Following the publication of an article of mine about Kazakhstan’s chances to bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians and to resolve the Palestinian problem once for all, a Muslim friend wrote to me, asking me to expand on the reasons for some of my proposals. He also made a comparison between Israel/Palestine and Cyprus, and he suggested that for both cases he would support a two-state solution. The present article is my reply to his questions and points about Cyprus. My previous articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (including subtitles and units) and links to them you will find at the end of the present article.
I. Cyprus & Palestine: an Island with one Nation & a Land with two Nations
I find the two cases distinct, and under any circumstances whatsoever I would never compare a land (Palestine) to an island (Cyprus), but my friend started his brief letter with the following sentences: “the solution is two states in Palestine and two states in Cyprus. In Cyprus, there are two peoples, not one. Ethnically, there are no ‘Cypriots’; there is no ‘Cypriot’ nation. The term ‘Cypriot’ is local/geographical, not ethnic / national. In Cyprus, there are two great nations, Greeks and Turks, and some tiny minorities”. Saying this, he drew a parallel between Palestine and Cyprus; but this is wrong.
In Ottoman Palestine, before 1882 (the very beginning of the Zionist ‘Aliyah’ project), Palestinians constituted the quasi-totality of the local population, whereas several tiny minorities lived in peace among them: Turkish Ottoman administrators, Druzes and Jews. With the arrival of the European (mostly Ashkenazi) Jews, the composition of the local population started gradually changing.
It is noteworthy that the arrival of those populations was approved by the Sultan and the Ottoman authorities (until 1917), accepted by the Palestinians in the beginning, fully supported by the English colonial gangsters, strongly opposed by the Palestinians with the passing of time, but originally rejected by the only who knew and understood: the Sephardic Jews of Palestine, who represented an authentic line of continuity between Late Antiquity and Modern Jews.
II. 2nd millennium BCE Alashiya (Cyprus)
Quite contrarily, Cypriots were always there. The original name of the island was Alashiya; this is attested in 2nd millennium BCE Assyrian-Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Ugaritic Canaanite, and Linear B Mycenaean texts. The king of Alashiya is mentioned even in the Amarna Letters; the island was part of the territory of the Hittite Empire for several hundreds of years. Mentioned in the text of Wenamun, early 11th c. BCE Alashiya was ruled by Queen Hatiba – which is the earliest known name of local ruler. As personal name, it is determinately Semitic.
The word ‘Cyprus’ is Semitic too, as it denotes the ‘coast’ or the ‘shore’ in Canaanite and Phoenician. Ethnically, all the Cypriots are Canaanites-Phoenicians entirely identical to today’s Lebanese. The sparse Achaean settlements could not and did not change the irrevocable Semitic Phoenician ethnic and cultural identity of Alashiya-Cyprus.
Papyrus with the text of Wenamun in Egyptian Hieratic
III. Vicious, colonial falsification of the History of Cyprus
The History of Cyprus has been extensively tampered with by prepaid pseudo-scholars, bogus-academics, and clownish professors who were on the payroll of London-based Greek ship owners, who were ordered by the Apostate Freemasonic lodge of England to monstrously disfigure the historical realities and to shamelessly portray Alashiya’s History as “Greek”. This fallacy would exacerbate the vicious political myths that were diffused by idiotic politicians and treacherous statesmen in Greece, who -thinking that they would ‘unite Cyprus with Greece-‘ brought disaster, bloodshed and interminable conflict. These were the stupid victims of the English colonial liars and crooks who did not give a damn for the lives of the Cypriots, the Turks, and the Greeks.
Statue of Baal (12th c. BCE) unearthed in Enkomi, Famagusta; to deny the Semitic-Canaanite identity of the island, the biased archaeologists did not name the statue correctly, but gave it rather an exotic appellation, namely ‘horned god’!
The fallaciously called ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ is a fake term invented to distort the History of the Oriental Empires; it consists in the invention of a factoid, which is then extrapolated from a marginal and unimportant region (the Anatolian Sea, which is also known as the Aegean Sea) and extended to describe the major centers of advanced civilization, namely Mesopotamia and Egypt, where it does not apply at all! The fabricated term is biased and absurd. It is impermissible to use terms that apply to an unimportant periphery in order to narrate the History of the lands of the great empires and the peoples who developed the major civilizations. In simple words, since there is no ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ in Mesopotamia, there is no ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ as a major historical circumstance; it is a marginal phenomenon that concerns peripheral lands to Mesopotamia.
Tjekker (Teucri) and Peleset (Philistines-Palestinians) fighting against the Egyptians and Pharaoh Ramesses III at the Battle of Djahy (ca. 1178 BCE); from the reliefs of the walls of the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, Luxor West
The so-called ‘major wave of Greek settlement’ (1100-1050 BCE) was not Greek and was not major; it was in fact ‘Western Anatolian’, and it did not affect Cyprus in particular. In fact, it was the side effect of the invasions of the Sea Peoples, who had nothing to do with ‘Greeks’, but actually destroyed the Achaean (‘Greek’) fortresses and brought an end to the Hittite Empire and its ally, the Mycenaean kingdom.
IV. 1st millennium BCE Cyprus
Cyprus was integral part of the Sargonid Assyrian, Nabonid Babylonian, and Achaemenid Iranian empires; as such, it was entirely disconnected from all the developments that took place in South Balkans during the 5th and the 4th centuries BCE. Cyprus was closer to the Seleucid Empire of Syria, but was always part of the Ptolemaic Empire of Egypt; this fact that reflects the survival of cultural rivalries of the past (Hittite Anatolia, Assyrian-Babylonian Mesopotamia, Egypt).
The gradual diffusion of Alexandrine Koine in Cyprus does not justify any claim of Hellenization; the various settlements of Arcadians did not change the Semitic-Canaanite ethnic identity of the Cypriots. The Romanization and the Christianization of the island constituted two processes, which -in spite of the crucial changes that took place there during the Late Antiquity- consolidated the ethnic unity of the Cypriots, who became part of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Ivory game board (detail) found at Enkomi, Famagusta; evident imitation of the Assyrian royal art by the artists of the local king who is depicted in hunting.
V. Cyprus as part of the Eastern Roman Empire
Cyprus was religiously and administratively important, and this is highlighted by the position of the bishop of Cyprus whose Church was proclaimed autocephalous in the First Council of Ephesus (431 CE) and by the outstanding privileges that Emperor Zeno (reign: 474-475 and 476-491) accorded to Archbishop Anthemius (488 CE). It is interesting that the Patriarchate of Antioch repeatedly failed to incorporate Cyprus into its dominion.
Furthermore, Cyprus was never part of an Eastern Roman ‘theme’ (administrative division), as it consisted in an entirely independent one. The partly Islamization of the island was a slow and rather unusual process which involved an Eastern Roman and Umayyad condominium (688), The Eastern Roman Reconquista (965 CE) took an end with the Crusades (1191), the much loathed (by the Cypriots) Knights Templar, the Lusignan rule (1192-1489), and the Venetian rule that lasted until the Ottoman conquest (1571). The few Ottoman settlers were military officers who entered into mixed marriages, thus having no major impact on the ethnic composition of the local population.
Agia Napa monastery, Cyprus (12th-18th c.)
Hala Sultan Tekke (or Mosque of Umm Haram), Larnaca (16th–18th c.)
VI. Conflicts in 20th c. Cyprus: due to the colonial manipulation of the anti-Turkish Greek racists
In fact, the Turkish Cypriots are Cypriots who accepted Islam; because of this, they did not need to further speak Cypriot Rumi, which was the local dialect of the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire. Today, this language, which erroneously called ‘Modern Greek-Cypriot’, is quasi-unintelligible to all the inhabitants of Greece, who lost their Eastern Roman (Romeiki/Rumi) identity and language, as they were forced -within the secessionist Greek state- to learn the fabricated Modern Greek ‘Standard’ language. On the other hand, Turkish-Cypriot has several differences from Ottoman and Modern Turkish.
Cyprus could have reached independence, unity and neutrality, had the nationalist, extremist and suicidal idea of ‘Enosis’ (unilateral union of Cyprus with Greece) not prevailed among the Greeks and the Greek Cypriots.
With the 15th July 1974 coup the Greek state breached the order in Cyprus, thus offering the chance to Turkey to intervene as a warranty power; the Turkish military intervention followed secret English directives. In Nicosia, the division line (‘Green Line’) cut the city into two parts in a way that offered to the Embassy of England the exclusive privilege to have access to both sectors of the divided island. Actually, it had been designed back in the 1960s by an English military officer as a provisory ceasefire line to separate armed groups of the Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots.
All the accusations of Turkey for the so-called ‘military occupation of the northern part of the island’ by the ridiculous Greek politicians, statesmen, corrupt journalists, chauvinist pseudo-academics, and racist bogus-intellectuals are nothing more than the most convincing proof of their high treason and the best confirmation of their subordination to foreign countries’ interests. By deliberately taking adamant and unrealistic positions, they make it sure that the problem is never resolved and people in Greece are thus fooled, fanaticized and sentimentally manipulated.
In an article published in Greek in Exormisi (‘Sortie’; then daily newspaper organ of PASOK in Greece) on 18th April 1990, I was the first to publicly demand the official Greek recognition of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The ignorant, idiotic, pathetic, corrupt and ludicrous political microcosm of Greece, by rejecting to pay heed to my unmistakable advice, only worsened the position of the country, as they demonstrated worldwide that they are miserable autistics or mentally defective morons. Whether you like it or not, the international community is not a primary school, and the states are not naïve pupils; there are no excuses for mistakes made and for acts breaching the international law, which is the consecration of the Law of the Jungle. For the silly Greek politicians and diplomats it is therefore ludicrous to endlessly complain for something that Greece caused in the first place, by launching the 15th July 1974 coup against President Makarios.
I don’t reject the idea of two states on the island of Cyprus; on the contrary, I fully supported it in the past, back in the 1990s, when Turkey was not an ailing state with paranoid crooks and pseudo-Islamist gangsters in the government. However, this is a matter of local governance. A confederal state could also be viable and successful. Turkish Cypriots have always been staunch Kemalists, as they accept only a secular form of state, while also rejecting the presence of idiotic Islamist Anatolian settlers. Today, a confederal, bi-communal, secular state in Cyprus would make sense. The solution of two states on the island would surely push the small states to unwanted conditions of dependence on Greece and Turkey respectively, and this is something that neither Greek Cypriots nor Turkish Cypriots would like.
VII. Greek & Turkish Cypriots’ enemies are Greece, Turkey and England
As it often happens in all the postcolonial states, the opposition to the absurd and disastrous Greek governmental position as regards the Cyprus problem is carried out also by the colonial powers’ stooges who are employed in order to diffuse other wrong ideas, thus placing the average Greeks in front of a fake dilemma. The steady, incessant generation of fake dilemmas is the method by which colonial powers rule their former colonies.
Consequently, ignorant journalists, being on the payroll of the London-based Greek ship owners and the US-based Greek Diaspora, propagate absurd ideas and vicious concepts, publishing scores of nonsensical articles to fool the average readers. In doing so, they support the current position of Greece’s ailing government on the matter. To be exact, the leftist approach taken by the most reviled government of Greece with respect to the Greek-Turkish relations and the respective position of Turkey’s Islamist gangsters are calamitous for both countries’ vital interests. The same is valid for the ‘new’ Greek approach to the Cyprus problem. It is not strange to qualify the Greek government’s positions as ‘leftist’; although masqueraded as conservative, the New Democracy party has always implemented a Trotskyist agenda.
In his letter, my Muslim friend quoted an article from Anihneuseis portal (see links below) in which the author expressed the following absurd question:
– Why should Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots be forced to live together? The Turkish-Cypriots will never ‘return’ (sic!) as minority to a state that is basically in the hands of Greek-Cypriots.
This paranoid statement reflects the stupid ideas of corrupt Greek journalists and analysts who write in order to reproduce the Islamist propaganda of Turkey, being on the payroll of the criminal Islamist regime of Ankara. Turks have to overthrow the Islamist regime at once, close down all pseudo-Islamist schools and bogus-tariqas, and get their country back from the colonial cholera of AKP. And Greeks have to remove the present government as soon as possible, before it makes of the country Europe’s best example of population replacement.
Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots loved living together until the moment the criminal stooges of England started diffusing among Greeks and Greek Cypriots the evil concept of ‘Enosis’ (Union) between an entirely non-Greek nation (Cyprus) and another equally non-Greek nation, which has been tyrannically ruled for 200 years within the dictatorial pseudo-state of ‘Greece’, undergone a spiritual genocide, and turned from real Christian Orthodox Eastern Romans into deluded and besotted bogus-Greeks, i.e. expendable stuff for the anti-Christian and anti-Islamic policies of the Western colonials of France, England and America.
The easiest response to the aforementioned, totally absurd, question is that Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots will love living together again as soon as they have the courage to speak sincerely to one another, agree on basic confidence-building measures, block reciprocally every type of Turkish and Greek interference, replace the Turkish soldiers with a UN peace keeping force, and ban every discussion about Hellenism, Greek impact on the History of Cyprus, and ‘Union’ with Greece. It goes without saying that Standard Modern Greek must be banned from the primary, secondary and tertiary education in the so-called ‘Greek-Cypriot’ sector (which must be renamed ‘Eastern Roman sector’), whereas Turkish Cypriot linguistic and cultural particularities must be strengthened in the completely secular education of the Turkish Cypriot sector.
Actually, there is no minority in a bi-zonal state; and this perspective of pacification, unification and rehabilitation of Cyprus is the red cloth for the bull. The criminal colonials of England intend to perpetuate the problem, causing many successive transformations to the same issue, in order to remain the only power to locally pull the strings. A united, confederal, bi-zonal state of Cyprus void of interference will have every right to close down the English military bases, terminating the colonial presence on the island once forever.
VIII. Cyprus, Egypt, and the true parallel: two communities in one nation
In fact, with respect to the two communities of Modern Cyprus, there is only one parallel that can be drawn; this is with Egypt. Reminiscent of the ancient impact and involvement, the socio-cultural conditions in the Valley of the Nile and on the island of Cyprus do enable us to establish an analogy.
Egyptians are one nation with two ethnic-religious communities: Christians and Muslims. The former speak Coptic and the latter use a Modern Arabic dialect as a means of everyday communication. However, both communities are indigenous Egyptians or if you prefer Copts (Christian Copts and Muslim Copts). Egyptian Muslims are not Arabs or other foreigners who came to settle in the Valley of the Nile; they are historical Egyptians (Copts) who gradually after 642 CE started accepting Islam; because of this, they did not use Coptic language anymore and they forgot it.
Similarly, Cypriots are one nation with two ethnic-religious communities: Christians and Muslims. The former speak Cypriot Eastern Roman (Rumi) language (which is falsely called Greek Cypriot) and the latter use a Turkish dialect slightly different from Standard Modern Turkish as a means of everyday communication. However, both communities are indigenous Cypriots. Cypriot Muslims are not Turks or Turkmen who came to settle in the island. The Ottoman soldiers who settled in Cyprus were very few. The bulk of the Turkish Cypriots are Cypriots who either entered into mixed marriages or accepted Islam during the Ottoman period.
Earlier articles about the Palestinian-Israeli problem (titles, subtitles, units and links):
Palestinians vs. Israelis: 11 Hidden Historical Truths about a Futile War
I. No Religion subsists without Moral, and no Nation exists due to Fake History II. 11 Points of Historical Clarification about the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Point 1: the Israelis are not ethnically Hebrew Point 2: the Israelis are not religiously Hebrew Point 3: ‘Judaism’ is not identical to the Ancient Hebrew religion Point 4: Jews represented an apostate minority of the Hebrews Recapitulation Point 5: the last historical state of the Jews was named Judah / Judaea, not ‘Israel’ Point 6: there is no right to the Promised Land for the Jews Point 7: the entire Old Testament is a posterior fabrication full of distortions Point 8: among today’s so-called ‘Jews’ only 10-15% are truly Jews: the Sephardi Point 9: today’s so-called ‘Jews’ are not ethnically Jewish: the Ashkenazim Point 10: Reform Judaism is not Judaism Point 11: Modern Hebrew (Ivrit) is a fake, constructed, non-Semitic language
Israelis vs. Palestinians: 6 Concealed Historical Truths about the Lost Wars
I. The Spiritual and Moral Conditions of National Resistance II. 6 Points of Historical Clarification about the Israeli- Palestinian Conflict Point 1: Palestinians are not Arabs, but victims of Arabization and Pan-Arabism. Point 2: The Aramaean and Philistine Past of the Palestinians Point 3: The Sea Peoples and the Peleset-Pelasgian-Cretan Ancestry of the Palestinians Point 4: Palestinian Islamists and Israeli Zionists: Criminal Accomplices in the Formation of a Deracinated Nation that functions as Expendable Material Point 5: Lack of Self-criticism brings Disaster, Death and Damnation Point 6: the Interminable Failures of the Palestinians
Pre-publication of chapter 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.
———————–
Keyumars: the central figure of Islamic mysticism, as he encompasses the souls of all prophets and kings. The miniature presents a vision of the “The Court of Keyumars” and it was painted by the illustrious Safavid court artist Sultan Muhammad around 1522. Who is Keyumars? Mentioned as Gayo Maretan in the Avesta and as Gayomard in Parsi (: late Zoroastrian) texts of Islamic times, he was superbly mythologized by Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh as the First Man, the First King, and the Founder of the Pishdadian dynasty of Righteous Rulers. Keyumars epitomizes life within a mortal world, thus setting in motion the concept of eternal presence and heralding the ultimate victory of the Messiah as the New (or Last) Keyumars.
Currently, the most common encyclopedic definitions of the two terms present these two distinct activities as overlapping or describe spirituality as a part of religion; this is however wrong, if it is considered as valid for all the religions of the world. Many historical religions started as a form of systematization of spirituality and of spiritual rules and they ended up as totally materialistic, rationalistic, and juristic systems of theology. The representatives of these systems have nothing to do with spirituality; they hate the spiritual universe about which they talk too much but only to confuse and besot the rest, and in the Name of God, they commit the world’s cruelest crimes in order to defend their otherwise nonexistent right to survive.
Irrespective of posterior alterations, deteriorations and degenerations, the original fact has always been spirituality; contrarily to religion, spirituality does not need a society to be activated, performed, and experienced. Spirituality is the cornerstone and the epitome of humanity. The human being was created as a unity of soul and body, and if one of the parts of the human identity is disconnected from the other, the being is not human anymore. In the human being, the soul represents the being’s connection to the spiritual world and the body consists in the being’s bond with the material world. What material vivacity is for the body is spiritual life for the soul.
Separation of the soul from the body is called death; disconnection of the soul from the body is also a form of death, and this was hinted at by numerous leading spiritual masters, like for instance Jesus (e.g. “let the dead bury their own dead”; Matthew 8:22). Since God is the Supreme Spiritual Being and the Creator of the spiritual and the material universes, the soul of the man connects, or does not connect, to God. And this is exactly what spirituality is about: spiritual life.
In other words, whereas human society is useless, worthless and unnecessary for the human being to exist and to live, spirituality encompasses all actions, practices, exercises, efforts and techniques pertaining to the interaction between a human being’s soul and body (: heart and mind) and to the activation of a human being’s connection with the spiritual universe – and with the countless spiritual beings and hierarchies that are set in motion and operate therein. Because spirituality, namely spiritual life, is of the foremost importance in the human being’s passage from the material world, many spiritual masters, mystics and spiritually active men departed from their society or lived a secluded life; this was due to the fact that human society can be either unnecessary or even harmful to a person’s spirituality. This common phenomenon is attested in numerous civilizations, and in some of them, it takes the form of asceticism or monasticism.
The early religions in Mesopotamia (Sumer, Elam, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylon), Anatolia (Hatti, Hurrians, Hittites, and Luwians), Egypt, Cush (Sudan), Canaan, and Iran were systems that offered their apprentice priests the possibility to
a) learn and practice all levels of soul-body (spiritual/material) interaction in a human being,
b) comprehend the nature, the norms, and the dimensions of the spiritual and material universes, the stages of their creation, and the phases of their final dissolution (every Cosmogony involves a Cosmology, a Soteriology, and an Eschatology), and
c) learn and perform all types of synergy with spiritual beings and hierarchies as per the needs and the targets set.
To be properly understood, the aforementioned has to be taken into consideration in the light of the following four critical points:
i. the ‘language’ used for the spiritual initiation, formation, education and activation of the apprentice priests by the hierophants and the high priests was the archetypal Oriental Myth, i.e. the inherently created and permanently manifested, within the human being, system of spiritual perception and comprehension, communication and interaction with all other intelligences, spiritual beings, humans, animals, plants and other beings of the material universe. In and by itself, the original Oriental Myth is the complete field of symbolic semiotics that encompasses all forms of Being and Becoming, their opposites, and the correlation between Being and Non-being. In other words, it is part of the Creation, and not a human invention or perception.
ii. the spiritual exercises, practices, advance and completion of the apprentice priests took place irrespective of the spiritual/material duality of Moral Order, i.e. the Good and Evil; this does not mean that this duality is irrelevant. On the contrary, the spiritual duality was reflected on the material universe, and there were entire priesthoods that preached and practiced a counterfeit, evil spirituality at the very antipodes of the moral priesthoods, which followed the Moral Order, i.e. the Law of God.
iii. the aforementioned duality of Moral Order has a lot to do with the Fall of Man or rather the successive stages of the Fall, which are known as the Flood, the Tower of Babel, etc. within the Ancient Hebrew (Biblical) religious context, and accordingly in other, earlier or later, civilizations. These stages of gradual moral degradation caused a) the progressive disconnection of the soul from the body in most of the humans,
b) the subsequent dissociation of the human being from the spiritual universe,
c) the subordination of the immoral, counterfeit priesthoods to the fallen spiritual beings,
d) the deterioration of the conditions of material life on Earth,
e) the preservation of the spiritual potency among several sacerdotal circles during the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE, and
f) the abysmal confrontation between the moral and the immoral priesthoods as part of the clash between Good and Evil in both, the spiritual and the material, universes.
One of the repercussions of this confrontation was the compilation of counterfeit religions geared to engulf humans not only to spiritual disconnection, but also to spiritual impotence and black magic; the very concept of an ‘intermediate’ (being, priest, idol, thought or anything) between the human being and God is the epitome of black magic, as it helps transfer spiritual and material (intellectual) power from an impotent, unconscious and spiritually disconnected human being to another person that gets criminally powered at both, the spiritual and the material, levels, therefore resulting in impermissible and lawless exploitation.
Keyumars instructs his officers to combat Ahriman: this is how the preaching of all the prophets in encapsulated in one symbolic representation. Spirituality does not need volumes of otherwise useless treatises to set the norms and convey the truth about Life.
iv. at the very early days of the History of Mankind, spirituality constituted the epicenter of religion, and so it was in every teaching and practice of a great spiritual master. All true founders of religions were basically leading spiritual masters, who did not launch ‘religions’ properly speaking, but taught their disciples and preached at large the authentic spirituality (the interaction between the human being’s soul and body, and the human being’s connection with the spiritual universe) and the inherent (since the Creation) Moral Order that all humans must follow.
In fact, religion came later either in the simple form of systematization of spirituality and of spiritual rules within the context of human society where the Moral Order should prevail or in the perplex form of counterfeit religions with black magic rituals of many types, i.e. ‘cult’.
Now, if one wants to understand what spiritual potency means, one can find plenty of examples in every literature, tradition, culture and civilization. Within the context of Christianity, one can refer to the well–known excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew (17:20) in which Jesus says to his disciples the following:
“Because you have such little faith”, he told them. “I tell you, if you have faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Go from here to over there’, and it would do it, and nothing would be impossible for you”.
Among numerous other deeds, which are nowadays erroneously (and due to the aforementioned, successive falls of Mankind) considered as ‘miraculous’, spiritual potency of a human involves the following: levitation, walking on water, telekinesis, teleportation across distances, healing, total control of electromagnetic fields, bodily luminescence, control over all natural forces, movement across various points in time, transfiguration, power over fallen (or evil, demonic) spirits and hierarchies, resurrection of the dead, and heavenly travels, like those of
a) the Biblical Enoch (Islamic Idris),
b) the Biblical Elijah (Islamic Ilyas),
c) Jesus (Islamic Isa),
d) Mani, the prophet and founder of Manichaeism,
e) Kartir, the leading theologian and high priest of the Mazdaean religion during the early Sassanid times,
f) the legendary Arda Viraf of the Parsis (as described in the Arda Wiraz namag), and
g) Prophet Muhammad, i.e. the well-known Isra’ and Mi’raj (الإسراء والمعراج) nocturnal travel; about:
As the fall of human societies and the decline of the human condition intensified, spirituality was reduced tremendously and the spiritual potency of most of the priesthoods became nil, with the exception of those whose spiritual power was not theirs anymore, but that of the demons inhabiting the souls of the priests who were acting as mere servants of negative hierarchies.
The fall of Mankind is symbolized within the context of Islamic mysticism by Kay Kavus, the second king of the Kayanian dynasty; in this miniature, Kay Kavus (son of the sublime Kay Kawad (or Kay Qubad), father of the misfortunate Siyavash (or Siyavush), and grandfather of Kay Khusraw, the resolute, selfless soldier and end times’ vanquisher) is being captured by the divs, i.e. the evil spirits that work for Ahriman.
As spiritual power among humans decreased considerably and was limited among few circles of priests and mystics or in isolated cases of ascetics, the condition of human life was restricted to the material level, and then an enormous materialistic, rationalistic, and juristic literature surfaced only to verbally and nominally guide the believers to the ‘correct path’, which was of course not correct and not a path, but a catastrophic swamp and a wrong impasse. Then, the ‘faithful’ were truly left without ‘faith’, because this term originally denoted only the spiritual potency acquired by an individual (as it is clearly shown in the aforementioned example).
In fact, the spiritual connotation of the word ‘faith’ means performance of acts, which in today’s fallen world are considered ‘miraculous’, but in reality they are not. ‘Faith’ does not mean mere acceptance of a narrative; this is a devious, degenerated and corrupt meaning of this word. This materialistic, rationalistic, and juristic literature, which appeared in later periods, among decadent nations, reduced the original Oriental Myth to a meaningless narrative about past times; this contributed to the alteration of the earlier form of religion, rendering some narratives ‘incredible’ or ‘inexplicable’, due to the proliferation of the idiotic rationalism of the fallen humans. Then, the worthless believers accepted the ‘unbelievable’ stories blindly, further worsening their condition of grave faithlessness (without of course realizing the calamitous situation in which they found themselves).
This worthless verbosity of materialistic, rationalistic, and juristic character is called nowadays “theology”. This means simply that what the average Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Phoenician and Hebrew of the 10th c. BCE knew as ‘Flood’ had nothing in common with the de-mythicized and therefore meaningless idea that the average Babylonian, Egyptian, Aramaean, Jew, Greek and Roman of the 1st c. BCE believed about that critical event. The same concerns the followers of later religions today, but not the disciples and the believers of later mystics and spiritual masters who had managed to attain the lost spirituality.
The term “theology” does not therefore apply properly to the earlier sacred texts of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE; whatever their contents may have been (mythical, apocalyptic, moral, literary, etc.), the earlier sacred texts of all religions were in fact ‘texts of spiritual awakeness’ – except for sacerdotal texts compiled by immoral, counterfeit and polytheistic priesthoods.
The preservation of socioeconomic power by the theological gangs and all those, who distorted the early systems of spirituality and defiled the spiritual teachings of later mystics and spiritual masters, was their main concern. For these preposterous theologians, morality among believers did not constitute the true promise of an individual’s spiritual rehabilitation and ultimate salvation, but a means to implement their own anti-spiritual, anti-godly, material(istic) takeover of the society.
Theology therefore signifies the death of spirituality, the falsification of religion, and the degeneration of the sacred texts in the minds of the believers; for this purpose, the average believer’s mindset is aptly distorted, the earlier faith is disoriented, and the people are made unable to ever perceive and understand correctly all things spiritual. Consequently, theologically hijacked religions are tantamount to systems of mental, intellectual, educational, academic, cultural, artistic and socio-economic prison and tyranny. They apparently ended up in the putrefaction of the human being.
There is an exception to the aforementioned; it occurs when there is no established religion but conflicting theological systems, and then the various theologians act like profane philosophers trying to pull their followers to this or that theme and belief that they want to highlight and propagate. This confusing situation may trigger eventually fanaticism, but at times, the worst has been averted due to a shrewd theologian, who prevented others from presenting even worse concepts.
This is the situation that Jesus faced opposite the Pharisees and Muhammad encountered, when confronting either the Jews and the idolatrous Arabs of Hejaz or the Constantinopolitan Christian clergymen, who forced Emperor Heraclius not to accept the invitation to Islam that the prophet extended to him. In reality, spirituality was defamed as black magic within Christianity by those who turned Jesus’ teaching into a black magic shamelessly performed in his name.
All spiritual mystics had to either permanently hide themselves or to develop and diffuse various forms of lesser theological distortion, which were then labeled as ‘heresies’ by the theological gangsters. The situation turned worse when mystics and theologians developed and launched systems of Christian spirituality limited only to the initiated members of secret religious orders (which was another form of hiding). For the average people, this meant that only as a monk or the member of a secret religious order, they could perhaps reconstitute the bond between their soul and their body in themselves.
Kay Khosrow inspects his army before the eschatological battle with Afrasiab; from a manuscript of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh painted in Shiraz in 1561-1562.
Exactly the same occurred within the context of Islam, which was preached as the utmost spirituality by Muhammad and preserved as such by Ali, Hasan, Husayn and their descendants, before several mystics and transcendental masters maintained the Islamic spiritual tradition in several mystical orders. In fact, many Islamic spiritual societies attempted to reconstruct the continuity of Mankind’s historical spirituality by duly interpreting ancient sacred texts and properly decoding mystical traditions kept in various forms of popular culture across the lands occupied by the Islamic Caliphate. This explains to great extent why many aspects and elements of earlier religions and systems of spirituality have emphatically survived within the Islamic world, notably Zervanism, Mazdakism, Mazdeism, Gayomardism, Gnosticisms, etc.
The characteristic difference that separates Christianity from Islam in terms of spirituality and the incomparably higher number of mystical orders that flourished within the Islamic world can be explained by the determinant fact that Islam as religious system is almost totally devoid of ‘cult’. This absence of the historically known and typically religious cult from Islam, as Prophet Muhammad entrusted his faith to his disciples and followers, impregnated an irrevocable mark that stood as major obstacle to all efforts of degrading this system of spirituality to a profanity.
Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, epic eschatology, Islamic mysticism, traditional painting, and popular spirituality: the departure of the mother and the grandmother of Kay Khosrow for Iran (by Hossein Qollar-Aqasi): the most adverse moment in Kay Khosrow’s transcendental life.
Of course, the earliest form of theological distortion of Islam was undertaken by immoral and evil theologians who were hired by the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphs in order to justify their criminal acts and anti-Islamic practices. In Chapter XXI (The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’), I offer many examples in this regard. However, in the process of theological systematization of Islam (known as madhhab), there appeared systems of theological jurisprudence, which looked quite normal in the beginning, but later turned Islam into a system of rationalistic verbalism, juristic nominalism, and materialistic dogmatism. In their verbosity, the original spirituality was lost forever.
At a later stage, pathetic, ignorant and evil theologians considered every Muslim’s connection with the spiritual universe and God (which is Islam’s sole purpose) as their own personal interest and business, and they consequently reduced Prophet Muhammad’s preaching to a silly list of dos and don’ts (as if spirituality and religion are a schoolboy’s lesson). To best express their monstrous identity, they hijacked the madhhab (theological schools of jurisprudence) in order to instrumentalize them as tools of pseudo-religious oppression; first, they undertook vast campaigns against the Islamic sciences in order to plunge the believers into ignorance, and then, they fanaticized their idiotic, uneducated and illiterate followers at a time of conflict (notably the Crusades), turning them against various Islamic mystical orders or independent mystics.
These evil theologians, on whom today’s fake Islam is based, caused an incredible bloodshed throughout the Islamic world; however, it is essential to distinguish between
a) the early bloodshed that took place in the 7th and 8th c. due to orders of caliphs, who cared about how to secure their illegal grab of power from the early Islamic mystics and descendants of Prophet Muhammad (notably Ja’far al-Sadiq, sixth imam of all Muslims; 702-765), and
b) the later, longer and more atrocious bloodshed that covered the period between the 9th and the 15th c. and which was caused by evil theologians, who wanted to control the Muslims by plunging them into ignorance, barbarism, ignominy, and fallacious interpretation of the sacred texts on the basis of their own pseudo-Islamic theological system.
What these theologians, and more particularly the disreputable Ahmed ibn Hanbal and the cursed Ahmad ibn Taimiyyah, did was a literal Christianization of Islam; they viciously interpolated their juristic doctrines between the Man (in this case, the Muslim) and God (Allah). These theological doctrines consist in an impermissible intermediate that breaks the connection of man with the spiritual universe and God. And to do this, these Satanic theologians butchered numerous mystics whom they failed to understand in the first place. Great examples in this regard are Mansour Hallaj (858-922; lashed terribly and then decapitated) and Imadaddin Nasimi (1369-1417), who was accused as Hurufi, without however being so, and skinned alive.
Drawing therefore on earlier experience, the Safavid Order decided to take the correct measures so as to prevent the massacre of their members at the hands of ignorant pseudo-Muslims fanaticized by Satanic theologians (who may have been indiscriminately ‘qadis’, ‘sheikhs’ and ‘imams’) and shamelessly bribed or favored by Ottoman sultans. Having been launched by, and named after, Safi-ad-Din Ardabili (1252–1334) at the end of the 13th c., the Safavid Order was a band of mystics, an assembly of enlightened Muslims, and a confederation of the true faithful, who performed the royal art, carrying out acts of devotion and spiritual salvation, while engaging in diverse techniques of spirituality. They were the friends of Christians, Parsis, Yazidis, Jews, Ahl-e Haq, Tengrists, Hindus, and Buddhists.
After having operated for two centuries, at the times of the Order’s Grandmaster Shaykh Haydar (1459-1488), the Safavid Order launched another secret society, namely the Qizilbash (Kızılbaş /(قزلباش, i.e. the “red headed” (because of their red headgear); the Qizilbash functioned as the army of the Safavid Order and they duly prevented all pseudo-Muslim theologians and their cursed followers from asserting their evil power across lands that the Qizilbash controlled, thus fully defending the members of the (hereditary) Safavid Order.
Safi ad-din Ardabili surrounded by his disciples, as illustrated in a 16th-century Safavid manuscript of the Safvat as-safa
Soon after their early successes, at the end of the 15th c., the mystical order and their army branch, knowing very well that the degenerate Islamic theologians would destroy the entire Islamic world, decided to set up their own state, which would be an empire ruled by the Safavid Order and predestined to save the Islamic world from total decay, slavery and decomposition. This type of state would not be and actually was not a religious or theological state; quite contrarily, it was a secular empire ruled by the mystical order. Automatically, every pseudo-Muslim theologian and every pseudo-Islamic state, which was nominally ruled by a sultan, emir, khan or king, but essentially it was governed by the bogus-religious authorities and the evil theologians, was found at the very antipodes of Safavid Iran.
It is crucial at this point to state that when the theologians put the monarch under control in a pseudo-Muslim state, this consists in the repetition of a phenomenon known only too well within the Christian world: Papo-Caesarism. No Christian and no Muslim state can adopt the Papo-Caesarist model. Spirituality imposes imperial rule, and this means Caesaropapism. This was solemnly introduced by Justinian I throughout the Roman Empire; it is for this reason that immediately after the death of prophet Muhammad, the followers of Ali asserted that only the prophet’s cousin and son-in law could possibly be the ruler of the Caliphate. Despite Ali’s astounding spiritual qualifications, his rule would follow the Caesaropapist pattern.
As a matter of fact, there cannot be religious evaluation of spiritual matters; this reality, which was never accepted by religious authorities and theologians alike (because it would herald their deserved dissolution and ultimate disappearance), is viciously concealed behind the Western confusion between spirituality (spiritalitas or numen / maneviyat/ معنویت/ الروحانية/靈性/ духовность) and religion (religio/din/ دین/宗教/ религия). Suffice it to check the most common definitions of spirituality and religion that are available online; there one gets a clear idea of the materialistic distortion of both terms’ meaning.
Miniature created by Mo’en Mosavver: Shah Ismail I holds an audience and welcomes the Qizilbash after they defeated the Shirvanshah Farrukh Yasar; album leaf from a copy of Bijan’s Tarikh-i Jahangusha-yi Khaqan Sahibqiran (A History of Shah Ismail I), produced in Isfahan, end of the 1680s
Drawing of a typical Qizilbash soldier
Then, what is fallaciously termed as “Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam” describes in reality the mere rise of the Safavid Order in large parts of Western Asia and the effort to eliminate the monstrous, pseudo-Muslim theologians who want to rule on the basis of their false Sharia, and of their pernicious interpretations of the sacred texts. Not one Safavid Emperor called himself a “Shia” and not one Ottoman Sultan used this term for the Safavid rulers, with whom the Ottomans fought so many times, although they were all Turanians. About:
2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu
(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
CONTENTS
PART ONE. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities
A. Examples of fake national names
a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!
b) Tataria – Not Russia!
c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!
d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!
e) Khazaria – not Israel!
f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!
B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish
C. The Preamble to My Response
CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.
CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.
CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment
A. Orientalism
B. Conceptualization
C. Contextualization
D. Concealment
PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT
CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece
PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY
CHAPTER VI: The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times
CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists
CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan
CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES
CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period
CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty
CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids
PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS
CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire
CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism
CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates
PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM
CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE
CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet
CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam
CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History
PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’
CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’
PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’
CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate
PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash
PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM
CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor
PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED
CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another
CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’
CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur
CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World
CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West
CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk
PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?
—————————————————
List of the already pre-published chapters of the book
Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
Pre-publication of chapter XXVII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI and XXXII form Part Eleven (How and why the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals failed) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
Until now, 16 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 17th (out of 33). At the end of the present pre-publication, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in gray color.
In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.
The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.
———————–
Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Ali Qapu Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Western historiography enters a stage of exorbitant falsification when attempting to reconstitute the History of the Safavid dynasty of Iran (1501-1736). What stands at the forefront of the Western forgery and distortion of the History of Iran during the said period is the theory that the Safavid dynasty was ‘Shia’, and also that they ‘converted’ the Turanian population of 16th c. Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. Of course, such fictional conversion never took place, and the Safavid rulers would reject the fake division of Islam into two denominations, since they always proclaimed their Islamic authenticity and integrity, fully refuting the concept of a ‘divided Islam’.
However, this fake division is instrumental for the colonial distortion of History, because on this fallacy hinges the entire Western involvement in the Orient and the conflicts that the criminal and evil states of England, France and America generated across Afro-Eurasia. In order to fully and irreversibly embed the vicious divisive scheme of a supposedly bi-polar Islamic world revolving around two rival empires, namely the ‘Sunni’ Ottomans and the ‘Shia’ Safavids, the Western Orientalists, agents, explorers, diplomats, and statesmen invented the fallacy of the so-called “Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam”.
Of course, at the time (: early 16th c.), the Western colonial powers did not have the chance to impose their false version of History on the Ottomans and the Safavids; they even had not developed Oriental studies properly speaking in their already established pernicious universities. At the time, History was in the making. The only thing that the colonial empires could do, and which they viciously did, was to frame the divisive plot and to pull their diplomatic strings in order to trigger as many Ottoman – Safavid wars as they could. The distortive interpretation and the evil misrepresentation of these facts would come later – in due course of time.
And the malignant fallacy ‘happened’ truly when it ‘should’ have; when the collapsing Ottoman and Iranian empires were eroded through colonial infiltration and evil subversion, then the colonial gangsters and the 19th c. Orientalists started carrying out the projection of the already preconceived forgery onto the Western powers’ local stooges, who by means of shameful bribery and high treason (termed as ‘scholarships for studies in Western Europe’) started diffusing pathetic nonsense and bogus-academic lies in their respective countries only to fit the needs of their masters, namely the colonial powers. At the last stage, the monstrous and murderous forgery of France and England was presented as “History” worldwide only because their colonial empires subjugated almost the entire world and imposed the racist Anglo-French intellectual-academic contamination.
So, the historical forgery that the Western academic murderers have been teaching for over two centuries in their bogus-universities as “Oriental History” is merely the coverage of their inhuman deeds, which plunged Afro-Eurasia into ceaseless local and regional wars, countless rebellions, and two world wars. But the original concept behind the inhuman diplomacy of England and France was already there at the beginning of the 16th c., when they started fallaciously calling Iran, namely a totally Turanian country, “Persia”; this was preposterous. Soon afterwards, they started also naming the Ottoman Empire “Turkey”, which is another expression of their evilness and forgery, because the Ottoman Empire was in reality the most anti-Turkic state in World History.
No less than eight (8) times the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran came to war during the period of 235 years of Safavid rule over Iran. Actually, the wars started in 1514 and ended 1736 with the fall of the Safavids; of course, the historical fact of 8 wars does not mean in this case only 8 years consumed in wars! Most of these wars lasted many years. And actually, the Ottoman-Iranian wars did not end with the demise of the Safavid dynasty. Wars were resumed at the times of the Turanian Afsharid dynasty of Iran (1736-1796) and also during the period of the Turanian Qajar dynasty of Iran (1789-1925). So, from 1514 until 1823, in only 309 years, the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Empire made eleven (11) wars one upon the other. In total, during 309 years, the two empires were engaged in wars against one another for no less than 81 years. About:
If one takes also into consideration the fact that both empires made many other wars with numerous neighboring empires (such as the Mughal Empire, the lately risen Russian Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) and several colonial kingdoms (Spain, Portugal, France, England, etc.), one concludes easily why the two empires gradually collapsed. Furthermore, taking into account first, the diplomatically instigated and deliberately machinated twelve (12) wars between the Ottomans and the Russian Empire, which took place during a period of 350 years (1568-1918) and lasted for no less than 57 years, and second, the five (5) wars between the Iranians and the Russians, which occurred over the span of 177 years (1651-1828) and kept going for 19 years, one can plainly assess the evilness of the divisive intrigues that the Western European colonial diplomats instigated across Afro-Eurasia, and the unprecedented bloodshed that they caused.
