What was Ordinary in the Antiquity looks Odd today, due to the Greco-centric Fallacy of the Biased European Colonial ‘Academics’
A while back, I received a brief email from a Bulgarian friend, who urgently asked me to watch a video and comment on the topic. The video offered links to a blog in Bulgarian and to an Austrian site of academic publications. The upsetting affair was the mention of a Bulgarian, or to put it rather correctly of a Bulgarian item or product which was imported in Coptic Egypt. As I understand Bulgarian to some extent, due to my Russian, I read the long presentation of the informative blog, and then replied to my friend. The video was actually a most abridged form of the article posted on the blog of a non-conventional Bulgarian blogger.
Contents
Introduction
I. Fayoum, Al Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus), and Ancient Egyptian Papyri
II. Karl Wessely and his groundbreaking research and publications
III. Papyrus fragment 1224 of Karl Wessely’s SPP VIII
IV. Βουλγαρικ- (Vulgarik-)
V. Eastern Roman Emperor Maurice’s Strategicon and the Bulgarian cloaks
VI. Historical context and the Ancient History of Bulgars
VII. Historical context, the Silk Roads, and Bulgarian exports to Egypt
VIII. Academic context and the Western falsehood of a Euro-centric World History
i- the conceptualization of World History
ii- the contextualization of every single document newly found here and there
iii- the stages of historical falsification that were undertaken over the past 500 years
iv- the forgers themselves and their antiquity
v- and last but not least, several points of
a) governance of modern states
b) international alliances, and
c) the ensuing captivity of all the targeted nations, each one well-adjusted into the preconceived role that the forgers invented for it
Introduction
What follows is my response on the topic; although it concerns an undeniably very specific affair, it helps greatly in making general readership aware of how deeply interconnected the Ancient World was, of how different it was than it is presented in conventional publications, and of how many layers of fact distortion, source concealment, systematic forgery, academic misinterpretation, and intellectual falsification have been adjusted to what average people worldwide think of as ‘World History’. In brief, the modern Western colonial presentation of World History, which was dictatorially imposed worldwide, is nothing more than a choice-supportive bias and a racist construct. You can also describe it as ‘Hellenism’, Greco-centrism or Euro-centrism.
—————— Response to an inquisitive Bulgarian friend ——————
My dear friend,
Your question and the associated topic are quite complex.
The video that you sent me is extremely brief and almost introductory.
Папирусът от Фаюм
However, in the description, it offers two links.
I read the article in the blog; I noticed that it was published before 12-13 years (13.10.2011). Папирусът (който щеше да бъде) с истинското име на българите?
The author seems to have been taken by surprise due to the Fayoum text, but as you will see, there is no reason for that.
The second link included in the video description offers access to Tyche, an academic annual (Fachzeitschrift) published by the Austrian Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altertumskunde, Papyrologie und Epigraphik der Universität Wien. But this is an introductory web page (https://tyche.univie.ac.at/index.php/tyche) that has links to many publications, which you can download in PDF.
You must not be surprised by such findings; they are old and known to the specialists; there are many Bulgarian professors specializing in Ancient Greek. Some of them surely know about the text. But it is in the nature of the Western sciences that scholars do not write for the general public; it is very different from what happened in the Soviet Union and the other countries of the Socialist bloc. Reversely, all the average bloggers, who find every now and then a historical document known but not publicized, think that they discovered something incredible, but in most of the cases, we don’t have anything to do with an extraordinary discovery. Simply, History has been very different from what average people have been left to believe.
I. Fayoum, Al Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus), and Ancient Egyptian Papyri
Fayoum by the way is an enormous oasis. It has cities, towns and villages. In our times, it was one of the strongholds of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Former president Muhammad Morsi got ca. 90% of the votes locally. About:
The discoveries of papyri in Egypt started mainly in the 19th c.; excavators unearthed tons of valuable documentation, unfortunately in fragmentary situation most of them; indicatively:
Such is the vastness of the documentation that either Egyptologists or Coptologists or Hellenists, there are many scholars of those disciplines who specialize in papyri only: the Papyrologists.
Fayoum map with Ancient Greek names
Fayoum Lake (above) – Wadi El Rayan waterfalls (below)
Temple of Soknopaios at Soknopaiou Nesos (Island), Fayoum (viewed from the SE)
Fayoum: a tourist destination
Another major site of papyri discovery is Oxyrhynchus (Ancient Greek name of the Egyptian site Per medjed / Oxyrhynchus is merely the Ancient Greek translation of Per medjed), i.e. the modern city of Al Bahnasa. Indicatively:
II. Karl Wessely and his groundbreaking research and publications
The fragment of papyrus that mentions in Ancient Greek an adjective, which means «Bulgarian» in English, was found in the Fayoum (you can write the word with -u or -ou). It was first published by a great scholar C. (Carl or Karl) Wessely (1860-1931).
He was one of the 10 most prominent scholars and philologists of the 2nd half of the 19th and the 1st half of the 20th c. He published a voluminous series of firsthand publications of discoveries, which was named Studien zur Paleographie und Papyruskunde (SPP). As you can guess, this took decades to be progressively materialized. Here you have an online list:
You will find the text’s first publication on page 189 of the book; this is the page 63 of 186 of the PDF. This means that you will find this indication at the bottom of the PDF: 189 (63 / 186).
This volume, as stated on p. 7, contains «Griechische Papyrusurkunden kleineren Formats», i.e. Greek papyri documents of smaller format. If you find it strange that on the first page of the main text (137 (11 / 186) as per the PDF), the first text has the number 702, please remember that this is an enormous documentation published in the series of volumes (SPP) published by Wessely between 1900 and 1920.
III. Papyrus fragment 1224 of Karl Wessely’s SPP VIII
As you will see, the text slightly differs from what is shown in either the blog article or the video. It is indeed the 1224 papyrus fragment as per the enumeration of the publication. Similarly to many other cases, most of the text is lost; this is quite common. Few things are easy to assess, if you through the entire volume; apparently the background reflects Coptic Egypt, which means that all the texts date between the early 4th and 7th c. CE. This is clearly visible because the dating system is based on indiction, which was a Roman system of periodic taxation and then chronology. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiction
This Latin word was accepted in Greek: ινδικτιών,
We can also understand that the person, who wrote this specific document, was following (not the Julian calendar but) the Coptic calendar, because on the 8th line the remaining letters αρμουθί (armouthi) help us reconstitute the well-known Coptic month of Pharmouthi (or Parmouti) which corresponds to end March-beginning April (in the Julian calendar) or April and early May in the Gregorian calendar. In Arabic, it is pronounced ‘Bermouda’ (unrelated to the Bermuda islands).
It has to be noted that the pagan Greek calendar was abolished, and that the use of ‘Greek’ (‘Alexandrine Koine, to be correct) in the Fayum papyri texts and elsewhere does not imply ‘ethnic’ membership but rather religious affiliation (in this case, in contrast to Coptic).
In addition, you can see the first letter of the word «indiction» ι (ι) after Pharmouthi.
Apparently, this papyrus documented a transaction effectuated by a certain Cyril (Cyrillus / Κύριλλος). Only the letters «rill» (ριλλ) are saved, as you can see, but the high frequency of the name among the Copts makes of this word the first choice of any philologist. By the way, the name is still widely used among today’s Copts as «Krulos».
I fully support Wessely’s reconstitution of the document on lines 7, 10 and 11.
Line 7 (εγράφη out of εγρα-), i.e. «it was written»
Line 10 (απείληφα out of -ειλ-), i.e. «I received from»
Line 11 (και παρών απέλυσα out of -αρω-), i.e. «I set free by paying a ransom or I disengaged or I released». Details:
Now comes a thorny issue, because on line 6, Wessely wrote «λαμιο(υ)» (: lamio reconstituted as lamiu), and went on suggesting a unique term «χαρτα-λαμίου» (charta-lamiou). This is not attested in any other source. Λάμιον (lamium) is a genus of several species of plants, whereas Lamios (Λάμιος) is a personal name. About:
But «χαρτα-λαμίου» (in Genitive declension) is a hapax. Still the opinion of the first explorer and publisher is always crucial; but as in many other cases, these people publish such an enormous volume of documentation that they do not have enough time to explain their suggestions and reason about their choices. To them, publishing hitherto unpublished material is undisputedly no 1 priority.
Other scholars attempted a different approach; they hypothetically added «υιός» (yios), i.e. «son», before λαμίου (Lamiou)
Personally, I find it highly unlikely. First, I most of the times support the first explorer’s / publisher’s approach.
Second, I believe that those, who add «υιός» (yios), i.e. «son» on line 6, are forced to reconstitute Βουλγαρικ̣[ὸς on line 5. This is most probably wrong.
But Wessely did not attempt something like that, preferring to leave the only saved word on line 5 as it is «Βουλγαρικ̣».
Now, what stands on lines 1 to 4 is really too minimal to allow any specialist to postulate or speculate anything. Perhaps there was something «big» mentioned on line 3 («-μεγ-»/«-meg-»), but this is only an assumption. Also, on line 4, we read that something (or someone) was (or was sent or was bought) from somewhere, because of the words «από της» (apo tis), i.e. «from the» (in this case, «the» being the feminine form of the article in Genitive declension).
IV. Βουλγαρικ- (Vulgarik-)
Now, and this is the most important statement that can be made as regards this fragment of papyrus, the word that stands on line 5 is undoubtedly an adjective, not a substantive! This is very clear. This means that the word is not an ethnonym. In English, you use the word «Bulgarian», either you mean a Bulgarian man (in this case, it is a noun) or a Bulgarian wine (on this occasion, it is an adjective). Bulgarian is at the same time a proper noun and an adjective in English.
However, in Greek, there is a difference when it comes to names of countries and nations. When it is a proper noun (substantive), you say «Anglos» (Άγγλος), «Sikelos» (Σικελός), «Aigyptios» (Αιγύπτιος), etc. for Englishman, Sicilian man, Egyptian man, etc. But you say «anglikos» (αγγλικός), «sikelikos» (σικελικός), «aigyptiakos» (αιγυπτιακός), etc. for adjectives of masculine gender.
Discussing the word attested on line 5 of the papyrus fragment 1224 of Karl Wessely’s SPP VIII, I have to point out that in Ancient ‘Greek’ and in Alexandrine Koine, there is a vast difference between Βούλγαρος (Vulgaros) and βουλγαρικός (vulgarikos).
The first denotes a Bulgarian national, someone belonging to the ethnic group / nation of Bulgars and/or Bulgarians. At this point, I have to also add that these two words in English are a modern academic convention to distinguish Proto-Bulgarians (Bulgars) from the Bulgarians, who settled in the Balkan Peninsula. However, this distinction did not exist in Late Antiquity Greek texts and in Eastern Roman texts.
The second is merely an adjective: βουλγαρικός (vulgarikos), βουλγαρική (vulgariki), βουλγαρικόν (vulgarikon) are the three gender forms of the adjective: masculine, feminine and neutral.
So, as the preserved part of the word being «βουλγαρικ-» (vulgarik-), we can be absolutely sure that the papyrus text mentioned a Bulgarian item (a product typical of Bulgars or an imported object manufactured by Bulgars) — not a Bulgarian man.
All the same, it makes sure the following points:
a. in 4th-7th c. CE Egypt, people imported products that were manufactured by Bulgars in their own land (Bulgaria).
b. since the products were known, imported and listed as «Bulgar/Bulgarian», people knew the nation, which manufactured them, and its location.
c. considering the magnitude of the documentation that went lost, we can safely claim that there was nothing extraordinary in the arrival of Bulgar/Bulgarian products in in 4th-7th c. CE Egypt.
d. the papyrus in question presents the transaction in terms of «business as usual».
This is all that can be said about the papyrus text, but here ends the approach of the philologist and starts the viewpoint of the historian. However, before presenting the historical context of the transaction recorded in the fragmentarily saved papyrus from Fayoum, I have to also discuss another issue, which was mentioned in the blogger’s interesting discussion.
V. Eastern Roman Emperor Maurice’s Strategicon and the Bulgarian cloaks
Of course, as anyone could expect, several historians and philologists would try to find parallels to the mention of Bulgarian imports made in this papyrus fragment.
And they did. In his presentation, the blogger already mentioned several academic efforts. So, the following paragraphs, which are to be found almost in the middle of the article (immediately after the picture), refer to two scholarly efforts to establish parallels:
«Публикуван е за пръв път от SPP VIII 1124, Wessely, C., Leipzig 1908 и по – късно препубликуван от Diethart, в публикация с многозначителното заглавие „Bulgaren“ und „Hunnen“, S. 11 – 1921. Въпреки това папирусът не стига много бързо до родна публика.
“По пътя” един учен, Моравчик, стига и по – далеч при превода. Той разчита в откъсите и думата “Пояс” и включва в теорията ново сведение(Mauricii Artis mllltaris libri duodecim, Xll (ed. Scheffer), p. 303) , където се казва, че пехотинците трябвало да носят “ζωναρία bм λιτά, xal βουλγαρική cay ία” – т.е. смята, че става дума за носен в Египет от военните “български пояс”(сведенията за публикациите дотук са по Иван Костадинов).
Вдясно виждате лична снимка. Коптска носия от 4-ти век н.е. Пази се в етнографския музей на александрийската библиотека. По необходимост за пустинния климат е от лен. Оттам вече аналогиите оставям изцяло на вас.
Папирусът “идва в България” късно. По спомени казвам ,че мисля, че първият публикувал го е доста уважаваният Иван Дуриданов, който с радост представя на българската публика вече 4 деситилетия предъвкваният от западната лингвистика български папирус. Той публикува радостна статия, с която приветства откритието».
The adjective Vulgarikos, -i, -on («Bulgarian» in three genders) is attested in a famous Eastern Roman text, which is rather known under the title «Maurice’s Strategicon»; this was a handbook of military sciences and a guide to techniques, methods and practices employed by the Eastern Roman army. It was written by Emperor Maurice (Μαυρίκιος- Mauricius /reigned: 582-602) or composed according to his orders. About:
I did not read Moravcsik’s article, but I read the Strategicon; it does not speak of «Bulgarian belts», but of «Bulgarian cloaks». In this regard, the blogger mentions a very old edition of the text, namely Mauricii Artis mllltaris libri duodecim, Xll (ed. Scheffer), p. 303). This dates back to 1664:
At those days, all Western European editions of Ancient Greek texts involved Latin translations. Scheffer’s edition of the Strategicon can be found here:
In the 12th chapter, which is the last of the Strategicon, under the title “Mixed Formations, Infantry, Camps and Hunting”, in part I (Clothing to be Worn by the Infantry), on page 138 (University of Pennsylvania Press), the word σαγίον (sagion) is very correctly translated as “cloak”. The author refers to “βουλγαρικά σαγία” (Latin: sagia Bulgarica) in plural; this is rendered in English “Bulgarian cloaks”, which are thought to be very heavy. Already, the word σαγίον (sagion) is of Latin etymology. About:
In that period and for more than 1000 years, what people now erroneously call «Medieval Greek» or «Byzantine Greek» (which in reality is «Eastern Roman») was an amalgamation of Alexandrine Koine and Latin. There were an enormous number of Latin words written in Greek characters and in Alexandrine Koine form. Indicatively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek
At this point, I complete my philological commentary on the topic. I read the Strategicon of Emperor Maurice when I was student in Athens in the middle 1970s.
I did not remember the mention of Bulgarian cloaks, but I know however that the Bulgars, who founded the Old Great Bulgaria, appear in Eastern Roman texts at least 100 years before the purported establishment and growth of that state (632–668). The academic chronology for the First Bulgarian Empire may be correct (681–1018), but the dates given for the Old Great Bulgaria and the Volga Bulgaria (late 7th c.–1240s) are deliberately false. General info:
VI. Historical context and the Ancient History of Bulgars
It is now time for me to briefly discuss the historical context within which the aforementioned topics took place. Let’s first ask some questions:
Is it strange that a Fayoum papyrus of the 3rd-7th c. CE mentions Bulgarian products that arrived in Egypt?
Is it odd that in Emperor Maurice’s Strategicon we find a mention of Bulgarian cloaks used or not used by the Eastern Roman army?
In both cases, the response is «no»!
From where did these Bulgarian products come?
Where did Bulgars (or Bulgarians) live at the time?
My personal response is somehow vague: they came from some regions of today’s Russia’s European soil, either in the southern confines (the Azov Sea, the northern coast of the Black Sea, and the North Caucasus region) or in the area of today’s Tatarstan and other lands north-northeast of the Caspian Sea.
It is not easy to designate one specific location in this regard, and this is so for one extra reason: it seems that there were several tribes named with the same name, and they were distinguished among themselves on the basis of earlier tribal affiliations, which may go back to the Rouran Khaganate (330-555 CE). There are actually plenty of names associated with the early Bulgars, notably the Onogurs, the Kutrigurs, etc. About:
Many readers may be taken by surprise because I go back easily from the time of the Old Great Bulgaria (630-668 CE) to that of the Rouran Khaganate and the Huns. All the same, there is no surprise involved in this regard. Western European historians deliberately, systematically and customarily underestimate across the board the value of Oral History and attempt to dissociate Ethnography from History; these approaches are wrong. It is quite possible that, from the very beginning of the establishment of Rouran Khaganate, many tribes, clans or families (which later became nations) started migrating. The very first Bulgars (Bulgarians) may have reached areas north of the Iranian borders in Central Asia or in Northern Caucasus much earlier than it is generally thought among Western scholars. See indicatively:
Now, the reasons for which I intentionally date the first potential interaction of Bulgars/Bulgarians with other tribes (or nations) in earlier periods are not a matter of personal preference or obstinacy. There is an important historical text named «Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans». It has not been duly comprehended let alone interpreted thus far. About:
From the Great Old Bulgaria to the beginnings of Volga Bulgaria
Three Russian copies of the text have been saved (in Church Slavonic); they date back to the 15th and 16th c. They are generally viewed as later copies of a potential Old Bulgarian text of the 9th c. Other specialists also pretend that there may/might have been an even earlier text, in either Eastern Roman («Medieval Greek») or Bulgar, which was eventually a stone inscription.
In this document, the highly honorific title «Knyaz» (Князь) is given to Asparuh (ca. 640-700) and to his five predecessors. I must add that the said document was always an intriguing historical source for me due to two bizarre particularities to which I don’t think that any scholar or specialist gave due attention, deep investigation, and persuasive interpretation.
First, the antiquity of the document is underscored by the fact that the early Bulgar calendar, which is attested in this text, appears to be an adaptation of the Chinese calendar. This fact means that the primeval Bulgars, when located somewhere in Eastern Siberia or Mongolia, must have had dense contacts with the Chinese scribal and imperial establishment; perhaps this fact displeased other Turanian-Mongolian tribes of the Rouran Khaganate and contributed to the emigration of those «Ur-Bulgaren». The next point is however more impactful on our approach to the very early phase of the Bulgars.
Petrograd manuscript of Nominalia
The Old Bulgarian calendar and the Nominalia of the Bulgarian khans
Second, although for most of the rulers immortalized in the historical document, the duration of their lifetimes or tenures are of entirely historical nature (involving brief or long periods of 5 up to 60 years of reign or lifetime), the two first names of rulers are credited with incredibly long lifetimes. This is not common; actually, it does not look sensible; but it is meaningful.
More specifically, Avitohol is said to have lived 300 years, whereas Irnik is credited with 150 years. But we know who Irnik was! Irnik or Ernak was the 3rd son of Attila and he is said to have been his most beloved offspring. Scholars fix the beginning of his reign in 437 CE, but this is still not the important point. The crucial issue with the partly «mythical» and partly historical nature of the text «Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans» is the fact that the two early rulers, whom the Bulgarians considered as their original ancestors, are credited with extraordinarily long and physically impossible lives. General reading:
This can therefore imply only one thing: at a later period, when the earlier memories were partly lost for various reasons, eventually because of the new environment namely the Balkan Peninsula, in which the then Bulgars were finding themselves, Avitohol and Irnik were retained as the leading figures of ruling families, and not as independent rulers. Consequently, the dates given for their lives were in fact those of their respective dynasties. It was then that the very early period of Bulgar History was mythicized for statecraft purposes, mystified to all, and sanctified in the national consciousness.
Many Western scholars attempted to identify Avitohol with Attila, but in vain; I don’t think that this attempt can be maintained. So, I believe that the Bulgars were one of the noble families of the Huns (evidently involving intermarriage with Attila himself), and that before Attila, the very earliest Bulgars were ruled by another dynasty which had lasted 300 years. But if it is so, we go back to the times of the Roman Emperor Trajan (reign: 98-117 CE), Vologases III of Arsacid Parthia (110–147 CE) and the illustrious Chinese general, explorer and diplomat Ban Chao (32-102 CE) of the Eastern Han dynasty. About:
The latter fought for 30 years against the Xiongnu (Hiung-nu/匈奴, i.e. the earliest tribes of the Huns, consolidated the Chinese control throughout the Tarim Basin region (today’s Eastern Turkestan or Xinjiang), and was appointed Protector General of the Western Regions. He is very famous for having dispatched Gan Ying, an envoy, to the West in 97 CE. According to the Book of the Later Han (Hou Hanshu/後漢書), which was compiled in the 5th c. CE by Fan Ye, Gan Ying reached Parthia (Arsacid Iran; in Chinese: Anxi, 安息) and gave the first Chinese account of the Western confines of Asia and of the Roman Empire. About:
It is n this historical environment that we have to place the very early ancestors of the Bulgars.
