105386978/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

https://www.academia.edu/52541355/Parthian_Turan_an_Anti_Persian_dynasty

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

https://www.academia.edu/105539884/Parthian_Turan_and_the_Philhellenism_of_the_Arsacids

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CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire

https://www.academia.edu/105053815/Arsacid_and_Sassanid_Iran_and_the_wars_against_the_Mithraic_Christian_Roman_Empire

CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism

https://www.academia.edu/105117675/Sassanid_Iran_Turan_Kartir_Roman_Empire_Christianity_Mani_and_Manichaeism

CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates

https://www.academia.edu/96142922/Iran_Turan_Manichaeism_and_Islam_during_the_Migration_Period_and_the_Early_Caliphates

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CHAPTER XVII: Iran–Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th-8th c. CE

https://www.academia.edu/105292787/Iran_Turan_and_the_Western_Orientalist_distortions_about_the_successful_early_expansion_of_Islam_during_the_7th_8th_c_CE

CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

https://www.academia.edu/105713891/The_fake_Orientalist_Arabization_of_Islam

CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History

https://www.academia.edu/105565861/The_systematic_dissociation_of_Islam_from_the_Ancient_Oriental_History

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CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’

https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_

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CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

https://www.academia.edu/61193026/The_Fake_Persianization_of_the_Abbasid_Caliphate

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CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash

https://www.academia.edu/96519269/From_Ferdowsi_to_the_Seljuk_Turks_Nizam_al_Mulk_Nizami_Ganjavi_Jalal_ad_Din_Rumi_and_Haji_Bektash

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CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur

https://www.academia.edu/104034939/From_Genghis_Khan_Nasir_al_Din_al_Tusi_and_Hulagu_to_Timur_Tamerlane_

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

https://www.academia.edu/105230290/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 the Peak of the Islamic Civilization: Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

https://www.academia.edu/105267173/The_Timurid_Era_as_the_Peak_of_the_Islamic_Civilization_Shah_Rukh_and_Ulugh_Beg_the_Astronomer_Emperor

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