Gate of Felicity (Bâbüssaâde), Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Imperial Hall with the throne of the sultan, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Central Hall, Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Open recess (iwan) of the Yerevan Kiosk, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Scene from the Surname-ı Vehbi, located in the Topkapı palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Battle of Chaldiran (1514); Grand painting at the Chehel SotounPalace (despite the fact that the battle ended with Ottoman victory), Safavid Isfahan
The Third Courtyard of the Topkapı Palace in the Ottoman Constantinople, as depicted in a miniature of the Hünername, 1584
Paintings in the main hall of the Chehel Sotoun Palace,Safavid Isfahan
All the wars, which were machinated and instigated by the colonial English and French diplomacies, needed a sophisticated coverage, e.g. some fake reasons, which would ‘explain’ or ‘justify’ to anyone why these wars happened (or ‘had’ to happen). To be convincingly fake, these reasons were based on a total distortion of the identity of both empires, the Ottoman and the Safavid; these distorted identities, which ‘explained’ the Ottoman – Safavid wars to the average public opinion in Europe at the time, became later the vertebral column of the fallacious Western Orientalism and its entirely fake branches, namely Turkology and Iranology.
To describe the extent and the depth of the Western Orientalist fallacy, suffice it that I herewith state the following: a major topic for Turkologists to study should become the Safavid Empire of Iran as a Turanian state, because it was ethnically a Turanian Empire whereby the outright majority of the population used to speak diverse Turkic languages as their native tongues.
Similarly, a major topic for Iranologists to study should become the Ottoman Empire, because an overwhelmingly Iranian culture permeated the state to such extent that, when Mehmet II entered Constantinople on 29th May 1453 and proceeded to the Palace of the Eastern Roman Emperors, the first words that he uttered were neither in Ottoman Turkish nor in Medieval Greek nor in Arabic, but in the classical, literary language of all Turanians, i.e. in Farsi.
The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes;
the owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.
These verses written c. 180 years before the conquest of Constantinople (1453) by the great Iranian poet Saadi (known as Saadi Shirazi, 1210-1291) reveal
– the absolutely identical nature of the Turanians and the Iranians,
– the common cultural background of all Iranian and Turanian nations,
– key elements of the Iranian-Turanian apocalyptic and soteriological eschatology,
– the last moments of the ailing Iranian rule (Chosroes: the last major Sassanid emperor Khusraw Parvez; 570-628), and
Mehmed II, by uttering these verses, clearly indicated that he viewed his victory in terms of Iranian-Turanian culture and eschatology, before all the other eventual or hypothetical parameters involved in the topic (Palaeologi-Ottoman imperial family rivalry; Christian-Muslim religious conflict; Eastern Roman-Turkic ethnic quarrel; economic interests).
In fact, there should have never existed Turkology and Iranology within the context of Western Orientalism, if this unit of academic disciplines were to serve the true purpose of exploration and search for the historical truth. The reason is simple: Turan and Iran have always been an indivisible historical – cultural entity.
However, the false portrait of the Ottoman and the Safavid empires, which had been systematically produced by the 16th c. colonial powers, involved two dimensions of distortion of the reality, namely religious and ethnic. Then, 19th and 20th c. French and English academics and explorers misinterpreted the 16th c. Ottoman – Safavid wars that their countries’ duplicitous diplomats had instigated as of both, religious and ethnic, reasons; and in both cases, these scholars lied, pretty much like today’s Orientalists lie when presenting, teaching and propagating the following forgery: “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids”.
In fact, at the beginning of the 16th c., with the exception of Eastern Iranians (namely the Tajik / Dari speaking populations), there was not one Persian ethnic alive; Iran had already been almost entirely Turanized at the ethnic-linguistic level. Farsi was a highly respected and widely used language of Literature, History, Spirituality, Art, Architecture and Culture that all the educated people felt obliged to learn in young age at the various madrasas of the cities, the towns and the villages of Iran. But in reality, Farsi was at the time a dead language like Latin in 16th c. Germany.
Only later and mainly during the 20th c., following the aggressive and extensive English involvement and the shameful colonial rule of Iran, which was carried out by local puppets, a ‘new’, systematized ‘modern education’ was imposed on all Iranians, the true, traditional Iranian History (based on Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi and many other illustrious epic poets) was forcefully and calamitously replaced by the fake, materialistic, atheistic and evil Iranian ‘History’ of the Orientalists, and Farsi became obligatorily the meaningless ‘national’ language. These tasks have been completed by the pathetically ignorant, uneducated and charlatanesque soldiers, who were later called “Pahlavi dynasty shahs”.
The Universal Empire of Iran disappeared, and a fake, nationalistic, ‘Persian’ pseudo-kingdom was established only to implement the ensuing culturally anti-Iranian and ethnically anti-Turanian, nationalist tyranny. It was a villainous Freemasonic plot and eschatological conspiracy against Iran, involving many ulcerous English, French, American and other enemies of Imperial Iran, who postured as ‘friends’ of ‘Persia’ or ‘admirers’ of the ‘Persian civilization’. They only wanted to fool the Iranians and to insult Iran diachronically, after the absurd and abominable example given by ancient rascals like Herodotus and Aeschylus.
While the rocambolesque and even wacky Pahlavi pseudo-dynasty was in power, the criminal English colonials prepared their substitute, namely several pseudo-theologians, who composed pathetic theoretical systems, triggered absurd religious fanaticism, and engulfed the entire Iranian nation in colonial dilemmas and utmost confusion of political nature. Farsi, as the language of the systematized Western education, was indeed revivified particularly among the incessantly increasing urban populations, who started forgetting their native tongues, notably Azeri, Turkmen and other.
During the time of the Pahlavi bogus-Iranian ‘shahs’ (1925-1979), a ‘white’, nationalist terror was imposed on the misfortunate nation; the use of other languages was strictly prohibited. However, this linguistic revival is a fake, and it looks like an awakening of the mummy. The people, who speak Farsi as a native language in today’s Iran, are of Turanian ethnic origin in their outright majority; even worse, their culture is entirely Turanian–Iranian, and their most celebrated rulers and beloved emperors are all Turanians, like Shah Isma’il I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty.
This does not mean that there are not several genuine Iranian languages spoken today in Iran by native speakers; of course, there are many: they speak Baluch, Lori, Bakhtiari, Gorani, Faili, Kalhori, Gilani, Laki, Talysh, etc. But these ethno-linguistic groups represent rather small minorities in Iran. These populations are certainly of Iranian ethnic origin, but they share the common Iranian-Turanian culture with all the populations of Turanian ethnic origin in Iran and in many other countries.
The present situation in Iran looks strange and absurd to all the local victims of the diffusion of Western propaganda of educational-academic-intellectual character; in fact, the systematic propagation of the erroneous Western notion of ‘nation’ or ‘ethnic group’ triggered only troubles and conflicts. This noxious development relates to the inhuman intellectual perversion that is called ‘Enlightenment’ in the Western world. This consists in intellectual darkness and educational paranoia that caused numerous wars over the past 250 years.
For millennia, various ethnic groups -Iranian and Turanian- speaking different languages, shared always their common culture and tradition without feeling or caring about the unsubstantiated and otherwise nonexistent, fake borders and the evil division lines that the 18th c. Western European concept of ‘nation’ produced worldwide. This historical reality of Turanian-Iranian indivisibility was irrevocable within the universal Iranian Empire, which was the supreme blessing of God and the best present that the divine world had bestowed upon Mankind.
Whatever fallacy the Western Orientalists may eventually invent and include in their often nonsensical bibliography falls apart in the light of all historical sources and texts. If the modern Western academia and intellectuals cannot understand the true reality, this is due to their degenerate minds, the advanced rottenness of their decomposed educational and social structures, and the nauseating putrefaction of their moral core.
Then, the fabrication of the fake divide “Turks vs. Persians” helped the criminal colonial powers spread divisions among the Turanians of Western, Central, Southern and Northern Asia, and the Caucasus region. The parallel creation of the fake divide “Sunni Muslims vs. Shia Muslims” was instrumental in plunging the entire Islamic world in permanent strife. Then, the combined fallacy “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids” is an explosive mixture geared to prolong and perpetuate the catastrophic division of all the populations living between the Bosporus and the Indus River Delta.
However, if they destroy the evil deeds of the local puppets of the Anglo-Saxon colonial governments, these populations could triumphantly unite in a secular super-state of ca. 450 million people and thus become the new superpower and Western Asia’s real locomotive of nations. Alternatively, if the existing colonial divisions are allowed to further exist, they can trigger new fratricidal wars among the Turks, who are culturally Iranian, and the Iranians, who are ethnically Turks.
For all the aforementioned national divisions and historical distortions to be duly presented and propagated worldwide by the Western historical forgers in a complete manner, a key point had to be invented: the supposed Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. This Orientalist fallacy hinges of the misrepresentation of the mystical Safavid Order, which founded an entire empire for themselves: the Turanian Empire of Safavid Iran.
However, the falsification of the identity and the deeds of the Safavid Order would never be successfully undertaken worldwide, if the entire Western world was not already totally confused about two totally different issues, which were systematically presented to the average people of all the Western countries as supposedly ‘one’ by their religious, academic and intellectual authorities alike: spirituality and religion.
Nevertheless, spirituality and religion are totally distinct activities of the spiritual and the material hypostases of the human being.
Sultanahmet Square in Ottoman Constantinople: the Eastern Roman hippodrome and Obelisk of Theodosius, which was transported from Luxor
Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Safavid Isfahan
Procession of the guilds in the hippodrome as per a miniature of the Surname-i Vehbi (1582)
Naqsh-e Jahan, the imperial square in Safavid Isfahan
—————- BLUE MOSQUE, OTTOMAN CONSTANTINOPLE —————-
Blue mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii): built between 1609 and 1617
Blue mosque, part of the interior decoration
Blue mosque, the mihrab (center) and the minbar (right)
—————– SHAH MOSQUE, SAFAVID ISFAHAN —————————-
Shah Mosque (Masjid-e Shah): built between 1611 and 1629
The winter hypostyle
The dome
——————————————————–
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
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
Pre-publication of chapter XXVI of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXIV, XXV and XXVI constitute the Part Ten {Fallacies about the Times of Turanian (Mongolian) Supremacy in terms of Sciences, Arts, Letters, Spirituality and Imperial Universalism} of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Until now, 9 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 10th (out of 33). A list of the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the end of this chapter.
———————————
Imam Reza Mosque, Mashhad – NE Iran
Timur was not a monstrous murderer as the Western historiographers depicted him in their vicious and pernicious, and therefore absolutely worthless and totally untrustworthy, narratives. Historical texts written by Western European authors about Timur reflect only the impotency of the hypocritical, sacrilegious, pseudo-Christian, petty kings of Europe. Like Genghis Khan, Timur shared the traditional Eastern Turanian vision of Tengrist Universalism; sectarian, ethnic, and other divisions or divisive lines were meaningless, barbarian, and inhuman to him. As per his worldview, these divisions represented only the interference of Evil in the human world. Contrarily to most of the then world’s kings and to all of today’s criminal politicians and statesmen, Timur did not engage in battles and wars for his personal, tribal, ethnic or national material benefit, but for the overall, true progress of the faithful Mankind.
Beyond being a grandmaster in chess, Timur was a great mystic, a knowledgeable interlocutor, and an emperor who highly evaluated erudition, literature, philosophy, arts, architecture and sciences. If today people get confused about Timur’s religious views, this is not due to an eventual misinterpretation of historical sources, but to the present confusion between spirituality and religion. It is enough for someone to associate spirituality with religion in order to totally misperceive entire historical eras. Consequently, Western scholars have nowadays difficulty to define whether Timur was a Sunni or a Shia; this is only normal, because there are no Sunni or Shia. This forged division cannot apply in Timur’s life. In fact, like every spiritually alive man, Timur was a secular monarch. Historically, he continued the tradition of Harun al-Rashid’s Abbasid Caliphate, the practices of the Seljuk sultans, and the modus operandi of the Ilkhanate: his empire was an absolutely secular state.
Today, the term ‘secular state’ is confused with the paranoia of the post-WW II world, but in reality the ‘secular state’ has nothing to do with atheism, agnosticism, academic elitism, sacrilegious intellectualism, rationalism, materialism, hedonism, pan-sexism, and all the evil modern bogus-concepts (politics, democracy, multi-partite system, human rights, etc.), which have been associated with the supposedly ‘secular’ societies of today’s decayed and putrefied Western world. In honorable distinction from, and in total contrast with, other modern states, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey (more specifically, the 1923 Constitution and the period until 1938) had nothing to do with today’s pseudo-secular Western societies, which in reality are strictly religious, yet scrupulously masqueraded, states with Satanism as secretively and tyrannically imposed dogma.
In Timur’s empire, there was sheer distinction between spirituality and religion, and every person was allowed to believe the religious dogma that he chose; religious authorities of all doctrines had the freedom to perform the rites and fulfill the cults of their faith; and there was no interference of the imperial administration in these activities. Many Western scholars attempted to tarnish Timur’s fame by holding him responsible for the gradual decline of Nestorian Christianity, Buddhism and Manichaeism in Central Asia, Siberia and Mongolia; that is totally misplaced.
Neither Genghis Khan nor Timur were ‘personally’ responsible for this fact. Timur did not tolerate any sectarian act of violence and discrimination. The reasons for which these three religions disappeared in the aforementioned regions have nothing to do with imperial decisions of any sort; they are totally unrelated to the Genghisid and Timurid empires. As a matter of fact, Buddhism was already present in the eastern provinces of Achaemenid Iran. Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity appeared during the Sassanid times.
These three religions had followers among several nations that lived across the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, and the mountainous ranges between China, Indus River valley, and parts of Siberia (Aramaeans, Eastern Iranians, Sogdians, Turanians, Khotanese, etc.). However, the process of their disappearance was complex, gradual and slow, covering ca. 700 years (750-1450); first, the Islamic advance towards Central Asia and the Indus River valley (middle 7th c. to middle 8th c. CE) was detrimental to some nations, notably the Sogdians, who were terribly decimated.
Second, the proliferation of mystical orders, spiritual systems, dissident movements, eschatological-messianic concepts, theological schools, soteriological groups, and literary-poetical reassessments of the historical, pre-Islamic past produced an abundance of attractive alternatives for all the nations of the aforementioned diverse regions (over the period between the 8th c. and the 11th c.).
Third and more important, the overwhelming migrations that took place across Asia between the 11th c. and the 15th c. totally changed the landscape between Central Europe and Eastern Siberia; the newly arrived nomads usually accepted concepts of Islam that suited best their traditions of Tengrism and Shamanism. Then, Nestorians, Buddhists and Manichaeans proceeded to the East (i.e. China), since it was well known that settled communities of their coreligionists existed there too and they lived in peace.
Timur met many leading mystics, scholars, scientists, theologians, architects and poets of his times; his meeting with Hafez (Khwaja Shams-ud-Din Muhammad; 1315-1390), the great Iranian poet from Shiraz, was commemorated for centuries among Islamic rulers and erudite scholars, because their conversation bears witness to Timur’s ostensible ability to appreciate wit, intellect, self-sarcasm, and modesty.
Manuscript miniature depicting the encounter between Timur and Ibn Khaldun
Two pages from a manuscript of Ibn Khaldun’s al Muqaddimah
16th c. copy of Hafez’s Divan with fighting scene
Ceiling decoration of the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz
Hafez’s Mausoleum, Shiraz
Timur met Ahmad ibn Arabshah (1389-1450) during the siege of Damascus; he saved him (along with many other scholars) and then sent him to Samarqand; later, the Damascene author returned to Damascus and proceeded to Edirne / Adrianople, the Ottoman capital at the time; there he composed a voluminous historical description of Timur’s deeds and conquests (Aja’ib al-Maqdur fi Nawa’ib al-Taymur: The Wonders of Destiny of the Ravages of Timur).
One can however instantly understand why Ahmad ibn Arabshah presented a negative image of Timur, who had saved his life: writing while you are at the Ottoman payroll can never be a guarantee for objective description and impartial narrative. Had Ahmad ibn Arabshah written a true and unbiased ‘Tarikh’, the Ottoman sectarian theologians and the rancorous courtiers of Mehmed I and of Murat II would have burned the manuscripts. The Ottoman hatred of Timur and the Timurids lasted until the demise of the Caliphate – only to the detriment of the Ottoman family.
The major and most trustworthy historical biographies and sources for the life, the conquests, and the deeds of Timur are Nizam ad-Din Shami’s Zafar nameh (ظفرنامه, Book of Victory), Sharif al-Din Ali Yazdi’s Zafar nameh, and Abu Taleb Husayni’s Malfuzat-e Timuri and the associated appendix Tuzokat (which is basically the Persian translation of an earlier manuscript written in Chagatai Turkic and found in Yemen; Abu Taleb Husayni presented his work to the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in 1637).
The conquest of Baghdad by Timur depicted on the miniature of a manuscript of in Sharif al-Din Ali Yazdi’s Zafar nameh
Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi with Muhammad Amuli; folio from the Majalis al-Ushaq of Kamal al-Din Gazurgahi, which was written and decorated in Shiraz around 1560
The phenomenon that Western scholars describe as Timurid ‘Renaissance’ consists in a serious misperception of the entire historical period; the irrelevant terminology was invented to project Western concepts onto the Islamic world. In general, the term ‘Renaissance’ cannot apply either in the case where there is uninterrupted continuity or in the manifestation of newly invented concepts, ideas, forms, styles or rhythms. Truly, the 2nd half of the 14th century and the entire 15th century were a period of fully-fledged spiritual, academic, scientific, literary, artistic, architectural, cultural, intellectual, and artisan creativity and dynamism across almost all Islamic lands.
However, this phenomenon does not have any trait of revival or rebirth of an earlier experience or condition. Quite contrarily, it consists in the culmination of the Islamic genius as manifested since the days of Abbasid Baghdad, Bayt al-Hikmah, Ferdowsi, Nizam al Mulk, and Nasir el-Din al Tusi. One may eventually express a rhetorical question like the following in order to fully demonstrate the inaccuracy of the Western neologism Timurid ‘Renaissance’:
– What was interrupted, terminated, dispersed, lost or forgotten as Islamic science, art, scholarship and craftsmanship in the days of Nasir al-Din al Tusi (1201-1274), only to restart, resume, and be rediscovered, revived and reborn at the time of Timur?
The answer is very simple: nothing!
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s works, explorations, studies, and astronomical tables and catalogues were continued in the works of Jamshid al-Kashi, Qadi Zadeh al Rumi (of Eastern Roman origin), and Ulugh Beg, Timur’s grandson, third successor, and astronomer emperor. There is an undisputed continuity from the Observatory of Maragheh to the Observatory of Samarqand, pretty much like there is an absolute continuity in Islamic science, academic life, and artistic creativity from Abbasid Baghdad to Timurid Samarqand.
Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad
Aerial view of Imam Reza shrine in 1976
The tomb of Imam Reza
And there was novelty! Timurid architecture, as manifested in Samarqand, Herat, Balkh, Turkistan {Kazakhstan; the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi (1093-1166) which was commissioned by Timur himself}, Mashhad (Goharshad Mosque, built in honor of Empress Goharshad, Shah Rukh’s royal consort), and elsewhere, may have several traits that date back to Seljuk times, and may well represent the next stage of evolution from Ilkhanate architecture. However, in reality, Timurid architecture consists in an entirely different and totally new Islamic style of architecture. With their characteristically elevated, fluted domes, with their deep niches, with their impressively raised iwans (vaulted gateways), with their very typical shabestans (underground spaces), with their innovative muqarnas (also known as honeycomb vaulting), and with their inscriptions on mosaic tiles, all the Timurid mosques, madrasas and mausoleums are unique of style and known for their rule of axial symmetry.
Goharshad Mosque, Mashhad
Goharshad tomb, Herat
High place of Timurid architecture is by definition the Registan esplanade at Samarqand, a vast public square with three astoundingly monumental universities; ‘madrasa’ at the time did not mean only ‘theological school’, because theology was only one of the numerous -more than 20- academic topics taught in the madrasas. The first madrasa built in Registan was the Ulugh Beg Madrasah (construction: 1417–1420); two centuries later, the Sher-Dor Madrasah (1619–1636) and the Tilya-Kori Madrasah (1646–1660) were built at the times of the Janid dynasty (established by descendants of the Khanate of Astrakhan) in exactly the same architectural style. Subsequently, Timurid architecture influenced architectural styles in the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman empires.
Registan Square, Samarqand
Ulugh Beg Madrasah: one of the three masterpieces of Timurid Architecture in Registan
Sher-Dor Madrasah, Registan
Tilya Kori Madrasah, Registan
Many irrelevant European scholars characterized the Turanian Timurid architecture as “Persian style”, but there is nothing ‘Persian’ in it. The enormous iwans may certainly be a reminiscence of the Parthian iwans, but Parthia was not ‘Persia’; quite contrarily, the Arsacid Empire of the Parthians was called ‘Iran’ and the Parthians were not ‘Persians’ but Turanians. Similar cases bear witness to the numerous colonial discriminatory abuses and to the academic, Indo-Europeanist racism.
Bibi-Khanym Mosque, Samarqand; it was built in 1399 by the Tamerlane’s favorite wife, Bibi-Khanym, in honor of his return from the war in India
Timur and Shah Rukh patronized the arts, improving the traditional Art of the Book, sponsoring scholars, scientists and artists, and demanding exquisite illustrations of manuscripts (miniatures). Manuscript illumination became then a highly revered art and several schools (styles) were distinguished in this regard; elements of Turanian, Central Asiatic, Iranian, and Chinese artistic traditions were then blended into a new style. The Timurids in general were remembered as benefactors of scholars, poets, artists, artisans, and architects. About:
Gur-i Emir Mausoleum, Samarqand, Shah Rukh’s headstone 3rd from the left
Tanka (silvr coin) of Shahrukh Mirza (Yazd mint)
Shah Rukh’s reign (1409-1447) is considered as the Golden Era of the Timurid Empire. He ruled over the largest part of Timur’s territory and only after his nephew Khalil Sultan (1405-1409) proved to be totally unable to reign. Timur’s western territories were lost because of the chaos caused by the conflicts between the Karakoyunlu and the Akkoyunlu and following the Karakoyunlu victory over Miran Shah and the Timurid army (1408). Shah Rukh preferred to rule in peace with his neighbors and this helped the scholarly, artistic, artisan and architectural activities that burgeoned in his empire. Shah Rukh created a solid base in Herat (today’s NW Afghanistan) where many Genghisid relatives of his royal consort Goharshad lived, as they were the local administrators.
Goharshad ranked below Shah Rukh’s other Genghisid wife, Malekat Aga. However, due to her family support, to her inclination for letters, arts and public works, and because of her sense of human relations, she became a considerable factor of her imperial husband’s success. As a matter of fact, Goharshad was the daughter of a notable Genghisid prince Giath al-Din Tarkan whose honorary title (Tarkan) was initially bestowed by Genghis Khan himself upon one of his ancestors. It is therefore only normal that, after Shah Rukh invaded Samarqand and was accepted as the final successor to his father by all, he transferred the imperial capital to Herat, leaving his son Ulugh Beg as governor of Samarqand.
Herat had been destroyed by Genghis Khan (1221) but rebuilt during the Ilkhanate; however, the magnificent edifices and architectural monuments erected there at the time of Shah Rukh and Goharshad made of the city one of the Islamic world’s most splendid capitals. The erection of the Musallah complex of Herat (1417), which involved mausoleums, madrasa, mosque and five minarets, is the most important among the many monuments patronized by Shah Rukh’s royal consort. The famous shrine of Gazur Gah (an 11th c. mystic who lived in Herat and is historically known as Khwaja Abd Allah) was also built (1425) under the imperial patronage of the Timurids. And the same is valid for Goharshad Mausoleum that was built (1438) as the tomb of Shah Rukh’s and Goharshad’s son, prince Baysunghur.
Perhaps the most impressive and most colorful monument commissioned by the imperial couple was the enormous Goharshad Mosque built in Mashhad (today’s NE Iran). With a 43 m high dome, with two 43 m high minarets, and with four iwans, the mosque was always considered as one of the most impressive and most beautiful monuments of Islamic architecture worldwide.
Patron of authors, explorers and erudite scholars, Shah Rukh benefitted from the great talent of Hafez Abru, who had first been one of Timur’s most favorite scholars and authors. Abdallah ben Lutfallah (as is the full name of Hafez Abru) accompanied Timur in several military campaigns and was present in all the imperial court feasts and symposia convened by Timur. After the death of the conqueror, he entered the service of Shah Rukh, who commissioned the elaboration of numerous historical and geographical opuses, notably
i. Dayl-e Zafar nameh ye-Shami (continuation of Nizam al-Din Shami’s biography of Timur for the period 1404-1405)
ii. Dayl-e Jame’ al-Tawarih (continuation of Rashid al-Din’s Universal History by an anonymous author who covered the period 1304-1335)
iii. Tarih-e Shah Rukh (History of the reign of Timur’s son until 1414; this text was later incorporated in other historical compilations by Hafez Abru)
iv. Tarih-e Hafez Abru, which is a Universal History and Geography commissioned by Shah Rukh in 1414 (originally it was scheduled to be the Farsi translation of selected geographical treatises earlier written in Arabic, but finally it became an original opus of historical geography); it also involved a map (British Library manuscript Ms. 1577) designed after the methods of the historical Balkh School of Cartography.
v. Majmu’a-ye Hafez-e Abru, i.e. a Universal History commissioned by Shah Rukh in 1418 in order to incorporate Bal’ami’s translation of Tabari’s Tarih to Farsi and Rashid al-Din’s Universal History, which was extended by Hafez Abru until 1393.
vi. Majma’ al Tawarih al Soltani, a Universal History until 1426, written for Shah Rukh’s son Baysunghur.
Shah Rukh established good diplomatic relations with Ming China by sending an imperial delegation to Beijing in 1419-1422. Member of the delegation was Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash, who was tasked to compose the official diary, which was not saved independently down to our times, but was largely incorporated in other historical opuses. As an official account, this text was highly evaluated and therefore translated to various Turkic languages in later periods. The Timurid delegation was received with imperial honor, traditional pomp, and great joy at the Ming court. Shah Rukh created an environment of stability and peace across Asia, systematically exchanging embassies and establishing good relations also with the Sultanate of Delhi (notably Khizr Khan), the Bengal Sultanate (and particularly with Shamsuddin Ahmad Shah), the Akkoyunlu, the Ottomans, the Turanian Ormuz kingdom in the Hormuz straits (then under Bahman Shah II), and even the Mamluks of Egypt.
As the Dravidian ruler (Samoothiri) of Calicut (in the presently occupied Deccan, in South ‘India’) encountered several Timurid officials who, while returning from the Sultanate of Bengal, anchored in his harbor, he decided to send an embassy to Herat. A Farsi-speaking Dravidian Muslim led the official delegation and impressed Shah Rukh, who subsequently dispatched a Timurid delegation to Calicut (Kozhikode; 1442-1443) under Abd al-Razzsaq Samarqandi (1413–1482); the scholar-diplomat wrote an extensive report of his mission that he later incorporated in his chronicle Maṭla’-e sa’dayn va maǰma’-e baḥrayn (the rise of the two auspicious constellations and the junction of the two seas). He thus offered insight into first, the small kingdom of Calicut and the local rulers (named Saamoothiri) and second, the Dravidian Vijayanagara kingdom, because the local king Deva Raya II invited Abd al-Razzsaq Samarqandi to his court.
Shah Rukh had however to fight several battles against the Karakoyunlu (in 1420, 1429 and 1434) and the Timurid army was victorious every time. However, since Shah Rukh did not inherit the brutality of his father, his victories did not solve the problem of the constantly rebellious Turkmen and the unstable situation in the western confines of the Iranian plateau, North Mesopotamia, South Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia continued during most of the 15th c. until the Akkoyunlu managed to achieve a decisive victory (1467) over the Karakoyunlu only to be later supplanted by the Safavid Empire (1501).
After Timur crushed the Hurufi rebellion in 1394, the secret Kabbalistic sect launched a subversive campaign of anti-Timurid hatred and evidently conspired against the empire by placing in the Timurid court several secret members who would be later mobilized against the imperial administration. In 1426, Shah Rukh risked his life in an assassination attempt; he survived and then undertook a great effort to uproot the evil secretive sect that promoted black magic practices by attributing numerical values to letters of the alphabet and then evoking spiritual potentates. Several modern scholars, who happen to be Kabbalists and Satanists, tried therefore to tarnish the fair name of Shah Rukh and to distort the truth by accusing him of ‘anti-intellectualism’, a nonexistent term coined by evil and inhuman gangsters in order to denigrate everyone who makes it impossible for them to conduct their perverse and evil operations. This is pathetic and ludicrous; the historical truth is that Shah Rukh was the patron of artists, scholars, erudite authors and architects. And in any case, an ‘intellectual’, who gets initiated in the secrets of a Kabbalist sect, already ceases to be a human.
When Shah Rukh died at the age of 70 (1447), his firstborn son Ulugh Beg (then at the age of 53; 1394-1449) succeeded him; he was also Goharshad’s favorite son and he had acquired a remarkable experience in travels, scholarly explorations, and imperial administration. He had been the governor of Samarqand and the entire Transoxiana (Mawarannahr) since 1409 (when he was just 15). And since the early 1420s, he was an accomplished scholar, mathematician and astronomer with his own madrasa and his own observatory – the best of his time. About:
Mirza Muhammad Taraghay bin Shahrukh (mainly known as Ulugh Beg, i.e. ‘the great ruler’; 1394-1449) was the unique case of Turanian Muslim Emperor who was also a consummate scholar, a leading mathematician, and the then world’s foremost astronomer. He ruled for only two years and only after having delivered pioneering opuses, notably Zij-i Sultani (زیجِ سلطانی; the astronomical tables of the Sultan, i.e. of himself), which is a collective work of many leading astronomers working under his guidance to produce a list of no less than 1018 stars.
Ulugh Beg was an exceptional man in every sense; he had 13 wives, he spoke ca. 10 languages (Chagatai Turkic, Farsi, Arabic, Syriac Aramaic, Chinese, and several other Western and Eastern Turanian languages), and he seems to have been a prodigious young man, very knowledgeable since his adolescence; and thanks to his numerous travels, he saw great monuments, universities, libraries and centers of learning that impressed him. However, Nasir el-Din Tusi’s observatory in Maragheh seems to have impacted the young imperial traveler more than any other edifice, and this was the reason for which, after he was appointed governor of Samarqand by his father Shah Rukh in 2009, he started to turn the city into the world’s leading academic center.
Ulugh Beg, as depicted by an anonymous painter of the period 1425-50
Ulugh Beg coin; AH 852 (1448-9) Herat mint
Samarqand Observatory, constructed by Ulugh Beg in the 1420s and rediscovered by Russians archaeologists in 1908
Ulugh Beg Observatory; the trench accommodated the lower section of the meridian arc.
Mirzo Ulughbek and Ali Kushchi working in the Samarqand Observatory, as per the imagination of modern local artists
Ulugh Beg created therefore an inviting environment for scholars from various regions and countries, and that’s why many researchers, explorers, scientists and students gathered in Samarqand as early as the 1420s. Ulugh Beg Madrasa was built in the period 1417-1420, and its parts were decorated with tiles of blue, light blue and white colors that all have a great symbolism in Turanian Tengrism. Two years later, the Ulugh Beg Observatory was constructed, as we can deduce from the letters sent by Jamshid al Kashi to his own father; these valuable documents were recently (in the 1990s) found, published and translated. Jamshid al Kashi (1380-1429) was a leading astronomer who worked with Ulugh Beg in Samarqand’s imperial observatory.
Another leading scholar, who contributed to the academic works, scholarly studies, and astronomical tables and catalogues undertaken in the observatory, was Ali Qushji (1403-1474; full name: Ala al-Dīn Ali ibn Muhammad). Ali Qushji was not greatly important only because he participated in the elaboration of the Zij-i Sultani and he made many other contributions to sciences, writing numerous astronomical, mathematical, mechanical, linguistic, philological and theological treatises; he is also credited for having established a real bridge between Samarqand and Istanbul in terms of scientific-academic life, scholarly exploration, and intellectual endeavors.
As a matter of fact, Ali Qushji was one of the very few scholars of his times to have met personally with three powerful emperors, namely the Timurid Ulugh Beg, the Akkoyunlu Uzun Hasan (1423-1478), and the Ottoman Mehmed II (also known as Fatih; 1432-1481). Ali Qushji delivered personally a copy of Zij-i Sultani to Mehmed II, evidently making the Ottoman sultan envy the unequaled superiority of the great Timurid capital Samarqand in terms of science, exploration, scholarship and intellect.
Jamshid al Kashi: opening bifolio of his major opus Miftah al-Hisab
Two pages from a manuscript of Jamshid al Kashi’s Sullam al-sama’
Jamshid al-Kashi’s The Key to Arithmetic; the last page of the manuscript
Pages of a manuscript with treatises elaborated by Ali al Qushji
Other remarkable scholars, who formed Ulugh Beg’s team, were Mu’in al-Din al-Kashi and Qadi Zadeh al-Rumi (1364-1436), a leading mathematician and astronomer of Eastern Roman descent, tutor and mentor of Ulugh Beg; Qadi Zadeh was greatly renowned for his pertinent commentaries on the works of earlier Turanian Islamic astronomers, like al-Jaghmini (full name: Mahmud ibn Muhammad ibn Umar al-Jaghmini; 13th – 14th c.), Shams al-Din al-Samarqandi (ca. 1250 – ca. 1310), and Nasir ad-Din al-Tusi. Students from Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River valley, the Ganges River valley, China and parts of Siberia were flocking to Samarqand to benefit from this worldwide unique environment.
To these great scholars it took no less than 15 years to compose in Farsi the voluminous Zij-i Sultani (completed in 1437), which was the World History’s most accurate and most complete astronomical table and star catalogue up to its time. Zij is an Islamic astronomical book that presents in tabular form various parameters used for astronomical calculations of the positions of stars therein included; as it can be assumed, it takes a great deal of observation in order to establish this type of documentation.
Around 20 different Zij catalogues have been established during the Islamic times, either saved until our times or not. However, Zij-i Sultani surpasses in terms of scholarship all earlier astronomical tables, including the 2nd c. CE Ancient Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy’s Almagest (Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις – Mathematike Syntaxis; المجسطي – al-Majisti). Ulugh Beg’s outstanding masterpiece was later translated to Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and several European languages.
In 1437, ten years before succeeding his father Shah Rukh on the throne of the Timurid Empire, Ulugh Beg specified the sidereal year as being 365d 6h 10m 8s long, which is an error of +58 s as per today’s calculations. Comparatively, Copernicus in 1525 reduced the margin of the error by 28 seconds, but the 9th c. CE Aramaean Sabian astronomer Thabit ibn Qurra (whose works, translated to Latin, were the primary sources of Copernicus) had determined the length of the sidereal year as 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 12 seconds (with an error of only 2 seconds as per today’s calculations).
After Shah Rukh’s death, Ulugh Beg had to fight in order to defend his right to succession; he won in the battle at Murghab (بالامرغاب; in today’s Afghanistan/not to be confused with Murgab in Eastern Tajikistan) over his nephew Ala al-Dawla (son of Ulugh Beg’s late brother Baysunghur/ بایسُنغُر) and advanced to Herat; there, in 1448, carried out a terrible massacre of the local population, taking revenge of their support to his nephew and demonstrating his Timurid originality. Ulugh Beg’s reign was brief and unhappy; his son Abd al-Latif Mirza (1420-1450) had an enormous psychological complex of inferiority toward his authoritatively intellectual and exceptionally erudite father, and he rebelled against him. After Abd al-Latif Mirza’s victory in a battle nearby Samarqand, Ulugh Beg had to surrender (1449), but the treacherous and evil son was not pleased with this, and he had his father assassinated, when the deposed Ulugh Beg was proceeding to Hejaz for Hajj.
The patricidal Abd al-Latif Mirza (in Farsi: padarkush; پدر کش) ruled for less than a year, having the support of evil, ignorant and rancorous theologians, who hated Ulugh Beg’s scholarly integrity, intellectual genius, scientific leadership, and secular rule. However, the outright majority of the population hated the ungrateful son for his two repugnant sacrileges; few days after having his father executed, Abd al-Latif Mirza killed also his brother Abd al-Aziz. So, in 1450 the patricidal and fratricidal ruler was murdered, and then came to power Ulugh Beg’s nephew Abdullah Mirza (son of Ibrahim Sultan, who was son of Shah Rukh and also a renowned artist and calligrapher); he rehabilitated his uncle’s imperial tradition and reputation. About:
After Ulugh Beg’s assassination, the Timurid Empire was in reality dissolved. The trends of imperial disintegration, tribal split, intra-family rivalry, and military localism prevailed at a time when Uzbek and Kazakh migrations were upsetting numerous settled populations in Central Asia. The Timurid Empire underwent a real fragmentation before totally disappearing. Abdullah Mirza was not able to rule for more than a year and only in Transoxiana (Mawarannahr); Timurid princes became independent in parts of Khorasan, Fars, and Iraq-e Ajami (Zagros Mountains).
Abu Sa’id Mirza (1424-1469; son of Muhammad Mirza, who was the son of Miran Shah, third son of Timur) was able to rule (1451-1469) and reunify the central parts of his great-grandfather’s empire. He allied with the Uzbeks (notably Abu’l-Khayr Khan: 1428-1468), but he faced many rebellions from Timurid princes of several provinces that he managed to suppress in terrible tribal massacres. He even executed Shah Rukh’s widow, the legendary dowager-empress Goharshad, accusing her of plotting against him by using her great-grandson. He arranged a temporary peace with the Karakoyunlu, but entered into an ill-fated war with the Akkoyunlu (who were former allies of the Timurids) and their powerful king Uzun Hasan. Finally, in February 1469, in the battle of Qarabagh, Abu Sa’id Mirza was defeated and held captive; Uzun Hasan handed him over to his Timurid allies, who remembering his monstrosity toward Goharshad executed him. Finally, Uzun Hasan sent Abu Sa’id Mirza’s decapitated head to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt Qaitbay, who arranged a proper burial.
Various Timurid princes ruled then in Khorasan, Kabul, Balkh, Fergana, Fars, and Iraq-e Ajami, whereas Transoxiana was first ruled by Sultan Ahmed Mirza from 1469 until 1494 and later divided into Samarqand, Bukhara and Hissar. Most of the northern part of the Timurid Empire was supplanted in 1488 by the Uzbeks, who set up their khanate under Muhammad Shaybani, a Genghisid prince. Soon afterwards, the Kazakh and the Sibir (Siberia) khanates were established, seceding from the Golden Horde. At the same time, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (a great-great grandson of Timur; 1438-1506) ruled (1469-1506) in Herat, continuing the Timurid tradition in terms of patronage of arts and sciences. He thus became a source of admiration for his nephew Babur, who was later the founder of the Mughal Empire of South Asia; but Babur was none else than the grandson of Abu Sa’id Mirza and therefore great-great-great-grandson of Timur.
Last, the southern parts of the Timurid Empire were most;y incorporated into the nomadic Akkoyunlu Empire that also controlled Eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia; however, internal strives decomposed that empire too around the end of the 15th c. It was then that the mystical Safavid Order, instead of supporting or infiltrating a state, decided to launch its own empire: the Safavid Empire. They already had their own army ready however: the formidable and renowned Qizilbash. About:
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
Pre-publication of chapter XXV of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXIV, XXV and XXVI constitute the Part Ten {Fallacies about the Times of Turanian (Mongolian) Supremacy in terms of Sciences, Arts, Letters, Spirituality and Imperial Universalism} of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Until now, 8 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 9th (out 33). At the end of the present pre-publication the entire Table of Contents is made available.
Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in green color.
—————————-
Many people believe that Timur (Tamerlane) was a descendent of Genghis Khan, but this is very wrong; however, he belonged to the same Eastern Turanian Mongolian family as his remote relative who died 109 years before Timur was born (1227-1336). There is actually a distance of 5 generations (the grandfather of the great-grandfather of a person) between the greatest conquerors of Eurasia. However, Genghis Khan and Timur seem to have as common progenitor Genghis Khan’s 4th patrilineal ancestor (the grandfather), who was Timur’s 9th patrilineal ancestor, namely Tumanay Khan.
More specifically, Genghis Khan was son of Yesugei Baghatur son of Bartan Baghatur son of Khabul Khan son of Tumanay Khan. And Timur was son of Taraghai Noyan son of Burgul Noyan son of Aylangir son of Ichil son of Qarachar Noyan son of Suqu Sechen son of Erdemchu Barlas son of Qachuli son of Tumanay Khan. The time passed from the death of Genghis Khan until the birth of Timur (109 years) is approximately the equivalent of the period between the deaths and the births of the following monarchs or spiritual leaders respectively: Consul Crassus’ death and Emperor Trajan’s birth (53 BCE-53 CE), Julian the Apostate’s death and Justinian’s birth (363-482), Nestorius’ death and Prophet Muhammad’s birth (451-571) and Napoleon’s death and Elizabeth II’s birth (1821-1926).
Timur (1336-1405) was born in Shahrisabz (Шаҳрисабз / شهر سبز; Timur’s tomb was built there, but his burial took place at Samarqand), in the southern part of today’s Uzbekistan, close to the border with Tajikistan; at those days, the city was named Kesh. Timur’s family belonged to the Turanian tribe of Barlas, which had recently accepted Islam and become sedentary in Mawarannahr (Transoxiana); those lands were thought to be the epicenter of the legendary and historical Turan, and at the time of Timur’s birth, they were provinces of the Chagatai Empire. About:
Shahrisabz: ruins of Timur’s summer palace, and modern statue
Today, not one scholar raises doubt about the Turanian ancestry and identity of Timur; quite interestingly, and in full refutation of the fallacious Western Orientalist academia, it is Timur himself who rejects this, and by so doing, he gives a lethal blow to the colonially invented distinction between Iran and Turan, to the forged ethnic-linguistic-cultural disconnection of the ‘Turkic nations’ from the ‘Iranian nations’, and to the evil pseudo-universities, institutes and foreign ministries of the colonial Western countries.
Dead before 618 years, Timur speaks to us today through the words that he said personally to the Berber (and not Arab as Western forgers claim) Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), whom the great conqueror met during the siege that he laid to Damascus in 1400. When the two greatest men of those days came face to face, they were aged (in their 60s) and already world renowned among all Muslims; the fame of Ibn Khaldun had reached the great conqueror and the magnificence of of Timur’s conquests was known to all the people between the Pacific and the Atlantic. For over a month, the great scholar, who was blocked in the besieged city, was lowered by ropes from the walls of Damascus to encounter Timur. Ibn Khaldun gave extensive details about his daily encounters with Timur in his autobiography (Al-taʿrīf) and in his World History (Kitāb al-ʿibar wa-dīwān al-mubtadaʾ wa-l-khabar fī ayyām al-ʿarab wa-l-ʿajam wa-l-barbar wa-man ʿāṣarahum min dhawī al-sulṭān al-akbar).