Noin-Ula carpet, embroidered rug imported from Bactria and representing Yuezhi
VII. Historical context, the Silk Roads, and Bulgarian exports to Egypt
Consequently, I believe that it is more probable that the Bulgarian products of those days were first appreciated by the Iranians and later sold to Aramaeans, Armenians, Iberians and other nations settled in the western confines of the Arsacid (250 BCE-224 CE) and the Sassanid (224-651 CE) empires, i.e. in Mesopotamia and Syria, and thence they became finally known in Egypt as well.
The incessant migrations from NE Asia to Central Europe and to Africa, as a major historical event, were not separate from the ‘Silk Roads’; they were part, consequence or side-effect of that, older and wider, phenomenon. Actually, the term ‘Silk Roads’ is at the same time inaccurate and partly; the magnificent phenomenon of commercial, cultural and spiritual inter-exchanges, which took place due to the establishment (by the Achaemenid Shah Darius I the Great) of a comprehensive network of numerous older regional trade routes, is to be properly described as ‘silk-, spice-, and perfume-trade routes across lands, deserts and seas’. About: https://silkroadtexts.wordpress.com/
It has to be said that, after the Achaemenid Iranian invasion, annexation and occupation of Egypt, Sudan and NE Libya (525-404 BCE and 343-332 BCE), Iranian settlers remained in Egypt; they were known to and mentioned by the Macedonian settlers, who manned the Macedonian dynasty of Ptolemies (323-30 BCE). General info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Achaemenid_conquest_of_Egypt
There were also in Egypt Jewish Aramaean descendants of the early Iranian settlers: “οἱ τρ(ε)ῖς | Ἰουδαῖοι Πέρσαι τῆς ἐπιγονῆς τῶν [ἀ]πὸ Σύρων κώ- | μης” (lit. Jewish Iranians, who were the descendants of an Aramaean town) – From: Database of Military Inscriptions and Papyri of Early Roman Palestine https://armyofromanpalestine.com/0140-2
Please note in this regard that the title given to the web page and the document is very wrong and extremely biased: “§140 Loan between Jews and Lucius Vettius”; the three persons who received the loan were not ethnic Jews. Their religion was surely Judaism, as it was the case of the renowned Samaritan woman with whom Jesus spoke according to the Gospels. Several other nations accepted Judaism, notably Aramaeans in Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia (they were called ‘Syrians’ by the Macedonians and the Romans). It is well known that there were many clashes and strives between them and the ethnic Jews. The latter were few and lived either in Jerusalem (and its suburbs) or in Egypt (in Alexandria and many other locations) or in the centers of Talmudic academies in Mesopotamia (namely Nehardea, Pumbedita and Mahoze / Ctesiphon). About:
If I expanded on this topic, it is precisely because the merchants, who were most active across the Silk Roads, were the Aramaeans, and that is why Aramaic became almost an official language in the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, whereas at the same time it turned out to be the lingua franca alongside the trade routes. Furthermore, a great number of writing systems in Central Asia, Iran, India, and Western Asia were developed on the basis of the Aramaic alphabet. Last but not least, Arabic originates from Syriac, which is a late form of Aramaic. About:
It is therefore essential to state that the Bulgarian products, which (either from North Caucasus and the northern coastlands of the Black Sea or from the regions around the north-northeastern shores of the Caspian Sea) reached Egypt (via most probably North Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine), were transported on camels owned by Aramaean merchants and due to caravans organized and directed by Aramaeans.
It is also noteworthy that, during the Arsacid times, several buffer-states were formed between the eastern borders of the Roman Empire and the western frontiers of Parthia: Osrhoene, Sophene, Zabdicene, Adiabene, Hatra, Characene, Elymais, Gerrha (the illustrious port of call and major trade center of the Persian Gulf that rivaled with Alexandria in the Mediterranean), the Nabataean kingdom, and the short-lived but most formidable Tadmor (Palmyra). This situation favored the world trade between East and West, as well as North and South. General info:
The great rivalry and ferocious antagonism between the Romans (and later the Eastern Romans) and the Iranians after the rise of the Sassanid dynasty (224 CE) did not affect in anything the good relations and the trade among Egyptians, Aramaeans, and Iranians; there were numerous Aramaean populations in both empires, so, we feel safe to conclude that any products from lands north of Caucasus mountains and north of Iran were transported by Aramaeans via Palestine or Nabataea to Egypt.
Aramaic inscription from Hatra, NW Iraq
There have been additional reasons for the good feelings of the Egyptians toward the Iranians, and they were of religious nature. The Christological disputes generated enmity and great animosity between
a) the Copts (: Egyptians) and the Aramaeans, who adopted Miaphysitism (also known as Monophysitism), and
b) the Eastern Romans and the Western Romans, who thought they preserved the correct faith (Orthodoxy).
One has to bear always in mind, that in order to define themselves, the so-called Monophysites (also known more recently as ‘Miaphysites’) used exactly the same term (i.e. ‘Orthodox’), which means that they considered the Eastern Romans and the Western Romans as heretics. The patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem were split. Atop of it, other Aramaeans (mostly in Mesopotamia and Iran) accepted the preaching of Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who was also deposed as a heretic (in August 431). For the aforementioned religious reasons, the Eastern Roman armies were most loathed in Syria, Palestine, North Mesopotamia (today’s SE Turkey), and Egypt as oppressors. About:
In addition, one has to take into consideration the fact that the Jews, who inhabited the eastern provinces of the Roman (and later the Eastern Roman) Empire, were also pro-Iranian and they expected that the Iranians would liberate them one day from the Roman yoke pretty much like the Achaemenid Iranian Emperor Cyrus delivered their exiled ancestors from the tyranny of Nabonid Babylonia (539 BCE).
The Axumite Abyssinian invasion of Yemen (ca. 530 CE; in coordination with the Roman Emperor Justinian I), the ensued Iranian-Axumite wars, the Iranian invasion of Yemen (570 CE; known as the Year of the Elephant among the Arabs of Hejaz), and the incessant battles and wars between the Eastern Roman and the Sassanid Iranian armies were closely watched by all populations in Egypt. The third Iranian conquest of Egypt (618 CE) was a matter of great jubilation for Copts and Jews; Egypt was annexed to Iran for ten (10 years), before being under Eastern Roman control again for fourteen years (628-642 CE) and then invaded by the Islamic armies. General info:
Iranian Emperor Khosrow (Chosroes) I Anushirvan on Coptic textile fragment
Indicative of the good Egyptian feelings for the Sassanid emperors and Iran is a tapestry weave found by Albert Gayet in his 1908 excavations in Antinoe (also known as Antinoöpolis, i.e. the town of Sheikh Ibada in today’s Egypt); this is a textile fragment of legging that dates back to the late 6th and early 7th c. (Musée des Tissus, in Lyon-France; MT 28928). It features the scene of an unequal battle that has been identified as one of the engagements between the Sassanid and the Axumite armies in Yemen; Iranian horse-archers are depicted at the moment of their triumph over Abyssinian infantry opponents, who appear to be armed with stones. In the very center of the scene, an enthroned figure was often identified with the great Iranian Emperor Khosrow (Chosroes) I Anushirvan (Middle Persian: Anoshag ruwan: ‘with Immortal Soul’), who was for Sassanid Iran as historically important as Justinian I, his early rival and subsequent peace partner, for the Roman Empire. About:
This was the wider historical context at the time of the arrival of the first Bulgarian exports to the Sassanid Empire of Iran, the Eastern Roman Empire, and Egypt more specifically. And the Bulgarian cloaks, as mentioned in Maurice’s Strategicon, make every researcher rather think of heavy winter cloaks, which were apparently not necessary for the Eastern Roman soldiers, who had to usually fight in less harsh climatological conditions. It is possible that those heavy cloaks were eventually used by the Iranian army when engaged in the Caucasus region, and thence they were noticed by the Eastern Romans.
With these points, I complete my philological and historical comments on the topic. However, the entire issue has to be also contextualized at the academic-educational level, so that you don’t find it bizarre that not one average Bulgarian knew about the topic before the inquisitive blogger wrote his article and the YouTuber uploaded his brief video.
VIII. Academic context and the Western falsehood of a Euro-centric World History
This part does not concern the Fayoum papyri and the Strategicon of Emperor Maurice; it has to do with what non-specialists, the average public, and various unspecialized explorers do not know at all.
This issue pertains to
i- the conceptualization of World History;
ii- the contextualization of every single document newly found here and there;
iii- the stages of historical falsification that were undertaken over the past 500 years;
iv- the forgers themselves and their antiquity, and last but not least; and
v- several points of
a) governance of modern states,
b) international alliances, and
c) the ensuing captivity of all the targeted nations, each one well-adjusted into the preconceived role that the forgers invented for it.
As you can guess, one can write an encyclopedia on these topics, so I will be very brief. Attention: only at the end, you will understand that all these parameters fully precondition the topic that we already discussed, and any other that we have not yet discussed, because simply it does not exist as a standalone entity but as a fact entirely conditioned by what I herewith describe in short.
What I want to say is this: if tomorrow another Fayoum discovery brings to light a 3rd c. BCE papyrus with the mention of something Bulgarian (Voulgarikon), this will not affect in anything the prevailing conditions of the so-called academic scholarship. In other words, do not imagine that with tiny shreds of truth unveiled here and there, you are going to change anything in the excruciatingly false manner World History was written.
i- the conceptualization of World History
It may come as a nasty surprise to you, but what we know now about History is not the conclusion or the outcome of additional discoveries made one after the other over the past 400-500 years. Contrarily, it was first preconceived, when people had truly minimal knowledge of the past, and after they had forged thousands of documents and manuscripts for at least 500-600 years, long before the early historiographical efforts were undertaken during the Renaissance.
After they destroyed, concealed and rewrote tons of manuscripts of Ancient Greek and Roman historiography from ca. 750 CE until 1500 CE, Western European monks and editors, philosophers and intellectuals, popes, scientists and alchemists started propagating their world view about the assumingly glorious past of their supposedly Greek and Roman ancestors – a nonexistent past that the Renaissance people were deliberately fooled enough to believe that they had lost and they had to rediscover it. In fact, all the discoveries made afterwards, all the decipherments of numerous ancient writings, and all the studies of original material from Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, Caucasus, Central Asia, China and India was duly processed and adjusted in a way not to damage or challenge in anything the preconceived scheme which was named ‘World History’ by the vicious and criminal Western European forgers.
This means that you should never expect ‘new discoveries’ to challenge the officially established dogma of the Western academia; it is not about Bulgars and the past of today’s Bulgarians, Thracians, Macedonians, etc., etc., etc. It is about all. What type of position the Bulgarians, the Russians, the Turks, the Iranians, the Egyptians and all the rest occupy in today’s distorted historiography had been decided upon long before the establishment of the modern states that bear those names.
ii- the contextualization of every single document newly found here and there
Any finding unearthed by anyone anytime anywhere means nothing in itself; this concerns every historiographer, truthful or dishonest. What truly matters for all is contextualization. It so did for the original forgers. Theirs was an arbitrary attempt; they contextualized the so-called ‘Ancient Greece’ in a way that would have been fully unacceptable, blasphemous and abominable for the outright majority of all the South Balkan populations during the 23 centuries prior to the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine the Great.
It was peremptory, partial and biased; according to the fallacious narratives of the forgers, centuries were shrunk and shortened in order to fit into few lines; moreover the schemers stretched geographical terms at will; they did not use various terms, which were widely employed in the Antiquity; they passed important persons under silence, while exaggerating the presentation of unimportant ones. This is what contextualization was for the forgers: they applied a Latin recapitulative name (Graeci) to a variety of nations, which never used this Latin term or any other recapitulative term for them; they applied a non-Ionian, non-Achaean, and non-Aeolian term (Hellenes) to them and to others; and after the decipherment of many Oriental languages, they did not rectify their preposterous mistakes, although they learned quite well that the two fake terms about those populations (Graecus and Hellene) did not exist in any other language of highly civilized nations (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, Hurrian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Old Achaemenid Iranian).
Consequently, every other information, data and documentation pertaining to any elements of the said context was concealed, distorted or misinterpreted in order to be duly adjusted to the biased context that had been elaborated first.
iii- the stages of historical falsification that were undertaken over the past 500 years
Following the aforementioned situation, many dimensions of historical falsification were carried out and can actually be noticed by researchers, explorers, investigators and astute observers. The ‘barbarian invasions’ (or Migration Period) is only one of them; I mention it first because it concerns the Bulgars. Long before distorting the History of Great Old Bulgaria and that of Volga Bulgaria systematically, Western historical forgers portrayed Bulgars and many other highly civilized nations as barbarians. Why?
Because the historical forgers of the Western World hate nomads! This is an irrevocable trait of them; that’s why they fabricated the fake term ‘civilization’ in their absurd manner: originating from the Latin word ‘civitas’, the worthless and racist term ‘civilization’ implies that you cannot be ‘civilized’ unless you are urban. This monstrous and unacceptable fact reveals the rotten roots of the hideous, vulgar, sick and villainous Western world and colonial academia.
In the Orient, there was never a cultural divide between urban populations and nomads; some nomadic tribes were considered as barbarians; that’s true. But also settled populations and urban inhabitants were also considered as barbarians (like the Elamites, who were considered as inhuman by the Assyrians). The rule was that the settled nations were nomads in earlier periods. But the status of a society was irrelevant of the consideration and the esteem (or lack thereof) that others had about a certain nation. This started with the Romans and their interpretation of the South Balkan, Anatolian, and Cretan past. It was then re-utilized and modified by Western Europeans. To some extent, the papal approval was tantamount to acquisition of credentials and to promotion to ‘civilized nation status’. Actually, this is today the nucleus of the whole problem concerning Ukraine.
That is why the so-called Migration Period was so terribly distorted by Western historians. Western historians deliberately preferred to stay blind and not to study the Ancient Mongol chronicles (notably the Secret History of The Mongols) in order to avoid assessing the Mongol-Turanian standards and principles of civilization. Had they proceeded in the opposite way, they would have discovered that, for the nomads, it is the settled people and the urban populations, who are barbarians, decayed and shameful.
The truth about the fallacious term ‘Migration Period’ is simple: there was never a migration period before 1500 CE (and certainly none afterwards), because every century was actually a migration period. Human History is a history of migrations.
The distorted linguistic-ethnographic division of the migrant nations helped forgers to dramatically increase the confusion level; as a matter of fact, there was no proper ethnic division (in the modern sense of the term) among Mongols, Turanians, Slavs and several other migrant nations. The languages change when people migrate and settle, resettle, move again, and end up in faraway places. For Muslim historians, the khan of the Saqaliba (: Slavs) was the strongest of all Turanian rulers. The arbitrary distinction of the migrant nations into two groups, namely Indo-European and Ural-Altaic/Turco-Mongolian nations was done deliberately in order to intentionally transform the face of the world and adjust it to the so-called Table of Nations, a forged text that made its way into the biblical book of Genesis in later periods (6th–4th c. BCE). General reading:
The Western academic tyranny is so deeply rooted that, irrespective of your political, ideological or philosophical affiliation (fascist, Nazi, communist, conservative, social-democrat, liberal, atheist, evolutionist, creationist, anarchist, etc.), you always have to adjust your seminars, courses, lectures, contributions, books and publications to the fallacy of Genesis chapter 10. The absurd logic of this system is the following: “since no Bulgars are mentioned in the Table of Nations, they must be a later tribe”. Then, believe it or not, whatever documentation may be found in Aramaic, Middle Persian, Pahlavi, Brahmi, Kharosthi, Avestan, Sogdian, Tocharian, Chinese or other texts about the Bulgars will be deliberately presented as irrelevant to Bulgars. If a new Sogdian document is found in Central Asia (dating back to the middle Arsacid times: 1st c. CE) and there is a certain mention of Bulgars in the text, the criminal gangsters and the systematic fraudsters of the Western universities and museums will write an enormous amount of articles to stupidly discredit the document or attribute the word to anything or anyone else.
iv- the forgers themselves and their antiquity
The above makes it clear that the foundations of today’s Western academic life, historiographical research, sector of Humanities, and all the associated fields of study were laid by the Western European Catholic monks and only after the end of the Eastern Roman imperial control, appointment and approval of the Roman popes (752 CE).
This changes totally the idea that you and the entire world have of the History of Mankind because it means that the Benedictine-Papal-Roman opposition to and clash with the Eastern Roman Empire (and the subsequent schisms of 867 and 1054) were entirely due to the resolute papal attempt to forge the World History, to substitute it with a fake History, and to diffuse all the Anti-Christian schemes that brought the world to today’s chaos. As the Muslims were totally unaware of the confrontation, the Crusades were undertaken against (not the Caliphate but) Constantinople. All the Christian Orthodox monasteries and libraries were controlled by Catholic monks, scribes, copyists and priests who had the time (from 1204 until 1261) to rob whatever manuscripts they had to rob, destroy whatever manuscripts they had to destroy, and leave all the rest as ‘useless’ to their enterprise.
That is why modern scholars are ordered to jubilate every time a papyrus fragment is found in Egypt with few lines of verses from Homer, Hesiod and the Ancient ‘Greek’ tragedians, historians or philosophers! They publicize these discoveries in order to make every naïve guy believe that the bulk of their forged documentation is genuine. But it is not.
v- and last but not least, several points of
a) governance of modern states
The consolidation of the historical forgery was top concern for the colonial puppets of the Western European powers and for the powers hidden behind the scenes. I still remember the blogger’s comments about the late 19th and early 20th c. Bulgarian statesmen, politicians and academics, who were not so enthusiastic about the Fayoum papyrus! He made me laugh at; of course, he was very correct in writing what he did. Absolutely pertinent! But also very naïve!
He failed to remember that the top Ottoman military officer in Salonica during the First Balkan War, lieutenant general Hasan Tahsin Pasha (also known as Hasan Tahsin Mesarea; 1845-1918), as soon as he learned that the 7th Bulgarian Division was coming from the northeast, decided on his own to surrender the Salonica fortress and 26000 men to the Greek crown prince Constantine, being thus deemed a traitor and sentenced to death by a martial court.
No Bulgarian (or other) official had ever the authority to go beyond the limits specified as regards either borderlines or historical approaches and conclusions.
b) international alliances, and
The same is valid today; it would be bizarre for Bulgarian professors of universities and academics to teach, diffuse, publish and propagate ideas, concepts and interpretations that contravene the worldwide norm that the Western colonials imposed across the Earth. It is as simple as that: Bulgaria, as EU member state, participates in many academic projects like Erasmus, etc. The professor, who would challenge the lies and the falsehood, which are at the basis of the so-called European values, principles and standards, would automatically become a problem for his rector, who would be receiving most unpleasant if not threatening calls from every corner of the Earth, as well as demands to fire the uncooperative, ‘controversial’ professor.
c) the ensuing captivity of all the targeted nations, each one well-adjusted into the preconceived role that the forgers invented for it
Actually, it is not a matter of Bulgaria and how the true History of Bulgaria is hidden from the Bulgarians; the same is valid in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Sudan, Israel, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, etc. As I lived in all these countries, I have personal experience and deep knowledge as regards their pedagogical systems and the contents of their manuals. In Egypt, schoolchildren study the History of Ancient Egypt down to Ramses III only (ca. 1200 BCE) and next year, they start with the beginning of Islam (642 CE). Why?
Because during the falsely called Roman times, Egyptian mysticisms, religions, spirituality, cults, sciences, arts, wisdom, cosmogony, cosmology, and eschatology flooded Greece, Rome, the Roman Empire, and even Europe beyond the Roman borders. The Egyptian pupil must not learn that the Greeks, the Romans, and the Europeans were dramatically inferior to his own cultural heritage. That’s why stupid and illiterate sheikhs, ignorant imams, and evil theologians intoxicate the average Egyptians with today’s fake Islam, which is not a religion anymore but a theological-ideological-political system at the antipodes of the true historical Islam. It cuts the average Egyptian from his own cultural heritage, thus making him stupidly care about the wives and the prematurely dead children of prophet Muhammad, as well as other matters of no importance for the spiritual-cultural-intellectual phenomenon of Islam.
The rise of China as a world superpower has hitherto been a long path marked with several successes and advances, but also significant drawbacks and failures. The Arab Spring can be seen from many viewpoints and interpreted as per its impact on diverse states, but it was indisputably a severe impediment to China’s attempt to penetrate in Africa and offer the numerous African nations a trustworthy perspective and a valuable support in terms of nation building and sustainable development. It goes without saying that, if the Chinese establishment truly intends to bring forth a groundbreaking change at the worldwide level, Beijing must carefully take the lesson of those circumstances before 13 years and overwhelmingly modify China’s understanding of perplex situations and approach to long standing problems, notably the European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere.
In the first part of this series of articles, I expanded on a) the centuries-old Western hatred of Egypt, b) the existing historical threats against the Valley of the Nile, c) the gradual process of decomposition that the criminal Western gangsters applied to Libya and the Sudan over the past 12 years, and d) the direct relationship between the otherwise worthless Renaissance Dam (also known as GERD), which has been built in the Occupied Benishangul land (currently province) of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia), and the Abyssinian ‘Prophecy’ against Egypt and Sudan. This is the link:
In the present article, I will complete the presentation of the Egyptian approach to the need of the Egyptian-Chinese Military Alliance and I will expand on the Chinese perspective towards the topic.
