Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur

Pre-publication of chapter XIX of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXVII to XXXII form Part Eleven (How and why the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals failed) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapters XXVII and XXVIII have already been pre-published.

Until now, 21 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the present book; this chapter is therefore the 22nd (out of 33) to be uploaded. At the end of the text, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in gray color. 

In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.

The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.

References made to entries of the Wikipedia offer average readers a starting point for their research; they do not signify acceptance and approval of their contents.

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Certainly, the Safavid Empire was not the first Islamic state established by a mystical order; but earlier states launched by mystical orders were either set up in small and remote territories as form of local resistance against the Islamic Caliphate like the Babakiyah (Khurramites) or organized as a secret subversive movement coordinated from mysterious, faraway, unreachable and impregnable headquarters, like those of the Hashashin Isma’ilis (known as Assassins in Western literature). In this regard, at the level of governance, the main difference between the Safavids and the Isma’ilis was the fact that the latter did not try or even plan to proclaim an empire, whereas the former, even before solemnly announcing their empire, felt that they had the task to entirely reshape the Islamic world.

Selim I

Ismail I Safavi

Babur

The Safavid Order had the apocalyptic, eschatological and messianic feeling that their task would be the only way to save the Islamic world; they felt that they had the divinely bestowed obligation to institute a secular empire across the Islamic world, which would be based on spiritual values, moral virtues, cultural traditions, and epic revival. The name of the empire was no lees imperial than the following expression: “the Realm of the Outspread Universe of Iran” (ملک وسیع‌الفضای ایران /Molk-e vasi-ye fezaye Eran); one understands automatically the importance of Ferdowsi’s epic narrative and the cosmological dimension that Safavid spirituality gave to the state that the venerable members of the Order launched. The term ‘Iran’ does not denote either the territory of a nation/ethnic group or the land controlled by a state; all these divisive, nonsensical, modern notions were nonexistent at the time. In the very beginning of the Safavid times, the term ‘Iran’ was not even used.

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

The most important historians of the early Safavid times were Ghiyath ad-Din Muhammad Khwandamir (Habib al-Siyar; Khulasatu-l Akhbar; Dasturu-l Wuzra), Abdallah Hatefi (Khamsa), Amini Haravi (Futuhat-e shahi), Fazli Khuzani Esfahani (Afzal al-tawarih), and Fazl-Allah Khonji Esfahani (Tarih-e alamara-ye amini).

It is interesting to herewith include selected excerpts from Prof. Anooshahr’s well-founded speech, notably (11:30 onwards/no editing involved):

“There was no idea of something called Iran in this transition period”.

“The word ‘Iran’ only shows in Amini’s book twice; once is paired with Turan; and then immediately afterward, when the Rumi (: Roman) envoy shows up on behalf of the Ottoman Emperors”.

“As far as the people of the time were concerned, the actual participants in these events, they had no idea of Iran, and this was not because they were alien or unpatriotic, in fact they were non-patriotic, because there is no patriotism; this was because they had a radically different idea of territory than we do today. So, in our modern conception, people are defined as a nation, they own the land that they live on, and this land has a particular characteristic that is shared between it and all the people”.

“When Amini writes about territory, he sublimates it by using the Quran and comparing it to heaven; he does not connect it to any kind of territorial identity at all”.

“The establishment of Twelver Shi’ism, based on this text, does not seem to be that important. And then the establishment of a kind of Ancient Persian Empire is actually not on their agenda”.

As a matter of fact, Safavid Iran was the entire universe for the members of the Safavid Order, and as such it had no ethnic/national dimension or character and no religious identity. Spirituality was all that mattered. Even more importantly, it was not proclaimed only to encompass the territories that the Safavid emperors finally controlled, as Western Iranologists perniciously suggest, perversely viewing the Safavid empire’s territory as simply a larger ‘version’ of the modern pseudo-state of Iran. For the members of the Safavid Order, “Molk-e vasi-ye fezaye Eran” had the divinely entrusted task to contain the entire circumference of the Islamic world.   

Four major monarchs between Rome and China

Between Rome and China, four persons, who played a determinant role in the final formation of major empires and in the final delineation of their borders, were born between 1450 and 1487.  In chronological order they are as per below:

i. Muhammad Shaybani (Muhammad Shaybani Khan or Abul-Fath Shaybani Khan; 1451-1510), grandson of Abu’l-Khayr Khan, and Genghisid founder of the Khanate of Bukhara (1500), one of the empires that were formed after the split of the Golden Horde and demise of the precarious Uzbek Khanate; he evidently did not make any distinction between a) Turanians and Iranians (which shows the extent of the completed ethnic Turanization of Iran) and b) those who are fallaciously called today ‘Shia’ and ‘Sunni’ by colonial Orientalists, diplomats or statesmen and Islamic terrorists and extremists alike.

Muhammad Shaybani; 16th c. portrait painted by the famous Iranian artist Kemaleddin Behzad

The fight between Shah Ismail I and Muhammad Shaybani (1510); from the manuscript Tarikh-i alam-aray-i Shah Ismail (the world adorning History of Shah Ismail)

Bukhara; Chor-Bakr burial place constructed under Muhammad Shaybani (1505-1510)

The state of Muhammad Shaybani

ii. Selim I (سليم اول / Yavuz Sultan Selim; 1470-1520), grandson of Mehmed II and son of Bayezid II; he ruled the Eastern Roman Empire only for eight years (1512-1520), but he was by far the most important sultan of the 600-year long dynasty for having expanded the Ottoman territories more than any other. Then, there was no ‘Ottoman Empire’; not one man used that term at the time. The term ‘State of the Ottoman family’ (دولت عليه عثمانیه‎ / Devlet-i ‘Alīye-i Osmaniyeh) was introduced centuries later. Selim I was the Padishah (پادشاه‎), i.e. the ‘Great King’, thus bearing an Iranian title that goes back to the early Achaemenids who antedated him by two millennia. Selim I was also (βασιλεύς Ρωμαίων / Imperator Romanorum / قیصر روم‎ / Qaysar-i Rum, lit. “Caesar of the Romans”) like his father and grandfather after 1453, because Mehmed II claimed the title after conquering Constantinople, George of Trebizond endorsed the claim, considering Mehmed II as emperor of the world, and Gennadius Scholarius, Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, fully recognized the title.

The state of Selim I was also viewed by others as the Roman Empire (in the sense of the Eastern Roman Empire, because the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist in 476 CE). From the aforementioned speech of Prof. Ali Anooshahr, I quote another excerpt here (exactly after 12:07 in the above mentioned video and link):

“I am referring to what we call ‘the Ottoman Empire’; but if the topic today is to look at how people perceived their own territoriality, then we shouldn’t call it ‘the Ottoman Empire’, because they didn’t call it that way; they called it ‘the Roman Empire’ (ruled by the Ottoman family)”.

Selim I was not styled “Commander of the Faithful” (أَمِير ٱلْمُؤْمِنِين‎ / ‘Amir al-Mu’minin) for most of his reign, and when he could claim the title, the majority of his subjects rejected it for him. The same concerns the later and minor title “Servant of The Two Holy Cities” (خَادِمُ الْحَرَمَيْن‎ / Hadimü’l-Haremeyn), which is somewhat a historical novelty introduced only as late as the 12th – 13th c. Last, it is only after 1517 that Selim I was accepted as ‘Caliph’ throughout his realm and dependencies.

Selim I (Yavuz Sultan Selim); portrait painted by the Ottoman artist Nakkaş Osman (16th c.)

The territorial expansion of the Ottoman Sultanate (focus on Anatolia and the Balkans)

Portrait (end of 18th-beginning of 19th c.) painted by the Christian Orthodox Eastern Roman artist Konstantin Kapıdağlı (Κωνσταντῖνος Κυζικηνός; Konstantinos Kyzikinos)

Ottoman Empire around 1520

Miniature from the 16th c. manuscript Hüner-nāme; I, Library of the Topkapi Palace Museum

The Ottoman Empire in 1875

Sultan Selim I and the Grand Vizier Piri Mehmed Paşa

Selim I portrait painted by Aşık Çelebi

Painting showing Selim I during the Egypt campaign, Army Museum, Istanbul

Portrait of Selim I painted by Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari); Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Staatsgalerie in der Residenz Würzburg

From the personal belongings of Shah Ismail that were captured by Selim during and after the Battle of Chaldiran. Topkapi Museum, Istanbul

iii. Babur (ظَهير اَلَدّين مُحَمَّد – Zahīr ud-Dīn Muhammad; 1483-1530) was the eldest son of Umar Sheikh Mirza, the Timurid governor of Ferghana who was the son of Abu Sa’id Mirza; consequently, Babur was the great grandson of Abu Sa’id Mirza’s father, Sultan Muhammad Mirza, governor of Samarqand for some time, whom due to an unknown reason Babur did not even mention in historical boon Babur-nameh. This implies that Babur was the great-great grandson of the father of Sultan Muhammad Mirza, Miran Shah, who was the third of Timur’s four sons. So, Babur was the great-great-great-grandson of Timur.

If he is basically known through his nickname (‘tiger’), this happens because he truly deserved it. Babur became the ruler of Ferghana at the age of 11 (in 1494), and he was an outstanding and exceptional adolescent in every sense. In his rather brief but most eventful life that had unprecedented ups and downs, Babur had to incessantly fight hard for long and in a most adventurous and often thunderous manner, undertaking campaigns, laying sieges, and winning battles, but also losing his capitals. He was defeated by Muhammad Shaybani, and he spent years in humiliation and poverty without a real shelter.

However, he managed to capture Kabul (1504) and to control parts of today’s Afghanistan; he then benefited from Ismail I’s victory over Muhammad Shaybani (1510), recaptured Samarqand, and prepared his army for the major campaign and the greatest success of his life, namely the invasion of the Indus River and the Ganges River valleys, the demolition of the Delhi Sultanate, and the foundation (1524-1526) of the Mughal Empire (1526-1858). So, triumph came at last to this intellectual soldier and philosopher-conqueror. By all means, Babur would have made -in a terrible historical irony- the perfect son to Timur himself!

iv. Ismail I Safavi (1487-1524) was none other than the son of Shaykh Haydar, the Grandmaster of the Safavid Order and the founder of the Qizilbash military order. It is noteworthy that his maternal grandmother was none other than Despina Hatun, i.e. Theodora Megale Komnene, of John IV of Trebizond, who became Muslim to get married (1458) with Uzun Hassan, the Aq Qoyunlu sultan, whose daughter Martha (mainly known as Alamshah Halime Begum) -in very young age- got married (1471) with Shaykh Haydar.

However, tribally and imperially, Ismail I’s lineage was not as important as the ancestry of Muhammad Shaybani, Selim I, and Babur, but his spiritual-mystical backing was incommensurately stronger; people of different origin, occupation and location could instantly rush to his support and give their lives personally for him. And his great military advantage was his unpredictability, which was due exactly to his spiritual-mystical backing. His opponents would never know from where his fighters would surface to protect him and defend his cause. 

Contrarily to Muhammad Shaybani who had the youth of a regular soldier, and to Selim I who spent years in palatial intrigues as he was his father’s third son, Ismail I was an exceptional youngster like Babur; but his father’s spiritual potency made an enormous difference. This is difficult to assess properly today, but in the circle of the Anatolian-Caucasus-Iranian-Central Asiatic members of the Safavid Order and the Qizilbash fighters, Shaykh Haydar was believed to be God Incarnate (elah) – in the spiritual (not theological) connotation of the word. This meant nothing less than an absolute faith as per which the infant Ismail, long before establishing the Empire of the Safavid Order, was believed to be ‘ebn Allah’ (Son of God).

Western colonial historians and Orientalist forgers, in their incessant effort to distort the historical reality of the Safavid times, select deliberately anti-Safavid authors of those days, like Fazl-Allah Khonji Esfahani, take their premeditated narratives at face value, attach to them several fake, pseudo-Islamic theological concepts, such as the ‘ghulat’, and portray the Safavids as ‘Shia extremists’ or ‘antinomians’ (another fake term), which is absolutely absurd. As said in the previous chapter, there cannot be religious evaluation of spiritual matters; this means that every attempt of theological interpretation of a spiritual term or expression is a failure already before it is stated. In fact, there are no ‘ghulat’ at all.

This term is a neologism, which is attributed by modern scholars to various mystics and spiritual masters (of different Islamic periods), who were misunderstood in their times by their theological critics. The perverse colonial interest in promoting the ‘ghulat’ bogus-literature and in using the fake term for people, who were not called ‘ghulat’ in their times, is due first, to the Western academics’ distortive effort to generate the nonexistent ‘Sunni vs. Shia’ divide, and second, to the Western intellectuals’ vicious attempt to portray several Muslim mystics and spiritual grandmasters as ‘heretics’, whereas the difference between Islam and Christianity hinges exactly on this point, namely that there cannot be ‘heresy’ within Islam.

Ismail I was undoubtedly an extraordinary youngster who lived in strict mystical seclusion for five years (from 7 to 12), before appearing as almost the Islamic Messiah (Mahdi). It is necessary to straightforwardly clarify at this point that this term has a totally different meaning in spirituality and in religion (or theology). Meanwhile, the bright and exceptional apprentice was communicating with several members of the Safavid Order and the Qizilbash army though a sophisticated network of agents that was too difficult for others to identify, let alone put under control.

For Ismail I Safavi’s early stage of life (during those five years), there were certainly several parallels between his concealed existence and that of Muhammad ibn al-Askari, the Twelfth Imam (who was born in 869 and finally disappeared in his Major Occultation in 941). However, only theological misinterpretation of spiritual activities and narratives could lead to the wrong assumption about an eventual identification of Ismail I with Muhammad ibn al-Askari. Not one member of the Safavid Order was confused in this regard.  

After having lived his childhood in the forests of Gilan, he appeared to his brethren and followers at 12 (in 1499), he achieved an unexpected, great victory over the Shirvanshah ruler Farrukh Yassar two years later (1501), and he was crowned king at 14. Thus, he was catapulted to power in the most exulting terms, whereas his merry, exuberant and legendary entry to Tabriz was followed by endless feasts, imperial banquets, endless consumption of wine, and fabulous erotic delights.

He who says that wine (or alcoholic drinks in general) is prohibited in Islam is either a conniving Westerner (diplomat, statesman, agent or academic) strongly motivated by his vicious hatred of the true, historical Islam or an idiotic puppet of the Western powers, i.e. an ignorant and idiotic, fanatic and extremist, Islamist sheikh, who – as per the Satanic orders of his Western masters – believes that “Islam is the Quran and the Hadith”. Quite contrarily to this fallacy, the extensively misinterpreted and calamitously misunderstood sacred texts of Islam do not represent even 0.001% of the existing voluminous literature (in classical Islamic languages, namely Arabic, Farsi, various Turkic languages, and Urdu), which has to be first studied, then correctly perceived and plainly comprehended before one attempts to read the Quran and the Hadith. No holy text exists without exact conceptualization and comprehensive contextualization. 

The sacred texts of Islam (similarly with those of every other religion) cannot be accurately and succinctly understood per se except in the light of literary, spiritual, historical, theoretical and scientific texts of the Golden Era of Islam. The same occurs in Christianity; without the Patristic Literature (Patristics or Patrology, i.e. the texts written by the Fathers of the Christian Church) no one can possibly understand correctly the New Testament, the Old Testament, and the true, historical Christianity. The fallacy, as per which anyone today can understand the Gospels and the other sacred texts of Christianity without the Patristic Literature, is a deviate, Protestant – Evangelical distortion.

The aforementioned four Muslim emperors were all authors, poets and highly educated and cultured monarchs. Muhammad Shaybani composed his Bahr ul Huda, a theological, moral treatise, being widely known as a consummate polymath and an erudite scholar who highly valued books, manuscripts, epics and arts. Selim I wrote poetry in Farsi and Turkish under the penname Mahlas Selimi. Babur excelled in prose; he elaborated his own biography in Chagatai Turkic; the legendary Babur nameh (Book of Babur) is a major historical source for the History of Asia during the 15th and 16th c.

Ismail I Safavi composed spiritual poetry in Turkish and Farsi under the penname Khatai, i.e. ‘the one who makes mistakes’; in and by itself, this fact constitutes the complete confirmation of the aforementioned statement, namely that there cannot be religious evaluation of spiritual matters. Confessing one’s own mistakes -by selecting a name that makes this reality so explicitly known- is full indication of humanity; a perfect human accepts that he/she makes mistakes. By using this penname, Ismail I fully demonstrated that the term ‘ebn Allah’ (Son of God) attributed to him was not meant in a rationalistic theological way but in terms of spiritual symbolism, which is absolutely unfathomable to juristic, rationalistic and materialistic theologians.

In the existing manuscripts (preserved in Tashkent and Paris) of Ismail I Safavi’s poetry, there are ca. 260 qasidas and ghazals, quatrains, morabbas, mosaddas, and three mathnawis (different types of Islamic poetry); two of his mathnawis are quite lengthy, namely the Dah nameh and the Nasihat nameh. Bektashis in Anatolia and the Balkans, as well as the Shabaks in Mesopotamia, extensively recite Ismail I Safavi’s poetry in their spiritual sessions down to our days.

The interaction of those four great emperors was not trouble-free, peaceful and bloodless; at times, it even took a dimension of extreme monstrosity. During the period 1497-1504, Babur and Muhammad Shaybani were repeatedly engaged in battles against one another, particularly for the control of Samarqand. Muhammad Shaybani proved to be Babur’s real nemesis, but both of them captured, lost and recaptured Samarqand several times. As Babur had a small basis of support in Central Asia, he undertook a most adventurous campaign in 1504, and with few men he captured Kabul, making of the area his new base. He made an alliance with a distant relative, namely the ruler of Herat Sultan Husayn Mirza Bayqarah; but Muhammad Shaybani chased him from there too.     

As Muhammad Shaybani was an ally of the Ottoman family and of Bayezid II, the father of Selim I, he concentrated his efforts in the East and Southeast, against the Hazara Turanian nomads in Khorasan (currently located in central Afghanistan) and the Kazakhs. In fact, his campaign against the Hazaras was a disaster, because first his cavalry had many casualties and second the war against the Hazaras produced a major reaction among the Qizilbash, because many members of the military order were of Hazara origin. Then, Ismail I Safavi, who had spent many years, invading and dismantling the Akkoyunlu state and its last remaining forces in Iran, Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia, and Mesopotamia, turned against Muhammad Shaybani. Then, in the Battle of Merv, the Qizilbash army, after devising a trick (i.e. a feigned retreat), ambushed and slaughtered an almost double Uzbek force.

The excesses after the Qizilbash victory were exorbitant; Muhammad Shaybani’s corpse was cut to pieces and parts were sent to be in public display in many cities; his skull ended up as a gold-plated cup for Ismail I. The cup was later sent to Babur himself, and the same occurred to one of Muhammad Shaybani’s wives, namely Khanzada Begum, who was Babur’s elder sister. These gestures started an era of cooperation between Ismail I, who had just risen to prominence, and Babur whose army and the Qizilbash fought side by side against the Uzbeks at the Battle of Ghazdewan (1512); however they were defeated there, and this event marked the end of Babur’s dream of recovering his father’s kingdom at Ferghana. For some time, Babur accepted Ismail I as his own emperor, while he was struggling to impose his rule in the mountains between Central Asia and the Indus River valley.

Opposing Ottoman allies at the Battle of Ghazdewan, Babur (today portrayed as a ‘Sunni’ by colonial Orientalists) became an ally of Ismail I Safavi (currently labeled as a ‘Shia’ by European and American historical forgers) and therefore an enemy of Selim I (nowadays described as a ‘Sunni’ by Western academics). The reality is totally different: Ismail I was a spiritual mystic, who became the ruler of a secular empire controlled by the army (Qizilbash) of his mystical order (Safavid), whereas Selim I was a palatial intrigue man controlled by evil theological circles and people who caused divisions, civil wars, internal strives and terrible bloodshed in the Eastern Roman Empire (of the Ottoman family). Then, in striking opposition with both, Babur was an intrepid, intelligent and opportunist, yet formidable, soldier entirely motivated by the dream to create an empire greater than his father’s and Timur’s.

The spread of Qizilbash force, movement, worldview, mentality, and lifestyle among Anatolian pastoralists was overwhelming in the 1500s. It triggered its own dynamics, which was not controlled anymore by the Safavid Order and the newly established Safavid Empire. The mystical order of Şahkulu was the perfect continuation of many long centuries of Anatolian Islamic spirituality and mysticism; it was energized by the introduction of the Qizilbash concept (an army for a mystical order that would establish a secular universal empire).

Ismail I Safavi in an incident from his campaign against Shirvan; he is charging down a mountain in pursuit of the King of Shirvan; miniature from the manuscript Shahnama-i-Ismail (Tabriz style), ca. 1540 (MS Add. 7784, f.46v. British Museum, London); his distinctive turban has twelve folds representing the twelve Imams of whom Ali ibn Abi Taleb was the first.

The Aq Qoyunlu tribal khanate (1378-1503) around 1475, i.e. 25-30 years before it was defeated and incorporated with the Safavid Empire

Miniature from a 17th c. manuscript with mystical representation of Sheikh Safi ad-din Ardabili (1252-1334) blessing the young Shah Ismail I; gouache heightened with gold on paper. The historic mystic is depicted at the top of a minbar in the mosque holding a Qur’an and blessing Shah Isma’il (identified in small brown script) who stands on a lower step of the same minbar, surrounded by courtiers and elders.

Ismail I Safavi offers an audience to the Qizilbash, after they have defeated his opponent Shirvanshah Farrukh in 1500; miniature from Bijan’s Tarikh-i Jahangusha-yi Khaqan Sahibqiran (A History of Shah Ismail I), which was written in Isfahan in the late 1680s. The painting was created by Muin Musawwir, a famous artist who also illustrated six editions of the Shahnameh.

Ismail I Safavi and his soldiers cross Kura River in the Caucasus region

Ismail I Safavi defeats Sultan Murad, the last ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu, near Hamadan in 1503.

Miniature from a manuscript of Bijan’s Tarikh-i Jahangusha-yi Khaqan Sahibqiran (A History of Shah Ismail I), which was written in Isfahan in the late 1680s. It was painted by or in the style of Mu’in Musavvir; gouache heightened with gold on paper. Ismail and his courtiers are depicted on horseback while hunting.

The fight of Ismail I Safavi against the Dulkadiroğulları in Southeastern Anatolia

Ismail I Safavi watches his soldiers defeat the Musha’sha (المشعشعية) messianic leader Sultan Fayyad in Khuzestan; from the miniature of a manuscript of the late 1680s.

Representation of the Battle of Merv between Shah Ismail and Shaybani Khan; fresco in the Chehel Sotun Palace in Isfahan

Ismail I Safavi’s envoy Ganbar Agha appears before the last Aq Qoyunlu ruler Sultan Murad; miniature from a manuscript of the 1670s

Representation of the Battle of Chaldiran (1514); fresco in the Chehel Sotun Palace in Isfahan

The helmet of Ismail I Safavi

The Şahkulu Spiritual Movement

However, the Anatolian mystical order was not stricto sensu created by the Safavid Qizilbash. Many Western Orientalists totally misinterpret the role, the scope, the targets and the motivations of the founder and grandmaster of the eponymous order; Şahkulu (also known as Shah Qoli Baba or Shah Kulu or Shah Quli or Karabıyıkoğlu, i.e. the son of the man with black moustache) was certainly not a Safavid puppet who attempted to subvert or infiltrate the Ottoman state; this misinterpretation is absurd. Şahkulu was an Anatolian original.

In this regard, colonial academics totally distort everything, even the real meaning of Şahkulu’s name! It is true that in Turkish, this word means ‘the servant of the Shah’; however, this is not meant in a theological and rationalist manner, but with a purely spiritual connotation. Şahkulu was indeed the ‘servant’ of the ‘Shah’, but according to the terminology of an Islamic mystical order, ‘Shah’ is God. In fact, even worse lies and incredible distortions are published by Western colonial historians as regards the bloodshed, the persecution and the oppression of the Anatolian Qizilbash by the usurper of the Ottoman throne Selim I. The reason for these lies is evident: on the misrepresentation of the historical events that took place in Anatolia during the dramatic period 1510-1512 hinge both, the entire falsification of the Ottoman History and the fallacious theory that “the Ottomans were Sunni and the Safavid Iranians were Shia”. In addition, Western historians tried systematically to obscure the fact that the Ottoman ruling class followed Maturidi theology, whereas the uncontrolled but intentionally tolerated majority of the madrasas and the imams were impacted by Ash’ari concepts.

As a matter of fact, the so-called Şahkulu İsyanı (rebellion), which was not an uprising but a messianic fervor, and the subsequent events, namely the battle of Chaldiran (1514) between Selim I and Ismail I, bear witness to the gradual rise of a pseudo-Islamic theological school at Istanbul (under the Hanafi madhhab coverage). Those indoctrinated and ignorant sheikhs progressively destroyed the Ottoman Empire with their absurd inhumanity and obdurate idiocy, which invariably took the form of nonsensical argumentation, strict anachronism, theological rigidity, verbal rationalism, worldly materialism, and nonsensical involvement in the governance of the expanding empire. Their worst and most catastrophic trait however was their explicit revilement and utmost hatred of Islamic spirituality (Batin/ باطن; Batiniyya/ باطنية; these terms literally means ‘inner’ and ‘esotericism’, but they have nothing to do with Western esotericism/mysticism).

These Istanbulite theological circles were not powerful at the time, but gradually, during the 16th c., they managed to prevail within the Ottoman court; their achievement was the destruction of Taqi ad-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf’s Islamic Observatory of Istanbul in 1580 – an event that marks the irrevocable death of the Islamic Civilization. In 1510-1512, the same theological circles plunged Anatolia in terrible bloodshed; this was due to their determination to oppose the prevalence of Şahkulu Qizilbash spirituality. That’s why these pseudo-Muslim theological circles always represented the ‘enfant gâté’ of Western academics: they constituted indeed the perfect guarantee for the destruction and the disappearance of Islam, because they could be (and they were) easily induced by Western colonial agents to trigger interminable divisions and fratricidal wars among the Muslims.

Selim I was not predestined to become a sultan, as he was the fourth among the eight sons of Bayezid II. Şehzade Abdullah was the first among Bayezid II’s eight sons, but he died young in 1483; Şehzade Şehinşah was the Ottoman sultan’s fifth son and he was very well educated and militarily strong, but he never gained the support of the Ottoman bureaucracy, administration and theological nomenklatura. Although governor of big cities and loved by the people of Karaman, he died in 1511 for unknown reasons, possibly poisoned by some vicious Ottoman theologians. Born in 1465, Ahmet (known as Şehzade Ahmet; 1465-1513) was the second son of Bayezid II; born in 1467, Korkut (known as Şehzade Korkut; 1467-1513) was the third son of Bayezid II. Şehzade Mahmud (1475-1507), the younger brother of Şehzade Ahmet, died in 1507 for undefined reasons. Seventh son of Bayezid II was Şehzade Alemşah (1477-1502) who also died in 1502 or 1503 for unspecified reasons.

Compared to Şehzade Ahmet and to Şehzade Korkut, Selim I (born in 1470) was a far cry and an unimportant prince, even more so since Bayezid II’s favorite candidate to his succession was Ahmet. However, the Ottoman court had always been a matter of Istanbulite palatial intrigues, intra-family fights, and endless fratricides, pretty much like those occurred during the Eastern Roman times in God-damned Constantinople. Bayezid II (1447-1512; his reign started in 1481) had to fight to secure his succession, because Cem Sultan (1459-1495), his younger brother, laid claim to the throne. Selim I was an insubordinate, rebellious, idiotic and absolutely unworthy son, who was manipulated by the evil Istanbulite theologians as to how to plot, cheat and connive against his own father. This is what the pseudo-Islamic madhhab (jurisprudential schools) and theological schools were reduced to at those days – and ever since down to our days.

Selim I rebelled against his father not for any other reason, but because the vicious theological circles of Istanbul, which are nowadays mistakenly called ‘Sunni’, wanted to use him against the spread and the rise of the Şahkulu Anatolian spirituality. The succession to the throne of Bayezid II was only the pretext. In fact, Ahmet (Şehzade Ahmet) did not only have the right of primogeniture, but also his father’s consent and favor; that’s why the disloyal son and puppet of Istanbul’s evil theologians Selim I had to ceaselessly plot against his father.

In addition, there was a confusing and disastrous tradition in the Ottoman family, as per which among the dying sultan’s sons, whoever reached the dead monarch’s bed first would (or could eventually) become his father’s successor. A clear sign of the chaotic situation that prevailed in the Istanbulite palace of the disorderly, lawless and faithless family was the disastrous fact that, in order to make sure that the eventually insubordinate crown princes and the other princes would not fuel a rebellion against the sultan, the Ottoman rulers used to send their sons to faraway provinces in order to serve there as local governors – which in turn reduced their chances to successfully plot. This meant that distance mattered greatly at those days!

Ahmet was the governor of Amasya in Northern Cappadocia (675 km from Istanbul), Korkut was the governor of Antalya (then called Teke, in Pamphylia) in the southern coast (640 km from the capital), and Selim was the governor of Trabzon (1060 km from his father’s palace). In that ridiculous situation, everyone was preparing for the forthcoming confrontation; it was therefore normal that Ahmet rejected his father’s appointment of Suleyman (son of Selim I, who became later known as Suleyman the Magnificent) as governor of Bolu, because of the small distance that separated the tiny and insignificant city from the Ottoman capital (only 260 km). Suleyman was then sent to the Ottoman Crimea (Kefe or Kaffa or Caffa; today’s Feodosia).