Two years before his staggering victory over the Ottomans at Ankara (1402), Timur saved all decent and benign scholars, artists and artisans of Damascus, by evacuating them and dispatching them to Samarqand, and then he sacked the city. There was a significant historical reason for this drastic solution, and Timur duly explained his actions. In fact, he rightfully massacred the entire population in due punishment for the sacrileges earlier perpetrated by the infidel Umayyad caliph Muawiyah, i.e. the murder of Hassan son of Ali (670 CE), and by Yazid I, the son of Muawiyah, namely the monstrous assassination of Husayn son of Ali (680). Ibn Khaldun returned to Cairo to complete his works and wrote exactly what Timur told him about his ancestry.
In total rejection of the Western scholarship’s historical forgery and division between Turan and Iran, the ‘Turanian’ Timur claimed maternal descent from the illustrious ‘Iranian’ (and certainly not ‘Persian’) hero Manuchehr whose legendary deeds were superbly narrated in Farsi poetry by Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh, already 400 years before the encounter of Timur with Ibn Khaldun.
Manuchehr enthroned; from manuscript miniature of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh
Who is Manuchehr, Timur’s remote ancestor?
Supreme legendary (or apocalyptic-eschatological) king of the Pishdadian dynasty whose first king was the first man Keyumars, Manuchehr is the 7th generation descendent of the founder of the Mankind’s sole royal dynasty. There is no doubt that Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh must have been almost holier than the Quran for Timur, and he definitely knew sizeable portions by heart. The Pishdadian dynasty involves eleven kings of kings: Keyumars, Hushang, Tahmuras, Jamshid, Zahhak, Fereydun, Iraj, Manuchehr, Nowzar, Zaav, and Garshasp. As a matter of fact, Fereydun had three sons, namely Iraj (from Shahmaz, Jamshid’s daughter), Salm and Tur (the latter two from Amavaz, Jamshid’s other daughter).
Manuchehr and Afrasiab fighting against one another; from a 16th c. Shahnameh manuscript
Historical interpretations of the legends superbly narrated in poetry by Ferdowsi offer specific identifications concerning the original ancestors of the three nations that shaped World History: Iraj was viewed as the ancestor of all the Iranians (involving also North Indians and several North Europeans); Tur was considered to be the forefather of all Turanians (Chinese included); and Salm was perceived as the progenitor of all the Anatolians and Eastern Romans (and in general the ‘West’). The three half-brothers represent the mythical-historical stage of division of the surface of the Earth among them.
According to Ferdowsi’s apocalyptic legend, Salm was the firstborn, but being trepid, he avoided fighting with the dragon that attacked him and his brethren; however, the dragon was only his father Fereydun transfigured in order to test his eldest son. On the contrary, Tur’s name means ‘brave’, and this functioned as prophecy. And Iraj was given the worldly glory (termed as ‘Farr’ in Shahnameh and as ‘Khvarenah’ in Avestan, i.e. glow or fortune) as a present granted by God. For this reason, Salm and Tur made a plot and killed Iraj.
At a later stage, Iraj’s daughter gets married with Pashang and their child is Manuchehr, who takes revenge for the assassination of his grandfather. Then, Fereydun (Manuchehr’s great grandfather) abdicates in favor of his great grandson. It is evident that all these ‘events’ take place in an atemporal, spiritual universe, representing values of moral order, hierarchical intelligences, prototypal virtues, choices, deeds and consequences.
However, from that ‘moment’ (Manuchehr’s revenge) started a spiritual clash between the entities ‘Iran’ and ‘Turan’; this clash is prophesied in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh to end during the ‘reign’ of Kay Khusraw, the 3rd king of kings of the Kayanian dynasty, which was instituted after the termination of the Pishdadian dynasty. It is noteworthy that there is a difference of six (6) generations between Manuchehr and Kay Khusraw, namely Nowzar, Zaav, and Garshasp of the Pishdadian dynasty and Kay Qubad, Kay Kavus, and Kay Khusraw of the subsequent Kayanian dynasty; already Manuchehr’s ‘reign’ is symbolized as of twice perfect duration (120 years: 2×60, as per the sexagesimal system).
Before being extensively narrated and greatly praised in Ferdowsi’s poetry, Manuchehr was an illustrious hero of the pre-Islamic oral traditions; that’s why several rulers were named after this legendary figure. Coin of Manuchihr I, who ruled Fars (Persis) as vassal of the Arsacid Parthian shahs in the early 2nd c. CE (above); (below) coin of Manuchihr III of Persis (late 2nd c. CE)
The name Manuchehr, as part of the Iranian culture, went beyond the limits of the Iranian world and was used by numerous neighboring peoples; Manuchehr khan Enikolopian was an Armenian eunuch of the 18th-19th c. Fath Ali Shah Qajar of Iran.
Jabbar Farshbaf, Manuchehr; a millennia long legend that fascinates the imagination of modern Iranian artists
The above is enough to explain what Timur meant, while specifying to Ibn Khaldun that he was a remote descendant (through his mother’s side) of Manuchehr, i.e. Iraj’s grandson. Timur, a ‘Turanian’, claimed that his ancestry stretched indeed back to the grandson of the forefather of all ‘Iranians’ (Iraj) – and not to Tur, who admittedly was viewed (then and now) as the ancestor of all ‘Turanians’. This automatically means that the two terms were not ethnonyms, and they were perceived totally differently, and not through the distortive lenses of modern rationalism and materialism. In fact, with Timur claiming a clearly ‘Iranian’ origin, the vicious Orientalist distortion and fake division between Turanians and Iranians totally collapses and falls to pieces. About:
Timur’s military formation, early experience, and rise to power were very different from those of Genghis Khan; the latter spent 20 years in wars against other Eastern Turanian Mongolian tribesmen until he achieved the unification of a certain number of tribes and only after his mid-40s, he went out of the borders of the already unified confederation of Eastern Turanian Mongolian tribes. The former was initially a small band leader, who was engaged in several battles as a mercenary, before allying with different kings (khans) against their opponents.
Originating from the Chagatai Empire, Timur fought along with his khan against the Turanian state of Volga Bulgaria, invaded Khorasan and Khwarazm, increased his basic military force, and then sided with Tughlugh Timur (1329-1363), the khan of Moghulistan (Eastern Chagatai Empire) only to be rewarded with the control of the entire Transoxiana (Mawarannahr). However, very soon, he had to defend that territory against Tughlugh Timur’ son, and his victory helped him consolidate his power. When Timur’s father died, he became a tribal leader, which enabled him to combine military experience and tribal status.
Gur-i Amir (Farsi: گورِ امیر; Uzbek: Amir Temur maqbarasi; ‘the emperor’s tomb’), Timur’s Mausoleum in Samarqand; the historical monument, except for being the burial place of Tamerlane, is one the most prominent architectural masterpieces worldwide as it determined Central Asiatic, Iranian and Indian architecture for many centuries.
Having well studied the History of the Abbasid Caliphate and the stories of the impotent caliphs of the last 350-400 years of Abbasid rule (ca. 850-1258), Timur ruled in the name of the various Chagatai khans, while reducing them to total impotency. Until 1370, Timur managed to establish a strong basis of popular support at Balkh (Bactra, in today’s Afghanistan) and then eliminate his contenders. He then spent considerable time to consolidate his empire. Only after 1380 (and at the age of 45), Timur started becoming a mighty opponent to reckon with beyond the limits of Central Asia. It was then that Timur started his own conquest of the world, thus creating a smaller but surely much more homogeneous empire than that of Genghis Khan.
He first had to defend Khwarazm and Azerbaijan against the powerful Tokhtamysh (1342-1406; Tuqtamış/ Тухтамыш), the khan of the reunified Golden (Blue and White) Horde, Kipchak and Sibir or Siberia (1376-1406). Tokhtamysh had oppressed the uprising of the Turanian Christians of Muscovy (Moscow) in 1382 (there were no Russians at time; they were invented later to set up the Romanov imperial narrative), and squelching the rebellion, he burned the Turanian city of Moscow to the ground. The hostilities between Timur and Tokhtamysh started in the 1380s and the wars culminated in the 1390s.
Timur’s main achievement in the 1380s was the elimination of all the petty dynasties that had surfaced after the decomposition of the Ilkhanate and covered the lands between Euphrates and Syr Darya (Iaxartes). Obliterating divisive statelets, Timur did in the aforementioned vast region what exactly the Ottomans were doing in Western and Central Anatolia and in the South Balkans. These were converging trajectories and one day, sooner or later, the clash between Timur and the Ottomans would come. Timur proved to be merciless in the oppression of rebellions, but his attitude was deliberate. He only wanted to prevent further resistance or opposition. However, he defended and supported the spiritual, academic, educational, artistic and artisan elites, while eliminating indoctrinated religious leaders, stupid sheikhs, tribal contenders, military opponents, and their supporters to the last.
Timur throws a feast in the gardens of Samarqand
By invading Soltaniyeh (in NW Iran) in 1384, Mazandaran (Caspian Sea’s southern coast land), Maragheh and Tabriz (in Iranian Azerbaijan) in 1386, and Isfahan and Shiraz in 1387, Timur controlled the Iranian plateau. Timur’s soldiers executed the quasi-totality of the population of Isfahan (ca. 100000-120000 people). Then, Timur spent several years, asserting his rule throughout the mountains of Zagros, the Caucasus region, and Mesopotamia, and capturing Baghdad in 1393. It was then that Timur rushed to the center of the Iranian plateau to disperse the last Isma’ili remnants that had gathered there again to foment resistance.
During the same period, Timur had to rush to the North; there he reached Western Siberia and Tataria (the western territories of the Golden Horde that constitute today the central part of Russia), defeated Tokhtamysh in the battle of Kondurcha River (1391), burned Ryazan, and invaded all lands around Muscovy (Moscow). This campaign was one of the most remarkable military operations ever undertaken by Islamic imperial armies; Timur’s fast offensive to the North and further on to the West involved an operation of ca. 140000 soldiers, who crossed a distance of over 2700 km, progressing rapidly and for many long hours every day in the formation of a 20 km wide front. So, his soldiers complained that, due to the brief duration of Siberia’s and Tataria’s summer nights, they could not sleep enough between the evening prayer (Isha’a / صلاة العشاء; ca. one hour after the sunset) and the morning prayer (Fajr / صلاة الفجر; ca. one hour before the dawn).
In 1395, Timur returned to the North, after crossing the Caucasus region, and in the famous Battle of Terek River, he won a final victory over Tokhtamysh, destroying Sarai, the Golden Horde capital (near today’s Samara), and Astrakhan. Known as ‘Timur’s stone’, the bilingual {8 lines in Chagatai written in the old Uyghur alphabet (which was directly based on the Aramaic alphabet) and 3 lines in Arabic} inscription found at the Karsakpay mines (Western Kazakhstan) bears witness to the event, and to the commemoration of Timur’s victory, which was also mentioned in historical texts of the period, notably the Zafarnameh (‘book of the victory’) of Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi.
In 1398, Timur turned to the southeast against the Islamic Sultanate of Delhi, which controlled already most of the territory of the modern states of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh; the then ruling Turanian Tughlaq dynasty (1320–1413) had replaced the also Turanian Khalji dynasty (1290–1320), which expanded greatly the territories controlled by the earlier Turanian Mamluk dynasty (1206-1290) that was substituted to the Turanian Ghurid Sultanate (879–1215) and to the Turanian Ghaznavid Empire (977–1186). When Timur arrived in the Delhi region (1398) and the northern parts of what today is confusingly called ‘India’ (instead of Bharat or Hindustan), the majority of the local population was already Turanian of origin, due to successive nomadic migrations, military invasions, extensive clashes, and subsequent amalgamation; and so the local population has been ever since and during the modern times, despite the colonially fabricated masquerade of the fake ‘Indo-European’ India, which is not the name of a real state, but the appellation of a colonial machination based on English perfidy, economic exploitation, political tyranny, historical distortion, and utter academic evilness.
The destruction of many cities in the Indus River valley by Timur’s armies heralded the fall of Delhi, which was one the then world’s richest cities: Tulamba, Multan, and Bhatner were turned to ruins, and no less than 100000 war prisoners were massacred, before the Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah Tughluq (1394 – 1413) of the Delhi Sultanate experienced a crushing defeat in December 1398. The sultan of Delhi and his generals counted on the psychological effect that their armored elephants would have on Timur’s soldiers, but their calculations proved to be wrong.
The great conqueror was above all an inventive and resourceful warrior, who knew that even camels can prevail over elephants, if duly and timely utilized by an ingenious strategist; having loaded a great number of camels with straw well tied on them and having supervised the digging of a trench to protect his soldiers, Timur set fire to the camel-borne volumes of straw, when the enemy’s army and elephants attacked. His soldiers pushed the camels forward through use of iron sticks and the flaming camels ran crazily on the elephants, yowling in extreme pain and despair. Thus, Timur’s camels caused unprecedented chaos, hellish fire, and utmost panic to the mammals that smashed under their feet the powerless soldiers of the unfortunate sultan of Delhi.
This was the victory of the camel over the elephant or, if you prefer, the triumph of a conqueror’s intellect over a greedy caretaker’s sloth. Delhi was properly plundered to best finance Timur’s next campaigns, and the entire Bengal, the Ganges River valley, and the Indus River valley became provinces of Timur’s empire or tributary states. About:
In 1399, Timur turned westwards; after eliminating Haleb (Aleppo) and Damascus, invading the Caucasus region, and demanding submission from the Anatolian Turkmen beys (rulers) in 1399 and 1400, Timur invaded Baghdad in June 1401. The menacing alliance of the Ottomans with the Mamluks of Egypt that had the support of Venice, Genoa and the Knights Hospitaller (who controlled Izmir/Smyrna) created an alarming situation west of Timur’s empire. However, other affairs were top of the priority list for the great conqueror, namely the incessant movements of Turkmen nomads from Central Asia though the Iranian plateau, the Caucasus region, and Anatolia. Timur sided with the Akkoyunlu (آق قویونلو /Aq Qoyunlu / White Sheep confederation – initially centered around Bayburt and known for their frequent intermarriages with Eastern Roman princesses; 1378-1501) and against the Karakoyunlu (قره قویونلو / Qara Qoyunlu /Black Sheep confederation – initially they were Turkmen vassals of the Jalayrid Sultanate in Baghdad and Tabriz; 1374-1468); this was only normal: by connecting themselves with the Ottomans and the Mamluks, the Karakoyunlu caused the ire of Timur.
Within the context of 14th c. Anatolia’s fragmentation, the Ottoman Sultanate appeared to be the strongest state around 1400. But Timur’s viewpoint over the Anatolian affairs was different: he considered the Seljuks as the legitimate sultanate in the entire region, and he wanted to put an order to the Turkmen chaos caused by the numerous progressive migrations. This situation was not only critical for the developments that took then place, but also determinant for what followed, and for the imperial polarization around Anatolia and the Iranian plateau during the 15th – 20th c.
Timur besieges the historic city of Urgench (in Khawarizm/ Chorasmia, today’s Uzbekistan)
Timur about to launch a war against Tokhtamysh
Timur against Tokhtamysh; from a miniature of the ‘Facial Chronicle’ (also known as ‘the illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible’; Лицевой летописный свод) volume 11, page 251
Timur in the conquest of Baghdad (1393) from a miniature in the Zafarnameh
Timur orders a campaign against Georgia
Timur’s army attacks the remaining survivors in Nerges, Georgia (1396)
Timur’s invasion of India, 1397-1399
The defeat of Nasir Al-Din Mahmum Tughluq at the battle of Delhi 1398
Timur defeats the Mamluk Sultan Nasir-ad-Din Faraj of Egypt
Sultan Bayezid prisoned by Timur, by Stanisław Chlebowski (Станислав Хлебовский; 19th c. Orientalist Russian painter of Polish origin)
Letter dispatched by Timur to Charles VI of France in 1402
————————————————————————————————————
Many people today believe that from the Seljuks to the Ottomans there has been a historical, cultural, spiritual, religious, literary and academic continuity in Anatolia. This is an enormous lie, and Timur’s perfect choice and drastic action help us fully understand how false this impression is. As a matter of fact, between the Seljuks and the Ottomans there was a disruption. About:
Timur defeated the Karakoyunlu in 1400; this brought the Akkoyunlu closer to him, and two years later, Timur conceded Diyarbakir to them. This development, in relation with the Ottoman defeat at Ankara in 1402, brought the Ottomans closer to Karakoyunlu and produced an atmosphere of enmity between the Ottomans and the Akkoyunlu. After Timur’s death, the Karakoyunlu managed to oppose successfully the Akkoyunlu for some time, but later the latter prevailed and the former were reduced to a small state in the Caucasus region.
This generated a ferocious rivalry between the then expanding Ottomans and the Akkoyunlu; the latter supported the Central Anatolian Karamanids and effectively stroke an alliance with the Ottoman Empire’s worst enemy, i.e. Venice. The escalation led to several battles between the Ottomans and the Akkoyunlu during the 15th c., and later, with the dissolution of the Akkoyunlu and the absorption of its structures within the rising Safavid Empire (established under the auspices of the homonymous mystical order), the rivalry was transformed into an Ottoman – Safavid quarrel that lasted centuries. But the conflict had basically the traits of an internal Turanian strife that metamorphosed from century to century; the Iranians represented the authentic Turanians, and the Ottomans were the corrupt renegades and the worst enemies of all Turanians. This situation was rectified only in the period 1919-1923, when Kemal Ataturk terminated the Ottoman shame, abolished the ridiculous ‘caliphate’, and reinstated Seljuk-Turanian valor and bravery across Anatolia.
Much discussion has taken place among scholars about the religious motives of all these successive conflicts which were misrepresented as supposed clashes between ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’, but this is a lie and there was no religious motivation. In reality, Timur and his successors, the Karakoyunlu, the Akkoyunlu, the Ottomans, and the Mystical Safavid Order were all Muslims, and no ‘Sunni’ – ‘Shia’ distinction applied to them, because simply there is no such distinction; it is a modern colonial academic invention that is not supported by the historical sources.
Even the scholars, who tried ceaselessly to create divisive religious lines where there is none, failed to ‘prove’ that the Karakoyunlu were ‘Shia’, and even if this absurdity could eventually be proven, it would be truly meaningless, because the Karakoyunlu sided with the Ottomans, who are portrayed today as ‘Sunni’ against the Akkoyunlu, who are also depicted as ‘Sunni’ by the fallacious Western academia.
What happened in reality behind all these successive developments was the fact that the internal Turanian strife (between Eastern Turanians and Western Turanians) and the exchange of terrible, written insults between Timur (66 years old at the Battle of Ankara) and Bayezid I (1360-1402; so 42 years old when fighting Timur, which means that there was one generation difference between the two rulers) cast an everlasting shadow on the Ottoman court’s foreign policy making. Then, even worse, Bayezid’s calamitous defeat and humiliating captivity pulled the Ottomans apart from the Turanian world and turned them to the West. Consequently, Ottoman reactions generated further deterioration and conflicts with their main Turanian neighbor, i.e. the Safavid Empire of Iran – which was an entirely Turkic state with almost no Persian population left there anymore. In the Turanian Safavid Empire, Farsi was almost exactly what Medieval Latin was in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: the language of culture and the administration.
It appears odd, but the Timurid Mughal Empire of South Asia (fallaciously described by colonial historiographers as ‘Sunni’) had clearly better relations with Safavid Iran than with the Ottomans as late as 1700, i.e. 300 years after the Battle of Ankara; this delivers a blow to the historical forgery about a ‘Sunni-Shia divide’ which was first invented by colonial academics, then projected onto colonized Muslims worldwide by the colonial administrations, and later repeated pathetically by the postcolonial ignorant, uneducated and idiotic sheikhs, imams, cadis, and muftis.
Every spiritual order and mystical school that was treated well by Timur was viewed suspiciously within the Ottoman territory, and this was not a matter of religious divergence, but of internal Turanian divisions and of imperial rancor. The case of the Safavid Order is quite telling. This mystical order was established before the birth of Osman I (ca. 1255-1323), the ancestor of all Ottomans who belonged to the Kayı tribe of Oghuz Turks. In fact, the Safavid Order was the main emanation of the Zahediyah Mystical Order, which was founded by the Turanian ascetic and mystic Zahed Gilani (1216–1301), a leading spiritual master who was born in the Iranian province of Gilan (southern coast of the Caspian Sea) but originated from Sanjan in Khorasan, a region entirely populated by Turanians at the time. Zahed Gilani was highly revered among the imperial elites of the Ilkhanate. The mystical orders of the Jelveti and the Bayrami are emanations of the Zahediyah Order. Zahed Gilani’s most distinguished disciple was Safi-ad-din Ardabili (1252-1334), an Azeri Turanian who initiated the Safavid Order {named after himself: ‘Safavid’ (صفویه) being an adjective formed out of the name ‘Safi’ (صفی)} as a distinct order although the doctrine was exactly the same as that of the Zahediyah Order.
The holy land of the Safavid Order was Azerbaijan (i.e. the Ancient Iranian holy land of Atropatene), and from there numerous mystics and ascetics traveled across great distances to diffuse the rites of the order throughout the Iranian plateau, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Central Asia and other Muslim territories. The position of the grand master was hereditary, and after Safi-ad-din Ardabili’s death, his son Sadr al-Dīn Musa (1305-1391) and his grandson Khvajeh Ali Safavi (ca. 1365-1429) oversaw the operations of the order. Timur met Khvajeh Ali Safavi and, although quite older, he was impressed by the spiritual art of the extraordinary mystic; that’s why he treated him well and offered him abundant lands to further finance the expansion of the mystical order. Following this development and the subsequent penetration of the order across the territories of the Timurids and the Akkoyunlu, the Ottomans took an inimical stance toward the Safavid Order and all its spiritual and social ramifications.
Safi ad-din Ardabili in a 16th c, manuscript of the hagiographical text Safvat as-Safa
From the moment Khvajeh Ali Safavi encountered Timur only four generations succeeded one another until Ismail I managed to supplant the Akkoyunlu and establish the Empire of the Safavid Order, which became known as Safavid Empire. These four generations are represented by the Safavid Order’s grandmasters, namely Shaykh Ibrahim (ca. 1400-1447; son of Khvajeh Ali Safavi), Shaykh Junayd (ca. 1410-1460; son of Shaykh Ibrahim), Shaykh Haydar (1459-1488; son of Shaykh Junayd), and Ali Mirza Safavi (also known as Soltan-Ali Safavi; ca. 1475-1494; son of Shaykh Haydar and elder brother of Ismail I, founder of the Safavid Empire). In today’s Azerbaijan and all the peripheral lands (Eastern Anatolia, Iran, and parts of Central Asia), these formidable mystics are highly revered, deemed saints, and constantly venerated, whereas many people bear their names (example: Heydar Aliyev, former president of Azerbaijan).
Tomb of Sheikh Junayd in Khazra, in the northern confines of Azerbaijan
Tomb of Sheykh Heydar in Meshginshahr, Iran
The emblem of the Safavid Order
The Safavid Order grandmasters were Turanian mystics, who reviled the rationalistic and materialistic approaches of the theological circles that held the Ottoman family captive for centuries, therefore generating the ceaseless Turanian fratricide wars only to the benefit of the Pope of Rome and of the Christian Empires of Western Europe. The Safavid Order grandmasters were connected by successive intermarriages with the Timurids, the Akkoyunlu, and the Eastern Romans; for instance, Ali Mirza Safavi was the son of Shaykh Haydar and Alam-Shah Begum (born Martha), who was the daughter of the Akkoyunlu Empire’s most powerful shah, Uzun Hasan, and Despina Khatun (Theodora Megale Komnene).
As they appear to have commanded enormous spiritual powers and performed miraculous deeds, their followers expressed total devotion to them; however, we cannot be absolutely sure about what several contemporaneous historiographers wrote about them at the time, namely that the members of the Safavid Order considered Shaykh Junayd as God Incarnate (‘ilah’) and called his son Shaykh Haydar as ‘Son of God’ (‘ibn Allah’). There were many antagonistic spiritual orders and theological schools at the time, and the clash between esoteric spirituality and rationalistic theology was overwhelming. The rationalistic theologians, who realized their impotency vis-à-vis the spiritual masters of the different Islamic orders, instead of concluding about how far from the essence of the true religion their worthless jurisprudential and rationalistic rhetoric had gone, used inflammatory verbalism, immoral attitude, and malicious defamatory tactics against the grandmasters of the spiritual orders. This practice turned Muslims from living faithful to putrefied carrion.
Of course, the concept of ‘God Incarnate’ is intolerable in Islam, but there are no original sources written by members of the 15th c. Safavid Order about themselves, their noble rites, and their grandmasters; consequently, the then rising rationalistic and materialistic trends among several Muslim theologians may have resulted in total misunderstanding of the Safavid Order’s spiritual terminology, which cannot be comprehended by defective, rationalistic minds. In addition, the jealousy and the envy that several ignorant theologians felt against various renowned spiritual grandmasters make of their literature an untrustworthy libel; an example is offered by Fadl-Allah ben Ruzbehan Qonyi, the legalist and rationalist theologian of the Akkoyunlu court, in his Tāriḵ-e ‘Ālāmārā-ye amini.
The point is that this whole issue goes indeed back to the times of Timur, and the Ottoman enmity toward the Safavid Order first and the Safavid Empire later was only due to the devastating defeat of Bayezid I at Ankara (1402) and to the excellent relationship established between Timur and the Safavid Order’s grandmaster Khvajeh Ali Safavi. The Ottoman – Safavid hostility, which lasted for more than two centuries (and was subsequently inherited by the also Turkmen Afshar and the Qajar dynasties of Iran for almost another two centuries), was of no ethnic and no national character. Both empires were indeed ruled by Turanians, had populations that were Turanian in their majority, and claimed the same ancestry and traditions. Not even one drop of Persian blood could be found in the reins of the Turkmen Ismail I (1487-1524; reign: 1501-1524). In both empires, Turanian (or Turkic) languages were used in the army and the administration, Farsi in poetry, literature, history and culture, and Arabic in sciences (astronomy, mathematics, medicine, natural sciences, geography, etc.). But the Ottomans reacted instinctively to all things Safavid, because even the name of the order reminded them of the humiliating defeat at Ankara in 1402.
The exchange of insults between Timur and Bayezid I involved ethnic denigration; but of course it was an entirely internal Turanian affair. As an Eastern Turanian, Timur rejected the lowly character, mentality and attitude of the settled Western Turanians; and he made his viewpoint bluntly known, fully rejecting assertions and pretensions earlier expressed in arrogant style by the pathetic Bayezid I. In fact, the Ottomans had to stop the blockade of Constantinople and turn the bulk of their forces to the east, because Timur invaded Sivas (Sebasteia) in 1401; arriving at Ankara, the Ottomans were supported by Albanian and Serbian soldiers, who fought along Bayezid’s army, as their states were vassals to the Ottomans.
Timur’s forces slightly outnumbered those of the Ottoman sultan, but this was not the determinant factor for the outstanding victory. Timur was smart enough to allow the Ottomans to advance to the east (reaching Çubuk) and to take an offensive, while part of his army ran fast southwestwards and then turned to the east, thus encircling the Ottomans. Timur counted also on his horse archers, who hit the Ottoman army terribly, and always thinking out-of-the-box, he made sure that his adversaries fail to secure water supply. To do this, some of his auxiliary forces diverted the Çubuk inlet to a reservoir, thus preventing the Ottoman soldiers from access to water; under the Anatolian plateau’s scorching summer sun, this trick had a catastrophic impact on the Ottoman army. To add misfortune to misery, Bayezid I faced desertions of soldiers and officers from his army, notably the Qarai Turks (originating from the Keraite Eastern Turanians) and the Sipahi cavalrymen of the former Anatolian beyliks; these forces joined Timur’s army.
That is why the 20th of July was always a ‘dies nefastus’ (an ominous day) for the Ottomans; actually, it was not only a defeat. It was the only time in the 600-year long Ottoman History when a sultan was held captive and died in captivity. It was also the beginning of the Ottoman interregnum, the civil war among Bayezid I’s sons, which lasted for 11 years (1402-1413). About:
After his victory, Timur proceeded to the western confines of Anatolia and invaded Izmir (Smyrna), kicking the Knights Hospitaller out of there. The entire family of Timur fought with him in the West; his sons and his grandsons were engaged in the battle of Ankara. To support the Ottomans and confuse Timur, the Karakoyunlu ruler Qara Yusuf attacked Baghdad, but after the Battle of Ankara, Timur sent forces that recaptured Baghdad under the command of Abu Bakr, son of Miran Shah, Timur’s third son, who was then the older among his two surviving sons. Timur returned to Azerbaijan, Khorasan and Samarqand where he spent some time, planning his next conquests. Since the Yuan dynasty was overthrown in China (1368) and the first emperors of the Ming dynasty expressed an interest to be involved in Central Asia, Timur set up an alliance with Eastern Turanian Mongolian forces in order to attack China. However, marching toward the east, he died in February 1405 at Otrar (also known as Farab; Kangju in Chinese) in today’s Kazakhstan’s southern provinces.
Timur’s succession was not an easy affair, because all the contenders did not agree on the matter. As a matter of fact, two of his four sons had died before him: Umar Shaikh Mirza I (1356-1394) and Jahangir Mirza (1356-1376). Few years before dying, Timur expressed his favor for Jahangir Mirza’s elder son Muhammad Sultan Mirza (1375-1403), but he also died in young age and before his grandfather. Little time before dying, Timur appointed another son of Jahangir Mirza as his successor: Pir Muhammad Mirza (1374-1407); but the heir apparent failed to garner significant support or to control the capital city of the empire, Samarqand.
There were reasons for which Timur did not want any of his two surviving sons to rise to his throne. Miran Shah (1366-1408) had an accident in the late 1380s after having fallen from his horse; this generated a traumatic brain injury and subsequent mental difficulties that were known to many people. Exploiting this situation, the Hurufi mystics (the Hurufiyyah mystical order developed an Islamic system of Kabbalah, crediting letters of the Arabic alphabet with hidden, spiritual value, after the esoteric teachings of Fazlallah Astarabadi; 1340-1394) denounced Miran Shah as the Antichrist (Dajjal), absurdly altering his name to Maran Shah (King of the Serpents). However, Timur’s third son was successful in combating them. The Hurufiyyah were duly dispersed, although some of their erroneous teachings survived among other spiritual orders. The end result is that due to the extensive defamation, Miran Shah’s chances to rule became nil. However, he contributed to the turmoil, because he supported his son Khalil Sultan (1384-1411) as successor to Timur.
Timur’s youngest son, Shah Rukh (1377-1447), was considered as too soft to be an emperor; this was Timur’s publicly expressed opinion. The reality is that Shah Rukh was a man of letters, arts, sciences, trade, diplomacy and negotiations, and that he resorted to war only when no other solution was ostensible. As a matter of fact, Shah Rukh, who was the ruler of Herat and the eastern provinces, claimed the right to his father’s throne, but in modesty and wisdom; he was not urged for a showdown with Khalil Sultan. Having accurately evaluated his nephew’s capabilities, he preferred to let him rule incompetently (as he expected him to do), so that all the people finally turn against him. This process lasted four years (1405-1409); Khalil Sultan ruled indeed as successor of Timur, but he was so incompetent that, when Shah Rukh marched against Samarqand, no one opposed him. As he was not a bloodthirsty conqueror but a wise moralist, he appointed Khalil Sultan as governor of Ray. Shah Rukh ruled for 38 years (1409-1447), contributing to what is now called ‘Timurid Renaissance’ more than his father.
The internal turmoil of the Timurid Empire caused several defeats to Timur’s successors; in 1406 and in 1408, Qara Yusuf of the Karakoyunlu marked two victories over the Timurid forces in Azerbaijan, in the Battle of Nakhchivan and in the Battle of Sardrud; in the latter, Miran Shah was killed and then his body impaled. When Shah Rukh rose to his father’s throne, the western part of the Timurid Empire was lost the Karakoyunlu, the Akkoyunlu and the Ottomans. About:
2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu
(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
CONTENTS
PART ONE. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities
A. Examples of fake national names
a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!
b) Tataria – Not Russia!
c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!
d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!
e) Khazaria – not Israel!
f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!
B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish
C. The Preamble to My Response
CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.
CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.
CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment
A. Orientalism
B. Conceptualization
C. Contextualization
D. Concealment
PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT
CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece
PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY
CHAPTER VI: The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times
CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists
CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan
CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES
CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period
CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty
CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids
PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS
CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire
CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism
CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates
PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM
CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE
CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet
CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam
CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History
PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’
CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’
PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’
CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate
PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash
PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM
CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor
PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED
CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another
CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’
CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur
CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World
CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West
CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk
PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?
Pre-publication of chapter XXIV of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapter XXIV constitutes the Part Ten {Fallacies about the Times of Turanian (Mongolian) Supremacy in terms of Sciences, Arts, Letters, Spirituality and Imperial Universalism}. The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
——————————-
The Enthronement of Genghis Khan (1206); miniature of a 15th c. manuscript of the World History, known as Jami’ al-tawarikh (‘Compendium of Histories’), of Rashid al-Din Hamadani
Few years before Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash were born, another distinct erudite Muslim scholar, pioneering scientist and astronomer, statesman and diplomat of universalistic aspirations was born: Nasir al-Din al Tusi (1201-1274). This great man’s life was a ceaseless demonstration of the scholarly-intellectual courage to view ‘borders’ as nonexistent, ‘religions’ as immaterial, ‘states’ as worthless, and ‘institutions’ as useless. He was the epitome of human genius in every sense.
Nasir al-Din al Tusi was not the elect of spiritual hierarchies like Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi; he did not have the Love for God that we attest across the poems of Rumi, but he replaced it with the love for God’s celestial creatures that he studied incessantly and in a worldwide pioneering manner. Nasir al-Din al Tusi was not a man of spiritual potency like Shams-e Tabrizi, and in contrast to Haji Bektash, he did not have great interest to actively participate in mystical orders, which however he had the chance to frequent for long, study in-depth, and comprehend their function and limits. He did not envision atemporal heroic figures and he did not conceive apocalyptic symbolisms, as he was very different from Ferdowsi and Nizami Ganjavi, but he managed to be highly appreciated and demanded by his times’ most formidable warriors, heroic conquerors, and secretive rulers. And contrarily with Nizam al-Mulk, who specified the rules of perfect governance, Nasir al-Din al Tusi used these rules to make kings’ and emperors’ governance useful to him and beneficial to mankind.
Above all, Nasir al-Din al Tusi was the Muslim, who personally controlled the various stages of the Mongol invasion and -most demanded- destruction of Baghdad (1258). Through his personal involvement as mediator or envoy, he helped the Buddhist Mongol emperor Hulagu (1218-1265) carry out the total demolition of the Abbasid capital. This historical event was not a ‘major historical development’ as many are inclined to believe today, because for many hundreds of years, Baghdad had lost its earlier importance as center of the world’s most immense and most formidable empire; in the middle of the 13 th c., the greatest capital of the Islamic world did not anymore have its hitherto unsurpassed significance as the world-center for letters, sciences, academic life, exploration, manuscript collection and translation, archivism, and arts. Baghdad was then only the shadow of the former Abbasid glory and splendor.
It has however to be underscored that the above description of the one-time Abbasid opulence was not the only way Muslims across the Islamic world viewed Baghdad at the time; the fallen Abbasid capital was also viewed as the palace of cruel rulers and unjust caliphs who imprisoned, poisoned and massacred several descendants of Prophet Muhammad and Ali, as the headquarters of deceitful potentates who misinterpreted Islam only to adjust it to their material needs and interests, and as the location of impotent, decayed ‘caliphs’ who for no less than ca. 350-400 years were more powerless than a single soldier and depended therefore on the mercy of the various secessionist emirs, sultans and shahs, who held the real imperial power in the regions of their states. In other words, for most of the then Muslims, Baghdad was not anymore a ‘glory’ but a disgusting ‘shame’.
Furthermore, long before the 13th c., numerous centers of Islamic spirituality, mysticism, letters, sciences, arts, philosophy and theology had already been established between the Atlantic Ocean and China and from the steppes of Siberia to the coast of today’s Tanzania and Mozambique. The annihilation of Baghdad’s library (with an estimate of about a million manuscripts) would not be and actually was not a detrimental and calamitous fact, as the mendacious modern Western historians and Orientalists try to depict. Spiritual, intellectual, academic, scientific, philosophical, and artistic life and creativity would continue and did indeed continue elsewhere.
In addition, very few contemporaneous Muslims ‘cried’ for the fall of the Abbasid capital; one of them was the already famous Saadi Shirazi (1210-1291), one of Iran’s greatest poets who exerted enormous impact on Iranians and Turanians. But at the time, this side was rather an insignificant minority.
Last, one must also point out that this event was not a religious war, and it was not then viewed as such, because there were many Muslims on the side of Hulagu, and of his official envoy Nasir al-Din al Tusi. They viewed the destruction of Baghdad as a God-sent present.
Colonial Orientalists shed interminable crocodile tears for the loss of what was indeed the greatest accumulation of manuscripts, written sources, and academic – intellectual heritage throughout the History of Mankind before modern times. The hypocritical Western academic attitude constitutes only a deceitful attempt and a divisive racist policy intended to generate frictions among Muslims and to turn fake entities, like the so-called ‘Arab Sunnis’ and the ‘Shia Iranians’, against one another. At the same time, the fallacious representation of this minor historical event helps produce Anti-Turanian, Anti-Turkish, Anti-Mongolian, and Anti-Buddhist hatred and rancor among uneducated, ignorant and idiotic Muslims.
In fact, any material record, any accumulation of written documentation, any library and archival institution has no value per se; humans and human life give its value to everything material. The treasures of 13th c. Baghdad’s libraries were to great extent copied and diffused from Andalusia to China. In any case, Baghdad would never again regain its 8th–9th c. position as the leading center of world’s knowledge, wisdom, science and spirituality; 500 years after its foundation, the Abbasid capital resembled, truly speaking, a mortuary.
As far as today’s ignorant and uneducated Muslims are concerned, it is extremely nonsensical and unprecedentedly shameful to express indignation for Baghdad’s destruction at the hands of Hulagu. What would actually their 18th, 19th and 20th c. ancestors have done, had Hulagu (or anybody else) not destroyed Baghdad? Judging from modern Muslims’ disgustingly materialistic approach to life and indifference for their own cultural heritage, they would have stupidly and inanely sold all these hundreds of thousands of supposedly remaining manuscripts to European and North American explorers, antiquaries, agents, diplomats, Orientalists, merchants and travelers, as they already did with what was left in other places. So, perhaps one can conclude that Hulagu’s only mistake was that he did not exterminate the entire population of the wider region to adequately purify the land, and thus prevent its putrefaction at a later age.
Nasir al-Din al Tusi was born in Tus to a theologian and jurist father; he studied in Neyshapur, Hamadan, Mosul and Baghdad. He encountered Attar of Neyshapur and Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, who was a student of Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi and a friend of Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Although he was familiar with spiritual exercises, mystical doctrines, and philosophy, Nasir al-Din al Tusi had a greater interest for medicine, mathematics, natural sciences, and astronomy. In rather young age, he was already viewed as an exemplary young scientist and scholar, and he was noticed by many known and surreptitious people.
Among the latter, the Isma’ili governor of the city Sartakht in Quhestan (: i.e. ‘mountainous land’: the southeastern part of Khorasan) invited him (1233) to work on several projects. Writing about teaching ethics to children and conversing with a high dignitary of the Isma’ili (the so-called ‘Sevener Shia’) administration, which also controlled several cities and provinces (except their headquarters, which constituted a real enclave inside the caliphate), Nasir al-Din al Tusi became familiar with the practices of governance held by mystical orders; he emphatically disliked this.
Nasir al din al Tusi with his associates and students, working in the then world’s most important observatory at Maragheh, East Azerbaijan-Iran; miniature of manuscript dating back to 1562, 300 years after the erection of the Maragheh Observatory
Two pages from a manuscript of Nasir al Din al Tusi’s ‘Treatise on the Astrolabe’ that dates back to 1505 (found in Isfahan).
Two pages from Nasir al Din al Tusi’s ‘Compendium of treatises on Astronomy and Mathematics’ from a manuscript dating back to 1279
Kitab tahrir al-usul li-Uqlidis (Commentary on Euclid’s Elements); each page with 19 lines of Maghribi script within double rules (with numerous diagrams); from: Fes (Alawi Morocco), al-Matba’ah al-‘Amirah, Khidmat al-‘Arabi al-Azraq (colophon with name of Sultan Muley Hassan), [1 Nov. 1876 CE =] 13 Shawwal 1293 H.
The Tusi couple from Vatican Arabic manuscript 319
Kitab Tahrir Usul li’Uqlidis (Elementorum Geometricorum) recension by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, first printed edition by the Medici Press (Typographia Medicea), Rome, 1594
Modern reconstruction: the dome of the Maragheh observatory
Central Tower of the Maragheh Observatory
Contemplation and Action: the Spiritual Autobiography of a Muslim Scholar – Nasir al-Din Tusi by Seyyed Jalal Hosseini Badakhchani
Nasir al Din al Tusi’s Maragheh Observatory and Library with 400000 manuscripts
Al Maragheh
Tashkent manuscript of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s treatise ‘Collection of Arithmetic’ (Jami’ al-hisab bi-‘l-Takht wa-‘l-turab), folio 120
However, he also had the experience of staying long in Alamut, the Isma’ili order’s headquarters which were located in an almost inaccessible mountainous region in Alborz, namely the range that separates the Caspian Sea from the Iranian plateau. There, Nasir al-Din al Tusi’s fame as a scientist and philosopher grew among the local Isma’ilis tremendously, and he became widely known across the Islamic world. He thus lived no less than 20 years in Alamut, being cut off from the rest of the world, but surrounded by dozens of thousands (if not more) of manuscripts.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-institutional-economics/article/nasir-addin-tusi-on-social-cooperation-and-the-division-of-labor-fragment-from-the-nasirean-ethics/866D4BA0EA8C7BA5493767E465113B63 This was a period in which the entire world was transformed into a Turanian Eurasiatic Empire. The achievement was unprecedented, but the method was known. Simply the family of Temüjin Borjigin (later known as Genghis Khan; 1162-1227) eclipsed by far the family of Seljuk. There is a slight but noticeable difference in the attitude of both families’ patriarch; whereas Seljuk fled straightforwardly to another region, Temüjin fought numerous battles before prevailing among first the Mongols and later the various Eastern Turanian (: Mongolian) nations. Whereas Temüjin was elected khan of the Mongols in 1186 (when he was 24 years old), it took him 20 years of incessant battles to prevail among all the surrounding Turanian nations, i.e. the Naimans, the Merkits, the Tatars, the Khamag Mongols, and the Keraites. Only in 1206 Temüjin became the undisputed and sole ruler of all the Eastern Turanian nations, thus controlling a sizeable nomadic empire.