Contents
I. The War in Gaza and the Destabilization of the Red Sea Region
II. The Rise of China as a World Super-power
III. The Irrevocable Prerequisites of China’s Worldwide Predominance
I. The War in Gaza and the Destabilization of the Red Sea Region
The War in Gaza, which started with the attack of the 7th October 2023, has nothing to do with the supposed liberation of Palestine (and even less with the formation of a Palestinian state); even more importantly, it is absolutely unrelated to the Islamic world. Hamas has been acknowledged as a functional outfit of the Israeli, English and American secret services, which envisioned, fabricated, established, promoted and imposed it on all the Palestinians, duly fooling them with associated nationalist and Islamist literature as well as numerous silly lies that only the already besotted populations could possibly take seriously. The fact that the secret services of Israel, England and America had their own stooges in the shameful outfit, tried to pull it closer to the interests of one or another country, and kept struggling for prevalence in and control of Hamas is of secondary importance. What matters is that Hamas was never a truly Palestinian let alone Muslim organization in spite of the public prayers of their leaders. They thought they were genuine, independent and unrestrained but in reality they were always closely manageable and totally maneuverable.
The War in Gaza has the meaning that its true instigators want to give it. This is essential to understand. The conflict is neither local nor regional; it is a worldwide conflict or, if you prefer, a World War. It has local repercussions in the sense that Gazan Palestinians -due to their leaders’ foolishness- lost their homes forever. It does have a regional impact indeed; this concerns mainly Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and to lesser extent other countries (Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran).
Although Lebanon and Syria have repeatedly been the targets of Israeli attacks (as far as Haleb/Aleppo), I mention Egypt first because the potential danger is greater and imminent. If the entire Gazan population is further pushed to the border, the government of Egypt will find themselves in an almost impossible position. With a chaotic situation in Libya, with Sudan plunged in civil war (in which one of the fighting factions depends exclusively on external factors and forces that are inimical to Egypt and friendly to the criminal, dictatorial and racist Amhara regime of Abyssinia/Fake Ethiopia), and with the Renaissance dam (GERD) filled, Egypt faces a havoc in the only part of the country’s national borders that was truly safe: that shared with Israel and Gaza. What is even worse is that there is an enormous distance between the governmental policy of the newly re-elected President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the popular feelings against Israel. Updates and readings:
Maintaining peaceful relations with Israel is necessary for the Egyptian president in order to come up with eventual solutions for the urgent needs of the evicted Gazan populations, to appear as a mediator should a circumstance arise, and to ensure that the Gazans will not be pushed by the Israeli soldiers up to Egyptian borders. All the same, this position is extremely delicate because Egypt cannot possibly accept to accommodate the populations of Gaza that the Israeli government subtly tries to force out once for all; indeed, the quasi-totality of the Egyptian population would not possibly accept such a development, which would automatically turn out to be tenure-terminator for any leader of the country. On the other side, any further deterioration of the poor conditions of life to which two millions of destitute Gazans have been exposed may deeply anger the average Egyptians up to the point of launching protests, which would further weaken the lukewarm support that the Egyptian president has.
As it was clearly understood from the first weeks, Israel’s military intervention in Gaza and the ensuing destructions and systematic killings of civil populations must be assessed as a long-term military operation that may last many months if not years. If at any moment, Gazan populations are pushed toward the Egyptian border, the war may become inevitable. Even worse, if thousands of uncontainable Gazans pour into the Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian government will be viewed by its citizens as truly impotent. Then, the newly elected president may be challenged by the protests (even more so because the economic outlook is rather gloomy) or removed by a military coup. For more than a decade, it has been clear that serious forces within the Western world (all those who have promoted Turkey’s Islamization over the past two decades) have a deep-seated hatred of Egypt. If France and a part of the US establishment supported the present Egyptian establishment, England and other states created and promoted a steadily anti-Egyptian sentiment.
But it is not only a matter of a turmoil limited in the Sinai Peninsula’s northernmost extremities. With the military activities launched by the Houthi government of Yemen against Israel, the Gazan conflict took another dimension that is seriously dangerous for the national security and safety of Egypt. As the Red Sea is Egypt’s eastern flank, it was always viewed as the safest region of the country; any condition of instability created in those governorates (Red Sea, Suez, and South Sinai) will severely endanger Cairo in many aspects. If maritime companies cancel the Red Sea – Suez Canal passageway, the Egyptian economy will take a disastrous hit. Map:
Under current circumstances, Egypt definitely needs a major ally beyond the well-conceived and auspiciously undertaken adhesion of Cairo to the BRICS+. The 2023 decision to enlarge the intergovernmental organization (from 5 to 10 member states) with the participation of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and UAE is highly important, particularly for Egypt’s economy. About:
However, the aforementioned wise decision of the Egyptian government has to be completed and consolidated with the selection of a main strategic partner and ally at the military and technological level. With Russia being focused on Ukraine, the Balkans, the Caucasus region, and other parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, China appears to be Egypt’s long-term close partner and ally of choice.
II. The Rise of China as a World Super-power
As a major imperial state, China has a historical tradition and a cultural heritage that very few other nations can claim today. China survived longer than other ancient empires like Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, (pre-Islamic) Iran and Rome.
Instead of being an empire identified with one religion, like the Christian Eastern Roman Empire and the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, China managed to compose a unified state dogma where Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism coexisted in peace and, at the same time, to plainly incorporate religions that came from the West, namely Mesopotamia: Manichaeism (either in its Sogdian form or in its Uyghur doctrine, fully blended with Buddhism), Nestorian Christianity, and Islam.
As a fully continental empire, China was one of the world’s five most civilized realms and foremost empires in the middle of the 16th century, along with the Mughal Empire (Hindustan), the Safavid Empire of Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the then nascent Muscovite-Russian Empire.
The five continental empires represented humanity and civilization, whereas the five maritime colonial empires (Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England) diffused barbarism, monstrosity and hatred, killing scores of indigenous populations, ruining great, highly civilized empires (Aztecs, Incas), spreading terror, inhumanity, diseases and falsehood, while also imposing tyrannically (and after deliberate genocides) the fake religion of the Western European heretical Christians (Catholics & Protestants).
In the span of 350 years (1570-1920), due to their sheer complex of inferiority, vicious plots, incessant cheating, wicked rancor, malignant lies, and systematized fallacy, the five maritime colonial empires (Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England), managed to
– fully invade and colonize one of the five continental empires, namely the Mughal Empire (which was far richer than Louis XIV’s France);
– totally dismember another continental empire, namely the Ottoman Empire, on the territory of which absurdly stand nowadays no less than 30 states;
– significantly reduce, temporarily occupy, and interfere in the local governance of another continental empire, namely the Qajar Empire of Iran (which succeeded the Safavid and the Afshar dynasties, but was subsequently replaced -following English intervention- with an ignorant and idiotic soldier who was later labeled ‘Pahlavi’ by his colonial master-‘adviser’);
– systematically undertake two Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) -in order to heinously corrupt the Chinese people- and then invade, occupy and dismantle the Qing Empire of China, first by attempting to divide the country into zones of foreign occupation and later by pitching the Japanese against the Chinese; and
– methodically turn Russia repeatedly against its natural allies, namely the above mentioned four empires and the equally continental empires of Austria-Hungary and Germany.
We have to consider the years 1945 and 1991 as the peaks of the maritime empires’ prevalence, because the United States substituted for the earlier Western colonial empires. As a matter of fact, in 1945, the very costly victory of a continental state (USSR) over another continental state (Nazi Germany) and the slow recovery of China, which was still plunged in Civil War, allowed the US to appear as the sole world superpower. Later, although the Soviet Union managed to soon become the second superpower, its dissolution in 1991, at a moment the People’s Republic of China had not yet risen to prominence, gave again the impression that the US was the world’s only superpower.
Now, 33 years after 1991, everything looks impressively different, because of the spectacular economic, military, technological and geostrategic ascent of China; all the same, the overwhelmingly transformed international environment is also due to Russia’s astounding comeback in terms of military modernization, administrative rehabilitation, socioeconomic reorganization, scientific breakthrough, technological advance and worldwide impact. Furthermore, the dramatic change has to also be attributed to India’s striking rise to the level of major economic, military, scientific and technological power, and to the remarkable progress that several middle level powers (Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Egypt, etc.) have made in the meantime, thus becoming notable regional powers and centers of gravitation that the Western colonial countries cannot anymore fully impact, influence or intimidate.
III. The Irrevocable Prerequisites of China’s Worldwide Predominance
All this may really augur very well for China, but unfortunately, it is not enough. And the real issue for China is not to outperform its own performance in terms of military and technological breakthrough or economic-commercial penetration. What matters -in the transformation of a traditional continental empire to a worldwide superpower- is the elimination of the existing drawbacks and obstacles. China may nowadays look far stronger and more important than France, a traditional maritime colonial empire, but things are not that simple when we examine both countries’ impact and influence on Africa.
Chairwoman of Russia’s Federation Council Valentina Matviyenko speaking with the President of Algeria Abdelmajid Tebboune (March 2023) said that “France must repent for colonial crimes”.
France controlled major lands of civilization for hundreds of years and imposed its own scientific method, academic system, moral-intellectual values, educational context, and socio-cultural environment. Fully colonizing the Algerian society, Paris
– imposed the study of 18th c. philosophers by Algerian schoolchildren;
– deleted Algeria’s Islamic and pre-Islamic historical and cultural heritage from Modern Algeria’s education, intellectual life, political discourse, academic research, cultural milieu, and artistic explorations;
– prevented a proper nation building process from being undertaken by Algerians;
– turned the average Algerian into either an entirely subaltern French or a fully reactionary Muslim predestined to doom in his vain effort to ‘Islamize’ his country and -even worse- not even to imagine that there is no return to national originality without an exhaustive de-Westernization;
– made of the average Algerian’s religion (Islam) a mere ideological caricature; and
– appended all the concepts and all the notions that an Algerian may develop or devise to French (and therefore Western) standards, measures and criteria, thus irrevocably preventing generations upon generations of Algerians to ever achieve cultural ingenuity, intellectual originality, and national authenticity.
That’s why one can easily observe that, even at the moment of the closest Soviet-Algerian or Russo-Algerian (after 1991) relationship, the ideal place for an Algerian to be was always Paris – and never Moscow!
What is even worse is that the French did the same in each and every of their colonies, whereas the English acted accordingly. And when the Americans arrived to take over, they followed the same pattern, offering scores of scholarships to the youth of the earlier colonized nations so that they get re-colonized after the American fashion (or version). This is how Morocco, to offer an example, was methodically managed and gradually turned against France. The Americans called it decolonization, but in reality the shameless process was a full re-colonization; they did not care about the local nations and the troubles caused to them by the European colonization process that had lasted perhaps 100 or 200 years before the American arrival. However, one has to take into consideration the fact that this was possible for the Americans to achieve because America was already a byproduct of the Western world.
12th c. manuscript of A’azzu Ma Yuṭlab by Ibn Tumart
But Russia is not part of the Western world and the same is valid for China. So, to be on the safe side, when a Russian or Chinese diplomat or statesman speaks, discusses or negotiates with an Algerian statesman, politician, military officer administrator, businessman, he must always bear in mind that in front of him does not stand a descendant of Ibn Tumart or a proponent of the Almohad doctrine, but a wretched person confused about his identity and choices, ignorant of his national past, and fooled by the -systematically administered to him and his compatriots- colonial Euro-centric fallacy. About:
As the above example constitutes only one case of troublesome encounter, Chinese must realize that, on the best occasion, they will meet similar cases everywhere. This means that, by imagining that Chinese financial aid, state loans, technology transfer, military advice, political partnership, foreign investment, infrastructure works, and sustainable development plans will suffice to make of an African country a strong and permanent ally of China in the Black Continent, Chinese diplomats, advisers and statesmen only fool themselves and lose their money. And this is not only due to the existent -among African governments- overwhelming corruption.
The Chinese must therefore realize that first, last and above all, they need to set the foundations of their presence in Africa- something that until now they have never done. This must be massive and, luckily, China can certainly afford it. It would perhaps be even better to undertake parallel efforts, namely through the Chinese embassies, consulates and universities and, also, via BRICS-based partnerships.
First, China must study in-depth all the African nations as per their own declarations of identity; if the Chinese authorities are contented with the superficial study of the colonial caricatures that the Modern African states are, it is better for Beijing to forget the dreams of worldwide predominance once forever. The Oromos of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia), the Bejas (Blemmyes) of Eastern Sudan, the Copts of Egypt, the Berbers of the African Atlas, the Mehris and the Soqotris of Yemen, the Luo, the Somalis, the Kikuyu, the Bantu Muslims of Kenya, and all the other nations and the ethnic-linguistic-religious groups of Africa must be meticulously studied in China.
The reason for this enormous academic-political endeavor is simple: Western colonial countries have done so for ca. 200 years. And without their enormous study, knowledge and documentation, the Western colonial administrations would have never asserted the firm control that they had and still have over Africa. It would perhaps be quite useful for Chinese scholars to first investigate the extent and the depth of Africanist or African Studies in Western Europe and North America. Russia has developed this academic discipline but not up to the level Italy has. The African colonial past of Rome (in Libya, Eritrea, Somalia and Abyssinia/Fake Ethiopia) did indeed play a certain role in this regard. Actually, the European colonialism was never an exclusively military affair; it was rather a combined enterprise based on universities, libraries, museums, companies, armies, secret services, and governments. It is essential for the Chinese to always keep this in mind. About: https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article-abstract/69/275/163/57603?redirectedFrom=PDF&login=false
At the same time, Chinese scholars must examine the indigenous scholarship-led attempt to establish Afrology or Africology at the antipodes of the Western colonial discipline. Africans involved in the development and implementation of concepts such as Afrocentricity and African Renaissance must be taken seriously by the Chinese, first as a topic of study and then as a potential partner in numerous hitherto undefined pro-African and pro-Chinese, anti-Western projects. It is really a joke for Chinese statesmen to think that, with only few hundreds of billions of dollars and due to governmental cooperation in bilateral trade, infrastructure projects, and political relations, Beijing will establish a deeply-rooted presence in the Black Continent.
In this manner and without a deep study of the entire continent (as I already said), China is going to lose most of the money spent for this scope. Few corrupt partners (ministers, generals, thugs-in chief, etc.) will pocket part of the Chinese money, but later some of their colleagues or subordinates will probably report this development to their French, English or American masters, and then China’s fraudulent trustees may get a bullet in their head or simply removed from power; their monies will be confiscated, and the country will be lost for China – pretty much like Libya was stripped from Beijing in 2011.
Second, China must deeply study African History without taking into consideration the existent borders. The down-to-Earth reality is simple: colonial borders are good only for the colonial powers, but never for the colonized nations. So, China cannot accept them – at least before duly studying how and why all these fake lines were drawn by the French and the English in order to work only to their benefit. By this, I don’t mean that one should break all the existing African countries to pieces. No! In some cases, one can produce one very sizeable, new African country out of two or three states – but the decision must be well-founded and based on the study of the local reality, and of the colonial perverse rule and evildoing. I will now offer an example.
Very old map of north africa with Focus on Egypt, other countries on this map are Libya, Sudan, Nigeria, Algeria. Main countries which were occupied by Britain in the early 20th century.
Egypt, Sudan and Libya could have easily made one enormous state; combined the three countries have a total area of ca. 4.7 million km2 (larger than India and smaller than Australia). This means that, if united, they would make the 6th largest state in the world. However, the following fact highlights the systematic English evildoing that took place and the perverse, calamitous nature of colonialism: despite the fact that the English colonized both lands, controlled the local societies, and built the infrastructure that they needed, including a vast network of railways, the colonial governors took good care never to connect Egypt and Sudan by train. Although the railway network in both lands totaled, back in 1950s, thousands of kilometers and the existing routes from Alexandria to Aswan and from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum covered 1100 km and 900 km respectively, no railway was ever constructed between Aswan with Wadi Halfa (ca. 320 km)!
This fact is critical for the Chinese and for anyone else to know, because it unveils the secret targets of the colonial powers, namely to rule Africa first locally and later remotely – through use of idiotic indigenous stooges-traitors, who were first selected to study in English or French universities and then there formed as to how to rule their lands as per the plans of their colonial masters and not in a way to reflect the true interests of their nations. That is why, after Sudan’s independence (1956), no Sudanese and no Egyptian statesman had ever the idea of linking the two countries by two railways – one crossing the Valley of the Nile (from Alexandria to Khartoum) and another running alongside the Red Sea Coast (from Suez to Suakin).
So, to conclude about this example, I would say that it is very good for the Chinese leaders to intend to launch many infrastructure projects in Africa, but it would be far better for them to also come to know which plans and designs were never proposed (let alone built) by the colonial powers, although they could have been undertaken, and for which reasons; this would reveal to the Chinese authorities who is going to certainly plot against China’s penetration in Africa, where, when and for which reason.
Third, China should deeply study African Antiquity and Oriental Antiquity in order to uncover the fallacious nature of the Western narrative, denounce it at worldwide level, and refute it solemnly, thus liberating world nations from the pro-Western, racist dogma, which generated tyrannies and genocides across the Earth. Chinese universities must lead the world academia in critical disciplines like Egyptology, Assyriology, Hittitology, Iranology, Turkology and many other crucial sectors of Orientalism, which reveal the truth about the History of Mankind that the Western academia wanted to conceal, distort and replace with the absurdity of Greco-Roman civilization, Hellenism, and Eurocentrism.
While being energetically involved in this majestic project, with the participation of dozens of thousands of African and Asiatic students, China should deploy a great effort in interconnecting universities in Africa and Asia. This will help irrevocably disconnect African and Asiatic universities from the vicious centers of falsehood, namely the Western European and North American universities, which plunged the world in distortion, racism, anomaly, darkness and wars.
Fourth, China must prepare a young generation of China-educated, Chinese-speaking African leaders, who will spend 4-7 years in China, before returning home to work in the field of their specialization and thus to demolish the remaining chains of colonialism, misconceptions, misperceptions, biases, and white man’s schemes and deceptions. These young Africans will form their countries’ new middle classes and they will be instrumental in irreversibly cutting the relations of their nations with the criminal colonial states of England, France, US, Holland, Canada, Belgium, New Zealand, and Australia. English and French must be irrevocably deleted from Africa’s collective memory.
This enormous project will also entail the establishment of annexes of dozens of Chinese universities throughout Africa; in every single African state, several Chinese universities, numerous high schools, and various institutes will have to open and operate. The penetration of Chinese as the first foreign language must therefore be considered as key to China’s presence in Africa. For this reason, it has to be fully supported at all levels, notably the Internet, blogging, social media, etc. Chinese press establishments must open Asia in general and China in particular to all Africans, while incessantly slandering the Western world in every dimension.
Fifth, China must develop an enormous program of cultural exchanges, involving visits of African artists to China and vice versa, African schoolchildren holidays in China and vice versa, traveling bilateral exhibitions (a China-Tanzania exhibition in Egypt or an Algeria-China exhibition in Kenya, and so on), ‘Africa and the Silk-, Spice- and Perfume-routes’ Annual Seminar, and a vast program of sister city or a twin town relationship.
Sixth, China must build an unmatched military presence in Africa. It is better to first establish bilateral military relations with several countries of the Black Continent and then launch the next stage of expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In order to better involve its allies, Beijing could introduce the concept of trilateral military alliance and presence; to offer an example in this regard, within the context of an Egyptian-Chinese military alliance, China could involve India and thus set up a Chinese-Indian-Egyptian brigade after the example of the Franco-German Brigade. On other occasions, a Chinese-Russian-Algerian brigade would reduce the chance of war in the African Atlas that the secret services of England and America work hard to instigate, and a Chinese-Russian-Niger and/or a Chinese-Russian-Mali brigade would eliminate the threat of Islamic fundamentalism throughout Sahara, therefore fully canceling the evil Anglo-Saxon plans.
China’s military presence in Africa can function as vector of peace throughout the Black Continent; it must start with a strong bilateral military agreement with Egypt. What the scope of a Chinese-Egyptian military alliance can be and how fruitful it will turn out to be I will present in the next article of the series, which will be the last.
Following the publication of an article of mine about Kazakhstan’s chances to bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians and to resolve the Palestinian problem once for all, a Muslim friend wrote to me, asking me to expand on the reasons for some of my proposals. He also made a comparison between Israel/Palestine and Cyprus, and he suggested that for both cases he would support a two-state solution. The present article is my reply to his questions and points about Cyprus. My previous articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (including subtitles and units) and links to them you will find at the end of the present article.
I. Cyprus & Palestine: an Island with one Nation & a Land with two Nations
I find the two cases distinct, and under any circumstances whatsoever I would never compare a land (Palestine) to an island (Cyprus), but my friend started his brief letter with the following sentences: “the solution is two states in Palestine and two states in Cyprus. In Cyprus, there are two peoples, not one. Ethnically, there are no ‘Cypriots’; there is no ‘Cypriot’ nation. The term ‘Cypriot’ is local/geographical, not ethnic / national. In Cyprus, there are two great nations, Greeks and Turks, and some tiny minorities”. Saying this, he drew a parallel between Palestine and Cyprus; but this is wrong.
In Ottoman Palestine, before 1882 (the very beginning of the Zionist ‘Aliyah’ project), Palestinians constituted the quasi-totality of the local population, whereas several tiny minorities lived in peace among them: Turkish Ottoman administrators, Druzes and Jews. With the arrival of the European (mostly Ashkenazi) Jews, the composition of the local population started gradually changing.