Incessantly plotting, Selim asked his father to appoint him as governor in a sanjak in Rumeli (: Balkans). Bayezid II rejected this bizarre demand because the Ottoman sanjaks in the European territory of the empire were smaller, more recently acquired, and unfit for princes. This fact shows that Anatolia was always the central and most important part of the Ottoman state, as it was of the Eastern Roman Empire in earlier periods.

Involving foreigners in acts against his father’s decisions and affairs, Selim asked the help of the Tatar Khan of Crimea and he was finally appointed as governor of the pashalik of Belgrade (then named in Turkish as ‘Semendire Sancağı’, i.e. Sanjak of Smederevo), which is located at a distance of 900 km from Istanbul. However, instead of staying at the headquarters of his administrative province, the disloyal, immoral and faithless Selim approached Istanbul, and then Bayezid II had to fight against him and defeat him in August 1511. Selim escaped to his Tatar friends in Crimea, but at the same time, the Şahkulu spiritual movement and the ensuing messianic fervor took disproportionate eschatological dimensions in Anatolia, and the sultan tasked Ahmed to impose order and discipline through the Ottoman Empire’s eastern provinces.

As a matter of fact, there was never a Şahkulu rebellion, contrarily to what most of the historians claim nowadays. There was instead a passionate messianic fervor and the Ottoman attempt to suppress the spiritual movement was met with resistance. This situation cannot be termed as ‘rebellion’, because there was no intention for rebellion among the members and the followers of the Şahkulu mystical order. They did not want to overthrow any authority or to impose themselves as the rulers. As every spiritual movement brings forth liberation and salvation, a large number of people across Anatolia viewed in the Şahkulu movement and in their Qizilbash army the promise and the perspective of a better life free from the Ottoman family’s incompetence and incessant butchery and bloodletting; but this was not tantamount to public disobedience or disorder.

As spirituality enables the faithful to understand the real purpose of this life and of the Hereafter, the Şahkulu members, followers and army knew quite well that the Ottoman princes had absolutely no legitimacy to possess the wealth they garnered and to hold the positions they had. In terms of spirituality, states do not exist or are not needed; these evil social structures have absolutely no value and no authority for any spiritual mystic and any spiritually-awakened person.

Şahkulu Qizilbash army raids on cities, on Ottoman treasures, on imperial caravans, and on regional administration centers started therefore becoming very frequent around 1510. It is essential for both, experienced historians and erudite readership, not to evaluate those developments with today’s average Western mentality and approach; there was nothing illegal in those acts. They were absolutely just, moral and lawful; even more importantly, they were viewed as such by the outright majority of the Anatolian populations. In any case, ‘lawful’ is only the ‘just’ and the ‘moral’, in striking contrast to the modern Western societies and their lawless laws, criminal nature, and evil states that are all doomed to perish.

The historical reality was as simple as that: the Qizilbash soldiers were not thieves; quite contrarily, the Ottoman princes, administrators and theologians were crooks. Şehzade Korkut’s caravan was attacked once, whereas the beylerbey of Anatolia (Anadolu) was defeated, when he tried to engage the Şahkulu forces in battle. Then, Bayezid II realized that his empire was about to crumble in Anatolia; he therefore sent Şehzade Ahmet (1511) and the Grand Vizier Hadım (: eunuch) Ali Pasha in order to protect his, his family’s, and his gang’s lawless interests. I severely criticize the Ottoman sultan because he was ruling his realm as a disgrace; when a ruler is not just, moral and lawful, it is the plain right and duty of every person to take justice in his hands.

The dispatch of Şehzade Ahmet happened at the same time, when Bayezid II was fighting against his lawless, faithless and rebel son Selim; this was a development Şehzade Ahmet had to keep a close eye on. During the battle against the Şahkulu forces (near Kütahya), Şehzade Ahmet tried therefore to close a personal deal and an alliance with Şahkulu Karabıyıkoğlu himself; in other words, he attempted to gain his support, as well as that of his movement and of the Qizilbash army for the succession to the Ottoman throne. This would be an excellent solution for all, namely the local populations, the Anatolian Qizilbash, the messianic mystic, and the heir of the Ottoman throne. 

Şehzade Ahmet’s attempt to ascend to power with the support of the Şahkulu movement, if it brought forth great results, would make of the Ottoman Sultanate {then still called ‘(Eastern) Roman Empire’} a perfect copy of the Safavid Empire: a Turanian Empire ruled by a spiritual order. This would trigger exceptionally positive and truly propitious changes across the Islamic world, entirely revivifying Islamic spirituality and terminating the catastrophic theological indoctrination, which finally prevailed and gradually destroyed the Islamic World totally.

Of course, Şehzade Ahmet was not a mystic and he acted only out of his personal interest. Şahkulu Karabıyıkoğlu tried then to gain him to his own cause; however, the affair was very risky, and unfortunately the news leaked. Then, Şehzade Ahmet had to persuade Hadım Ali Pasha that the scope of the negotiations was other, ask him to continue the battle against the Qizilbash army, and run to major Anatolian cities to gain wider regional support for his ascension to the Ottoman throne. The correct place for this was Konya, the leading center of Anatolian spirituality.

The forces of Hadım Ali Pasha pursued the Şahkulu Qizilbash army and after several minor engagements, in the battle of Çubukova (Eastern Cappadocia), both Şahkulu Karabıyıkoğlu and Hadım Ali Pasha were killed (July 1511). However, the Qizilbash force was not dispersed and remained actively powerful. Having prevailed over his rebellious son Selim in August 1511, the embattled Bayezid II had to deal with the chaotic situation of his empire in Anatolia. As Şehzade Ahmet controlled Konya and disobeyed his father’s order to return to his position, Bayezid II believed that the true reason for the spread of the Şahkulu movement was Ismail I; this was a very wrong conclusion, because the Anatolian Qizilbash force was totally independent from the Safavid state. Actually, in the ensuing exchange of royal correspondence, Ismail I totally rejected any involvement in the Şahkulu events in Anatolia; he even went on to explicitly condemn the Anatolian Qizilbash attitude and practices.

Meanwhile, Şehzade Ahmet attempted to advance to Istanbul and dethrone his father, while Selim was in Crimea; however, he failed to advance, as he was blocked by the imperial guard before Bursa. At the same time, Selim gathered a Tatar force and, relying on the Istanbulite theologians’ and bureaucrats’ timely messages and direct support, returned to Istanbul in April 1512 and dethroned his father; no less than a month later (26 May 1512) Bayezid II died dishonored in shameful exile (in Dimetoka, today’s Didymoteicho/Διδυμότειχο on the Turkish-Greek border).

The confrontation between Şehzade Ahmet, who had gathered Qizilbash support in the meantime, and Selim I took place in April 1513 near Bursa, and after an initially indecisive clash, Şehzade Ahmet was defeated and killed. Although Şehzade Korkut had accepted his younger brother’s reign in 1512, Selim I had him killed too, in 1513. An extraordinary purgatory took then place against all the remaining nephews of Selim I, so that the bloody reign of the Ottoman butcher may not be endangered in any way; this would also concern particularly Şehzade Murad, the son of Şehzade Ahmet, who was viewed by the outright majority of the Anatolian population as the rightful heir to the Ottoman throne. However, Şehzade Murad was clever enough to escape to Eastern Anatolia, which was totally out of Ottoman control, communicate with Ismail I, get his support, and coordinate with other Turkmen and Qizilbash forces in order to oppose and eventually overthrow Selim I.

The terrain of the Şahkulu movement

Full of hatred, rancor and hysteria, Selim I carried out an unprecedented ‘white terror campaign’, killing dozens of thousands of civilians under the fake pretext of supporting the Qizilbash army; numbers vary in several historical sources, but an estimate of 50000 people would not be far from truth. This extraordinary bloodshed took place in only one third of today’s Turkey’s territory, namely Western Anatolia. Subsequently, a great number of captives were sent to Rumeli (European provinces of the Ottoman state) and finally settled in Mora Eyalet (ایالت موره; Eyalet-i Mora, today’s Peloponnese in southern Greece).

After the previous description, it becomes clear why, in today’s absurd, disastrous, anti-Turkish and pseudo-Islamic regime of Turkey, one can find journalists who still remember the illustrious Şahkulu movement, having however shaped a disastrously mistaken opinion about it. The so-called ‘political islam’ was indeed fabricated by the French, English and American Orientalists in order to entirely replace the traditional knowledge of the Muslims about the true historical Islam; for this project, an entirely fake History of the Islamic World was scrupulously written, taught and propagated by thousands of Western Orientalist forgers over the last 200 years.

The Islamic forgery of the Western academics did indeed match the ideological forgery that is known as ‘political islam’: they proved to be the two sides of the same coin. The scope of Western Islamology (or ‘Islamic Studies’) was exactly to come up with narratives, which would offer venues to all the Islamists and to the stupid Muslim followers of ‘political islam’ to misperceive the Şahkulu movement (and generally, the entire History of the Islamic World) and to thus shape a totally distorted idea about this topic (and about thousands of other topics). This was done in order to engulf all the Muslims in a totally false perception of the History of the Islamic World, and in an absolutely compact ignorance of their past and heritage.

The fallacious contextualization of the history of the Şahkulu movement had therefore started long before the English secret services selected the ignorant street seller Erdogan for the position to which they raised him, duly fooling the Turkish military, academics, politicians, and businessmen. As he functioned as the prefab puppet of the worst enemies of the Muslims, a false reading of the History of Islam spread throughout Turkey (as it had already been the case in all the other Muslim countries which, contrarily to Turkey, were colonized). As a matter of fact, nowadays all the worthless theologians and disreputable sheikhs of Diyanet (Turkey’s so-called ‘Directorate of Religious Affairs’) are the equivalent of the uneducated, idiotic and evil theologians of the times of Selim I.

A typical example of historical distortion concerning the Şahkulu movement in today’s Turkey is offered by the shameless villain and crook Murat Çolak who published a ridiculous article in the local newspaper of Kahramanmaraş (formerly Germanikeia) ‘Maraş Gündem’ on the 16th July 2018 under the nonsensical title “FETÖ’nun Tarihsel Kökleri Şahkulu İsyanı ve 15 Temmuz” (The historical roots of FETO organization, the Şahkulu Rebellion, and July 15), which is an allusion to the failed coup of the 15th July 2016. Useless to add that there is no connection at all between the Şahkulu movement (not rebellion) and Fethullah Gülen, the notorious leader of the said organization; https://www.marasgundem.com.tr/makale/fetonun-tarihsel-kokleri-sahkulu-isyani-ve-15-temmuz-16277

The war between the Ottoman state and the Safavid Empire had become inevitable, because the unprecedented killings and the Istanbulite anti-Anatolian malignancy caused an even greater reaction among all the populations of Anatolia, Turanian or not. Selim I and Ismail I exchanged several insulting letters prior to the historic Battle of Chaldiran (August 1514) and some of them have been preserved down to our times. They only bear witness to their reciprocal rejection, without however using the colonially-imposed (starting with the 19th c.) false terms ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’. About: 

Rıza Yıldırım, Turkomans between two empires: the origins of the Qızılbash identity in Anatolia (1447-1514).

Click to access 52925088.pdf

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

Click to access 0006379.pdf

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

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

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

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

Click to access 02selimismail.pdf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babür

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

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/بابر

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://silkroadtexts.wordpress.com/

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

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

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

Click to access anatm_1297-8094_1997_num_7_1_946.pdf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to access jaas072001.pdf

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

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

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

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/golat

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

Comparative evaluation

An objective assessment of the four Turanian rulers whose Iranian education and culture was evident may lead us to devastating conclusions. Finding themselves in different environments, they failed to go beyond the limits of their ‘worlds’. Still, this was imperative for the survival of their respective realms, taking into account what was happening in the Western confines of Asia, namely the pseudo-continent of Europe, which is Asia’s most worthless, most troublesome, and most barbarian peninsula. Consequently, we have to consider them as the initial reason for the collapse of their states, despite the fact that these empires lasted long and fell after 350-400 years. The sole exception is certainly Babur; but he also failed to effectively convey to his offspring and successors the mindset, the predisposition, the attitude, and the ensuing behavior which undeniably helped him transform his Central Asiatic failure into an Indian triumph.

The really embarrassing part of the conclusion is the ascertainment that all four rulers were very civilized, highly cultured, and impressively educated; it goes without saying that I use these terms with the connotation they had at the time, and not the meaning that they have in our fallen, corrupt and putrefied world. They all failed to assess the serious problems that existed in the Islamic World during their lifetime and they proved to be unable to detect the lethal threats that were mounted against their empires and more generally the entire Muslim World. Again, the only exception is Babur, because the time between his conquest of the Sultanate of Delhi and his death is truly brief.

With the exception of Ismail I Safavi (1501-1524), all the rest experienced a rather brief period of reign. Muhammad Shaybani ruled for 10 years (1500-1510); Selim I reigned for only 8 years (1512-1520). And Babur was the sovereign of an empire only for 4.5 years (April 1526-1530). One can truly be astounded with their narrow horizons, naïve approaches to governance, profane understanding of reign, and simplicity in worldview.

Muhammad Shaybani was the living intersection of all things Iranian and Turanian; from his paternal side, he belonged to the lineage of Shayban (also written as Shiban) who was the fifth son of Jochi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan; Jochi was the ancestor of all rulers of the Golden Horde. This means that Muhammad Shaybani was indeed associated and concerned, one way or another, with all the states that came out of the split of the Ulus Jochi (as the Great Empire of the Golden Horde was named at the time), namely the Kazan khanate, the Crimean Khanate, the Qassim Khanate, the Astrakhan khanate and the Nogais.

Muhammad Shaybani was almost 30 years old at the time of the renowned Ugra standoff (1480), when the emperor of the ailing Great Horde failed to impose his dictates on the formerly tributary statelet of Muscovy; Akhmat Khan of the Great Horde and Ivan III of Muscovy, facing one another from the opposite banks of Ugra River, hesitated to cross the river and start fighting, This rather bizarre event is generally considered as the beginning of Muscovy’s independence from the Golden Horde.  

From his maternal side, Muhammad Shaybani was the cousin of Janibek’s son Kasym Khan (reign: 1511-1521), the great Kazakh ruler, who expanded his khanate at the detriment of the Bukhara Khanate. Furthermore, according to the historical treatise “Tavarikh-i guzida-yi nusrat-namah” (Chagatai: تواریخ گزیده نصرت‌نامه ; Таварих-и гузида-йи нусрат-наме), which was elaborated by Alla Murad Annaboyoglu in the early 16th c. (ed. V. P. Yudin/В. П. Юдин, Alma Ata 1969), Munk Timur, i.e. Muhammad Shaybani’s great-great-great-great grandfather, was married to the daughter of a Turanian descendant of Ismail Samani (849-907; reigned after 892), the founder and first ruler of the Samanid dynasty of Eastern Iran, one of the states that seceded from the Abbasid Caliphate while also recognizing the caliph as the head of all Muslims.   

In spite of the aforementioned, briefly presented, background, Muhammad Shaybani remained always a sectarian and tribal ruler. Despite the fact that he was unbiased in his approach to people, although he did not discriminate among Iranians and Turanians (therefore viewing them as one nation), and in spite of the fact that he was truly tolerant in his stance towards Muslim mystics, theologians, members of various tariqas, and followers of different madhhab, he clearly proved to be a treacherous subordinate (to Sultan Ahmed Mirza, a Timurid), a cruel oppressor of the Kazakhs, a disastrous ally to khanate of Moghulistan, a distant and useless friend to Bayezid II, and a consummate plunderer. His poor judgment relied on tribal lineage, family affairs, and petty calculations; this resulted in vindictive deeds, sheer opportunism, and day-to-day governance. He would not be a match for any strong strategist who intended to create an empire. Hating all the Timurids, he defeated Babur several times, but he did not prevent him from establishing one of the world’s greatest empires of all times.

Muhammad Shaybani’s silly head had a well-deserved end; the skull served as a lovely drinking goblet in the hands of Ismail I Safavi. One can even assume that, although it was graciously bejeweled, the goblet was thrown to the ground many times, during those fabulous feasts and banquets of Tabriz – just for fun!

Among these four monarchs, Ismail I Safavi was certainly the best prepared to reign; but he was still acting as a semi-nomad pleased with what was available in nature around him. During his early years in the throne of Tabriz, he used to spend time, camping in the mountains and hunting for several months; there was no urgency to conquer lands and territories. The expansion of his empire was slow and it took the form of a joyful endeavor instead of a serious state affair, scrupulous programming or a major expansion stratagem. There were certainly many wars, notably against the Shirvan kingdom (in part of today’s Azerbaijan), the Kartli and Kakheti kingdoms of Georgia that became vassal states, and the Aq-Qoyunlu nomadic sultanate that was entirely eclipsed, but there was no methodical undertaking in this regard. Not a care in the world!

Within few years, the empire of Ismail I Safavi replaced the Aq-Qoyunlu tribal confederacy, but there were no second thoughts, no back thoughts, and no serious observations, let alone monitoring, of developments, state affairs, and relations among neighboring states. To offer an example, not one Iranian magistrate in the court of Ismail I Safavi took note that two Kakheti Georgian embassies had been dispatched by Alexander I to Ivan III of Muscovy (in 1483 and 1491) as soon as the tiny statelet stopped paying tribute to the Golden Horde.

Ismail I Safavi and his spiritual brethren, namely the members of the most ancient and most venerable Safavid Order and the combatants of the Qizilbash contingent, acted out of free will and spiritual illumination. They did not need to even name their empire; at the beginning; the structures of state were rudimentary, and there was no bureaucracy at all. Ismail I Safavid was indeed closer to Cyrus the Great than Shapur I was. Living the epic moments superbly narrated by Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi and others, performing the spiritual exercises of Saif ad-Din Ardabili, and staying in cities only during the cold winter months of the Iranian plateau, they gave the impression that wars consisted merely in short break times of a peaceful eternity that they enjoyed. Fearless to die in battle, knowledgeable about the Hereafter, and devoted in their vow, they were less envious, possessive and worldly than most of the soldiers of their time. There was no need for a rational plan for war, because this is genuinely evil; there was impulse for war instead – which is genuinely human.

This situation may perhaps appear as confusing and unpromising to many people, but it is not. Of course, it is normal for a mystical fighter to believe that due to the synergy between his soul and body, he is indomitable and invincible; this conviction is basically correct and true. However, it takes a very high degree of moral discipline and of self-restraint for the spiritual potency and the inherent impulse of the fighter to be exacted and exerted. Quite unfortunately, Ismail I Safavi’s spiritual master and mentor, Hossein Beg Laleh Shamlu, tolerated a great degree of self-gratification, self-complacency, and even exuberance; he was lenient with the rising emperor, his brethren, and his guards. This did not bode well for the ruler, his army, and his empire. Compromised moral is tantamount to weakened spirituality and emollient attitude conditions human integrity.

This explains perfectly well why, after his defeat in Chaldiran (1514), Ismail I Safavi collapsed and lived the rest of his life ashamed, in sadness, despair, lamentation and uncontrollable alcoholism; in reality, there was nothing to be sad for. During the battle, the Iranians were about to mark a thunderous victory, being provenly better trained to fight; the Ottomans won only because they started using gunpowder artillery that the Iranians did not have. Even worse, the Ottoman army was about to be cut to two pieces, because the Janissaries did not accept to fight against and kill their Muslim brethren. Actually, the Ottoman soldiers who used the cannons that they had transported with greatly difficulty also murdered Ottoman Janissaries. However, a mystical fighter with compromised moral and self-indulgent attitude certainly collapses after a defeat; quite contrarily, a mystic strongly experienced in ascetic self-denial never feels sorrow, frustration and depression – ever after an extreme adversity.   

Having to fight against monstrous criminals, rancorous establishments, bloodthirsty rulers, rancorous enemies, inhumanely cruel soldiers, professional serial killers, and greedy armies that sailed off to intentionally perpetrate genocide in Mexico and to circumvent Africa by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, the Safavid elite was rather living in a dream that turned out to become a nightmare for Iran and for the almost the entire world. Iran had always been a major empire with long maritime tradition; Achaemenid Iran is credited with the merge of several earlier regional trade routes that had existed for millennia; this was due to the unmatched, royal administrative genius of Darius I the Great (522-486 BCE).

Darius the Great’s contribution to the emergence of the east-west trade network was twofold: a) the establishment of the Royal Iranian Road and b) the circumnavigation of the Arabian Peninsula and the direct maritime connection of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea with the Persian Gulf. Oman was always an Iranian satrapy; and during the Sassanid times, Iran invaded also Yemen, which was a focal land for the world trade between East and West. However, this background was entirely lost and the Safavid elite did not care at all about the maritime presence and strength of their empire despite the fact that in the beginning of the 16th c., Iranians still controlled an important part of the commerce between East and West, having always been an important constituent of the Islamic times’ navigation and trade. But for all the people around Ismail I Safavi, treasures were to be mainly collected from lands conquered and cities pillaged.

For the case of Ismail I Safavi, one is however tempted to think that the historical heritage itself rather than the various individuals and the ruling elite resurrected the Iranian Empire under the Safavid dynasty. The spiritual exercises of the Safavid Order, their ruminations, their cordial illuminations, and their angelic invocations seem to have electrified the Soul of Iran as incantated by Ferdowsi; but their impious self-indulgence confused the serenity of their souls and made it sure that their pledge was predestined to doom.  

Selim I shared the same ideas as Ismail I Safavi and Muhammad Shaybani about a state’s chances to acquire wealth; this was not due to cultural tradition (as in Iran) or to geomorphological impact (as in Central Asia). The state that Selim I -through plots, family disloyalty, treason, and shameful banditry- managed to put under control stretched from Central Anatolia to Belgrade; this had been the usual, typical domain of the Constantinopolitan βασιλείς (basileis; emperors) from the 7th to the 12th c. The official name of the state was invariably ‘Eastern Roman Empire’, and this was the will of all the successors of Mehmet II. But quite unfortunately, the ill-fated Ottoman Sultanate was controlled by a criminal, pseudo-Muslim family, which was manipulated by idiotic theologians, sectarian sheikhs, and a bogus-Islamic authority, the sheikh-ul-Islam (also written as Shaykh al-Islam). The sultans wanted, quite absurdly, to represent the Eastern Roman imperial tradition, while remaining the petty warriors (غازى; ghazi), who relied on worthless and unnecessary razzias (غزية), i.e. military expeditions of greedy barbarians; this meant that they were a 14th c. state in a 16th c. world; this situation could not possibly have a successful exit.

The immediate descendants of Mehmet II continued ruling their realm in a most ineffective manner that included very contradictory elements, practices, concepts and procedures, which produced endless tensions. On one side, the devshirme (دوشیرمه; devshirme; lit. ‘collecting’), i.e. child levy, and the janissary infantry elite (یڭیچری; yeniçeri) gave the Ottoman sultan (and, after 1453, emperor) the real tools to create a formidable empire similar to that of Justinian I. But on the other side, the obscure, nefarious and ominous presence of a body of execrable theologians and their increasing, onerous and catastrophic impact on the sultan gradually turned the Ottoman sultanate to a sort of Papo-Caesarist realm, whereas for the Eastern Roman Empire (of which the Ottomans wanted to make their state the living continuity) the Caesaropapist model of rule had to be the sole, paramount and permanent concept of imperial order.

The existing anachronistic elements, the tensions ensued from the contradictory dynamics, the ruinous hatred unleashed by the blind, dogmatic and cruel sheikhs and sheikh-ul-islams, and the vindictive stance of many sultans (as well as of other members of the Ottoman family) triggered unprecedented reactions. In their outright majority, the populations, either Christian or Muslim, reviled the cursed state of the Ottoman family (دولت عليه عثمانیه; Devlet-i Aliye-i Osmaniye), whereas the wretched family in a vicious and most anti-Islamic manner disrespected the humans that God had entrusted to them. This situation led to real worsening of the living conditions, sheer deterioration of the state structures, and grave decrease of government effectiveness.

The Ottoman Sultanate never managed to acquire a well-structured administration; that’s why it was never a strong empire that could methodically elaborate a program of expansion or Reconquista. Islamic spirituality was besmirched, attacked and later prohibited; the worthless Ottoman bureaucracy was a burden; the wars declared against neighboring empires were due to sectarian or arbitrary motives; and the only sound element in the empire was the janissary elite.

A mere comparison of the Roman and the Ottoman possessions in Africa helps everyone realize how absurd, precarious and inconsequential the rule of the Ottoman sultans was. On the Black Continent, the Ottomans controlled an area more sizeable than the largest Roman dominions there. The Romans never managed to advance successfully south of Egypt and to conquer the Cushitic (i.e. Ancient Ethiopian) Kingdom of Meroe in today’s Sudan; but they controlled the African North up to the coasts of today’s Morocco.

The Ottomans invaded Egypt (1516-1517) to disband the Mamluk state, and then they progressively extended their rule over the entire coast of North Africa, thus including Algiers (1518), Benghazi (1521), Tripoli (1551) and Tunis (1574) in their domain; the Ottomans were invited and acclaimed by the indigenous populations that were mostly Muslim (only according to Western colonial propaganda, the Ottomans ‘colonized’ North Africa), and until the time these lands were incorporated into the Caliphate, the Ottoman Emperor was acknowledged as the caliph – which already made of these lands real dependencies of the Constantinopolitan Muslim ruler. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1554) and Murat III (1576), two Ottoman military expeditions were undertaken in Morocco, ending with the capture of Fez.

In Eastern Africa, the Ottomans sent detachments and corsairs to defend the Somalis against the Portuguese (in the 1520s-1540s), having excellent relations with all the Somali sultanates, notably Adal and the Ajuuraan Empire. In fact, by recognizing the caliph at Constantinople and by mentioning his name first in the Friday prayer, all Muslim African sultanates and emirates recognized the Ottoman Caliphate, thus becoming effectively mere dependencies of the Caliphate. That’s why there was no real need for an Ottoman invasion of the Western Africa, Sahara (the Songhai, Mali, Hausa-Zaria, Kanem-Bornu, Wadai, Funj, Darfur, and other realms), and Eastern Africa. Located south of the Mısır eyaleti (as the province of Egypt was named in Ottoman Turkish), the Habeş eyaleti (i.e. the province of Abyssinia) comprised the coastal lands of today’s Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, and parts of today’s Somalia and Ethiopia). The Adal Somali sultanate shared therefore borders with the Ottoman Empire.

But exactly because of the highly de-centralized condition of the Muslim African world, it was totally impossible for them to establish a major, functional force ready to repel colonial attacks. Even worse, the Ottoman dominions in North Africa never became a serious matter of governmental concern and there was never a real effort to organize, systematize and standardize the integration of the African vilayets into the Ottoman state. Certainly, the Ottoman Empire controlled vast territories in Africa; but because of the aforementioned problems, these lands were a burden rather than an advantage and an asset. In this regard, Selim I’s attack against the Mamluk state and his subsequent invasion of Syria, Palestine, Arabia and Egypt, after the victory he marked over Ismail I Safavi in Chaldiran, proved to be a complete waste of the Ottoman military resources.

Bayezid II’s disloyal son was not prepared to become an emperor and that’s why he was a miserable opportunist without a clue of strategy; he could not understand what truly makes an empire strong, wealthy and sustainable. With respect to the expansion of a state, he did not know which lands are necessary and which are not; even worse, he did not observe -let alone study- patterns and models of expansion from the History of the Islamic Caliphates and Empires.

Selim I was a blind, indoctrinated idiot, who -after his victory in Chaldiran- lost the unique opportunity to promptly invade Iran, merge the two Turanian and Iranian empires, and then attack the Sultanate of Delhi. I have however to admit that he did not have the correct education, the shrewd mindset, and the accurate perception of the reality to possibly think strategically and act accordingly. The Iranian plateau and the valleys of Hindustan (India) and Bengal were far more important than the sands of Arabia and the waters of the Nile.

Had he attempted to establish one empire from Danube to Ganges, he would have followed the example of Timur (Tamerlane); at the same time, he would have created a uniquely wealthy empire able to possess the inexorable resources and the technical infrastructure needed to oppose and defeat the Western colonial kingdoms.

Babur makes Humayun his successor (1530); miniature from a manuscript of the Akbarnameh (created ca. 1602-3)

Babur treated by doctors during a serious illness, in 1498; while recuperating, Babur had a relapse and his condition became critical; for four days he could only take water dribbled into his mouth from a piece of cotton, and for several days he could barely speak.

In his Baburnama (Book of Babur), the founder of the Mughal Empire describes his struggle first to assert and defend his claim to the throne of Samarkand and the region of the Fergana Valley. After being driven out of Samarkand in 1501, he sought to create his headquarters in Kabul and then in northern India in Delhi. In this miniature from a manuscript of the Baburnama, Babur meets Sultan Ali Mirza near Samarqand.

Scene from Babur’s wars; from a miniature of the Farsi edition of Baburnama (translation by the Mughal courtier Abdul Rahīm in AH 998, i.e. 1589-90)

Babur from the miniature of manuscript of Baburnama currently in the Museum of Oriental Art (Государственный музей Востока), Moscow

Vasily III, ruler of Muscovy (1479-1533; reigned after 1505), son of Ivan III and Sophia Palaiologina, receives the ambassador from Babur; miniature from the 19th volume of the Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible (Лицевой летописный свод Ивана Грозного)

The Mausoleum of Babur (Bagh-e Babur, i.e. Babur Gardens) in Kabul

Khusrau shah swearing loyalty to Babur; miniature from the Baburnama copy in Moscow

Babur receiving Baqi Beg Chaghaniyani, a Turkistani Qipchaq, in his encampment on the banks of the Amu Darya (Oxus); Baqi was a loyal supporter of Babur contrarily to his brother Khusraw shah, whom Baqi brought to pledge allegiance; however, at a later moment, Khusraw shah proved to be a traitor once more. Miniature from a manuscript now in the British Library (Or. 3714, f. 35v); it was painted by the Mughal artist Bhem Gujarati.