Genghis Khan: from a 14th c. Yuan era Chinese album originally painted in 1278
Börte & Genghis Khan from a 16th c. manuscript: along with Hoelun Ujin, the emperor’s mother, she was the person that impacted the conqueror most.
However, long before Temüjin’s spectacular successes in the South (China) and the West (Central Asia, Western Siberia, Iran, Caucasus and Eastern Europe) took place (which occurred only after he was 50 years old), critical developments had happened to his family, and they determined the future of his offspring and the destiny of his immense empire. At a certain moment, during Temüjin’s early combats, his principal wife Börte (who was by then already pregnant) was taken captive by Temüjin’s contenders for some months. This event decisively compromised the way she was viewed afterwards; when she was liberated only few months later, she gave birth to Temüjin’s son, Jochi (1182-1227).
These circumstances did indeed cast a doubt about Jochi’s real father. Although Temüjin fully and unreservedly recognized Jochi as his first son, the story reached the ears of his other three sons (from Börte) at a later moment; this development irrevocably compromised Jochi’s chances to succession. Among Temüjin’s next sons, i.e. Chagatai (1183–1242), Ögedei (1186–1241), and Tolui (1191–1232), Chagatai announced his intention never to accept Jochi as Temüjin’s succession; to properly address the situation, Temüjin appointed Ögedei, his third son, as successor to both, remove doubts and castigate disloyalty. Jochi died few months before his father, but the aforementioned situation predetermined the future of the four brethren’s sons, and actually caused several conflicts among them and even among the younger generation, i.e. Temüjin’s grandchildren.
Basic source of information for the early stages of the Mongolian Turanian Empire is the ‘Secret History of the Mongols’; page from a 1908 Chinese edition (Mongolian text in Chinese transcription, plus a small glossary next to each column); the imperial historiographical source was written in Mongolian little time after the death of the great conqueror by an anonymous author as per the traditional imperial criteria. All surviving texts are transcriptions in Chinese characters and translations that date back to the 14th c. when the early Ming dynasty administrators wanted to offer an imperial narrative about the previous dynasty. A modern English translation of the Secret History of the Mongols can be found here: https://jigjids.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/the_secret_history_of_the_mongols_the_life_and_times_of_chinggis_khan1.pdf
‘Secret History of the Mongols’: the oldest copy preserved in Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia
Mausoleum of Genghis Khan in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China (not a personal tomb)
Temüjin was a staunch monotheist, and he observed the traditional rites of his religion, Tengrism. The early Turanian religion is a form of monotheism based on transcendental experience, spiritual exercises, utmost morality, military discipline, and universal perception of the world. Sticking always to meritocracy and combating favoritism, Temüjin was an extroverted man with great interest for the religious and spiritual beliefs of surrounding nations: he was therefore in constant contact with Buddhist monks, Manichaean Elects, Nestorian Christian clergymen, Muslim imams, and Taoist priests, being conversant in their respective faiths and cults. When he was not at the battlefield, Temüjin had also literary interests and to fight illiteracy, he introduced among Mongolians the Uyghur writing system, which had been attested as early as the 5th c. CE in Sogdian characters, being therefore of Aramaic origin.
The great expansion of Temüjin’s empire occurred in the period 1206-1227, when the situation across his realm was already stable, solid and untroubled. Until 1211, Temüjin (Genghis Khan) conquered the nomadic Tangut Empire (‘Western Xia’ dynasty), another Turanian Empire located west of Temüjin’s territory. In the period 1211-1215, invaded the Northern Chinese kingdom (Jin dynasty), sacking Zhongdu (: the old Beijing city, capital of Jin China) in the process; the North Chinese king Xuanzong fled to the South, therefore losing more than half of his territory to Temüjin. In 1218, the ever improving armies of Genghis Khan defeated Qara Kitai, another nomadic Turanian Empire that was located west of the already demised Tangut Empire. This means that for the first time in the History of Eurasia an empire controlled all the lands between Lake Balkhash (in today’s Eastern Kazakhstan) and the coastlands of Northeast Asia, also including the northern half of today’s China. By that time, Temüjin’s empire bordered with the Turanian Empire of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) that stretched from the eastern coastlands of the Caspian Sea to today’s Eastern Kazakhstan and down to the Persian Gulf and Straits of Hormuz.
Central, Southern, Northern and Eastern Asia in the early 13th century
Genghis enters Zhongdu (Beijing) in 1215; miniature from Jami al-tawarikh
The campaigns Genghis Khan in the period 1207-1225
From 1219 to 1223, an incredible thunderstorm hit Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Following the devastating defeat of Khwarazm (1221), Temüjin’s armies invaded the western parts of Central Asia and today’s Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, engaging in successive ferocious battles; in one of them, Chagatai’s firstborn son Mutukan died (in Bamian). During the next two years, Eastern Anatolia, Caucasus, Crimea, today’s Ukraine and today’s Russia’s southern half were conquered by the Turanian armies led by Temüjin’s family members and relatives. The Christian state of Kievan Rus (which is spiritually rather than ethnically related to Modern Russia) collapsed after the defeat in the Kalka River battle.
Jalal al-Din Mangburni (also known as Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah), the last of Khwarazm, crosses the Indus River trying to escape from the Mongolian forces; from a late 17th century manuscript of Jami al-tawarikh (by Rashid al Din Hamadani)
With the invasion of the multi-religious Turanian Cuman–Kipchak confederacy and following the annexation of the Muslim Turanian Khanate of Volga Bulgaria, the first two sizeable Turanian kingdoms in Europe took an end, after having lasted for more than 400 years. The khanate of Volga Bulgaria had been a Muslim state since 922 (so for more than 300 years before its demise), thus representing a major chapter of Europe’s Islamic past and identity. This highlights the fact that Islam antedates Christianity in Eastern Europe. As a matter of fact, the Volga Bulgarian ruler Almış sent an embassy to Baghdad, asking for religious instructors; in response to his demand, Ibn Fadlan (ca. 880 – ca.960) was dispatched at once to teach Islamic faith, theology and jurisprudence there. About:
Little resistance was attested following the Turanian conquests undertaken by Genghis Khan’s (:Temüjin’s) armies, and this is due to the religious-cultural tolerance that prevailed everywhere after the largest part of Eurasia was invaded and unified in about 20 years. The only significant rebellion took place in Tangut, and it was squelched by Temüjin who died next year.
Ögedei became the 2nd Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire. In the period between 1227 and 1241, he carried out military campaigns across Central Asia, Khorasan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Caucasus (1230), he invaded Korea (1231), and he completed the invasion of China (1230-1234), bringing about the final fall of the Jin dynasty. His armies carried out numerous campaigns in the wider Caucasus region (1232-1240), squelching revolts and conquering remote mountainous spots. During the period 1235-1241, Ögedei’s firstborn son Güyük Khan (1206-1248) and other relatives and generals invaded Eastern, Southeastern and Central Europe; Güyük Khan’s half-brother Kadan, Jochi’s second son Batu (c. 1207–1255) and Mutukan’s son Büri (Chagatai’s grandson) were also present in the invasions, leading armies and engaging in battles and sieges; the former territories of Kievan Rus and today’s Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and parts of Germany were swept and conquered.
Chagatai outlived his younger brother and 2nd Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire by one year; with Ögedei as Khagan, Chagatai was entrusted with the administration of a vast Central Asiatic territory, which became later known as the Chagatai Khanate and under different forms and dynasties survived until ca. 1700. With capital at Almaligh (close to today’s Chinese – Kazakh border in Eastern Turkestan / Sinkiang), Chagatai favored Tengrism over Islam, causing hostility among his country’s Muslims, whose bulk inhabited the western and southern provinces of the vast state. Quite contrarily, he tolerated Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism and Buddhism.
After participating in his father’s and older brother’s campaigns, Tolui sacrificed himself to save Ögedei from an illness caused by China’s spirits of Earth and Soft Waters; as per the description available in ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’, the earliest historical record in Mongolian language, Tolui by his own will drank a cursed potion to appease the spirits and heal his brother, therefore dying in the process.
Genghis Khan and Jochi standing in the left
Jochi Mausoleum, Ulytau-Kazakhstan
The funerals of Chagatai Khan
Coronation of Ögedei, from a 14th century’s manuscript of Rashid al-Din Hamadani’s Jami’al Tawarikh
Ögedei portrait from the times of Yuan dynasty 47×59 cm
Tolui
Mongol army captures a city of the Kievan Rus state (16th c. Russian miniature)
Among the generation of Genghis Khan’s grandsons prominent role played the following:
i. Ögedei’s sons Güyük Khan (1206-1248; 3rd Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire for the period 1246-1248), Godan Khan (1206-1251), and Kadan;
ii. Chagatai’s sons Mutukan (died 1221), Baidar (who participated in the European campaign and was present in the election of Güyük Khan in 1246), and Yesü Möngke (Khan of Chagatai Khanate for the period 1246-1252, after and before Mutukan’s son Qara Hülegü, who was twice Khan of Chagatai Khanate: 1242-1246, 1252);
iii. Tolui’s sons were the luckiest in terms of posterity and imperial prevalence. Tolui was the regent of the empire for a certain period. His historically important sons were: Möngke Khan (1209–1259) 4th Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire (1251-1259), Kublai Khan (1215–1294) Emperor of China (1st Emperor of the Yuan dynasty: 1271-1294) and 5th Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire (1260-1294; however his imperial power at this level was only nominal due to the empire’s division), Hulagu Khan (1217–1265) who was tasked by Möngke Khan in 1251 to destroy Western Asia’s remaining Islamic states, and Ariq Böke (1219–1266; known for his Nestorian Christian sympathies) Khagan of the Mongol Empire (a title with only nominal value due to the empire’s division), who clashed with Kublai Khan and finally got imprisoned and then poisoned;
The empire of Möngke Khan
iv. Jochi’s sons Orda Ichen (c. 1206–1251; participant in the invasion of Kievan Rus’ in 1237-1242) Khan of the Golden Horde Eastern Half (White Horde; 1226-1251), Batu (c. 1207–1255) Khan of the Golden Horde Western Half (Blue Horde; 1227-1255), and Berke, Khan of the Golden Horde Western Half (Blue Horde; 1257–1266), who was the first member of the Genghisid family to have become Muslim.
From the above, it can be understood that, despite the consented, appropriate and fair-minded division of Genghis Khan’s empire among his sons and grandsons, several disputes took place, and soon after Güyük Khan’s tenure as the 3rd Khagan, the supreme title shifted to the progeniture of Tolui; nevertheless, the empire was so immense to possibly supervise that Möngke Khan was practically the last to be effective as Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire.
Many depict the great events of the period 1219-1258 as a unique moment in the history of mankind, but in reality, Eurasia had indeed experienced several similar cases before. Where does the difference lie then? This is easy to answer. Contrarily to earlier spectacular invasions, which had repeatedly crisscrossed Eurasia in the past, the Turanian Mongolian invasions of the 13th c. occurred at a time when historiography had already greatly progressed. Numerous nations had developed their own writing systems and great amounts of historical records were scrupulously kept in state archives, involving state annals and correspondence, royal chronographers, etc. In addition, diverse types of ample documentation, such as literary, theological, philosophical and other texts mentioning and commenting historical events, offer a wide-angle view of the facts. That is why these events are incomparably better documented, and this makes an enormous difference.
One has however to observe a major new trait – something that finds early parallels only in the Achaemenid court of Darius I the Great at Parsa (Persepolis). For the first time after the procession of the subject nations’ representatives in the Apadana audience hall of Darius the Great’s palace occurred in the last years of the 6th c. BCE, Western nations’ defeated rulers, subjugated princes, and humiliated diplomats made headway to an Eastern imperial capital to attend a splendid event whereby they were summoned as humble servants of their superior potentates.
This sublime event of worldwide importance was Güyük’s enthronement as the 3rd Khagan of the Turanian Mongolian Empire; it took place on 24th August 1246, at Karakorum, Güyük’s capital. The Seljuk Sultans of Anatolia, the Abbasid caliph, the sultan of Delhi, the shadowy kings of Georgia, Armenia, and Vladimir (a city 200 km east of Moscow), the king of Poland, the pope of Rome, and other marginal Western rulers sent their representatives or attended the spectacular ceremony, i.e. the Great Kurultai (‘tribal assembly’). The scenery reminds us of the famous bas-reliefs of Parsa (Persepolis) where Ionians, Libyans, Egyptians, Sogdians, Indians and others were depicted bearing tribute, present and homage to the Achaemenid King of Kings.
Letter written in Farsi and sent by Güyük Khan’s emissaries to Pope Innocent IV, demanding his submission (1246)
After Güyük Khan’s death, two kurultais were held, but his sons Naqu and Khoja did not make their case strong, and the title of Khagan passed on to Tolui’s sons, and more specifically to Möngke Khan. It is however wrong to call the events ‘Toluid revolution’, because everything occurred in full compliance with the Turanian-Mongolian tribal traditions and moral order; no revolution took place among the Turanian Mongolians; this is a Western colonial invention.
Möngke Khan ruled for eight years (1251-1259) over an area of over 30 million km2 (this is double the size of today’s Russia). The entire territory of today’s China and Vietnam, the northwestern part of today’s India, and other parts of SE Asia were invaded in the 1250s. Progressively, until the end of the 13th c., the Turanian Mongolian Empire reached the size of 37 million km2, being of course significantly decentralized into smaller structures. More than any other person among all his relatives, Möngke Khan had a genuine sense for imperial administration, taxation, systematization, organization and coordination. He definitely had to suppress various rebellions here and there, but he was not cruel and he pursued a rather tolerant approach to all the major religions of his vast empire.
Möngke Khan supported Buddhism, discussed with Christian priests of every denomination, engaged in conversations with Taoists, Manichaeans and Muslims, and although his brother Hulagu destroyed the Nizari Isma’ili enclave at Alamut and demolished Baghdad (thus terminating the Abbasid Caliphate), they both (Möngke and Hulagu) offered tax exemption to the Najaf Muslim community that had opposed for many long centuries the Abbasid cruelty and corruption. About:
As early as 1251, Hulagu was entrusted (by Möngke) with the elimination of four Islamic states: the Assassins’ domain (the Nizari Isma’ili enclave), the Abbasid Caliphate, the Ayyubid state of Damascus, and the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. Although it looks like a Buddhist’s attempt to destroy the most important of the remaining Islamic states, the demolition of the Isma’ili enclave (the state of those who are today falsely called ‘Sevener Shia’) really saved the Islamic world from an evil cancerous tumor and at the same time catapulted Nasir al-Din al-Tusi to supreme position among the top scholars, scientists and intellectuals of the world’s only formidable empire.
Kale-ye Alamut
The 26th Nizari Ismaili Imam Ala al-Din Muhammad (the Elder of the Mountain) in the Travels of Marco Polo
In 1253, Hulagu advanced westwards with no less than 20% of the entire military force of the Turanian Mongolian Empire. He crossed Transoxiana, invaded Khwarazm (Chorasmia) and Khorasan, and reinstated the imperial order. The major problem caused by the existence of the Nizari Isma’ili ‘state’ (i.e. the clandestine organization and the unreachable enclave) was that it did not function as an ordinary, regular state, but as a secretive clandestine organization with members dispersed across vast territories of the Muslim world and with an impregnable mountainous headquarters (Kale-ye Alamut, i.e. the Alamut Castle in Alborz Mountains) from where all the instructions for the members’ subsequent actions, tactics and schemes were dispatched by various camouflaged agents – at the unbeknownst of all the rest. In other words, it was the first time in World History a spiritual order attempted to get involved in the governance of the Muslim world as such. Even worse, this was not undertaken by means of frontal opposition to the caliph, like the rebellions against the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphs, but in an evidently subversive manner.
Hulagu undertook the systematic elimination of Isma’ili governors of various regions, notably Quhistan (today’s Eastern Iran and Western Afghanistan) and Qumis (Eastern Iran between Gorgan and Dasht-e Kavir), before attacking Alborz Mountains from three different directions and finally demolishing Alamut Castle in December 1256. The events have been detailed in the Tarikh-i Jahangushay (‘The History of The World Conqueror’ /تاریخ جهانگشای), a voluminous masterpiece elaborated in Farsi by Ala al-Din Ata-ullah Juvayni (جوینی علاءالدین عطاءالله), a prominent Iranian historian (1226-1283) whose father had served as minister of Jalal ad-Din Mingburnu, the last ruler of Khwarazm, and of Ögedei Khan. Juvayni (from Joveyn in Khorasan) was also employed as an imperial administrator at Karakorum, and then he followed Hulagu in his campaign, therefore offering unprecedented insight and fascinating descriptions of the various events. Less than 14 months later, Juvayni was next to Hulagu during the siege of Baghdad. Meanwhile, Hulagu founded his new capital at Maragheh, not far from Lake Urumiyeh’s southeastern coasts
The fall of Alamut in miniatures of historical manuscripts
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s reputation ran very high at those days; that’s why he was invited to join Hulagu’s camp and become his adviser and diplomat. Hulagu was highly educated and had great consideration for scholars, polymaths, scientists, poets and authors. In total contradiction to nonsensical narratives of the modern uneducated theologians and Islamists, who are idiotic enough to portray Hulagu as an oppressor or a barbarian, the great emperor relied always on erudite academics and actually promoted the scientific research in a most determinant and resolute manner – more than any other ruler of his time. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was then tasked to negotiate with the imam of the Isma’ilis Rukn al-Din Khurshah and to convince him to submit to the imperial authority, save his family, and dissolve his order.
When demolishing Alamut Castle, Hulagu followed Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s and Juvayni’s advice, and they saved all the astronomical instruments that were found in the vast library, which had earlier functioned under the auspices of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Armillary spheres, astrolabes, manuscripts with astronomical observations and tables, books, copies of the Quran, and important documents were rescued, whereas the rest – and more in particular any literature related to the heretic faith and the malignant activity of the secretive Isma’ili order – was consumed by the fire. Hulagu indulged every scholarly and intellectual curiosity, and Juvayni narrates how he initially saved the biography of Hassan-i Sabah (1050-1124), the obscure figure credited with the rearrangement of the Isma’ili order and its transformation into an evil, secretive and terrorist organization, but after reading the evilness contained therein, he burnt it by himself!
So great Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s reputation as astronomer and astrologer was that Hulagu wanted to dispatch him to Karakorum, because Möngke demanded one leading erudite in his capital; Tusi accepted, but finally this journey was spared due to Tusi’s effective negotiation skills and successful astrological advice delivered to Hulagu. Due to Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Hulagu’s army invaded the otherwise believed impregnable Alamut Castle with few casualties; Tusi’s negotiation skills caused a certain defeatism among the ranks of the Isma’ilis, as their peaceful dispersion was promised to be tantamount to survival.
Subsequently, Hulagu consulted Tusi about the then forthcoming assault on Baghdad. This was a serious issue, because among the Turanian Mongolian army soldiers, several rumors were circulating about an eventual extraordinary disaster which would eventually befall them, if they shed the blood of the last caliph who was a descendant of Prophet Muhammad’s uncle (Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib). The rumors would have not been easily accepted, had there not been a time-honored Turanian Mongolian tradition, which prohibited the spilling of royal blood. After observing the stars and finding that the celestial conditions were auspicious, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi assured Hulagu that his victory was certain and that he would replace the corrupt and idiotic caliph on the throne of Baghdad
The Battle of Baghdad (1258)
The siege of Baghdad (Supplément persan 1113, fol. 180v-181 ca. 1430)
The events that took place outside the gates of Baghdad during the last days of January and the first days of February 1258 bear witness to the nauseating corruption and the utmost paranoia that characterized the evil dynasty, which – in the Name of Allah – persecuted and executed great numbers of descendants of Prophet Muhammad only to serve filthy interests, secure material wealth, uphold imperial power, and ensure contemptible continuity. The idiotic attitude of the last caliph Al-Musta’sim, who could not even understand that his end had come and continued living carefree like all his predecessors over the previous 300 years, fully justifies the kind of death that he underwent (wrapped in carpet and crushed by horses).
During the siege of Baghdad, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, acting as Hulagu’s chief envoy, delivered imperial messages to the senseless caliph and supervised the evacuation process, when an important part of the local population abandoned the city and surrendered. Tusi and the last vizier of Al-Musta’sim were able to save all Islamic shrines, holy sites, and monuments of Iraq, and to make the local Muslim population come to senses and realize that the end of Abbasid Baghdad was something good even for Muslims. Tusi was instrumental in convincing most of the Muslims that the Abbasid court’s pseudo-Islamic theologians were sectarian fanatics and evil blasphemers. Actually, many Iraqi cities’ populations welcomed the Turanian Mongolian armies. Such was Tusi’s success that many rumors started circulating that he had persuaded Hulagu to accept Islam and that the End of Times was about to come, since Hulagu’s armies had come from Turan (there are certain Ahadith that can be interpreted in this manner); of course, this was an exaggeration, because Hulagu died as a Buddhist.
Doquz Khatun, Hulagu’s most influential wife, was a Keraite Turanian princess that accompanied him in the campaigns to Asia’s southwestern confines. She was a Nestorian Christian (which was quite common among the Keraites) and because of this, she proved to be highly beneficial to Iraq’s Christian populations which were all Nestorians. The Church of the East (as the then Seleucia-Ctesiphon-based Nestorian Patriarchate was named) prospered indeed under Hulagu and his successors, the rulers of the vast Ilkhanate; the portion of the Turanian Mongolian Empire allotted to Hulagu comprised of all territories stretching between Indus River in the East and Sakarya River in the West (Anatolian Seljuks were a vassal state), and between Amu Daria River and the Caucasus Mountains in the North to Euphrates River in the South (totaling ca. 5 million km2).
Hulagu Khan and Doquz Khatun; miniature of a 14th c. manuscript of Jami’al Tawarikh
Thanks to the upgraded conditions of life of the Nestorian Christians in the Ilkhanate, it is not therefore strange that Nestorian Aramaean artists of those days, while depicting the Exaltation of the Cross by St. Constantine and St. Helena, depicted around the Cross the two saints of Christianity with the features of Hulagu and Doquz Khatun, thus equating them as the ‘new’ St. Constantine and St. Helena.
Because of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s extraordinary services, Hulagu rewarded him with the library of Baghdad (Bayt al Hikmah), and the great astronomer saved dozens of thousands of manuscripts and other valuable items, taking them to Maragheh, the new capital of Hulagu’s empire. Furthermore, the treasures of all the waqfs (i.e. foundations collecting donations for religious or charitable purposes) of Baghdad and Iraq were forcefully given to Nasir al-Din al-Tusi in order to enable him to finance the erection of the then world’s leading Observatory at Maragheh. Following the death of Möngke in 1259, Tusi did not need to travel to Karakorum, and then he concentrated his scientific prowess and intellectual genius on the operation of the Maragheh Observatory, on the cooperation of numerous Muslim, Jewish, Nestorian Christian, Buddhist and other scholars in that magnificent venue, and on the preparation of his Zij-i Ilkhani, an extraordinary series of astronomical tables that consisted in an official imperial document dedicated to Hulagu Ilkhan (this title was attributed to Hulagu by Kublai Khan, after he defeated their youngest brother Ariq Böke).
Hulagu Khan and Dokuz Khatun depicted as the New St. Constantine and the New St. Helena in the miniature of an illustrated Syriac Aramaic Bible of the 13th c.
Rather known for his famous ‘Tousi couple’ (a mathematical device in which a small circle rotates inside a larger circle twice the diameter of the smaller circle), Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was not the only author of Zij-i Ilkhani. The extraordinary opus was the result of a uniquely international team of astronomers and astrologers, who worked under the guidance of Tusi, involving amongst others Bar Hebraeus {1226-1286; known as Mor Gregorios Bar Ebraya in Syriac Aramaic, Ebn al-‘Ebri in Arabic and Abulpharagius in Latin, he was the chief-bishop of the Aramaean (Syriac) Jacobite Orthodox -Monophysitic/Miaphysitic- Church across the Ilkhanid Empire}, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (1236-1311), Muhyi al-Dīn al-Maghribī, Mu’ayyid al-Din al-‘Urdi, Hulagu’s Chinese astronomer Fao Munji, and many others.
Page from Bar Hebraeus’ treatise Hewath Hekmetha (Butter of Wisdom), (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Or. 83, fol. 32r)
Zij-i Ilkhani includes data and observations made during a period of 12 years, starting as early as 1260. The magnificent opus was published at the time of Hulagu’s son Abaqa Khan (1265-1282) and became the model that many posterior Muslim astronomers and astrologers followed. Later astronomical tables and texts produced in Maragheh were translated from Arabic and Farsi to Greek by Gregory Choniades, who was the student of Shams ad-Din al-Bukhari, another Turanian astronomer who had worked at the illustrious Maragheh Observatory.
Page from a manuscript of Zij-i Ilkhani
Such was the success of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Observatory that Kublai Khan, Hulagu’s brother, trying to compete in terms of imperially promoted scholarship and pioneering research, had another observatory built in China at Gaocheng in 1276 under the supervision of the famous Chinese astronomer Guo Shoujing (郭守敬; 1231–1316). Around 150 years later, Ulugh Beg, the Timurid Emperor of Samarqand, who was his time’s worldwide leading mathematician and astronomer, studied the remains of the Maragheh Observatory to build his own observatory in his empire’s capital.
Guo Shoujing
Geometric model of Chinese Astronomy
For the exemplarily universal scholar Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Bar Hebraeus, chief-bishop of the Syriac Church in the Ilkhanid Empire, wrote in his Chronography the following:
“He constructed instruments for the observations of stars, and the great brass spheres that were more wonderful than those that Ptolemy set up in Alexandria, and he observed and defined the courses of the stars. And there were gathered together about him in Maragheh … a numerous company of wise men from various countries. And since the councils of all the mosques and the houses of instruction of Baghdad and Assyria were under his direction, he used to allot stipends to the teachers and to the pupils who were with him”.
This unsurpassed example of universal scholarship, erudition and intellectual genius disturbed at the time various uneducated, obscurantist, pseudo-Muslim theologians, like Al-Safadi (1296-1363); expressing the Mamluk state’s anti-Ilkhanid propaganda, he wrote against Nasir al-Din al-Tusi deprecatory comments, which were later reproduced by the idiotic religious authorities of the decayed Ottoman Empire in their catastrophic opposition to Safavid Iran, an attitude that ruined both empires. Even worse, over the past decades, anti-Tusi inflammatory speech is tantamount to Islamic terrorism.
The only historically pertinent response to the illiterate and uneducated pseudo-Muslims, who pathetically self-define themselves as ‘Sunnis’ and incessantly regret for the ‘fall of Abbasid Baghdad’ to the ‘barbarians’ is that, only thanks to the destruction of that wretched and worthless state and city, Islamic sciences reached their culminating point at Maragheh few decades later, and then at Samarqand, in the Mughal Empire of Hindustan, and elsewhere. Speaking with sadness about the demolition of the Abbasid Caliphate’s capital is typical camouflage for either idiotic Islamist politicians or criminal suicide-bombers. About:
Hulagu died in 1265 in his capital Maragheh and was buried on an island of the Lake Urumiyeh {: ‘the non-(Eastern) Roman’, because the Eastern Roman Empire never expanded over those regions} at a location still unidentified. For over 400 years, not one ruler had achieved to control so firmly the entire region over which he reigned. Even more importantly, as he ruled one of the four parts of Genghis Khan’s vast empire, his reign greatly facilitated contacts, exchanges, and movements.
Numerous nomadic populations and pastoralists moved across vast or small distances from Eastern and Central Siberia to either China or Europe, and from Central Asia either toward Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Syria and Anatolia or in the direction of Iran, the Indus River valley and further on to the Deccan (today’s India’s South). During the 13th, 14th, 15th and the early 16th c., practically speaking all the ethnic groups and nations of Eurasia and North Africa were greatly amalgamated with the incessant waves of new comers. From Sahara and Central Europe to the Bering Strait an indivisible ethnic-cultural entity was formed only to be locally accentuated and highlighted in some regions where major ancient civilizations had been developed.
A ‘universal man’ was then effectively created, no less than 600-700 years before the so-called ‘global world order’ that was calamitously announced at the end of the 20th c. only as an atrocious and vindictive reaction against most of the people worldwide. But back in the 13th, 14th and the 15th century, the only barbarians, who made the exception across Afro-Eurasia, were the Western European pseudo-Christian monarchs and their master, namely the heretic and schismatic pope of Rome, who was anathematized in 1054 by the Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of New Rome Constantinople.
In this regard, ethno-linguistic and theological-religious diversity helped only underscore spiritual, cultural and imperial unity. In reality, the various empires and kingdoms were basically the specular reflection of one another. The major axes of differentiation were between nomads and pastorals (whereby the nomads viewed the pastorals as enfeebled) and between rural dwellers and urban inhabitants (whereby the rural populations considered the urban denizens as corrupt and degenerate).
The split of the Mongolian Empire
Hulagu’s vast empire (known basically as the Ilkhanate; 1256-1353) survived for almost 100 years after his death; taking into consideration the earlier divisions that existed across those regions and the massive migrations that occurred during the reign of Ilkhan’s successors, we can conclude that the Ilkhanate was a success story. In China, the Yuan dynasty (established by Kublai Khan) lasted also slightly less than one century (1279-1368). The Chagatai Khanate did not last much longer in its initial and integral form (1226-1347); after that term, it was decomposed and underwent several metamorphoses; its eastern part survived as Moghulistan (1347-1487), only to be later diminished and subdivided (Turfan Khanate, 1487-1690; Yarkand Khanate 1465-1705). Last, the Golden Horde survived longer, but only through early divisions (White Horde and Blue Horde) and subsequent multi-divisions (Great Horde, Crimean Khanate, Kazan Khanate, Astrakhan Khanate, Nugai Khanate, Sibir Khanate and Kazakh Khanate).
Since the times of the Ilkhanate, the entire landmass of Central Asia, the Iranian plateau, the Indus River Valley, the Ganges River Valley, Zagros Mountains, the South Caucasus region, Mesopotamia, Syria and Anatolia were practically speaking inhabited by populations of the same ethno-linguistic background and cultural identity. Since those days, the majority of the population either in Anatolia or in Iran was Turanian. As a matter of fact, the Ilkhanate could work as the ideal prototype for all posterior Oriental monarchs.
Being a paradigm in every sense, the Ilkhanate was a religiously tolerant empire whereby Tengrists, Shamanists, Nestorian, Monophysitic / Miaphysitic and Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Yazidis, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Manichaeans, and others lived peacefully under an initially Buddhist and later Islamic imperial court. The Safavids attempted to imitate and reinstate the Ilkhanate, but they failed because of their sectarianism; when at the end of the 16th c. they favored theologians instead of mystics, they heralded the final fall Iran. Contrarily, the Ottomans ignored the Ilkhanate model only to further expand to troublesome and otherwise worthless territories, which simply made their empire weaker and prompt to multi-division; the poor Ottoman choice was also the result of evil, pseudo-Islamic theological sectarianism – or to put it better sectarian opposition to Safavid sectarianism.
Abaqa Khan (1234–1282) had to engage, during his reign (1265-1282), in many battles against the Golden Horde (for control of, and prevalence in, the Caucasus region; until Berke Khan’s death in 1267), the Chagatai Empire (because Baraq Khan tried to detach Khorasan from the Ilkhanate in 1270), the remains of the Nizari Isma’ilis (that tried to reassemble), and the Mamluks of Egypt (twice: 1271 and 1281, and always within the context of wider alliances, i.e. Golden Horde and Mamluks against the Ilkhanate, the Eastern Roman Empire, Armenia and the last Crusaders). Abaqa Khan was also the son-in-law of Michael VIII Palaiologos of the Eastern Roman Empire, because he got married with the basileus’ daughter Maria Palaiologina, who was initially dispatched to become Hulagu’s wife, but arrived after the great emperor’s death. However, Abaqa Khan was a religiously tolerant Buddhist in whose coins sometimes the Christian cross was depicted under the evocation of the Christian Trinity (in Arabic). Maria Palaiologina played an important role in the Ilkhanate after the death of Doquz Khatun, Hulagu’s Nestorian wife.
Abaqa Khan’s brother Ahmed Tekuder (1246-1284) reigned for two years (1282-1284) after his elder brother died; in young age, he was baptized Nestorian Christian, but later he accepted Islam. However, he faced fierce opposition and many intrigues from the part of Abaqa Khan’s son Arghun, a Buddhist. After many battles (of purely tribal, not religious, background), Tekuder was accused of misgovernance in trial, condemned and executed.
Abaqa enthroned with one of his wives (most probably Dorji Khatun)
Three generations of the Ilkhanate in just one miniature. Abaqa on a horse; his son Arghun stands next to him under the imperial umbrella, holding his own son, Mahmud Ghazan, with his right arm.
Gold Dinar of Abaqa Khan, Isfahan Mint; obverse: (in Arabic) Al-Mulku Lillah, La Ilaha Illa Lah Muhammad Rasul – lallah Sallallahu Alayhi vasallam; reverse: Qa An Shah A’lam Ilkhan Al-A’azam Abaqa Khalada mulk allah
Arghun (1258-1291) was a pro-Christian, Buddhist emperor, who persistently tried to strike a Franco-Mongol alliance against the Muslim control of Palestine and Egypt; he did not view this in terms of religious enmity or rivalry, but clearly as an internal Turanian-Mongolian tribal contention. Any modern scholar, who disregards this reality, totally misinterprets that historical period, therefore failing to represent the main factors’ real motives and targets. Today’s Muslims and Christians, who attempt to view the then historical developments through distortive sectarian lenses, only generate problems; they create confusion to themselves, stay in ignorance, and are subsequently absorbed by fanaticism. The Mamluks were disdained by most of the Turanians (since the early Islamic times) as a disparate and disorderly element with no tribal ancestry, and this was actually a historically correct judgment.
There is no difference in this regard between the Genghisid Buddhist Arghun of the Ilkhanate, the (‘Sunni’) Ottoman Selim I, the (‘Shia’) Safavid Isma’il I, and the (‘Sunni’) Timurid Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire across South Asia. To all of them ancestry mattered; and the Mamluks did not have any. They were Turanian soldiers, who first acted individually, then made an alliance among them and formed a kind of international military class, and in the process ruled various unrelated lands, initially in the name of the caliph. So, their origin could be retraced either to all the branches of Turanian nations or to selected youngsters taken from among other nations, basically from either the Caucasus region or Egypt. However, no one takes seriously a group of experienced military warlords without tribal connection, tradition and ancestry, i.e. a group of deracinated soldiers who therefore fight for material goods and power, and not for honor. This is the whole matter. There is an extra, rather minor point. Many Mamluk originated from the Western Turanian branch of Cumans and the Kipchak, who were never taken in great esteem by the Eastern Turanians.
During Argun’s reign (1284-1291), the various posts were distributed among the emperor’s relatives; Argun’s cousins Jushkab and Baydu were entrusted with Baghdad and Mesopotamia; his brother Gaykhatu was tasked to maintain control in Anatolia, along with his uncle Hulachu. Khorasan was given to Argun’s son Ghazan and his cousin Kingshu. And the Jalayir tribesman Buqa, who helped Argun against his uncle and predecessor, got awarded with the top military and administrative positions. Argun had a close relationship and firm alliance with his powerful uncle Kublai Khan, but his mismanagement of the Ilkhanate was disastrous.
Gaykhatu (in Mongolian: Gaikhat, which means ‘surprising’) reigned for four years (1291-1295), after being the governor of Anatolia during the reign of his brother; although a staunch Buddhist (he was given the Tibetan honorific Rinchindorj, i.e. ‘diamond’), he got married also with Muslim princesses, notably Padishah Khatun who originated from the Qutlugh-Khanid vassal state, which was ruled by an ethnically Khitan dynasty in the region of Kerman. This is one more indication that in reality the Ilkhanate was a totally secular state, and that the ‘court religion’ was an individual expression of spirituality and not an imperial state order imposed on the society. Gaykhatu faced fierce opposition to his election (in the typical Turanian national assembly, the Kurultai, which was held in Ahlat, in today’s Eastern Turkey) by several disorderly elements that supported Baydu, his cousin.
Farman by Gaykhatu, dating back to 1292 and mentioning names of Shiktur Noyan, Aq Buqa, Taghachar and Sad ud-Din Zanjani
Gaykhatu enthroned: from a manuscript of Shams al-Dîn Kâshânî (Bibliothèque nationale de France; Département des Manuscrits, Division orientale, Supplément persan 1443 f.241v)
Gaykhatu’s reign was consumed in numerous internal fights, such as the uprising of Afrasiab of the Hazaraspid dynasty (a Turanian-Iranian vassal state in today’s Lorestan, Western Iran), the rebellion of several Turanian vassal states in Anatolia (notably the Karamanids, the Chobanids, the Eshrefids, and the Menteshe), and the plots of Taghachar in Iran. However, Gaykhatu was the first ruler in Western Asia and Europe to ever print paper money (Jiaochao /交钞), which was first introduced in China ca. 150 years earlier and then widely used at the times of Kublai Khan. In 1295, Gaykhatu, who despite his libertine morals liked Nestorian Christianity, was betrayed by several magistrates, who sided with Baydu, and thus his reign ended with his assassination.
Gaykhatu interrogates Shigtûr Noyan, ally & cousin of Arghun; miniature by Sayf al-Vâhidî. Hérât. Afghanistan (Bibliothèque nationale de France; Département des Manuscrits, Division orientale, Supplément persan 1113, fol. 208)
Baydu ruled only for few months in 1295, failing to oppose the centrifugal forces of the vast state where new populations had meanwhile settled, mixed with indigenous nations, and became a tool in the hands of every experienced and ambitious soldier. Born as a Buddhist, sympathizing with Nestorian Christianity, and wearing a cross, Baydu tried to befriend the outright Muslim majority of his ailing empire. However, his clash with Ghazan, Argun’s son, brought an end to his reign and life.
Mahmud Ghazan (1271-1304) was the first Ilkhan who accepted officially Islam; his reign (1295-1304) seems to be a period of stabilization in a vast empire composed of disparate elements stirred up by many newcomers. His strong advantage was that he had the chance, before rising to the throne of the Ilkhanate in Tabriz at the age of 24, to experience conditions of court plots, family betrayals, tribal rivalries, military conflicts, imperial alliances, administrative doldrums and governmental prowess during four different reigns within the span of only 13 years. He engaged in many wars against the Mamluks of Egypt in Syria and the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia. Despite his conversion to Islam, he pursued the traditional Mongolian tendency to shape a Franco-Mongolian alliance, but he also failed in this effort.
In Ghazan’s times, the traditional religious tolerance that prevailed among Mongolian Turanians and the secular nature of the Ilkhanate took a severe hit; this was not due to Mahmud Ghazan himself, but to people around him. Buddhists were persecuted, Nestorian churches were looted, and Monophysitic/Miaphysitic Christian churches were demolished. A certain portion of the Ilkhanate’s Muslims, particularly those living in Syria and Anatolia, started being fanaticized at those days, due to the false and sectarian rhetoric of the entire Islamic History’s most ominous and most calamitous figure, namely the pseudo-Muslim theologian Ibn Taymiyyah whose demented thoughts represent a form of Christianization of Islam.
Conversion of Ghazan to Islam; Ghazan was born as a Buddhist, and converted to Islam as part of an agreement upon accession to the throne.
Ghazan studying the Quran
This type of religious fanaticism was earlier attested among 4th–5th c. Christians across the Roman Empire. The evil propagators of this fanaticism, who appeared for the first time within the Islamic world during the reign of Ghazan, immediately started dividing Muslims across historically nonexistent sectarian lines. To do this, they carried out an enormous effort of falsification, misrepresenting the earlier Islamic History through use of distortive sectarian lenses. They also spread vicious hatred against previous historians, scholars, erudite polymaths, astronomers, philosophers, poets and thinkers.
Ibn Taymiyyah’s ignorant, heinous and besotted followers diffused the fallacy that they were ‘Sunni’ and that their opponents were ‘Shia’; they therefore tried to adjust the earlier Islamic History as per the needs of their evil mindset, immoral nature, sick mentality, inhuman behavior, materialistic goals, nonsensical ideas, and obscurantist theories. This evil system that had absolutely nothing to do with the true, historical Islam survived during many centuries by means of deep and ceaseless hatred for the others, and through promotion of paranoid sectarianism and evil intolerance. In fact, it was substituted to true Islam and it eradicated the religion preached by Prophet Muhammad.
Then, at the end of the 18th c., this theological system was selected by the colonial powers as a fantastic tool for the final elimination of Islam through its transformation into a monstrous political ideology deprived of any spirituality; it was then adjusted to a modern pseudo-theology and pseudo-ideology (‘political islam’), which have nothing in common with the preaching of Muhammad and the teachings of Ali. Only due to Ibn Taymiyyah’s system, second rank figures of Early Islam, the likes of Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan, Khalid ibn al-Walid, and Aisha Bint Abi Bakr, became important in the sick imagination of the fooled followers of Ibn Taymiyyah and his worthless ‘school’; suffice it to read the true historians of Islam, notably Tabari, and you find all those minor figures reduced in their real dimensions.
For this reason, the ignorant and sectarian followers of Ibn Taymiyyah deliberately disregarded Tabari, which is far more valuable than the Quran and the Ahadith for the History of the first three centuries of the Islamic Era; consequently, today’s fake Muslims, who are the perfect tools of the English and the American secret services, fully misinterpret the Quran (because they don’t rely on Tabari’s Tafsir) and conceal many facts and aspects of the historical truth that are to be found in Tabari’s Tarikh, while offering ridiculous excuses for their absurd propaganda and sectarian evilness.
Ghazan and his wives at the court; from the miniature of a 13th c Mongol manuscript
Seal of Mahmud Ghazan, over the last two lines of his 1302 letter to Pope Boniface VIII. The seal was given to Ghazan by the sixth Great Khan (Emperor ChengZong of Yuan; also known as Temür Khan). In Chinese (王府定國理民之寶) it reads “Seal certifying the authority of his Royal Highness to establish a country and govern its people”. There are two lines vertically overwritten on the seal; the text is Mongolian and the writing is the Old Uyghur script, which was formed on the basis of Aramaic (from the Vatican Archives).
Based on his experience, Ghazan realized that too many powerful noblemen, court advisers, and military warlords constituted a potential danger for any emperor; he therefore eliminated many people around him at the top of the imperial hierarchy. He maintained excellent relations with Yuan China and the Great Khans, while also improving his relations with the Golden Horde; however, he had to engage in battles against the Chagatai khans in Central Asia and to fight with the Mamluks in Egypt. He also faced strong opposition within his empire, but he was able to squelch the revolts of Baltu, Nawruz, and Sulemish. His war against the Mamluks consists in an extra proof that conflicts among the major states of those days mainly did not have religious motives. Ghazan allied with Georgia, Armenia and the Crusaders against the Mamluks, and advanced in Syria, but in the last war between the Mamluks and the Ilkhanate (1299-1303), he failed to invade Egypt.