It is noteworthy that the arrival of those populations was approved by the Sultan and the Ottoman authorities (until 1917), accepted by the Palestinians in the beginning, fully supported by the English colonial gangsters, strongly opposed by the Palestinians with the passing of time, but originally rejected by the only who knew and understood: the Sephardic Jews of Palestine, who represented an authentic line of continuity between Late Antiquity and Modern Jews.
II. 2nd millennium BCE Alashiya (Cyprus)
Quite contrarily, Cypriots were always there. The original name of the island was Alashiya; this is attested in 2nd millennium BCE Assyrian-Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Ugaritic Canaanite, and Linear B Mycenaean texts. The king of Alashiya is mentioned even in the Amarna Letters; the island was part of the territory of the Hittite Empire for several hundreds of years. Mentioned in the text of Wenamun, early 11th c. BCE Alashiya was ruled by Queen Hatiba – which is the earliest known name of local ruler. As personal name, it is determinately Semitic.
The word ‘Cyprus’ is Semitic too, as it denotes the ‘coast’ or the ‘shore’ in Canaanite and Phoenician. Ethnically, all the Cypriots are Canaanites-Phoenicians entirely identical to today’s Lebanese. The sparse Achaean settlements could not and did not change the irrevocable Semitic Phoenician ethnic and cultural identity of Alashiya-Cyprus.
Papyrus with the text of Wenamun in Egyptian Hieratic
III. Vicious, colonial falsification of the History of Cyprus
The History of Cyprus has been extensively tampered with by prepaid pseudo-scholars, bogus-academics, and clownish professors who were on the payroll of London-based Greek ship owners, who were ordered by the Apostate Freemasonic lodge of England to monstrously disfigure the historical realities and to shamelessly portray Alashiya’s History as “Greek”. This fallacy would exacerbate the vicious political myths that were diffused by idiotic politicians and treacherous statesmen in Greece, who -thinking that they would ‘unite Cyprus with Greece-‘ brought disaster, bloodshed and interminable conflict. These were the stupid victims of the English colonial liars and crooks who did not give a damn for the lives of the Cypriots, the Turks, and the Greeks.
Statue of Baal (12th c. BCE) unearthed in Enkomi, Famagusta; to deny the Semitic-Canaanite identity of the island, the biased archaeologists did not name the statue correctly, but gave it rather an exotic appellation, namely ‘horned god’!
The fallaciously called ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ is a fake term invented to distort the History of the Oriental Empires; it consists in the invention of a factoid, which is then extrapolated from a marginal and unimportant region (the Anatolian Sea, which is also known as the Aegean Sea) and extended to describe the major centers of advanced civilization, namely Mesopotamia and Egypt, where it does not apply at all! The fabricated term is biased and absurd. It is impermissible to use terms that apply to an unimportant periphery in order to narrate the History of the lands of the great empires and the peoples who developed the major civilizations. In simple words, since there is no ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ in Mesopotamia, there is no ‘Late Bronze Age collapse’ as a major historical circumstance; it is a marginal phenomenon that concerns peripheral lands to Mesopotamia.
Tjekker (Teucri) and Peleset (Philistines-Palestinians) fighting against the Egyptians and Pharaoh Ramesses III at the Battle of Djahy (ca. 1178 BCE); from the reliefs of the walls of the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, Luxor West
The so-called ‘major wave of Greek settlement’ (1100-1050 BCE) was not Greek and was not major; it was in fact ‘Western Anatolian’, and it did not affect Cyprus in particular. In fact, it was the side effect of the invasions of the Sea Peoples, who had nothing to do with ‘Greeks’, but actually destroyed the Achaean (‘Greek’) fortresses and brought an end to the Hittite Empire and its ally, the Mycenaean kingdom.
IV. 1st millennium BCE Cyprus
Cyprus was integral part of the Sargonid Assyrian, Nabonid Babylonian, and Achaemenid Iranian empires; as such, it was entirely disconnected from all the developments that took place in South Balkans during the 5th and the 4th centuries BCE. Cyprus was closer to the Seleucid Empire of Syria, but was always part of the Ptolemaic Empire of Egypt; this fact that reflects the survival of cultural rivalries of the past (Hittite Anatolia, Assyrian-Babylonian Mesopotamia, Egypt).
The gradual diffusion of Alexandrine Koine in Cyprus does not justify any claim of Hellenization; the various settlements of Arcadians did not change the Semitic-Canaanite ethnic identity of the Cypriots. The Romanization and the Christianization of the island constituted two processes, which -in spite of the crucial changes that took place there during the Late Antiquity- consolidated the ethnic unity of the Cypriots, who became part of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Ivory game board (detail) found at Enkomi, Famagusta; evident imitation of the Assyrian royal art by the artists of the local king who is depicted in hunting.
V. Cyprus as part of the Eastern Roman Empire
Cyprus was religiously and administratively important, and this is highlighted by the position of the bishop of Cyprus whose Church was proclaimed autocephalous in the First Council of Ephesus (431 CE) and by the outstanding privileges that Emperor Zeno (reign: 474-475 and 476-491) accorded to Archbishop Anthemius (488 CE). It is interesting that the Patriarchate of Antioch repeatedly failed to incorporate Cyprus into its dominion.
Furthermore, Cyprus was never part of an Eastern Roman ‘theme’ (administrative division), as it consisted in an entirely independent one. The partly Islamization of the island was a slow and rather unusual process which involved an Eastern Roman and Umayyad condominium (688), The Eastern Roman Reconquista (965 CE) took an end with the Crusades (1191), the much loathed (by the Cypriots) Knights Templar, the Lusignan rule (1192-1489), and the Venetian rule that lasted until the Ottoman conquest (1571). The few Ottoman settlers were military officers who entered into mixed marriages, thus having no major impact on the ethnic composition of the local population.
Agia Napa monastery, Cyprus (12th-18th c.)
Hala Sultan Tekke (or Mosque of Umm Haram), Larnaca (16th–18th c.)
VI. Conflicts in 20th c. Cyprus: due to the colonial manipulation of the anti-Turkish Greek racists
In fact, the Turkish Cypriots are Cypriots who accepted Islam; because of this, they did not need to further speak Cypriot Rumi, which was the local dialect of the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire. Today, this language, which erroneously called ‘Modern Greek-Cypriot’, is quasi-unintelligible to all the inhabitants of Greece, who lost their Eastern Roman (Romeiki/Rumi) identity and language, as they were forced -within the secessionist Greek state- to learn the fabricated Modern Greek ‘Standard’ language. On the other hand, Turkish-Cypriot has several differences from Ottoman and Modern Turkish.
Cyprus could have reached independence, unity and neutrality, had the nationalist, extremist and suicidal idea of ‘Enosis’ (unilateral union of Cyprus with Greece) not prevailed among the Greeks and the Greek Cypriots.
With the 15th July 1974 coup the Greek state breached the order in Cyprus, thus offering the chance to Turkey to intervene as a warranty power; the Turkish military intervention followed secret English directives. In Nicosia, the division line (‘Green Line’) cut the city into two parts in a way that offered to the Embassy of England the exclusive privilege to have access to both sectors of the divided island. Actually, it had been designed back in the 1960s by an English military officer as a provisory ceasefire line to separate armed groups of the Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots.
All the accusations of Turkey for the so-called ‘military occupation of the northern part of the island’ by the ridiculous Greek politicians, statesmen, corrupt journalists, chauvinist pseudo-academics, and racist bogus-intellectuals are nothing more than the most convincing proof of their high treason and the best confirmation of their subordination to foreign countries’ interests. By deliberately taking adamant and unrealistic positions, they make it sure that the problem is never resolved and people in Greece are thus fooled, fanaticized and sentimentally manipulated.
In an article published in Greek in Exormisi (‘Sortie’; then daily newspaper organ of PASOK in Greece) on 18th April 1990, I was the first to publicly demand the official Greek recognition of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The ignorant, idiotic, pathetic, corrupt and ludicrous political microcosm of Greece, by rejecting to pay heed to my unmistakable advice, only worsened the position of the country, as they demonstrated worldwide that they are miserable autistics or mentally defective morons. Whether you like it or not, the international community is not a primary school, and the states are not naïve pupils; there are no excuses for mistakes made and for acts breaching the international law, which is the consecration of the Law of the Jungle. For the silly Greek politicians and diplomats it is therefore ludicrous to endlessly complain for something that Greece caused in the first place, by launching the 15th July 1974 coup against President Makarios.
I don’t reject the idea of two states on the island of Cyprus; on the contrary, I fully supported it in the past, back in the 1990s, when Turkey was not an ailing state with paranoid crooks and pseudo-Islamist gangsters in the government. However, this is a matter of local governance. A confederal state could also be viable and successful. Turkish Cypriots have always been staunch Kemalists, as they accept only a secular form of state, while also rejecting the presence of idiotic Islamist Anatolian settlers. Today, a confederal, bi-communal, secular state in Cyprus would make sense. The solution of two states on the island would surely push the small states to unwanted conditions of dependence on Greece and Turkey respectively, and this is something that neither Greek Cypriots nor Turkish Cypriots would like.
VII. Greek & Turkish Cypriots’ enemies are Greece, Turkey and England
As it often happens in all the postcolonial states, the opposition to the absurd and disastrous Greek governmental position as regards the Cyprus problem is carried out also by the colonial powers’ stooges who are employed in order to diffuse other wrong ideas, thus placing the average Greeks in front of a fake dilemma. The steady, incessant generation of fake dilemmas is the method by which colonial powers rule their former colonies.
Consequently, ignorant journalists, being on the payroll of the London-based Greek ship owners and the US-based Greek Diaspora, propagate absurd ideas and vicious concepts, publishing scores of nonsensical articles to fool the average readers. In doing so, they support the current position of Greece’s ailing government on the matter. To be exact, the leftist approach taken by the most reviled government of Greece with respect to the Greek-Turkish relations and the respective position of Turkey’s Islamist gangsters are calamitous for both countries’ vital interests. The same is valid for the ‘new’ Greek approach to the Cyprus problem. It is not strange to qualify the Greek government’s positions as ‘leftist’; although masqueraded as conservative, the New Democracy party has always implemented a Trotskyist agenda.
In his letter, my Muslim friend quoted an article from Anihneuseis portal (see links below) in which the author expressed the following absurd question:
– Why should Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots be forced to live together? The Turkish-Cypriots will never ‘return’ (sic!) as minority to a state that is basically in the hands of Greek-Cypriots.
This paranoid statement reflects the stupid ideas of corrupt Greek journalists and analysts who write in order to reproduce the Islamist propaganda of Turkey, being on the payroll of the criminal Islamist regime of Ankara. Turks have to overthrow the Islamist regime at once, close down all pseudo-Islamist schools and bogus-tariqas, and get their country back from the colonial cholera of AKP. And Greeks have to remove the present government as soon as possible, before it makes of the country Europe’s best example of population replacement.
Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots loved living together until the moment the criminal stooges of England started diffusing among Greeks and Greek Cypriots the evil concept of ‘Enosis’ (Union) between an entirely non-Greek nation (Cyprus) and another equally non-Greek nation, which has been tyrannically ruled for 200 years within the dictatorial pseudo-state of ‘Greece’, undergone a spiritual genocide, and turned from real Christian Orthodox Eastern Romans into deluded and besotted bogus-Greeks, i.e. expendable stuff for the anti-Christian and anti-Islamic policies of the Western colonials of France, England and America.
The easiest response to the aforementioned, totally absurd, question is that Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots will love living together again as soon as they have the courage to speak sincerely to one another, agree on basic confidence-building measures, block reciprocally every type of Turkish and Greek interference, replace the Turkish soldiers with a UN peace keeping force, and ban every discussion about Hellenism, Greek impact on the History of Cyprus, and ‘Union’ with Greece. It goes without saying that Standard Modern Greek must be banned from the primary, secondary and tertiary education in the so-called ‘Greek-Cypriot’ sector (which must be renamed ‘Eastern Roman sector’), whereas Turkish Cypriot linguistic and cultural particularities must be strengthened in the completely secular education of the Turkish Cypriot sector.
Actually, there is no minority in a bi-zonal state; and this perspective of pacification, unification and rehabilitation of Cyprus is the red cloth for the bull. The criminal colonials of England intend to perpetuate the problem, causing many successive transformations to the same issue, in order to remain the only power to locally pull the strings. A united, confederal, bi-zonal state of Cyprus void of interference will have every right to close down the English military bases, terminating the colonial presence on the island once forever.
VIII. Cyprus, Egypt, and the true parallel: two communities in one nation
In fact, with respect to the two communities of Modern Cyprus, there is only one parallel that can be drawn; this is with Egypt. Reminiscent of the ancient impact and involvement, the socio-cultural conditions in the Valley of the Nile and on the island of Cyprus do enable us to establish an analogy.
Egyptians are one nation with two ethnic-religious communities: Christians and Muslims. The former speak Coptic and the latter use a Modern Arabic dialect as a means of everyday communication. However, both communities are indigenous Egyptians or if you prefer Copts (Christian Copts and Muslim Copts). Egyptian Muslims are not Arabs or other foreigners who came to settle in the Valley of the Nile; they are historical Egyptians (Copts) who gradually after 642 CE started accepting Islam; because of this, they did not use Coptic language anymore and they forgot it.
Similarly, Cypriots are one nation with two ethnic-religious communities: Christians and Muslims. The former speak Cypriot Eastern Roman (Rumi) language (which is falsely called Greek Cypriot) and the latter use a Turkish dialect slightly different from Standard Modern Turkish as a means of everyday communication. However, both communities are indigenous Cypriots. Cypriot Muslims are not Turks or Turkmen who came to settle in the island. The Ottoman soldiers who settled in Cyprus were very few. The bulk of the Turkish Cypriots are Cypriots who either entered into mixed marriages or accepted Islam during the Ottoman period.
Earlier articles about the Palestinian-Israeli problem (titles, subtitles, units and links):
Palestinians vs. Israelis: 11 Hidden Historical Truths about a Futile War
I. No Religion subsists without Moral, and no Nation exists due to Fake History II. 11 Points of Historical Clarification about the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Point 1: the Israelis are not ethnically Hebrew Point 2: the Israelis are not religiously Hebrew Point 3: ‘Judaism’ is not identical to the Ancient Hebrew religion Point 4: Jews represented an apostate minority of the Hebrews Recapitulation Point 5: the last historical state of the Jews was named Judah / Judaea, not ‘Israel’ Point 6: there is no right to the Promised Land for the Jews Point 7: the entire Old Testament is a posterior fabrication full of distortions Point 8: among today’s so-called ‘Jews’ only 10-15% are truly Jews: the Sephardi Point 9: today’s so-called ‘Jews’ are not ethnically Jewish: the Ashkenazim Point 10: Reform Judaism is not Judaism Point 11: Modern Hebrew (Ivrit) is a fake, constructed, non-Semitic language
Israelis vs. Palestinians: 6 Concealed Historical Truths about the Lost Wars
I. The Spiritual and Moral Conditions of National Resistance II. 6 Points of Historical Clarification about the Israeli- Palestinian Conflict Point 1: Palestinians are not Arabs, but victims of Arabization and Pan-Arabism. Point 2: The Aramaean and Philistine Past of the Palestinians Point 3: The Sea Peoples and the Peleset-Pelasgian-Cretan Ancestry of the Palestinians Point 4: Palestinian Islamists and Israeli Zionists: Criminal Accomplices in the Formation of a Deracinated Nation that functions as Expendable Material Point 5: Lack of Self-criticism brings Disaster, Death and Damnation Point 6: the Interminable Failures of the Palestinians
Pre-publication of chapter XXVII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI and XXXII form Part Eleven (How and why the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals failed) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
Until now, 16 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 17th (out of 33). At the end of the present pre-publication, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in gray color.
In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.
The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.
———————–
Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Ali Qapu Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Western historiography enters a stage of exorbitant falsification when attempting to reconstitute the History of the Safavid dynasty of Iran (1501-1736). What stands at the forefront of the Western forgery and distortion of the History of Iran during the said period is the theory that the Safavid dynasty was ‘Shia’, and also that they ‘converted’ the Turanian population of 16th c. Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. Of course, such fictional conversion never took place, and the Safavid rulers would reject the fake division of Islam into two denominations, since they always proclaimed their Islamic authenticity and integrity, fully refuting the concept of a ‘divided Islam’.
However, this fake division is instrumental for the colonial distortion of History, because on this fallacy hinges the entire Western involvement in the Orient and the conflicts that the criminal and evil states of England, France and America generated across Afro-Eurasia. In order to fully and irreversibly embed the vicious divisive scheme of a supposedly bi-polar Islamic world revolving around two rival empires, namely the ‘Sunni’ Ottomans and the ‘Shia’ Safavids, the Western Orientalists, agents, explorers, diplomats, and statesmen invented the fallacy of the so-called “Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam”.
Of course, at the time (: early 16th c.), the Western colonial powers did not have the chance to impose their false version of History on the Ottomans and the Safavids; they even had not developed Oriental studies properly speaking in their already established pernicious universities. At the time, History was in the making. The only thing that the colonial empires could do, and which they viciously did, was to frame the divisive plot and to pull their diplomatic strings in order to trigger as many Ottoman – Safavid wars as they could. The distortive interpretation and the evil misrepresentation of these facts would come later – in due course of time.
And the malignant fallacy ‘happened’ truly when it ‘should’ have; when the collapsing Ottoman and Iranian empires were eroded through colonial infiltration and evil subversion, then the colonial gangsters and the 19th c. Orientalists started carrying out the projection of the already preconceived forgery onto the Western powers’ local stooges, who by means of shameful bribery and high treason (termed as ‘scholarships for studies in Western Europe’) started diffusing pathetic nonsense and bogus-academic lies in their respective countries only to fit the needs of their masters, namely the colonial powers. At the last stage, the monstrous and murderous forgery of France and England was presented as “History” worldwide only because their colonial empires subjugated almost the entire world and imposed the racist Anglo-French intellectual-academic contamination.
So, the historical forgery that the Western academic murderers have been teaching for over two centuries in their bogus-universities as “Oriental History” is merely the coverage of their inhuman deeds, which plunged Afro-Eurasia into ceaseless local and regional wars, countless rebellions, and two world wars. But the original concept behind the inhuman diplomacy of England and France was already there at the beginning of the 16th c., when they started fallaciously calling Iran, namely a totally Turanian country, “Persia”; this was preposterous. Soon afterwards, they started also naming the Ottoman Empire “Turkey”, which is another expression of their evilness and forgery, because the Ottoman Empire was in reality the most anti-Turkic state in World History.
No less than eight (8) times the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran came to war during the period of 235 years of Safavid rule over Iran. Actually, the wars started in 1514 and ended 1736 with the fall of the Safavids; of course, the historical fact of 8 wars does not mean in this case only 8 years consumed in wars! Most of these wars lasted many years. And actually, the Ottoman-Iranian wars did not end with the demise of the Safavid dynasty. Wars were resumed at the times of the Turanian Afsharid dynasty of Iran (1736-1796) and also during the period of the Turanian Qajar dynasty of Iran (1789-1925). So, from 1514 until 1823, in only 309 years, the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Empire made eleven (11) wars one upon the other. In total, during 309 years, the two empires were engaged in wars against one another for no less than 81 years. About:
If one takes also into consideration the fact that both empires made many other wars with numerous neighboring empires (such as the Mughal Empire, the lately risen Russian Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) and several colonial kingdoms (Spain, Portugal, France, England, etc.), one concludes easily why the two empires gradually collapsed. Furthermore, taking into account first, the diplomatically instigated and deliberately machinated twelve (12) wars between the Ottomans and the Russian Empire, which took place during a period of 350 years (1568-1918) and lasted for no less than 57 years, and second, the five (5) wars between the Iranians and the Russians, which occurred over the span of 177 years (1651-1828) and kept going for 19 years, one can plainly assess the evilness of the divisive intrigues that the Western European colonial diplomats instigated across Afro-Eurasia, and the unprecedented bloodshed that they caused.
Gate of Felicity (Bâbüssaâde), Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Imperial Hall with the throne of the sultan, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Central Hall, Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Open recess (iwan) of the Yerevan Kiosk, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Scene from the Surname-ı Vehbi, located in the Topkapı palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Battle of Chaldiran (1514); Grand painting at the Chehel SotounPalace (despite the fact that the battle ended with Ottoman victory), Safavid Isfahan
The Third Courtyard of the Topkapı Palace in the Ottoman Constantinople, as depicted in a miniature of the Hünername, 1584
Paintings in the main hall of the Chehel Sotoun Palace,Safavid Isfahan
All the wars, which were machinated and instigated by the colonial English and French diplomacies, needed a sophisticated coverage, e.g. some fake reasons, which would ‘explain’ or ‘justify’ to anyone why these wars happened (or ‘had’ to happen). To be convincingly fake, these reasons were based on a total distortion of the identity of both empires, the Ottoman and the Safavid; these distorted identities, which ‘explained’ the Ottoman – Safavid wars to the average public opinion in Europe at the time, became later the vertebral column of the fallacious Western Orientalism and its entirely fake branches, namely Turkology and Iranology.
To describe the extent and the depth of the Western Orientalist fallacy, suffice it that I herewith state the following: a major topic for Turkologists to study should become the Safavid Empire of Iran as a Turanian state, because it was ethnically a Turanian Empire whereby the outright majority of the population used to speak diverse Turkic languages as their native tongues.