Miniature from a Baburnama manuscript now in the National Museum, New Delhi; squirrels, a peacock and peahen, demoiselle cranes and fishes

Babur was exempt of sectarian ideas, tribal mentality, and worthless theological prescriptions; of the Western colonial powers he had minimal knowledge, if any. Deep in his heart and mind he had apparently the wish and the dream to prove himself worthy of his glorious past; for this reason, he needed to establish himself somewhere, i.e. to set up the headquarters of his forthcoming empire. Samarqand was an ideal location; but there he failed repeatedly. Babur’s life was not that of a great emperor, because prior to the invasion of the Delhi Sultanate, his realm was always small and constantly under attack.

Continuously moving from place to place with his few but loyal and devout soldiers, Babur was however an indomitable adventurer, an indefatigable soldier, an excellent tactician, and a great strategist. The greatness of the Mughal Empire, which was far wealthier than the Ottoman Empire, Iran, Russia, Holland, England and even Louis XIV’s France, was basically due to its founder Babur. As it is known, he died rather young (at 47). If he had lived as long as his great ancestor Tamerlane (69), the History of Asia would have certainly been markedly different.

Great rulers are those who prepare well their successors; to do so, they have to endlessly convey to their heirs their way of thinking, their approach to facts, their reaction to developments, their world perception and worldview, and -last but not the least- their method of governance. This is often a long enduring process; it is not always sure that the elder son of a ruler is fit to it. For this reason, we often observe a ruler’s predilection for his second or third son. For Babur this dilemma did not exist; Humayun (همایون/lit. ‘auspicious’ in Farsi; born as Mirza Nasir-ud-Din Muhammad; 1508-1556) was his firstborn (being also son to Babur’s favorite wife Maham Begum), and he proved to be a loyal, shrewd and very knowledgeable heir.

Babur apparently imparted his first son with many of his crucial personal traits and great abilities, notably his mobility, agility, flexibility and adaptability. That’s why Humayun managed to survive, although he was inexperienced at the beginning of his reign, when he faced many challenges, particularly from his half-brother Kamran Mirza and from Sher Shah Suri, a villainous and heinous scoundrel who set up a divisive but temporary rule. All the same, Humayun recaptured his empire with the help of Ismail I Safavi’s son Shah Tahmasp I (طهماسب; 1514-1576), and later consolidated and even expanded his realm. About:

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

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

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

However, Babur did not achieve to pass onto his son and successor a superb quality that was the top trait of Timur’s and Genghis Khan’s idiosyncrasy; this consists in a rare moral expertise and spiritual dexterity to invariably disdain and undervalue material achievements of one’s own and to thus infallibly maintain the original impulse toward a great vision permanently alive. Genghis Khan and Timur were indelibly motivated by their vision to unite the world; Babur was stimulated by his first target to re-establish the great empire of his ancestors, but he did not stay long on the throne of Agra (1526-1530).

With him died the vision of a universal empire. Humayun had to fight all his life long to eliminate threats and challenges and, when everything was put under control, he did not enjoy his throne more than few months before dying at 48, due to an accident. When Akbar I (أكبر; born Abu’l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad; 1542-1605; reigned after 1556) was crowned, very little was left from the original vision of his grandfather, Babur. Akbar I expanded greatly his realm and, after a certain moment, he shifted his interest to the North with the intention to extend his borders up to the ancestral lands in Central Asia; but by the end of the 16th c., it had become very clear to Akbar I that it was impossible to incorporate Samarqand and the Ferghana Valley to his empire.

To the early instability of the Mughal Empire and to Akbar I’s effort to expand in Central Asia testify the incessant changes of the Mughal capital: Agra 1526-1540, Agra 1555-1571, Fatehpur Sikri 1571-1585, Lahore 1586-1598 (reflecting Akbar I’s move to the North), Agra 1598-1648 and Delhi 1648-1857. In fact, Akbar’s death marks the end of every Central Asiatic venture of the Mughal rulers.  

The Mughal Empire expanded greatly across the Asiatic South, notably the Deccan; it impacted considerably the formation of Muslim sultanates in Southeastern Asia and the islands of today’s Indonesia. All the same, the Gurkanian (گورکانیان; lit. ‘the sons-in law’), as the Iranians called the Mughal emperors due to an old Turanian tradition, only corroborated the unchangeable verdict of History, namely that from Central Asia, Iran, Mesopotamia and Anatolia great military expeditions to faraway lands have often been and can actually be undertaken successfully; but no ruler has ever launched a campaign and a conquest of major parts of Asia, starting from the Valley of Indus and the Valley of Ganges. (The same is also valid for the Yellow River and the Yangtze River valleys.)

Having a truly complex mindset, a very wealthy, composite and perplex culture, and a spiritual impact on their reasoning, the Mughals, the Safavids and the Ottomans could never understand how simple, low, and profane the intentions, attitudes, and mindsets of the colonial bandits, soldiers, merchants, academics and agents were. Had they perceived accurately the level of the colonial purposes and objectives, they would have early reacted against the Western barbarism, cruelty and monstrosity; but they were not able to lower their intellect in order to deal with petty things. They mistook the Western inhumanity for foolishness; their mistake allowed the Western colonials to achieve their targets. How could it have been otherwise? Occam’s razor, if described to a Mughal, Safavid or Ottoman erudite scholar, would have been considered as totally nonsensical, puerile, absurd, and typical for savages. That’s why English, French, Dutch, and American savagery plunged all these civilized lands to poverty, wars, genocides, and interminable destructions down to our days. About:

The simplicity principle in perception and cognition

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

Blue Mosque, Istanbul: the most representative Ottoman architectural masterpiece

Masjid-e Shah / The Mosque of Shah, Isfahan: the most representative Safavid Iranian architectural masterpiece

Taj Mahal, Agra: the most representative Mughal architectural masterpiece

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FORTHCOMING

Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey

2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists

By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu

(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CONTENTS

PART ONE. INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities

A. Examples of fake national names

a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!

b) Tataria – Not Russia!

c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!

d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!

e) Khazaria – not Israel!

f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!

B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish

C. The Preamble to My Response

CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.

CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.

CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment

A. Orientalism

B. Conceptualization

C. Contextualization

D. Concealment

PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT

CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece

PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY

CHAPTER VI:  The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times

CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists

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

CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran

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

PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES

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

CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS

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

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

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

PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM

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

CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet

CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

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

PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’

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

PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’

CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

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

PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM

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

CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order

CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED  

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

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

CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur

CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World

CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West

CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk

PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION

CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?

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List of the already pre-published chapters of the book

Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.

CHAPTER VII: The Fallacious Representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists

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

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

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

CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty

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

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

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

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

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

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

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

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CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order

https://www.academia.edu/105230290/Timur_Tamerlane_as_a_Turanian_Muslim_descendant_of_the_Great_Hero_Manuchehr_his_exploits_and_triumphs_and_the_slow_rise_of_the_Turanian_Safavid_Order

CHAPTER XXVI: The Timurid Era as the Peak of the Islamic Civilization: Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

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

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

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

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

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

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Timur (Tamerlane), as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order

Pre-publication of chapter XXV of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXIV, XXV and XXVI constitute the Part Ten {Fallacies about the Times of Turanian (Mongolian) Supremacy in terms of Sciences, Arts, Letters, Spirituality and Imperial Universalism} of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Until now, 8 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 9th (out 33). At the end of the present pre-publication the entire Table of Contents is made available.

Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in green color.  

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Many people believe that Timur (Tamerlane) was a descendent of Genghis Khan, but this is very wrong; however, he belonged to the same Eastern Turanian Mongolian family as his remote relative who died 109 years before Timur was born (1227-1336). There is actually a distance of 5 generations (the grandfather of the great-grandfather of a person) between the greatest conquerors of Eurasia. However, Genghis Khan and Timur seem to have as common progenitor Genghis Khan’s 4th patrilineal ancestor (the grandfather), who was Timur’s 9th patrilineal ancestor, namely Tumanay Khan.

More specifically, Genghis Khan was son of Yesugei Baghatur son of Bartan Baghatur son of Khabul Khan son of Tumanay Khan. And Timur was son of Taraghai Noyan son of Burgul Noyan son of Aylangir son of Ichil son of Qarachar Noyan son of Suqu Sechen son of Erdemchu Barlas son of Qachuli son of Tumanay Khan. The time passed from the death of Genghis Khan until the birth of Timur (109 years) is approximately the equivalent of the period between the deaths and the births of the following monarchs or spiritual leaders respectively: Consul Crassus’ death and Emperor Trajan’s birth (53 BCE-53 CE), Julian the Apostate’s death and Justinian’s birth (363-482), Nestorius’ death and Prophet Muhammad’s birth (451-571) and Napoleon’s death and Elizabeth II’s birth (1821-1926).

Timur (1336-1405) was born in Shahrisabz (Шаҳрисабз / شهر سبز‎; Timur’s tomb was built there, but his burial took place at Samarqand), in the southern part of today’s Uzbekistan, close to the border with Tajikistan; at those days, the city was named Kesh. Timur’s family belonged to the Turanian tribe of Barlas, which had recently accepted Islam and become sedentary in Mawarannahr (Transoxiana); those lands were thought to be the epicenter of the legendary and historical Turan, and at the time of Timur’s birth, they were provinces of the Chagatai Empire. About:

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tur_(Shahnameh)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salm_(Shahnameh)

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

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

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/aql-e-sork-the-crimsoned-archangel-lit

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

Click to access None_of_the_Kings_on_Earth_is_Their_Equal_in_a_abiyya_The_Mongols_in_Ibn_Khald_n_s_Works.pdf

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09503110.2016.1198535

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23801883.2019.1593089?journalCode=rgih20

https://www.academia.edu/652075/Ibn_Khaldun_His_Life_and_Works

Click to access ibn-khaldun.pdf

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:

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokhtamysh%E2%80%93Timur_war

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharaf_ad-Din_Ali_Yazdi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zafarnama_(Yazdi_biography)

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir-ud-Din_Mahmud_Shah_Tughluq

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk_dynasty_(Delhi)

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

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

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.

——– Incomparably brilliant & exorbitantly ingenious conquests ——-

Timur enthroned at Balkh

Timur commanding the siege of Balkh

Timur besieges the historic city of Urgench (in Khawarizm/ Chorasmia, today’s Uzbekistan)

Timur about to launch a war against Tokhtamysh

Timur against Tokhtamysh; from a miniature of the ‘Facial Chronicle’ (also known as ‘the illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible’; Лицевой летописный свод) volume 11, page 251

Timur in the conquest of Baghdad (1393) from a miniature in the Zafarnameh

Timur orders a campaign against Georgia

Timur’s army attacks the remaining survivors in Nerges, Georgia (1396)

Timur’s invasion of India, 1397-1399

The defeat of Nasir Al-Din Mahmum Tughluq at the battle of Delhi 1398

Timur defeats the Mamluk Sultan Nasir-ad-Din Faraj of Egypt

Sultan Bayezid prisoned by Timur, by Stanisław Chlebowski (Станислав Хлебовский; 19th c. Orientalist Russian painter of Polish origin)

Letter dispatched by Timur to Charles VI of France in 1402

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Many people today believe that from the Seljuks to the Ottomans there has been a historical, cultural, spiritual, religious, literary and academic continuity in Anatolia. This is an enormous lie, and Timur’s perfect choice and drastic action help us fully understand how false this impression is. As a matter of fact, between the Seljuks and the Ottomans there was a disruption. About:

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

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.

About:

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

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safi-ad-din_Ardabili

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadr_al-D%C4%ABn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81

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

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ali-kaja-also-known-as-sayyed-ali-ajami-b

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/safavids-before-empire-two-15thcentury-armenian-perspectives/E33FE6069D55E57E7CA18081C15BD8B9

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/jonayd

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

https://www.academia.edu/4255709/Oghuz_Khan_Narratives

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/haydar-safavi

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

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ali-mirza-d

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahangir_Mirza_(Timurid_prince)

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pir_Muhammad_(son_of_Jahangir)

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

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahrokh_(mythical_bird)

—————————————  

FORTHCOMING

Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey

2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists

By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu

(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CONTENTS

PART ONE. INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities

A. Examples of fake national names

a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!

b) Tataria – Not Russia!

c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!

d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!

e) Khazaria – not Israel!

f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!

B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish

C. The Preamble to My Response

CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.

CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.

CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment

A. Orientalism

B. Conceptualization

C. Contextualization

D. Concealment

PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT

CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece

PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY

CHAPTER VI:  The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times

CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists

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

CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran

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

PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES

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

CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS

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

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

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

PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM

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

CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet

CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

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

PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’

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

PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’

CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

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

PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM

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

CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order

CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED  

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

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

CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur

CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World

CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West

CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk

PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION

CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?

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Download the chapter (text only) in PDF:

<object class="wp-block-file__embed" data="https://megalommatiscomments.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/timur-tamerlane-as-a-turanian-muslim.pdf&quot; type="application/pdf" style="width:100%;height:600px" aria-label="<strong>Timur (Tamerlane), as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid OrderTimur (Tamerlane), as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid OrderDownload

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

<object class="wp-block-file__embed" data="https://megalommatiscomments.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/timur-tamerlane-pictures-legends.pdf&quot; type="application/pdf" style="width:100%;height:600px" aria-label="<strong>Timur (Tamerlane), as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr (pictures and legends)Timur (Tamerlane), as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr (pictures and legends)Download

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

Pre-publication of chapter XV 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”. Along with Chapter XIV and Chapter XVI, Chapter XV belongs to Part Five {Fallacies about Sassanid History, History of Religions, and the History of Migrations}. The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapters XIV and XVI have already been made known in pre-publication here: https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2023/02/02/iran-turan-manichaeism-islam-during-the-migration-period-and-the-early-caliphates/&nbsp; and

Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic-Christian Roman Empire

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The two most ferocious enemies and spiritual masters delivered a merciless attack on one another: Kartir (above) as depicted in the relief of Naqsh-e Rajab, and Mani (below) as portrayed on his personal, rock crystal seal that bears the inscription “Mani, messenger of the messiah”

Long before the rise of the official Roman Christianity in the Roman Empire, the founder of Manichaeism, Mani invented a magnificent and most perplex Cosmogony and Eschatology that consisted also in an alternative dogma to the various Christian theological doctrines that contradicted one another; he postulated two absolutely different hypostases named Jesus, one material and perverse and another luminous and highly soteriological. Eventually, this could be the most formidable Iranian state religion to oppose Roman Christianity at all levels; but Manichaeism was totally opposed to all things Iranian in the first place.

Mani was an Iranian born in 216 CE in Tesifun (Ctesiphon), which was one of the Iranian capitals of the Arsacid and Sassanid times in Central Mesopotamia. Mani’s father was an Elcesaite Jewish Christian from Ecbatana (in Media, today’s Hamadan) and his mother was a Parthian. Following early spiritual revelations and major transcendental experiences that he had when 12 and 24 years old, in which his soul (usually described in Manichaean texts as the ‘spiritual twin’ or ‘syzygos’ in Greek Manichaean texts) called him to preach the true faith of Luminous Jesus, Mani traveled to India and spent some time there avidly studying all of the then known religions, doctrines, dogmas, faiths and esoteric systems of theurgy.

Afterwards, he returned to Iran and, in very young age, wrote a book titled ‘Shabuhragan’ (‘the book of Shapur’ – so the book was dedicated to the Sassanid Iranian Emperor), which became the major holy book of Manichaeism. Mani solemnly presented the mystical and revelatory book personally (242 CE) to Shapur I the Great (240-270 CE), one of the greatest monarchs of all times worldwide. This act was tantamount to divine designation of the Iranian monarch as the World Savior.

———————— Mani, Prophet of Manichaeism —————————

From left to right: Mani, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus; the four major prophets of the Manichaeans

The immaculate birth of Mani: he emerged from the breast of his mother

Mani’s Parents as depicted on a fragment of hanging scroll (decoration with gold and pigments on silk), 14th c. China

10th c. Manichaean Elects depicted on a wall painting from Gaochang (Qocho) near Turfan, Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang)

Uighur Manichaean Elects from a 10th c. wall painting in Qocho, near Turfan, Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang)

Manichaeans expressing adoration for the Tree of Life, which is located in the Realm of Light; drawing from a 10th c. wall painting in the Bezeklik Cave 38 (25 by Albert Grünwedel), near Turfan, Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang)

Mani’s death (hanging from a palm tree in front of the Gundeshapur University) as depicted on a miniature from the ‘Shahnameh Demotte’ (also known as Great Mongol Shahnameh), from Ilkhanid Iran (ca. 1315); today in the Riza Abbasi Museum, Tehran

Mani presenting his painting to Bahram I: from the miniature of a 16th c. manuscript of a text by Ali-Shir Nava’i

——————————————————————————————————–

Prophet for his followers, who were the first in World History to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Mani (or Mani Hayya in Syriac Aramaic, i.e. Living Mani) was the world’s most multifaceted and multitalented mystic, spiritual preacher, universal visionary, magician, hierophant, erudite scholar, historian of religions, linguist, art theorist, painter, intellectual, thinker, and founder of religion of all times. In spite of his overwhelming rejection by the imperial priesthood of Iranian Mazdeism after Shapur the Great’s death, despite the enduring Christian anti-Manichaean hysteria, and notwithstanding the vertical disapproval of Manichaeism (mainly known as Manawiyah in Arabic – الـمـانـويـة) by Islam, Mani is by all criteria a unique and unsurpassed apostle.   

At very young age, Mani was able to select elements from almost all the religions and esoteric systems of his times that existed between India, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean, to reshuffle them, to proclaim Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus as earlier prophets, to invent an entirely original Cosmogony, to entwine it with an apocalyptic revelation of the destiny of the Mankind, to add a fully structured eschatological soteriology, and to preach the entire system without the slightest tergiversation or nebulousness, adding to it a sacerdotal hierarchy and enriching / reconfirming it with impressive miracles (levitation, teleportation, faith healing, etc.).

In addition to the above and to the texts that he wrote in Syriac Aramaic and Middle Persian, Mani also invented an independent alphabetic writing system (presently known as the ‘Manichaean writing’); in this regard, it is essential to underscore that the term does not denote religious contents but the new, invented by Mani and based on Aramaic, alphabetic characters. The primary sources of Manichaeism and the Manichaean holy books were written in Syriac Aramaic, Middle Persian, and Manichaean writings. Translations were widely produced in the above writings and also in Parthian, Sogdian, Tocharian, Coptic, Greek, Latin, Old Uyghur, and Chinese.

Shapur I met Mani in-between his numerous battles and victories against the Kushan Empire and various other Asiatic states in the East and the Romans in the West. This was the best documented encounter between an emperor and a prophet in the History of the Mankind, almost 1000 years after Prophet Jonah was summoned by Sargon II, Emperor of Assyria and Emperor of the Universe. Shapur I did not adhere to Mani’s doctrine but evidently facilitated its diffusion.

To the eyes of the King of Iran and Aniran, Mani’s almost all-encompassing dogma could facilitate a unique opportunity to reunify the Achaemenid state’s territories from the plains of Ukraine to Egypt and from Western Anatolia to the Indo-Scythian kingdom’s lands, and further beyond, to the Pamir and the Tian Shan Mountains. Manichaeism could therefore function as the perfect tool of universal unification and the Manichaean Iran could be the melting pot of various Oriental nations, religions, esoteric systems, traditions and cultures, at a moment when west of Iran, the Roman Empire had already become a genuinely Oriental but counterfeit Empire.

Despite the fact that he was a co-ruler with his father (Ardashir I) and he therefore was viewed as a foremost pioneer of the widely supported Zoroastrian restoration, Shapur I was able to understand that his state religion, Mazdeism (a late form of Zoroastrianism that greatly differed from the religion of the Achaemenids), although enthusiastically attractive to his central provinces’ inhabitants, could never garner as many supporters from India, Central Asia, Africa and Europe as Mani’s new but practically more universalistic doctrine was clearly predestined to.

Manichaeism expanded rapidly and tremendously during the reign of Shapur I. As it was expected, there were few Persian adepts; but there were many Aramaeans, Turanians, Sogdians, Egyptians, Cappadocians and other Anatolians, Macedonians and Romans. Turanians across Central Asia and Siberia particularly embraced the new faith, which could prevail worldwide, if Shapur the Great’s successors followed his farseeing attitude. But a formidable Turanian mystic had deliberately seen fit to do otherwise: Kartir (or Kerdyr). Apparently, his will lay elsewhere, and this fact changed World History, averting the Manichaeization of Mankind.

Hormizd I continued his father’s attitude, but ruled only for a year; there are several indications that he was under the influence or the guidance of Mithraic Magi and this may have brought a sudden end to his reign. Hormizd I rose to power under very dark circumstances, even more so because he was his father’s third son. Bahram I, who was Shapur the Great’s firstborn son, sided firmly with the powerful mystic, hierophant, and spiritual theoretician of the imperial Sassanid doctrine Kartir, who seems to have prepared the premature end of Hormizd I’s pro-Mithraic reign.

——————— The Gallery of the Unchallenged Sassanids ———————–

Illustration of a Firuzabad relief depicting Ardashir I’s victory over Artaban IV, the last Parthian Arsacid; made by the French Orientalist painter and traveler Eugene Flandin in 1840

The coronation of Ardashir I (224-242 CE); he receives the ring of kingship by Ahura Mazda

The illustrious relief of Shapur I’s victory (Urfa-Urhoy/Edessa of Osrhoene; 260 CE) of the Roman Emperor Valerian, who is depicted as kneeling in a most humiliating manner; Naqsh-e Rustam, the imperial Achaemenid burial site

Broader views

Colossal statue of Shapur I (reign: 240-272) in the Shapur Cave, near Bishapur (7 m high): it was carved from one stalagmite

The famous cameo of Shapur I’s victory over Valerian

Bust of Shapur II (reigned from 309 to 379); one of the longest reigning rulers in history, he was crowned on his mother’s womb.

The coronation of Ardashir II (379-383) as depicted on the relief of Taq-e Bostan Paradise (imperial garden); Ahura Mazda offers him the ring of kingship, whereas Mithra (Mehr) holds the barsom, a sacred object used in rituals.

Peroz I (reign: 457–484) hunting argali

Kavad I (reign: 488–496 and 498–531) hunting rams

Khusraw (Chosroes) I Anushirvan (‘Immortal Soul’; reign: 531–579) hunting

Coptic woolen curtain with representation of Khusraw I fighting Axumite Abyssinian forces in Yemen

Khusraw I

The Iranian ambassador (probably dispatched by Khusraw I) at the court of Yuan of Liang dynasty (梁元帝) in Jingzhou, early 6th c. in later representation

The rebellious son (against Hormizd IV) Khusraw II Parvez (reign: 590 and 591-628) in boar hunting

Picture and design from the ceiling of Ajanta Cave 1 with the representation of the Iranian ambassador (apparently dispatched by Khusraw II Parviz) at the court of the Dravidian king Pulakesin II (610–642) of Vatapi (the Badami Chalukya kingdom)

Coin of the last great Sassanid Emperor Khusraw II Parviz

This is one of the first Umayyad coins: minted in Basra (AH 56 675-6 CE) at the time of the first Umayyad caliph Mu’awiya I, it mentions the local governor Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad. The similarity with the imperial Iranian Sassanid coins, particularly those of Khusraw II Parviz, demonstrates the viciously anti-Islamic nature and character of all those who opposed Ali ibn Abi Taleb as the first caliph of the Islamic state, and ended up with the son of Prophet Muhammad’s worst enemy (Abu Sufyan) founding the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus (i.e. far from Medina) and declaring himself as the “Khusraw of the Arabs”.

—————————————————————————————————————–

With the rise of Bahram I, every sense of tolerance disappeared from the Sassanid Empire once for all. Kartir’s influence and prevalence in imperial doctrinal matters and in their implementation took almost the form of a terror regime, also involving incessant pogroms of any other faith beyond Mazdeism, which was a form of late Zoroastrianism that was then thought to be the ‘genuine return to Achaemenid Zoroastrian orthodoxy’. Kartir contributed greatly to Mazdeism, but he was not the sole contributor; on the contrary, he was the only to conceptualize and contextualize an imperial doctrine of cosmological dimensions, heroic moral standards, and fully exuberant human commitment. For the Turanian founder and standard-bearer of Sassanidism, men live only to be heroes, and it cannot be otherwise.

In an effort to reinstate the importance of Ancient Iran’s foremost religious center Adhur Gushnasp (where the original copy of the Avesta was kept and the original Fire was always burning), all Sassanid emperors, after being crowned in Tesifun (Ctesiphon), had to walk on foot the enormous distance (ca. 600 km) between their Mesopotamian imperial capital and their religious capital in the northern part of Zagros mountains (located at an elevation of ca. 3000 m, near today’s Takab, in NW Iran); this was something that neither the Achaemenids nor the Arsacids had done.

However, Kartir (in several texts, his name is spelled as Kerdyr) elaborated a state religious system of excessive veneration of the Iranian past with uniquely stressed references to ancestral heroism; Zoroastrian spirituality, Achaemenid metaphysics, and Arsacid ethics evaporated within Kartir’s religious invention in which only heroic deeds and ferocious battles were viewed as the designated way for Iranians to reach their ancestors’ universal apotheosis. Kartir’s imperial world conceptualization, vision, doctrine, and historical role generated a very divisive, sectarian environment across Iran; this situation has indeed some parallels with the Christological disputes (Docetism, Arianism, Monophysitism/Miaphysitism, Nestorianism, etc.) within the Roman Empire.

Kartir’s system, i.e. Imperial Mazdeism (or Sassanidism), demanded the imperative persecution of Mithraists, Christians, Gnostics, Manichaeans, Buddhists, and all the rest. The well-known Christian persecutions in the Roman Empire pale indeed with the destiny that Christians met in Sassanid Iran after the rise of Bahram I and the prevalence of Kartir. It was then that Mani, who was arrested when entering the Iranian city-university Gundeshapur, was imprisoned and later killed, eventually crucified. In this regard, I have to add that there have been several parallels -in historical, literary and theological sources- between Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem and Mani’s entry to Gundeshapur. However, not all the authoritative historical sources make state of Mani’s crucifixion.

Gundeshapur was the pre-Islamic world’s largest, richest and most advanced educational institution, library, museum, translation and scientific research center. Gundeshapur (lit. ‘the military city of Shapur’; گندی‌شاپور) was known in Syriac Aramaic as Beth Lapat, and it was located not far from Susa, east of Tigris river (few km south-east of today’s Dezful in SW Iran). The city-university was one of the few Iranian imperial centers and cities that were not destroyed during the Islamic invasion, and later most of its wealth and the academics were transferred to Abbasid Baghdad (750 CE) in order to set up the Islamic city-university Bayt al Hikmah (House of Wisdom).

Kartir’s ‘white terror’ and ‘purification pogrom’ shed rivers of blood and caused enormous migration movements among the Sassanid Empire’s minorities; Christians started leaving through Syria, Arabia and Yemen to India (like the ancestors of present day Malabar: the Malankara Nasrani or St Thomas Christians) or to Central Asiatic territories that were out of the Sassanid control. The Manichaeans spread worldwide; others moved to the Roman Empire, various groups settled in Caucasus, and larger numbers escaped in Central Asia, India and China. In a way, the diffusion of Nestorian Christianity and the spread of Manichaeism among the Turanians in Central Asia and Siberia are due to Kartir’s pogroms. The terrible persecution did not last only during Kartir’s lifetime; it was repeatedly carried out every now and then until the collapse (636-651 CE) of the Sassanid Empire.

Among Turanians and Muslims, but also within the context of Parsism, Kartir underwent almost a real process of damnatio memoriae; it is impressive that Tabari, Islamic times’ greatest historian, did not mention him at all, although he described religious persecution during the Sassanid era. Perhaps the reason for this compact silence about Kartir in Islamic sources, which ends only with Ibn al Nadim and his famous Kitab al-Fihrist, is due to two inscriptions of Kartir: one on a relief from Naqsh-e Rustam and the other from the Kaaba-e Zardosht (Zoroaster’s Kaaba), a sacred building in Naqsh-e Rustam.

— The major Sassanid high places of spirituality and sacred Imperial rule —

The only standing in its entirety building of the Sassanid times, Kaaba-e Zardosht, is located at Naqsh-e Rustam, in front of the tombs of the Achaemenid emperors that are hewn in the rock (few kilometers northwest of Parsa/Persepolis).

Istakhr: the few remains of the grandiose Sassanid capital which was located not far from Parsa (Persepolis), the ancient Achaemenid capital, in Fars

Istakhr

Adhur Gushnasp – Praaspa – Takht-e Suleyman (the ‘throne of Solomon’ as per the Islamic traditions): the sublime religious capital of Zoroastrian Orthodoxy was located in the northern part of the Zagros Mountains; the Sassanid emperors were walking from Tesifun (Ctesiphon) in Central Mesopotamia to reach the shrine where the only copy of the Avesta was guarded.

Takht-e Suleyman is located near Takab, at an elevation of 3000 m

Zendan-e Suleyman (‘the prison of Solomon’) is an ateshgah (fire temple), close to the Sacred Lake and the enclosure of Takht-e Suleyman.

Tesifun (Ctesiphon), in today’s Central Iraq (25 km south of Baghdad): Taq-i Kasra is the major remaining monument from the second Sassanid capital, which was the world’s most populous city during the period 550-630 CE.