Mahmud Ghazan, in striking difference with several religious, administrative and military authorities of his empire, was a religiously tolerant ruler and had special interests for the arts, the sciences, the letters; he sponsored every exploration and innovation. Due to his own interest and thanks to his own support, a World History was then elaborated -for the first time in the history of mankind- by Rashid al-Din Hamadani, a Jewish Iranian multilingual polymath and author. Its title shows the nature of the enormous composition (in three volumes) of which only a part was preserved until today: Jāmi’ al-tawarikh (جامع التواريخ / lit. the ‘gathering of histories’, i.e. the collection of earlier written chronicles). It is the first historiography that was based on historical sources of so diverse peoples and civilizations as Iran, Turan, China, the subcontinent, North Africa, and Western Europe
Mahmud Ghazan tolerated all Islamic spiritual orders and schools of philosophy and theology, exempted Christians from taxes, rebuilt Christian churches, preserved the Mongolian oral traditions, and offered safe passage to his empire’s Buddhists who wanted to move to Tibet. Being a multilingual, he supported improvements in technology, arts and crafts, introduced new measures, coinage, administrative methods, and fiscal policy, and reformed his empire’s military organization.
Öljaitü (1280-1316) was the last of all important successors of Hulagu, succeeded his brother, and reigned for 12 years (1304-1316). Not only he represents the Ilkhanate’s religious tolerance and secular character better than any other Ilkhan, but he also seems to have been the man who changed more religions in his life than any other person anytime anywhere! He was born Buddhist; he later accepted Christianity (1291-1295; being baptized as Nikolya – Nicholas); then in 1295, he adhered to Islam, and while an emperor he stopped siding with theologians, who are mistakenly portrayed as ‘Sunni’ today, and wholeheartedly embraced the spiritual faith and the teachings of Muslims, who are currently considered to be ‘Shia’ (those terms were not used at the time and in any case are totally invalid). After he became Muslim, his official imperial name was Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad Khudabanda Öljaitü Sultan
Khan Öljaitü accepts the Yuan China ambassador; miniature from Majma’ al-Tavarikh
Öljaitü supported the sciences, the letters, and the arts, subsidized the works of the Maragheh Observatory, tried hard to establish peace among the four emperors, i.e. the descendants of Genghis Khan (Ilkhanate, Golden Horde, Chagatai, and Yuan China), managed to squelch uprisings in the areas of today’s Afghanistan and North Iraq, advanced in Syria against the Mamluks, invaded Damascus, and in 1315 started an invasion of Hijaz in order to exhume and desecrate the corpses of Abu Bakr and Umar, who were viewed as the true traitors of Prophet Muhammad by the majority of his empire’s Muslims. More importantly, he founded a splendid new capital, Soltaniyeh (southeast of Tabriz), where one can still visit today his mausoleum, which is worldwide acknowledged and admired for its superb dome and impressive architectural structure.
The Letter of Öljaitü to Philippe le Bel, written in classical Mongolian script, bears the Chinese seal reading “真命皇帝天順萬夷之寶”, which was bestowed by Emperor Chengzong of Yuan China. The huge roll measures 302×50 cm.
Translation of Öljeitu’s message by Buscarello de Ghizolfi, on the back side of the letter (visible here)
Öljaitü’s son Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan (1305-1335) ruled for almost 20 years (1316-1335) after his elder brothers and father died. Although very young, Abu Sa’id managed to win over the invading armies of the Golden Horde near Mianeh in Southern Azerbaijan (1319). He was viewed as a ‘hero’ (Baghatur in Mongolian), but he had to face in 1322 the rebellion launched by the infamous mystic named Chupan, who declared himself to be the Mahdi (i.e. the Islamic Messiah) in the Caucasus region. He tried to improve relations with the Delhi Sultanate, the Mamluks, and Venice (commercial treaty of 1320). Known also as al-Sultan al-Adil (the Just Sultan), he composed music, wrote poetry, and was a rarely educated and cultured monarch; that’s why Ibn Battuta wrote very flattering comments about him.
The Ilkhanate times were a transformative period for all the lands between Central Asia and Anatolia; after the 13th c., there was no Persian element left across the heavily Turanized Iran, except the language (Farsi); but Farsi had already been the language of Culture and Poetry of all Turanians. Anyway, after the dissolution of the Ilkhanate and down to our times, in reality “Iran” has been “Turan”, and “Turan” has been “Iran”.
However, after his death and after the one year reign of Arpa Ke’un, the Ilkhanate was dissolved and replaced by a multitude of small states. The territory of Hulagu’s empire was divided among the Muzaffarids, the Kart dynasty, the Chobanids, the Injuids, the Jalayirids, the Sarbadars, the Mihrabanids, the Artukids, the Ayyubids, the Eretnids, the Candar, the Karamanids, and many other tiny kingdoms. This was the situation, when a great conqueror and unifier was born (in 1336): his name was Timur. He was a mighty Chagatai warrior, although one of his legs was shorter than the other; that’s why in Farsi, he became rather known as Timur-i Lang (Tamerlane). About:
Россия, Украина и мир-IV: Континентальные империи и морские державы – фальшивые друзья и единственный враг россиян
Or how the Romanov collapsed only to the benefit of Serbs’ and Greeks’ Evil Elites
Или как Романовы рухнули только в пользу злых элит сербов и греков
Contents
I. Prof. Huntington’s entirely misunderstood Book
II. The Serbian Delusion of Russians
III. The Clash of Civilization? A Mirage come True
IV. Spirituality & Universalism: Divine Earth vs. Unholy Sea
V. Civilized Continental Empires vs. Barbarian Sea Powers
VI. Continental Empires, Sea Powers, and Divisive Traps
VII. The ‘Greek Orthodox’ Delusion of Russians
Содержание
I. Совершенно неправильно понятая книга профессора Хантингтона
II. Сербское заблуждение русских
III. Столкновение цивилизаций? Сбывшийся мираж
IV. Духовность и универсализм: Божественная Земля против Нечестивого Моря
V. Цивилизованные континентальные империи против варварских морских держав
VI. Континентальные империи, морские державы и разделительные ловушки
VII. ‘Греческое православное’ заблуждение русских
Since the conflict in Ukraine affects the entire world, it is essential at this point for me to shift the focus and shed light on two issues that should attract the attention of the Russian leadership, because these thorny matters can turn out to be disastrous traps. When a major readjustment of the world’s strategic balance takes place, it is essential for a rising alliance of nations not to fall into colonial traps set before 200 years in order to ensure continuity of the Western world’s prevalence.
The worst trap that can be set to the rising challengers of the international status quo is the deceitful appearance of a fake friend, i.e. a colonially fabricated state, which appears to be friendly, familiar or able to become a trusted partner of the emerging competitor. But in reality, due to the fact that this state is fully instrumentalized, controlled and maneuvered by the colonial powers, it inevitably functions as a real energy-consumer, mindblower or even ultimate destroyer of the aspiring super-power.
In fact, for the faithless crooks, who rule the colonial countries of the West, it is easy to use religion to make a purposefully fabricated and duly instrumentalized state simulate the ‘friendly’ force and, in the process, generate calamitous engagements for the emerging power.
I. Prof. Huntington’s entirely misunderstood Book
Prof. Huntington’s overwhelmingly notorious and extremely fallacious book on the purported Clash of Civilizations (1996) was -thank God- quite early known to me; the same is valid for the evil intents and purposes that are hidden behind it. One has to recall however that the book had become first famous as a lecture in 1992 and as an article in 1993.
I quite often remember the wonderful, long discussions that I entertained about it in Istanbul (between 1993 and 1997) with my excellent -alas, deceased- Turkish friends, namely the famous film director Halit Refig (Halit Refiğ; 1934-2009) and the leading Kemalist intellectual and economist Prof. Erol Manisali (Erol Manisalı; 1940-2022).
Although they were fully aware of the dangers that such a nefarious book entailed for Turkey (and for many other countries, by the way), I always believed that my friends underestimated its impact, because they did not read the deceitfully written book in the proper manner. The same conclusion is also valid for Francis Fukuyama’s apparently nonsensical but definitely revelatory book about the End of History (1992). Most of the people worldwide have misunderstood these two books, which have functioned like the pillars Boaz (בֹּעַז) and Jachin (יָכִין), ushering us into the era of the Mankind extermination.
Still today, many Russians and many other countries’ natives fail to realize how these two books, as vicious tools in the hands of immoral and heinous rascals, shape and will shape the world, until the moment someone, who achieved to access their true, mystically embedded and secretively encrypted meaning, manages finally to fully outmaneuver them. I am therefore irrevocably convinced that, for this to be done, one needs to read these two blasphemous books in reverse.
Look now at the unprecedented extent of the feat: although Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (1989) against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988), a book that did not herald the eradication of Islam and the extermination of Mankind, the supreme guide (رهبر معظم ایران /rahbar-e moazam-e Iran) of the unfortunate nation (and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) failed to issue two new fatwas for the above mentioned books, which were written by far more ulcerous enemies of the Islamic religion and the Muslim nation.
Nonetheless, the same deep regret and absolutely deprecatory evaluation should be expressed as regards today’s Sunni muftis, imams and theologians, who fail to assess the true nature of the world in which they have been hitherto allowed to live. All these fools, instead of making sense of the terribly disastrous plots that have been mounted against all Muslim nations, seem to be happy enough to perpetually live in the rhythm of the famous song ‘Let’s forget about tomorrow’ (initially sung as ‘Forget domani’ by Katyna Ranieri in the 1964 film The Yellow Rolls-Royce), hypnotizing their misfortunate followers, while also incapacitating all the Muslim states.
Where does Russia stand in this regard?
As a matter of fact, the two ominous books contain approaches and considerations, world views and conclusions that do not bode well for the Russian Federation, the Russians, and Orthodox Christianity. Notions of all these elements we are able to already detect in the ongoing conflict that the Russian administration correctly and accurately named ‘Special Operation’ (специальная военная операция), and not ‘war’.
But do they understand that only the outcome of a conflict is the kaleidoscope of all intents and purposes? As I have never discussed with any of them personally, I don’t venture to respond; however, it is true that when the magistrates and the potentates of a country fail to accurately evaluate the numerous dimensions of a conflict that their enemies invent or ponder over, they sooner or later end up with a defeat. The ensuing debacle can at times be of colossal proportions like the fall of the Romanov dynasty (1917), which was undeniably the top achievement of Russia’s best friends (namely England and France) during WW I.
For the time being and on the basis of his recent articles and interviews, I have the feeling that Dmitri Medvedev has a very correct and very accurate perception of the Ukrainian conflict’s multilayered dimensions; but did he read the aforementioned impious books in reverse? This is crucially essential to ask now, because the Russian Federation faces indeed an existential threat at a moment the Russian leadership has not yet decided to threaten the very existence of Russia’s enemies. This situation -in and by itself- creates already a problem.
Threats are not always visible; sometimes, invisible threats emanate from a state’s ostensible friends. This is so, because sea powers (the likes of England, France and the US), being indisputably inferior, can never win over continental empires in a true and honest military confrontation. That is why they customarily resort to cheating; they thus undertake all types of ruse, deceit, and plot. Their external relations and international involvement constantly and systematically require an outstanding array of theatrical practices.
Their secret masters have actually trained, educated and guided the academic, intellectual, political, economic, and military leadership of all those states to act accordingly. Unfortunately, those who fail to read texts in reverse cannot possibly understand, being thus predestined to inevitably lose and disappear. The epitome of the colonial decision-making, practice, policy, diplomacy and intrusion is the maxim ‘all the world’s a stage’ (from William Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’: Act II Scene VII Line 139). General introductory reading:
Nicholas II failed to save his throne and prolong his dynasty, because he naively accepted the external appearance of certain situations and he failed to unveil the trap set by the scheming Western European powers, i.e. the Serb-Russian alliance or, if you want, the Alliance of Orthodox Nations. To defend his fake friend, namely the French puppet named ‘King of Serbs’, the last Romanov terminated his illustrious dynasty. This does not mean that in 1914 the King of Serbia (Peter I of Serbia/ Пётр I Карагеоргиевич; 1844-1921) said lies to the Russian ambassador, Baron Nicholas Genrikhovich Hartwig (Nikolaus von Hartwig/Николай Генрихович Гартвиг; 1857–1914: assassinated by means of magical invocation on the 10th July, i.e. 12 days after the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo). No! Peter I of Serbia did not pretend to be a friend of Russia, while being an enemy.
At the time, the King of Serbia was sincerely a friend of the Russian monarchy – as a person with feelings, thoughts, opinions and considerations; but he could not see, feel or detect how he functioned, placed on the European chessboard by his ‘gods’, namely all the various French statesmen, politicians, diplomats, military officers, agents, ‘advisors’, academics, intellectuals and businessmen who had created Serbia in the first place (from 1804 until the Ottoman recognition of the Kingdom of Serbia: de facto in 1867, de jure in 1878, and involving diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire were established in 1886). {I don’t mention herewith the short-lived Kingdom of Serbia (1718–1739), because it was an Austrian-Hungarian fabrication.} Since Day 1, the entire Serb military, political, economic, and academic-intellectual leadership followed the path of their predecessors, i.e. the early 19th c. rebels who were duly utilized by France as expendable material against the Ottoman Empire; in fact, it was sort of ‘Arab Spring operation’ of those days. Thus, the entire establishment of Serbia functioned inevitably as a trap, first for the Serbs themselves and subsequently for the Russians.
It was therefore inevitable that the Serbian royal and political class foolishly believed the pro-Serbian feelings of the French criminals. However, the undeniable fact is that, exposed to many great powers, the Serbians could never function properly as a tiny, independent nation around Belgrade. The colonial trap was later strengthened with the formation of the Pan-Slavic movement, notably after the Prague Slavic Congress was first held in 1848.
Things turned worse, because various local stooges of high rank (generals, ministers and academics) were deceitfully flattered with their calamitous initiation in the filthy rites of French and English Freemasonry (and the ensuing financial benefits), and they therefore willingly worked for the interests of their masters, i.e. the French and the English colonial gangs, without understanding or imagining the extent to which they contributed to the engulfment of their country. They helped further diffuse the unnecessary, divisive and catastrophic Anti-German Pan-Slavic delusion either in Russia or in Serbia.
The three emperors meeting at Skierniewice on 15 September 1884: an Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, Ottoman, Iranian and Chinese alliance at the end of the 19th c. would save the entire mankind from two world wars, one cold war, and numerous other conflicts.
At the end of the whole process, Nicholas II failed to detect the masterfully prepared Serbian trap that the French had long prepared against their ally whom they so much loathed. How could it happen otherwise? So many of the last czar’s prime ministers, ministers and generals were Freemasons and members of French Freemasonic lodges that they totally obscured Nikolai II Alexandrovich’s sight and vision; their endless, unreserved and sophisticated lies, plots, fake promises, dissimulated proclivities, and insidious activities helped only fool the Russian monarch.
When it comes to the creation of states in Europe, what matters most is the location that these fabrications have on the European chessboard. The ‘gods’ (or creators) of these fake states know how to play the game of non-reversing mirrors very well, when creating these commodities. This means that they know the correct position where they have to locate their tools, which are named ‘states’; this has nothing to do with ‘historical nations’. Why? Because the criminal scoundrels that govern the sea powers do not want to either support or revive historically known ethnic nations; they only fabricate civic nations to which they merely provide the fake story, i.e. the absolutely false and ludicrous narrative that their stooges locally teach as the supposed ‘history of the glorious ancestors’.
So, we can conclude that the French produced (or literally ‘gave birth to’) Serbia at a spot where it could never function as a proper ally of Russia. Why this is so we can easily assess! By establishing an alliance with the microscopic (or rather nanoscopic) ‘nation’ of Serbia, Imperial Russia would be forced to occasionally clash with other major continental empires, notably Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Caliphate (and later Imperial Germany), which was absurd for Russia, disastrous for Christian Orthodoxy, and calamitous for all the nations that lived in peace in the wider region.
This conclusion can be thoroughly corroborated following the consultation of the proper maps. Compare the territorial increase of Serbia from 1912 to 1918 and the territorial loss of Russia during the same period! Serbia’s population increased from 2.9 million to 4.5 million in 1914 and to 12 million in 1918; the tiny Danube kingdom with an area smaller than 35000 km2 in 1912 became a sizeable state with an area ca. 250000 km2, i.e. slightly less than that of Italy, a major European power! Contrarily, Russia lost vast territories with the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (3 March 1918; Брестский мирный договор). This disaster occurred only due to the trap set by France and England to the Russian czars; the trap’s name was ‘Serbia’; Pan-Slavism was merely the Marketing campaign of the trap.
The territorial gains of Serbia between 1912 and 1918
Europe in 1914
Russian borders at the time of Brest Litovsk treaty (3 March 1918)
Russian territorial losses as per the Brest Litovsk Treaty
How should we therefore read books and texts in reverse, timely spotting traps and adequately outplotting the degenerate sea powers?
III. The Clash of Civilization? A Mirage come True
Prof. Huntington’s story is not a historical book at all; every simple reader can understand this, because it is well known that, throughout 5-6 millennia of Human History, there has never been a ‘clash of civilizations’. On the 17th September 2005, writing for the portal Buzzle, I totally deplored the nonsensical effort of Turkey and Spain to establish a ridiculous organization in hypothetical, yet idiotic, opposition to the said book. The title was “The Clash and the Alliance of Civilizations: too much ado for nothing!”; the article has been widely republished, commented, quoted, referred to, and … misunderstood. You can find this article here:
The rather brief, 2300-word article starts from a very simple, undeniably correct, point that the quasi-totality of the readers of Huntington’s story were fooled enough not to take into consideration. However, I must admit that, quite deceptively, the trap was set beforehand, thanks to the book’s title itself! I therefore found it compulsory to start my article from the primordial point and to refute the falsehood, which is included in the Prof. Huntington’s devilishly misleading title.
My article’s first unit focused on «‘Clash of Civilizations’: an irrelevant and a-historical concept.».
The article’s three other units were the following:
«The Divide ‘East vs. West’ is an Orientalist, Colonial Aberration»
«Impossibility of Clash of Civilizations in Our Era»
«There can never be an ‘Alliance of Civilizations’!»
My approach was quite simple; you can never oppose something that does not exist. This is correct at all times, except you are as stupid and as the pathetic as Erdogan, who -due to his nauseating ignorance, detrimental lack of education, and sly yet mean character- fell in the trap and, quite ludicrously, added fuel to the fire – only to the detriment of his own country.
Here you have comments about my article, and my denunciation of some of them:
Why do I claim that there have never been any clashes of civilization anytime, anywhere, and under any circumstances whatsoever?
Civilization is commonly defined as a high “stage of human social and cultural development and organization” or “any complex society characterized by the development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system)”
People, societies, nomads, states, hordes, tribes and armies never made war one upon the other, because of ‘civilization’ or due to difference of civilization; even in cases as per which (through a racist viewpoint – and this is absolutely impermissible for humans to accept) «barbarians waged war on a supposedly ‘civilized’ kingdom», the war never occurred because the barbarians envied the supposedly ‘civilized’ kingdom or the latter wanted to ‘civilize’ them. What was at stake was either of spiritual-religious-moral nature or of economic motives; in many cases, it was a matter of survival. However, this means that there was never a truly speaking ‘clash of civilizations’.
Religious wars are of very diverse nature, and quite often they are fought only for material benefits and royal prestige, but they never constitute ‘wars’ (or a ‘clash’) of civilization. This is so because, in any historical period, religion constitutes only a small fraction of the civilization of a nation; this means that if you describe a ‘clash of religions’ as ‘clash of civilizations’, you will end up in an over-generalization without purpose. And as it is very well known, many times religious wars occurred between people who had the same civilization.
Jehu of Israel bows in front of Shalmaneser III of Assyria from the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (858-824 BCE): Assyria’s wars with other Oriental states was not a ‘Clash of Civilizations’.
The Roman Emperor Valerian, captive after his defeat at Urhoy-Urfa/Edessa of Osrhoene (260 CE) is depicted as kneeling in front of the victorious Iranian Emperor Shapur I (215-270; ruled after 240) in the bas-reliefs of Naqsh-e Rustam. The Iranian-Roman wars were not a ‘Clash of Civilizations’.
Taizong (598-649; reigned after 626), founding Emperor of the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), gives audience to the Tibetan ambassador Gar Tongtsen Yulsung (painting by Yan Liben).
King Suvarnapuspa of Kucha (600-625 CE) as depicted in Kizil Cave 69 (Eastern Turkestan/Xinjiang); he was a vassal of the Western Turkic Khaganate. Chinese Emperor Taizong’s war against Kucha was not a ‘Clash of Civilization’.
Naval battle scene between the Eastern Roman fleet and the attacking navies of the combined Eastern Roman rebel (Thomas the Slav) and Islamic imperial forces; the event took place in 821-823. The Eastern Roman fleet makes ostensible use of the Roman fire (πυρ ρωμαϊκόν/pyr rhomaikon) that the Western European mendacious academics deliberately distorted as ‘Greek fire’. The numerous wars between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphates did not constitute a ‘Clash of Civilizations’, even more so because almost every time numerous dissidents from either sides fought with the enemy of their state.
The Battle of Chaldiran (depicted at the Chehel Sotoun Pavilion in Esfahan) between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran (1514) was not an episode of the otherwise nonexistent ‘Clash of Civilizations’.
Then, why did Prof. Huntington give a so bizarre title to his book?
This is exactly what only astute and perspicacious readers can assess; in other words, this is up to those who can read the text in reverse. It is again the same game of non-reversing mirrors; Prof. Huntington projected onto the past what he guided experts, statesmen, military officers, diplomats, politicians, academics, intellectuals, agents and others to create in the future.
In other words, he made all of his gullible readers (involving heads of state, premiers, ministers, ambassadors, professors, and others) ‘see’ in the past something that never existed, because he merely fabricated a mirage (or Fata Morgana) that he placed in the future.
In other words those, who are properly instructed as to how to read and implement the book contents, will produce a situation (namely the clash of civilizations) that the idiots (like Erdogan and many other heads of state, prime ministers, etc. all over world) will -very mistakenly- view as the comeback of an earlier state of affairs. But, as I said as early in 2005, no clash of civilization has ever existed in the past.
Then, the answer to the earlier question is very simple:
Prof. Huntington did not give a bizarre title to his book. The clash of civilizations that he wrote about is merely the clash of civilizations that he wanted to generate in the future in a way to trigger numerous wars in many parts of the world to the benefit of his financiers. To do so, he fooled most of his readers that the clash of civilizations had already taken place whereas this is not the case.
IV. Spirituality & Universalism: Divine Earth vs. Unholy Sea
Once deeply and fully comprehended, Prof. Huntington’s book is a harmless amount of paper waste that anyone can use for whatever purpose one may choose; recycled is better than read.
All the same, I have to state that governments, administrations, establishments, military academies, diplomacies, academic institutions and mass media all over the world must take into account, when they define their decision-making, the fact that the outright majority of bureaucrats, magistrates and officers in the UK, US, NATO and other Western countries have already been formed and educated in the darkness and the negativity of this prejudicial book. A primary task for governments in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Central-Eastern Europe is therefore to outmaneuver the evil plan encrusted in the lines of the scheming professor’s traveler’s companion to the Hell.
If World History is studied in the light of Spiritual Ontology, the definition of the major continental empires as creative forces of the Earth will help explorers and investigators realize the true but deceitful nature of the modern world and identify sea powers as destructive forces of the Sea. Today’s major powers in Asia, namely China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Iran, are in reality the offspring of the main historical empires that successively developed illustrious civilizations whose achievements are still unmatched by the Western sciences and technologies. The same is valid for several outstanding states in Africa and Latin America. For all of them, it is surely imperative to explore the methods of creative governance that their forefathers employed and to follow in their footsteps.
Continental empires are expanding structures that reflect human societies in their creative dimension. History, as we know it, was formed exclusively by continental empires; to them the various seas were (and could only be) the periphery, which would eventually be used in a positive and creative manner. The Achaemenid Empire of Iran offered a groundbreaking example in this regard; by re-opening the Ancient Suez Canal (also known as the Canal of the Pharaohs), the Iranian imperial authorities offered themselves another transportation means in order to ensure communication between the satrapy of Egypt and Fars (: Persia), Iran’s mainland and imperial headquarters. This was a creative innovation indeed. About:
To make a striking contrast between the virtuous continental empires and the evil sea powers, I have now to offer a dramatic comparison; when the Iranians intended to further pursue the expansion of their already vast empire and to invade Egypt and Cush (Napata in Ancient Sudan, i.e. the historical Ethiopia), they undertook (under Kambujiya/Cambyses; reigned 530-522 BCE) a land invasion of the Valley of the Nile – and not an overseas maritime expedition. The Iranian occupation of Egypt ushered Egyptians into an era of peace and this was a very positive development, particularly if we take into consideration the terrible divisions that the country had known for centuries even before the three Assyrian invasions, 150 years earlier.
Achaemenid Iran: from Ukraine to Sudan and from Albania to Tibet
Iranians could invade Egypt by circumnavigating the Arabian Peninsula but they knew that this would certainly have an ominous end; imperial expansion is far more important an attempt than mere transportation. Uniting lands under a universal scepter is a divine blessing; sending messages and transporting merchandises sold or purchased elsewhere are ordinary human activities. You can never compare the former to the latter. This worldview or world conceptualization was common among all the important nations of the Antiquity. The valorization of the Earth derived from critical passages of their holy books; it was a matter of Cosmogony and Cosmology.
On the other hand, the inferiority, transience and profanity of the Sea (: Salt Waters), the marginal role that it had to play in human affairs, and the preservation of life far from it were also key topics of the most civilized ancient nations’ holy books. In striking contrast with Ether, Soft Waters, Earth and Air, the Sea represented only an unholy element of chaos, disorder, uselessness and unholiness. For the Ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Cushites, Hittites and Iranians, the seas were the threatening barbarian periphery; no divine attribute was given to this element. It is irrevocably imperative that, when it comes to human affairs, namely prophecy, eschatology, and soteriology, there is no Salvation in the Sea. The impure element will be canceled and, by definition, it has no place either in the Original Paradise or in the Kingdom of the Heaven.
If we leave Spiritual Ontology and History of Religions aside, we can conclude that the ensuing historical fact proved to be that islands never generated civilizations; on the contrary, they merely reflected the civilizations developed in the lands in the vicinity of which these islands happened to be. It is noteworthy that, only in later periods (1st millennium BCE) and among less advanced civilizations (namely the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Romans, etc.), we attest divinities of the sea. Indicatively I add that the Ancient Yemenites (Sheba, Awsan, Qataban, Himyar and Hadhramaut), who developed a great continental civilization while also engaging in extensive maritime activities, colonizing Somalia, Socotra, and the Eastern African coast land, and sailing to India and beyond, did not worship any major divinity of the sea. This assessment only reconfirms my earlier statement that, contrarily to the holy element of Soft Waters (later mythologized among Greeks and Romans as the ‘Ocean’, i.e. the Soft Waters stream that surrounds the Earth), the Sea (Salt Waters) is an impure and profane element.
Consequently, we can realize why sea powers do not and cannot become proper empires. This is so, because they lack land continuity; accordingly, people living in islands cannot fathom the concept of universal empire, which exemplified all major historical empires. Yet, universalism (or ecumenism) is conditio sine qua non for the foundation of a real empire, and this fact became well known as early as the World History’s first empire, namely that of Sargon of Akkad, before 4500 years. It goes without saying that all empires started first as small kingdoms, and all theoretical considerations appeared after a significant land expansion. This means that land invasions are in reality enthralling methods of spiritual initiation for every good king and for his gallant soldiers and armies. Violence is holy, whereas absence thereof is profane and destructive.
The first empire of World History and the beginning of Universalism: the Akkadian Empire of Sargon of Akkad
Among all the major historical empires, the Roman Empire constitutes an oddity. Although it undeniably expanded across vast lands in Europe, Africa and Asia, in spite of the fact that it willingly attempted to be positioned in the series of historical empires that originate from Mesopotamia (translation imperii), and notwithstanding its apparent, continental character, it ended up with the formation of a truly bizarre imperial structure around a sea: the Mediterranean.
The Roman Empire under Octavian Augustus
The Roman Empire under Trajan
As such, the Roman Empire was the materialization of a rather counterfeit universalism, because the earlier empires and their theoretical backgrounds made full abstraction of the sea. Imperial considerations matter greatly for Russia today, because the Eastern Roman Empire functioned as a pertinent continental empire, fully detaching itself from the already briefly described Roman particularity, and in the process, epitomizing (as New Rome) what Third Rome (Muscovy-Russia) would, could and should be. About:
V. Civilized Continental Empires vs. Barbarian Sea Powers
To make a clear distinction between civilization and barbarism, we can compare the Achaemenid Iranian conquest of Egypt (525 BCE) with the Spanish invasion of Mexico; there is an enormous difference between the two events that are separated from one another by more than 2000 years. The first event did not cause even one thousandth (1/1000) of the bloodshed caused in Mexico by the Spanish colonial monsters that were fully conscious of the fact that they fought with detrimentally superior weapons (firearms).
Plainly acting as a continental empire, Achaemenid Iran fully respected the Ancient Egyptian population, civilization and local administration. The Achaemenid shahs were depicted as typical Egyptian pharaohs with complete Egyptian hieroglyphic names and in Ancient Egyptian art form; the Iranian satraps’ close cooperation with the major sacerdotal colleges (notably the Iwnw-Heliopolitan priesthood) ensured continuity for the local civilization, peace and freedom for the Egyptian people, prosperity for the imperial administration, and seamless integration of Egypt in the empire. Later, the Iranian pattern of local rule, provincial administration, and peaceful annexation was maintained by the Ptolemies and the Romans. It was an undeniable success of religious tolerance, socio-behavioral distinction, and cultural persistence.
The Achaemenid Emperor Kambujiya (Cambyses), depicted as Egyptian, kneels in front of Apis.
Darius I the Great as depicted in Iran (Behistun reliefs)
All five Pharaonic names of Darius I the Great in Egyptian hieroglyphics
The Iranians did not force the Egyptians to become Zoroastrians, contrarily to the monstrous and evil attitude of the Spanish conquistadores who executed scores of innocent, imperially proud, and spiritually superior Mexicans, who did not accept to change their religion and become ‘Christian’. The Iranians did not demand of the Egyptians to learn Old Achaemenid Iranian, write in cuneiform writing, accept the Iranian culture, and adopt the Iranian customs and way of life. Furthermore, the Iranians did not impose a loathsome tyranny on the Egyptians.
Quite contrarily, the cruel Spanish rule over Mexico caused an unprecedented genocide (in the name of Jesus), whereas those who survived had to learn and write Spanish, accept the obnoxious Castilian culture, and imitate the cruel behavior of their conquerors; however, even in that case, they were viewed as an inferior race and treated with incommensurable contempt. This concerned even the mestizos, every offspring of mixed race (Mexican/indigenous and Iberian).
The death of the Aztec King Moctezuma, depicted in the ‘Florentine Codex’, which is an opus of 12 volumes written by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. The original title was ‘La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España’ (The Universal History of the Things of New Spain)
Aztec ruler Xicoténcatl and Hernán Cortés from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala
Nuño de Guzmán & Tlaxcalan allies conquering Michoacan
The Battle of Olumba; 7 July 1520
Cortés and his wife, the treacherous indigenous woman La Malinche, meet Moctezuma Tenochtitlán, 8 November 1519
La Malinche carrying arms in the Battle of Tepotzotlán (1520), from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala
The battle of Otumba, 7 July 1520
“La noche triste” (the sad night); 1 July 1520: when Hernán Cortés and his gangsters, along with their native allies, were defeated and driven out of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, losing two thirds of their force.
Fully functioning as a sea power, pseudo-Christian Spain (considered as heretic by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople at the time) disrespected the populations that the conquistadores enslaved overseas, spreading for the first time in World History racism outside the limits of Western Europe. Intentionally, viciously and bestially, the 16th c. Spanish Jihadists {this is the correct term!} destroyed a civilization incomparably higher than theirs in every sense. The criminal gangsters dismantled every sense of local administration and imposed Spanish criteria, measures and concepts, therefore decimating the local populations and extending their bias, bigotry, hatred of the other, cruelty and inhumanity across other continents. About:
The Spaniards set the pattern for the other Western Europeans who imitated their barbarism; I am herewith referring to the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch and the English. We can certainly discern variances of colonial practice, but this fact does not change in anything the appalling nature of the Western European racism, odium and inhumanity. The French were worse than the Spaniards, and the English proved to be worse than the French, because they wanted to “make the world England” – which is the most racist tenet ever uttered in Word History.
Closing this brief description, I have however to add that the Ancient World’s major sea powers, namely the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, were not known for similar cruelty; we don’t have any textual source or archaeological evidence to support such claim.
All the same, there was certainly an abominable model that the spiritual masters of the conquistadores, i.e. the apostate popes of Rome and the Renaissance intellectuals, certainly had in mind before sending the conquistadores to butcher the civilized indigenous populations of the lands that they colonized.
It consists in one of the World History’s bleakest pages of utmost barbarism, inhuman monstrosity, and repugnant cruelty. The abhorrent deed that served as model for the conquistadores was perpetrated by a tiny, racist and uncivilized state that the Western colonial countries have always exalted. Quite interestingly, during the Christian Eastern Roman imperial times, the past of this abominable and outrageous statelet was deplored and detested, as it was considered an outcast of the civilized world.
Paranoid gangster, blasphemous atheist, and barbarian Pericles (495-429 BCE) was an ignominious perpetrator of series of crimes against the Mankind; however, for the needs of the villainous agenda that provided for the corruption of the modern world, he was shamelessly and absurdly depicted (1852) as an exemplary statesman (Pericles’ Funeral Oration / Perikles hält die Leichenrede) by the German painter Philipp Foltz, a Freemason. It was this cruel beast’s partners, colleagues, associates, pupils and followers, who carried out the genocide of the Melians. The History of Ancient Greece is a monstrous fabrication undertaken by lewd Modern European intellectuals, mendacious academics, and obscene pseudo-artists.
This statelet is Athens, i.e. the Mediterranean basin’s most disgusting ignominy. Only in modern times, the sea powers’ criminal and racist academics and statesmen turned Ancient Athens’ pedophilia, sexual anomaly, perversion and disgusting darkness into absurdly applauded felony. During the Peloponnesian War, which was a tribal butchery that lasted almost three decades (431-404 BCE) and constituted Ancient Greece’s greatest ‘contribution’ to World History, Athens (a sea power and corrupt republic) opposed the Kingdom of Sparta (a minor continental power).
As Melos Island (a tiny independent statelet) sided with Sparta (due to their common Dorian origin), the Athenian fleet sieged the misfortunate island (416 BCE) and in the process, due to the heroic stance of the local population, the cruel and inhuman Athenian soldiers executed the entire male population to the last, also selling the women and the children as slaves. Of course, as it always happens with sea powers, Athens was unconditionally vanquished and the cursed city was set ablaze by the victorious Spartans, but the cruel Melian genocide remained in World History as the best example of Greek barbarism and sea power inhumanity.
The fact that this horrible deed did not prevent Western European intellectuals and academics from lauding and extolling Ancient Athens clearly demonstrates their biased nature and evil character. As Renaissance intellectuals and Catholic monks were well versed in Thucydides, who authored his biased narrative about the war, must have noticed the merciless attitude of the Athenian rascals. They subsequently presented it as an example to the uncouth and ruthless conquistadores whose deeds fully demonstrated that sea powers can never be civilized. About:
As regards the so-called Ancient Greece, i.e. the meridional periphery of the Balkan Peninsula south of Ancient Macedonia and Ancient Illyria, one has to admit that the great exposure to the sea, the lack of a major river, and the absence of vast plains or a plateau prevented the region from becoming the cradle of a major civilization. That’s why it was always a marginal region for all the empires in which it belonged: the Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Caliphate.
VI. Continental Empires, Sea Powers, and Divisive Traps
Whereas continental empires expand on land, sea powers disembark in faraway lands only to spread chaos and diseases, perpetrate massacres, and destroy cultures and civilizations. After the first stage of Modern European colonialism, which helped demonstrate the Western European gangsters’ cruelty at the material level, three sea powers (France, Holland and England) created enormous colonial ’empires’ in Asia and Africa, carrying out massive spiritual genocides. If the sudden collapse of the great continental empires of Mexico and Peru was due to the unmatched superiority of the Spaniards in terms of weapons (firearms), the disintegration of the Asiatic continental empires was in fact never completed (thank God!).
As there was no more armament superiority, the sea powers employed ruse and deception against the Ottomans, the Safavid-Afshar-Qajar Iranians, the Great Mughal Empire, and Qing China. Only China managed to resist, in spite of the Opium Wars, and of the partly occupation (or colonization) of Chinese coast lands. When the sea powers attempted to oppose Imperial Russia from further expanding in Central Asia, started the Great Game, which continues down to our days.
The most commonly known trap that sea powers invented and implemented against the continental empires is the divisive practice, which is rather known thanks to the Latin maxim ‘divide et impera’ (‘divide and rule’). This practice was early attested in the Antiquity among continental kingdoms fighting for prevalence in a wider region of secondary importance where many smaller states and nomads lived; the ancient kings and emperors used their armies for lands of crucial importance (against main opponents) and their diplomacies for region of lesser significance.
Since the 16th c., sea powers’ deceitful practices against the great Asiatic continental empires involved the formation of trade companies on the territory of the targeted states, the dictation of trade terms, the instigation of numerous local rebellions, the invention and establishment of fake states, notably Afghanistan, the utilization of religious leaders against kings and emperors, the support of locally dissident voices, the preaching of divisive beliefs, the diffusion of controversial ideas, the propagation of the Western European modernism and behavioral system, and the activation of endless wars among the major continental empires (Ottoman Empire vs. Russia, Ottoman Empire vs. Iran, Russia vs. Iran, Iran vs. Mughal Empire, Russia vs. China).
When an Italian painter (Stefano Torelli) depicts Catherine’s Victory over the Ottomans (1772) in this manner, it is high time for Russians to find out what went wrong; Russia should have made common front with the Ottomans, the Iranians, the Mughal and the Chinese against the colonial powers of the West.
Alexey Danilovich Kivshenko (Алексей Данилович Кивше́нко; 1851-1895) portrays Nizhny Novgorod dragoons pursuing the Ottoman army on the road to Kars during the Battle of Alaca-dağ (Aladzha/Авлияр-Аладжинское сражение) 3 October 1877; the Russian-Ottoman wars were reciprocally detrimental.
Miniature from the Süleymanname shows the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent advancing on Nakhchivan (1554) in one of the numerous Ottoman-Iranian wars that were detrimental to both continental empires.
Official copy of the treaty of Erzurum, between the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran (1823); Iranian manuscript, black ink on paper, leather binding 19.7 by 13.4 cm, 21 leaves plus 2 flyleaves, 11 lines to the page, written in nasta’liq script with keywords picked out in red, catchwords, margins ruled in gold, camel-coloured leather binding and outer hard cover with ribbon. It consists in an account of the peace treaty made between Iran and the Ottoman Empire; the author is Mirza Muhammad ‘Ali, chief secretary and private steward to Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza. In the beginning of the 19th c., the incessant wars between the Ottomans and the Iranians had already lasted for about 300 years and brought both empires to the brink of collapse.
Nader Shah Afshar of Iran invades the Mughal Empire (Hindustan); in this painting, he is depicted mounting his horse at the sack of Delhi 1738-1740. The war between two major Asiatic continental empires had calamitous impact on both.
The negotiations prior to the sack of Delhi by Nader Shah Afshar of Iran, as depicted in the miniature of a historical manuscript.This disastrous war was beneficial only to the sea powers (England, France and Holland) that found it easier to pursue their infiltration in either empires.
Alexander II and Naser al-Din Shah Qajar in St. Petersburg (1873); when the major continental empires stopped warring against one another, they were already gravely weakened and confused enough to fall victims of the plots mounted by the sea powers.
From the French publication ‘Le Petit Journal’, 23 April 1916: the Russian in Esfahan. The disastrous pro-Serbian and pro-Greek choice of Nicholas II cost him his throne. During the First World War, the Qajar Empire of Iran collapsed and was divided into ever shifting zones of influence and occupation: Russian, Ottoman and English. The problem is that the Romanovs collapsed in 1917, the Ottomans disappeared few years later, and the English managed to overthrow the Qajar dynasty in 1925, imposing as shah of Iran an ignorant and uneducated soldier who did not know even the history of his own country. English Orientalists gave him his supposedly royal name: Pahlavi. All three continental empires paid dearly for the mistakes they made for hundreds of years.
Russian delegates (鄂羅斯国/E-luosi-guo) in Beijing in 1761 From 万国来朝图 (: all nations came to court), which is a monumental painting (3×2 m) depicting foreign delegations paying visit and tribute to Emperor Qianlong.
The Treaty of Livadia (里瓦幾亞條約/Liwaji ya tiao-yue) signed between Russia and China in Crimea, on 2 October 1879; although Russia returned a part of Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang) that it had occupied, the treaty was viewed as so detrimental (currently described by the Chinese authorities as ‘unequal treaty’, like many other similar treaties that Qing China was forced to sign in the 19th c.) that the Chinese ambassador Chonghou (崇厚), when he returned, was accused of high treason and condemned to death. Only the international reaction, his successor’s success in the renegotiation of the treaty terms, and the signature of a new Russian-Chinese treaty led to a decision change which enabled him to pay an indemnity and retire.
In the 19th c., when the Great Game started, the sea powers managed to infiltrate among many small nations that belonged in different continental empires, utilize numerous individuals, educate numerous rebels (by means of ‘studies’ in Western universities), promise national independence to the supposedly ‘oppressed’ nations of the continental empires, etc. Aptly utilizing religious or linguistic affinities, the colonial agents managed to create alliances between an imperial administration and representatives of several indigenous nations in another continental empire, notably Czarist Russia and the Armenians, Aramaean Nestorians (falsely called ‘Assyrians’), Eastern Romans (Rumlar/Romioi), and Pontus ‘Greeks’ (: Eastern Romans) of the Ottoman Empire.