Similarly, a major topic for Iranologists to study should become the Ottoman Empire, because an overwhelmingly Iranian culture permeated the state to such extent that, when Mehmet II entered Constantinople on 29th May 1453 and proceeded to the Palace of the Eastern Roman Emperors, the first words that he uttered were neither in Ottoman Turkish nor in Medieval Greek nor in Arabic, but in the classical, literary language of all Turanians, i.e. in Farsi.
The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes;
the owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.
These verses written c. 180 years before the conquest of Constantinople (1453) by the great Iranian poet Saadi (known as Saadi Shirazi, 1210-1291) reveal
– the absolutely identical nature of the Turanians and the Iranians,
– the common cultural background of all Iranian and Turanian nations,
– key elements of the Iranian-Turanian apocalyptic and soteriological eschatology,
– the last moments of the ailing Iranian rule (Chosroes: the last major Sassanid emperor Khusraw Parvez; 570-628), and
Mehmed II, by uttering these verses, clearly indicated that he viewed his victory in terms of Iranian-Turanian culture and eschatology, before all the other eventual or hypothetical parameters involved in the topic (Palaeologi-Ottoman imperial family rivalry; Christian-Muslim religious conflict; Eastern Roman-Turkic ethnic quarrel; economic interests).
In fact, there should have never existed Turkology and Iranology within the context of Western Orientalism, if this unit of academic disciplines were to serve the true purpose of exploration and search for the historical truth. The reason is simple: Turan and Iran have always been an indivisible historical – cultural entity.
However, the false portrait of the Ottoman and the Safavid empires, which had been systematically produced by the 16th c. colonial powers, involved two dimensions of distortion of the reality, namely religious and ethnic. Then, 19th and 20th c. French and English academics and explorers misinterpreted the 16th c. Ottoman – Safavid wars that their countries’ duplicitous diplomats had instigated as of both, religious and ethnic, reasons; and in both cases, these scholars lied, pretty much like today’s Orientalists lie when presenting, teaching and propagating the following forgery: “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids”.
In fact, at the beginning of the 16th c., with the exception of Eastern Iranians (namely the Tajik / Dari speaking populations), there was not one Persian ethnic alive; Iran had already been almost entirely Turanized at the ethnic-linguistic level. Farsi was a highly respected and widely used language of Literature, History, Spirituality, Art, Architecture and Culture that all the educated people felt obliged to learn in young age at the various madrasas of the cities, the towns and the villages of Iran. But in reality, Farsi was at the time a dead language like Latin in 16th c. Germany.
Only later and mainly during the 20th c., following the aggressive and extensive English involvement and the shameful colonial rule of Iran, which was carried out by local puppets, a ‘new’, systematized ‘modern education’ was imposed on all Iranians, the true, traditional Iranian History (based on Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi and many other illustrious epic poets) was forcefully and calamitously replaced by the fake, materialistic, atheistic and evil Iranian ‘History’ of the Orientalists, and Farsi became obligatorily the meaningless ‘national’ language. These tasks have been completed by the pathetically ignorant, uneducated and charlatanesque soldiers, who were later called “Pahlavi dynasty shahs”.
The Universal Empire of Iran disappeared, and a fake, nationalistic, ‘Persian’ pseudo-kingdom was established only to implement the ensuing culturally anti-Iranian and ethnically anti-Turanian, nationalist tyranny. It was a villainous Freemasonic plot and eschatological conspiracy against Iran, involving many ulcerous English, French, American and other enemies of Imperial Iran, who postured as ‘friends’ of ‘Persia’ or ‘admirers’ of the ‘Persian civilization’. They only wanted to fool the Iranians and to insult Iran diachronically, after the absurd and abominable example given by ancient rascals like Herodotus and Aeschylus.
While the rocambolesque and even wacky Pahlavi pseudo-dynasty was in power, the criminal English colonials prepared their substitute, namely several pseudo-theologians, who composed pathetic theoretical systems, triggered absurd religious fanaticism, and engulfed the entire Iranian nation in colonial dilemmas and utmost confusion of political nature. Farsi, as the language of the systematized Western education, was indeed revivified particularly among the incessantly increasing urban populations, who started forgetting their native tongues, notably Azeri, Turkmen and other.
During the time of the Pahlavi bogus-Iranian ‘shahs’ (1925-1979), a ‘white’, nationalist terror was imposed on the misfortunate nation; the use of other languages was strictly prohibited. However, this linguistic revival is a fake, and it looks like an awakening of the mummy. The people, who speak Farsi as a native language in today’s Iran, are of Turanian ethnic origin in their outright majority; even worse, their culture is entirely Turanian–Iranian, and their most celebrated rulers and beloved emperors are all Turanians, like Shah Isma’il I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty.
This does not mean that there are not several genuine Iranian languages spoken today in Iran by native speakers; of course, there are many: they speak Baluch, Lori, Bakhtiari, Gorani, Faili, Kalhori, Gilani, Laki, Talysh, etc. But these ethno-linguistic groups represent rather small minorities in Iran. These populations are certainly of Iranian ethnic origin, but they share the common Iranian-Turanian culture with all the populations of Turanian ethnic origin in Iran and in many other countries.
The present situation in Iran looks strange and absurd to all the local victims of the diffusion of Western propaganda of educational-academic-intellectual character; in fact, the systematic propagation of the erroneous Western notion of ‘nation’ or ‘ethnic group’ triggered only troubles and conflicts. This noxious development relates to the inhuman intellectual perversion that is called ‘Enlightenment’ in the Western world. This consists in intellectual darkness and educational paranoia that caused numerous wars over the past 250 years.
For millennia, various ethnic groups -Iranian and Turanian- speaking different languages, shared always their common culture and tradition without feeling or caring about the unsubstantiated and otherwise nonexistent, fake borders and the evil division lines that the 18th c. Western European concept of ‘nation’ produced worldwide. This historical reality of Turanian-Iranian indivisibility was irrevocable within the universal Iranian Empire, which was the supreme blessing of God and the best present that the divine world had bestowed upon Mankind.
Whatever fallacy the Western Orientalists may eventually invent and include in their often nonsensical bibliography falls apart in the light of all historical sources and texts. If the modern Western academia and intellectuals cannot understand the true reality, this is due to their degenerate minds, the advanced rottenness of their decomposed educational and social structures, and the nauseating putrefaction of their moral core.
Then, the fabrication of the fake divide “Turks vs. Persians” helped the criminal colonial powers spread divisions among the Turanians of Western, Central, Southern and Northern Asia, and the Caucasus region. The parallel creation of the fake divide “Sunni Muslims vs. Shia Muslims” was instrumental in plunging the entire Islamic world in permanent strife. Then, the combined fallacy “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids” is an explosive mixture geared to prolong and perpetuate the catastrophic division of all the populations living between the Bosporus and the Indus River Delta.
However, if they destroy the evil deeds of the local puppets of the Anglo-Saxon colonial governments, these populations could triumphantly unite in a secular super-state of ca. 450 million people and thus become the new superpower and Western Asia’s real locomotive of nations. Alternatively, if the existing colonial divisions are allowed to further exist, they can trigger new fratricidal wars among the Turks, who are culturally Iranian, and the Iranians, who are ethnically Turks.
For all the aforementioned national divisions and historical distortions to be duly presented and propagated worldwide by the Western historical forgers in a complete manner, a key point had to be invented: the supposed Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. This Orientalist fallacy hinges of the misrepresentation of the mystical Safavid Order, which founded an entire empire for themselves: the Turanian Empire of Safavid Iran.
However, the falsification of the identity and the deeds of the Safavid Order would never be successfully undertaken worldwide, if the entire Western world was not already totally confused about two totally different issues, which were systematically presented to the average people of all the Western countries as supposedly ‘one’ by their religious, academic and intellectual authorities alike: spirituality and religion.
Nevertheless, spirituality and religion are totally distinct activities of the spiritual and the material hypostases of the human being.
Sultanahmet Square in Ottoman Constantinople: the Eastern Roman hippodrome and Obelisk of Theodosius, which was transported from Luxor
Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Safavid Isfahan
Procession of the guilds in the hippodrome as per a miniature of the Surname-i Vehbi (1582)
Naqsh-e Jahan, the imperial square in Safavid Isfahan
—————- BLUE MOSQUE, OTTOMAN CONSTANTINOPLE —————-
Blue mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii): built between 1609 and 1617
Blue mosque, part of the interior decoration
Blue mosque, the mihrab (center) and the minbar (right)
—————– SHAH MOSQUE, SAFAVID ISFAHAN —————————-
Shah Mosque (Masjid-e Shah): built between 1611 and 1629
The winter hypostyle
The dome
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FORTHCOMING
Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey
2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu
(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
CONTENTS
PART ONE. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities
A. Examples of fake national names
a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!
b) Tataria – Not Russia!
c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!
d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!
e) Khazaria – not Israel!
f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!
B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish
C. The Preamble to My Response
CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.
CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.
CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment
A. Orientalism
B. Conceptualization
C. Contextualization
D. Concealment
PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT
CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece
PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY
CHAPTER VI: The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times
CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists
CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan
CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES
CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period
CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty
CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids
PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS
CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire
CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism
CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates
PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM
CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE
CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet
CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam
CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History
PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’
CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’
PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’
CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate
PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash
PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM
CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor
PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED
CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another
CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’
CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur
CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World
CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West
CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk
PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?
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List of the already pre-published chapters of the book
Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
Pre-publication of chapter 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 XVII, XVIII, XIX and XX form Part Six (Fallacies about the Early Expansion of Islam: the Fake Arabization of Islam) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapter XVII and XX have already been pre-published.
Until now, 15 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 16th (out of 33). At the end of the present pre-publication, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in gray color.
In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.
The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.
———————————————————
Bosra (South Syria), Bahira Monastery
This process is associated with the fabrication of numerous fake terms, such as ‘Muhammedanism’, ‘Arab invasions’, ‘Arab conquests’, ‘Arab civilization’, etc. also involving the denigration of Islam as ‘religion of the Arabs’. The ‘Arabization’ of Islam is a paranoid Western Orientalist effort to reduce Islam to the level of a religion of just one nation, which – in addition – was the realm of repugnant barbarians; that’s why Orientalists and Islamologists always tried to portray the early Islamic invasions as ‘Arab’. About the reasons for which the initial Arab – Yemenite invasions (633-638) were successful, I already spoke in the previous chapter XVII (Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE; see sections VI to X).
But there is certainly more to it. First, among the Islamic armies’ soldiers, who advanced after 640 either in the direction of the Iranian plateau and Caucasus or toward Egypt, the Arabs constituted already the minority. Most of the soldiers of the Islamic armies after 640 were Yemenite, Aramaean, and Axumite converts and, speaking about the Islamic armies two decades later (after 661), one has to add also new Turanian and Egyptian converts.
Major centers of Aramaean Syriac Jacobite (Monophysitic/Miaphysitic) Christianity in 7th c. CE Syria and Mesopotamia
In the Umayyad Caliphate, Medieval Greek and Syriac Aramaic were the two official languages, while Arabic was only the religious language for the Muslim minority. And the Arab warriors, who settled in Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere, were so few that they were racially-ethnically assimilated with the local populations. The gradual, linguistic Arabization of the local populations in Yemen and in the formerly Eastern Roman provinces of the Orient was due to the fact that Arabic was the religious language.
In the lands where Islam was spread and became the official religion, there was no Arab culture diffused, because as I already said (chapter XVII, section I), to accept Islam the Arabs of Hejaz were de-Arabized and compactly Aramaized in the first place. This means that the ethnically Arab Muslim soldiers, who fought at Yarmuk and Qadissiyyah, were not culturally Arab anymore. They were indeed culturally Aramaized Arabs, thanks to their acceptance of Islam. There is no such thing as Arab culture in Islam.
Apparently, Arab culture existed before Islam in Hejaz and the desert, involving polytheistic cults, barbarian traditions, lawlessness and total absence of rudimentary civilization. To all the surrounding, civilized nations {namely the Yemenites, the Aramaeans, the diverse nations of Iran, the Eastern Romans, the Egyptians, the Sudanese Meroites (: Cushitic Ethiopians), the Axumite Abyssinians, and the Somalis of Other Berberia and Azania}, the pre-Islamic Arabs were known as the only barbarians of the wider region, and this was valid for many long centuries.
Homs/Emessa, Syria: Saint Mary Church; seat of the Syriac archbishopric and also known as Church of the Holy Girdle, it is a historical Syriac monument built over an underground church that dates back to 50 CE. Homs is famous for its black stones and rocks of which this church and many early mosques were built.
It is enough for anyone to read the text of the Periplus of the Red (‘Erythraean’) Sea (an Ancient Greek text written by an Alexandrian Egyptian merchant and navigator of the 2nd half of the 1st c. CE), so that he gets a very clear picture. Paragraph 20 of the said text, particularly if compared with earlier or later parts of the text, is quite revelatory of the rightfully deprecatory view of the Arabs that all the other ancient nations had.
“Directly below this place is the adjoining country of Arabia, in its length bordering a great distance on the Erythraean Sea. Different tribes inhabit the country, differing in their speech, some partially, and some altogether. The land next the sea is similarly dotted here and there with caves of the Fish-Eaters, but the country inland is peopled by rascally men speaking two languages, who live in villages and nomadic camps, by whom those sailing off the middle course are plundered, and those surviving shipwrecks are taken for slaves. And so they too are continually taken prisoners by the chiefs and kings of Arabia; and they are called Carnaites. Navigation is dangerous along this whole coast of Arabia, which is without harbors, with bad anchorages, foul, inaccessible because of breakers and rocks, and terrible in every way. Therefore we hold our course down the middle of the gulf and pass on as fast as possible by the country of Arabia until we come to the Burnt Island; directly below which there are regions of peaceful people, nomadic, pasturers of cattle, sheep and camels“.
The text is to be found online here (translation by Wilfred H. Schoff):
This barbarism took an end with the preaching of Prophet Muhammad, who transferred Aramaean culture, education, intellectuality and spirituality among the Arabs. All the themes and topics discussed by Prophet Muhammad, either in his revelations (Quran) or in his explanations (Hadith), were Aramaean. Of course, and with reference to developments taking place during the middle of the 7th c., there was an evident differentiation between a) Christian Aramaeans and b) Muslim Aramaeans and Muslim Arabs; but the differentiation was only religious, and not cultural. Culturally, the groups a) and b) were identical; and religiously they differed only partly and not fundamentally. But the perfidious colonial Orientalists have always been intentionally oblivious of this fact.
Founded by Mor Mattai the Hermit in 363 CE, Mor Mattai Monastery is situated 20 km north of Mosul and consists in a major center of Aramaean Syriac Jacobite culture and faith.
Deyrulzafaran (or Derzafaran; ‘the Saffron Monastery) is mainly known as Mor Hananyo Monastery, being located 5 km from Mardin (SE Turkey) in the famous Tur Abdin region, major center of Aramaean culture, faith and letters. In the Antiquity, there was a temple dedicated to the Assyrian-Babylonian and later Aramaean divinity Shamash; it was then converted to fortress by the Romans. The Syriac monk Mor Shlemon turned it into a monastery in 493 CE. Finally in 793, the bishop of Mardin and Kfartuta, Mor Hananyo, renovated it.
Surely there are ancient Oriental parallels to what happened to the Arabs in the early 7th c.
The Aramaeans and the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and the Anatolians, the Greeks and the Romans – all those who accepted the preaching of Jesus and belonged to the early Christian communities (except for the Jewish converts) – were culturally Hebraized (in the first two centuries of our era).
There is no such thing as Aramaean or Phoenician or Egyptian or Greek or Roman culture in Early Christianity. Aramaean culture revolved around Astarte or the ‘Syrian Goddess’, Baal, and many other Aramaean deities, myths and concepts; Phoenician culture was developed around Baal and other local divinities and myths; Egyptian culture was related to Isis, Osiris, Horus and the Heliopolitan religion or the Theban dogma of Amun or the Memphitic cult of Ptah or the Hermupolitan Ogdoad. Greek culture (which had earlier involved a highly politicized theater, Olympic games, philosophy, calamitous indifference for religion, and quasi-total ignorance of spirituality) and Roman culture were already heavily impacted by numerous Oriental religious, esoteric, spiritual and cultural-behavioral systems. Then, the diffusion of Early Christianity among them (up to the middle of the 2nd c. CE) consisted in cultural Hebraization.
What happened culturally to Arabs with their acceptance of Prophet Muhammad’s preaching had occurred already to the Aramaeans, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Anatolians, the Greeks and the Romans, who accepted Early Christianity in the 1st – 2nd c.
Similarly, the Ancient Hebrews were not exempt of overwhelming foreign cultural impact. When in Egypt, they were heavily impacted by Atenism (also known as Amarna monotheism), which was the official, aniconic and monotheistic religion of Pharaoh Akhenaten in the middle of the 14th c. BCE. Excerpts from the Hymns to Aten, which were composed in Ancient Egyptian and written in hieroglyphic writing by the pious monotheist and great reformer Pharaoh, were later reproduced, word by word, in the Psalms of the otherwise ‘Hebrew’ Bible.
At this point I have to also add that Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1353–1336), after his fourth year of reign, changed his theophoric name to Akhenaten, so that it does not contain the first component, which – as name of the polytheistic Theban religion’s main god Amun – was considered as an abomination by the Egyptian monotheists, after the solemn proclamation of Atenism.
And who were the Ancient Hebrews after all? Who was Abraham? An early 2nd millennium BCE Babylonian (from Ur, Southern Mesopotamia), who abandoned his land in order to preserve his monotheistic faith and openly reject the polytheistic religion that was imposed there at the time. The Assyrian-Babylonian impact on what is called Ancient Hebrew religion or Judaism is absolute, compact, and irreversible. The Old Testament is an Assyrian-Babylonian cultural, religious, intellectual, and spiritual byproduct.
Discussion near the mosque of a village (from the 43rd maqamah of the Maqamat al-Ḥariri); by the Iraqi painter and calligrapher Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti (13th c.); the illustrations of the famous Muslim painter show that rural life continued following exactly the same Aramaean patterns before and after the diffusion of Islam.
The aforementioned approach is extremely embarrassing to colonial Orientalist forgers and to Western pseudo-Christian Evangelical, Taliban-fashion theologians, who should rather be considered as the real instigators and the original perpetrators of Islamic terrorism, which they have studiously and scrupulously produced because of their vicious anti-Islamic hatred that they have ceaselessly diffused. That is why it is vitally important for them to stick the label ‘Arab’ onto the entire phenomenon of ‘Islamic Civilization’, ‘Islamic History’, ‘Islamic religion’, and ‘Islamic armies’.
However, there is even more to it, if one examines the fundamentals of the divine revelation as spelled out in Islam’s holy text and the associated explanations. The historical reality is that Muhammad, either one accepts him as prophet or not, never pretended that he was preaching a ‘new’ religion; according to his revelation (the Quran) and explanations (the Hadith), Islam (lit. ‘submission to God’) was the only true faith (‘religion’) of Adam. In fact, according to the prophet Muhammad’s world conceptualization, there has been only one religion in the History of Mankind; it was preached by various prophets, either they were/are known to humans as such or not. All prophets were sent by God to correct deviations, because beyond the only and true religion (which involves total devotion to God), there have been across the ages numerous deformations, distortions, deliberate alterations, and pernicious modifications of the true religion, and of the preaching / revelation of the various earlier prophets.
The birth of prophet Muhammad in presence of humans and angels; miniature illustration on vellum from Rashid al-Din Hamadani’s famous masterpiece Jami’ al-Tawarikh (lit. ‘Compendium of Chronicles’), which is also known as ‘Universal History’ (Tabriz-Iran, 1307)
Prophet Muhammad on his death bed (Jami’ al-Tawarikh)
Prophet Muhammad reveals to Ali (both protected by halos of golden flames) secrets he unveiled during Mir’aj (transcendental travel to the spiritual universe); from the Ottoman Turkish ‘Tarjuma-i Thawaqib-i manaqib’ (translation of stars of the legend), which was ordered by Sultan Murad III (1574–1595) to be done (in 1590) from the Farsi abridgement (14th c.) of Aflaki; found in Baghdad and purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1911 (MS M.466, fol. 96r). According to this tradition, ten thousand of the hundred thousand secrets were revealed to Ali as the rightful successor to prophet Muhammad. Ali had difficulty keeping them, and that is why he shouted them into a well; however, a young man made a flute from the tree, which grew from the reed in the well. People came from all over to hear the young man play, and then prophet Muhammad requested to hear the youth perform, declaring that his notes “were the interpretation of the celestial mysteries that he had confided to Ali”. The flute was used ever since as part of the Mevlevi ritual dance (samaa). Jalal ad-Din Rumi has apparently borrowed the story of the barber, who shouted the secret of the Phrygian King Midas’ donkey ears into a hole over which reeds grew, and subsequently the winds whispered the secret to all. The early spirituality of the true Islam was greatly appreciated by Muslims of the Golden Era of Islamic Civilization, but there is nothing Arabic in it.
It is the aforementioned, outspoken universality of Islam that has deeply upset and dramatically embarrassed Western Orientalist forgers, colonial radicals, Catholic-Jesuit schemers, and materialist-atheist extremists. And this explains why they tried to imitate some Eastern Roman historians of the 8th c., who collectively called all the Muslims ‘Saracens’, a deprecatory term that is historically false enough to reveal either the ignorance or the evilness of the users.