Taq-i Kasra (طاق كسرى; also known as Ayevan-e Kesra/ایوان خسرو; Iwan/Arch of Khusraw)

Taq-e Bostan (5 km from Kermanshah): the Sassanid Paradise (imperial garden, which was established after the axioms of the imperial doctrine and the prescriptions of the Zoroastrian cosmological conceptualization), left an irrevocable impact on Iranians, before and after Islam. The Sassanid arches, reliefs and inscriptions are the major monuments around the Sacred Lake, but Islamic times’ Iranian-Turanian dynasties left also their input.

Taq-e Bostan

Shushtar, near Susa: the remains of an impressive hydraulic system established during the Sassanid era

The Mithraic temples at Bishapur, near Kazerun, in the southernmost confines of Zagros

The Sassanid walls and fortifications at Derbent (Eastern Caucasus), in today’s Russia

Near Zabol and the tri-border area (between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan), Kuh-i Khwajah (کوه خواجه) is a major Iranian site in front of the Sacred Lake Harun.

Kuh-i Khwajah (Mount Khajeh)

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In these inscriptions, Kartir makes state of his miraculous ascent to the heaven, a spiritual event later reproduced within Arda Wiraz Namag, a Sassanid times’ sacred book of Mazdeism, this time about the pious mystic Arda Wiraz. The issue of divine ascent to the heaven (known in Arabic as Isra and Mi’raj) was narrated later within the Quran about Prophet Muhammad (in chapter 17, Al Isra).

It is however interesting that Kartir’s (or Kerdyr’s) name has evident Turanian mythological meaning, but a very negative one (Ker). And in the famous relief of Naqsh-e Rajab, Kartir is depicted with his right hand making the well-known but ages-old sign of Bozkurtlar (‘Gray Wolves’).

Kartir’s inscription on the Kaaba-e Zardosht

Kartir depicted on the Naqsh-e Rajab relief; he apparently makes the very well known sign of the Bozkurtlar with his right hand.

The early diffusion of Manichaeism in Alexandria, NW Africa, and Europe makes it clear that, if Mani’s religion had even minimal support, let alone sponsorship, from the Sassanid state, it would supersede all other religions, faiths and esoteric systems across the Roman Empire. Tolerance toward Manichaeism ended in Sassanid Iran in 271 CE. And yet, the diffusion of the Manichaean faith across the Roman Empire was such that in 296 CE the Roman Emperor Diocletian had to issue a decree, ordering the slaughter of all Manicheans and the destruction of their books.

In the last three-four decades of the 3rd c., a great number of Aramaeans, Anatolians, Egyptians, Berbers of Northern and Northwestern Africa, Macedonians and Romans were Manichaean. As per the Roman Emperor’s description, the Roman Empire was shaken from its foundations. On 31st March 302, the leading Manicheans of Alexandria were burnt alive. During the Christianization of the Roman Empire, Manichaeism continued spreading from North Africa to Iberian Peninsula, Gaul and throughout Europe.

Many Manichaean ‘elects’ (: monks) existed already in Rome. And Fathers of the Christian Church were Manichaean for some years, like St. Augustine of Hippo. Manichaeism was a well-organized church with bishops, monks and sacerdotal hierarchy; several Christian Roman Emperors, like Theodosius I (379 – 395 CE) had to issue decrees and undertake campaigns to prevent Manichaeism from supplanting Christianity. However, the extent of Manichaean impact on Christian theology is another, totally different topic, which is vast and tenable.

This shows that, speaking about ‘one more Iranian religion’ spread across the ‘West’, namely the Balkans, Italy, and other parts of Western Europe, an unbiased scholar refers to Manichaeism, which -in addition to Mithraism- left an everlasting impact on Western Europe. In fact, during the so-called ‘Medieval times’ (which should be properly named ‘Christian and Islamic times’) in Central, Western and Southern Europe, the official religion (Christianity) and its true challenge and religious opposition (Manichaeism) were both of Oriental origin, nature and character. This undeniable fact highlights the Oriental impact on European civilization, thus rendering Europe an annex of Asia. In fact, Manichaeism determined European History and Civilization more than any indigenous religion or philosophy. It is true that for a moment, Manichaeism seemed to be extinct in the Western Roman Empire (around the 5th c.) and in the Eastern Roman Empire (during the 6th c.). However, it resurfaced soon afterwards.

The expansion of the Sassanid Empire of Iran

Eastern Roman Empire (395-1453), Sassanid Empire of Iran (224-651), and the Rashtra Empire of the Gupta dynasty (ca. 270-550)

General reading and bibliography can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani_(prophet)

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Seals_(Manichaeism)

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

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

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Mada%27in

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletianic_Persecution#Manichean_persecution

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/kartir

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartir%27s_inscription_at_Naqsh-e_Rajab

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqsh-e_Rajab

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf#In_culture

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_(organization)#Name_and_symbolism

——————————- Sassanid Iranian Art —————————

Sassanid silk twill textile with the representation of the holy bird Simurgh whose name means “thirty birds”; Simurgh was the emblem of the Sassanid Empire of Iran. The sacredness of Simurgh survived during Islamic times.

Sassanid silver plate with representation of the holy bird Simurgh

Silver plate showing lance combat

Silver cup with a hunting Shah

Aramaean Christian cornelian gem of the Sassanid times with representation of the Biblical theme ‘the Sacrifice of Abraham’

Head of Sassanid scepter

Relief with a high ranking Sassanid official

Wall paintings from Kuh-i Khwajah

Relief over the Arch of Taq-e Bostan with angelic divinities

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Download  the entire chapter (text only) in PDF:

sassanid-iran-turan-kartir-roman-empire-christianity-mani-and-manichaeismDownload

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

sassanid-iran-turan-kartir-roman-empire-christianity-mani-and-manichaeism-pictures-legendsDownload

Russia, Ukraine and the World-I: ‘Moscou, les Plaines d’Ukraine, et les Champs-Élysées’

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

Россия, Украина и мир-I: «Москва, равнины Украины и Елисейские поля»

Российская спецоперация в Украине: год спустя – 24 февраля 2023 г.

Содержание

I- Историческая справка

II- Западный колониализм против России: проекция фальшивых концепций и исторической лжи на российские элиты

III- Западный уклон: европеизация России как дерусификация

IV- Где заканчивается заблуждение европейской России?

V- Ложная идентичность для россиян означает поражение в большой игре (в Войне теней)

VI- Падение Романовых: из-за ложной концепции «России как европейской империи»

Contents

I- The Historical Background

II- Western Colonialism against Russia: Projection of Fake Concepts and Historical Falsehood onto Russian Elites

III- Western Bias: Russia’s Europeanization as De-Russification

IV- Where does the Fallacy of European Russia End?

V- False Identity for Russians means Defeat in the Great Game

VI- The Fall of the Romanov: due to the False Concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’

Before almost 60 years, a famous French song offered the most convincing, artistic yet not academic, proof of the indivisibility that characterizes Moscow and the plains of Ukraine; it was the famous hit ‘Nathalie’ performed by Gilbert Bécaud (1964). The verses described the case of a flirt between a male French tourist and a female Russian guide.

So legendary this song became, thus breaking the ice of the aptly stage-managed Cold War (just like France under Charles de Gaulle had superbly withdrawn from the otherwise useless NATO ‘alliance’ one year earlier: on the 21st July 1963) that the famous but purely hypothetical Café Pouchkine (café Pushkin), mentioned in the song’s verses as a meeting point for the French tourist and Nathalie, became real in 1999 (Ресторан «Кафе Пушкинъ»).

Dans la salle des Conférences, de gauche à droite, Messieurs Couve de Murville, Brejnev, le général de Gaulle et Monsieur Podgorny, à Moscou, URSS le 22 juin 1966

General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (R) and French President George Pompidou at the airport.

Actually, it was there that Chirac encountered Putin and created a political friendship that marked the 2000s.

About:

https://kalinareynier.wixsite.com/articles-datcha/post/2015/09/29/nathalie-au-caf%C3%A9-pouchkine

https://kalinareynier.wixsite.com/articles-datcha/post/2019/12/03/le-caf%C3%A9-pouchkine-de-la-fiction-%C3%A0-la-r%C3%A9alit%C3%A9

https://www.leparisien.fr/politique/entre-chirac-et-poutine-une-estime-reciproque-30-09-2019-8162751.php

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

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Pouchkine

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

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_(chanson)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_(song)

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Деланоэ,_Пьер

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Delano%C3%AB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Delano%C3%AB

https://fr.rbth.com/lifestyle/83582-jacques-chirac-liens-russie

Gilbert Bécaud, Nathalie – Жильбер Беко, Натали

https://ok.ru/video/440517200493

Ресторан «КафеПушкинъ» – Café Pouchkine – Café Pushkin

And it is this song that makes state of the geographical and historical unity that exists between the Red Square and the plains of Ukraine; when the verses describe the bond between the French tourist and Nathalie, the respective backgrounds are narrated in order to offer a spectacular impression of the two lands. In this metaphor, the French tourist is represented by the illustrious Champs-Élysées Avenue in Paris, whereas Moscow and the plains of Ukraine speak for Nathalie.

“Moscou, les plaines d’Ukraine et les Champs-Élysées, οn à tout melangé et l’on à chanté” (Moscow, the plains of Ukraine, and the Champs Elysees; we got them all mixed up and we sang).

I- The Historical Background

Now, this song appears to be the lost ruin of a remote past; however, this impression is entirely false, being due to the excessive propaganda made as regards this subject. Ignorant rascals promoted to ‘authors’ or ‘intellectuals’, criminal liars masqueraded as ‘journalists’ or ‘geopolitical experts’ produced an enormous volume of nonsensical trashy literature in support of the undeniable UK-US-NATO involvement in the purely Russian land named Ukraine.

If Ukraine consists today in the greatest threat to worldwide peace, this is due to the lack of proper reaction against the incessant evildoing, which started as early as the 1990s. In fact, many people are presently able to fathom that the times of Adenauer and de Gaulle are definitely bygone for Europe; this is due to numerous grave mistakes which were made by the rather mean and apparently incompetent people who succeeded these great statesmen. That is why the assessment of what happened in Ukraine is rather an effort of meditation à la recherche du temps perdu (in search of the lost time/в поисках утраченного времени).  

The problem with the examination of the root causes of the present Ukrainian quagmire is the fact that, if we widen the context of our search, the origin of the trouble appears to be even older. Then, the beginning of the ordeal goes back to the time of Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Khrushchev, Nicholas II Romanov, and Alexander II or rather Peter I (the Great), the boyar (aristocrat) Vasily Golitsyn (1643-1714; Василий Васильевич Голицын) and the Treaty or Perpetual Peace (Вечный мир; 1686), when Russia recovered Kiev from Poland.

Vasily Golitsyn

Background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Perpetual_Peace_(1686)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Golitsyn_(1643)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Polish_War_(1654%E2%80%931667)

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

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

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

Similarly, we can go back in time incessantly transposing the problem; we can reach the time of Michael of Russia (Михаил Фёдорович Романов; 1596-1645), Filaret (Feodor Nikitich Romanov/ Фёдор Никитич Романов; 1553-1633), Boris Godunov (Борис Фёдорович Годунов; 1552-1605), Nikita Romanovich (Никита Романович; 1522-1586), Ivan IV Vasilyevich (known as The Terrible/Иван Васильевич Грозный; 1530-1584), Ivan III of Moscow (Иван III Васильевич; 1440-1505) who got married with Zoe (renamed Sophia Palaiologina/Софья фоминична Палеолог;  1449-1503), the niece of the last Eastern Roman Emperor with the blessings of the great enemy of Orthodox Christianity, the Pope Paul II.

Sophia Palaiologina

Background:

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Romanovich_Zakharyin-Yuriev

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

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

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

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

However, this method is futile; even if we go back to the time of the so-called Vasily I of Moscow, who was merely a prisoner of the Emperor Tokhtamysh, the ruler of the Blue and White Hordes (Тухтамыш/Tuqtamış, توقتمش; 1342-1406), when Moscow (or Muscovy) was merely a Tatar village, if we refer to the days of Dmitry Donskoy (Дмитрий Иванович Донской; 1350-1389) and if we direct attention to  the period of Daniil Aleksandrovich (Даниил Александрович; 1261-1303), the youngest son of Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky (Александр Ярославич Невский; 1221-1263) ‘prince of Kiev’, we consistently encounter scarce documentation, later sources, excessive postulation, false interpretation, intentional distortion, concealment of intentions and facts, undeniable destruction of the material record, sectarian historiography, biased narratives, and -in one word- complete reconstruction of the historical evolution.

Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_I_of_Moscow

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

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

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

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

Vasily I of Moscow (Василий I Дмитриевич) and Sophia Palaiologina represented on the vestment (sakkos) of Photius (14th c.–1431), metropolitan of Kiev (in Moscow)

The Emperor of the Blue and White Hordes Tokhtamysh as represented in a miniature of the Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible

Tamerlane advancing against Tokhtamysh

But there was no Ukraine at the time of the Kievan Rus kingdom; no land, no country, no people and no language of ‘Ukraine’. In fact, any person well versed in Slavic and Russian linguistics knows that this word originates from the term ‘krai’, which denotes basically an administrative division in Modern Russian. Present in most Slavic languages, ‘krai’ means ‘edge’, ‘territory’ or ‘region’; in Czech, it is okraj.

‘Ukraina’ means then the border areas or the confine / periphery of a land.  

https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/край

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

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

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

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

There were no Ukrainians at the time of the Kievan Rus kingdom (882-1240) for a very good reason: there were no ‘Russians’ properly speaking. The amalgamated populations of the rather tiny state varied; they were basically Turanian, Slavic, Teutonic (: German) and Scandinavian. The entirely fake History of Eastern Europe, as it was fabricated by Western European and North American universities over the past 200-300 years, involves a great number of disinformation tools. The three main subjects that the colonial forgers of England, France and America worked laboriously to effectively conceal are the following:

– the overwhelming presence of Turanian peoples in Eastern Europe eclipses by far the existence of nomads and settlers of other origin;

– the early Slavic populations (Saqaliba) were considered by all historical Islamic authors as integral part of the Turanian nations;

– the diffusion of Islam in the wider region of today’s Ukraine and European provinces of Russia antedates the propagation of Christianity in the same lands; and

– the fallacy of Europe as a continent.   

Kubrat’s Bulgaria, ca. 650 CE

The Bulgarians divided by the Khazars, 9th c.

Kimek–Kipchak confederation

Kievan Rus was a small multi-ethnic Christian state with significant Turanian population

Volga Bulgaria was an enormous Eastern European Turanian kingdom that accepted Islam long before the Kievan Rus adopted Eastern Roman Christianity.

With respect to the aforementioned three circles of topics, numerous academic terms have often been deliberately used in order to distort the truth in front of the eyes of non-specialized readership. Even worse, scores of scrupulously forged, fake maps have also been produced and they are abundant in books, scholarly reviews, mass media, and the Internet, whereas in many cases, simply they are absent, because they gravely disturb the fabricated myths and the vicious lies that Western Europe’s criminal academics and disreputable universities intend to present as ‘History’. Examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:Location_of_Kyivan_Rus.png

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:Muromian-map.png

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:East_Slavic_tribes_peoples_8th_9th_century.jpg

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:Varangian_routes.png

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

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

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Volga_Bulgaria#/media/File:Volga-Bulgaria.jpg

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

II- Western Colonialism against Russia: Projection of Fake Concepts and Historical Falsehood onto Russian Elites

The aforementioned reality heavily impacts all forces, regimes and governments, scholars and journalists involved in the present conflict. This is so because, before they became active parts in the ongoing military confrontation, they were entirely formed educationally-intellectually-academically-culturally-ideologically by means of an enormous amount of forged concepts and historical distortions (i.e. of so-called ‘myths’) that they unconsciously accepted and calamitously believed and which led them to the decisions and the acts that caused the Ukrainian quagmire. In other words, the Western anti-Russian racism and the intention of the Western colonial centers to effectively colonize Russia existed since the late 15th and the 16th centuries; simply this attempt would not be materialized at the military level but otherwise.

Even more troublesome is the fact that these destructive concepts and distortions are not only a matter of our time, but also of the historical past (the last 500-570 years). In other words, this affair concerned many generations of Russians, who lived and acted, decided and performed under the impact of concepts forged and distortions made by Western European and North American scholars, diplomats, statesmen, agents and intellectuals. I don’t mention the Ukrainians at all here, because simply they are Russians, either they like it or not; in addition, the negation of the Russian identity of the populations that inhabit the plains of Ukraine is the last propagated Western fallacy and crime.

The victims of the said propaganda can easily understand the veracity of my previous statement, if they search in every historical book, every encyclopedia, every scholarly publication, every review, magazine and newspaper published before 1910 worldwide in order to find the term “Ukrainian nation” or “nation of Ukraine”; after a long effort, they will fail, because simply there was never an Ukrainian nation and not one government accepted such a nonsense before 1910. But this is another issue.

Speaking about generations of Russians confused and deceived by Western lies and historical falsehood, I imply mainly that the ‘myths’ of yesterday generated the wrong decision-making of today, and the misperceptions of today trigger the mistakes of tomorrow. There has therefore been a chain of lies (diffused by the Western powers and believed in Russia) and mistakes (made by the Imperial, Soviet and Republican establishments) that has lasted for about five (5) centuries. In fact, it antedates the Romanov dynasty and it foregoes the birth of Ivan IV the Terrible.

Ivan IV the Terrible: an Asiatic monarch fluent in Turkic languages

Even the way 19th c. Russian painters viewed their past fully demonstrates that they knew that their identity was Asiatic and Oriental, i.e. not Western and not European; Pyotr Korovin’s painting (1890) depicts Ivan IV in Kazan.

This topic is not easily identified, let alone understood, by today’s Russian academic, educational, intellectual and political establishment. And it constituted always an unknown and unscrutinized point that led to divisions, defeats, troubles or -even worse- failures to exploit splendid opportunities. So serious it is that it affects the Russians’ perception of their true national and imperial identity. Why? Because this was the foremost target of the pernicious Western colonial establishments as regards Russia.

All these distortions and falsifications undertaken by the major centers of power in Western Europe (Rome, Paris and London) have indeed a common denominator; this was the Western colonialism, namely the conquest of the world, and the imposition of vicious and evil intellectual, pseudo-religious, academic, educational, scientific and sociopolitical establishments, which totally dismantle and utterly destroy the local culture and civilization, faith and spirituality, traditions and behavioral systems (the way of life) wherever it is spread. As this reproach hinges on the criminal acts of the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the English that are known as the main colonial powers, many will react pretending that Muscovy/Russia was never colonized.

This is exactly what Russians never paid attention at! In fact, what I state consists in a very subtle form of intellectual, academic, artistic, educational, scientific, ideological, socio-behavioral and imperial/political colonialism. In fact, the Western colonial establishments composed myths and elaborated falsifications that they subsequently projected onto the Russians without them realizing the trap, because they were nominally independent and eventually a militarily formidable state. The reason for this enduring but unnoticed development is double:

– first, the trap appeared as a propulsion, a praise, and a glorification of Russia; and

– second, it was linked with Russia’s apparent modernization, consolidation and fortification.

III- Western Bias: Russia’s Europeanization as De-Russification

In fact, the Western colonial establishments diffused numerous false concepts and scores of historical falsification which would drastically incapacitate the Russian state (Росийская держава/ Rossiskaya derzhava) from making most of its chances to prevail worldwide as a Christian Orthodox Oriental state inhabited mainly by Asiatic and Turanian peoples. Initially, the Western effort took the form of ‘taming’ or (even more provocatively) ‘civilizing’ the supposedly brutal Russians; in other words, they attempted to gradually ‘Europeanize’ Russia, but in this case there are four critical parameters, namely

– first, 17th c. ‘Europe’ was a nebulous, false, and truly revisionist concept that negated the true historical evolution from the Scythian, Cimmerian, Celtic, Punic and Roman Antiquity down to the Fall of Constantinople (1453) and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494);

– second, the concept of ‘Europe’ was then overwhelmingly rejected by the outright majority of the European nations, irrespective of ethnic origin, language, religion (Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism), and state;

– third, in reality, this bogus-concept was essentially the method of few Western European powers to colonize the Germans, the Russians, and the numerous other nations of Eastern Europe, by destroying their cultures, traditions and faiths and by projecting onto them the vicious and evil falsehood (and version of bogus-historical narrative) that Rome, Paris and London had fabricated in straightforward denial of their Christian past; and

– fourth, cultural Europeanization was aptly confused with scientific-technological modernization, which was apparently sought after by Russian monarchs, who were willing to consolidate their vast, apparently Oriental and Asiatic, empire.

Renaissance and all the subsequent Western European intellectual movements are the epitome of worldwide revisionism or anti-historical revanchism. However, to fully comprehend the intertwined nature of Renaissance and Colonialism, one has to realize that the first to be colonized were the colonial countries themselves, namely Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England; this is valid in the sense that these lands were the first to succumb to the evil and inhuman elites that masterminded, concocted and later spread the spiritual disease of the Renaissance, thus taking hold of the local power due to their schemes (initiating kings, noblemen and priests into evil religious orders).

Confusing modernization with Europeanization, Peter I helped Europeans colonize his own country, thinking that this torturous deformation of Russia’s identity, nature and character could ever be beneficial.

Pyotr Potyomkin: an entirely Oriental and Asiatic, Russian diplomat and statesman

When it comes to Russia’s enduring Europeanization, which proved to be absolutely calamitous for all Russians and for the Russian state’s natural interests, the kingdom of France played a great role, already before Peter I the Great (Пётр I/Пётр I Алексеевич; 1672-1725). From the days of Jacques Margaret (1565-1619), Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) and Pyotr Potyomkin (also spelled Potemkin; Пётр Ива́нович Потёмкин; 1617-1700 / distant relative of Grigory Potemkin, the 18th c. statesman in whose honor was named the early 20th c. Battleship Potemkin), dense series of cultural, intellectual and imperial exchanges started taking place.

First, travelers wrote about Russia, pejoratively depicting the country and the people as purely ‘backward’; simply because corruption, faithlessness, evilness, debauchery and lawlessness did not have any place in the Russian Empire, and the local morals had not softened as in Western Europe, Russia appeared to those Western Europeans as ‘uncivilized’. Then, historians and linguists, philologists and historians of art started therefore writing about the vast empire, which they wanted to represent as they wished it to be, and not as it truly was. Furthermore, scores of Italian architects were dispatched to Russia, whereas countless German princesses married Russian noblemen and princes only to corrupt the land from the top to the bottom. About:

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

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

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

http://www.saint-petersburg.com/famous-people/great-italians/

In fact, what even today’s Russians seem to easily forget is that, due to the need of modernization, several Russian czars opened the way to Europeanization, which was tantamount to utter de-Russification. Catherine II {1729-1796; Екатерина II; born as German princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst / София Августа Фредерика фон Анхальт-Цербст-Дорнбург (Романова)} had to appear at times in the Russian national costume (also involving veil) and at times in her Western dresses. About:

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

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

The true Catherine II: a Western libertarian

Catherine II masqueraded as Russian

IV- Where does the Fallacy of European Russia End?

It caused an undeniably deep division inside the Russian Empire, because the Christian priests, monks and laymen reacted to what they considered rather as Satanization of Holy Russia. If I expanded on the topic, it is due to the fact that the aforementioned situation still today affects Russia directly. For instance, when Putin speaks positively about Peter the Great, this constitutes in fact an oxymoron, because at the same time, the Russian president opposes Russia’s Europeanization today. But this is the whole problem: in fact, Peter ‘the Great’ (?), in his time, was acting in the exactly opposite direction from that of Russia’s incumbent president.    

I fully support President Putin’s efforts to block the spread of Western lawlessness, inhumanity, corruption and putrefaction in Russia; more importantly, the outright majority of the Russians today support him in this effort, irrespective of faith, ethnic origin, language, and culture. However, the truth is that Peter I acted differently (and very mistakenly as per my evaluation), willing to oppose and diminish the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Russian education and culture. So, I have to admit that Ivan the Terrible, Tamerlane, Stalin or even Genghis Khan are far more suitable prototypes and heroes for today’s Russia in the great national effort to defend the land from the evil intentions of the criminals who rule the West. Then, the fact that this discrepancy obviously exists today only jeopardizes Russia’s national interests and clarity as regards the national identity of the great country.

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The greatest Russians of all times: Genghis Khan (above), Timur/Tamerlane (middle) and Stalin (below)

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In a way, it would make sense if Russia’s liberal opposition, which consists in a shame and a disgrace for all Russians, expanded much on Peter I as the model. If they want to introduce in Russia today the Western European and North American decadence, depravity and decay, thinking that this is ‘modernization’, it is Peter I who took similar measures before 300 years openly supporting the presence and spread of Freemasonic lodges in his empire; but this development had negative impact on Russia’s pledge to the Holy Rus, the Kievan kingdom. About:

Putin compares modern-day Russia to the times of Peter the Great on tsar’s 350th anniversary

https://www.academia.edu/695748/Freemasonry_and_the_Occult_at_the_Court_of_Peter_the_Great

https://www.academia.edu/449346/A_Mason_Tsar_Freemasonry_and_Fraternalism_at_the_Court_of_Peter_the_Great

This is a nonsensical Western propaganda for idiots:

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/putin-endangers-russias-future-just-his-hero-peter-great-did

The scrupulously elaborated and systematically projected onto all the successive Russian establishments (Imperial, Soviet and Republican) concept of Russia as a European nation is the Western countries’ most fallacious distortion and most pathetic falsity about the vast country. It repeatedly damaged gravely the national interests of Russia. As a forgery, it helps identify the real intentions of Russia’s permanent enemies; to them, Russia would then be ‘good’ if limited in a portion of European Russia’s territory, let’s say in the triangle St Petersburg, Volgograd and Nizhny Novgorod, thus sending Moscow back to the 1500s.

The Western fallacy of a ‘European Russia’ provides with an expiry date for what the Russian Empire has always been. With Russia ‘becoming’ a state double the size of Ukraine, with the entire Caucasus region in flames, with an independent Tatarstan (enlarged with the annexation of Bashkortostan, Chuvashia and Udmurtia), and with the secession of a Karelia-Komi-Nemets ‘state’ in the North, the path will be open for the detachment and colonization of Siberia and Northern Asia by the criminal Western European and North American colonial gangsters.

Bashkirs

Tatars

Chuvash

Udmurts

About:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V- False Identity for Russians means Defeat in the Great Game

In addition to fallacy, deception, corruption and historical forgery, the existence of ‘colonial empires’ involves a lengthy and meticulous agenda for all continents, target prioritization, and -above all- deception continuity and, if necessary, adaptation. Whereas the British and the French colonial empires were not dissolved but merely transformed after the end of WW II (with scores of unsuspicious, credulous, and subservient Asiatics, Eastern Europeans, Africans and Latin Americans endlessly enrolling to ‘study’ in the colonial universities-factories of falsehood), the dissolution of the Russian (or Soviet) Empire became a constant parameter of the perverse and criminal expansionism of the Western powers. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, they insist on the dissolution of the Russian Federation that they persistently depict as a ‘vast’ Russian ‘Empire’. To the Russians, this sounds as merely Western propaganda, and this is right – but only up to a certain extent. Quite unfortunately and more importantly, this is also historiography, colonial conceptualization, and foreign policy target.

The ‘reason’ that the Western academics, experts, diplomats and statesmen evoke in order to possibly justify their claims and demands, policies and targets is founded on the concept of ‘European Russia’ that they had long created and projected onto their agents (or interlocutors or sympathizers of ‘brothers’ or friends) in Imperial Russia. In 1850 or 1900, these naïve Russians, who believed in the good intentions of the evil Western administrations, could not understand where this vicious concept leads to; had they survived until 2022-2023, they would have understood very clearly the erroneous choice that they had made.

Who were these agents of the Western establishments?

Sergei Witte

They were high rank Russian academics, noblemen, generals, and quite often members of the imperial family; when it comes to German princesses, they were the embodiment of Russia’s Europeanization, because Germans, who are also an Asiatic origin nation, had been Europeanized, i.e. corrupted, first. Politicians and members of the State Duma (Государственная дума/Gasudarstvennaya Duma), ministers and even prime ministers, the likes of Witte (Sergei Witte/Сергей Юльевич Витте; 1849-1915), Stolypin (Pyotr Stolypin/Пётр Аркадьевич Столыпин: 1862-1911, assassinated) and, last but not least, Kerensky (Alexander Kerensky/Александр Фёдорович Керенский; 1881-1970), were the leading agents of the Western states and establishments, not in the sense of payroll agent of foreign countries, but due to their confusion between modernization and Europeanization.

Alexander Kerensky

Later, after the October revolution, Lev Davidovich Bronstein (also known as Leon Trotsky/Лев Троцкий; 1879-1940) became the main champion of Russia’s foremost Europeanization; his paranoid theory of permanent revolution is the quintessence of Western European colonialism. In fact, by this term, Trotsky merely denoted the accomplished status of Asia’s, Africa’s and Latin America’s Europeanization. English colonials had a rather shorter way to describe it: “Make the world England”.

https://www.hamiltonfortexas.com/video-6

Villainous rascal and paranoid gangster Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Trotsky

It is not a coincidence that Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization also involved Ukraine’s annexation of Russian Crimea; it was apparently due to Khrushchev’s latent but extant Trotskyism. This was also attested in the case of Khrushchev’s attempt to breach the territorial integrity of the Kazakh SSR. About:

Kazakhstan from the Göktürks (Celestial Turks) and Genghis Khan to the Jadid Intellectuals to Nursultan Nazarbayev, ch. XVIII unit c:

https://www.academia.edu/85192029/Kazakhstan_from_the_G%C3%B6kt%C3%BCrks_to_Nursultan_Nazarbayev_Illustrated_edition_Album_of_Kazakh_History_with_555_pictures_and_legends_

The following entry is filled with inaccuracies, oversights, and distortions:

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

A latent form of Trotskyism

What matters most in this regard are not the persons, but the calamitous results brought about following the projection of this malicious concept onto Russia; one has also to take into consideration the opportunities that the Russian Empire lost due to the confusion between technological modernization and Europeanization that prevailed in the minds of the Russian elites.