Then, by seemingly making the Russians imagine that their infiltration inside the Ottoman Empire increased (whereas the Western colonials definitely controlled these minorities by means of bribery and corruption), they turned them against another major continental empire, i.e. the Ottoman Caliphate. But this development was beneficial to the sea powers’ agenda and catastrophic for both Eurasiatic empires. About:
Long before Nicholas II, many other czars committed disastrous mistakes for the continental empire that they had to solidly maintain and properly expand. It was absurd for Russians to support anti-Ottoman activities and rebellions of the Eastern Roman Orthodox subjects of the Caliphate. Russia’s monumental failure was plainly demonstrated in 1917, but we have first to analyze the reasons and to offer several examples, before examining the disastrous results that the Romanovs brought upon their heads with their ‘Greek Orthodox’ delusion.
The term ‘Greek Orthodox’ is an ahistorical, deceitful, modern construction; there was never such nation or people or church for the very simple reason that for all Christians, before and after all the theological disputes and the schisms, ‘Greek’ was a shameful and profane name and entity as an idolatrous, polytheistic and utterly blasphemous nation. Actually, there was never an ancient Greek nation, and -more importantly- there was never an ancient Greek state, be it a kingdom, a tyranny, a tribal union or an ignominious ‘republic’. ‘Greece’ was merely a geographical notion to describe the South Balkan confines south of Mount Olympus; ‘Greeks’ (‘Hellenes’) was a noxious recapitulative term applied to a group of tribes (Achaeans, Ionians, Aeolians, and Dorians) that lived among other populations (Pelasgians, Illyrians, etc.), which were not considered ‘Greeks’. Furthermore, numerous foreign slaves, notably Scythians, lived in some cities-states.
Homer was therefore not a ‘Greek’, but an Ionian of Anatolia, culturally unrelated to South Balkans; yet, when he used a recapitulative name for the participants of the naval military expedition against Troy (Taruisha), he basically called them ‘Danaans’. In the external, Oriental historiographical sources (Hittite, Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Old Achaemenid Iranian, Ancient Hebrew, etc.), we never attest a recapitulative term about all these marginal tribes. This is normal, because the plethora of the historically unimportant and meaningless Ancient Greek ‘statelets’ never united in one kingdom. ‘Greeks’ (Graeci) is merely a posterior, Latin name by which the Romans designated this collection of tribes and clans. Useless to add that to the Romans Graecia (Greece) was geographically, ethnically, culturally, linguistically, spiritually and socio-behaviorally very different and absolutely distinct from Macedonia, Illyria, and Thrace in the Balkans, and from Lycia, Caria, Lydia, and Phrygia in Anatolia.
The fabricated narrative that the mendacious Western European academics forged about ‘Ancient Greece’ does not include any element of historical truth; that’s why most of the people today do not know that the outright majority of the Ancient Greeks accepted to be part of the Iranian Empire and did not oppose the Iranian armies when they advanced south of the vassal state of Macedonia. The so-called glorious moments of Ancient History, namely the likes of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea, are pathetic lies about some blasphemous idiots who dared oppose the advice of the Oracle at Delphi (Ancient Greeks’ foremost shrine) not to oppose the Iranian army.
The so-called Ancient Greeks were so disparate tribal elements that, despite Alexander the Great forced most of them to unify under Macedonian scepter, after his death, they continued living in the disorderly and haphazardous manner of theirs, being impossible to incorporate in any of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Attalid Anatolia (Pergamon), Seleucid Syria or Ptolemaic Egypt (although Antiochus III the Great attempted to achieve it in 192-188 BCE, only to be stopped by the expanding Romans). Simply, Ancient Greeks were unfit to civilize. That is why the Romans, extending their control throughout South Balkans in the middle of the 2nd c. BCE, were forced to decimate them, notably during the conquest of Corinth (146 BCE).
Attalid Anatolia, Seleucid Syria, Macedonia, and the disparate, chaotic and worthless ‘Greek’ states of South Balkans around 200 BCE
The Seleucid advance which triggered the Roman interference: Western Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula at 192 BCE
The Roman-Seleucid wars
Annexed to Rome, Greece became a rather unimportant province strongly characterized by population movements (local populace relocating elsewhere and foreign populations settling in the lands south of Macedonia), aggressive invasions, and spiritual-religious-cultural Orientalization. The name ‘Greece’ was forgotten and that is why the lands south of Macedonia became part of the Roman province of Macedonia (147 BCE). The lands of ‘Greece’ were later detached from the senatorial propraetorial province of Macedonia by Emperor Octavian Augustus, during a major administrative re-arrangement (27 BCE); they formed a separate Roman province, but they were named Achaia. This shows that, even as a geographical term, ‘Greece’ was an obsolete name.
Of course, one has to add also that the descendants of the Ionians and the Aeolians in Western Anatolia inhabited several other Roman provinces, notably Asia (129 BCE; established after the dissolution of Attalid Pergamon), Bithynia and Pontus (63 BCE), Galatia (25 BCE), Cappadocia (17 CE), Lycia and Pamphylia (43 and 74 CE), Pontus (62 CE), and Commagene (72 CE), being however ethnically, linguistically and culturally amalgamated with numerous other Anatolian nations, the Iranian settlers of the Achaemenid times, the Roman ruling class, and the remnants of various invaders, notably the Galatians. This means that, in the 1st and 2nd c. CE, those Anatolians were entirely disconnected in every sense from the historical process that took place in South Balkans (‘Achaia’, not Greece).
With the Edict of Caracalla (212 CE; ‘Constitutio Antoniniana’) all the free citizens throughout the empire (‘Provincia Achaia’ included) were declared ‘Roman citizens’. This overwhelming imperial change irrevocably put the tombstone on the remainder of the ‘Greek’ tribes either in Anatolia or South Balkans; this is so because it proved that they were imperially or politically extinct. Then, the groundbreaking edict was enthusiastically accepted across the empire; this fact demonstrated that, except the Romans (who were amalgamated with most of the nations of the empire), no other nation existed west of Euphrates and east of the Iberian and Mauretanian coasts of the Atlantic Ocean.
In other words, no other tribe, people, ethnic group, religious community or nomad clan had retained their moral integrity, their cultural identity, their socio-behavioral values, and their imperial or political world view intact up to the point of forming an independent kingdom or empire. They had all gradually been entirely Romanized. By 212 CE, if Greeks had ever existed, they would have vanished.
Later on, the Greek speaking populations in the South Balkans were repeatedly decimated during the numerous catastrophic invasions (first wave: 300-500 CE; second wave: 500-700 CE). During the same period, due to their obdurate rejection of Christianity as the sole official Roman religion and to their obstinate attachment to their absurd polytheism, they caused an unprecedented massacre of the pagans among them. ‘Hellen’ or ‘Graecus’ (Greek) ended up meaning ‘profane’, ‘villainous’, ‘promiscuous’ and ‘blasphemous’ during the period of the Eastern Roman Empire (down to 1453). The inhabitants of the surviving part of the Roman Empire called themselves ‘Romans’ {Ρωμαίοι – Ρωμιοί; أروام (Arabic); رومیان (Farsi); Rûmîler & Rumlar (Turkish)}, denying with abject indignation that they had any relation with the ‘Hellenes’ or ‘Graeci’. About:
In the terrible imperial and religious confrontation that pitched Rome against New Rome (Constantinople) already before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 CE) but more openly after Rome discarded (752) the institution of Constantinople-selected/approved popes of Rome (which was imposed by Justinian I in 537), the pejorative term ‘Hellene’/’Graecus’ became a crucial tool in the hands of the impious and blasphemous, anti-Christian popes of Rome, who attempted to utilize various barbarians (notably the Frankish Merovingians and Charlemagne) in order to oppose the Eastern Roman Empire, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the prevailing Caesaropapism.
As part of his Reconquista, Justinian I appointed three popes successively and instituted the Constantinopolitan imperial selection and approval of every pope of Rome; the practice was respected in Rome from 537 until 752. Roman popes were then of Anatolian, Syrian, Balkan or Sicilian ancestry or had the experience of the apocrisiarius (papal liaison to the emperor) or the inhabitants of Byzantine-ruled Greece, Syria, or Sicily.
Following the two schisms (Photian schism: 863-867; East-West schism: 1054), the launch of the Crusades (1095), and the Latin conquest and sack of Constantinople (1204), in order to fully discredit the Eastern Roman Empire and to posture as the sole religious authority among Christians, the Latin (: Western European) pseudo-Christian ‘Catholic’ occupiers and looters of the Eastern Roman Empire extended the use of the term ‘Greeks’ for their Eastern Roman Christian Orthodox subjects. The abominable, Satanic rule of the Latin conquerors was fully overthrown (1261), but the scheming Catholic heretics had managed to establish a strong foothold in parts of Romania (Ρωμανία; as the official name of the Eastern Roman Empire was in Eastern Roman language) and to form small groups of theological lackeys and local stooges, who became known as ‘Enotikoi’ (Ενωτικοί; pro-Union). It goes without saying that the papal puppets tried to diffuse the pejorative name, but they failed to achieve any substantive results until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Sultanate (1453) and the end of the Ottoman rule in South Balkans (early 19th c.).
With the removal of the Christian Orthodox Eastern Roman obstacle, the apostate, Anti-Christian, Catholic Church launched the projects that it had already prepared for about 250-300 years: Renaissance and Colonialism (the totally mischievous term ‘Discovery of America’ must be considered as an obsolete falsehood). Part of the Renaissance intellectual-scientific-artistic fallacy concerned Ancient Greece; it was indeed the fabrication of an entirely ahistorical, misleading and delusional narrative which did not represent but distort the historical truth, which was contained in historiographical sources and documented in the archaeological material record. The intentionally distorted representation of Ancient Greece was coined ‘Hellenism’ in disparaging contradiction to the use of the term that Ancient Ionians, Aeolians and others made of it.
Typical example of Renaissance painting with reference to a very distorted representation of an Ancient Greek mythological topic of dire, Anti-Christian content; the Calumny of Apelles by Sandro Botticelli (1494-5) is an evil artwork in which Repentance is depicted as a vicious witch and Truth is portrayed as a nude prostitute. The excuse for this monstrous achievement is offered by Lucian, a 2nd c. CE Aramaean author who described a painting by the 4th c. BCE Ionian painter Apelles.
During the Late Antiquity, Ionians described as ‘Hellenism’ the tendency of some people in Anatolia and Syria (Cappadocians, Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Jews) to appear dressed after the ‘Greek’ fashion and to adopt the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Ionians, Athenians and Macedonians living in cities founded by Alexander the Great and his successors. But during the Renaissance, ‘Hellenism’ defined the falsehood that anti-Christian Western European intellectuals, fraudsters, academics and crooks invented, fabricated and believed about Ancient Greece.
The villainous forgery of Hellenism was quite useful to the Satanic gangsters who killed millions of Mexicans and Peruvians; it helped diffuse scores of profane topics, concepts, illusions, sick passions, evil desires, immoral behaviors, anti-Christian attitudes, and an absolutely putrefied world conceptualization at the very antipodes of Christianity. By merely marketing these mental and intellectual contaminations as ‘civilization’, the so-called Renaissance ‘humanists’ started distancing themselves from the faith that they deceitfully presented as still theirs. They thus produced a polarization that gave birth to other movements like Classicism, Enlightenment, etc., which further contributed to the corruption of the Western world and, through colonialism, to the degeneracy of the rest of mankind. In this manner, the formation of the modern faithless, worthless and useless societies was completed, only to fully corroborate the various calls that we now hear for eugenics, population control, and reduction of the world population to 500 million or 50 million people.
All this was totally unknown to the Muscovites, the Tatars, and the populations of Novgorod, Astrakhan and Sibir (Siberia) back at the time of Ivan IV the Terrible. To them, Constantinople was merely Tsargrad (Царьград), the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (Восточная Римская империя), even more so because Gennadius Scholarius (Геннадий Схоларий) ensured the translatio imperii, making of Mehmet II the successor of Constantine XI Palaeologus, who was the last of the Palaeologi dynasty (Палеологи). Tsargrad means literally ‘the city (gorod/город) of Caesar’ (i.e. the Roman Emperor), thus fully demonstrating that to the Russians the realm that the Ottomans conquered in 1453 was purely, entirely and indisputably Roman.
Ivan III of Moscow, as depicted by the 19th c. Russian painter Aleksey Kivshenko (Алексей Данилович Кившенко)
Neither Ivan III of Moscow nor his second wife Sophia Palaiologina would accept as a ‘work of art’ Sandro Botticelli’s infamous painting ‘The Birth of Venus’ (c. 1484–1486)
The dispute around the term lasted no less than 450 years, ever since Sophia Palaiologina (born Zoe; 1449-1503/ Софья Палеолог), niece of the last Eastern Roman Emperor, married Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow (1440-1505 / Иван III Васильевич) in proxy marriage (1 June 1472; in the Old St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome) in presence of Gian Battista della Volpe, diplomat and adventurer in the Muscovite service in the 15th c., who became rather known as Ivan Fryazin (Иван Фрязин). Sophia, accompanied by a pontifical custody led by Ivan Fryazin, reached Moscow (Muscovy) on 12th November 1472 and later gave birth to many children, notably Vasili III of Moscow (Василий III Иванович/1479-1533), who was the father of Ivan IV the Terrible. The dispute ended with the abdication of Nicholas II (15th March 1917) and the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate (1st November 1922), because -for ca. 470 years- one of the titles of the Ottoman sultans was Qaysar-i Rum (روم قیصر).
We therefore conclude that Ivan the Terrible knew only Romans and Eastern Romans, and wanted to position Muscovy as continuity to Tsargrad; of ‘Greeks’ he probably never heard. The same is true for most of his successors and for the first of the Romanovs. Only after the rapprochement with European dynasties that Peter I attempted, numerous academics, artists, and architects started moving from France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Denmark and England to Russia. They diffused what was then called ‘European civilization’, involving the tenets of Renaissance, Classicism and Enlightenment, including Hellenism.
The rise of the proponents of Westernization at the time of Catherine II became a real threat to the Russian Orthodox identity; this generated several reactions, notably the Pochvennichestvo (Почвенничество) movement, the supporters of the so-called Slavophilia (Славянофильство/however, the term is not accurate), the fervent defenders of traditional Russian values, such as Sobornost (соборность), Obshchina (община), etc., and -last but not least- a monarchical conceptualization of Russia as Orthodoxy, Autocracy & Nationality (Православие, Самодержавие, Народность).
Ilya Glazunov (Илья Сергеевич Глазунов; 1930-2017), Timeless Russia (Вечная Россия), 1988: a modern visualization of the Pochvennichestvo (Почвенничество) movement’s ideals
A.S. Lysenko (А.С. Лысенко; born 1974), Stalingrad 1942 (Сталинград 1942). Move with the Icon (Ход с Иконой). The painting shows the arrival of the Patriarch of All Rus’ in the autumn of 1942 in Stalingrad. The patriarch traveled along the entire front lines in Stalingrad and blessed the troops for victory. For many defenders of Stalingrad, this was the last blessing and communion in life, because. they stood to die. A little-known fact is that for a dangerous trip to Stalingrad, the Patriarch, according to the Decree signed by Stalin, was awarded the military order “The Order of the Red Banner of Battle”. The traditional Russian values survived during the Soviet period and have forcefully emerged throughout the society over the past 30-32 years. About the painter: http://www.academia-maki.com/members/korr/lysenko-as
Illarion Pryanishnikov (Илларион Михайлович Прянишников΄; 1840-1894), Easter Procession (Крестный ход). Orthodoxy as popular religion stands at the very top of the monarchical conceptualization of Russia.
However, this reaction was not enough to eliminate the diffusion of the historical forgery that the biased Western scholars undertook in 18th and 19th c. Russia. Then, in the case of the so-called Greek Revolution of 1821 and the subsequent formation of the tiny pseudo-state ‘Greece’ (by the English and the French colonials) Russia made exactly the same mistakes as in the case of Serbia. The Russian diplomats, statesmen and czars were fooled enough to possibly believe that the descendants of the Eastern Romans could make ‘Greeks’ resurrected after almost 1500 years!! Even worse, the imperial elites failed to fathom that, if the English and the French wanted to perform the rebirth of the Ancient Greeks, as a blasphemous act of Black Magic, this simply meant that they intended to utterly destroy Orthodoxy and Christianity in general.
Failing to realize that the only descendants of the Ancient Ionians and Aeolians, surely amalgamated with numerous other nations, were located in Ottoman Anatolia and that the inhabitants of the South Balkan Ottoman provinces were ethnic Slavs amalgamated with Vlachs, Albanians, Italians, Turks, Egyptians and Berbers, the czars contributed greatly, at their own detriment, to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. The imperial Russian elites could not realize that to defend their interests, as a continental empire, they had to side with the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran. The only beneficiaries of the numerous Russian-Iranian and the Russian-Ottoman wars were England and France. When it comes to the tiny state of Greece, this became the embodiment of colonially educated and prepared elite that govern their country according (not to the local, national interests but) to the needs of their colonial masters.
It is ironical but, by helping the tiny Greek state first exist and second expand, the Russians damaged their own chances to ever reach their secret and mystical targets: Tsargrad (Constantinople) and Jerusalem. The Russian Church of Mary Magdalene (Церковь Святой Марии Магдалины) on the Mount of Olives symbolized that vision; constructed in 1888 by Alexander III, the splendid edifice with the typically Russian gilded onion domes epitomized all the Russian Orthodox eschatological claims.
Jerusalem, The Dome of the Rock and the Russian Church of of Mary Magdalene (Церковь Святой Марии Магдалины Гефсимания): the end target of every Russian Orthodox eschatology
As a matter of fact, the Russians were far closer to both locations than their rivals (the English) were; they could reach there first. But to do so, they should ally themselves with the Ottomans and strengthen the Ottoman Empire against the evil erosion carried out by the French and the English. And this is the merciless strike that Fate delivered to the naïve Czar Nicholas II who thought it possible to ally Holy Russia to the filthiest and most execrable realm on Earth, namely England; although he wanted to reach Jerusalem first, he was arrested and imprisoned in his own country, when the profane general Edmund Allenby entered the old city of Jerusalem on 11th December 1917. Russia was plunged in the Marxist-Leninist abyss, when England achieved its largest territorial extent.
Allenby enters Jerusalem; Russians paid dearly for their mistakes. Irrespective of their religions, continental empires must unite. This is a spiritual imperative.
This disaster will come again, if Russia’s present ruling elite and administration make the same mistake and fail to realize that the worst enemies of Holy Russia are (not the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Germans, the French, the Israelis or the Americans but) the English. It is only England (along with London’s various paraphernalia, i.e. the pseudo-states of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) that turns the US, NATO, and also EU against Russia. The reason is very simple; in full agreement with their Satanic eschatological agenda, the English want to prevent Holy Russia-Third Rome from becoming “a blessing on the Earth” (Isaiah, 19:24). To cancel the English agenda, Russians must remove Shakespeare from their education.
II. Skillful Western European Falsification of Russian History
A. Erroneous contextualization of Archaeology of Northern Asia
B. Deliberate use of overlapping terms: Northern Asia, Siberia, and Scythia
C. Prehistory and Ancient History of Northern Asia are subject to modern borders and to the meaningless attempts for ‘national archaeology’
D. Failure to discern Northern Asia in its entirety and true dimensions
E. Deliberate, multifaceted distortion of the Asiatic Turanian Migrations
F. Minimization of the cataclysmic presence and prevalence of the Turanian nations throughout Eastern Europe
G. European academia-backed biases: malignant disregard of the spiritual value of Kievan Rus, and absurd focus on ethnic, racial and linguistic considerations
H. Erroneous focus on Kievan Rus and disastrous neglect for Volga Bulgaria
I. Concealment of the historical reality of the Turanian (‘Tatar-Mongol’) period
Russia, Ukraine and the World-III: the need for a New UN or how UK, US, France and NATO must be defenestrated from the world (28 March 2023)
Россия, Украина и мир-II: 5000 лет русской азиатской идентичности против 500 лет англо-французского расизма и колониализма
uliššakkansalîmubalumithuṣi
ulibbaššiṭûbtubalu šitnuni
The peace is not established without conflict
The good relations don’t come without rivalry
Epic of Tukulti Ninurta (13th c. BCE)
Мир не устанавливается без конфликта
Хорошие отношения не бывают без соперничества
Эпос о Тукульти Нинурте (13 век до н.э.)
The times when peace and war alternated and rivalries were transformed into friendly relations between kingdoms have gone; we don’t live anymore in times similar to those of the great Assyrian Emperor Tukulti Ninurta I {lit. ‘My trust is in Ninurta’ (i.e. the divine concept of the Messiah for the Ancient Assyrians); reign: 1243-1207}. Those who are able to understand that World War I, World War II, and the Cold War were mere phases of the Great Game (Война теней or Большая игра) can now conclude that the Mankind entered into an undeniably eschatological clash that can only deteriorate down to the End.
All the perspicacious observers and the astute commentators do not waste their time in silly ‘geo-political analyses’ and ‘financial charts’ or econometrics, because they know that these bogus-sciences are entirely fake and deceitful. On the other hand and more importantly, eschatology is not relevant of religion (let alone theology) but does indeed hinge on Moral; the good, the just and the virtuous inherently disregard the evil, the promiscuous and the wicked. This is in their nature. Contrarily, the iniquitous, the vile and the abominable cannot accept the existence of the Good.
It is therefore inevitable that Russia ‘disturbs’; not because Putin and Medvedev are angelic beings, but due to
a) the nature of Russia as the Land par excellence, and
b) the character of Russians as the highest quality people of consciousness.
——- Scenes from the Great Game / Сцены из большой игры ————
Cartoon depicting Queen Victoria of England comforting widows and orphans during the Crimean War.
—————————————————————————–
Contents
I. The Western Anti-Russian Bias
II. Skillful Western European Falsification of Russian History
A. Erroneous contextualization of Archaeology of Northern Asia
B. Deliberate use of overlapping terms: Northern Asia, Siberia, and Scythia
C. Prehistory and Ancient History of Northern Asia are subject to modern borders and to the meaningless attempts for ‘national archaeology’
D. Failure to discern Northern Asia in its entirety and true dimensions
E. Deliberate, multifaceted distortion of the Asiatic Turanian Migrations
F. Minimization of the cataclysmic presence and prevalence of the Turanian nations throughout Eastern Europe
G. European academia-backed biases: malignant disregard of the spiritual value of Kievan Rus, and absurd focus on ethnic, racial and linguistic considerations
H. Erroneous focus on Kievan Rus and disastrous neglect for Volga Bulgaria
I. Concealment of the historical reality of the Turanian (‘Tatar-Mongol’) period
Содержание
I. Западный антироссийский уклон
II. Умелая западноевропейская фальсификация российской истории
А. Ошибочная контекстуализация археологии Северной Азии
B. Умышленное использование совпадающих терминов: Северная Азия, Сибирь и Скифия.
C. Предыстория и древняя история Северной Азии подчинены современным границам и бессмысленным попыткам «национальной археологии»
D. Неспособность различить Северную Азию во всей ее полноте и истинных размерах
E. Умышленное, многогранное искажение азиатско-туранских миграций.
F. Минимизация катастрофического присутствия и распространенности туранских народов по всей Восточной Европе.
G. Предубеждения, поддерживаемые европейскими академическими кругами: пагубное пренебрежение духовной ценностью Киевской Руси и абсурдная сосредоточенность на этнических, расовых и языковых соображениях.
H. Ошибочное внимание к Киевской Руси и пагубное пренебрежение к Волжской Булгарии
I. Сокрытие исторической реальности туранского («татаро-монгольского») периода
I am not racist either in my conviction or in my expression; Russians are not a Slavic-speaking, Christian nation of Eastern Europe, which was incepted before 450 years. This biased and utterly false definition belongs to the Anglo-French rascals and their inhuman wickedness. Russians are the multiethnic, multilingual, multi-religious, and multicultural nation that lives within and outside the borders of Russian Federation.
I. The Western Anti-Russian Bias
The English, the French and the Dutch are ethnically and culturally unrelated to Ancient Romans; but they intentionally usurped the Roman Heritage while also distorting it.
Even more preposterously, the English, the French and the Dutch inhabit only a small part of the lands ruled by the Ancient Romans; but they deliberately attempted to take control of the lands of the Roman Empire (and of many other territories), and they did so by means of colonies, proxies, regime change, and history falsification. This was instrumental for their need to lay a claim to the heritage of the Roman Imperial.
Contrarily to them, today’s Russians are ethnically and culturally related to the Turanian (Turkic-Mongolian) nations, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Caucasians, and the Northern Indians, i.e. all the major Asiatic nations with which they have interacted for millennia.
Even more importantly, today’s Russians inhabit the lands from where all the ancestors of the aforementioned nations emigrated to conquer the lands in which they dwell nowadays. Viewed diachronically, Russians (in both usages: Россияне and Русские) did not truly invade the lands south and east of Moscow (‘Muscovy’) and later in Sibir (Сибирь/Siberia), North-Northeast Asia, and Central Asia, neither did they assume colonial control over those territories. This is a fallacious reading of History; this preposterous intellectual forgery was indeed conceived-elaborated in and propagated first from the heinous and criminal academic institutions of France, England, and Holland. Interesting reading:
In fact, what has long been described as ‘Russian Conquest of Siberia, Caucasus and Central Asia’ is an effective attempt to reunify and pacify all the various peoples that had been endlessly roaming in the northern part of the so-called Euro-Asiatic landmass.
In reality,
what Genghis Khan achieved in a most formidable and spectacular manner in the 1100s and the 1200s,
what Genghis Khan’s descendants, and in particular Kublai Khan (志祖 /元世祖: Shizu of Yuan), attempted to ensure by dividing their forefather’s empire in the 1200s and the 1300s,
what Timur (Tamerlane) managed to accomplish by establishing an empire from Ganges River to Moscow and from Western Anatolia to the Altai Mountains in the 1300s and the 1400s, ….
… Ivan the Terrible, the Stroganovs (Строгановы/the accent is on the first syllable), and the Romanov (Романовы/the accent is on the penultimate syllable) were successful to implement in the 1500s through the 1800s.
This consisted in an unprecedented achievement and a uniquely outstanding feat, if we take into consideration the countless invasions, the incessant incursions, the endless wars, and the detrimental destructions that used to happen for thousands of years between the Kamchatka Peninsula in the East and Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula in the West.
However, this colossal achievement of pacification did not correspond to the evil targets of the inhuman maritime powers of France, England and Holland; quite contrarily, it damaged their interests irreparably. That is why these criminal states wanted to irrevocably negate the miraculous Russian triumph; and before they managed to demolish it in deeds, they have tried to destroy it in words. This is how and why the Western falsification of the Russian History started. Misperception and partial approach are at the origin of the racist portrayal of Russia by the Western academia.
Whereas the Western European sea powers usurped the Roman past, which does not belong to them, their political and academic elites do not want to accept that Czarist, Soviet and Republican Russia represents the summation of 5000 years of Asiatic civilization, the aggregation of a Turanian-Slavic confederacy, and the paramount example of peaceful multiculturalism.
Few people realize today that, even if the inhabitants of Ukraine did not speak a Russian dialect (which is what is now called Ukrainian ‘language’), the colonial powers of the West would find other victims to hire due to their bribery, corruption, false promises, and other evil techniques.
It is not the ‘Ukrainians’ that the criminal Western powers want to defend; not at all! This is a nave approach. London, Paris, Rome and Washington D.C. fabricate, show, support and promote the ‘Anti-Russians’. If they did not find elements of the local, Ukrainian, elite to first fool, second upend, and third utilize, they would pursue their tactics elsewhere.
It is not the ‘Ukraine’ that the criminal Western powers want to defend; not at all! This is a nave approach. London, Paris, Rome and Washington D.C. soil the Earth with the blood of innocent people caught between the two halves of a vice. The desecration of the land plays an extremely important role in the schemes of the sea powers. Any person, who fails to comprehend the evil spiritual agendas that secret organizations of the West (namely the Jesuits, the Freemasons, and the Zionists) want to implement, cannot have a clue of what this conflict and the forthcoming wars are all about.
(Note: If some readers find it odd that I use the definite article before the name of that land on the first line of the previous paragraph, they must come to terms with the fact that this was the original and correct usage in English in this regard. This in turn makes it automatically clear that Ukraine is not a nation, but a piece of land. These populations were actually never considered to be a nation before the 1990s. As a matter of fact, the definite article is prefixed to names of regions. About the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Ukraine#English_definite_article)
One should not confuse between the smokescreen (mainstream media and all the types of political discourse) used for the useful idiots (the atheists, the materialists, the evolutionists, the modernists, the consumerists, the rationalists, the fanatics, the agnostics, and the extremists) and the upper part of the ruling elites of the Western countries. They are aware -only too well- of their lawlessness, their iniquity, and their forthcoming end, and they try to effectively dissipate their sea (i.e. diabolical) nature, nonsensically shifting the focus on factoids, fake dilemmas, nonexistent concepts, and an enormous array of misinformation paraphernalia, involving false maps, memes, figures of speech, and associated techniques.
II. Skillful Western European Falsification of Russian History
In the previous, first article of the series, I explained the reasons and the targets of the systematic academic effort of the Western European powers to portray Russia as a European country and nation, also stating where it all leads. The article is here:
Russia, Ukraine and the World-I: ‘Moscou, les Plaines d’Ukraine, et les Champs-Élysées’
Russian Special Operation in Ukraine: One Year after – 24 February 2023
In the present article, I will enumerate the critical points of Western European falsification of Russian History on which the Western Anti-Russian bias is founded.
A. Erroneous contextualization of Archaeology of Northern Asia
By limiting the study of prehistoric and early historical periods within modern borders and by classifying the material record as per modern, otherwise nonexistent terms, Western archaeologists prevent the adequate exploration of vast spaces within which human activities, cultures and civilizations were boundless because simply the modern (Western European) concepts of ‘state’ and ‘borders’ are worthless filth. In the links below, you get a brief impression of the intentional confusion created around the topic:
B. Deliberate use of overlapping terms: Northern Asia, Siberia, and Scythia
By using terms that are misplaced in time and by recurring to names attested in later historical sources, Western historians prevent the accurate understanding and the comprehensive representation of numerous human societies, cultures, movements, and migrations; the ensuing conclusions are therefore fragmentary and vague. The name of the Scythians is first attested in Assyrian-Babylonian and Achaemenid Iranian cuneiform texts in the 7th–6th c. BCE, but the lack of detailed topographical information makes the use of the term uncertain.
The Khanate of Sibir (Siberia)
Similarly, the name of Siberia (Sibir), which was a Turanian Muslim khanate formed after the dissolution of the enormous empire of Genghis Khan, cannot be used in replacement of the correct term ‘Northern Asia’, because Siberia represents only a small part of the Eurasiatic landmass’ northern circumference. The end result entails the abysmally wrong theory of Pan-Indo-Europeanism and the assumption that the Aryans (or Indo-Iranians, Indo-Europeans) are distinct from the Turkic or Turanian nations. Then, the preconceived, mistaken and absurd linguistic models are projected onto the diverse archaeological findings only to lead historians and explorers to the bogus-historical narrative, as per which no Turanians reached, lived in, and civilized Europe. The links below reveal only a small part of the erroneous schemes of the Western European academia:
——————————– The Andronovo culture misinterpreted / Андроновская культура неверно истолкована ——————————–
Spread of Andronovo culture
Chariot model from the Arkaim Museum
Map in full contradiction of the facts and the findings, geared to conform to agendas
———————————————————————-
C. Prehistory and Ancient History of Northern Asia are subject to modern borders and to the meaningless attempts for ‘national archaeology’
By persistently implementing a fragmentary approach to archaeological-historical research, by disaggregating European Bronze Age cultures from the wider Asiatic landmass (of which Europe is merely a marginal peninsula), and by aptly utilizing the so-called Kurgan hypothesis to ‘demonstrate’ that the Indo-European fallacy exists, the colonialist and racist academia of Western Europe set the foundations of the falsehood that makes of Russia an ‘Eastern European modern nation’. The dire results involve the division lines between the Russians and the Turanian nations, the dissociation of Russians from the great Asiatic civilizations (Mesopotamia – Anatolia, Iran, Indus River Valley, and China), and the removal of Central Asia from its rightful position as the very epicenter of World History.
Kurgan Temir, Arkaim – South Urals
Kurgan sites in NW Iran
The notorious Kurgan hypothesis and Indo-European expansion fallacy
D. Failure to discern Northern Asia in its entirety and true dimensions
Northern Asia has always been the pathway crossed by countless nomads, tribes, clans, families and armies, which sought to either find refuge in the West, i.e. the marginal confines of the Earth, or chase renegades and lawless fugitives there. This is how diverse Asiatics ended up in the faraway periphery that is now called ‘Europe’. This fact and the innumerable details of the process are at the origin of what is called Christian-Muslim, Turco-Mongol tradition. However, the racist Western academia, by failing to see Northern Asia in its correct dimensions, generated fake divisions between ‘Slavs’ and ‘Turanians’, deceitfully and criminally identifying the former with Christianity and the latter with Islam. That’s nonsense!
Nestorian Christianity was a major religion in Central Asia, China, India and Northern Asia. More particularly, there were many Turanian and Mongol adepts of Nestorianism, notably Dokuz Khatun, the wife of the Great Emperor Hulagu. This means that the so-called ‘Turco-Mongol tradition’ existed in reality as early as the 2nd millennium BCE, in spite of the deceitful scheme of the Western academia to describe it merely as a later phenomenon dating back to the 12th and the 13th centuries CE!
E. Deliberate, multifaceted distortion of the Asiatic Turanian Migrations
The term ‘Barbarian Invasions’ consists in heinous vocabulary and compact historical falsehood; it does not only reveal the incorrigibly racist mindset and mentality of the Western European academics and intellectuals, but it also involves a very systematic concealment of the true dimensions and the correct duration of the World History’s most seminal phenomenon. The fallacious representation of this millennia-long event by Western colonial historians is fragmentary and occasional. Whereas this truly momentous historical event generated numerous states, produced diverse cultures, terminated several empires, and facilitated the diffusion of diverse religions, the rancorous, biased Western scholars persistently avoid offering compulsory courses about it. Instead, they intermittently discuss it as an annex of Iranian, Roman or Chinese History. This is an outrage.
At the end, people get the extremely wrong impression that the Asiatic Turanian Migrations occurred in irregular intervals, whereas they constituted an endless development until the formation of modern states. In fact, there is no such period as ‘Migration Period’; the History of Mankind is a permanent migration. Furthermore, many important nations whose migration was recorded in different historical sources almost never appear in the title of a university seminar in spite of the existence of vast documentation.
In addition, an enormous amount of false maps offer a transvestite version of the historical reality. Few examples of distortion can be found here:
Presenting World History as the history of settled populations is the quintessence of racism.
Fake map giving a very partly and very partial idea of the 2nd – 5th c. CE invasions of Asia’s western confines (which are called ‘Europe’); these invasions were one phase of the endless migrations that permanently determine the historical development.
History is an endless movement of people; all are migrants.
The state of Attila threatened Rome and Constantinople
The Hephthalites threatened Sassanid Iran
Another fake map showing that the Slavs came from nowhere or fell from the Moon!
F. Minimization of the cataclysmic presence and prevalence of the Turanian nations throughout Eastern Europe
In fact, from the time of the Turanian Pazyryk culture (Пазырыкская культура / 600-300 BCE; in the Ukok plateau of the Altai Mountains), which was erroneously defined as ‘Scythian’ by the racist Western European academics, an endless process of migrations created, strengthened, weakened and demolished kingdoms and other types of state in Central and Western Asia and as far as Central Europe.
Pazyryk culture in the Altai Mountains, Russia; burial mounds
Pazyryk: close to the borders of Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia
Typical samples of Pazyryk Culture artifacts and archaeological findings
Pazyryk Culture as exhibited in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Actually, the plains of Eastern Europe were already inhabited by Turanian nomads as early as the first years of the Roman Empire; later, the rise of the Turanian Rouran Khaganate (330–555 CE) in Central and Eastern Asia triggered numerous successive migrations because fleeing nomads forced semi-nomads and other migrants to move further to the West. The trajectory followed by the Turanian Tiele (Dili) tribes must have been extremely embarrassing for the disreputable liars of filthy institutions like the universities of England and France; in and by itself, it reveals much – and in full rejection of their interpretational schemes.
Gaochang (高昌/Kocho, near Turfan/Xinjiang-Eastern Turkestan) was invaded by the Rouran Khagan in 460 CE.
With the establishment of the Avar Khaganate (587-825), the rise of the First Turkic Khaganate (552-603), the formation of the Old Great Bulgaria (632-668) in the area of modern times’ Novorossiya and in the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and with the settlement of the Cuman and Kipchak nomads throughout the plains of Ukraine and Russia, massive Turanian populations already inhabited a very large part of Europe. The process only intensified during the Western Turkic Khaganate (581-742), which functioned also as a secure passage from Central Asia to Eastern Europe for many nomadic populations.
Impartial and honest scholars do not need to wait until as late as the 12th and the 13th centuries in order to make state of the arrival of Turanian / Tatar-Mongol populations in Eastern Europe; however, the racist Western European academics do not cover this topic but rather avoid referring to the said period. Unfortunately, this period is rather presented in a summarizing form. The following topics should be taken into account, when one examines closely the History of Eastern Europe from the 1st to the 9th c. CE:
Xi’an, China: tomb of the Sogdian nobleman and trader An Jia. Arrival of a Turkic leader (left); 579 CE
Xi’an, China: tomb of the Sogdian nobleman and trader An Jia. Negotiations between An Jia and a Turkic leader (left); 579 CE
Shoroon Bumbagar tomb mural – Mongolia, 7th c. CE
G. European academia-backed biases: malignant disregard of the spiritual value of Kievan Rus, and absurd focus on ethnic, racial and linguistic considerations
Today for Russians, it is not Kievan Rus that matters most; it’s Volga Bulgaria. All Russians know very well that, when Ivan the Terrible attempted a series of conquests and carried out a unification effort, he basically wanted to bring peace to a vast territory which had already been united under Genghis Khan only to be divided again among his children and grandchildren. In a way, the closest possible parallel to Ivan IV’s effort was Timur’s triumph. None of these two conquerors undertook a religious war. The famous Oprichnina operation fully demonstrates that Ivan IV killed more Christians than Muslims. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprichnina
It was only later that the historical link to the Kievan Rus became preponderant among the elites of the multiethnic, multilingual and multicultural kingdom of Russia. One has also to admit that this Russian link -for many long centuries- was never challenged by any ethnic group, social stratum, or religious/royal authority throughout the territory of Ukraine. The link to Kievan Rus, although historically valid and linguistically arguable, did indeed represent only one of the numerous imperial aspirations that the rising power of Moscow claimed to possess, namely the eschatological.
In other words, it was not an ethnic or national declaration but a spiritual-imperial-ecumenical assertion. And it was quite solemn. Muscovy, as a continuation of the multiethnic state of Kievan Rus, was not the reconstitution of the same state, but a continuity from the spirituality of Vladimir the Great (Владимир Святославич /958-1015; ruled after 980), who was married with (the daughter of the Eastern Roman Emperor Romanos II and the sister of the Eastern Roman Emperor Basil II) Anna Porphyrogenita (Анна Византийская – Άννα Πορφυρογέννητη /963-1011; princess consort after 989), introduced Eastern Roman Orthodox Christianity in his state, and also adopted Eastern Roman Law (Codex Justinianus/Code of Justinian, formally Corpus Juris Civilis: “Body of Civil Law”). About:
Vladimir the Great talks with a Greek theologian about the Christian faith; from the 15th c. Königsberg Chronicle, which is believed to be a copy from the 13th c. Radziwiłł family of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
Kievan Rus was a multiethnic principality without ecumenical ambitions; but Christian Orthodox Muscovy postured as Third Rome, after the Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire (1453), therefore in absolute opposition to, and detrimental rejection of, the schismatic church of Rome whose pope had been excommunicated (1054) by the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael I Cerularius.
Enthronement of Michael I Cerularius, from the Madrid Skylitzes manuscript
The aforementioned facts are enough for any honest explorer to understand that the true importance of Kievan Rus lies in spirituality, and not in the ethnic continuity. Any state that lays claim to Kievan Rus must therefore reject the schismatic Catholic Church in order to be possibly taken seriously. Today’s Russians and Ukrainians are racially / ethnically unrelated to the ethnically diverse populations of Kievan Rus. Russians are the offspring of the numerous ethnicities that were amalgamated over the centuries throughout the space between the river Dniester and the Kamchatka Peninsula, whereas Ukrainians are Russians with linguistic particularities due to the fact that the westernmost parts of the Russian imperial territory had been partly occupied by Poland-Lithuania (formally the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; 1569-1795) and Austria-Hungary.
However, any association with the heretic orders that rule Vatican and the Catholic Church, any relationship with the modern, anti-Christian states of England, France, Holland, and the US, and any tolerance towards (let alone adaptation to) the lawless laws, the blatant immorality, the sexual debauchery and the inhuman anomaly that prevail in the Western world make any claim to Kievan Rus absurd, invalid and ludicrous. In fact, the present pseudo-state of Ukraine is at the very antipodes of the Kievan Rus in every sense.
H. Erroneous focus on Kievan Rus and disastrous neglect for Volga Bulgaria
As I already said, when it comes to the History of Russia, Volga Bulgaria is definitely more crucial than Kievan Rus for the Russians today. This is so because it highlights the Turanian nature of the Slavs; it underscores Islam’s anteriority over Orthodox Christianity in Eastern Europe, and it also emphasizes the historical reality of the extensive ethnic amalgamation that took place in Eastern Europe for over more than two millennia. These conclusions are not new, and I am not the first to explicitly state these truths, but it will be essential for the Russian establishment to make of them the standard-bearer of the country’s sovereignty and the pinnacle of the national positioning worldwide.
Volga Bulgaria was apparently inhabited by Turanian populations and its capital was located at Bolghar (Болгар), 180 km north of Kazan and more than 900 km east of Moscow. Yet, one of the foremost Muslim geographers, scholars, and leading magistrates of the Abbasid Caliphate, Ibn Khordadbeh (ابن خرداذبه; 820–913) wrote in his grand opus ‘Book of Roads and Kingdoms’ (كِتَاب ٱلْمَسَالِك وَٱلْمَمَالِك/Kitab al Masalik wa ‘l Mamalik) that the ruling title of the khan of Volga Bulgaria was “King of Saqaliba”, i.e. ‘king of (all) Slavs”.
The Iranian Muslim potentate was writing in Baghdad, but exactly the same details can also be found in the famous report (‘Risala’; الرسالة / كتاب إلى ملك الصقالبة) that was composed by Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who was not just a mere traveler but the official delegate of the Abbasid Caliph to the court of Almış, the Great Khan of the Bulgars. Ibn Fadlan, who was invited by the Khan to preach Islam in his kingdom, and was the first to do so in Eastern Europe in 922, called the Great Khan the ‘King of Slavs’, clearly denoting this ruler’s prominence among all the Slavs. This means that Islam was diffused in Eastern Europe no less than 67 years before the prince Vladimir of Kiev accepted Orthodox Christianity.