However, to Eastern Roman Christian Orthodox theologians, like John Damascene (or John of Damascus), Islam was merely the latest Christological heresy. This is what Vatican, the pseudo-Christian Evangelicals, and the anti-Jewish Zionists do their ingenious best to conceal; because the Eastern Roman Christian Orthodox truth destroys their absurd lies and diabolical conspiracies.
The multiply controversial gold coins of the Umayyad caliph Abd al Malik ibn Marwan (reign: 685-705); during his reign, there was an apparent effort to impose Arabic as the official language of the divided Caliphate and to replace Christian signs (notably the Cross) with the declaration of Islamic faith. However, the caliph ruled only on a small part of the territory that most people usually see as enormous on the mostly false maps of the Umayyad Empire, and this was due to the fact that he was facing a multiple revolt. Even worse, following a defeat, he had to be tribute to the Eastern Roman Empire. But to his greatest surprise, when he tried to pay with these new coins, the Roman Emperor Justinian II (reign: 685-695 and 705-711) refused to accept them because they were of an unknown type and of evidently unacceptable character. This attitude triggered a new war; the offense was not only the absence of Christian symbols, but also the Arabic inscription with the Islamic declaration of faith (‘bismallah, la illah illa-allah muhammad rasul allah’, i.e. ‘in the name of God, there is no god but God alone; Muhammad is His messenger’) on the reverse and the presence of three standing figures on the obverse.
As there no names written on the coins, every discussion is basically a matter of assumption, but there are specialists, who suggest that the three figures are none else than prophet Muhammad (center), Abu Bakr, and his paranoid daughter Aisha, who was the last wife of the prophet. Abu Bakr was indeed one of the early followers of Islam (the very first being Ali ibn Abi Taleb, who was the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law). Abu Bakr, was selected by a small group of vicious Meccan renegades at the time prophet Muhammad was dying – in straightforwardly anti-Islamic rejection of the solemn investiture of Ali by the prophet at Ghadir Khumm on the 16th March 632 (18 Dhu al-Hijjah), i.e. only three months before prophet Muhammad’s death (8 June 632), in the 11th year of the Islamic calendar (Anno Hegirae). The heinous, anti-Islamic nature and practices of the Umayyad dynasty, which existed only after the massacre of the rightful heir of Ali and against the will of the quasi-totality of the Muslims, is the reason for which this interpretation can be considered as possibly correct.
The much loathed and decried, lawless and illegitimate caliph sought to ‘prove’ that he was the rightful ruler and that he represented a line of succession approved by prophet Muhammad. Of course, this was preposterous because at the very end of the prophet’s life, Abu Bakr acted openly and deliberately against Muhammad’s will, whereas the rancorous and hysterical Aisha supported the killers of Fatima and later of Ali. An extra reason for which we can accept this effort of interpretation is the fact that this shameless and absolutely anti-Islamic depiction caused an unprecedented outcry (because it was taken as a clear sign of overwhelming rejection of Islam by the court at Damascus) up to the point that these blasphemous coins were all ordered to be destroyed shortly after they were minted. As his wretched empire experienced divisions, civil wars, and real trichotomy, the shy and coward Abd al Malik ibn Marwan decided not to further risk his otherwise useless throne.
The supposedly powerful (according to Western colonial liars and forgers) Umayyad Empire was a multi-divided terrain of which Abd al-Malik Marwan controlled only a small portion (highlighted in red); the lands controlled by his opponents al-Mukhtar and al-Zubayr are colored in green and blue; and the territory under Kharijite power is shown in yellow. This chaotic period (680-692) is typically called ‘Second Fitna’, i.e. conflict, sedition, or civil strife; the word has many connotations, but the most accurate description of the historical fact would be ‘civil war’.
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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.
Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
Pre-publication of chapter 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/ and
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
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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”.
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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:
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
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 1966General 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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
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.
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”.
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:
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;
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.
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:
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:
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.
Or why I defended Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 against the thoughtlessly irascible Muslims
When a Muslim writes an Obituary for the Catholic Church’s sole Pope Emeritus…
Table of Contents
I. From Joseph Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI
II. The theoretical concerns of an intellectual Pope
III. Benedict XVI: A Pope against violence and wars
IV. Manuel II Palaeologus and the Eastern Roman Empire between the Muslim Ottoman brethren and the Anti-Christian Roman enemies
V. The unknown (?) Turkic mystic interlocutor and the Islamic centers of science and reason that Benedict XVI ignored
VI. Excerpt from Benedict XVI’s lecture given on the 12th September at the University of Regensburg under title ‘Faith, Reason and the University–Memories and Reflections’
VII. The problems of the academic-theological background of Benedict XVI’s lecture
VIII. Benedict XVI’s biased approach, theological mistakes, intellectual oversights and historical misinterpretations
IX. The lecture’s most controversial point
X. The educational-academic-intellectual misery and the political ordeal of today’s Muslim states
Of all the Roman popes who resigned the only to be called ‘Pope Emeritus’ was Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI (also known in German as Prof. Dr. Papst), who passed away on 31st December 2022, thus sealing the circle of world figures and heads of states whose life ended last year. As a matter of fact, although being a head state, a pope does not abdicate; he renounces to his ministry (renuntiatio).
Due to lack of documentation, conflicting sources or confusing circumstances, we do not have conclusive evidence as regards the purported resignations of the popes St. Pontian (235), Marcellinus (304), Liberius (366), John XVIII (1009) and Sylvester (105). That is why historical certainty exists only with respect to the ‘papal renunciation’ of six pontiffs; three of them bore the papal name of ‘Benedict’. The brief list includes therefore the following bishops of Rome: Benedict V (964), Benedict IX (deposed in 1044, bribed to resign in 1045, and resigned in 1048), Gregory VI (1046), St Celestine (1294), Gregory XII (1415) and Benedict XVI (2013).
I. From Joseph Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI
Benedict XVI (18 April 1927 – 31 December 2022) was seven (7) years younger than his predecessor John Paul II (1920-2005), but passed away seventeen (17) years after the Polish pope’s death; already on the 4th September 2020, Benedict XVI would have been declared as the oldest pope in history, had he not resigned seven (7) years earlier. Only Leo XIII died 93, back in 1903. As a matter of fact, Benedict XVI outlived all the people who were elected to the Roman See.
Benedict XVI’s papacy lasted slightly less than eight (8) years (19 April 2005 – 28 February 2013). Before being elected as pope, Cardinal Ratzinger was for almost a quarter century (1981-2005) the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was the formal continuation of the Office of the Holy Inquisition, and therefore one of the most important sections (‘dicasteries’; from the Ancient Greek term ‘dikasterion’, i.e. ‘court of law’) of the Roman administration (‘Curia’).
A major step toward this position was his appointment as archbishop of Munich for four years (1977-1981); Bavaria has always been a Catholic heavyweight, and in this regard, it is easy to recall the earlier example of Eugenio Pacelli (the later pope Pius XII), who was nuncio to Bavaria (and therefore to the German Empire), in Munich, from 1917 to 1920, and then to Germany, before being elected to the Roman See (in 1939). Before having a meteoric rise in the Catholic hierarchy, Ratzinger made an excellent scholar and a distinct professor of dogmatic theology, while also being a priest. His philosophical dissertation was about St. Augustine and his habilitation concerned Bonaventure, a Franciscan scholastic theologian and cardinal of the 13th c.
II. The theoretical concerns of an intellectual Pope
During his ministry, very early, Benedict XVI stood up and showed his teeth; when I noticed his formidable outburst against the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, I realized that the German pope would be essentially superior to his Polish predecessor. Only in June 2005, so just two months after his election, he defined relativism as “the main obstacle to the task of education”, directing a tremendous attack against the evilness of ego and portraying selfishness as a “self-limitation of reason”.
In fact, there cannot be more devastating attack from a supreme religious authority against the evilness of Anglo-Zionism and the rotten, putrefied society that these criminals diffuse worldwide by means of infiltration, corruption, mendacity, and simulation. Soon afterwards, while speaking in Marienfeld (Cologne), Benedict XVI attacked ferociously all the pathetic ideologies which indiscriminately enslave humans from all spiritual and cultural backgrounds. He said: “absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism”. This is a detrimental rejection of Talmudic Judaism, Zohar Kabbalah, and Anglo-Zionism.
It was in the summer 2005 that I first realized that I should study closer the pre-papal past of the Roman Pontiff whom St Malachy’s illustrious Prophecy of the Popes (12th c.) described as ‘Gloria olivae’ (the Glory of the olive). I contacted several friends in Germany, who extensively updated me as regards his academic publications, also dispatching to me some of them. At the time, I noticed that my Christian friends already used to question a certain number of Cardinal Ratzinger’s positions.
But, contrarily to them, I personally found his prediction about the eventuality of Buddhism becoming the principal ‘enemy’ of the Catholic Church as quite plausible. My friends were absolutely astounded, and then I had to narrate and explain to them the deliberately concealed story of the Christian-Islamic-Confucian alliance against the Buddhist terrorism of the Dzungar Khanate (1634-1755); actually, it took many Kazakh-Dzungar wars (1643-1756), successive wars between Qing China and the Dzungar Khanate (1687-1757), and even an alliance with the Russian Empire in order to successfully oppose the ferocious Buddhist extremist threat.
Finally, the extraordinary ordeal of North Asia {a vast area comprising lands of today’s Eastern Kazakhstan, Russia (Central Siberia), Northwestern and Western China (Eastern Turkestan/Xinjiang and Tibet) and Western Mongolia} ended up with the systematic genocide of the extremist Buddhist Dzungars (1755-1758) that the Chinese had to undertake because there was no other way to terminate once forever the most fanatic regime that ever existed in Asia.
Disoriented, ignorant, confused and gullible, most of the people today fail to clearly understand how easily Buddhism can turn a peaceful society into a fanatic realm of lunatic extremists. The hypothetically innocent adhesion of several fake Freemasonic lodges of the West to Buddhism and the seemingly harmless acceptance of Buddhist principles and values by these ignorant fools can end up in the formation of vicious and terrorist organizations that will give to their members and initiates the absurd order and task to indiscriminately kill all of their opponents. But Cardinal Ratzinger had prudently discerned the existence of a dangerous source of spiritual narcissism in Buddhism.
III. Benedict XVI: A Pope against violence and wars
To me, this foresight was a convincing proof that Benedict XVI was truly ‘Gloria olivae’; but this would be troublesome news! In a period of proxy wars, unrestrained iniquity, and outrageous inhumanity, a perspicacious, cordial, and benevolent pope in Rome would surely be an encumbering person to many villainous rascals, i.e. the likes of Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, and many others so-called ‘leaders’. The reason for this assessment of the situation is simple: no one wants a powerful pacifier at a time more wars are planned.
At the time, it was ostensible to all that a fake confrontation between the world’s Muslims and Christians was underway (notably after the notorious 9/11 events); for this reason, I expected Benedict XVI to make a rather benevolent statement that evil forces would immediately misinterpret, while also falsely accusing the pacifist Pope and absurdly turning the uneducated and ignorant mob of many countries against the Catholic Church.
This is the foolish plan of the Anglo-Zionist lobby, which has long served as puppets of the Jesuits, corrupting the entire Muslim world over the past 250 years by means of intellectual, educational, academic, scientific, cultural, economic, military and political colonialism. These idiotic puppets, which have no idea who their true and real masters are, imagine that, by creating an unprecedented havoc in Europe, they harm the worldwide interests of the Jesuits; but they fail to properly realize that this evil society, which early turned against Benedict XVI, has already shifted its focus onto China. Why the apostate Anglo-Zionist Freemasonic lodge would act in this manner against Benedict XVI is easy to assess; the Roman pontiff whose episcopal motto was ‘Cooperatores Veritatis’ (‘Co-workers of the Truth’) would apparently try to prevent the long-prepared fake war between the Muslims and the Christians.
IV. Manuel II Palaeologus and the Eastern Roman Empire between the Muslim Ottoman brethren and the Anti-Christian Roman enemies
And this is what truly happened in the middle of September 2006; on the 12th September, Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany; the title was ‘Glaube, Vernunft und Universität – Erinnerungen und Reflexionen’ (‘Faith, Reason and the University – Memories and Reflections’). In the beginning of the lecture, Prof. Dr. Ratzinger eclipsed Pope Benedict XVI, as the one-time professor persisted on his concept of ‘faith’, “which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole”, as he said. In a most rationalistic approach (for which he had been known for several decades as a renowned Catholic theologian), in an argumentation reflecting views certainly typical of Francis of Assisi and of Aristotle but emphatically alien to Jesus, Benedict XVI attempted to portray an ahistorical Christianity and to describe the Catholic faith as the religion of the Reason.
At an early point of the lecture, Benedict XVI referred to a discussion that the Eastern Roman Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (or Palaiologos; Μανουήλ Παλαιολόγος; 1350-1425; reigned after 1391) had with an erudite Turkic scholar (indiscriminately but mistakenly called by all Eastern Roman authors at the time as ‘Persian’) most probably around the end of 1390 or the first months of 1391, when he was hostage at the Ottoman court of Bayezid I. In the historical text, it is stated that the location was ‘Ancyra of Galatia’ (i.e. Ankara).
This Eastern Roman Emperor was indeed a very controversial historical figure; although undeniably an erudite ruler, a bold diplomat, and a reputable soldier, he first made agreements with the Ottomans and delivered to them the last Eastern Roman city in Anatolia (Philadelphia; today’s Alaşehir, ca. 140 km east of Izmir / Smyrna) and then, after he took control of his ailing kingdom thanks to the sultan, he escaped the protracted siege of Constantinople (1391-1402) only to travel to various Western European kingdoms and ask the help of those rather reluctant monarchs (1399-1403).
At the time, all the Christian Orthodox populations, either living in the Ottoman sultanate or residing in the declined Eastern Roman Empire, were deeply divided into two groups, namely those who preferred to be ruled by Muslims (because they rejected the pseudo-Christian fallacy, evilness and iniquity of the Roman pope) and the fervent supporters of a Latin (: Western European) control over Constantinople (viewed as the only way for them to prevent the Ottoman rule); the former formed the majority and were called Anthenotikoi, i.e. ‘against the union’ (: of the Orthodox Church with the Catholics), whereas the latter constituted a minority group and were named ‘Enotikoi’ (‘those in favor of the union of the two churches’).
V. The unknown (?) Turkic mystic interlocutor and the Islamic centers of science and reason that Benedict XVI ignored
Manuel II Palaeologus’ text has little theological value in itself; however, its historical value is great. It reveals how weak both interlocutors were at the intellectual, cultural and spiritual levels, how little they knew one another, and how poorly informed they were about their own and their interlocutor’s past, heritage, religion and spirituality. If we have even a brief look at it, we will immediately realize that the level is far lower than that attested during similar encounters in 8th- 9th c. Baghdad, 10th c. Umayyad Andalusia, Fatimid Cairo, 13th c. Maragheh (where the world’s leading observatory was built) or 14th c. Samarqand, the Timurid capital.
It was absolutely clear at the time of Manuel II Palaeologus and Bayezid I that neither Constantinople nor Bursa (Προύσα / Prousa; not anymore the Ottoman capital after 1363, but still the most important city of the sultanate) could compete with the great centers of Islamic science civilization which were located in Iran and Central Asia. That’s why Gregory Chioniades, the illustrious Eastern Roman bishop, astronomer, and erudite scholar who was the head of the Orthodox diocese of Tabriz, studied in Maragheh under the guidance of his tutor and mentor, Shamsaddin al Bukhari (one of the most illustrious students of Nasir el-Din al Tusi, who was the founder of the Maragheh Observatory), before building an observatory in Trabzon (Trebizond) and becoming the teacher of Manuel Bryennios, another famous Eastern Roman scholar.
The text of the Dialogues must have been written several years after the conversation took place, most probably when the traveling emperor and diplomat spent four years in Western Europe. For reasons unknown to us, the erudite emperor did not mention the name of his interlocutor, although this was certainly known to him; if we take into consideration that he was traveling to other kingdoms, we can somehow guess a plausible reason. His courtiers and royal scribes may have translated the text partly into Latin and given copies of the ‘dialogues’ to various kings, marshals, chroniclers, and other dignitaries. If this was the case, the traveling emperor would not probably want to offer insights into the Ottoman court and the influential religious authorities around the sultan.
Alternatively, the ‘unknown’ interlocutor may well have been Amir Sultan (born as Mohamed bin Ali; also known as Shamsuddin Al-Bukhari; 1368-1429) himself, i.e. none else than an important Turanian mystic from Vobkent (near Bukhara in today’s Uzbekistan), who got married with Bayezid I’s daughter Hundi Fatema Sultan Hatun. Amir Sultan had advised the sultan not to turn against Timur; had the foolish sultan heeded to his son-in-law’s wise advice, he would not have been defeated so shamefully.
Benedict XVI made a very biased use of the historical text; he selected an excerpt of Manuel II Palaeologus’ response to his interlocutor in order to differentiate between Christianity as the religion of Reason and Islam as the religion of Violence. Even worse, he referred to a controversial, biased and rancorous historian of Lebanese origin, the notorious Prof. Theodore Khoury (born in 1930), who spent his useless life to write sophisticated diatribes, mildly formulated forgeries, and deliberate distortions of the historical truth in order to satisfy his rancor and depict the historical past according to his absurd political analysis. Almost every sentence written Prof. Khoury about the Eastern Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate is maliciously false.
All the same, it was certainly Benedict XVI’s absolute right to be academically, intellectually and historically wrong. The main problem was that the paranoid reaction against him was not expressed at the academic and intellectual levels, but at the profane ground of international politics. Even worse, it was not started by Muslims but by the criminal Anglo-Zionist mafia and the disreputable mainstream mass media, the likes of the BBC, Al Jazeera (Qatari is only the façade of it), etc.
I will now republish (in bold and italics) a sizeable (600-word) excerpt of the papal lecture that contains the contentious excerpt, also adding the notes to the text. The link to the Vatican’s website page is available below. I will comment first on the lecture and the selected part of Manuel II Palaeologus’ text and then on the absurd Muslim reaction.
VI. Excerpt from Benedict XVI’s lecture given on the 12th September at the University of Regensburg under title ‘Faith, Reason and the University–Memories and Reflections’
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on – perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara – by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.[1] It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor.[2] The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between – as they were called – three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point – itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole – which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις – controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”[3] The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (σὺνλόγω) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”.[4]
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.[5] The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.[7]
Notes 1 to 7 (out of 13)
[1] Of the total number of 26 conversations (διάλεξις – Khoury translates this as “controversy”) in the dialogue (“Entretien”), T. Khoury published the 7th “controversy” with footnotes and an extensive introduction on the origin of the text, on the manuscript tradition and on the structure of the dialogue, together with brief summaries of the “controversies” not included in the edition; the Greek text is accompanied by a French translation: “Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman. 7e Controverse”, Sources Chrétiennes n. 115, Paris 1966. In the meantime, Karl Förstel published in Corpus Islamico-Christianum (Series Graeca ed. A. T. Khoury and R. Glei) an edition of the text in Greek and German with commentary: “Manuel II. Palaiologus, Dialoge mit einem Muslim”, 3 vols., Würzburg-Altenberge 1993-1996. As early as 1966, E. Trapp had published the Greek text with an introduction as vol. II of Wiener byzantinische Studien. I shall be quoting from Khoury’s edition.
[2] On the origin and redaction of the dialogue, cf. Khoury, pp. 22-29; extensive comments in this regard can also be found in the editions of Förstel and Trapp.
[3] Controversy VII, 2 c: Khoury, pp. 142-143; Förstel, vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.5, pp. 240-241. In the Muslim world, this quotation has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation. I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion. In quoting the text of the Emperor Manuel II, I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between faith and reason. On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic.
[4] Controversy VII, 3 b–c: Khoury, pp. 144-145; Förstel vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.6, pp. 240-243.
[5] It was purely for the sake of this statement that I quoted the dialogue between Manuel and his Persian interlocutor. In this statement the theme of my subsequent reflections emerges.
[6] Cf. Khoury, p. 144, n. 1.
[7] R. Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue, Paris 1956, p. 13; cf. Khoury, p. 144. The fact that comparable positions exist in the theology of the late Middle Ages will appear later in my discourse.
VII. The problems of the academic-theological background of Benedict XVI’s lecture
It is my conviction that Benedict XVI fell victim to the quite typical theological assumptions that Prof. Dr. Ratzinger had studied and taught for decades. However, the problem is not limited to the circle of the faculties of Theology and to Christian Theology as a modern discipline; it is far wider. The same troublesome situation permeates all the disciplines of Humanities and, even worse, the quasi-totality of the modern sciences as they started in Renaissance. The problem goes well beyond the limits of academic research and intellectual consideration; it has to do with the degenerate, rotten and useless mental abilities and capacities of the Western so-called scholars, researchers and academics. The description of the problem is rather brief, but its nature is truly ominous.
Instead of perceiving, understanding, analyzing and representing the ‘Other’ in its own terms, conditions and essence and as per its own values, virtues and world conceptualization, the modern Western European scholars, researchers, explorers and specialists view, perceive, attempt to understand, and seek to analyze the ‘Other’ in their own terms, conditions and essence and as per their own values, virtues and world conceptualization. Due to this sick effort and unprecedented aberration, the Western so-called scholars and researchers view the ‘Other’ through their eyes, thus projecting onto the ‘Other’ their view of it. Consequently, they do not and actually they cannot learn it, let alone know, understand and represent it. Their attitude is inane, autistic and degenerate. It is however quite interesting and truly bizarre that the Western European natural scientists do not proceed in this manner, but fully assess the condition of the object of their study in a rather objective manner.