To many it may sound bizarre that Rome, France and England first, and the US at a later stage, supported and promoted or tolerated the expansion of the Russian Empire during several centuries (16th-19th) only to plan to split and dismember it at a later stage; however, this colonial attitude is not strange at all. It only demonstrates the permanent and menacing character of the Western colonialism. The Imperial Russian expansion in the Black Sea and the Caucasus regions, in Northern and Northeastern Asia, and later in Central Asia was aptly utilized by the colonial powers, England and France, as an instrument necessary for the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, Safavid-Afshar-Qajar Iran, and Qing China.

A critical moment of the Great Game: the Russian invasion of Samarkand (1868); from the painting of Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin (Николай Николаевич Каразин; 1842-1908)

To view it correctly, the inception and the projection of the false concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’ is tantamount to declaration of war against Russia; historically, it consists in the birth certificate of the Great Game. It definitely constitutes an act of enmity against Asia in its entirety and against all the historical nations, cultures, and empires of Asia, which -throughout the millennia- civilized the barbarians of Asia’s most worthless and most pathetic peninsula: Europe.

VI- The Fall of the Romanov: due to the False Concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’

In brief, the subtle but venomous, slow and multilayered projection of the concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’ onto the Russian elites prevented the czars from forging an alliance with the sultan at Constantinople, the shah at Esfahan, the Great Mughal (Shahanshah-e Hindustan/شاهنشاهی هندوستان) at Delhi, and the Tianzi (Son of Heaven/天子) at Beijing in order to set up a common front against the European colonial expansionism in Asia and drown the colonial gangsters in the sea.

Ottoman Empire (end 16th c.)

Safavid Iran (early 16th c.)

Mughal Empire (early 18th c.)

Qajar Iran (19th c.)

The aforementioned point alone stands as convincing proof that Russians today must rewrite their National History, removing Western European revisionism, distortions, fake concepts, and historical falsehood, in order to allow for a veracious, true and accurate perception of Russian History; this would definitely lead to the formation of a consummate, all-encompassing, and genuine Russian national identity, which would be the solid foundation of every decision-making process.

Qing China 19th-early 20th c.

An example of the extremely calamitous impact that a) the false concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’, b) the erroneous perception of the Russian national identity, and c) the mistaken, hitherto colonially written History of Russia exerted on the imperial decision-making is Nicholas II’s alliance with France and England before and during WW I. Acting under the confusion triggered by the aforementioned parameters, the last of the czars, although recently canonized, led his empire from defeat to defeat, his people to certainly undeserved death, and his throne to an end.  

It is impermissible for a continental empire to ever make an alliance with maritime powers, which by definition constitute the embodiment of falsehood, inhumanity, barbarism, and evilness; this fact leads to destruction, because as an expression of the sea, i.e. the aboriginal chaos, sea powers play always a destructive role in the human affairs until they are annihilated – which is what they always deserve.

World History, Spiritual Revelation, and Human Civilization are the exclusive domain of continental empires, land kingdoms, and societies closely related with plains, plateaus, hills, mountains and valleys. Coastal states existed, but they never generated civilizations; at their best, they rather reflected the values, the concepts, the virtues and the principles that were identified, cherished and defended first by societies developed far from the sea.

In the eve of what is, conventionally and mistakenly, called World War One (in fact, it is an episode of the Great Game), Russia and Austria-Hungary were ostensibly continental empires; Germany and Italy, in spite of their, then recent, colonial expansion in Africa were continental empires that occupied overseas lands only to prevent England and France from further enlarging their monstrous colonial empires that spread death, oppression, corruption and inhumanity worldwide. This means that, after the disintegration of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, the only maritime powers were England and France and, to lesser extent, Holland and Belgium.

Imperial Russia’s misfortunate alliance with Paris-controlled Serbia was an awful trap. All other circumstances and instances, events and incidents cannot weigh-in on a proper decision-making, when the fundamental principles and the theoretical prescriptions impose a resolute approach based on identity consideration, foe identification, and strategic alliance evaluation.

The alliance with France and England was for Russia the stupidest decision ever made by any czar, also consisting in the Act of Death Certificate for the Romanov dynasty. England, as an island, cannot exist as an independent state as per the criteria of every historical continental empire. If one takes into account the despise with which all the great historical rulers and emperors from Sargon of Akkad to Alexander the Great to Tamerlane looked down at all the islands in general, one gets conclusive evidence about the worthlessness of the islands in terms of civilization, spiritual authority, and imperial rule.

Similarly, ever since her devilish inception, France was the foothold of a maritime monster that unfortunately Justinian I and General Belisarius failed to eliminate; the Merovingian myth details in length the abominable deeds of the Quinotaur, the maritime beast-ancestor of the villainous Merovingian dynasty, thus fully unveiling the evil nature of that state irrespective of the form that it may take. Unfortunately, Nicholas II Romanov failed to read the Chronicle of Fredegar to possibly fathom the Anti-Christian nature and character of the disreputable state of which he disastrously made Holy Russia an ally! About;

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

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

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

Quite contrarily, if Russia was fully and irrevocably perceived as an Asiatic Empire, the continental dimension of Holy Russia would lead Nicholas II to an alliance with the Kaiser, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, the Sultan at Constantinople, and the Shah of Qajar Iran. This alliance would be the only normal and natural expression of Russia’s historical and geographic identity. The ensuing result would be of entirely breathtaking and spectacular dimensions.

Having no apparent need to maintain armies close to the Imperial German, Austrian-Hungarian, and Ottoman borders, Romanov Russia and Qajar Iran would eliminate the ahistorical bogus-state of Afghanistan, which is a filthy, devilish English colonial invention and fabrication (geared to merely weaken Iran); soon afterwards, no less than five million (5.000.000) Russian and Iranian soldiers would overwhelmingly invade India, irreversibly obliterating the criminal colonial presence of England in South Asia, triumphantly liberating the local multi-ethnic populations, and effectively establishing fraternal relations among the adepts of all the different religions, cults and faiths.

With the inevitable defeat and final division of France (between Germany and Italy), Russian, Austrian-Hungarian and Italian regiments would irrevocably eradicate the presence of Anglo-French colonials in Egypt, Sudan and the Eastern Mediterranean. After the prompt pacification of the three continents, an enormous German-Russian-Spanish-Italian operation would be undertaken against the ‘British Isles’ to totally eliminate every notion of insular rule and independent state in England.

Nicholas I’s total failure to understand the Asiatic nature of Russia throughout the millennia and his inability to exert continental force against the maritime powers’ treachery, evilness, and putrefaction caused Russians not only a terrible defeat in WW I, a Civil War, and an unnecessary regime change, but also a terrible bloodshed during WW II, a Cold War, the needless disintegration of the USSR in 1991, and ever since, the absolutely unneeded fratricidal conflict in Ukraine – an entirely Russian land and population that the sea powers attempt to corrupt.

The maritime powers’ evilness is identical with marine erosion; they appear friendly and innocent in order to cheat and they show their true face later. At the end, the Russians will understand the real meaning of the verse: “Moscou, les Plaines d’Ukraine, et les Champs-Élysées“. In fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with either the French or the Ukrainians and the Russians. It simply means that in Moscow and in the plains of Ukraine there must be as many brothels, cabarets, night bars, sexual debauchery, and inhuman anomaly as in les Champs-Élysées.

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Russia, China, the Decayed Muslim World, and the Crumbling, Savage Western World – I

By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Fake states of fake Arabs and fake Muslims

II. Turkey and Iran: the two exceptions

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.

Here you have the links:

https://www.academia.edu/26051442/Russia_Islam_and_the_West_by_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/26051219

https://inosmi.ru/world/20071210/238309.html

https://centrasia.org/newsA.php?st=1197397080

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

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CHINA, INDIA, RUSSIA, IRAN AND TURKEY: THE WORLD’S FIVE MOST IMPORTANT CONTINENTAL EMPIRES FIRST CANNOT BE REVIVED AND SECOND CAN PROSPER ONLY AS SECULAR STATES

Ming dynasty Emperor Zhu Houzhao (朱厚照; 1491-1521)

15th c. painting of the Forbidden City

Forbidden city Beijing

Qing China map 1820

Qing dynasty Emperor Kangxi (康熙帝; 1661-1722)

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Superior to the paranoid lunatic Ottoman Selim I and stronger than the lascivious Ismail Safavi, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad rather known as Babur (1483-1530) was the founder of the Mughal Empire; incomparably the most adventurous, the most impulsive and the most intellectual emperor of his times.

Emperor Humayun (1508-1556) and his son Akbar

Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) receiving the four-year old Abdul Rahim following the assassination (1561) of his father Bairam Khan, who was Akbar’s leading general and mentor: miniature from the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), which was commissioned by Akbar as the official chronicle of the reign. It was written by Abu’l Fazl between 1590 and 1596, illustrated between c. 1592 and 1594.

Diwan-i-Aam (Hall of Public Audience) in the palace of the Great Mughal Emperor in Agra

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‘Moscow under Ivan the Terrible’ (1902) is a famous painting by Apollinary M. Vasnetsov; the 19th-20th c. impression that the Russians had about the beginning of the tiny Muscovy principality before 350 years was very inaccurate, erroneous, and biased. This is so, because they projected their own ideas on their own past that they viewed through the binoculars of their distorted education and historiography.

Mikhail Romanov (1596-1645) and his father, the patriarch Philaret, distribute alms, in an illustration of the first Romanov coronation. From the Coronation Album of Mikhail Fedorovich; the manuscript “The Book of the Election to the Highest Throne of the Great Russian Tsardom of the Great Sovereign Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail Fedorovich of All Great Russia Autocrat” was produced in Moscow few decades after the event (in 1672-1673). From the 1856 reprint edition.

Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg; when Russia ceased to be Russia and started imitating Western Europe corrupt pseudo-kingdoms, insidious academics, fake intellectuals, and uncivilized politicians, the divisions and the discords started. Peter I and Catherine II are the true reason of the fall of the Romanov.

When you have Western European theater, opera and dance in a theoretically Christian Orthodox Empire, sooner or later your contaminated state will collapse; Nicholas II could not save anything (here in his coronation along with Alexandra Feodorovna, 1896).

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Shah Tahmasp I of Iran & Emperor Humayun of the Mughal Empire Hindustan enjoying Nowrouz festivities, as depicted on the Chehel Sotoun palace in Esfahan

Shah Abbas I the Great (1571-1629)

The imperial Naqsh-e-Jahan (‘The Image of the World’) square in Esfahan, Safavid Iran’s most flamboyant capital

Safavid Iran, 1511

General view of the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Shah Mosque (below), and the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (in the middle), Isfahan

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Stupid Ottomans! They abolished the only valuable military units they had, namely the Janissaries; the absurd development took place at the time of the idiotic Sultan Mahmoud II (1785-1839). Instead of killing all the uneducated, ignorant, dark and pathetic sheikhs, muftis, qadis and imams that contaminated and destroyed the Ottoman Empire with the fallacy of their anti-Islamic “sunnah”, Mahmoud II closed down the illustrious Bektashi Order and the formidable Janissary elite infantry, thus issuing the death warrant of his otherwise wretched state. Today, people confuse two totally different terms: ‘Ottoman Empire’ and ‘Ottoman Civilization’. All factors of the Islamic civilization in the territory of the Caliphate were indeed persecuted by the pathetic, corrupt, cruel and villainous Ottoman dynasty. As it used to be said at the time, to be a member of the Ottoman family you had to have killed your brother! The ominous empire was the World History’s most anti-Turkish state.

Topkapı sarayı at the time of Selim I (1512-1520)

Official ceremonies in the Ottoman palace were a spectacular and costly affair that was impermissible in an absurd state ridiculously governed by pathetic, biased and ignorant theologians who took their stupid theology as tantamount to the religion of Islam.

Topkapı sarayı (طوپقپو سرايى) in Ottoman Constantinople; the historical name ‘Istanbul’, which was attested in sources for more than 100 years before the fall of the Eastern Roman imperial capital (1453), became the official name of the city only thanks to Kemal Ataturk. The absurd measure of turning Ayasofya Museum to a fanciful pseudo-mosque for political circus automatically cancels the popular city name and imposes the re-introduction of the old name that was the official appellation when the monumental edifice was operating as a real mosque (1453-1923).

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II. Turkey and Iran: the two exceptions

The two most notable exceptions from this chaotic and nefarious situation have been Turkey and Iran; the Turkish exception is entirely due to the greatness of the scope and the depth of understanding of Kemal Ataturk, who was one of the very few minds to timely, accurately and plainly identify the colonial goals. The founder of Modern Turkey had understood that Islam as religion was already defunct during his time and that the uneducated, ignorant and worthless Muslims of the early 20th c. were to be re-educated from scratch and on the basis of their own culture in order to later rediscover the true historical Islam in all its width, depth and height.

Kemal Ataturk knew that all that the criminal colonial imperialists of France, England and America wanted to do was to aptly utilize and duly instrumentalize the uneducated and silly Muslims of his time, turning them to fully operable tools of Western hegemony. The basic tools of this instrumentalization were the following:

– the deceitful ideologization (theologization) of the Islamic religion,

– the execrable politicization of the Muslim societies,

– the Orientalist falsification of the History of all Asiatic and African nations, and

– the linguistic, educational, academic and cultural subordination of all, Muslim and non-Muslim, Oriental nations to the Western European and North American barbarism and inhuman model of life, which was produced in Western Europe starting with the Evil Renaissance and diffused worldwide due to the genocidal colonialism

But theology is not religion; today’s fake Muslims do not believe Islam as religion, but pseudo-Islamic theological systems that contain a modern and ahistorical bogus-interpretation (i.e. a misinterpretation) of the values of Islam, thus fully eliminating Spirituality and turning Moral from a profound understanding of virtues to a silly obedience of other humans, which is “shirk” (شرك) according to the dogma of Islam.

It goes without saying that the aforementioned situation (or condition of being) does not only consist in religious deviation for Muslims but also constitutes supreme humiliation and final demise for any nation. Kemal Ataturk was triumphantly confirmed by all the historical developments that followed his death.

The uneducated, ignorant and stupid Muslims of Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, etc. fell exactly into the trap of their utilization and instrumentalization by the West; from 1948 to 1967 to 1973, the fake Muslims of the wider region did indeed function as fully programmed automatons. More they hated the Zionists, stronger the state of Israel became. This does not mean that the Zionist state is rightful and correct; it is not. But this does not matter (or does not play any role) anymore, when the Aramaean Muslims of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine and the Coptic Muslims of Egypt are so wrong as to become dehumanized automatons focused on wrong choices that can bring only grave deterioration and final destruction.

Having no national identity, believing in a pseudo-theology (that they mistook for religion), being truly disconnected from one another, being totally unaware of one another’s historical past and cultural heritage, and acting -at the political level- like conveniently submissive monkeys of the Westerners, these fake Muslims do not have a chance in the billion to ever win. Automatons do not win; humans do. Automatons act as per their pre-fashioned mechanism and then get decomposed to pieces.

The Iranian exception was basically due to the earlier imperial tradition (Safavid, Afshar and Qajar). The English interfered in Iran in the early 20th c. in a multifaceted and multilayered manner. They deposed the true, imperial dynasty and imposed an ignorant soldier as ‘king’, after duly cheating, bribing and corrupting him; this poor and uneducated guy did not even know the historical Iranian name ‘Pahlavi’ and its meaning, but the academic instructor and tutor, whom his colonial masters assigned to him, gave him this name as ‘royal family name’ – which constitutes the most shameful and most disgraceful stigma of Iranian History.

The reason for the English intervention in Iran in the late 19th and early 20th c. is still unknown to most people worldwide. For many long centuries, the evil Anglo-French diplomacy, vicious colonial trickery, and incessant machinations pitched the silly Ottomans and the naïve Iranians in interminable wars that weakened both empires; even worse, when Constantinople and Isfahan/Tehran did not fight against one another, most probably one of the two ailing empires made a war with the Russians. This unprecedentedly disastrous series of developments occurred despite the fact that both, the dynasties and the populations of the two empires, were Turanian in their majority and the local culture in both realms was a millennia long Iranian-Turanian amalgamation.

But with Kemal Ataturk turning the world’s most anti-Turkic empire (namely the wretched Ottoman Empire) into Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, the path was open for the much needed merge of the two great states into one; but this eventuality (that had been fully materialized by Tamerlane in 1402) was the real horror of the Western colonial powers for no less than four centuries (1500-1900).

The reason of the colonial fear was the fact that the Ottoman state and the Iranian Empire were equally Iranian and Turanian at the same time; in either case, the majority of the local population was Turanian, whereas the popular culture and tradition constituted an amalgamated Turanian (nomad / military-martial) and Iranian (settled / academic-intellectual) common heritage. So, by intervening colonially in Iran, the English intended to

– devilishly ‘Persianize’ Iran (an attempt that had no historical precedent),

– reduce the universal-ecumenical Empire of Iran into a ‘national Persian kingdom’, and thus

– transform untouchable Iran into a malleable ‘Persia’.

By so doing, the evil colonials knew beforehand that they would trigger enormous reactions from the part of Azeris, Turkmens and others, who would never accept ‘their’ Iran (so, a Turanian-Iranian entity) to be degraded into a Farsi (‘Persian’) state.

However, not even an interference of this scale was enough for the English and the French to fully control developments in Iran. As the English occupied the formerly Ottoman land of Mesopotamia (Aram-Nahrain or ‘Iraq’), the colonial conspirers mobilized several naïve Shia religious leaders and turned them against the puppet soldier king Reza, whom they had imposed on his fake throne in the first place.

As the colonial ‘explorers’, ‘advisers’ and ‘friends’ pushed the idiotic, credulous and unsuspicious Reza to westernize Iran and to stupidly send his son, the crown prince Muhammad Reza, to Switzerland for ‘studies’ (which would also further westernize him: 1931-1936; at the age of 12-17), they instigated anti-royal hatred among the silly ayatollahs and the other useless religious leaders, whom they urged to react against the ‘atheist’ king Reza, whom they had raised to power for a start. This has always been the criminal nature of the Western colonial evilness: you don’t only raise a silly puppet to prominence and power; you also prepare the puppet’s opponents and eventually the puppet’s murderers.

The situation went out of control, when the soldier’s son, after being educated as crown prince in Switzerland, proved to be a perspicacious successor to the much undeserved throne of Iran. As a matter of fact, and clearly to his credit, Muhammad Reza, by noticing the conflicting agendas of the various colonial powers and by identifying tremendous discrepancies in the ultimate goals of the major lobbies of power (or secret societies) in the Western World (Jesuits, Freemasons and Zionists), understood a large and critical part of the overall scheme, took therefore his role seriously, and following the path of Kemal Ataturk, attempted to modernize Iran in order to make it truly competitive to Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and the major Western nations. This was exactly what the evil Western colonials did not want to happen, because Kemal Ataturk has always been the man whom they hated most and for a good reason: if there were another 3-4 men like the founder of Modern Turkey, as perspicacious as he was, as determined as he was, and as audacious as he was, then the entire colonial rule would crumble in Asia, Africa and Europe, ultimately and rightfully plunging the Western World into the well-deserved final implosion and irreversible decomposition. That’s why Iran’s position has severely degraded since 1979 and the so-called ‘Islamic revolution’.

III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians

It could not happen otherwise, because the nonsensical theory published by Khomeini and known under the name ‘Velayat-e Faqih’ {‘the Governance of the (Islamic) Jurisprudents’} did not exist (and consequently was not practiced) earlier, throughout the History of Islamic Caliphates; it is a modern concept, although many efforts were made to attach some historical credibility to it. As far as the so-called ‘Shia Muslims’ are concerned, quite unfortunately, this theory was the effective counterpart of the ‘Political Islam’ that the colonial Orientalists, diplomats and politicians diffused among /imposed on the so-called ‘Sunni Muslims’. I use the expression ‘so-called’, because in reality the distinction into Sunni and Shia Muslims is also fake, but this is not a topic on which I can further expand here. About: https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_

The degradation of Iran’s position at the international level was stopped to some extent (not because an improvement was made in the unfortunate realm ruled by a puerile elite that failed to identify the anti-Iranian and anti-Turanian schemes of the Western colonial gangsters but) due to rather external factors. Despite the fact that Turkey followed a different trajectory, also Ankara’s position at the international level started gradually being severely degraded in 2002-2003, when the Western colonial fabrication ‘AKP’ was forcefully imposed on Turkey’s political life by direct and multileveled Western colonial interference.

The Turkish generals were constantly, boldly and gravely threatened by the US, NATO, EU, UK, and other governments and international bodies not to intervene, not to undertake a -much needed- coup, and not to cause the -much demanded- physical death of the disreputable US-UK-Israel puppet Erdogan, Turkey’s silliest, most ignorant, most uneducated, most pathetic, and most ludicrous prime minister and president.

The fact that Turkey’s Islamists came to and stayed in power only due to systematic Western colonial support clearly shows their absolutely non-Muslim, evil nature, and their servile character, which is the epitome of the disbeliever, the unfaithful and the perfidious. It also heralds the forthcoming destruction of Turkey, because this is the ultimate goal of the Western colonials, who brought the stupid Islamists of the AKP to power in order to duly, effectively and irrevocably utilize them for their plans.

Having a decomposed, divided and useless army (due to ceaseless post-2016 purges), a collapsed economy, half a trillion external gross debt, and a current account deficit of $36.7 billion in 2020, Turkey will need more than a decade to recover from the nonsensical and paranoid governmental policies of the idiots, who imagined it possible to govern a 21st c. country with oral utterances of a prophet who lived before 1400 years and with the prescriptions of a holy book manifested to indigenous people in Hejaz 300 years after the Roman Empire became Christian.

What is even worse for the brainless humanoids that support Turkey’s impossible Islamization is the fact that Muslim kingdoms and empires during the Islamic times were not governed (and did not have to be governed) on the basis of the Shariah in the way today’s uneducated and ignorant Muslim theologians understand this very vague and currently misinterpreted term. Quite contrarily, many times caliphs and sultans ruled against the Islamic Law; this is a vast topic that goes out of the scope of the present article, but at this point, I want only to indicate the original mistake and the defective approach to which are due the false interpretations and the erroneous conclusions of almost all modern Muslim theologians.

IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials

Instead of duly studying and carefully examining what truly occurred during all the periods of Islamic History and subsequently concluding thereupon, today’s fake Muslim theologians theorize on the basis of various historical texts (Quran, Hadith, Fiqh, Kalam), which by definition they cannot understand in their original, correct and accurate contextualization. When you hear silly people using this style of wooden language «theologian X said: ‘about this topic prophet Muhammad said that’», you can be sure that you have in front of you an idiot duly utilized by the colonial powers in order to harm all interlocutors who would accept such fully unrealistic purposes, positions and pretensions.

This is so, because whatever prophet Muhammad (or any other individual, prophet, high priest, mystic or layman) said does not truly matter; what really matter are the moral principles, the spiritual concepts, and the divine values that are contained in what the prophet (or any other person) said. Actually, words have worth only as expression of principles, concepts and values; otherwise they are absolutely empty, meaningless and useless.

Why the use of wooden language consists in an absurdity possible to be perfectly utilized by one’s own enemies is easy to understand; the safe losers are always the ignorant, the idiotic, and the unrealistic people, as they can be easily entrapped.

First, it is a matter of idiocy to imagine that, by using citations, one can replace 1400 years of History. Citations are tantamount to nothing; only diachronic practices reveal what Islam has been.

Second, only due to lack of proper education can one think that one may be able to understand any text written or words uttered before 1400 years in the exact sense and with the correct connotation that they had at the time; this is so irrespective of language, ethnic origin, religion, literature and culture. Connotations of words always change, and this is nothing ignorant theologians can possibly speak about. Now, the much needed task to identify the specific connotation that a word had when used within a specific text would demand the skills of honest and consummate scholarship, but unfortunately there cannot be acceptable scholarship in cases of indoctrination.

Third, the easiest persons to manipulate are always the imbeciles, who believe in a doctrine, while abstracting its elements and giving to the doctrine’s terms the meaning that they want (which did not exist historically) or can (due to their ignorance and lack of education). Such unsophisticated people usually attribute to their doctrine’s words absolute value, whereas the only absolute value is that of the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind each word’s original meaning.

However, due to their crudeness, these people cannot imagine that, before duly comprehending the meaning of a word, they have to recover first the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind it. So, they end up projecting their own, debased personal beliefs and conclusions onto the texts that they mechanically read (or at times learn by heart) without ever reaching the true meaning of the texts’ contents; but this process is well known to colonial academia.

Consequently, these persons convert their own personal misery into a permanent fight for egoistic self-confirmation and self-justification, and the abstractly taken elements of the doctrine that they believe in have unfortunately -in reality- only a subliminal psychological importance to them.

The hysterical screams of today’s fake preachers, sheikhs and imams during the Friday prayer khutbahs (sermons) are not a matter of Religion to be studied, but of Psychology. The same is valid for the various heretical pseudo-Christian pastors of the West, namely the Evangelicals, the Baptists, the Mormons and their likes.

There is no religion that forces the believers to scream hysterically; only theological-ideological indoctrination can cause this devious and disastrous behavior. However, this form of pseudo-Islamic indoctrination is what the colonial powers want to achieve among today’s fake Muslim preachers, sheikhs and imams, because only under these circumstances they can easily manipulate these miserable people subliminally.

This subliminal passion fully detaches these people from down-to-Earth reality, rendering them pliable enough for all those, who -for one reason or another- want these ignorant and misfortunate persons to fight for their unrealistic purposes, thus causing enormous damages to themselves, to their societies, and to their country’s national interests, institutions, and governments.

And that’s why Turks must drastically and resolutely remove Erdogan and AKP from power at all costs and as soon as possible. Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey is not a fake state like Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia or Saudi Arabia; and -as I already said- it cannot be ‘Islamized’. If a pseudo-Islamic dictatorship is imposed in Ankara, Turkey will simply cease to exist.

As soon as the basic traits of the state will be altered and stop functioning, Turkey will be dangling in the vacuum. This will not turn the entire structure into ‘Islamic’, as the corrupt and besotted Islamist slaves of the US, NATO, EU and UK believe before and after making their cursed and useless prayers. After the alteration of Turkey’s basic traits, the state will soon disappear, as it will have been canceled. The entire country would then suddenly find itself under the status of the Treaty of Sevres. The decomposition, which will ensue, will be far worse than that of the Ottoman Empire or, more recently, of the USSR; it will rather look like the present case of Yemen.

V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials

So, more than 15 years have passed after I published the aforementioned article, but I still stick to my conclusion: “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. This is still valid, not because the two countries improved their standards and strengthened their positions, but mainly due to the fact that many other Muslim countries totally collapsed and fell into chaos or fully capitulated to the evil elites of the Western World. Many countries still existed back in 2007, but do not exist as such anymore: Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Sudan. And many other countries, like Turkey and Iran, saw their power waning: Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. However, the situation of Turkey and Iran no longer concerns Ankara and Tehran only, due to the considerable changes that occurred at the international level with respect to the world balance of power.

Internal conflicts accentuated the growing social tension in the US; the refugee crisis plunged EU and UK into an impasse; despite the undeniable mistakes made in the Ukraine crisis (2013-2014 and 2022-2023) and in parallel with the successes marked in Syria (2015-2023), Putin managed to re-establish an impressively rehabilitated Russia at the epicenter of international relations; India and Brazil made themselves felt in the world affairs; Germany remained the sole economic power of EU; and China was transformed into one pole of the bipolar system that seems to prevail for the time being. Despite Beijing’s continuous affirmation of its dedication to a forthcoming multipolar world, we still do not -properly speaking- attest such a situation. It rather seems that many powers would find a China-US bipolar world good for them, at least for some time.

Turkey and Iran, under similar conditions, can cause serious trouble – not only if pitched against one another, but also if transformed into an obstacle on a country’s way to rising to prominence. The same is also valid for the fate of all other Muslim countries; an eventual dismemberment of just one of them or also a potential war between two of them can dramatically affect the interests of a major power. For the time being, Russia, China and Iran have managed to establish an alliance at many levels, involving also Tehran’s recent adhesion to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (as a full member state). About: https://www.academia.edu/53029736/From_the_Great_Game_to_the_Final_Game_Iran_Full_Member_State_of_the_SCO_as_the_Greatest_Event_of_the_21st_Century_text_pictures_and_legends_

Contrarily to Iran, Turkey followed an erratic path for all intents and purposes. After having been a fully accredited, modern Western state and society (thanks to Kemal Ataturk), Turkey got contaminated after 2002 by Islamism, anachronism, extremism, radicalism, obscurantism and self-destructive hysteria to significant extent. But as a Muslim country, Turkey is the sole NATO member state. This hiatus consists in a tragi-comical situation that can no longer exist; it leads to extinction.

In a rather recent article published in Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s foremost newspaper, on 21st September 2021, the distinguished Prof. Dr. Erol Manisali (1940-2022), a leading Kemalist intellectual and academic, made an extraordinary comparison; his article’s title was quite indicative in this regard (Erol Manisalı, AKP’nin ‘Osmanlıcılığı’, İngilizin ‘Brexit’ine mi benziyor! / https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/erol-manisali/akpnin-osmanliciligi-ingilizin-brexitine-mi-benziyor-1870529): «Does AKP’s ‘Ottomanism’ look like the ‘Brexit’ of the English?»