The Khan (king/’basileus’) of Volga Bulgaria and the Eastern Roman delegates
Modern painter’s imaginative representation of Ibn Fadlan, dressed in white, reading Caliph’s al-Muqtadir proclamation to King of Volga Bulgaria Yiltawar (also known As Aydai Khan); the painting is located in Bolgar State Historical and Architectural Museum, Russia.
Page from ibn Fadlan’s manuscript
The itinerary from Baghdad through Bukhara to Bolgar
B. A. Gilvanov, the arrival of the Caliph’s embassy in Bolghar
Bolgar, capital of Volga Bulgaria according to modern painter’s imagination
Bolghar today
It is quite interesting that the manuscript with the report composed by Ibn Fadlan was found in Mashhad (NE Iran) by the great Bashkir Turanian scholar, intellectual, activist Ahmed Zeki Velidi Togan, one of the most prominent Jadid thinkers. About:
It is however preposterous to see Western scholars like Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, illustrious Sovietologist and permanent secretary of the Académie Française, speak about Batu Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, and state that he pillaged Kiev(1240), while shamelessly hiding the fact that the great Turanian conqueror also invaded and demolished the Muslim kingdom of Volga Bulgaria; in fact, Batu destroyed Bolghar in 1236 before proceeding to the West and unifying those divided territories under his pacifying rule.
Genghis Khan (miniature of a manuscript of Rashid al-Din’s Jami al-Tawarikh)
Even more outrageous is the attempt of the French academician to intentionally misinform her readers and audience by saying that only after the Turanian (the term Tatar-Mongol being inaccurate) conquest of Eastern Europe, Islam was diffused in that vast region for the first time (“La population installe l’islam”; 07:43/ «Les voyageurs au fil des siècles. Découverte de l’espace russe» by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kodw9azYVUI). The truth is that the outright majority of the Eastern European populations were already Muslims for more than 300 years before the thunderous and superb conquests of the illustrious offspring of Genghis Khan.
Khan Batu in the miniature of a manuscript (above) and in the modern popular imagination (below)
I. Concealment of the historical reality of the Turanian (‘Tatar-Mongol’) period
The fallacy of the so-called ‘Tatar-Mongol Occupation of Russia’ and its ‘annex’, namely the pretended ‘Russian Liberation from the Tatars’, complete the wicked assemblage of distorted facts, misinterpreted events, delusional factoids and gibberish discourse that the racist Western European academics teach as “Russian History” in their vicious universities. In fact, there is no ‘Mongol’ but Turanian presence throughout Eastern Europe; but this started more than seven (7) centuries before the destruction of Kievan Rus by Batu Khan. The so-called Mongol invasions were simply an internal Turanian affair. There were no anti-Christian feelings during the conquest of Kievan Rus, pretty much like there was no anti-Muslim sentiment during the invasion of Volga Bulgaria.
‘Tatar-Mongol’ is a charlatanesque term deliberately used in order to diffuse wrong impressions and erroneous conceptualization of the historical events; the invading armies were Turanian. The local populations in Volga Bulgaria, Cuman-Kipchak confederation, Kievan Rus, Christian Alania, Vladimir-Suzdal, and Khazaria were predominantly of Turanian origin too. How could one scholar possibly speak of a ‘Turanian occupation of Turanians’? This would be an oxymoron.
For this reason, the Western European factories of falsehood, which pretend to be ‘centers of learning’, produce fake names in order to plunge the non-specialists and the credulous victims of their propaganda into endless confusion, thus positioning their deceitful narrative. One can describe the Turanian invasions of Genghis Khan and his descendants as a ‘civil war’ among Turanians or even as fratricidal clashes that spanned across Asia (with Europe being just an Asiatic peninsula). However, these events, in spite of the great number of casualties, were in reality merciless conflicts of tribal leaderships; the causes for them were issues of spiritual purity, moral integrity, Turanian identity, and imperial honesty.
The racist historians and the biased intellectuals of the Western European countries lack the academic ability, the free will, and the fair judgment to view things as they truly happened and in the way their champions felt them at the time. By continually projecting their immoral mindsets, worthless values, and conceited character, they get a shallow understanding of each historical development, and they always fail to fathom that it did not happen as they could expect or even imagine. Then, when the historical facts have to be distorted enough in order to be adjusted to the criminal agendas of the Western European elites and the colonial governments, their bigotry and partiality reach the level of madness.
The myth of the ‘Tatar-Mongol Occupation of Russia’ is the key ruse point of the racist Western historiography about Russia. This is the result of the discriminatory theory of racial purity. This approach was subtly diffused among Russian academic, intellectual and political elites over centuries; it forces Russians to believe that they were initially a small country which later expanded. This is wrong. Nations are not races with racist elites, but cultural communities organized in culture-based states that are open to all the inhabitants, and secret organizations have no right to exist.
Russians must not feel closer to Kievan Rus than to Volga Bulgaria and the other Turanian states of Asia and Europe that stretched at the time over today’s Russian territory; preponderantly, Russians are ethnically the offspring of all the Turanian khanates and nations, which were formed throughout the territory of Russia and several adjacent states. Slavicization (Russification) came later. Studying the topic of the Turanian invasions, Russians should not feel sentimentally linked to Kievan Rus. Their ancestors were truly on both sides of the war.
The 16th c. pledge made to Kievan Rus by the Muscovite authorities was entirely spiritual and eschatological, not ethnic – let alone political. This must become crystal clear, because it will play a decisive role in the much needed, forthcoming victory of Russia and annexation of Ukraine. Russians today must emancipate themselves from the czarist need for a European Russia; they have to envision their remote past as an all-encompassing heritage,
Representations of eschatological concepts involving Kievan Rus and Third Rome-Russia
As intentionally racist fabrication of the Western academia, the so-called ‘Tatar-Mongol Occupation of Russia’ is fully refuted and utterly invalidated by historical facts and sources that the disreputable professors of English, French, Dutch, Belgian, American, Canadian, Australian and other universities do their ingenious best to hide. In fact, from the middle of the 13th to the middle of the 16th c., there were no religious fanaticism, ethnic enmity and social divisions throughout Eastern Europe.
On the contrary, after the incorporation of the Kievan Rus, there were frequent mixed marriages at all levels; as they were fluent in Turkic dialects, numerous Rus princes quite often got unreservedly married with Turanian princesses, thus getting the favor of their Emperor of the Golden Horde. There was no rancor and no hatred from the Christians against the Tengrists and the Muslims and vice versa, in striking contrast to what the villainous Anglo-French scholars ruthlessly attempt to represent, further drawing their lines of division. One can publish endless series of volumes, stating facts and referring to historical sources that totally discredit the criminal Western European academics, their vicious fallacies, and their murderous pseudo-historical divisive lines.
A typical example is the case of the prince Yuri Danilovich (Юрий Данилович; 1281-1340/prince of Moscow/Muscovy after 1303), who was vassal of the Sultan Giyas al-Din Mohammed Öz Beg (غیاث الدین محمد /Султан Гийас ад-Дин Мухаммед; 1282-1341; reigned after 1313/also known as Özbeg Khan /Узбек-хан / اوزبیک خان), the great emperor of the Golden Horde. Giyas al-Din Mohammed was born Tengrist, but accepted Islam before being coronated. Yuri Danilovich managed to get married with the emperor’s sister Konchaka (Кончака; died 1318), who was authorized to become Christian Orthodox; Yuri Danilovich’s loyalty to the Golden Horde -at the very moment the vast empire adopted Islam as official religion- fully shows that at the time everything was very different from the vicious, divisive narrative that Western academics have ceaselessly and shamelessly have propagated. About:
Due to the fact that Rus/Slavic-Turanian Christianity was the Orthodox faith (and not the schismatic Catholic heresy), the two more systematized faiths were viewed as they truly are, i.e. quasi-identical, and this facilitated the conversions from either side. In this regard, a typical example is Tsarevich (Czarevitch) Peter Ordynsky (i.e. Peter of the Horde; Пётр Ордынский/died 1290), who was also known as Peter Rostovsky (Пётр Ростовский) or Dair Kaydagul Orda-Ichinov (Даир Кайдагул Орда-Ичинов); great-grandson of Genghis Khan, nephew of Batu Khan and Berke (or Birkai) Khan (Бәркә хан; died 1266), the prince of the Golden Horde was the son of prince Orda-Ejen (or Orda Ichen) and grandson of Jochi. He accepted Christianity; he was baptized Peter and he saw formidable spiritual visions. Then, Bishop Ignatius of Rostov {Игнатий I (епископ Ростовский); died 1288} solemnly declared Peter Ordynsky and Boris Vasil’kovich (1231-1277) brothers under the vaults of the church; the latter was the vassal -to the Golden Horde- prince of Rostov. Before dying, Peter Ordynsky became a monk and established a monastery; he was early canonized in 1547. About:
Berke Khan; painting by the distinguished Tatar painter Rushan Shamsutdinov (born 1946; Рушан Галяфович Шамсутдинов) on the basis of the description by the 14th c. Coptic Christian historian Al-Mufaddal ibn Abi al-Fada’il (المفضل بن ابي الفضائل) who wrote a historical book about the Mamluks, also including a report about the visit of a state visit (1263) to the palace of the Jochi Ulus.
Other illustrious cases of noble intermarriages between Christian Rus princes and Turanian imperial families involve Gleb Vasil’kovich (Глеб Василькович; 1238-1278), who was the first prince of Beloozero (Белозерское княжество; 1238–1486), another small vassal state of the Golden Horde, and St. Fyodor the Black (also known as Theodore Rostislavich / Феодор Ростиславич Чёрный; ca. 1233-1299), another vassal of the Golden Horde and ruler of Smolensk and Yaroslavl, who was later (1463) canonized. The former got married with one of the daughters of Sartaq Khan (Сартак), who was the oldest son of the conqueror Batu Khan; and the latter wedded the daughter of Möngke Temür (or Munkh Tumur/ Мангутемир; died in 1280), who was the grandson of Batu Khan.
Coin of Möngke (Mengu) Timur Khan; Bulghar mint 1273
Built by Batu Khan, Sarai was the capital of the Golden Horde and the world’s most refined, most lavish, and most marvelous city of the 14th c.; amongst others, Ibn Battuta visited and described the Muslim world’s true capital of those days. One century later, Sarai was depicted in the map designed by the Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro around 1450.
I will continue in the next article of the series; but at this point, I have to conclude that for the Russians the only path to victory involves
a) an accurate perception of their historical identity as a non-European, Asiatic Empire, and
b) a resolute rejection of the misperceptions, the inaccuracies, the distortions and the divisive sentimentalism that Western colonial historians and academics projected onto them in order to confuse them and make them unable to exploit in the best possible manner the chances that History offered to Northern Asia.
Napoleon I Bonaparte, who failed to win over the Russians, knew it, understood it and said it; but today’s criminal Western regimes do their best to hide the statement.
“Dig up a Russian and you will find a Tatar!”
1812 – Napoleon retreats from Moscow as it burns; painting by Viktor Mazurovsky (1859-1944)
Today’s Russian leadership must make the big leap; in it, they will have to combine
– Genghis Khan’s military acumen,
– Tamerlane’s martial ingenuity,
– Ivan IV’s imperial tenacity, and
– Nikolai II’s pledge to Kievan Rus-Third Rome.
But all these mental faculties, personal advantages, and moral challenges will need to be backed by the adamant spirituality and the concealed forcefulness that typified Stalin only 70 years ago.
Yet, it will be up to the forthcoming Last Czar to manifest the vitality that will irrevocably remove the Anglo-French perfidy and the Roman outrage from the surface of the Earth.
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu (Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
Pre-publication of chapter XXIII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapter XXIII constitutes the Part Nine (Fallacies about the Golden Era of the Islamic Civilization). The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
—————————————————-
Known rather through his cognomen (‘Paradisiacal’) and his kunya (teknonym: Abu’l Qassem, i.e. ‘father of Qassem’), Ferdowsi was born (ca. 940) in Tus (Khorasan, NE Iran) around the time Muhammad ibn al-Askari, son of Hasan al-Askari and 12th Imam, went into his Major Occultation (941). The apocalyptic eschatological fascination of those days is explicitly shown in Ferdowsi’s own name, because the quest for the Paradise is the epitome of every reliable Messianism (: Soteriology) and Eschatology.
Ferdowsi is a worldwide unique case of highly venerated poet whose work is absolutely immense and whose known details of life are incredibly minimal; although he was historically referred to as the leading epic poet, erudite sage, and unsurpassed master of Farsi (and there have been several historical biographies of him), we don’t know even his real name. Judging from his son’s name, Ferdowsi (940-1020) was a Muslim, but there stop all the important biographical details that we know. In fact, Ferdowsi’s life is enveloped in mystery and legend similarly with the contents of his monumental and sublime epic; we know however that he had a great Turanian sponsor: the formidable Conqueror and Emperor Mahmud Ghaznavi (971-1030; the founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty), who invaded the Indus Valley, Punjab and the Ganges Valley, unifying territories that stretched between the Caspian Sea and today’s Bangladesh.
Ferdowsi mausoleum, Tus – Iran
Ferdowsi’s unsurpassed masterpiece, the Shahnameh (: the Book of the Kings) is the world’s largest epic totaling more than 100000 (one hundred thousand) verses. In terms of Iranian Literature, it was not the first epic composed under this title. Thanks to his historical biographies, we know that Ferdowsi started the composition of the enormous opus in 977, initially viewing it as the completion of a similar effort earlier undertaken by another Iranian poet, Abu Mansur Daqiqi, who did not have the chance to advance his Shahnameh much before being assassinated. However, Ferdowsi’s epic differs greatly from all the other Shahnameh epic poems or prose compositions in many ways; although similar narratives have been attested in other Iranian and Islamic epics, Ferdowsi places his heroes in an atemporal field of semiotics whereby they function as symbols of spiritual ideas, moral principles, and eternal values.
Was Ferdowsi a ‘Sunni’ or a ‘Shia’? The question sounds irrelevant; although it is evident that he was a Muslim and a strong monotheist (which also applies to several forms of pre-Islamic Iranian religions), Ferdowsi does not contain the slightest portion of reference to the Early Islamic History into his legendary opus.
Is pre-Islamic Iranian-Turanian History reflected in Ferdowsi’s epic? In a way, yes! But it is an ahistorical reference to a series of dynasties that modern Iranologists, philologists, specialists in Comparative Literature, historians and historians of religions, experts in Mysticism Studies and Symbolism try in vain to accommodate within the scholarly known frame of the Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sassanid dynasties. This is however quite impossible a task to carry out; and Ferdowsi is the only reason for this. Although there is not a single indication that Ferdowsi divided his masterpiece into ‘periods’, the entire Shahnameh is divided, on the basis of typical literary analysis, into three sections: mythical age, heroic age, and historical age.
As per this – absolutely wrong – categorization, all the aforementioned pre-Islamic Iranian dynasties belong to the third section (historical age). But more than two thirds of the enormous epic’s verses are dedicated to the narration of episodes of the so-called ‘heroic age’. An analysis of Shahnameh goes beyond the scope of the present book, but with the above brief description I wanted to point out that Ferdowsi mainly focused on pre-Achaemenid eras and that his intention was to illuminate the spiritual ideas and the human valor that predestined historical Iran-Turan to be what we know through regular historical documentation that it was. Despite the numerous distortive presentations and worthless analyses, if one stays close to Ferdowsi’s verses, one concludes easily that, as per the illustrious poet and mystic, Iran-Turan constitutes an indivisible world.
Was Ferdowsi a Persian or a Turanian? This question in and by itself reveals total ignorance of Iranian and Turanian History, Culture and Civilization. The undisputed and definitely unequaled mastership of Farsi to which the majestic composition of Shahnameh bears witness does not make of Ferdowsi a Persian. Across the ages, many Turanians excelled in Persian poetry. Ferdowsi’s origin from Khorasan (a region traditionally inhabited by Turanians and Persians alike) and his close relationship with the great Turanian Emperor Mahmud Ghaznavi show that it is quite plausible that Ferdowsi was a Turanian. Mahmud Ghaznavi vanquished the Samanid state (995-999) pretty much like the Seljuk Turks had destroyed the Buyids half a century later. Consequently, we can conclude that Ferdowsi ostensibly sided with Turanian institutions and rulers against Persian states and kings.
There are also some other indicators that must be taken into consideration, as regards Ferdowsi’s identity: although his legendary narratives reflect the foremost values of the Achaemenid Civilization and represent the Zoroastrian conceptualization of the Universe, the contents of Shahnameh do not stringently correspond to the world of Parsis, namely those among the Sassanid times’ Persians who managed to escape the Islamic onslaught and survived in Iran and in India, preserving a posterior form of Mazdeism (and Zoroastrianism) that we presently call ‘Parsism’. Several PhD-level dissertations can be elaborated to properly demonstrate that on many critical issues Ferdowsi’s viewpoint on the pre-Islamic Iran and the Parsis’ traditions pertaining to the Sassanid (and earlier) past differ greatly.
In Shahnameh, one cannot find the slightest support for the Parsi faith, let alone of the Parsis’ anti-Islamic feelings. There is not a single sign that Ferdowsi saw his grand opus as an Iranian ‘comeback’ (let alone ‘revenge’), as an instigation of pre-Islamic Iranian ‘patriotism’ among Iranian Muslims or as anti-Islamic fascination and mobilization. On the contrary, throughout Shahnameh, there are incessant references to Turanian gallantry and passion, bravery and confusion, unity and division, crime and punishment, discipline and order, mysticism and divination, honesty and treachery, clarity and confusion.
The Iranian – Turanian epic presents a magnificent equilibrium among all tendencies and characters, trends and exploits, attempts and regrets. Shahnameh attains a spherical perfection, contains no pointless element, locates all elements in their correct place whereby everything meets its reverse reflection and all spirits are accompanied by their opposites. All this is put in perfect Farsi, in lines of 22 syllables, in rhyming couplets (masnaviyat), and in metre 1.1.11.
Where does Ferdowsi stand among his time’s mystics, orders, kings and warriors, erudite scholars and theological jurists?
Was he close to late Sassanid Zervanism? Certainly not as much as Tabari, a fully accredited Islamic exegete and theologian, founder of a major madhhab, and the Islamic world’s supreme historian! Tabari dedicated the introductory chapter of his voluminous History to a theoretical analysis of the Time (: Zervan or Zurvan, a late Mithraic figure that was the central god of a late branch of Mithraists). But Ferdowsi started his epic with Keyumars (Gayomard of the late Zoroastrian texts), the first man and first king (Pishdad dynasty); this approach makes of royalty the first human virtue.
Was Ferdowsi close to the late Sassanid followers of Gayomard? Not quite! His focus on the recapitulation of themes related to heroic combats gives us the impression that Ferdowsi envisioned a dynamic universe in which Cosmogony and Eschatology consisted in an indivisible entity of spiritual and material order based on a permanent movement back and forth between Being and Becoming.
From all the major groups of early Muslims and from all the followers of then extant Iranian religions, the Khurramites, the Parsis, the Manichaeans, the Mazdakists, the so-called Twelver Shia, the Isma’ilis, between the Mazdeists and all the rest, Ferdowsi seems to be equidistant.
The same attitude appears in the Shahnameh; between the Turanian Afrasiab and the Iranians Siyavash and Kay Khosrow, Ferdowsi pursues a narrative that does not favor any of the combatants, while presenting brave deeds and mythical facts as the straight result of the great legendary heroes’ spiritual choices and divine providence.
In fact, Ferdowsi is to be found at cosmic distance from all his contemporaneous mystics, poets, erudite polymaths, historians, scholars and theologians. Next to him, all the rest appear infinitesimal. That’s why we can safely claim that within the wider context of Islamic Civilization across Eurasia only Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh proved to be as influential a book as the Quran. The great epic impacted all the Islamic nations, ethno-linguistic groups, mystical orders, intellectuals, poets, authors, and artists so irrevocably that, from the beginning of the 11th c. onwards, it would perhaps be more accurate, instead of speaking of Iranians and Turanians, to start referring to them as Ferdowsians. About:
Kay Qobad (Kay Kawad) on his throne; a leading figure of the Kayanid dynasty that was transcendentally constructed by Ferdowsi
In fact, one cannot speak about the Seljuk Turks, before briefly presenting Ferdowsi’s Cosmogony within the Islamic world. This is so because the Seljuk dynasty, along with the Ghaznavids, proved to be the first and the most enthusiastic adepts and supporters of the heroic worldview narrated by Ferdowsi, of the spiritual ideas revealed in Shahnameh, and of the moral values respected by the great heroes of the legendary, atemporal and apocalyptic Pishdadian and Kayanian dynasties. In fact, only this phenomenon, i.e. the Ghaznavids’ and the Seljuk Turks’ wholehearted acceptance and overwhelming promotion of the Universe as reassessed by Ferdowsi, makes of the grand master of Farsi Literature the national poet of all Turanians.
Quite contrarily to the historical facts, the criminal Western Orientalists depict a terribly tarnished and viciously distorted image of this reality; as per their false and nonsensical interpretations, the Seljuk Turks accepted Islam through Persian culture. This is as idiotic as an eventual, irrelevant assumption according to which a (fully hypothetical) educational jury was supposedly awaiting at the northeastern Iranian borders for the Seljuk Turks to come, and then upon their arrival, they told them: “pass your Ferdowsi exam, and come-in”! So pathetic and ludicrous is the Western Orientalist approach to the topic! Things did not happen that way, and this reality shows that it is absolutely absurd and utterly calamitous for any Turkic and Iranian nation to accept the presence of Anglo-American institutions in their territories or to allow their nationals to study in Western universities or even to visit West European, North American, and Oceanian countries.
The heroic, legendary, cosmological and eschatological order revealed by Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh was the basic oral culture of all Turanians and Iranians, Persians included, for millennia. Simply, this cultural background was not (and could not be) the religious dogma of Zoroastrianism (and of its subsequent forms, i.e. Arsacid Zendism and Sassanid Mazdeism) as attested in the holy texts of that religion and in the imperial inscriptions of the faithful Kings of Kings.
The fallacy of Modern Western Humanities, as developed in the racist, colonial, criminal pseudo-universities of Western Europe and North America, is due to the paranoid (but intentionally implemented) method of compartmentalizing the historical truth and the exploration thereof; this occurs in total contradiction to the universal, comprehensive and holistic approach and method (of viewing and examining the historical truth) that prevailed among all the great historical civilizations (whereby there was no compartmentalization). This vicious method leads colonial historiographers to the distortive division of topics into separate ‘academic fields’: history, archaeology, philology (‘literature’), linguistics, history of religions, ethnography and social anthropology, philosophy, history of arts, history of sciences, architecture, and so on. Consequently, this makes researchers separate their various study topics between “written cultures” and “oral cultures”; but by so doing, they totally misperceive and misrepresent entire historical periods.
As a matter of fact, Ferdowsi did not ‘invent’ (or ‘envision’ or ‘conceive’ or ‘devise’ or ‘create’) his narratives; he only managed to compose them in an incomparably genuine and superior poetic manner. All the terms, names and ideas of Shahnameh’s stories antedate Ferdowsi for about 1500 years – to say the least; this is something that all Orientalists accept. But they fail to see that these terms, names, ideas and stories constituted the oral culture of all the Iranians and the Turanians long before the heliocentric fallacy of Mithras was first propagated among them in the first half of the first pre-Christian millennium. Ferdowsi wrote down this millennia-long Turanian and Iranian oral anti-Mithraic cultural tradition in a literarily majestic manner. And by doing so, he did not ‘give’ the Seljuk Turks their culture (which was already theirs and their ancestors’), but the wings that they needed to conquer the world and implement their millennia long values and virtues as reinstated in the Quran and reinterpreted in the Shahnameh.
Of course, there is a reason the colonial historiography appears to have some success in plunging readers into deceitful schemes, distortive narratives, and nonexistent popups; if you are naïve enough to believe that the Seljuk Turks came from the North Pole or the Moon, then you will certainly accept the fallacy of the so-called Seljuk acculturation in Iran, and you will start believing the nonsense of the Turanian nations’ ‘persianization’. But the Seljuk Turks were neither in the North Pole nor in the Moon! In fact, they had been -for several centuries- just on the other side of the Islamic Caliphate’s northeastern border. And for cultures, for nations, for faiths, and for civilizations, there are no borders; even more importantly, borders do not apply to oral cultures.
Even more absurdly, “border historiography” cannot exist across the Silk Road; by ‘stopping’ their premeditated and therefore fallacious description of historical facts at the borders of the various modern states, the criminal Western pseudo-historians intentionally implement their evil political axiom ‘divide et impera’ throughout Humanities. This is the way most of the people worldwide have been deceived in this regard.
For several centuries, the ancestors of the Seljuk Turks lived within the wider Yabyu (English: Yabghu) territory within the land of the Oguz/Oghuz (Oğuz) nomads’ state. Its location stretched across vast territories of the modern states of Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and (to smaller extent) Uzbekistan. Yabyu spanned east of the Khazar Khaganate (or Khanate), between the Caspian Sea and Aral Lake, and north of the border of the Islamic Caliphate. The forefather of the Seljuk Turks was a formidable Oghuz combatant named Seljuk, who served also in the Khazar army, before clashing with other Oghuz warriors, migrating to southeast (around the year 980), and settling in Transoxiana (Arabic: Mawarannahr / ماوراءالنهر), next to Syr Darya (Iaxartes) river. At that original stage, the ‘Seljuk Turks’ (i.e. the family of Seljuk) were less than 1000 people in total.
Seljuk made an alliance with the Samanids (a mainly Persian kingdom) and fought against the Kara-Khanids, a Turanian Khaganate, mainly known as the House of Afrasiab (آل افراسیاب / which means that they were named (as early as the 9th c.; so before Ferdowsi) after the most important Turanian hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The development was not good for the Seljuk family, and Seljuk’s grandsons Tughril and Chaghri had to further migrate (ca. 1040) to the South (Khorasan). The son of Mahmud Ghaznavi, Mas’ud I of Ghazni, tried to prevent them from advancing, and the battle of Dandanaqan (near Merv in today’s Turkmenistan) opened the way for the Seljuk rise. Tughril’s and Chaghri’s victory (1040) was tantamount to Seljuk prevalence in Khorasan. Ten years later (1050), Tughril invaded Isfahan and established the Great Seljuk Empire.
However, only to prove the inalienable, indissoluble, and indelible nature of the Turanian–Iranian civilization and identity, the early Seljuk success across the Iranian plateau would have no historical continuity and impact without the astounding contribution of a Persian original: Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi, who is rather known through his incredible title ‘Nizam al Mulk’ (:”Systems of Royal Governance”). Nizam al Mulk (1018-1092) was born two years before Ferdowsi died, but his inclination and genius covered a totally different field than that of the greatest epic poet of World History. Originating from Khorasan, Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi left his position at Ghazni, the capital of the Turanian Ghaznavid Empire and entered the service of the Seljuk Turks (1043); there he was entrusted, among other tasks, with the education of Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri (mainly known as Alp Arslan), i.e. the son of Chaghri and nephew of Tughril, the founding sultans of the Seljuk empire.
The assassination of Nizam al Mulk
Consequently, the rise of the Seljuk Empire is entirely due to the wise advice, the outstanding guidance, and the governance systematization introduced by Nizam al Mulk, a Persian; of course, all this would prove to be useless without the Seljuk bravery and thunderous attacks. One can call the Seljuk Empire a ‘Turanian’ (or ‘Turkic’ state); but it was equally ‘Iranian’ – notwithstanding the historical forgeries of the Orientalist gangsters of the Anglo-American universities.
Nizam al Mulk is perhaps the person, who studied best the infinite intrigues that occurred on daily basis among all the rulers who enjoyed some portion of power due to the already discussed phenomenon of the Abbasid Caliphate’s fragmentation. Highly respected and incessantly consulted by Tughril, Chaghri and their children, Nizam al Mulk methodically guided them in the splendid attempt to terminate the Abbasid Caliphate’s fragmentation. First, they consolidated their control across the northern part of the Iranian plateau until 1046-7. In 1048, they attacked an Eastern Roman – Georgian army near today’s Pasinler (or Hasankale), east of Erzurum, in the less publicized but historic battle of Kapetron. After ensuring a great capital for themselves at Isfahan (1050), in the Iranian plateau’s southern part, Tughril invaded Baghdad (1055), terminated the Buyid dynasty, and (according to modern Turkish Islamist bibliography) ‘liberated’ the Abbasid Caliph; this is however not accurate because it was not possible anymore to restore the original power of the Abbasid Caliphate. The Abbasids remained a weak and impotent dynasty for another 200 years.
Nizam al Mulk set up a series of academies named after him, ‘Nizamiyah’; his major opus Siyasatnameh (‘the Book of the Governance’) was the basic manual that was taught, discussed, and in-depth understood there, after the completion of an entire basic circle of studies. The numerous Nizamiyah academies that the indefatigable Nizam al Mulk founded in various parts of the expanding Seljuk territory were not similar either to the earlier appeared jurisprudential madhhabs or to the regular madrasas (theological schools).
The graduates of every Nizamiyah acquired first a spherical, encyclopedic knowledge, and at a second stage, an excellent command of the diverse methods of a successful administration of the state (one could vaguely compare them to various modern ‘national schools of administration’). Nizamiyah graduates could man the Seljuk administration and deliver spectacular results, due to the innovative and resourceful mindset that they were taught to build and thanks to their persistence on avoiding bureaucracy. Despite his indisputable imperial and administrative genius, Nizam al Mulk was also a combatant, and – contrarily to the worthless and corrupt, modern bureaucrats – he often accompanied his shahs in their campaigns.
Nizam al Mulk was ostensibly against the group of Isma’ilis and their system of secretive and elitist governance. In his book, he expanded on them; this however does not make of him a ‘Sunni’, as modern forgers pretend. He and his Seljuk emperors were Muslims, who did not accept either secretive governance or the particularities of various eschatological, messianic groups like the Isma’ilis (today mistakenly named ‘Sevener Shia’) or the apocalyptic adepts of the Ahl al Bayt (today erroneously called ‘Twelver Shia’), who expected the imminent reappearance of the 12th imam. This is an extra proof that throughout History there is no such sectarian division and false identification as “Turkish Sunni” and “Iranian Shia”; this is a colonial lie and a shameful Orientalist forgery.
All the same, because of the colonially imposed (during the 19th and 20th centuries) sectarianism, which prevails among today’s deceived and disoriented Muslims, Nizam al Mulk is totally unknown among African Muslims and Saudi-impacted Muslims in Southeast Asia, because he is idiotically viewed as “Iranian and therefore Shia”. This externally imposed pseudo-historical dogma is enough to reveal the criminal nature of the colonial countries France and England, of their successor state (USA), and of the various associated structures, like Canada and Australia.
The rise of the Seljuk Empire was the result of great bravery, heroic fascination, and superb imperial administration that greatly contributed to arts, letters, sciences and spirituality; but it was practically speaking the affair of one family. Few victories were enough to catapult the Seljuk Turks to world predominance between China and Rome. This was due to their wisdom, universal culture, and ability to compose out of many diverse elements; they therefore became a pole of major attraction. Within the general context of Modern Turkology, most of the researchers are specializing in the Ottoman Empire (eventually because of the abundance of historical sources) and have a certain predilection and admiration for the Ottomans, who also functioned as one family – only to the detriment of the Empire that they acquired and that they inherited. But this scholarly attitude is very subjective, highly sentimental, and therefore wrong.
In reality, the Ottomans were superior to the Seljuk Turks only quantitatively. They controlled larger territory and they lasted longer; that’s true. But if one examines the data qualitatively and evaluates comparatively, one easily concludes that the Seljuk were remarkably superior to the Ottomans. However, their undeniably inherent weakness, which consisted in numerous internal conflicts and in incessant, yet unnecessary, family divisions, antagonisms and rivalries, predestined them to fast decay. In fact, the Seljuk Golden Era lasted ca. 100 years: from the dissolution of the Buyid dynasty (1055) to the death of Ahmad Sanjar (1157). After that term, the Seljuk Empire split to several sultanates. The most remarkable among them was certainly the Sultanate of Rum, but that was an Anatolian state, not a major empire across Eurasia. All the same, the History of Mysticism and Spirituality in Seljuk Anatolia eclipsed the Imperial History of that branch of the Seljuk family.
Even Alp Arslan (1063-1072) and Malik-Shah I (1072-1092), who represent the top of Seljuk power, had to engage in battles to eliminate contenders to their throne, and the contenders were none else than their formidable uncles, Kutalmish and Qavurt respectively. Thanks to Nizam al Mulk, Alp Arslan organized a mixed form of feudal empire, at the same time sedentary and nomadic, and for this, he was praised by many Persians like Saadi Shirazi, whereas with the rising sectarianism of the 13th c. he was terribly scolded by Turanians like Shams al-din ibn Kızoğlu (Sıbt İbnu’l-Cevzi). Thanks to Nizam al Mulk’s concepts and Alp Arslan’s rule and practices, a great process of Turanian sedentism across Iran, India, Caucasus, Anatolia and Syro-Mesopotamia was initiated only to strengthen the local populations and transform the Central Asiatic and Siberian nomadism. More importantly, this ingenious idea and brilliant execution introduced -across a vast region- a new social system of mutual social interdependence among sedentary and nomadic populations, thus fortifying the states that would rule these populations. Many populations that still preserve their nomadic nature and traditions across the vast lands from the Mediterranean to the Indus River and from the Persian Gulf to the Tian Shan Mountains and the Siberian permafrost reached the regions where they currently live in the period between the arrival of the Seljuk Turks and the rise of Mughal Empire.
Contrarily to Orientalist deceitful schemes and deliberate misinterpretations, Malik-Shah I did not clash with the dangerous Isma’ili enclave of Hassan al Sabah (1050-1124) in Alamut and in various surrounding locations in the Alborz Mountains because of a hypothetical ‘Sunni’–’Shia’ dispute or an ethnic Persian–Turanian conflict. Simply, as a student of Nizam al-Mulk, he fully accepted and implemented his tutor’s and adviser’s recommendations as regards the nature of the imperial administration and state.
First of all, the small and perfidious Isma’ili state constituted real dynamite in the foundations of the Seljuk Empire; second, the treacherous nature of the Assassins consisted in permanent threat for all the local populations that wanted to live in peace across the Seljuk territory, and not in ceaseless strives. Above all, Malik-Shah I rejected the concept of elitist rule and the existence of spiritual orders with material aspirations. Unfortunately, his successors proved to be quite incompetent and totally unable to face the challenges that they encountered. Because of them and due to their internal discord, the Seljuk Empire was not prepared to oppose the Crusades that started at that moment. For a period of 26 years (1092-1118), four monarchs ruled the vast state that was gradually being decomposed; their incompetence triggered the secession of various lands that formed independent sultanates under the control of various members of Seljuk’s family.
Ahmad Sanjar (1118-1153) was the luckiest of the sons of Malik-Shah I, because he managed to defeat successive invasions from the Kara-Khanids (Afrasiab) of Central Asia, the Ghurids of Khorasan, and the Ghaznavids of the Indus River Valley; however, he faced a crushing defeat at the hands of the Siberian Turanians of Kara Khitan (at the Battle of Qatwan; 1141) and a disastrous uprising among his fellow Seljuk tribesmen (1153). After Ahmad Sanjar’s death, the Turanians of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) conquered the northeastern part of the Seljuk Empire, whereas the vast territory was finally divided among the Seljuk sultans of Hamadan and Baghdad, the Seljuk sultans of Kerman, the Seljuk emirs in Syria, and the Seljuk sultans of Rum (i.e. Romania-Ρωμανία: the Eastern Roman Empire). The endless internal strives of the Seljuk dynasty are no 1 reason of the Crusaders’ success in the Orient. In 1157, Muhammad II ibn Mahmud (1128–1159), Sultan of Seljuk Empire from 1153 to 1159, failed to conquer Baghdad, despite the siege that he laid to the city; this shows that the Great Seljuk state was already weak and that tensions often existed between Baghdad’s impotent caliphs and the various monarchs who ruled in his name.
The Seljuqian-e Rum (1077-1308 / سلجوقیان روم) lasted longer and became the forerunners of the Iranian-Turanian oral culture and the standard bearers of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in the most important regions of the Eastern Roman Empire. If you only have a look at the list of the Seljuqian-e Rum monarchs for a moment, you come to realize that their spiritual world and their imperial identity originated from the all-encompassing Turanian-Iranian Universe of Shahnameh: among the 18 sultans, who ruled during a period of 231 years, there were three (3) named Kayqubad, two (2) named Kaykaus, and three (3) named Kaykhusraw. This means that almost half of this dynasty’s rulers named themselves after the most illustrious legendary Iranian kings of the Kayanian dynasty, which represents the focal point of Ferdowsi’s sublime Iranian-Turanian epic poetry.
Throughout Human History, we have known a great number of historical kings, who posthumously entered the world of the legend; but the Seljuqian-e Rum were the only to incarnate the legend and to make out of the realm of the spiritual intuition and the transcendental vision an undeniably historical reality. This fact irrevocably marked the central position that they occupy within the indivisible Iranian-Turanian world. About:
The prevalence of the Seljuqian-e Rum in Anatolia transformed this land into the high land of Islamic Civilization, Spirituality and Mysticism. Pretty much like the Islamic world’s gravitational center shifted from Arabia to Mesopotamia with the foundation of Baghdad and the establishment of the Bayt al Hikmah in the middle of 8th c., the Islamic world’s center of imperial power, mysticism and spirituality was relocated from Iran and Caucasus to Anatolia in the late 12th and early 13th c. For many centuries, Anatolia had lost its worldwide radiation; after the end of the Eastern Roman Isaurian dynasty (717-802), the defeat of the Iconoclasts (842), and the downfall of the Paulicians (dispersed in 872 and massively relocated in 970), Anatolia was in ramshackle. The overwhelming rejection of the evil Constantinopolitan theology by the quasi-totality of the Anatolian population irrevocably predestined their future and facilitated the forthcoming Islamization. The spiritual successors to the Iconoclasts and the Paulicians were to be the Mevlevis, the Bektashis, and above all the Qizilbash. The indigenous, traditional Anatolian mysticism predetermined the historical evolution.
The beginning of the Seljuk prevalence in Anatolia is entirely due to Kilij Arslan I (1092-1107; Kılıç Arslan / قِلِج اَرسلان), the first Seljuk to have Konya-Iconium as capital. He managed to defeat three Crusader armies and to secure a sizeable portion of Anatolia for his expanding state. He was a great warrior and an illustrious mystic. However, many scholars want to deliberately forget the fact that the two names of this sultan became the emblem of the Iranian Safavid Empire 400 years later! If this sounds somewhat strange, the English translation of the two names will be enough to clarify the case: “Kılıç Arslan” means “the sword holding lion”. See the emblem:
However, the main part of the preparatory work for the rise of Seljuk Anatolia was done by Rukn al-Din Mesud I (1116-1156; Rükneddin Mesud /ركن الدین مسعود) who was able to defeat two Crusader armies (led by the German Conrad III and the French Louis VII) in 1147 and 1148 and to welcome the adhesion of significant portion of the local Eastern Roman population to Islam. Even illustrious members of the Comneni / Komnenos imperial family, like John Komnenos Tzelepes (grandson of the Eastern Roman Emperor Alexios I Komnenos) who married Rukn al-Din Mesud I’s daughter, became Muslim around the middle of the 12th c.
Rukn al-Din Mesud I’s son and successor, Izz ad-Dīn Qilij Arslān bin Masʿūd (rather known as Kilij Arslan II (1156-1192; Kılıç Arslan / عز الدین قلج ارسلان بن مسعود) represents a very successful consolidation stage of the Seljuqian-e Rum; his critical victory at Myriokephalon (SW Turkey: between Isparta and Konya) in 1176 sealed the end of Eastern Roman presence in Anatolia. Kilij Arslan II, who claimed to be a far relative of Heinrich der Löwe (German prince of the Welf family and Teutonic Knight), expanded at the detriment of the Turkmen Danishmends and the Eastern Roman, but, despite his alliance with Saladin, proved to be unable to possibly stop Frederick Barbarossa’s Third Crusade; however, the numbers speak for themselves: for 76 years, the Seljuqian-e Rum were under only two kings – which is tantamount to great stability.
To the court of the Seljuqian-e Rum started flocking numerous Muslim mystics, spiritual masters, erudite polymaths, theologians, interdisciplinary scholars, great architects and artists, philosophers, leading medical doctors, poets, and other prominent intellectuals of those times. Konya had gradually become a major pole of attraction for the world’s leading wise men. In fact, Seljuk Anatolia eclipsed all other parts of the world in terms of spirituality, mysticism, letters, arts and sciences. This is not strange; despite the great confusion caused by colonial Orientalists and Western Medievalists, who elaborate a distortive and highly politicized representation of this historical period by focusing on the Crusades and the bloodshed caused by Papal Pseudo-Christianity, the 13th c. proved to be above all the peak of the Golden Era of Islamic Civilization.
Those were the times when Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209; today celebrated as the national poet of Azerbaijan), based in South Caucasus, composed his illustrious epics Khusraw and Shirin (1177-1180), Eskandar-Nameh (: the Book of Alexander the Great; 1196-1202), and his apocalyptic eschatological masterpiece Haft Peykar (: the Seven Beauties; 1197), in which he detailed the troubles of seven major lands of civilization that will rise at the End of Time, when a formidable punishment will be adjusted to the evil perpetrator of crimes against those nations. The sublime epic is monstrously misinterpreted by materialistic Western pseudo-academics as “erotic poetry”, because those corrupt and worthless forgers cannot understand what apocalyptic symbolism is all about. The seven nations / lands of civilization are personified by
– Furak (or Nurak; India),
– Yaghma Naz (China, described as the land under the “Khaqan of the Turks”),
– Naz Pari (Turanian Central Asia, named ‘Khwarazm’/Chorasmia),
– Nasrin Nush (Russia, which is in reality Tatarstan, i.e. the Land of the descendants of the Rouran Touranian Khaganate),
– Azarbin (or Azareyon; Africa – called Maghreb, but viewed generally as the ‘West’)
– Humay (the Eastern Roman Empire’s lands), and
– Diroste (Iran, described as the House of Kay Ka’us, an illustrious Shah of Fardowsi’s heroic Kayanian dynasty whose deeds cover the largest part of Shahnameh).