In fact, the Western disciplines of the Humanities, despite the enormous collection and publication of study materials, sources and overall documentation, are a useless distortion. Considered objectively, the Western scientific endeavor in its entirety is a monumental nothingness; it is not only a preconceived conclusion. It is a resolute determination not to ‘see’ the ‘Other’ as it truly exists, as its constituent parts obviously encapsulate its contents, and as the available documentation reveals it. In other words, it consists in a premeditated and resolute rejection of the Truth; it is intellectually barren, morally evil, and spiritually nihilist. The topic obviously exceeds by far the limits of the present obituary, but I had to mention it in order to offer the proper context.
It is therefore difficult to identify the real reason for the magnitude of the Western scholarly endeavor, since the conclusions existed in the minds of the explorers and the academics already before the documentation was gathered, analyzed, studied, and represented. How important is it therefore to publish the unpublished material (totaling more than 100000 manuscripts of Islamic times and more than one million of cuneiform tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, Canaan and Anatolia – only to give an idea to the non-specialized readers), if the evil Western scholars and the gullible foreign students enrolled in Western institutions (to the detriment of their own countries and nations) are going to repeat and reproduce the same absurd Western mentality of viewing an Ancient Sumerian, an Ancient Assyrian, an Ancient Egyptian or a Muslim author through their own eyes and of projecting onto the ancient author the invalid and useless measures, values, terms and world views of the modern Western world?
As it can be easily understood, the problem is not with Christian Theology, but with all the disciplines of the Humanities. So, the problem is not only that a great Muslim scholar and erudite mystic like Ibn Hazm was viewed by Benedict XVI and Western theologians through the distorting lenses of their ‘science’, being not evaluated as per the correct measures, values and terms of his own Islamic environment, background and civilization. The same problem appears in an even worse form, when Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Hittite, Iranian and other high priests, spiritual masters, transcendental potentates, sacerdotal writers, and unequaled scientists are again evaluated as per the invalid and useless criteria of Benedict XVI, of all the Western theologians, and of all the modern European and American academics.
What post-Renaissance popes, theologians, academics, scholars and intellectuals fail to understand is very simple; their ‘world’ ( i.e. the world of the Western Intellect and Science, which was first fabricated in the 15th and the 16th c. and later enhanced progressively down to our days) in not Christian, is not human, and is not real. It is their own delusion, their own invalid abstraction, their abject paranoia, and their own sin for which first they will atrociously disappear from the surface of the Earth (like every anomalous entity) and then flagrantly perish in Hell.
Their dangling system does not hold; they produced it in blood and in blood it will end. Modern sciences constitute a counter-productive endeavor and an aberration that will terminally absorb the entire world into the absolute nothingness, because these evil systems were instituted out of arbitrary bogus-interpretations of the past, peremptory self-identification, deliberate and prejudicial ignorance, as well as an unprecedented ulcerous hatred of the ‘Other’, i.e. of every ‘Other’.
The foolish Western European academic-intellectual establishment failed to realize that it is absolutely preposterous to extrapolate later and corrupt standards to earlier and superior civilizations; in fact, it is impossible. By trying to do it, you depart from the real world only to live in your delusion, which sooner or later will inevitably have a tragic end. Consequently, the Western European scholars’ ‘classics’ are not classics; their reason is an obsession; their language and jargon are hallucinatory, whereas their notions are conjectural. Their abstract concepts are the manifestation of Non-Being.
VIII. Benedict XVI’s biased approach, theological mistakes, intellectual oversights and historical misinterpretations
Benedict XVI’s understanding of the Eastern Roman Empire was fictional. When examining the sources, he retained what he liked, what pleased him, and what was beneficial to his preconceived ideas and thoughts. In fact, Prof. Dr. Papst did not truly understand what Manuel II Palaeologus said to his Turkic interlocutor, and even worse, he failed to assess the enormous distance that separated the early 15th c. Eastern Roman (not ‘Byzantine’: this is a fake appellation too) Emperor from his illustrious predecessors before 800 or 900 years (the likes of Heraclius and Justinian I) in terms of Christian Roman imperial ideology, theological acumen, jurisprudential perspicacity, intellectual resourcefulness, and spiritual forcefulness. Benedict XVI did not want to accept that with time the Christian doctrine, theology and spirituality had weakened.
What was Ratzinger’s mistake? First, he erroneously viewed Manuel II Palaeologus as ‘his’ (as identical with the papal doctrine), by projecting his modern Catholic mindset and convictions onto the Christian Orthodox Eastern Roman Emperor’s mind, mentality and faith. He took the ‘Dialogues’ at face value whereas the text may have been written not as a declaration of faith but as a diplomatic document in order to convince the rather uneducated Western European monarchs that the traveling ‘basileus’ (βασιλεύς) visited during the period 1399-1403.
Second, he distorted the ‘dialogue’, presenting it in a polarized form. Benedict XVI actually depicted a fraternal conversation as a frontal opposition; unfortunately, there is nothing in the historical text to insinuate this possibility. As I already said, it is quite possible that the moderate, wise, but desperate Eastern Roman Emperor may have discussed with someone married to a female descendant of the great mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi (namely Bayezid’s son-in-law, adviser and mystic Emir Sultan). Why on Earth did the renowned theologian Ratzinger attempt to stage manage a theological conflict in the place of a most peaceful, friendly and fraternal exchange of ideas?
This is easy to explain; it has to do with the absolutely Manichaean structure of thought that was first diffused among the Western Fathers of the Christian Church by St Augustine (in the early 5th c.). As method of theological argumentation, it was first effectively contained, and it remained rather marginal within the Roman Church as long as the practice introduced by Justinian I (537) lasted (until 752) and all the popes of Rome had to be selected and approved personally by the Eastern Roman Emperor. After this moment and, more particularly, after the two Schisms (867 and 1054), the Manichaean system of thinking prevailed in Rome; finally, it culminated after the Renaissance.
Third, Benedict XVI tried to depict the early 15th c. erudite interlocutor of the then hostage Manuel II Palaeologus as a modern Muslim and a Jihadist. This is the repetition of the same mistakes that he made as regards the intellectual Eastern Roman Emperor. In other words, he projected onto the ‘unknown’, 15th c. Muslim mystic his own personal view of an Islamist or Islamic fundamentalist. Similarly, by bulldozing time in order to impose his wrong perception of Islam, he fully misled the audience. As a matter of fact, Islam constitutes a vast universe that Prof. Dr. Papst never studied, never understood, and never fathomed in its true dimensions.
In fact, as it happened in the case of the Eastern Roman Emperor, his interlocutor was intellectually weaker and spiritually lower than the great figures of Islamic spirituality, science, wisdom, literature and intuition, the likes of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Al Qurtubi, Mohyi el-Din Ibn Arabi, Ahmed Yasawi, Al Biruni, Ferdowsi, Al Farabi, Tabari, etc., who preceded him by 150 to 500 years. But Benedict XVI did not want to accept that with time the Islamic doctrine, theology and spirituality had weakened.
The reason for this distortion is easy to grasp; the Manichaean system of thinking needs terminal, crystallized forms of items that do not change; then, it is convenient for the Western European abusers of the Manichaean spirit to fully implement the deceitful setting of fake contrasts and false dilemmas. But the 15th c. decayed Eastern Roman Orthodoxy and decadent Islam are real historical entities that enable every explorer to encounter the multitude of forms, the ups and downs, the evolution of cults, the transformation of faiths, and the gradual loss of the initially genuine Moral and vibrant Spirituality. This reality is very embarrassing to those who want to teach their unfortunate students on a calamitous black & white background (or floor).
All the books and articles of his friend, Prof. Theodore Khoury, proved to be totally useless and worthless for the Catholic theologian Ratzinger, exactly because the Lebanese specialist never wrote a sentence in order to truly represent the historical truth about Islam, but he always elaborated his texts in a way to justify and confirm his preconceived ideas. Prof. Khoury’s Islam is a delusional entity, something like the artificial humans of our times. Unfortunately, not one Western Islamologist realized that Islam, at the antipodes of the Roman Catholic doctrine, has an extremely limited dogmatic part, a minimal cult, and no heresies. Any opposite opinion belongs to liars, forgers and falsifiers. As a matter of fact, today’s distorted representation of Islam is simply the result of Western colonialism. All over the world, whatever people hear or believe about the religion preached by Prophet Muhammad is not the true, historical, religion of Islam, but the colonially, academically-intellectually, produced Christianization of Islam.
Fourth, in striking contrast to what the theologian Ratzinger pretended through use of this example or case study (i.e. the ‘discussion’), if Benedict XVI shifted his focus to the East, he would find Maragheh in NW Iran (Iranian Azerbaijan) and Samarqand in Central Asia. In those locations (and always for the period concerned), he would certainly find great centers of learning, universities, vast libraries, and enormous observatories, which could make every 15th c. Western European astronomer and mathematician dream. But there he would also find, as I already said, many Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and other scholars working one next to the other without caring about their religious (theological) differences. This situation is very well known to modern Western scholarship, but they viciously and criminally try to permanently conceal it.
This situation was due to the cultural, intellectual, academic, mental and spiritual unity that prevailed among all those erudite scholars. Numerous Western European scholars have published much about Nasir el-Din al Tusi (about whom I already spoke briefly) and also about Ulugh Beg, the world’s greatest astronomer of his time (middle of the 15th c.), who was the grandson of Timur (Tamerlane) and, at the same time, the World History’s most erudite emperor of the last 2500 years. However, post-Renaissance Catholic sectarianism and Western European/North American racism prevented the German pope from being truthful at least once, and also from choosing the right paradigm.
IX. The lecture’s most controversial point
Fifth, if we now go straight to the lecture’s most controversial point and to the quotation’s most fascinating sentence, we will find the question addressed by Manuel II Palaeologus to his erudite Turkic interlocutor; actually, it is rather an exclamation:
– «Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached»!
This interesting excerpt provides indeed the complete confirmation of my earlier assessments as regards the intellectual decay of both, Christian Orthodoxy and Islam, at the time. Apparently, it was not theological acumen what both interlocutors were lacking at the time; it was historical knowledge. Furthermore, historical continuity, religious consciousness, and moral command were also absent in the discussion.
The first series of points that Manuel II Palaeologus’ Muslim interlocutor could have made answering the aforementioned statement would be that Prophet Muhammad, before his death, summoned Ali ibn Abu Taleb and asked him to promise that he would never diffuse the true faith by undertaking wars; furthermore, Islam was diffused peacefully in many lands outside Arabia (Hejaz), notably Yemen, Oman, Somalia, and the Eastern Coast of Africa. In addition, there were many Muslims, who rejected the absurd idea of the Islamic conquests launched by Umar ibn al-Khattab and actually did not participate.
We have also to take into consideration the fact that, in spite of the undeniable reality of the early spread of Islam through invasions, there has always been well-known and sufficient documentation to clearly prove that the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, the Copts of Egypt, and the Berbers of Africa, although fully preserving their Christian faith, preferred to live under the rule of the Caliphates and overwhelmingly rejected the Eastern Roman imperial administration, because they had been long persecuted by the Constantinopolitan guards due to their Miaphysite (Monophysitic) and/or Nestorian faiths.
On another note, the Eastern Roman Emperor’s Muslim interlocutor could have questioned the overall approach of Manuel II Palaeologus to the topic. In other words, he could have expressed the following objection:
– «What is it good for someone to pretend that he is a follower of Jesus and evoke his mildness, while at the same time violently imposing by the sword the faith that Jesus preached? And what is it more evil and more inhuman than the imposition of a faith in Jesus’ name within the Roman Empire, after so much bloodshed and persecution took place and so many wars were undertaken»?
Last, one must admit that the sentence «Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new!» would have been easily answered by an earlier Muslim mystic of the Golden Era of Islam. Actually, this statement is islamically correct and pertinent. The apparent absence of a spectacular response from the part of Manuel II Palaeologus’ Muslim interlocutor rather generates doubts as regards the true nature of the text. This is so because he could have immediately replied to Bayezid I’s hostage that not one prophet or messenger was sent by God with the purpose of ‘bringing something new’; in fact, all the prophets from Noah to Jonah, from Abraham to Jonah, from Moses to Muhammad, and from Adam to Jesus were dispatched in order to deliver the same message to the humans, namely to return to the correct path and live according to the Will of God.
Related to this point is the following well-known verse of the Quran (ch. 3 – Al Imran, 67): “Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but he was (an) upright (man), a Muslim, and he was not one of the polytheists”. It is therefore odd that a response in this regard is missing at this point.
It is also strange that, at a time of major divisions within Christianity and more particularly among the Christian Orthodox Eastern Romans, the ‘unknown’ imperial interlocutor did not mention the existing divisions among Christians as already stated very clearly, explicitly and repeatedly in the Quran. Examples:
“You are the best community ever raised for humanity—you encourage good, forbid evil, and believe in Allah. Had the People of the Book believed, it would have been better for them. Some of them are faithful, but most are rebellious”. (ch. 3 – Al Imran, 110)
“Yet they are not all alike: there are some among the People of the Book who are upright, who recite Allah’s revelations throughout the night, prostrating in prayer”.
(ch. 3 – Al Imran, 113):
To conclude I would add that elementary knowledge of Roman History, Late Antiquity, and Patristic Philology would be enough for Benedict XVI to know that
– in its effort to impose Christianity on the Roman Empire,
– in its determination to fully eradicate earlier religions, opposite religious sects like the Gnostics, and theological ‘heresies’ like Arianism,
– in its resolve to exterminate other Christian Churches such as the Nestorians and the Miaphysites (Monophysites),
– in its obsession to uproot Christian theological doctrines like Iconoclasm and Paulicianism, and
– in its witch hunt against Manichaeism, …
… the ‘official’ Roman and Constantinopolitan churches committed innumerable crimes and killed a far greater number of victims than those massacred by Muslim invaders on several occurrences during the early Islamic conquests.
So, when did the Christian Church encounter Reason and when did it cease to be ‘unreasonable’ according to the theologian Pope Ratzinger?
One must be very sarcastic to duly respond to those questions: most probably, the Roman Church discovered ‘Reason’ after having killed all of their opponents and the so-called ‘heretics’ whose sole sin was simply to consider and denounce the Roman Church as heretic!
If Benedict XVI forgot to find in the Quran the reason for the Turkic interlocutor’s mild attitude toward the hostage Manuel II Palaeologus, this is a serious oversight for the professor of theology; he should have mentioned the excerpts. In the surah al-Ankabut (‘the Spider’; ch. 29, verse 46), it is stated: “And do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in a most kindly manner”.
Similarly, the German pope failed to delve in Assyriology and in Egyptology to better understand that the Hebrew Bible (just like the New Testament and the Quran) did not bring anything ‘new’ either; before Moses in Egypt and before Abraham in Mesopotamia, there were monotheistic and aniconic trends and traits in the respective religions. The concept of the Messiah is attested in Egypt, in Assyria, and among the Hittites many centuries or rather more than a millennium before Isaiah contextualized it within the small Hebrew kingdom. Both Egypt and Babylon were holy lands long before Moses promised South Canaan to the Ancient Hebrew tribes, whereas the Assyrians were the historically first Chosen People of the Only God and the Assyrian imperial ideology reflected this fact in detail. The Akkadian – Assyrian-Babylonian kings were ’emperors of the universe’ and their rule reflected the ‘kingdom of Heaven’.
If Etana and Ninurta reveal aspects of Assyrian eschatology, Horus was clearly the Egyptian Messiah, who would ultimately vanquish Seth (Satan/Antichrist) at the End of Time in an unprecedented cosmic battle that would usher the mankind into a new era which would be the reconstitution of the originally ideal world and Well-Being (Wser), i.e. Osiris. There is no Cosmogony without Eschatology or Soteriology, and nothing was invented and envisioned by the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Romans that had not previously been better and more solemnly formulated among the Sumerians, the Akkadians – Assyrian-Babylonians, and the Egyptians. There is no such thing as ‘Greco-Roman’ or ‘Greco-Christian’ or’ Greco-Judaic’ civilization. Both, Islam and Christianity are the children of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
And this concludes the case of today’s Catholic theologians, i.e. the likes of Pope Benedict XVI or Theodore Khoury; they have to restart from scratch in order to duly assess the origins and the nature of Christianity before the serpent casts “forth out of his mouth water as a river after the woman, that he may cause her to be carried away by the river”. All the same, it was certainly Prof. Ratzinger’s full right to make as many mistakes as he wanted and to distort any textual reference he happened to mention.
X. The educational-academic-intellectual misery and the political ordeal of today’s Muslim states
Quite contrarily, it was not the right of those who accused him of doing so, because they expanded rather at the political and not at the academic level; this was very hypocritical and shameful. If these politicians, statesmen and diplomats dared speak at the academic level, they would reveal their own ignorance, obscurantism, obsolete educational system, miserable universities, nonexistent intellectual life, and last but not least, disreputable scientific institutions.
The reason for this is simple: not one Muslim country has properly organized departments and faculties endowed with experts capable of reading historical sources in the original texts and specializing in the History of the Eastern Roman Empire, Orthodox Christianity, Christological disputes and Patristic Literature. If a Muslim country had an educational, academic and intellectual establishment similar to that of Spain or Poland, there would surely be serious academic-level objection to Benedict XVI’s lecture. It would take a series of articles to reveal, refute and utterly denounce (not just the mistakes and the oversights but) the distorted approach which is not proper only to the defunct Pope Emeritus but to the entire Western academic establishment; these people would however be academics and intellectuals of a certain caliber. Unfortunately, such specialists do not exist in any Muslim country.
Then, the unrepresentative criminal crooks and gangsters, who rule all the countries of the Muslim world, reacted against Pope Benedict XVI at a very low, political level about a topic that was not political of nature and about which they knew absolutely nothing. In this manner, they humiliated all the Muslims, defamed Islam, ridiculed their own countries, and revealed that they rule failed states. Even worse, they made it very clear that they are the disreputable puppets of their colonial masters, who have systematically forced all the Muslim countries to exactly accept as theirs the fallacy that the Western Orientalists have produced and projected onto them (and in this case, the entirely fake representation of Islam that theologians like Ratzinger, Khoury and many others have fabricated).
If Ratzinger gave this lecture, this is also due to the fact that he knew that he would not face any academic or intellectual level opposition from the concerned countries. This is so because all the execrable puppets, who govern the Muslim world, were put in place by the representatives of the colonial powers. They do not defend their local interests but execute specific orders in order not to allow
– bold explorers, dynamic professors, and impulsive intellectuals to take the lead,
– proper secular education, unbiased scientific methodology, intellectual self-criticism, free judgment, and thinking out of the box to grow,
– faculties and research centers to be established as per the norms of educationally advanced states, and
– intellectual anti-colonial pioneers and anti-Western scholars to demolish the racist Greco-centric dogma that post-Renaissance European universities have intentionally diffused worldwide.
That is why for a Muslim today in Prof. Ratzinger’s lecture the real problem is not his approach or his mistake, but the impermissible bogus academic life and pseudo-educational system of all the Muslim countries. In fact, before fully transforming and duly enhancing their educational and academic systems, Muslim heads of states, prime ministers, ministers and ambassadors have no right to speak. They must first go back to their countries and abolish the darkness of their ridiculous universities; their so-called professors are not professors.
Here you have all the articles that I published at the time in favor of Benedict XVI; the first article was published on the 16th September 2006, only four days after the notorious lecture and only one day after the notorious BBC report, which called the Muslim ambassadors to shout loud:
Анатолия и Турция: Духовность, мораль, культура, легенда, народная религия, управление, религия, теология и политика
Оглавление
Введение
I. Народная религия, сражения и воины
II. Духовность, мораль, культура, легенда и народная религия
А. Духовность
Б. Мораль
В. Культура
Г. Легенда
Д. Популярная религия
III. История религии: несовместима с западноевропейским манихейским мировоззрением.
IV. Управление, религия, теология и политика
А. Управление
Б. Религия
В. Богословие
Г. Политика
V. Анатолия, Турция, культура, духовность, религия, история и образование
А. Сегодняшние тюрки: они в основном исламизированные восточные римляне на этнокультурном уровне.
Б. Частями национальной души Турции являются все анатолийские цивилизации, культуры и религии.
В. Неоосманизм — антитурецкая паранойя и хитрая западная ловушка против государства Кемаля Ататюрка
Г. Не называйте Анатолийское море «Эгейским морем»!
Д. Восточные римляне и туркменские кочевники: история — это история народов, а не элит или государств
Е. Почему Кемаль Ататюрк мудро закрыл дверь Турции перед уродливым лицом Энвер-паши
а- Тюркские или туранские народы, племена и роды всегда воевали друг с другом.
б- Страны с нерешенными проблемами ничего не получают при слиянии с другими.
в- Пытаясь объединить несколько маленьких стран, вы теряете большую картину и лучший шанс!