Prof. Manisali was absolutely right; Brexit was disastrous indeed for England, and Ottomanism (also known as Neo-Ottomanism) is definitely calamitous for Turkey. However, Prof. Manisali still clarified several points in which Brexit is (and is made) less disastrous than the forgery and the paranoia of Ottomanism. On the other hand, it is true that the two options have indeed something in common. Both political concepts constitute a form of retreat or isolation that can end up in seclusion and implosion.  

VI. What Russia and China must do

In the present article, I don’t intend to examine the troubles that will be caused by so virulently unrealistic purposes. I will come up with another article to examine the catastrophic perspectives that inconsistent, nonsensical and pathetic doctrines like Neo-Ottomanism, Neo-Safavism, Neo-Mughalism, Neo-Czarism, and Neo-Qingism may eventually cause if given some consideration and trustworthiness. Here, I intend to discuss the dangers ensuing from the subtle and smart utilization of such delusions that the crumbling Western colonial powers may make. For the Russian and Chinese aspirations to establish a multipolar world, these dangers may be lethal. That is why I will also suggest several measures that Moscow and Beijing must take; in addition, I propose the introduction of these methods to several other countries.  

Before all the rest, it is essential for many people worldwide to understand how the colonial powers of Western Europe and North America managed to survive. Both, the EU and the US seem to be collapsing and disintegrating nowadays; NATO has already been described as ‘dead’ by a member state’s head! And after five centuries of English colonialism, two world wars, one cold war, an unnecessary adhesion to the EU, and a final Brexit, England looks like a 15th c. country in a 21st c. world. The 15th century was a terrible period indeed for Western Europe, which was a barbarian periphery that experienced many wars and lost much blood in the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). At the very end of the 15th c., Western Europe was plagued with so many problems that the local kingdoms would irrevocably implode and disappear, if they did not expand colonially.

This reality must be carefully observed today by Chinese and Russians alike, because similar situations do not exist in their own national past. Consequently, the presently ailing Western states may well manage to survive by repeating exactly the same method, i.e. by exporting their own problems to others; their tactics in Ukraine do clearly confirm my assessment. Certainly, this involves more wars, more conflicts, more bloodshed, and greater risks; but the paranoid Western elites do not try to avoid them! Quite contrarily, they try to trigger them.

The silly but dangerous AUKUS bellicose rhetoric is just one example. It is absurd to take the Western political propaganda about ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ at face value. They did not want to impose ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. They are criminal enough to want to trigger only the situation that the entire world has clearly attested in the aforementioned misfortunate countries. The same can also happen eventually to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Algeria, Indonesia, and so on.

This means that the ensuing dangers are real and great, because the pulverization of numerous countries will cancel the long propagated dream of a peaceful multipolar world and significantly modify the scope of the historically founded and humanely prepared, multiply beneficial strategy One Belt One Road (OBOR/一带一路). How can Russia and China react to the chaotic plans of the Western World? To this question I will respond in the next part of this series of articles.

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

By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu (Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)

Pre-publication of chapter XVI 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 XIV, XV and XVI belong to Part Five (Fallacies about Sassanid History, History of Religions, and the History of Migrations). The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. 

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Hsiung-nu soldier from Saksanokhur, Tajikistan

However, soon afterwards, Europe faced two major threats that lasted many centuries: the Islamic armies and the Manichaean subversion. Despite their ferocity and their conquests, at a certain point the Islamic armies were stopped either in Western or in Eastern Europe. But the Manichaean tidal wave that hit Europe back was disproportional and beyond any expectation. Starting from the Eastern Roman Empire and the entire Caucasus region and as early as the 7th c. CE, the Paulicians triggered an enormous religious, social and imperial destabilization across vast lands. The famous Eastern Roman Akritai, i.e. the imperial Eastern Roman guards and frontal forces against the Islamic Caliphate, were – all – Paulicians, having rejected the Christian Orthodox Constantinopolitan theology. Digenes Akritas, the Eastern Roman Empire’s greatest hero and Modern Greeks’ most revered and foremost legendary figure was a Paulician, not an Orthodox.

Constantinopolitan patriarchs, emperors and theologians persistently described the Paulicians as Manichaeans; they used the same term also for the Iconoclasts. This does not mean that these religious, spiritual and esoteric systems of faith were ‘Manichaean’ stricto sensu, but they were definitely formed under determinant Manichaean impact. The same concerns the Bogomiles across the Balkans, Central and Western Europe, starting in the 10th c., the Cathars across Western Europe from the 12th c. onwards, and also many other religious, spiritual and esoteric systems that derived from the aforementioned.

The Muslim friends, partners and associates of the Paulicians were also groups formed under strong Manichaean impact and historically viewed as such; known as Babakiyah or Khurramites or Khorram-dinan, the 8th c. religious group setup by Sunpadh and led in the 9th c. by Babak Khurramdin made an alliance with the Eastern Roman Emperor Theophilos (829-842), an outstanding Iconoclast, and not only repeatedly revolted against the Abbasid Caliphate but also fought along with the Eastern Roman army in 837 in the Anti-Taurus Mountains to recapture Melitene (Malatya), and on many other occasions. The Khurramite commander Nasir and 14000 Iranian Khurramite rebels had no problem in being baptized Iconoclast Christians and taking Greek names (Nasir became then known as Theophobos), which shows the Manichaean origins and affinities of the Iconoclasts and the Khurramites. 

The state of the Paulicians

The massacre of the Paulicians

Kale-ye Babak, the impregnable castle of the Babakiyah (or Khurramites) near Kaleybar – East Azerbaijan, Iran

Afshin brings Babak as captive in Samarra. from a manuscript miniature of the Safavid times

Babak Khorramdin statue from Babek city in Nakhchivan province of Azerbaijan

Within the context of early Islamic caliphates, the Manicheans prospered, definitely marked by their superiority in terms of spirituality, letters, sciences, philosophy and cosmology. It was relatively easy for them to reinterpret the Quran as a Manichaean scripture; it was totally impossible for the uneducated and naïve early Muslims to oppose Manicheans in open debate or to outfox Manichaean interpretative schemes. Among the leading Muslim erudite polymaths, mystics, poets and translators of the early period of Islamic Civilization (7th – 8th c.), many defended all major pillars of the Manichaean doctrine and even the dualist dogma; Ibn al Muqaffa is an example. The illustrious translator of the Middle Persian literary masterpiece Kalila wa Dimna into Arabic was a crypto-Manichaean Muslim, and surely he was not the only. Ibn al Muqaffa was executed as per the order of Caliph al-Mansur (754-775), but the first persecution of the Manicheans started only under the Caliph al-Mahdi (775-785); however, this was the time many groups and movements or Manichean origin started openly challenging Islam and the Caliphate in every sense. However, it is noteworthy that the greatest Caliph of all times, Harun al Rashid (786-809), had a very tolerant and friendly stance toward Manicheans of all types.

Abu’l Abbas al-Saffah proclaimed as the first Abbasid Caliph: the Abbasid dynasty opened the door for a cataclysmic Iranian cultural, intellectual, academic, scientific and spiritual impact on the Muslim world.

However, it is only as late as the time of Caliph al-Muqtadir (908-932) that the Manicheans, persecuted in the Caliphate, left Mesopotamia in big numbers, making of Afrasiab (Samarqand) and Central Asia the center of their faith, life and activities. This was not a coincidence; many Turanians had already been long date enthusiastic Manichean converts and adepts, whereas several Manichaean monuments unearthed in Central Asia date back to the 4th c. At the time of al-Mansur, the Uyghur Khaqan (: Emperor) Boku Tekin accepted Manichaeism as official state religion in 763; the Uyghur Khaqanate stretched from the Tian Shan mountains and the Lake Balkhash (today’s Kazakhstan) to the Pacific. For more than one century, Manichaeism was the state religion across the entire Northeastern Asia.

During the same time, Manichaeism was diffused in Tibet and China. Similarly with what occurred in the Islamic Caliphate, Manicheans in Tibet and China had it easy to reinterpret Buddhism in Manichaean terms. As a matter of fact, Chinese Buddhism is full of Manichaean impregnations. For this reason, several anti-Buddhist Chinese emperors (like Wuzong of Tang in the period 843-845) confused the Manicheans with the Buddhists and persecuted them too. However, Manichaeism was for many centuries a fundamental component and a critical parameter of all social, spiritual, intellectual and religious developments in China. And this was due to the incessant interaction of Turanians and Iranians across Asia. About:

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/korramis

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophilos_(emperor)

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Muqaffa%27

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

During the Sassanid and early Islamic periods, the central provinces of Iran had to embrace many Turanian newcomers. This was one of the numerous Turanian waves that the Iranian plateau and its periphery had to welcome across the millennia. A vast and critical topic of the World History that was excessively distorted and systematically misrepresented across various disciplines of the Humanities is the chapter of the major Eurasiatic Migrations. Various distorting lenses have been used in this regard. It is surely beyond the scope of the present chapter to outline this subject, but I must at least mention it with respect to the persistent Orientalist efforts to divide and dissociate Iranian from Turanian nations across several millennia.

If one accepts naively the ‘official’ dogma of Western colonial historiography, one imagines that all the world’s major civilizations (Sumerians, Elamites, Akkadians-Assyrians/Babylonians, Egyptians, Cushites-Sudanese, Hittites, Hurrians, Urartu, Phoenicians, Iranians, Greeks, Romans, Dravidians, Chinese, etc.) were automatically popped up and instantly formed by settled populations. Modern historians, who compose this sort of nonsensical narratives, are monstrous gangsters intending to desecrate human civilization and to extinguish human spirituality. All civilizations were started by nomads, and there was always a time when all indigenous nations (each of them in its own turn) were migrants.

But modern Western historians intentionally and criminally misrepresent the major Eurasiatic Migrations in a most systematic and most sophisticated manner, by only introducing – partly and partially – aspects of this overwhelming and continual phenomenon, like spices on gourmet dishes. I do not imply that the Eurasiatic Migrations were the only to have happened or to have mattered; there were also important migrations in Africa, the Pacific, and the continent of the Aztecs, the Mayas and the Incas. However, I limit the topic to the migrations that are relevant to the History of Iran and Turan. So, those who study Ancient Roman History are customarily told that, ‘although everything was fine and civilized Romans prospered in peace’, suddenly some iniquitous barbarians arrived to invade Roman lands and to embarrass the civilized settled populations altogether; this type of bogus-historical presentations is a Crime against the Mankind, because it distorts the foremost reality of human history, namely that we have all been migrants.

There is no worst bigotry worldwide than that of settled populations.

Yet, every manual of history would be easily rectified, if few extra chapters were added, at the beginning and during the course of the narration, to offer an outline of parallel developments occurred in the wider and irrevocbly indivisible Eurasia.

The discriminatory, truly racist, manner by which the civilized migrants are presented in various manuals of (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Cushitic, Anatolian, Roman, Greek, European, Russian, Iranian, Dravidian, and Chinese) History helps only reinstate the vicious and immoral axiom that ‘History is written by the victors’. Every historian, who does not consciously write in an objective manner to reveal the truth and to reject the paranoia of the aforementioned adage, is an enemy of the Mankind.   

Beyond the aforementioned points, many historians today will try to find an excuse, saying that, by writing about let’s say the so-called ‘barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire’, they intentionally reflect the Roman viewpoint, because they rely on Roman historical sources. This could eventually be accepted, if stated in 1820, when the modern science of history had not advanced much, and only few archaeological excavations had taken place. But if this is seriously expressed as an apology today, it constitutes an outrage. The least one can say to these forgers is that they must first obtain an interdisciplinary degree, before publishing their nonsensical manual, or – alternatively – study several paperbacks on the History of the Migrant Nations (in this case: Huns, Vandals, Goths, etc.).  

An even greater mistake that modern historians make is that they present the continual phenomenon of Eurasiatic migrations in a most fragmentary manner; this creates, by means of Nazi propaganda, the wrong idea and the distorted impression that all of a sudden, every now and then, new migrants appear in the horizon, coming out of the vast Asiatic ‘nowhere’. This is an aberration and a fallacy. The absurd factoid, which is deceitfully called “Invasions of the Roman Empire” and is peremptorily dated between 100 CE and 500 CE, is merely an academic fabrication. Why?

First, there were incessant migrations before and after the said period.

Second, the aforementioned factoid is a fallacy due to the fact that, during the same period, other migrations took also place, but the specialists in Roman History do not mention (or even do not know) them; however, these migrations (that they fail to even name) constitute intertwined phenomena with those that they present in their manuals, and consequently their presentation is a conscious and plain distortion.

Third, the events are always portrayed as a menace of barbarism, as breach of Roman legitimacy, and as violation of a hypothetical right of the Roman Empire to exist. This is an outrage; the Roman Empire was not a sacrosanct institution. In many aspects, its lawless formation, barbaric expansion, and bloody wars constitute some of the World History’s bleakest pages. But criminal colonial historians never discussed ‘unpleasant’ topics with the correct terminology; they did not write for instance about the barbarian Roman demolition of Carthage, the monstrous Roman sack of Corinth, the savage Roman invasion of Seleucid Syria or the lawless Roman annexation of Egypt.

This is the disgusting bias of the Western colonial historiographers: when a negative development takes place against Rome, it is ‘bad’; and quite contrarily, when an undesirable occurrence happens to others, it is ‘good’. And in order to represent this vicious bias as ‘historical truth’, they mobilize a great intellectual effort, involving many methods. In this regard, the Eurasiatic migrations are absurdly fractured into many parts, and many of these parts are deliberately concealed, when focus is made on only one of them. The pseudo-academic methods involved to disguise and conceal the topic are numerous.

First, some migrations are not presented as such, but named after the migrant nations; examples: Scythians, Sarmatians, Celts. And yet, these nations are basically known due to their migrations across vast lands.

Second, other migrations are not mentioned as such, but called after the name of the location where excavations brought to light the material remains of a migrant nation’s civilization; example: Andronovo culture, Afanasievo culture, etc.

Third, several migrant nations of different origin are regrouped after the geography where they spread; this is totally paranoid, because no one can possibly ‘regroup’ the Vandals, who crossed Central and Western Europe, reached North Africa, settled in Hippo Regius and Carthage, and then attacked Greece, Sicily, Rome, Sardinia, Corsica and the Iberian coastlands, with the Huns, who crossed Siberia, Russia, and Ukraine, settled in Eastern Europe and attacked the Balkans, Italy and Gaul.

Fourth, several migrant nations are dissociated from one another migrant nation of the same ethnic origin (example: Huns and Turkic nations), whereas in cases of severe distortion, different names of the same nation, attested in diverse historical sources, are tentatively presented as names of two different nations (example: Huns and Hsiung nu whose name is erroneously spelled Xiongnu).

Fifth, several parts of migrant nations are arbitrarily dissociated from their ethnic counterparts and presented separately as settled nations (example: White Huns or Hephthalites).

Sixth, the ethnic origin of several migrant nations is confusingly presented (example: the Bulgars, who were a Turkic nation, are often included in Europe’s ‘Migration Period’ and categorized along with Slavs, whereas they should have been mentioned in the ‘Turkic migrations’!).

To the aforementioned inaccuracies, distortions and prejudices, a plethora of false maps is added to comfortably reduce the size of kingdoms, empires and nations whose existence did not happen to please the discriminatory minds of the perverse Anglo-French and American colonial historians. About:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afanasievo_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarmatians

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6kt%C3%BCrks

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

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

The end result of this systematization of Western colonial falsehood is that great and highly civilized conquerors and emperors like Attila, Genghis Khan, Hulagu Khan, Kublai Khan, Timur Lenk and others appear as mysterious meteorites, who came from “nowhere”, as barbarian invaders, and a “scourges of God”, whereas in reality they all (and many others) were far more educated, more cultured, more competent and more heroic than any Greek, Macedonian, Roman or European king or general. To the aforementioned historical reality additional, deceitful tactics and insidious procedures have been added by the criminal, racist, Western European and North American ‘historians’: they definitely proved to be able to write 100000 words to deplore the destructions supposedly caused to the Human Civilization by Attila, Genghis Khan, Hulagu Khan, and others, but when they happen to write about the fact that Alexander the Great burned Persepolis, they remain malignantly and partially silent, abstaining from any due criticism. 

King Attila with the Turul bird in his shield (Chronicon Pictum, 1358)

It would be far easier for all to tell the truth: ‘Asia is Turan’ for most of its territory. And the moral lesson must be drawn: the existence of a ‘state’ is not a reason for anyone not to invade its lands. States are not sacrosanct; and in any case, the territory occupied by the nation that setup the local state, in all cases of historical states, was also invaded by the ancestors of that nation in the first place.

The biased Western colonial historians carry out all these distortions as tasks in order to promote the lawless interests of their own disreputable states; for this reason they always concealed the following unwavering reality: throughout World History, various fundamental concepts like ‘land’, ‘state’, ‘nation’, ‘sacred place’, etc. have had different connotations among nations of nomadic migrants and nations of settled populations.

Furthermore, several fundamental concepts, which are valid among settled nations, have no validity at all among nomads and migrant nations, and vice versa. In addition, some basic concepts that exist among nomads and migrant nations start being altered and becoming different if and when these nations happen to settle somewhere ‘permanently’. The concept of ‘universe’ and the deriving imperative of ‘universalism’ are fundamental notions of nomads and migrant nations; notably, the Akkadians (early Assyrians – Babylonians), who first produced significant literary narratives to detail the concept, were also a migrant nation that had settled only few centuries before writing down in cuneiform texts their world views.

The History of Eurasiatic Migrations, in and by itself, highlights the extensive presence of Turanians in Iran since times immemorial. Thanks to the Turanians of the Achaemenid Empire, the Turkic nations of Central Asia, China and Siberia came to get detailed descriptions of faraway regions and lands, such as Mesopotamia, Syria-Palestine, the Caucasus Mountains, the Anatolian plateau, the plains of Ukraine and Central Europe, the Balkan Peninsula, and Egypt. Consequently, further the interaction between Iran and Rome progressed, more details about the western confines of Europe reached the Turanian nomads who were moving around Lake Balkhash (Kazakhstan), Yenisey River and Baikal Lake (Siberia), Orkhon River (Mongolia), the Tarim Basin (China), the Oymyakon River (Yakutia, Eastern Siberia) and other circumferences. The incessant waves of migrations to the West and to the South were not blind and desperate movements of uninformed barbarians, who ran like crazy on their horses; only the distorted publications of Western colonial historians contain similar, nonsensical conclusions.

The pattern of the Turanian military horsemen and skillful soldiers is absolutely prominent and protruding in the History of the Early Caliphates; but it is merely the continuation of a millennia long tradition. This consists in a very embarrassing fact for all the Western Orientalists specializing in Early Islamic History, and more particularly with focus on the 8th c. CE, the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate, and the rise of Abbasid Baghdad. They therefore constantly come up with incredible assumptions, farfetched arguments, nonsensical explanations, and sly innuendos to explain how and why so many Turanian soldiers and military heads appear in the Islamic Caliphate. In fact, without Turanian military skills, the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus may have not been overthrown.

It is well known that the early Islamic armies advanced up to Merv in today’s Turkmenistan (651) and they stopped there. For the next hundred years, the only Islamic advance in Asia was effectuated only in today’s Baluchistan province of Pakistan; only at the end of the 7th c. and the beginning of the 8th c., the Islamic armies reached the Indus Delta and Gujarat. But how the Islamic Caliphate started being flooded with Turanian soldiers as early as the last decades of the Umayyad rule, if there had not already been massive Turanian populations in the Sassanid Empire of Iran? If the Turanian nations were confined ‘somewhere in Eastern Siberia and Mongolia’ (as per the distortions of colonial Orientalists), why did they appear to be so deeply involved in battles and developments that took place in Mesopotamia and Syria during the first half of the 8th c.? The answer to this question is very simple: there were always massive Turanian populations in the Pre-Islamic Iranian empires.

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History of Achaemenid Iran 1B, Course I – Achaemenid beginnings 1B

Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

Outline

Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia

6- Western Orientalist historiography

The modern Western European specialists on Iran were first based on the Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Latin sources and on travelers’ records and descriptions. On his way to China, the Italian Franciscan monk Odoric of Pordenone was the first European to probably visit (in 1320) the ruins of Parsa (Persepolis) that he called ‘Comerum’. The site was then known as Chehel Minar (چهل منار /i.e. forty minarets) and later as Takht-e Jamshid (تخت جمشید/i.e. the throne of Jamshid, a great hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography about which we discussed). The Venetian Giosafat Barbaro visited the same location in 1474 and, being the victim of the delusions about which I spoke already, he attributed the erection of the majestic monuments to the Jews!

After the rise of the Safavid dynasty and the formation of the two alliances (the French with the Ottomans and the English with the Iranians), an English merchant visited Persepolis in 1568 and wrote a description that was included in Richard Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages’ (1582). Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions were first noticed and reported by the Portuguese António de Gouveia, who visited the site in 1602 and wrote about it in 1611. It is only in 1618 that the Spanish ambassador (to the court of the Safavid Shah of Iran Abbas I/1571-1629; reigned after 1588) García de Silva Figueroa associated the location with the great Achaemenid capital that was known as Persepolis in the Ancient Greek and Latin sources.

The Italian Pietro Della Valle spent five years (1616-1621) in Mesopotamia and Iran, visited Persepolis (1621), made copies of several inscriptions that he noticed there and took them back to Europe, along with clay tablets and bricks that he found in Babylon and Ur. This was the first cuneiform documentation brought to Europe. With respect to Persepolis he wrote that only 25 of the 72 original columns were still standing.

Good indication of the lunacy that Western Europeans experienced at those days due to their erroneous reading of the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historical sources about Achaemenid Iran is the following fact: after traveling in Asia and Africa, Sir Thomas Herbert wrote in his book (1638) that in Persepolis he saw several lines of strange signs curved in the walls. These were, of course, Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions, but at the time, the modern term ‘cuneiform’ had not been invented; however, excessively enthused with Greek literature about Ancient Iran, he ‘concluded’ that these characters ‘resembled Greek’! He mistook cuneiform for Greek! So biased his approach was!

The term ‘cuneiform’ (‘Keilschrift’ in German) was coined (1700) by the German scholar and explorer Engelbert Kaempfer, who spent ten years (1683-1693) in many parts of Asia. The monumental site of the Achaemenid capital was also visited by the famous Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruijn (1704) and the famous jeweler Sir Jean Chardin, who also worked as agent of Shah Abbas II for the purchase of jewels. He was the first to publish (1711) pertinent copies of several cuneiform inscriptions.

The German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr took the research to the next stage when he copied and published (1764) the famous rock reliefs and inscriptions of Darius the Great; in fact, he brought complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe. He realized that he had to do with three writing systems and that the simpler (which he named ‘Class I’) comprised 42 characters, being apparently an alphabetic script. Niebuhr’s publication was used by many other scholars and explorers, notably the Germans Oluf Gerhard Tychsen, who published the most advanced research on the topic in 1798, and Friedrich Münter, who confirmed the alphabetic nature of the script (in 1802). 

The reconstitution of the Iranian past proved to be far more difficult a task than that of the Ancient Egyptian heritage. This is so because, if we consider the Old Achaemenid Iranian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyphics as the earliest stages of the two respective languages and scripts, Coptic (the latest stage of the Egyptian language) was always known in Europe throughout the Christian and Modern times, whereas Pahlavi and Middle Persian (the corresponding stages of the Iranian languages) were totally unknown. For this reason, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, the first French Iranologist and Indologist, played a key role in the decipherment of the cuneiform writing, although he did not spend time exploring it. But having learned Pahlavi and Farsi among the Parsis of India, he managed to study Avestan and he translated the Avesta as the sacred text of the Zoroastrians was preserved among the Parsi community. Pretty much like Coptic was essential to Champollion for the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic, the pioneering work of Anquetil-Duperron and the knowledge of Avestan, Pahlavi, Middle Persian and Farsi helped the French Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the German Georg Friedrich Grotefend make critical breakthroughs and advance the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid.   

Grotefend’s Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1802, but it was rejected; in fact, he had deciphered only eight (8) letters until that moment, but most of his assumptions were correct. He had however to wait for an incredible confirmation; after Champollion completed his first step toward the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822, he read the Egyptian text of a quadrilingual inscription on the famous Caylus vase (named after a 18th c. French collector). Then, Champollion’s associate, the Orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, announced that Grotefend’s reading of the imperial Achaemenid name ‘Xerxes’ did indeed correspond to what the Egyptian hieroglyphic text testified to. This situation generated an impetus among Orientalist scholars and explorers; until the late 1830s and the early 1840s, Grotefend, the French Eugène Burnouf, the Norwegian-German Christian Lassen, and Sir Henry Rawlinson completed the task.

Shush (Susa), an Elamite and later an Achaemenid capital, was explored in 1851, 1885-1886, 1894-1899, and then systematically excavated by the French Jacques de Morgan (1897-1911), whereas Pasargad (the early Achaemenid capital) was first explored by the German Ernst Herzfeld in 1905. Persepolis was excavated quite later, only in the 1930s by Ernst Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Not far from Hamadan (the ancient capital Hegmataneh/Ekbatana of the Medes), the splendid site of Mount Behistun (Bisotun) had become world-famous even before it was excavated (initially in 1904) by Leonard William King and Reginald Campbell Thompson (sponsored by the British Museum). This was due to the fact that the famous trilingual Behistun inscription and the associated reliefs were carved at about 100 m above ground level on a cliff, and explorers had to scale the cliff. Several fascinating descriptions of the extraordinary location were written by travelers and visitors, before academic work was carried out there. Putting his life in risk, Rawlinson copied the Old Achaemenid text in 1835, and this helped him advance considerably the decipherment of the script. 

Without the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid, it would be impossible for Rawlinson to decipher the Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, and later for others to read the Hittite script which enabled us to have access to the most important and the most original Anatolian literature of pre-Christian times.

Behistun (Farsi: Bisotun / Old Iranian: Bagastana, i.e. ‘the place of God’) was mentioned by Ctesias, who totally misunderstood the inscription, attributing it to the ‘Babylonian’ Queen Semiramis and describing it as a dedication to Zeus! In reality, the text is part of the Annals of Emperor Darius I the Great, duly detailing his victory over a rebellion; the Iranian monarch dedicated his triumph to Ahura Mazda. Now, Semiramis seems to be an entirely misplaced Ancient Greek legend about the historical Queen of Assyria (not Babylonia!) Shammuramat. The Assyrian queen was consort of Shamshi Adad V and co-regent with her son Adad-nirari III (during his reign’s early phase). But the Assyrian Queen had nothing to do with Mount Behistun and the Achaemenid Iranian inscription.

In the early 17th c., Pietro della Valle was the first Western European to come to Behistun and sketch the remains. As a matter of fact, many European travelers and explorers visited Behistun, saw the impressive inscription, and disastrously misinterpreted it, due to their preconceived ideas, mistaken readings, and unrealistic assumptions.

A foolish English diplomat and adventurer, Robert Sherley, visited the location in 1598, and he considered the astounding reliefs and the inscriptions as ‘Christian’! Napoleon’s subordinate, General Claude-Matthieu, Comte de Gardane, visited the place in 1807 only to see in the monuments the representation of ‘Christ and his twelve apostles’! In 1817, Sir Robert Ker Porter thought that the impressive relief and inscriptions detailed the deeds of Emperor Shalmaneser V of Assyria and the transportation of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel to the NE confines of Assyria. Last, quite interestingly, the German spiritual-scientific society Ahnenerbe, which used Hitler for their non-Nazi, highly secretive projects, explored Behistun in 1938.

7- Early sources of Iranian History: Assyrian-Babylonian Cuneiform  

The early sources of Iranian History are Assyrian-Babylonian historical documents pertaining to the military, commercial and/or administrative activities of the Neo-Assyrian kings in the Zagros mountains and the Iranian plateau; these sources shed light on the earliest stages of Median, Persian and Iranian History, when the ancestors of the Achaemenids were just one of the many tribes that settled somewhere east of the borders of the Assyrian Empire.

Since the 3rd millennium BCE, Sumerian and Akkadian historical sources referred to nomads, settlers, villages, cities, strongholds and at times kingdoms situated in the area of today’s Iran. Mainly these tribes and/or realms were barbarians who either partly damaged or totally destroyed the Mesopotamian civilization and order. That’s why they were always described with markedly negative terms. On the other hand, we know through archaeological evidence that several important sites were located in the Iranian plateau, constituting either small kingdoms or outstanding entrepôts and commercial centers linking Mesopotamia with either India or Central Asia and China.

For instance, settled somewhere in the Middle Zagros, the Guti of the 3rd millennium BCE constituted a barbaric periphery that finally destroyed Agade (Akkad), the world’s first empire ever; and in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the Kassites descended from Middle Zagros to Babylon, after the Old Babylonian kingdom was destroyed (in 1596) by the Hittite Mursilis I, and they set up a profane kingdom (Kassite dynasty of Babylonia) that the Assyrians never accepted as a heir of the old Sumerian-Akkadian civilization.

As both ethnic groups learned Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian, their rulers wrote down their names, and thus we know that neither the Guti nor the Kassites were a properly speaking Iranian nation; the present documentation is still scarce in this regard, but there are indications that some of these people bore Turanian (or Turkic) names. 