Miniature from a manuscript of Nizami Ganjavi’s Haft Peykar: Bahram Gur in the Turquoise Pavilion with Azarbin, the personnification of Maghreb
Quite indicative of the Rum Sultanate’s court’s proclivity to mysticism, Turanian heroic tradition, and attachment to Ferdowsi’s epic genius is the fact that, only 14 years after Nizami Ganjavi wrote the incomparably revelatory Haft Peykar and only 2 years after he died, the new Seljuk sultan of Rum, Kaykhusraw I’s son, was named Kaykaus I (1211-1220). It was a time of extensive intermarriages with the Eastern Roman imperial family of the Comneni / Komnenoi. Kaykhusraw I (1192-1196 and 1205-1211) was fluent in Roman (‘Medieval Greek’) language and had evidently double Turko-(Eastern) Roman culture.
Kaykaus I’s mother was an Eastern Roman princess, daughter of Manuel Komnenos Maurozomes (Μανουήλ Κομνηνός Μαυροζώμης), who was an Eastern Roman nobleman. Ala ad-Din Kayqubad bin Kaykavus (1220–1237; Alâeddin Keykûbad / علاء الدين كيقباد بن كيكاوس) was the most illustrious sultan of the entire Seljuqian-e Rum dynasty. At the times of his son and successor Kaykhusraw II (1237-1246) starts the fall of the Anatolian Seljuk imperial power, basically due to the religious rebellion of Baba Ishak (1240-1243) and the Mongol victory at the battle of Köse Dağ (1243) where Baiju Noyan (appointed by Ögedei Khan) prevailed. As a matter of fact, this battle is the Seljuk equivalent of the Ottoman defeat in Ankara (1402) by Timur (Tamerlane).
In 1204, one of the most influential dignitaries of the Anatolian Seljuk court invited Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi (1165-1240; full name: Abu Abd Allah Muḥammad ibn Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn Arabī), the Islamic world’s foremost mystic and spiritual master, to Anatolia; Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi’s Futuhat al Makkiyah (: ‘the Mekkan Initiations’) is the greatest text of spiritual revelations (effectuated as result of successive initiations experienced under the guidance of supreme spiritual beings – not after the human fashion) that was ever written in the History of the Mankind. The incredible size (560 chapters or 37 volumes totaling ca. 10000 pages of modern books) of this unique masterpiece of spirituality matters very little when compared to the enthralling contents, which go up to the level of mystical communication with a) the souls of beings that were alive and inhabited the Earth during several generations prior to ours, and b) supreme hierarchies of spiritual beings, intelligences, spirits of elements, and numerous ethereal potentates.
h ttps://ibnarabisociety.org/futuhat-al-makkiyya-printed-editions-claude-addas/
Born in Andalusia’s coastal city of Murcia to parents of Arab and Berber origin, Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi studied in Seville, met and discussed extensively with Ibn Rushd (Averroes), worked as secretary in the city governorate, and undertook incessant travels across North Africa, Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Anatolia. His travels’ most determinant stages took place in Mecca (where he wrote his celebrated masterpiece), in Mosul, in Damascus, and in Eastern Anatolia where he met the students of the great mystic Abdal Qadir Gilani (1078-1166), who was one of the leading mystics of an earlier generation and also the founder of the Qadiriyah mystic order.
Opening pages Konya manuscript Futuhat, handwritten by Ibn Arabi
It is interesting to notice the details of the theological and jurisprudential affiliation of that great mystic, who was born in Gilan (i.e. Caspian Sea’s southwestern coast) and lived most of his life in Baghdad and in various other locations of Mesopotamia. He was a descendant of Hasan ibn Ali, the second imam and grandson of Prophet Muhammad, but did not belong to Ja’far al-Sadiq’s madhhab; however, if one sees the world through today’s colonially imposed, sectarian and distortive lenses, Abdal Qadir Gilani should have been a Ja’fari. In fact, the great mystic and ascetic was a Hanbali and follower of the jurisprudential school that is nowadays said to be (whereas originally it was not) the most ‘anti-Shia’ or ‘anti- Ja’fari’.
The Qadiriya order had many followers in Anatolia and later in the Balkans, although its diffusion from Mesopotamia to China, to Somalia and to Western Sahara regions was spectacular. The sectarian viewpoint in this regard is posterior and it started with the catastrophic distortion of Ibn Hanbal’s doctrine by the vicious theologian Ahmed ibn Taimiyya whose pseudo-Islamic theology represents a sort of Christianization of Islam. The propagation of his fake Islamic ideas triggered obscurantism, ignorance, and utter hatred for the sciences and the arts among the Muslims; as a consequence, extreme fanaticism prevailed among the gradually decayed, spiritually debased, and increasingly ignorant Muslims of later periods (late 14th – early 16th c.), and then the Safavid reaction (as of 1501) to this situation only added oil to the fire.
Ala ad-Din Kayqubad (Kayqubad I) held in great esteem and sponsored numerous mystics, erudite scholars, poets, architects, artists and spiritual masters. His court was also frequented by very exceptional figures like Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162-1231), a great spiritual master, alchemist, physician and polymath, who explored antiquities at both, the spiritual and the material, levels, thus being an early, Muslim Egyptologist.
Following Kayqubad I’s invitation, the great mystic, theologian and jurisprudential scholar (of the Hanafi madhhab) Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad (1151-1231), a Persian originating from Balkh/Bactra (Khorasan), arrived and settled in Konya with his entire family in 1228; this event would have an everlasting impact down to our days. The entire Seljuk royal family was fond of the newly arrived scholar and mystic, who had earlier faced negative treatment from Ala ad-Din Muhammad II of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) in whose state Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad used to live. Khwarazm was a Turanian state with constant problems with the Seljuk sultanates, and the main reason Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad had problems with his shah was the fact that in Khwarazm’s court the most influential mystic and theologian was Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, the scholar who invented the concept of Multiverse (: the parallel existence of many Universes) and with whom Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad had terribly clashed. It was therefore only normal that, to flee the Mongol invasions and to get rid of Ala ad-Din Muhammad II’s enmity and disgrace, Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad found a subterfuge in Seljuk Anatolia. The everlasting impact is due to the prodigious poetry composed and the mystical exploits performed by his son, Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Rumi, who is also known as Mawlana or Mevlana.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273; جلالالدین محمد رومی) surpassed by far his father’s fame, literary mastership, mystical experience, intellectual acumen, spiritual ingenuity, and posthumous fame, being one of the Islamic world’s foremost mystics, poets, and holy men. Bringing spiritual activities at the epicenter of material life, Rumi turned dance into active meditation, and thus made of Anatolia the worldwide epicenter of all later Islamic mysticisms. He is considered as the founder of the Mevlevi Spiritual Order (the ‘tariqa’ of the ‘whirling dervishes’), although it is very clear that his son and his disciples founded the Order after Rumi’s death. In younger age, he was fascinated with the literary masterpieces of the mystic Sana’i Ghaznavi (1080-1141); remarkable influence on Jalal ad-Din Rumi was also exerted by his father, by the famous Persian Khorasani mystic and poet Farid ud-Din (1145-1221; known as Attar of Neyshapur), and by Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi. But the close companionship he had with Shams-e Tabrizi (1185-1248), a supreme spiritual hierophant and mystic, was the most determinant factor of his spiritual advance, mystical comprehension, sublime poetry, and whirling dance conceptualization as meditation technique.
Did Jalal ad-Din Rumi actually meet Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi?
This question has been raised by many modern scholars, although on the basis of several historical sources there is clear evidence that they first met during Rumi’s first arrival to Damascus, and later again during Rumi’s formative years there. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that several disciples of ibn Arabi (notably Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi) were companions of Rumi and that Shams-e Tabrizi knew personally ibn Arabi very well. In addition, several literary patterns and terms testify to a spiritual, intellectual and philosophical connection, despite the fact that the essence, the contents, and the forms of both masters of Islamic spirituality and mysticism differed greatly, pretty much like their respective quests, explorations, devotions, spiritual exercises, and transcendental experiences did.
Mausoleum of Jelaleddin Rumi Mevlana, Konya – Turkey
Rumi was a human, who discovered the divine world through love and through strict imitation/repetition of Prophet Muhammad’s manner of life; Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi was a man contacted by spiritual hierarchies, entrusted with the revelation of spiritual occurrences, and endowed with unique qualities to describe in human words unfathomable situations comprehended only through spiritual initiation. An enlightened man like ibn Arabi could never be strictly bound to only one religion.
Closer to Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi was indeed Haji Bektash (1209-1271; Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli / حاجی بکتاش ولی); born in Neyshapur (Khorasan), he was a descendant of Musa Kazim, the 7th imam and son of Ja’far al-Sadiq. He fled westwards because of the Mongol invasions and he arrived in Seljuk Anatolia in the late 1220s or early 1230s. He belonged to the Ja’fari jurisprudential tradition (madhhab), which is quite normal as he retraced his ancestry to the 6th imam’s son. Given his Arab ancestry, it is ridiculous to entertain discussions about his ethnicity (Persian or Turkic) as Western nonsensical Orientalists do; Haji Bektash was certainly acculturated among all Iranians and Turanians between Central Asia and Anatolia. However, this issue can allow us to better assess the locally prevailing ethnic and cultural environment; if a person of Arab descent, like Haji Bektash, living in Khorasan, preferred to bear a Turkish name, i.e. Bektaş, this means that we cannot afford anymore to consider that vast NE Iranian region as exclusively Persian (as fallacious colonial Orientalists do), but as predominantly Turanian. In his young age, Haji Bektash was apparently fascinated with the mystical poetry of the Turanian spiritual master, mystic, and Hanafi theologian Ahmed Yesevî (1093-1166; قوجا احمەت ياساۋٸ), the founder of Yasawiyah (Yeseviye) order.
The oldest painting of the Muslim mystic Haji Bektash Veli
Modern forgers and Western impostors try to associate Haji Bektash with the Qalandariyah Order (which is wrong) and with Baba Eliyas al-Khorasani, another Khorasani mystic who had settled in Anatolia and instigated the Babai revolt that was led by Baba Ishak in 1239. That’s totally false, because Haji Bektash, despite his Batiniyya approach to Islam’s holy scriptures (as per which all holy scriptures have ‘external’ and ‘internal’-mystical meaning), reprimanded the Isma’ili enclave in Iran, denounced Baba Ishak’s plot for the establishment of a Crypto-Christian state in Amasya (Anatolia), and condemned Baba Ishak’s infamous pretensions that he was a ‘prophet’. As a matter of fact, Haji Bektash was greatly esteemed by everyone in the Anatolian Seljuk court where they appreciated his contribution to the combat against the rebellion and to the refutation of anti-Islamic concepts among Turanian nomadic settlers in Anatolia. All the same, the early Bektashi Order accepted in their lodges (khanqah) many earlier adepts and followers of Baba Ishak, who had repented and regretted, and numerous participants in the failed rebellion. The Bektashi Order played later a determinant role in the formation of the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate and in the relations between the Ottomans and the Safavids.
The Seljuk Turks managed to assimilate among them a great number of Anatolian, Eastern Roman populations. This topic is critical in understanding later historical developments in the region. Whereas the Achaemenid Iranians failed to plainly assimilate Anatolia during their rule (546-330 BCE) and finally only later (during the Seleucid and Roman times) we clearly attest an undeniable Iranian cultural impact on the various Anatolian kingdoms, the Rum Sultanate proved to be far more efficient in rapidly shaping a diverse yet inclusive Anatolian Muslim identity which revolves around the Iranian-Turanian epic traditions and legends and an Islamic interpretation of the Eastern Roman Christianity. About:
III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians
IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials
V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials
VI. What Russia and China must do
Introduction
Fourteen years ago, on 4th December 2007, I published an article under title ‘Russia, Islam, and the West’, which -within few days- was officially (ИноСМИ / Inosmi) translated into Russian (‘ Россия, ислам и Запад’). I wanted to briefly elaborate on how things would develop and to also identify possible allies for Russia within the so-called ‘Islamic World’.
As the translated version of the article was extensively reproduced, I noticed that it was also well understood. Example: the great portal Centrasia (www.centrasia.org), while republishing the Russian translation, added an over-title for the use of its readers to state the following: “Экспансия западного мира не столько решала проблемы, сколько распространяла их вширь” (The expansion of the Western world did not so much solve problems as spread them in breadth). Indeed, there could not be better summary of my article’s contents. The over-title was indeed an excellent reflection of my original perception and ultimate conviction, namely that the West wanted to use the senseless Islamic World against Russia.
In that article’s last part, I put a title that appeared very odd, even to several Egyptian and other African friends of mine (at the time, I was living in Cairo): “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. In that part, I explained why only these two countries could possibly be Russia’s allies against the Western colonial contamination that threatens the entire world. The reason for this statement is that only these two countries had maintained until that time a correct sense of historical-cultural identity and an imperial-level establishment and diplomacy. As a matter of fact, the rest of the so-called Islamic world is constituted by fake states-puppets of the colonial powers (from Morocco and Nigeria to Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia); unfortunately, the uneducated, ignorant, and idiotic elites of these neo-colonial structures never realized what ‘national integrity’ means.
I. Fake states of fake Arabs and fake Muslims
This is so because, by describing these states as ‘puppets’, I don’t only suggest that the local governments receive and execute orders dictated by the Western colonial capitals (Paris, London, Washington D.C., etc.), often being also blackmailed by them in the most obscene manner, but I also specify that these states were entirely pre-fabricated by the colonial elites and administrations to the slightest detail.
What I imply by mentioning the ‘detail’ is simple: not only the location of the false and troublesome (notably in the Halaib triangle) borderline between Egypt and Sudan was decided by the English colonials long before the two modern states came to exist (in order to offer their successors in the colonial institutions and governments the chance of future manipulation of either local ‘governments’), but also the lack of railway connections between first Cairo and Khartoum and second Suez and Port Sudan had been programmed before the beginning of the 20th c. So, colonialism means also ‘deeds carried out with long-term perspective’; actually, it does not occur in a wide array of sectors of social activities, but across the board.
Neo-colonial governments in Algiers, Riyadh, Baghdad, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere were totally deprived of any substantive nation-building tools; entire nations were stripped of their historical-cultural identity, and their elites -which used to have idiotically been sending their children to ‘study’ in French, English, US, Canadian and Australian universities- were plunged into a scrupulously elaborated delusion that turned them into pure and permanent servants of their former colonial masters.
Even worse, all Muslim, African and Asiatic nations have been scrupulously disconnected from one another, and thus, to study Egyptology and Coptology a Nigerian has to move to England or America, whereas a Moroccan willing to specialize in Assyriology or Iranology needs to pursue university studies in France. Similarly, Muslims in Senegal and Sierra Leone have no idea about Islamic History, Art History, Architecture, Sciences, Wisdom, Spirituality and Literature in Central Asia, whereas Egyptian and Syrian Muslims know nothing about the great Islamic dynasties that ruled Eastern or Western Africa and the existing Islamic monuments there. In other words, the fake neo-colonial structures have been totally disconnected from one another at the intellectual, academic, cultural, educational and scientific levels, each of them being calamitously tied to its former colonial center.
The aforementioned unprecedented ignorance and reciprocal disconnectedness was complemented by colonially promoted confusion and darkness. When it comes to the confusion that prevails among Muslims worldwide, the first point to mention is the materialistic evaluation of human interests, which is an entirely anti-Islamic trait and an alien element among historical Muslim societies that revolved around axes of spiritual, intellectual and scientific endeavors.
The short-sighted materialistic viewpoint on the human endeavors and interests was projected by the colonial elites onto the local Muslim populations and it permanently destroyed the Islamic moral order, eliminating all cultural values that had prevailed for many long centuries (in several cases for more than a millennium) and turning therefore all Muslims into miserable replicas of corrupt Westerners. The very use of money, the existence of the Banking system, the shameful fallacy of the so-called ‘Islamic Economics’, and the economic structure itself of today’s Muslim countries are an anathema against prophet Muhammad.
The colonially promoted confusion took also the form of a pathetic race for ‘socioeconomic development’, involving the catastrophic deformation of the traditional urban landscape throughout the Islamic world. As -generation after generation- young students were pushed to Engineering and Economis, all the neo-colonial structures and the corrupted or demented pseudo-Muslim societies were even more strongly tied to the Western colonial capitals.
Last, backwardness, obscurantism and darkness were diffused in the form of false theories, disruptive ideologies, and nonsensical theologies; by believing in the Pan-Arabic falsehood, hundreds of millions of non-Arab Aramaeans, Yemenites, Copts (Egyptians), Sudanese Cushites, and NW African Berbers were permanently prevented from achieving proper nation-building. By embracing Nasserism, Baathism and other catastrophic schemes, dozens of millions of people engulfed themselves in wars, conflicts, bloodshed, abject poverty, and irreversible misfortune.
And by accepting the pathetic, anti-Islamic doctrines of today’s totally uneducated and deeply ignorant pseudo-theologians and bogus-imams, African and Asiatic Muslims were diverted from Islamic spirituality, wisdom, moral, sciences, intellect, education, religion, culture, and civilization. Even worse for them, they were diverted to a trivial and pathetic, bogus-Islamic theological indoctrination of which all the foundations, all the elements, all the concepts, all the parts, and all the words had been previously examined, considered, authorized and approved by the Western Orientalist colonial academia, before being projected onto the local masses due to the determinant commitment of the military, administrative, diplomatic and political gangsters who controlled the vast lands of the Mughal Empire, the detached territories of the Ottoman Caliphate, the colonial puppet state of Pahlavi Iran, as well as many other earlier Muslim sultanates, khanates and emirates.
Wherever there was a sound, secular, culturally original, socially strong state, as in the case of Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia, the criminal English, American, Canadian, Australian and French diplomats employed all possible means to diffuse the fake Islamic theologies, the nonsensical political doctrines, the absurd politicization of the Muslim societies, and the villainous ideologization of the deliberately kept-ignorant masses. In total negation of today’s fake Muslim societies, there cannot be politics in a historical Muslim society; and there was no politics in both, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia.
In other words, all the present dimensions of social-intellectual-educational-political life in today’s fake Muslim countries had been pre-fashioned by the colonial powers in order to permanently function detrimentally against all their users, adherents, admirers, supporters and followers onto whom they were projected systematically, tyrannically and criminally. I expanded on this topic in my article titled ‘Why Former Ottoman Provinces cannot become Proper States’ that I published before 10 years: https://www.academia.edu/26064731/Why_Former_Ottoman_Provinces_cannot_become_Proper_States_By_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis?auto=download
CHINA, INDIA, RUSSIA, IRAN AND TURKEY: THE WORLD’S FIVE MOST IMPORTANT CONTINENTAL EMPIRES FIRST CANNOT BE REVIVED AND SECOND CAN PROSPER ONLY AS SECULAR STATES
Ming dynasty Emperor Zhu Houzhao (朱厚照; 1491-1521)
15th c. painting of the Forbidden City
Forbidden city Beijing
Qing China map 1820
Qing dynasty Emperor Kangxi (康熙帝; 1661-1722)
——————————————————
Superior to the paranoid lunatic Ottoman Selim I and stronger than the lascivious Ismail Safavi, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad rather known as Babur (1483-1530) was the founder of the Mughal Empire; incomparably the most adventurous, the most impulsive and the most intellectual emperor of his times.
EmperorHumayun (1508-1556) and his son Akbar
Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) receiving the four-year old Abdul Rahim following the assassination (1561) of his father Bairam Khan, who was Akbar’s leading general and mentor: miniature from the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), which was commissioned by Akbar as the official chronicle of the reign. It was written by Abu’l Fazl between 1590 and 1596, illustrated between c. 1592 and 1594.
Diwan-i-Aam (Hall of Public Audience) in the palace of the Great Mughal Emperor in Agra
————————————————————-
‘Moscow under Ivan the Terrible’ (1902) is a famous painting by Apollinary M. Vasnetsov; the 19th-20th c. impression that the Russians had about the beginning of the tiny Muscovy principality before 350 years was very inaccurate, erroneous, and biased. This is so, because they projected their own ideas on their own past that they viewed through the binoculars of their distorted education and historiography.
Mikhail Romanov (1596-1645) and his father, the patriarch Philaret, distribute alms, in an illustration of the first Romanov coronation. From the Coronation Album of Mikhail Fedorovich; the manuscript “The Book of the Election to the Highest Throne of the Great Russian Tsardom of the Great Sovereign Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail Fedorovich of All Great Russia Autocrat” was produced in Moscow few decades after the event (in 1672-1673). From the 1856 reprint edition.
Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg; when Russia ceased to be Russia and started imitating Western Europe corrupt pseudo-kingdoms, insidious academics, fake intellectuals, and uncivilized politicians, the divisions and the discords started. Peter I and Catherine II are the true reason of the fall of the Romanov.
When you have Western European theater, opera and dance in a theoretically Christian Orthodox Empire, sooner or later your contaminated state will collapse; Nicholas II could not save anything (here in his coronation along with Alexandra Feodorovna, 1896).
———————————————————————-
Shah Tahmasp I of Iran & Emperor Humayun of the Mughal Empire Hindustan enjoying Nowrouz festivities, as depicted on the Chehel Sotoun palace in Esfahan
Shah Abbas I the Great (1571-1629)
The imperial Naqsh-e-Jahan (‘The Image of the World’) square in Esfahan, Safavid Iran’s most flamboyant capital
Safavid Iran, 1511
General view of the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Shah Mosque (below), and the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (in the middle), Isfahan
———————————————————————–
Stupid Ottomans! They abolished the only valuable military units they had, namely the Janissaries; the absurd development took place at the time of the idiotic Sultan Mahmoud II (1785-1839). Instead of killing all the uneducated, ignorant, dark and pathetic sheikhs, muftis, qadis and imams that contaminated and destroyed the Ottoman Empire with the fallacy of their anti-Islamic “sunnah”, Mahmoud II closed down the illustrious Bektashi Order and the formidable Janissary elite infantry, thus issuing the death warrant of his otherwise wretched state. Today, people confuse two totally different terms: ‘Ottoman Empire’ and ‘Ottoman Civilization’. All factors of the Islamic civilization in the territory of the Caliphate were indeed persecuted by the pathetic, corrupt, cruel and villainous Ottoman dynasty. As it used to be said at the time, to be a member of the Ottoman family you had to have killed your brother! The ominous empire was the World History’s most anti-Turkish state.
Topkapı sarayı at the time of Selim I (1512-1520)
Official ceremonies in the Ottoman palace were a spectacular and costly affair that was impermissible in an absurd state ridiculously governed by pathetic, biased and ignorant theologians who took their stupid theology as tantamount to the religion of Islam.
Topkapı sarayı (طوپقپو سرايى) in Ottoman Constantinople; the historical name ‘Istanbul’, which was attested in sources for more than 100 years before the fall of the Eastern Roman imperial capital (1453), became the official name of the city only thanks to Kemal Ataturk. The absurd measure of turning Ayasofya Museum to a fanciful pseudo-mosque for political circus automatically cancels the popular city name and imposes the re-introduction of the old name that was the official appellation when the monumental edifice was operating as a real mosque (1453-1923).
=========================================
II. Turkey and Iran: the two exceptions
The two most notable exceptions from this chaotic and nefarious situation have been Turkey and Iran; the Turkish exception is entirely due to the greatness of the scope and the depth of understanding of Kemal Ataturk, who was one of the very few minds to timely, accurately and plainly identify the colonial goals. The founder of Modern Turkey had understood that Islam as religion was already defunct during his time and that the uneducated, ignorant and worthless Muslims of the early 20th c. were to be re-educated from scratch and on the basis of their own culture in order to later rediscover the true historical Islam in all its width, depth and height.
Kemal Ataturk knew that all that the criminal colonial imperialists of France, England and America wanted to do was to aptly utilize and duly instrumentalize the uneducated and silly Muslims of his time, turning them to fully operable tools of Western hegemony. The basic tools of this instrumentalization were the following:
– the deceitful ideologization (theologization) of the Islamic religion,
– the execrable politicization of the Muslim societies,
– the Orientalist falsification of the History of all Asiatic and African nations, and
– the linguistic, educational, academic and cultural subordination of all, Muslim and non-Muslim, Oriental nations to the Western European and North American barbarism and inhuman model of life, which was produced in Western Europe starting with the Evil Renaissance and diffused worldwide due to the genocidal colonialism
But theology is not religion; today’s fake Muslims do not believe Islam as religion, but pseudo-Islamic theological systems that contain a modern and ahistorical bogus-interpretation (i.e. a misinterpretation) of the values of Islam, thus fully eliminating Spirituality and turning Moral from a profound understanding of virtues to a silly obedience of other humans, which is “shirk” (شرك) according to the dogma of Islam.
It goes without saying that the aforementioned situation (or condition of being) does not only consist in religious deviation for Muslims but also constitutes supreme humiliation and final demise for any nation. Kemal Ataturk was triumphantly confirmed by all the historical developments that followed his death.
The uneducated, ignorant and stupid Muslims of Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, etc. fell exactly into the trap of their utilization and instrumentalization by the West; from 1948 to 1967 to 1973, the fake Muslims of the wider region did indeed function as fully programmed automatons. More they hated the Zionists, stronger the state of Israel became. This does not mean that the Zionist state is rightful and correct; it is not. But this does not matter (or does not play any role) anymore, when the Aramaean Muslims of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine and the Coptic Muslims of Egypt are so wrong as to become dehumanized automatons focused on wrong choices that can bring only grave deterioration and final destruction.
Having no national identity, believing in a pseudo-theology (that they mistook for religion), being truly disconnected from one another, being totally unaware of one another’s historical past and cultural heritage, and acting -at the political level- like conveniently submissive monkeys of the Westerners, these fake Muslims do not have a chance in the billion to ever win. Automatons do not win; humans do. Automatons act as per their pre-fashioned mechanism and then get decomposed to pieces.
The Iranian exception was basically due to the earlier imperial tradition (Safavid, Afshar and Qajar). The English interfered in Iran in the early 20th c. in a multifaceted and multilayered manner. They deposed the true, imperial dynasty and imposed an ignorant soldier as ‘king’, after duly cheating, bribing and corrupting him; this poor and uneducated guy did not even know the historical Iranian name ‘Pahlavi’ and its meaning, but the academic instructor and tutor, whom his colonial masters assigned to him, gave him this name as ‘royal family name’ – which constitutes the most shameful and most disgraceful stigma of Iranian History.
The reason for the English intervention in Iran in the late 19th and early 20th c. is still unknown to most people worldwide. For many long centuries, the evil Anglo-French diplomacy, vicious colonial trickery, and incessant machinations pitched the silly Ottomans and the naïve Iranians in interminable wars that weakened both empires; even worse, when Constantinople and Isfahan/Tehran did not fight against one another, most probably one of the two ailing empires made a war with the Russians. This unprecedentedly disastrous series of developments occurred despite the fact that both, the dynasties and the populations of the two empires, were Turanian in their majority and the local culture in both realms was a millennia long Iranian-Turanian amalgamation.
But with Kemal Ataturk turning the world’s most anti-Turkic empire (namely the wretched Ottoman Empire) into Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, the path was open for the much needed merge of the two great states into one; but this eventuality (that had been fully materialized by Tamerlane in 1402) was the real horror of the Western colonial powers for no less than four centuries (1500-1900).
The reason of the colonial fear was the fact that the Ottoman state and the Iranian Empire were equally Iranian and Turanian at the same time; in either case, the majority of the local population was Turanian, whereas the popular culture and tradition constituted an amalgamated Turanian (nomad / military-martial) and Iranian (settled / academic-intellectual) common heritage. So, by intervening colonially in Iran, the English intended to
– devilishly ‘Persianize’ Iran (an attempt that had no historical precedent),
– reduce the universal-ecumenical Empire of Iran into a ‘national Persian kingdom’, and thus
– transform untouchable Iran into a malleable ‘Persia’.
By so doing, the evil colonials knew beforehand that they would trigger enormous reactions from the part of Azeris, Turkmens and others, who would never accept ‘their’ Iran (so, a Turanian-Iranian entity) to be degraded into a Farsi (‘Persian’) state.
However, not even an interference of this scale was enough for the English and the French to fully control developments in Iran. As the English occupied the formerly Ottoman land of Mesopotamia (Aram-Nahrain or ‘Iraq’), the colonial conspirers mobilized several naïve Shia religious leaders and turned them against the puppet soldier king Reza, whom they had imposed on his fake throne in the first place.
As the colonial ‘explorers’, ‘advisers’ and ‘friends’ pushed the idiotic, credulous and unsuspicious Reza to westernize Iran and to stupidly send his son, the crown prince Muhammad Reza, to Switzerland for ‘studies’ (which would also further westernize him: 1931-1936; at the age of 12-17), they instigated anti-royal hatred among the silly ayatollahs and the other useless religious leaders, whom they urged to react against the ‘atheist’ king Reza, whom they had raised to power for a start. This has always been the criminal nature of the Western colonial evilness: you don’t only raise a silly puppet to prominence and power; you also prepare the puppet’s opponents and eventually the puppet’s murderers.
The situation went out of control, when the soldier’s son, after being educated as crown prince in Switzerland, proved to be a perspicacious successor to the much undeserved throne of Iran. As a matter of fact, and clearly to his credit, Muhammad Reza, by noticing the conflicting agendas of the various colonial powers and by identifying tremendous discrepancies in the ultimate goals of the major lobbies of power (or secret societies) in the Western World (Jesuits, Freemasons and Zionists), understood a large and critical part of the overall scheme, took therefore his role seriously, and following the path of Kemal Ataturk, attempted to modernize Iran in order to make it truly competitive to Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and the major Western nations. This was exactly what the evil Western colonials did not want to happen, because Kemal Ataturk has always been the man whom they hated most and for a good reason: if there were another 3-4 men like the founder of Modern Turkey, as perspicacious as he was, as determined as he was, and as audacious as he was, then the entire colonial rule would crumble in Asia, Africa and Europe, ultimately and rightfully plunging the Western World into the well-deserved final implosion and irreversible decomposition. That’s why Iran’s position has severely degraded since 1979 and the so-called ‘Islamic revolution’.
III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians
It could not happen otherwise, because the nonsensical theory published by Khomeini and known under the name ‘Velayat-e Faqih’ {‘the Governance of the (Islamic) Jurisprudents’} did not exist (and consequently was not practiced) earlier, throughout the History of Islamic Caliphates; it is a modern concept, although many efforts were made to attach some historical credibility to it. As far as the so-called ‘Shia Muslims’ are concerned, quite unfortunately, this theory was the effective counterpart of the ‘Political Islam’ that the colonial Orientalists, diplomats and politicians diffused among /imposed on the so-called ‘Sunni Muslims’. I use the expression ‘so-called’, because in reality the distinction into Sunni and Shia Muslims is also fake, but this is not a topic on which I can further expand here. About: https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_
The degradation of Iran’s position at the international level was stopped to some extent (not because an improvement was made in the unfortunate realm ruled by a puerile elite that failed to identify the anti-Iranian and anti-Turanian schemes of the Western colonial gangsters but) due to rather external factors. Despite the fact that Turkey followed a different trajectory, also Ankara’s position at the international level started gradually being severely degraded in 2002-2003, when the Western colonial fabrication ‘AKP’ was forcefully imposed on Turkey’s political life by direct and multileveled Western colonial interference.
The Turkish generals were constantly, boldly and gravely threatened by the US, NATO, EU, UK, and other governments and international bodies not to intervene, not to undertake a -much needed- coup, and not to cause the -much demanded- physical death of the disreputable US-UK-Israel puppet Erdogan, Turkey’s silliest, most ignorant, most uneducated, most pathetic, and most ludicrous prime minister and president.
The fact that Turkey’s Islamists came to and stayed in power only due to systematic Western colonial support clearly shows their absolutely non-Muslim, evil nature, and their servile character, which is the epitome of the disbeliever, the unfaithful and the perfidious. It also heralds the forthcoming destruction of Turkey, because this is the ultimate goal of the Western colonials, who brought the stupid Islamists of the AKP to power in order to duly, effectively and irrevocably utilize them for their plans.
Having a decomposed, divided and useless army (due to ceaseless post-2016 purges), a collapsed economy, half a trillion external gross debt, and a current account deficit of $36.7 billion in 2020, Turkey will need more than a decade to recover from the nonsensical and paranoid governmental policies of the idiots, who imagined it possible to govern a 21st c. country with oral utterances of a prophet who lived before 1400 years and with the prescriptions of a holy book manifested to indigenous people in Hejaz 300 years after the Roman Empire became Christian.
What is even worse for the brainless humanoids that support Turkey’s impossible Islamization is the fact that Muslim kingdoms and empires during the Islamic times were not governed (and did not have to be governed) on the basis of the Shariah in the way today’s uneducated and ignorant Muslim theologians understand this very vague and currently misinterpreted term. Quite contrarily, many times caliphs and sultans ruled against the Islamic Law; this is a vast topic that goes out of the scope of the present article, but at this point, I want only to indicate the original mistake and the defective approach to which are due the false interpretations and the erroneous conclusions of almost all modern Muslim theologians.
IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials
Instead of duly studying and carefully examining what truly occurred during all the periods of Islamic History and subsequently concluding thereupon, today’s fake Muslim theologians theorize on the basis of various historical texts (Quran, Hadith, Fiqh, Kalam), which by definition they cannot understand in their original, correct and accurate contextualization. When you hear silly people using this style of wooden language «theologian X said: ‘about this topic prophet Muhammad said that’», you can be sure that you have in front of you an idiot duly utilized by the colonial powers in order to harm all interlocutors who would accept such fully unrealistic purposes, positions and pretensions.
This is so, because whatever prophet Muhammad (or any other individual, prophet, high priest, mystic or layman) said does not truly matter; what really matter are the moral principles, the spiritual concepts, and the divine values that are contained in what the prophet (or any other person) said. Actually, words have worth only as expression of principles, concepts and values; otherwise they are absolutely empty, meaningless and useless.
Why the use of wooden language consists in an absurdity possible to be perfectly utilized by one’s own enemies is easy to understand; the safe losers are always the ignorant, the idiotic, and the unrealistic people, as they can be easily entrapped.
First, it is a matter of idiocy to imagine that, by using citations, one can replace 1400 years of History. Citations are tantamount to nothing; only diachronic practices reveal what Islam has been.
Second, only due to lack of proper education can one think that one may be able to understand any text written or words uttered before 1400 years in the exact sense and with the correct connotation that they had at the time; this is so irrespective of language, ethnic origin, religion, literature and culture. Connotations of words always change, and this is nothing ignorant theologians can possibly speak about. Now, the much needed task to identify the specific connotation that a word had when used within a specific text would demand the skills of honest and consummate scholarship, but unfortunately there cannot be acceptable scholarship in cases of indoctrination.
Third, the easiest persons to manipulate are always the imbeciles, who believe in a doctrine, while abstracting its elements and giving to the doctrine’s terms the meaning that they want (which did not exist historically) or can (due to their ignorance and lack of education). Such unsophisticated people usually attribute to their doctrine’s words absolute value, whereas the only absolute value is that of the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind each word’s original meaning.
However, due to their crudeness, these people cannot imagine that, before duly comprehending the meaning of a word, they have to recover first the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind it. So, they end up projecting their own, debased personal beliefs and conclusions onto the texts that they mechanically read (or at times learn by heart) without ever reaching the true meaning of the texts’ contents; but this process is well known to colonial academia.
Consequently, these persons convert their own personal misery into a permanent fight for egoistic self-confirmation and self-justification, and the abstractly taken elements of the doctrine that they believe in have unfortunately -in reality- only a subliminal psychological importance to them.
The hysterical screams of today’s fake preachers, sheikhs and imams during the Friday prayer khutbahs (sermons) are not a matter of Religion to be studied, but of Psychology. The same is valid for the various heretical pseudo-Christian pastors of the West, namely the Evangelicals, the Baptists, the Mormons and their likes.
There is no religion that forces the believers to scream hysterically; only theological-ideological indoctrination can cause this devious and disastrous behavior. However, this form of pseudo-Islamic indoctrination is what the colonial powers want to achieve among today’s fake Muslim preachers, sheikhs and imams, because only under these circumstances they can easily manipulate these miserable people subliminally.
This subliminal passion fully detaches these people from down-to-Earth reality, rendering them pliable enough for all those, who -for one reason or another- want these ignorant and misfortunate persons to fight for their unrealistic purposes, thus causing enormous damages to themselves, to their societies, and to their country’s national interests, institutions, and governments.
And that’s why Turks must drastically and resolutely remove Erdogan and AKP from power at all costs and as soon as possible. Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey is not a fake state like Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia or Saudi Arabia; and -as I already said- it cannot be ‘Islamized’. If a pseudo-Islamic dictatorship is imposed in Ankara, Turkey will simply cease to exist.
As soon as the basic traits of the state will be altered and stop functioning, Turkey will be dangling in the vacuum. This will not turn the entire structure into ‘Islamic’, as the corrupt and besotted Islamist slaves of the US, NATO, EU and UK believe before and after making their cursed and useless prayers. After the alteration of Turkey’s basic traits, the state will soon disappear, as it will have been canceled. The entire country would then suddenly find itself under the status of the Treaty of Sevres. The decomposition, which will ensue, will be far worse than that of the Ottoman Empire or, more recently, of the USSR; it will rather look like the present case of Yemen.
V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials
So, more than 15 years have passed after I published the aforementioned article, but I still stick to my conclusion: “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. This is still valid, not because the two countries improved their standards and strengthened their positions, but mainly due to the fact that many other Muslim countries totally collapsed and fell into chaos or fully capitulated to the evil elites of the Western World. Many countries still existed back in 2007, but do not exist as such anymore: Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Sudan. And many other countries, like Turkey and Iran, saw their power waning: Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. However, the situation of Turkey and Iran no longer concerns Ankara and Tehran only, due to the considerable changes that occurred at the international level with respect to the world balance of power.
Internal conflicts accentuated the growing social tension in the US; the refugee crisis plunged EU and UK into an impasse; despite the undeniable mistakes made in the Ukraine crisis (2013-2014 and 2022-2023) and in parallel with the successes marked in Syria (2015-2023), Putin managed to re-establish an impressively rehabilitated Russia at the epicenter of international relations; India and Brazil made themselves felt in the world affairs; Germany remained the sole economic power of EU; and China was transformed into one pole of the bipolar system that seems to prevail for the time being. Despite Beijing’s continuous affirmation of its dedication to a forthcoming multipolar world, we still do not -properly speaking- attest such a situation. It rather seems that many powers would find a China-US bipolar world good for them, at least for some time.
Turkey and Iran, under similar conditions, can cause serious trouble – not only if pitched against one another, but also if transformed into an obstacle on a country’s way to rising to prominence. The same is also valid for the fate of all other Muslim countries; an eventual dismemberment of just one of them or also a potential war between two of them can dramatically affect the interests of a major power. For the time being, Russia, China and Iran have managed to establish an alliance at many levels, involving also Tehran’s recent adhesion to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (as a full member state). About: https://www.academia.edu/53029736/From_the_Great_Game_to_the_Final_Game_Iran_Full_Member_State_of_the_SCO_as_the_Greatest_Event_of_the_21st_Century_text_pictures_and_legends_
Contrarily to Iran, Turkey followed an erratic path for all intents and purposes. After having been a fully accredited, modern Western state and society (thanks to Kemal Ataturk), Turkey got contaminated after 2002 by Islamism, anachronism, extremism, radicalism, obscurantism and self-destructive hysteria to significant extent. But as a Muslim country, Turkey is the sole NATO member state. This hiatus consists in a tragi-comical situation that can no longer exist; it leads to extinction.
In a rather recent article published in Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s foremost newspaper, on 21st September 2021, the distinguished Prof. Dr. Erol Manisali (1940-2022), a leading Kemalist intellectual and academic, made an extraordinary comparison; his article’s title was quite indicative in this regard (Erol Manisalı, AKP’nin ‘Osmanlıcılığı’, İngilizin ‘Brexit’ine mi benziyor! / https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/erol-manisali/akpnin-osmanliciligi-ingilizin-brexitine-mi-benziyor-1870529): «Does AKP’s ‘Ottomanism’ look like the ‘Brexit’ of the English?»
Prof. Manisali was absolutely right; Brexit was disastrous indeed for England, and Ottomanism (also known as Neo-Ottomanism) is definitely calamitous for Turkey. However, Prof. Manisali still clarified several points in which Brexit is (and is made) less disastrous than the forgery and the paranoia of Ottomanism. On the other hand, it is true that the two options have indeed something in common. Both political concepts constitute a form of retreat or isolation that can end up in seclusion and implosion.
VI. What Russia and China must do
In the present article, I don’t intend to examine the troubles that will be caused by so virulently unrealistic purposes. I will come up with another article to examine the catastrophic perspectives that inconsistent, nonsensical and pathetic doctrines like Neo-Ottomanism, Neo-Safavism, Neo-Mughalism, Neo-Czarism, and Neo-Qingism may eventually cause if given some consideration and trustworthiness. Here, I intend to discuss the dangers ensuing from the subtle and smart utilization of such delusions that the crumbling Western colonial powers may make. For the Russian and Chinese aspirations to establish a multipolar world, these dangers may be lethal. That is why I will also suggest several measures that Moscow and Beijing must take; in addition, I propose the introduction of these methods to several other countries.
Before all the rest, it is essential for many people worldwide to understand how the colonial powers of Western Europe and North America managed to survive. Both, the EU and the US seem to be collapsing and disintegrating nowadays; NATO has already been described as ‘dead’ by a member state’s head! And after five centuries of English colonialism, two world wars, one cold war, an unnecessary adhesion to the EU, and a final Brexit, England looks like a 15th c. country in a 21st c. world. The 15th century was a terrible period indeed for Western Europe, which was a barbarian periphery that experienced many wars and lost much blood in the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). At the very end of the 15th c., Western Europe was plagued with so many problems that the local kingdoms would irrevocably implode and disappear, if they did not expand colonially.
This reality must be carefully observed today by Chinese and Russians alike, because similar situations do not exist in their own national past. Consequently, the presently ailing Western states may well manage to survive by repeating exactly the same method, i.e. by exporting their own problems to others; their tactics in Ukraine do clearly confirm my assessment. Certainly, this involves more wars, more conflicts, more bloodshed, and greater risks; but the paranoid Western elites do not try to avoid them! Quite contrarily, they try to trigger them.
The silly but dangerous AUKUS bellicose rhetoric is just one example. It is absurd to take the Western political propaganda about ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ at face value. They did not want to impose ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. They are criminal enough to want to trigger only the situation that the entire world has clearly attested in the aforementioned misfortunate countries. The same can also happen eventually to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Algeria, Indonesia, and so on.
This means that the ensuing dangers are real and great, because the pulverization of numerous countries will cancel the long propagated dream of a peaceful multipolar world and significantly modify the scope of the historically founded and humanely prepared, multiply beneficial strategy One Belt One Road (OBOR/一带一路). How can Russia and China react to the chaotic plans of the Western World? To this question I will respond in the next part of this series of articles.
megalommatiscomments 