For thousands of years, South Zagros and the southwestern confines of today’s Iran belonged to Elam, the main rival of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria. Viewed as the true negation of the genius of Mesopotamian civilization, Elam was ruled by the ‘kings of Shushan and Anshan’; the two regions corresponded to Susa (and the entire province of Khuzestan in today’s Iran) and South Zagros respectively. The name that modern scholarship uses to denote this nation and kingdom is merely the Sumerian-Akkadian appellation of that country. In Elamite, the eastern neighbors of the Sumerians called their land ‘Haltamti’. Their language was neither Indo-European (like Old Achaemenid and Modern Farsi) nor Semitic (like Assyrian-Babylonian); it was also unrelated to Sumerian, Hurrian and Hattic, the languages of the indigenous populations in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Recent linguistic research offers tentative approaches to the relationship between Elamite and the Dravidian languages, thus making of it the ancestral language of more than 250 million people.

Elamite linear and cuneiform writings bear witness to the life, the society, the economy, the faith and the culture of the Elamites, as well as to their relations with the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But they cannot help us reconstitute the History of the Iranian plateau, because the Elamites never went beyond the limits of South Zagros.

With the rise, expansion and prevalence of Assyria (from the 14th to the 7th c. BCE), we have for the first time a Mesopotamian Empire that showed great importance for the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau; consequently, this means that, for the said period, we have more texts about these regions, which earlier constituted the periphery of the Mesopotamian world, but were gradually incorporated into the ever expanding Assyrian Empire. Thanks to Assyrian cuneiform texts, we know names of tribal chieftains and petty kings, cities, fortresses, ethnic groups, etc., and we can assess the various degrees of Assyrianization of each of them; but it is only at the time of Shalmaneser III (859-824 BCE) that we first find a mention of the Medes and the Persians. The former are named ‘Amadaya’ and later ‘Madaya’, whereas the latter are called ‘Parsua’ (or Parsamaš or Parsumaš).

Assyrian cuneiform texts about the Medes and the Persians more specifically are abundant during the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BCE) and at the time of the Sargonids (722-609 BCE). It is noteworthy that the Parsua were first located in the region of today’s Sanandaj in Western Iran and later they relocated to the ancient Elamite region of Anshan (today’s Iranian province of Fars), which was devastated and emptied from its population by Assurbanipal (640 BCE). After the great Assyrian victory, which also involved the destruction of Susa, Assyrian texts mention the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, Cyrus I, as Kuraš, king of Parsumaš. He sent gifts to Nineveh and he also dispatched his eldest son (‘Arukku’ in Assyrian from a hypothetical ‘Aryauka’ in Ancient Iranian) there – nominally as a hostage, but essentially as a student of Assyrian culture, sacerdotal organization, and imperial administration and procedures.

The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III

Tiglathpileser III

Sarrukin (Sargon of Assyria) with his son and successor Sennacherib (right)

8- Pre-History in the Iranian plateau, and Mesopotamia

During the 4th, the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE, the major hitherto excavated Iranian archaeological sites are the following:

Tepe Sialk

Located near the modern city of Kashan, in the center of the Iranian plateau, and excavated in the 1930s by the Russian-French Roman Ghirshman, the site was first occupied in the period 6000-5500 BCE. The remains of the zikkurat (dating back to around 3000 BCE) show that it was the largest Mesopotamian style zikkurat. Tepe Sialk IV level (2nd half of the 4th millennium BCE) testifies to evident links with Sumer (Jemdet Nasr, Uruk) and Elam (Susa III). The site was abandoned and reoccupied in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BCE (Tepe Sialk V and VI). Its location and the archaeological findings let us understand that the site was a key commercial center that linked Mesopotamia with Central Asia and China.

Tureng Tepe

Located close to Gorgan in Turkmen Sahra (NE Iran) and excavated by the American Frederick Roelker Wulsin in the 1930s and by the French Jean Deshayes in the 1950s, the site was inhabited in the Neolithic and then continually from 3100 to 1900 BCE, when it appears to have been the major among many other regional settlements and in evident contact with both, Mesopotamia and Central Asia. There was a disruption, and the site was occupied again only in the 7th c. BCE (Tureng Tepe IV A) by newcomers.

Tepe Yahya

Located at ca. 250 km north of Bandar Abbas and 220 km south of Kerman, the site was of crucial importance for the contacts between Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley; it was also in contact with Central Asia. Excavated by the Czech-American Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky, the site was inhabited from ca. 5000 to 2200 BCE and then again after 1000 BCE. The genuine ‘Yahya Culture’ covered the first half of the 4th millennium BCE. The Proto-Elamite phase started around 3400 BCE (Tepe Yahya IV C); few proto-Elamite tablets have been unearthed from that stratum. This period corresponds to the strata Susa Cb and Tepe Sialk IV. During the 3rd millennium BCE, the site appears to have been the center of production of hard stone carving artifacts; dark stone vessels produced here were found / excavated in Mesopotamia. Similar vessels and fragments of vessels have been found in Sumerian temples in Mesopotamia, in Elam, in the Indus River Valley, and in Central Asia.

Not far from Tepe Yahya are situated several important sites that testify to the strong ties that the entire region had with Sumer and Elam in the West, the Indus River Valley in the East and Central Asia in the North; Jiroft gave the name to the ‘Jiroft culture’ which is better documented in the nearby site of Konar Sandal and covers the 3rd millennium BCE. Further in the east and close to the triangle border point (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan), Shahr-e Sukhteh was an enormous site which thrived between 3200 BCE and the end of the 3rd millennium BCE. It was associated with both, the ‘Jiroft culture’ and the Helmand culture, which was attested in several sites in South Afghanistan. Elamite texts were also found in that site, which already offered many surprises, involving the first known artificial eyeball and the earliest tables game with dice.

Several important prehistoric Mesopotamian sites demonstrate parallels and contacts with the aforementioned sites, notably

– Tell Halaf (near Ras al Ayn in NE Syria; the Neolithic phase lasted from 6100 to 5400 BCE, and the Bronze Age covers the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE),

– Tell al Ubaid (near Ur in Dhi Qar governorate; 6500-3700 BCE),

– Tell Arpachiyah (near Nineveh; the site was occupied in the Neolithic period, like Tell Halaf and Ubaid),

– Tepe Gawra (close to Nineveh; the site was occupied from 5000 to 1500 BCE),

– Tell Jemdet Nasr (near Kish in Central Iraq; 3100-2300 BCE), and

– Uruk {near Samawah in South Iraq; type site for the Uruk period (4000-3100 BCE), it was a major Sumerian kingdom and it was the world’s most populated city in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE with ca. 40000 inhabitants and another 90000 residents in the suburbs}.

In the next course, I will present a brief diagram of the History of the Mesopotamian kingdoms and Empires down to Sargon of Assyria – with focus on the relations with Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau.

Tepe Sialk

Tureng tepe

Tepe Yahya

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To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1Α

By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

https://vk.com/video429864789_456239757

https://ok.ru/video/5416043547224

https://www.brighteon.com/ca749192-7c1b-4a9d-901d-5f530611c965

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1B

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_9011%2Fall

https://ok.ru/video/5452334828120

https://www.brighteon.com/491e7afe-d4f6-4100-909c-3f35b9c57323

————————   

To listen to the audio, clink the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1 (a+b)

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_8990%2Fall

https://megalommatis.podbean.com/e/history-of-achaemenid-iran-1a-course-i-achaemenid-beginnings-1a/

—————————— 

Download the course in PDF:

achaemenid-iran-course-1b-textDownload

achaemenid-iran-course-1b-frameDownload

From the Great Game to the Final Game: Iran Full Member State of the SCO, as the Greatest Event of the 21st Century

The Earth is one and undividable; the historical presence of several major empires over the past 45 centuries does not consist in a division but rather in a union around the same human, universalist-ecumenist ideals. From Sargon of Akkad (薩爾貢/سارگون) to the Qing, the Romanovs, the Ottomans and the Qajar, various empires incarnated these very old, common to all, and permanently cherished ideals in their respective locations. And by entering in endless commercial, cultural and spiritual exchanges, the great realms of Afro-Asia gave new dynamics to the magnificent soar made by the original civilizations that started in the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE in Mesopotamia (美索不达米亚/ بین النهرین) and Egypt. And the Silk-, Spice- and Frankincense Routes across Lands, Deserts and Seas, which are commonly called ‘the Silk Roads’, demonstrated very well the supreme human value, i.e. the Unity of Earth Life, removing in reality all the frontiers across the main landmass where the Mankind dwells. About:

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/萨尔贡大帝

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

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/美索不达米亚

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

Starting with the late 15th and early 16th c., mankind was hit with an unprecedented plague that originated from a minor and insignificant peninsula, which had never been viewed as the center of a civilization or the location of a meritable kingdom by any civilized nation: Europe. I mainly refer to the current territories of Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium and England. These lands alone represent nowadays the historical meaning of what people define as “Europe” today.

I. Europe is not a Continent

There is a troublesome hiatus in this regard, and it is necessary to make things clear. When people across the world think today of ‘Europe’ as a so-called continent (‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’), they only demonstrate to what great extent they have been deceived by the propaganda that emanated from the aforementioned modern states. This delusion of a ‘Europe – Continent’ does not exist in History; it’s a fake. The inhuman means of its propagation do not concern the scope of the present article, but surely involve the education, the publications, the mass media, the psychological operations (psy-ops), the so-called ‘political life’ (a low level farcical act), and the pseudo-culture that these states imposed at home and abroad.

Throughout the ages, Europe was never viewed as a ‘continent’ (in the sense we mean now); it did not actually consist in a continent, and -even worse- it was not the land of a civilization that impacted World History. Europe did not represent a unity of culture, tradition, faith, ancestry or language in any sense. In reality, all the useless elements of Asia and Africa ended up in Europe one way or another. And more tragi-comically for the well-propagated Fake History of Europe, the few civilized elements of Asia and Africa, which generated a rudimentary civilization on what is now called ‘European soil’ (Cyprus, Crete, Rome, Macedonia), did so by merely reproducing Asiatic and African values, arts, traditions, concepts and techniques and by bringing with them forms of spirituality, faith, moral, piety and virtue that were typically African or Asiatic in their original form.

What puts European colonials’ pseudo-historical propaganda beyond all intents and purposes is the fact that the very few civilized kingdoms, which were formed on what is now called ‘Europe’ did not identify themselves as ‘European’, did not view ‘Europe’ as a cultural unity or imperial entity, and did not care for the largest part of what we now call Europe, because simply it was worthless to them.

Alexander the Great of Macedonia, the absolute embodiment of Anti-Greek or Anti-Hellenic ruler, deployed enormous effort to succeed to the Achaemenid rulers of Iran. He was not the invader of many lands, as the modern European pseudo-historical propaganda projects him to be; he only conquered the entire Achaemenid Iran because he wanted to be an Asiatic king of kings. That’s why he deliberately made of Babylon his capital and of the Sogdian princess Roxanne his wife. But the central and northern part of the Balkan Peninsula, which would be easy to conquer, fully disinterested him. And the same is also valid for Southern Italy and Sicily where Ionians and Dorians had established colonies, let alone the useless plains of Gaul and the plateau of the Iberian Peninsula.

Achaemenid Iran

And the Roman Emperors repeatedly and convincingly proved that to them Egypt was more important than Gaul, Anatolia was more worthwhile than Iberia, and Syria was more significant than Britain. Romans undertook a naval expedition against Arabia Felix (today’s Aden), but not around the otherwise useless coasts of Sweden, Norway and Finland. Optimus princeps Trajan (98-117; 圖拉真/ تراژان), the greatest Roman emperor of all times, carried out military expeditions down to Characene (today’s southern Iraq and Kuwait) and up to Caucasus Albania (today’s Azerbaijan), but he did not have the slightest concern about the shores of today’s Poland and Estonia or the Azov Sea and the plains of Ukraine. Even more exemplarily, not one Roman Emperor bothered to invade Hibernia, today’s Ireland. About:

The Roman Empire was not a European empire.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/圖拉真

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/تراژان

Through conquests and treaties, the Romans controlled in Africa a definitely larger territory than in Europe, but today’s forged maps are systematically produced in a way to scrupulously conceal this historical reality. Even worse, scholarly Orientalist bibliography is kept far from the hands of the average public (and therefore not duly popularized in education manuals, publishing houses, and the mass media) in order not to reveal the overwhelming and cataclysmic diffusion of Oriental cults, concepts, virtues, values, lifestyles, faiths, esoteric rites, mythologies, worldviews, religions, arts, symbolisms, cosmogonies, cosmologies, systems of eschatology and messianic soteriology, rites, ceremonials, forms of spirituality, wisdom and erudition across all European territories of the Roman Empire, and also in other lands in Europe. Quite contrarily to the pseudo-historical dogma that the European colonial intellectuals produced by fallaciously naming an entire period ‘Hellenistic and Roman Times’, this same period is indeed ‘Orientalist and Orientalizing Times’, due to the above mentioned prevalence of Oriental cultures and civilizations throughout Europe.

II. Colonial Gangsters, Division of the World, and the East-West Divide

A fake concept for Europe and a bogus-historical dogma were not the only calamities with which the European kingdoms affected the rest of the world; in fact, they were only two and among the last. The six colonial kingdoms used their military edge to inflict great empires and primitive structures with all sorts of disaster, destruction, ruin, death, and unadulterated inhumanity. Settler colonialism and intellectual-spiritual-cultural-intellectual-educational-academic-religious colonialism started with the evil treaty of Tordesillas (1494; پیمان تردسییاس /托德西利亚斯条约) and they soon attained unprecedented levels of monstrosity with the evil deeds of the Spanish and the Portuguese conquistadors. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519-1521; فتح امپراتوری آزتک توسط اسپانیا /西班牙征服阿兹特克帝国) before exactly 500 years and the destruction of the highly civilized Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (特诺奇蒂特兰/ تنوختیتلان) only heralded what would follow. About:

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/托德西利亚斯条约

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

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/西班牙征服阿兹特克帝国

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/悲痛之夜

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/特諾奇提特蘭

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

The division of the seas as per the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)

In the beginning of the 16th c., when such terribly inhuman crimes started being perpetrated by the first colonial empires, namely Spain and Portugal, there were still several human empires on Earth: in 1520, the Ottoman Empire covered a sizable territory in Western Asia, Northeastern Africa, and what is now called Southeastern Europe. In Western Africa, the Mali Empire (Manden Kurufaba) was still powerful, although superseded by the Songhai Empire.

In Iran, the Safavids were in power, controlling vast lands from Central Iraq to Herat to Baluchistan. The formidable Turanian-Mongolian Empire of the Golden Horde had split, but from today’s NE Balkans and Poland to the Pacific Ocean, a number of Muslim, Buddhist and Tengrist Turanian-Mongolian khanates controlled a really enormous territory. You needed only to speak Chagatay Turkic to cross (from west to east) the vast lands of the Qasim Khanate, the Crimean Khanate, the Nogai Horde, the Khanate of Kazan, the Astrakhan Khanate, the Uzbek Khanate, the Kazakh Khanate, the Khanate of Sibir (Siberia), the Turpan Khanate, the Yarkand Khanate, and the Four Oirat confederacy. In China, the Ming dynasty was still powerful, and in 1526, Timur’s (Tamerlane’s) great-great grandson Babur took power in Delhi, eliminating the earlier sultanates and founding the formidable Gurkanian Empire of South Asia, which is better known as the Mughal Empire.

The Golden Horde (Turanian-Mongolian Empire)

The divided Turanian-Mongolian Empire around 1500

The Ottomans around 1520

The Safavid Empire of Iran around 1520 which according to Western colonial propaganda was called ‘Persia’, although it was a Turanian Empire.

The Mughal Empire of South Asia

The Songhai Empire in the 15-16th c.

However, none of these empires’ human elites had an idea about the monstrous plans and the atrocious deeds of the then otherwise insignificant colonial barbarians, who aspired to conquer and disfigure the entire world through evil conspiracy, deceitful schemes, pernicious practices, and utterly inhuman deeds. The naivety of the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Ming emperors hinges on the fact that they did not studiously monitor the deeds of the colonial powers; furthermore, they mistook the European colonials for humans, and they did not make proper plans as to how to oppose them. The worst mistake of the great Asiatic and African empires was that they did not perceive the forthcoming encounter and clash in terms of long-term perspective, eschatological agenda, and human race extinction. Still, all these empires cherished traditions and beliefs that described the ‘evil’ extensively; but the Asiatic imperial elites failed to timely identify the European colonials as the evil par excellence.

Hitherto unconceivable concepts were then introduced, and the fallacious version of History, peremptorily produced by the European colonial elites, was instrumental in projecting onto the entire world the aberration of a division between East and West (or Orient and Occident). This forgery had a double headed axe’s use:

a) it made the colonial elites, academics, diplomats, administrators, army officers, soldiers, societies and average people in general utterly believe in their ‘proven’ superiority (whereas they are indeed multiply inferior, degenerate and inhuman), and

b) it convinced the targeted nations’ elites, academics, diplomats, administrators, army officers, soldiers, societies and average people in general that they were irrevocably inferior (whereas they are indeed superior, law-abiding and human in every sense).

III. Colonial Weaponization of Knowledge and Deceitful Schemes against the Entire Mankind (1494-1925)

None of the 16th c. great imperial establishments of Asia and Africa realized the extent of the colonial perversion, subversion and systematic falsification of the World History. Study, research, exploration, knowledge, erudition and wisdom were traits, activities, qualities and virtues invariably attested throughout millennia in Asia and Africa; however, the entire scope and the final target were always the same, namely the discovery of the truth and the improvement of understanding. There was never a claim of superiority and such an attitude or claim would appear as absurd; there was competition and quite often synergy.

All the intellectuals of Ionia, Attica, Aeolia and Macedonia willingly acknowledged that they went to Mesopotamia, Egypt and Iran to be educated in the vast temples- universities of the Oriental capitals, because there was only darkness in the multi-divided and backward, petty states of South Balkans. Scholars from all backgrounds and lands used to flock to Nineveh, to Babylon, to Iwnw (Heliopolis), and to Persepolis, and later to Alexandria, to Antioch, to Nisibis, to Ctesiphon, to Istakhr, to Gundishapur, and during Islamic times to Baghdad, to Cordoba, to Cairo, and to Samarqand without idiotic prejudices of ethnic or national, ancestral or racial superiority.

However, the weaponization of knowledge, as attested in magnificent colonial grand opuses like the famous Dutch “Hortus Malabaricus” (1669-1676) and the illustrious French “La Description de l’Égypte” (1809-1829), showed that the insidious European colonial adventure was not a simple military expedition, an economic exploitation, and a national enslavement, but it consisted in the total deprivation of the colonized nations from their natural and national resources, their urban and architectural environment, their traditional knowledge and cultural heritage, and their own identity.

La Description de l’Égypte – the cover page of the monumental voluminous publication

Even worse, the European colonial plague constituted a systematic and permanent projection of the false identity of subaltern and subservient humanoid onto all the civilized Asiatic and African humans; they had been civilized, but they were forced into abandoning their culture and civilization, into being barbarized and enslaved, and into being transformed into humanoid automatons to serve their barbarian masters, i.e. the inhuman monsters of Portugal, Spain, England, France, Holland and Belgium. European colonialism was therefore the complete, irreversible and ultimate dehumanization of the ‘Other’. In the History of Mankind, we can describe European colonialism as the Crime of Crimes.

Simply, in the case of Luso-Spanish, Dutch, and Anglo-French colonialism, the ‘Other’ was the entire world, and the vicious gangsters and forgers were the most worthless barbarians of Asia’s westernmost and most uncivilized peninsula. The result of the detrimental shock was evident: the Mughal Empire could not last more than 180 years after the publication of the “Hortus Malabaricus”, and the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist less than 100 years after the publication of the “Description de l’Égypte”. The morale of the story is easy to figure out: when the foreigners know ‘your’ possessions better than you do, you better ask the astrologers how much time is left before your state disappears.

The French colonial empire

The English colonial empire

This is so because, if foreigners know ‘your’ possessions better than you do, this means that your state is already useless and dysfunctional. It also means that your religion is apparently worthless and your sacred texts evidently valueless; and this is true, not in the sense that the religion and the sacred texts in question are meritless, but because you lost their true meaning and therefore your understanding of them is nil.

IV. Naivety and Subsequent Fall of the Oriental Imperial Elites: Mughal Empire, Qing China, Czarist Russia, the Ottomans & Qajar Iran  

It is interesting that the Opium Wars started only few years before the Mughal Empire disappeared. In 1839, the power of Bahadur Shah II was not greater than that of a puppet king in the Balkans or a tribal leader in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cornered among the Ottomans, the Russians, the English in ‘India’, and the English puppets in the pseudo-state of Afghanistan, the Iranian Qajar shahs could do nothing either to help the Chinese Qing or to organize their own defense with the much demanded final dissolution of Afghanistan and with an attack against British India.

It was too late for them; or perhaps one could say that for Imperial Iran, it was already too late in 1501, when the young shah Ismail Safavi, almost adored as the Messiah/Mahdi Incarnate in his early years, was spending his nights in fabulous banquets and sexual orgies, while the Luso-Spanish armadas were sailing across all oceans, which were literally prohibited to all Muslims, Chinese and the rest by virtue of the Treaty of Tordesillas of which no Iranian intelligence ever heard anything before the 20th c.

Ismail Safavi

Under such circumstances, no one has a doubt why Fat′h-Ali Shah Qajar (reign: 1797-1834) did nothing else except losing one more war to the Russians and spending his long days and his even longer nights with his 1000+ concubines, thus laboriously producing no less than 100 children and ca. 600 grandchildren (although several trustworthy historical sources include even higher numbers of heirs). The same is valid for the pious but stupid Ottomans whose best way of correcting a mistake was to commit another.

Fat′h-Ali Shah Qajar

And what is the difference between the last Mughal (Bahadur Shah II) and the last Ottoman (Vahdettin)? Having got a kick in the ass, the former died (1862) in Rangoon (Myanmar) where he was exiled; having experienced the same miserable fate, the latter died in exile (1926), in Sanremo (Italy); either in the East or in the West, an exile is an exile. It is therefore a permanent shame and an irrevocable disgrace. No one can raise a claim to Neo-Safavism, Neo-Mughalism or Neo-Ottomanism without being similarly destroyed and eradicated from the surface of the Earth. And quite instructively, today’s China does not play into the Neo-Qing game; neither does Republican Russia develop Neo-Czarist delusions.

Bahadur Shah II, the powerless Mughal emperor when he was still on his throne

The exiled Bahadur Shah II in his small cabin

Vahdettin, the most execrable and the most miserable of all Ottomans leaves his palace to sail on an English ship to Italy where he lived in exile for the last years of his shameful life

The Opium Wars did not signal only the beginning of the European-American-Japanese colonization of China; they also heralded the beginning of the end for the Romanov. Yet, it was a period of stability for Russia – or so it seemed. From 1825 until 1881, when Alexander II was assassinated at the age of 63, Russia was ruled by only two czars, namely Nicholas I and his son. But there was no foresight, no real study of the European colonials, and no identity clarity.

The Zionist assassination of the Freemason czar Alexander II

Russia’s most shameful spot: the room where Nicholas II and his family were assassinated, thus paying for the mistake to associate Holy Russia to the unholy and devilish colonial states of France and England. Russia’s and the Romanov dynasty’s destiny would be different, if Nicholas II became the ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary and liberated India from the English colonial contamination.

Few people understand that only identity clarity can offer success in the governance of a realm and in the status it rejoices at the international level; on the contrary, identity confusion leads mathematically to defeat and destruction. Imperial Russia was in fact a Western European colonial fabrication – not by means of military invasion but by virtue of colonial stratagems. Colonial investors, agents and diplomats bribed, corrupted and utilized Russian noblemen and royals, and through subtle machinations convinced the Romanovs that they were a ‘European’ power. Thus, the Anglo-French colonials pulled the Russians into their historical forgery, persuaded them that the ‘Russians’ were ‘Indo-Europeans’, dragged them into the fallacious scheme ‘Christianity vs. Islam’ (whereas the English, the Dutch and the French elites were virulently anti-Christian), and engaged them in the same colonial competition (not anymore “Scramble for Africa” but for the entire world). However, all these developments were calamitous for Russia, and finally they led only to the demise of the entire dynasty.  

The Russians were subtly made to believe that the ‘common’ enemy that they had with the English and the French was the Islamic World; this was a success of the Anglo-French colonial diplomacy. In fact, the Russians had much in common with the Muslims, whereas they had nothing in common with the Anglo-French colonial contamination.

The Opium Wars: one of the worst shames of the History of Mankind

Pu Yi, the last of the Qing emperors

As a virtually Turanian, Asiatic and Oriental superpower (like the Golden Horde), Russia had to support China in the Opium Wars, by making an alliance with Iran and by attacking Afghanistan and invading British India. But when you are an Asiatic and you think you are a European, you cannot possibly opt for the correct decision. That’s why identity clarity matters above all, when it comes to national survival. Identity recognition is a very serious and at times painful process; usually, you are neither what you think (are taught that) you are, nor what you would like to be. Only a very neutral and objective/objectivist standpoint toward past atrocities and a strict detachment from national/nationalist/nationalistic narratives, present dreams, and wishful thinking can offer you the key to your identity.

Similarly, during WW I, Russia had to be the ally of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Japan and Iran against France and England. In such a case, having no apparent reason to keep significant military forces in their western borders, the Russians could support the Ottomans against the English in Mesopotamia, Palestine and Hejaz, while three (3) million Russian soldiers with their Iranian allies could eliminate the fake state of Afghanistan and march on Delhi, invading the English colony and controlling the southern parts of Asia.

States function like human beings; the same rules apply to an individual and to a group of individuals. When someone does not do the correct thing, a mishappening takes always place. Wrong choices are constantly met with disastrous results; It was very unfortunate that the Russians participated with France and England in the vicious dismemberment of Qing China and that, in 1858-1860, through several ‘unequal treaties’ (the expression is an acknowledged historical term), they detached Outer Manchuria (外滿洲 / Приамурье). That’s why less than 60 years after Alexander II did this injustice to China, his grandson Nicholas II was deposed and assassinated. Alexander II was assassinated too (1881); but after his tragic death, Holy Russia still continued to exist. However, after his grandson’s assassination (1918), Holy Russia was no more. The ‘holy’ had been progressively but completely desecrated through the alliance with England and France.

V. Intellectual Colonialism and Orientalism

While the intellectual elites of the European colonial powers composed their false historical dogma on the basis of the intellectual-academic-cultural movements that we now call ‘Renaissance’, ‘Classicism’, and ‘Enlightenment’, arbitrarily distorting the past of their own lands, they also misinterpreted the History of Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire that they –also deliberately and erroneously- associated with them; it was a real usurpation of another nation’s past and cultural heritage. Then, peremptorily selecting earlier rejected philosophers of Ionia, worthless and forgotten politicians of Attica, long dismissed Aeolian poets, self-styled historians of Carian origin, authors of obscure past and unknown ancestry, repudiated tragedians and duly banished comedians, as well as forms of decayed lifestyle involving pedophilia and homosexuality, ritualistic orgies, and other absolutely pathetic and barbarian practices and traditions of various South Balkan tribes, they fabricated -out of thin air- what we now call ‘Ancient Greece’.

Ancient Greece never existed as a historical entity in the sense Ancient Phoenicia did. The royal divisions of the Ancient Phoenicians did not impact their culture and values that are now recognized for their coherence, consistency and uniformity. Quite contrarily, the disparate cultural elements that appear in the historical sources, the divergent religious beliefs and faithless lifestyles that are documented by means of archaeological evidence, and the incessant conflicts that pitched one ‘Ancient Greek’ city against another bear witness to the undeniable reality that ‘Ancient Greece’ never existed. In case, during the Antiquity and the Christian Times, the name had only a geographical connotation. In Islamic Times, it was duly forgotten.  It is one more colonial fabrication (just like the European ‘Continent’!) geared to be an element of destructive propaganda and a double headed axe. This is what we now call ‘Hellenism’, i.e. a racist ghost.

Hitherto unconceivable concepts were then introduced, and the fallacious version of History, peremptorily produced by the European colonial elites, was instrumental in projecting onto the entire world the aberration of a division between East and West as per which

a) all the positive values, virtues, elements, contributions and exploits were delivered by the Ancient Greeks and Romans (the so-called ‘West’),

whereas

b) all the negative values, sins, disorders, embarrassments, and shames were caused by all the Ancient Oriental nations, the Eastern Christians of all denominations (Orthodox, Miaphysitic/Monophysitic, and Nestorian), and all the Muslims (the so-called ‘East’).

It goes without saying that the latter (b) were (or rather ‘had to be’) ‘lower’ than the former (a)!!

To add insult to injury, the colonial academic elites turned their intellectual and scientific robbery of the colonized nations’ natural and national resources, urban and architectural environment, traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, and diachronic identity into an unprecedentedly enormous academic fallacy. Colonial explorers, epigraphists, linguists, archaeologists, philologists and historians deciphered dozens of ancient scripts, surveyed and excavated dozens of thousands of archaeological sites, penned millions of speeches, articles, manuals and books, and filled thousands of libraries and museums with an enormous documentation which consists basically in a calamitous, venomous and discriminatory misrepresentation of the historical past of Asia and Africa. This enormous falsehood is now called Orientalism. All the discoveries, analyses, syntheses, conclusions and interpretations of the colonial Orientalist scholars were published and popularized only in a way to preserve the earlier constituted pseudo-historical dogma intact; this means automatically that vast part of the said documentation was concealed far from the average public.

There are many deliberately erroneous aspects of Orientalism; it goes beyond the scope of the present article to refute the atrocities of the Western colonial Orientalists. However, I must herewith mention a persistent and critical dimension of historical falsification that concerns the use of the forged World History that the Western colonials make.

When you initially write and teach a ‘World History’, based on historical sources that cover the period 500 BCE – 1500 CE and then, at a later stage, you discover numerous anterior sources, which reveal to you (with respect to the outright majority of the world’s historical nations) diverse aspects of spiritual exploration, intellectual endeavor, scientific research, cultural life, artistic genius, economic activity, state governance, public administration, military expedition, imperial conceptualization, and interstate relations that cover 2-3 millennia of History (which antedate the period you initially knew about), then you have to amend all your earlier criteria, preconceived ideas, measures of evaluation, moral standards, virtues, world views, concepts, and standpoints, values, theories, ideas, assumptions and conclusions, because they are -most probably- entirely wrong. 

When you discover millions of texts in several languages and you get a clear idea of how life was 2000 or 3000 years before the moment you -arbitrarily and due to lack of sources- had taken as the ‘beginning of History’, then everything that you ‘knew’ (before the astounding discovery and the subsequent enrichment of knowledge) is wiped out, obliterated, and considered as obsolete once forever.

If we eventually suppose that the peremptory aberrations and the arbitrary conceptualizations of the Renaissance European colonial intellectuals were not malignant schemes providing only for the enslavement of the entire Mankind but mere errors and erroneous assumptions, then we can safely conclude that all these earlier aberrations and conceptualizations had to be immediately, completely and adequately amended in the light of the enormous amount of evidence unearthed, deciphered, studied, analyzed and interpreted.

Enuma Elish, the ancient Assyrian-Babylonian holy text that consists in the first human narrative of the Creation. After the discovery, decipherment, publication and study of the world’s earliest myths, epics and holy texts, everything changes, and we cannot afford to use posterior criteria to evaluate earlier masterpieces of spirituality and literature. On the contrary, all earlier, Assyrian-Babylonian and Egyptian, cultural and spiritual criteria apply to the evaluation of posterior epics and holy texts, notably those of the Hebrews, the ‘Greeks’ and the Romans.

The Hawara papyrus with text of Homer’s Iliad. After the decipherment, study and publication of Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian and Hittite holy texts, myths and epics, the only value that Homer’s epics can possibly have is the one that the Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian and Hittite criteria allow us to assess.

The fact that this development did not happen at all and the evident practice that today’s West European and North American colonial academics and intellectuals continue diffusing the same, preconceived and widely imposed falsehood are enough to convince all persons of good intentions that the European pseudo-historical dogma has always been deliberately and inanely false from A to Z.

VI. The Fake Science of Geopolitics

Since the misrepresentation of the ‘Other’ reached such extent, it was normal for the colonial elites to develop additional nonsensical theories, which were laboriously portrayed as ‘scientific disciplines’. In fact, they were merely wishful thinking defense mechanisms that lacked historicity, objectivity, authenticity, veracity and congruity; in brief, they were tools of propaganda and means to fool the eye. One of these arbitrary schemes is what people now call ‘geopolitics’. There is no geopolitics in any sense, and there can’t be any; the term is totally meaningless and self-contradictory.  

Coined by the Swedish political scientist and politician Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922), the term ‘Geopolitics’ (initially Geopolitik in Swedish and German) contains two linguistic elements in striking contradiction to one another. Being composed of two Ancient Greek words (γη+πολιτική/ge+politiki) that mean ‘earth’ (or ‘land’) and ‘politics’, the term was geared to purportedly describe “the study of the effects of Earth’s geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations”.

This assumption raises many points; first, ‘earth’ (γη) is not ‘geography’; second, ‘geography’ (lit. description of the earth) was already an ancient science that the Ancient Greeks and Romans learned from the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and other ancient and highly civilized nations. Modern geography is a scientific discipline dedicated “to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of the Earth and planets”, but Modern Geography and Ancient Geography are two completely different disciplines, methods, concepts and endeavors. This is still preliminary.

The main problem of the term ‘Geopolitics’ (‘earth’ and ‘politics’) is precisely that the Earth (or land) is unrelated to politics, and actually no politics can possibly apply to the Earth or most of the surface of the Earth. ‘Politics’ constitutes a very specific and historically marginal system of governance that can concern only a city-state (polis). There is no ‘politics’ in an empire, a kingdom, a nomad confederation, and a sizable realm of any racial, ethnic, linguistic, cultural and spiritual background. There was no ‘politics’ in Ancient Egypt, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Hittite Anatolia, Cush (Ancient Sudan), Carthage, Iran, Yemen, Turan, and China. There was no ‘politics’ in any Balkan or Anatolian kingdom; and there was no ‘politics’ in Seleucid Syria, Attalid Pergamum, Bactria, Sogdia or Kushan.  

Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Alcibiades taken by Socrates. Politics can exist in a small city-state with no hereditary rule. However, a major state, let alone an empire, cannot be ruled by means of politics. As it is only the result of negotiations, material compromises, desecrated social life, corruption and impiety, politics is an improper, immoral and calamitous system even for the unfortunate cities-states that happen to be organized in this manner. But Western Europeans could not possibly understand this reality, because they had disastrously idealized the misery of Ancient Athens, one of the world’s most disreputable states.

Ancient Rome offers a good example in this regard; there was no politics in the Kingdom of Rome (Regnum Romanum; 753–509 BCE); there was politics in the Roman Republic (Senatus Populusque Romanus; 509-27 BCE); and there was no more politics in the Roman Empire (Imperium Romanum; 27 BCE-476 CE).

Subsequently, there was no ‘politics’ in the Eastern Roman Empire, in the Sassanid Empire of Iran, in the Gupta Empire, in Han, Tang, Yuan or Ming China, in the Islamic caliphates, sultanates, emirates, and khanates, in the Christian kingdoms of Western Europe or in any other nomadic confederation, realm or dominion. No system of governance can possibly be called ‘politics’ except for the republican administration of a city-state with democratic participation in the rule.

Certainly, the currently prevailing confusion makes everyone imagine that politics means governance and vice versa, but this represents only one more aspect of the multifaceted colonial propaganda that was diffused worldwide during the 19th and the 20th c. Useless to add, for any sizable realm larger than a modest self-governed city, there is no ‘politics’ today; the system is a tyranny disguised as ‘republic’ or ‘democracy’ and there cannot be any comparison between today’s fake politics and Ancient Roman or Athenian politics, except in terms of corruption, evil character, pernicious attitude, and social disorder.

So, to return to the initial point, “the effects of Earth’s geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations” (as per another definition of the fake term) should be rather called “geo-imperium”, “geo-tyranny”, “geo-dictatum” or “geo-control”; perhaps the best term would be “geo-sovereignty”. This is also proven by the deplorable contents that all the Western colonial academics, intelligence and military experts, diplomats and intellectuals invariably gave to the fake term ‘geo-politics’. Suffice it that one studies these ‘contents’ to realize that ‘geo-politics’ is an ahistorical mixture of criminal colonial targets with incessant distortions of the historical past. It has nothing to do with the ‘governance of one city with non-hereditary rule.  

Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) came up with a debased theory, as per which the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, Qing China, Japan, and the colonial pseudo-state of Afghanistan were facing existential threats from the so-called ‘two monsters’, namely England and Russia. This nonsense can only be the invention of a cruel American pro-French/pro-Republican colonial, who felt that -despite France’s disproportionate control of African lands- Paris did not play an important role in the so-called ‘Big Game’ between Russia and England. Had the Vietnamese Nguyen dynasty survived the French colonial onslaught, Mahan would surely have invented a much larger ‘zone of threatened realms’ (probably between the 10th and the 40th parallels north, not only between the 30th and the 40th parallels north)! He presented himself as a Christian, but he was a Biblical racist and therefore a pseudo-Christian.

Until today, Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) is viewed as the principal heresiarch of the geo-political fallacy. All that he did was to draw fake lines, which did not represent historical realities in any sense. His long celebrated ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ (1904) reflected the harsh antagonism of German, Russian and English scholars and explorers in parts of today’s Central Asia and Western China. Many people read this book, but do not know that it was written immediately after the first expedition (1900-1901) of Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) in Central Asia, during which the Hungarian Jewish-English explorer and British Intelligence officer carried out surface surveys, extensive reconnaissance, and excavations at Dandan Oilik, an oasis of the Taklamakan Desert. Mackinder’s book was published only months after Aurel Stein’s ‘Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan Personal Narrative of a Journey of Archaeological & Geographical Exploration in Chinese Turkestan’ (1903). 

Mackinder’s texts reflect colonial concepts, diplomatic efforts, and Orientalist terms and explorations; at the time, Aurel Stein was still using currently obsolete terms like ‘Serindia’ (China, Indochina and India viewed as an entity) and ‘Innermost Asia’ (Central Asia, Western China, Mongolia, Central and Eastern Siberia) because his time was a period of pioneering research in those territories that had not been visited by Western European colonials until then. At those days, colonial Orientalists had already gathered enough evidence to fully document the History of Turan and to understand how internal Turanian (Turkic and Mongolian) conflicts generated endless historical waves of immigrants either to the South (in today’s China) or to the West (in today’s Central Siberia, Central Asia, Iran, Western Siberia, Eastern and Central Europe). This reality is hidden behind Mackinder’s concept of ‘pivot’ that he defined as the central point in his otherwise nonexistent ‘World-island’. However, his pivot area was not historically pivotal. Worse, it never existed as a geo-historical entity!

Even if we take the Afanasievo culture (3300=2500 BCE; in the Altai Mountains) and the Andronovo culture (2000-900 BCE; north of the Aral Lake) as signs of early and successive migratory waves, we cannot afford to define today’s NE Siberia, Central Siberia, Central Asia, and Iran’s northern and central parts as the real geographical ‘pivot’ of History. Quite contrarily, pivotal for the World History was the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’ – another pseudo-historical term that denotes Mesopotamia, Syro-Palestine and Egypt. It is from there that civilization spread to the rest of the world. But in 1904, these regions were controlled by the Ottomans (Mesopotamia and Syro-Palestine) and the Anglo-French colonials (Egypt), and there was not much at stake. Contrarily, in the lands that Mackinder described as ‘pivot’, the possible limits of a) the German involvement, b) the English infiltration, c) the Russian advance, and d) the Chinese presence were unknown, whereas all borders were essentially ill-defined.

Last, Mackinder’s tripartite division of the world {into World-Island, offshore islands (England and Japan), and outlying islands (America and Oceania)} is nonsensical either at the historical or the geographical level. Why didn’t he include Indonesia? Probably because it was already colonized by the Dutch and nothing was at stake there. Inane!

On the other hand, Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) produced a geopolitical system that reflected many historical concepts and approaches to imperial governance. In strong contrast with Mackinder’s bizarre abstractions and ahistorical maps, Haushofer’s ideas appear sound and solid. But they are not … ‘geopolitical’! They represent merely a traditional imperial worldview, and they constitute the basics of the state prosperity and expansion as documented in 18th dynasty Kemet (Egypt), Sargonid Assyria, Achaemenid or Sassanid Iran, Han or Tang China, the Abbasid caliphate, and the Timurid Empire.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing ‘new’ or ‘modern’ in Haushofer’s ideas; they are correct, but they constitute the antipodes of the colonial nonsense that we nowadays call ‘geo-politics’. I simply wonder why the distinguished German scholar did not have the courage to decry ‘geo-politics’ as a fake science and to portray the Anglo-Saxon colonial paranoia as the supreme danger for the Mankind’s survival.

The notion of the organic state, the theory of Lebensraum, the need for self-sufficiency-self-reliance (autarky), and the division of the world into spheres of influence or distinct realms (pan-regions) can be found in cuneiform, hieroglyphic, Chinese, Middle Persian, Arabic and Farsi historical sources – millennia before Haushofer put them down on a piece of paper. But they were not described as ‘geopolitical notions’; they were viewed as basics of imperial governance. The only element that did not exist during the Antiquity and the Christian-Islamic times is the delusion of dichotomy between land power and sea power. But in this, Haushofer was apparently influenced by those whom he had to firmly oppose but failed to do so: his Anglo-Saxon opponents.

As it could be expected, on the earlier basis of ahistorical sketches and arbitrary aberrations, further fallacies and false notions were progressively added. Nicholas Spykman (1893-1943) expanded the erroneous concept as per which today’s NE Siberia, Central Siberia, Central Asia, and Iran’s northern and central parts are the ‘pivotal’ area. He then peremptorily and therefore erroneously divided the Afro-Asiatic landmass into a) the so-called ‘heartland’ and b) the ‘rimland’. These jolly delusions never existed in the History of Mankind; they actually do not consist in any worthwhile synthesis or serious interpretation of the existing historical sources. They only reflect the Anglo-Saxon regimes’ final goals, and the evil methods that they intend to use in order to achieve them; in other words, one can surely describe them as ‘wishful thinking’ and properly decry them as the most serious threat against the entire Mankind.  

Fake lines, fake borders, fake concepts and fake science: geo-politics

Before ending this unit, I feel obliged to shift the discussion from the false and fake ‘geo-politics’ to the true and genuine ‘geographical determinism’. When it comes to topics pertaining to the Earth’s impact on empires, peoples and cultures, one has to point out that these topics did not come to surface only in Modern Times; they have constituted an integral part of all the major civilizations of World History. They were known as part of the ancient wisdom, knowledge and sciences; and this was already known to Orientalists, historians and philologists. This knowledge we presently define as ‘geographical determinism’.

Ancient erudite scholars, high priests, mystics and explorers always viewed the material universe as hinging on the spiritual universe; consequently, they were adamant in identifying concordances between the two entities. Part of their scientific knowledge and understanding depended on their spiritual wisdom and exploration. Among the scientific disciplines that they developed and which they viewed as an undividable unity of spiritual and material knowledge and wisdom, ‘geographical determinism’ was only one.

Geographical determinism was not only a concept and a theory, but a practice and a set of criteria as to how to live in Ancient Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Hittite Anatolia, Elam, Cush, Canaan-Phoenicia, and Iran. The same is valid for Carthage, Yemen, the Indus Valley, Turan, and China. The choice of dwelling places, the urban plans, the construction of temples and palaces, the orientation of cities, the identification of sacred sites, the direction of prayer, the selection of specific locations for rock reliefs and inscriptions, the recognition of the correct spots to place enormous statues, pillars and obelisks, altars and thrones, in one word everything, depended on the conclusions drawn after a deep study of geographical determinism.

Nineveh

Etemenanki, the world’s holiest location as per the Babylonians

Ishtar’s Gate, Babylon – Berlin Museum

Parsa (Persepolis), the Achaemenid capital of Iran. Not only the selection of major sites (for palaces and temples) but also the minor details of a society’s daily life were arranged on the basis of geographical determinism.

In fact, the interconnection of the spiritual and material universes is the sole factor that denotes and specifies the nature and the traits of every single geographical point, therefore revealing its uniqueness, importance and possible use. High priests, mystics and hierophants were able to duly explore and describe the locally particular interaction of the five elements (i.e. Ether, Soft Waters, Earth, Air, and Salt Waters) and the subsequent generation of electromagnetic flow per point. This is how they concluded as regards the eventual use of the geographical point, ground, space or area.

It matters little whether you delve in Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian and Iranian Cosmogony and Spiritual Ontology (see above, as regards the five elements) or you explore the Traditional Chinese Wuxin (五行) Ontology, as per which the five elements are the following: Metal (initially conceived as Gold and corresponding to Ether), Water (evidently conceived as Soft Waters), Earth, Wood (corresponding to Air) and Fire. The conclusions were always identical. At the end of the day, either you were at the banks of Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Huang-he (黃河/Yellow River) or Chang Jiang (黃河/Yangtze), geographical determinism functioned always as (to use a modern term) a fully accredited ‘urban environmental acupuncture’.

Traditional Chinese Wuxin (五行) Ontology

The ‘woke’ attitude to transfigure the term and turn ‘geographical determinism’ into ‘environmental determinism’ reveals only the ignorance and the paranoia of the corrupt left-wing social-justice movements and ideologies that currently exist in the worthless and already defunct Western world. This is so, because ‘geography’ meant always the study of the environment (not only the earth) in historical periods.

VII. From the Great Game to the Final Game

European colonial powers’ expansion brought destruction, barbarism, pandemics, wars, deaths, misery, poverty, inhumanity, demolition of cultures, and deracination of millions of people. European colonialism caused also two world wars and a 44-year long ‘cold war’. For these nefarious results and for all the crimes perpetrated, the European colonial states (Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium, and England) and their derivatives (USA, Canada, and Australia) will have to pay dearly for their attempt to annihilate so many historical nations, destroy their traditions, and uproot their cultures.

Quite unfortunately, the Western colonial and neo-colonial powers did not regret and did not repent for the calamitous and inhuman deeds that they carried out worldwide. There is a serious reason for this grave mistake and unacceptable attitude; the unrepentant savages of US, UK, NATO and their allies are controlled by forces that push the world to the edge, as they advance in the implementation of an eschatological agenda that provides for the extermination of more than nine tenths of the current world’s population. If this claim appears farfetched, one has only to read the text of the magnificent monument known as the Georgia Guidestones; it will be enough.

The persistent manner by which the ruling classes of the colonial powers seek to achieve the extermination of the largest part of world’s population is not a reason for inactivity and despair. There are opposite forces actually working to avert the evil plans, cancel the targets, and lead the colonial powers to self-destruction, social chaos, climactic disorder, ultimate implosion, and total decomposition. Constituting a continuation of the Shanghai Five, which started in 1996 as a mutual security agreement between China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) consists in the greatest alliance in the History of Mankind as it represents more than 40% of the world’s population and almost 25% of the global GDP.

Offering a multi-level synergy in diverse fields, such as security, economy and cultural cooperation, SCO was launched in 2001 with the additional engagement of Uzbekistan; it was considerably enlarged in 2017 with the participation of Pakistan and India as full members. Observer status was offered to Mongolia (2004), Pakistan, India and Iran (2005), Afghanistan (2012) and Belarus (2015). Dialogue partner status was extended to Sri Lanka (2009), Turkey (2012), Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Nepal (2015).

SCO expanded in parallel with the groundbreaking Belt and Road Initiative (OBOR) and in cooperation with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU: Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia as members and Uzbekistan, Moldova and Cuba as observers). On 17th September 2021, Iran was accepted as full member state (the technical and legal processes may take more than a year to be completed) and Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia were granted dialogue partner status.

Tacikistan’ın başkenti Duşanbe’de Şangay İşbirliği Örgütü’nün (ŞİÖ) Devlet Başkanları Zirvesi düzenlendi. Zirve toplantısına katılan İran Cumhurbaşkanı İbrahim Reisi (solda), Tacikistan Cumhurbaşkanı İmamali Rahman (sağda) tarafından karışlandı. ( İran Cumhurbaşkanlığı – Anadolu Ajansı )

Governed by consensus, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is not the anti-NATO or anti-EU as many people think; however, if we take into consideration the brilliant failures of NATO where one member sabotages the goals of the other and the final impasse of the European Union where every plan has been in deadlock after the European refugee crisis (2015) and the Brexit referendum (2016), no one needs to repeat the experience of these two bodies or to function similarly. The Turkish-Greek row for the case of NATO and the courageous, constant and resolute opposition of the Visegrad Group to the Brussels authorities constitute the perfect examples in this regard.

Being a forum for cooperation, synergy and engagement rather than a typical regional alliance, SCO will be able to gradually encompass Southeast Asia and Africa, thus leaving US, UK, Canada, Australia, France and Holland to implode all on their own. To mark an outstanding success as the world’s first superpower with human face and without colonial past, Beijing must steadily maintain a multilayered approach to international affairs, distinguishing bilateral alliance from multilateral cooperation.

Drawing on hitherto successes and capitalizing on its enormous resources, China must act as the liberating force within a world plagued with colonial divisions, racist concepts, discriminatory prejudices, delusional Euro-centric theories, and historical falsifications. Creating the image of a popular superpower, China must build on Education, Culture, Intellect, Science, Humanity and Justice, unveiling to all and demolishing forever the myths, the delusions, the aberrations and the forgeries that supported the West European and North American colonial adventure, i.e. mankind’s worst nightmare.

About:

https://www.president.ir/en/131311

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https://www.mk.ru/social/2021/09/17/iran-poluchil-status-polnopravnogo-chlena-shos.html

https://news.cctv.com/2021/09/09/ARTI7XWt2KbA2OzpqwkLmh1a210909.shtml

http://world.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0917/c1002-32230485.html

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https://www.ntv.ru/novosti/2607682/

https://www.irna.ir/news/84473661/دستاورد-های-عضویت-کامل-ایران-در-سازمان-همکاری-شانگهای

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https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/india-to-join-sco-summit-in-dushanbe-today-afghanistan-affairs-high-on-agenda-101631837729929.html

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Iran-to-gain-Central-Asia-clout-with-entry-into-SCO-security-club

https://www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/2021/08/12/iran-to-finally-take-full-membership-of-the-shanghai-cooperation-organisation/

https://www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/2021/09/01/egypt-saudi-arabia-to-join-shanghai-cooperation-organisation-as-dialogue-partners/

https://www.turan.az/ext/news/2021/9/free/analytics/en/7826.htm/001

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How subtly Colonial Orientalists and Egyptologists promote the Evil Theory of Pan-Arabism

Excerpts from my correspondence with an ignorant Pan-Arabist Tunisian reader about Ancient Egypt, Punt (Somalia), and ‘Arabia’, a nonexistent land in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE

Question

Many thanks dear Friend for your long email,

I’m from Sfax, and by chance I worked about Ramsenites a kind of stories widely spread in north africa. You are specialized also in old languages and I have a question about the representation in old egypt about Amoon sun-rise coming from the east Arabia? with smell of perfume and myrrh, is it true that rulers of old egypt were from yemen? So by the way what is the new traduction of this word in hieroglyphic (Cf. enclosed)

Response

The picture that you sent me shows how vicious the colonial, Egyptological – Orientalist academics of France can be; they write a fake translation to confuse the readers and the students, and in the footnotes they try to say indirectly the truth, but end up in other lies! It is hypocritical, inane, inhuman and Satanic.

There is no ‘Arabia’ in any hieroglyphic text of the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st millennium BCE; and there is no Arabia in the text that you provide me with. The footnote includes another wrong word, e.g. Orient, but the vicious and criminal French pseudo-scholar writes ‘Arabia’ and ‘Orient’ in order to avoid the bitter truth. The word written in Hieroglyphics is not Arabia and is not Orient. It is Punt, and Punt is today’s Somalia. Exemplary dishonesty and premeditated confusion! I keep the document to include it in a denunciation of the Western pseudo-scholarship! Great example of viciousness!

If you want to familiarize with Classical Egyptian, please download the Pdf and use it extensively; there may be few minor amendments but the concise and systematic work is unmatched.

https://mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/grammars/Gardiner.pdf

If you want to personally crosscheck the word, go the second section of the dictionary (English / Classical Egyptian) and turn on page 658 (of the Pdf document)!

The first mention of Arabs goes back to the Annals of the Assyrian Emperors of the 9th c. BCE, Same for the Sabaean (Sheba) Yemenites, who are not Arabs, but clearly distinct from them. As a matter of fact, the northern part of the peninsula belonged to the Assyrians and the Babylonians; as ‘Yathribu’ was on the mountains, the last Babylonian kings (6th c. BCE) had their summer palace there.

You also mention other topics; frankincense and myrrh were imported from the Red Sea coast and Somalia (Punt). There was strong Egyptian presence in 2nd BCE Somalia and the Hatshepsut’s Expedition to Punt highlights the importance of that land, which was also called Ta Netsheru (Ta Netjer), i.e. ‘the land of God’.

Some translate Netsheru as Gods, and the grammatical form is truly plural; but it does not mean ‘gods’ (except for the Egyptian polytheists like Queen Hatshepsut herself whose Satanic Theban high priests were the first in the world to conceive the evil theory of Theogamy); Netsheru means ‘the divine powers’.

Last, the Egyptians as Hamites did not originate from Yemen. Of course, there is a time honored Ancient Egyptian tradition as per which the Egyptians originated from Northern Sudan and more specifically Karima, which was Napata, the capital of the Cushitic state. But I reject this; it is merely Theban, anti-Heliopolitan propaganda of the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE. You can’t find the idea earlier.

Answer

Many thanks for your mail,

The most important thing in your email is that in your point of view in old Egypt there was no geographic word for Arabia an eastern land at less than 200 km. Perhaps it can confort the hypothesis that actual Egypt and Arabia were the same land !

Salutations

 

Second  Response

If you want, we can continue our conversation in French or Arabic (I am ashamed that my Berber is rudimentary) because I realize that to some extent you misread. I did not write that “in my point in Ancient Egypt (I never use the false term ‘Old Egypt’) there was no geographic word for Arabia”. I stated a fact. You cannot find any word in Hieroglyphic, Hieratic and early Demotic Egyptian about Arabia or Arabs. In late Demotic texts, you may find a few.

It seems that your ignorance of History matches your cluelessness in Geography! You make nonsensical considerations about distant lands. Basics in Historical Geography – which you also never studied – are enough for anyone to understand that people move to faraway places (like Somalia for 2nd millennium BCE Egypt), if there is an interest, whereas they don’t move to nearby places (like the arid, empty and useless mountains of Hejaz) when there is absolutely no interest.

As we know that the territory around Yathribu belonged successively to 1st millennium BCE Assyrians, Babylonians and Iranians, we realize that the Egyptians would have to make wars against greater powers in order to reach that land which for them was useless, whereas of the Asiatic empires it was merely an extra territory at their circumference. This covers the period 8th – 4th c. BCE.

As I told you, the first mention of tribes called ‘Aribi’ and known to be moving in Northern Hejaz dates back to the times of the Assyrian Emperor Shalmaneser III. At that time, there was no land called Arabia, and no text dating to those days or before mentions that name. It became later known as geographical term describing part of Hejaz, when those barbarians settled. Even Alexander the Great, who went as far as Siwah in the West, as far as Niwt / Thebes (Luxor) in the South, and as far as Central Asia and India in the East, did not give a damn to invade the useless, arid and cursed land of those barbarians.

Then the Ptolemies did not find any reason to act otherwise. In the Ptolemaic period, the geographical term by extension covered the entire peninsula but the northern part of the Hejaz belonged to the Aramaean Nabataean Kingdom of Rekem / Petra (down to the area which is today called Madain Saleh and whch was the great Aramaean Nabataean necropolis – nothing the contemporaneous Arab barbarians could ever build even in their wildest dream!), whereas from the whereabouts of Najran further to the South, Southeast, East, and Northeast were located the different Yemenite states, i.e. Qataban, Sheba (Sabaeans – not ‘Sabians’), Himyar, Awsan, Hadhramaut and Oman.

In the second half of the 1st c. CE, the famous text ‘Periplus of the Erythraean / Red Sea’ (at those days, ‘Red sea’ meant a) what we call now ‘Red Sea’, b) the Persian Gulf, and c) the entire Indian Ocean) describes extensively the chaotic and barbaric situation of central Hejaz (proper Arabia), offering warning to navigators and merchants to sail far from that cursed coast. You will find it translated and commented here:
Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis, Colonial Biases in Support of Barbaric Arabia, and Against Civilized Yemen
https://www.academia.edu/23145558/Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis_Colonial_Biases_in_Support_of_Barbaric_Arabia_and_Against_Civilized_Yemen

The above explains what was difficult for a non-specialist like you to grasp.

My Kenya-based Greek friend had long discussions with me about these topics, and came up with an interesting question; as soon as I answered and explained the point, he composed an excellent article about this issue. Here it is:
If Yemenis are Not Arab, why did the Romans call Yemen ‘Arabia Felix’?
https://greeksoftheorient.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/if-yemenis-are-not-arab-why-did-the-romans-call-yemen-arabia-felix/

As regards your last sentence, namely that Civilized Egypt, which has always been located in Africa, and Barbaric Arabia, which has always been Asia’s most worthless and useless spot, ‘were the same land’, I can guarantee to you that this is the world’s most ludicrous, most mendacious, and more Satanic sentence ever uttered, and I urge you to liberate yourself from this paranoia as soon as you can. Otherwise, from neuro-scientist you will turn to neuro-patient. It’s a pity!

This sort of distortions have been subtly diffused by Zionists among the idiotic, ignorant and uneducated masses of the colonial constructions in order to faster bring their dismemberment, destruction and ultimate elimination. As all these useless and fake countries were cut off the Ottoman Empire and created to prepare the elimination of their populations, their end comes now close. You surely need to go through the following:
https://www.academia.edu/26064731/Why_Former_Ottoman_Provinces_cannot_become_Proper_States_-_By_Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/24440061/Arab_Nation_Hoax_Geared_to_Falsify_Islamic_History_Ruin_Varied_Nations_disfiguratively_Named_Arab_-_by_Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/25491609/The_Aramaeans_rise_will_transfigure_the_Middle_Eastern_Chessboard_2005_-_by_Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/25552905/Islam_the_Cultural_Aramaization_of_the_Arabs_-_by_Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/25553198/Aramaeans_vs._Arabs_The_fight_between_Civilization_and_Barbarism_within_Islam_-_by_Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/24420104/Syria_A_Non-Arabic_Aramaean_Country_Ruled_by_the_Pan-Arabist_Puppets_of_Zionism_and_Freemasonry_-_by_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/23699776/Pan-Arabism_the_inhuman_progenitor_of_Islamic_Terrorism_by_Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis
En français:
https://www.academia.edu/23218437/Anc%C3%AAtre_des_guerres_et_de_la_tyrannie_le_mensonge_Pan-Arabe_-_Par_Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/23143540/Yemenis_are_Not_Arab_Eliminate_Yemens_Pan-Arabist_Tyranny_Empower_the_Yemenis_with_National_and_Cultural_Integrity

Bien cordialement à vous,
Shamsaddin