Table of Contents
Introduction
I. Popular Religion, Battles, and Warriors
II. Spirituality, Moral, Culture, Legend, and Popular Religion
A. Spirituality
B. Moral
C. Culture
D. Legend
E. Popular religion
III. History of Religion: Incompatible with Western European Manichaean Weltanschauung
IV. Governance, Religion, Theology and Politics
A. Governance
B. Religion
C. Theology
D. Politics
V. Anatolia, Turkey, Culture, Spirituality, Religion, History and Education
A. Today’s Turks are mainly Islamized Eastern Romans at the ethnic-cultural level
B. Parts of Turkey’s National Soul are all the Anatolian Civilizations, Cultures and Religions
C. Neo-Ottomanism is an Anti-Turkish Paranoia and a Subtle Western Trap against the State of Kemal Ataturk
D. Do not call the Anatolian Sea ‘Aegean Sea’!
E. Eastern Romans and Turkmen Nomads: History is the History of the Peoples, not of the Elites or the States
F. Why Kemal Ataturk wisely shut the door of Turkey on the Ugly Face of Enver Pasha
a- Turkic or Turanian peoples, tribes and clans always fought one upon another.
b- Countries with unresolved problems gain nothing when merging with others.
c- Trying to unite few small countries, you lose the greater picture and the best chance!
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The rise of Kay Khosrow to the Heaven; the legendary hero who fascinated the Anatolian Muslims for a millennium was the reflection of pre-Islamic Iranian and Turanian epics, myths and imperial universalism. Evliya Çelebi narrates that meddahlar (errant minstrels) were reciting excerpts from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh about Kay Khosrow in public venues in Bursa.Antalya – Statue of Gıyâseddin Keyhüsrev I (reigned: 1205-1211/غياث الدين كيخسرو بن قلج ارسلان), the Seljuk sultan of Rum (i.e. the Eastern Romans) who was named after the legendary Kay Khosrow.
A long response and an article full of definitions …
Introduction
A few days ago, I received an interesting comment sent by an astute reader of my recently published text in which I analyzed the interaction among the following factors: falsified history, fake religion, and perverse education. In that text, I made it clear that this nefarious combination leads to wars serving the eschatological agendas of several secret societies and evil religious Orders, notably the Jesuits.
The title was published under a rather long title as it concerned many countries:
Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Greece: False History, Fake Religion and Worthless Education lead to Disastrous Wars to fit an Evil Eschatological Agenda
I- The Calamitous Structure of Cultural Colonialism
II- Southern Canaan: an Egyptian Territory
III. Wrong Education & Ignorance of Historical Identity can destroy entire countries
IV. National History, not Religion, makes today’s Nations Strong
V. What means National History for today’s Turks?
VI. Between Turkey and Greece, there can only be a Clash between Two Opposite Historical Models.
VII. Muslim Countries without National History will disappear in the Forthcoming Reconquista
VIII. Religion does not liberate Nations! National History and Identity do!
My reader’s comment made me understand that I did not clarify several points and I will now do so, while also responding to the comment. As a matter of fact, even if all the historical data are accurately known to someone, a persisting confusion about several critical terms does indeed generate incomprehension and misjudgment.
Many conflicts, strives, unrests and wars would have been avoided had people not confused terms such as ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’, ‘moral’ and ‘religion’, ‘religion’ and ‘theology’, ‘governance’ and ‘politics’, and ‘culture’ and ‘religion’. These conditions of the Mankind are presently misperceived, misunderstood, misinterpreted or even ignored, and this dire situation opens the way for people to be subconsciously manipulated up to the point of failing to react against their forthcoming, well-planned annihilation. I will therefore plainly define these terms and also clearly demonstrate how distinct they are from one another, thus offering a better and most accurate understanding of my positions.
——————– Comments made by a reader ————————
Dear Prof. Megalommatis,
The writing style looks mostly ranting, but you have some strong points. I like how you paint the ‘religion’ of a nation as the collective spirit that keeps them alive through the times. I would say that it is very likely that when two populations get into a war in the material plane through kinetic warfare, they also engage in “metaphysical” warfare in the narrative plane. The god of freedom defeating the forces of tyranny only makes sense because the American Revolution and its gods defeated the British monarchy. That is why the revolutionary trope is repeated in so many cultural artifacts of the west. The victory of the sacrifice of Christ over the militant Hebrews only makes sense because the Hellenic-Romans that adopted some Semitic customs took control over the Roman Empire. The militant Jews had a second opportunity with the advent of the Prophet Muhammad as the Semitic-speaking Aramaeans took control over the Middle East.
I guess that what you try to say in this post is that the current historical narrative of Turkey lacks of gravitas to pull traction into its direction, maybe because they take the Islamic faith in full while you advocate for a model where the history of Turkey absorbs all the residents of the Anatolian peninsula. For example, Ankara should take Justinian as its own emperor. Here then rises the challenge of how to explain the Byzantine-Ottoman wars. Are they civil wars? Why do you renounce pan-Turkish in full when the union with Azerbaijan would be fairly feasible?
I believe you are onto something, and I hope my comment helps to further your intellectual quest.
—————————– My response ————————-
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your time and comment!
Yes, your points do help me clarify my position.
Apparently, my writing style varies according to the topic; when I present the History of Kazakhstan, there is no trace of rant. However, when I denounce the falsification of History or another sort of evildoing, my wholehearted denunciation of the iniquity certainly impacts my written expression.
I. Popular Religion, Battles, and Warriors
Your definition of ‘religion’ (or rather what you describe as my way of painting it) and my definition of ‘religion’ are not the same; but they are both very far from the absolutely ridiculous, worthless, vicious and evil understanding of the term that most people, believers (Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, etc.) and non-believers, have today.
What you say that you like in my way of painting the ‘religion’ (namely ‘the collective spirit that keeps them alive through the times’) is not the ‘religion’, but the ‘popular religion’ or ‘folk religion’. This condition is inalienable to the humans. You can be a human being or a human society without systematic theology and without official religion, but definitely you cannot be a human or establish a human society without a ‘popular religion’ or ‘folk religion’.
‘Popular religion’ or ‘folk religion’ is the cornerstone of every culture and civilization. That’s why today’s criminal forgers and gangsters, who intend to bring about the massive extermination of the Mankind, express paranoid rage, extreme hysteria and nonsensical argumentation in their effort to discredit and to delete ‘popular religion’ or ‘folk religion’ from among human societies. In their worthless ‘definition’ of the term, they even use the adjective ‘pervasive’! Rabid dogs are healthier indeed than the authors of this poisonous text t, which literally speaking was written with the intention to spiritually kill the readers:
“Popular religion as the pervasive beliefs, rituals, and values of a society”
Behind this disingenuous attack against ‘popular religion’ or ‘folk religion’ are the Anglo-American gangsters whose forthcoming nuclear extinction will liberate the Mankind from its current slavery. These are the sick and corrupt rascals, who contaminated the Earth with their fake discoveries and evil ‘inventions’. Now, they must disappear along with their Facebook, Metaverse, transgenderism, homosexual marriages, and the rest of their diseases and anomalies.
What you say about the clash of two populations is essentially true:
“When two populations get into a war in the material plane through kinetic warfare, they also engage in ‘metaphysical’ warfare in the narrative plane”.
You mean ‘spiritual’ warfare; I personally never use the false term ‘metaphysical’. In reality, it is meaningless, confusing and erroneously produced: Aristotle wrote a text without title. It concerned his understanding about the spiritual world; when this text was copied in the libraries of the Late Antiquity (in Turkey’s Antioch or Egypt’s Alexandria), it was written (on the papyri) after another text written by Aristotle that concerned his observations of the material (or natural) world. Christian monks, who copied these texts later (either in the Eastern Roman Empire or in pseudo-Christian Western Europe), named the former ‘Physica’ (i.e. ‘about the natural world’ / it has nothing to do with ‘Physics’) and the latter ‘Metaphysica’ (lit. «text written after the ‘Physica’»).
As you see, the original use of the 3-word phrase (in Greek: Μετά τα Φυσικά) has nothing to do with the contents of the text, but merely denotes its location in the papyrus (‘after the text about the natural world’). Only later, the contents of the text (about the spiritual world) gave another meaning to the word ‘Metaphysica’ and, at a later stage, the word ‘metaphysics’ started being used to describe all references to the spiritual world. It is therefore advisable to avoid using this term.
What you write about a 2-level war during the battle time, namely the material and the spiritual planes, is correct, but it does not happen always at the same scale; it depends on the degree of the national spiritual consciousness that the fighters have during the battle. It also hinges on the degree of sincerity that the fighters (from both sides) have in their respective faiths. In any case, the issue of each and every battle is a complex matter to study, if you truly want to be fully aware of what actually happened there.
Never forget that a battle is engaged between two armies; every military force is composed of human beings; and every man’s thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, passions, fantasies, imaginations, and even delusions are expressed at all levels: material (physical), mental-sentimental (lower spiritual – also known as ‘astral’), and spiritual. Sometimes, a warrior’s imaginative skills, particularly when making parallels between himself and legendary heroes (such as Rustam or Fereydun) can do wonders, because they activate spiritual forces of what you call ‘the collective spirit’. I would not describe it like that, although the terms are not wrong, but it is clear that you refer to an existing spiritual entity (in the case of each community or population or nation).
Contrarily to what you say (“the collective spirit that keeps them alive through the times”), the spiritual entity of a community or nation does not ‘die’; it continues existing and has evidently its own History, because it affects and impacts in many different ways
a- the remnants of a defeated nation after the collapse of a state, kingdom, etc.;
b- the amalgamated population that may have come out of intermarriages between the rest of a vanquished population and the invaders/newcomers;
c- the settlers, who arrived in a specific land, which had been earlier populated by another population of which none survived; and
d- later incomers, who may have settled in the same land many centuries after the early disappearance of the first inhabitants.
Typically Hittite artistic traits in the statues of lions and eagles at Nemrut Dagh (Mountain) peak sanctuary (62 BCE), more than 1100 years after the fall of the Hittite Empire and more than 600 years after the Assyrian invasion of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms, and the subsequent assimilation of the Neo-Hittites into the Aramaeans.
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Similar developments are not always visible – to the greatest chagrin of modern materialist and atheist scholars who cannot comprehend the diverse ways by which numerous concepts, visions, designs, beliefs, traditions, eschatological faiths, and artistic designs are passed on from one nation to another. Typical examples in this case, as far as Anatolia is concerned, are
i- the absolutely Hittite design of the statues of lions and eagles in Mount Nemrut peak sanctuaries, and
ii- the typically Hittite concept of the Antichrist rising from the sea (Revelation 13), which originates from the Hittite eschatological epic Ullikummi.
There is therefore, at this point, an evident need for several definitions of terms that we use in our conversation.
II. Spirituality, Moral, Culture, Legend, and Popular Religion
A. Spirituality
Spirituality is not identical with religion; it is incommensurately higher than religion.
DEFINITION
Spirituality is the ability of the human being to establish sensible connection among his soul (spiritual entity), his heart, mind and solar plexus (lower spiritual entity or ‘character’), and his body (material entity). Spirituality is not a theory, a thought or a consideration; it is a practical exercise involving spiritual effort to utilize the body and its electromagnetic flows for a certain purpose either at the spiritual or the material level.
The results of spiritual exercises bring forth the comprehensive synergy of the human individual’s three parts and the materialization of what today’s average people would call ‘miracles’. Spirituality allows humans to enter in contact with spiritual entities of all created hierarchies; its cardinal importance can be assessed if one takes into consideration that only through one’s soul (so spiritual entity) can one person contact or fathom the Creator. Spirituality does not exist without incessant praise of God, endless thanks for His misericord, glorification of His attributes, and complete devotion to the Moral principles and standards which make the spiritual-material synergy possible.
The Wikipedia, among other rather confusing statements, offers a partly correct definition of ‘spirituality’: ‘a process of re-formation which aims to recover the original shape of man oriented at the image of God’. Although this is true, the definition does not make it clear that this is a practical endeavor. During this process, every apprentice carries out many exercises in order to sense, familiarize with, and streamline the electro-magnetic fields of his body in view of a better synergy among his soul, character and body.
However, in the same entry, the definition involves several absolutely mistaken statements: this process is described as ‘religious’, which is extremely wrong and very confusing. Irrespective of his own religion, any person can practice spiritual exercises, because the ability for this is inherent to humans from the Creation and totally unrelated to ethnic, linguistic or religious differences. However, this very ability is highly conditioned by Moral, and persons living in immorality or amorality are de facto incapable (and also unwilling) to re-connect with their soul. In the same definition, spirituality is confused with religion for a second time, when it is stated that spirituality was exemplified by the founders of religions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirituality
‘Founders of religions’ is an entirely modern misconception, an evil forgery, and a viciously treacherous term fabricated only to spread confusion; there have never been ‘founders of religions’. The identity of the persons, who are called like that, is other: they are prophets, false prophets, eventually founders of an organization, but not of religion. Religion is certainly very different from spirituality, but it is not an ‘office’. Only offices, companies, institutions and organizations can be founded. I will further expand when defining religion.
Spirituality has nothing to do with philosophy, which is a theoretical, not practical, effort to grasp the truth, to make real wisdom out of it, and to describe some of the spiritual world’s facts, situations, conditions and developments in human language (up to the very limited extent that this is possible). Philosophy is a minor and low mental activity, always viewed as profane by high priests, ancient scientists, spiritual masters, and mystics; a philosopher is a man who talks uselessly, because even if he understands, he does not feel or sense the realities he speaks about.
Israa and Mi’raj of prophet Muhammad depicted on a manuscript of the famous opus ‘Bustan and Gulistan’ of the 13th c. Iranian poet Saadi (Calligrapher Sultan Muhammad Nur; date: 1525-153; Folio 3v, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Quite contrarily, a mystic is a man of action, able to reveal to his disciples the unfathomable realities of the spiritual world and the way to perform while in synergy with their soul. Describing the method of spiritual action, narrating in detail the various spiritual exercises, writing in detail about the spiritual world is an oddity of our time; in the Antiquity, this was absolutely impermissible as it was viewed as a profanity and a blasphemy. Apparently, you cannot reveal the spiritual truth to the vulgar infidels who live in compact materialism, paranoid rationalism, absurd utilitarianism, and other mental-sentimental-intellectual diseases.
Within the context of the Islamic world, spirituality was uniquely embodied by prophet Muhammad and his spiritual experience, notably the nocturnal journey and the ascension (al Isra’ w-al Mi’raj) and the revelation of the Qur’an. Since Islam (i.e. the correct attitude of a human toward God) did not start with prophet Muhammad (it was actually only spelled out more analytically thanks to his recitations and his revelations/explanations), spirituality was also exemplified earlier by all previous prophets, starting with Adam. Spirituality was concretized in the exercises and the teachings of Hz. Ali ibn Abi Taleb, his sons and his descendants; the same concerns several mystical orders of the Islamic world (notably the Mevlevis, the Safavis, the Bektashis, and many others), which tried to preserve the cherished practices until they progressively lost them due to the decay that spread throughout the Muslim societies.
B. Moral
Many people make the mistake to exclusively associate Moral with religion; this is wrong. Equally mistaken is the effort to associate Moral with philosophy. Modern definitions of Moral basically relate to the ‘standards or principles of good behaviour’ (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/moral_2) or to ‘a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality).
These approaches and interpretations fail to explain why mystics and prophets have always been necessary to appear every now and then to call societies to the correct path. Although it is undeniable that priests specified the correct moral standards for their adepts to follow and philosophers examined almost every issue pertaining to the principles of Moral (or Morality), it is clear that neither religion nor philosophy can be taken as the true source of Moral.
Modern scholars have anxiously attempted to find the origin of the moral values in the organization of the early societies, but this approach is inherently ideologized as it merely reflects militant evolutionism, Darwinism, materialism, agnosticism and atheism. Actually, it cannot be taken into account, particularly in the light of so many sacred texts and holy traditions, as per which the code of moral behaviour is entirely divine.
On the other hand, all people acknowledge that, in reality, Morality is synonymous with ‘goodness’ or ‘rightness’; this helps us understand that the origin of every moral order is the spiritual universe, which is also called the ‘divine world’. In fact, the inherent freedom that the Human Being enjoys since the Creation and, in parallel, the existence of the fallen angels, have produced the double reality of moral and immoral standards, therefore subsequently generating the possibility of the human being to choose for either ways. In fact, these two categories reflect the prevailing situation in the spiritual universe: the Divine Ideas and the lack thereof. Noticeably, it was early known to Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian sacerdotal colleges, mystics and spiritual masters that the Creation of the World hinges on the axe of the Being and the Non Being. At the material level, this means that immorality is a form of denial of one’s own existence.
The association that religion and philosophy have with Moral only corroborates the inherent (in every human) quest for the ‘good’ and the ‘right’ within the context of a fallen world.
DEFINITION
We can therefore conclude that, in reality, Moral is the inherent code of the Creation that must never be breached by any human being; in fact, every person’s conduct in life must be in agreement with the -common to all- moral standards. Spirituality (synergy between the soul, the character and the body) is the only way for humans to pertinently identify the moral standards that they must follow.
Rhinoceros, bull, and the naked beings of the Tree; from Zakariya al-Qazwini’s masterpiece of spirituality and moral ‘Aja’ib al-Makhluqat wa Ghara’ib al-Mawjudat’ (عجائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات/ Wonders of Creatures and the Oddities of Beings); Zakariya’ Qazwini (1203-1283; زكرياء القزويني) in his aforementioned masterpiece of spiritual and material cosmography clearly demonstrates that every irregularity or oddity of form is due to a moral non-conformity, moral idleness and moral depravity.
All present definitions of Culture are false because they are written by authors who intended to dissociate humans from their spirituality and therefore presented the History of the Mankind as a succession of customary acts and a process of material actions, as if humans were idiotic automatons and silly robots. Several definitions of Culture may seem therefore correct, but they are actually not, as long as they do not establish a clear link between material actions and spiritual faiths.
In a typical example of wrong definition of Culture almost everything is accurately stated, but there is no mention of or reference to Spirituality and Moral: ‘the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society’. Yet, all these ‘ideas’ and ‘customs’ originate from the spiritual activities of a society and the ‘behaviour’ hinges indeed on the moral standards of these very ‘particular people or society’! (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/culture_1?q=culture).
Even worse, other definitions of Culture involve unnecessary elements of modern societies, such as institutions or laws. This is merely a consequence of the erroneous but prevailing evolutionism as per which modern societies are more ‘developed’ whereas in reality they are more decayed than the traditional societies. An example is offered by the Wikipedia: ‘Culture is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups’. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture)
In this manner, modern lexicographers and grammarians are forced to dissociate ‘culture’ and ‘folklore’, because they want to offer to the former a much wider range of notions and concepts in order to also comprise within the semantic array of its values possible definitions of secluded segments of society (notably the elites and the secret companies or initiation organizations) and of their ‘culture’. However, this is an elitist approach, and as such definitely Nazi and absolutely evil. Even worse, this lexicographic and academic attempt consists in an amalgamation of the truly genuine (the traditional unitary societies) and the fake (modern, stratified and segmented societies). In this case, the distorted definition (of Culture) and the dissociation (of ‘culture’ from ‘folklore’) help only further corrupt today’s societies, engulf readers into misconceptions, and rapidly spread the grave contamination that leads today’s sick Western World to death.
Culture, folklore and lore are similar notions.
When it comes to lore, one could consider the following definitions as correct, but they are not: ‘a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth’ and ‘knowledge and information related to a particular subject, especially when this is not written down; the stories and traditions of a particular group of people’
First, these elements (‘body of traditions’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’) do not concern just persons or groups of people but entire societies, communities or nations.
Second, the total absence of reference to the spirituality of the community or society or nation in question fully cancels the veracity of the definitions; this is so because these elements (‘body of traditions’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’) emanate from, pertain to, depend on, and account for the spiritual life of the said community or society or nation.
As lore we should therefore define the totality of oral traditions, stories, narratives, songs, fairy tales, legends, didactic and moral tales, oral historical knowledge, as well as statements of popular wisdom and proverbs, which are passed from generation to generation as cornerstone of the local home education. This oral treasure of the community or society or nation in question is indissolubly linked to the spiritual life of these people. Consequently, it constitutes the foundation stone of the national identity, because without cherishing the values encrusted in their lore, individuals of this group of people cannot be considered as really indigenous.
Eastern Romans soldiers (above) and Janissaries (below): different states, similar traditions
Double-headed eagle in the Seljuk (above) and the Palaiologos family Roman (below) versions
Double-headed eagle from the time of Ala ad-Din Kaiqubad (1188-1237) in Iconium-Konya (above); two divinities standing on double-headed eagle from the Hittite rock-relief (13th c. BCE) of Yazilikaya, the Hittite religious capital (below, at the right end of the picture)
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Folklore is a wider notion, because it also includes material traditions and activities (involving local architecture, handicraft, typically local artifacts, etc.), many religion-related practices (that are not religiously indispensable stricto sensu), customary actions, popularized faith, art, folk dances, material culture with respect to the human life cycle (birth, weddings, funerals, etc.), rituals, initiation rites, ceremonies, celebrations, customary lore, undertakings that are necessary for folk beliefs and local traditions, etc. Similarly with lore, folklore hinges on the spiritual life of the community or society or nation and makes the daily life very colorful, joyful, vivid and pleasant for all the members of that group of people, thus strengthening the bond that unites them. Folklore is therefore a crucial element of the national identity and the cultural integrity of a nation; it goes without saying that nations that lost their folklore have zero chances to survive.
The Red Apple: Basic Element of Anatolian Folklore
Folklore, as notion, is not as wide as Culture; the latter involves also behavioral patterns and customs, the moral values of the community or society or nation, the popular religion, the rudimentary structure of education, the annual cycle of agricultural activities, and -in general- the traditional way of life, which is markedly impacted by the geomorphological and meteorological conditions of the land inhabited by the said group of people.
That is why, although they have the same religion, the Baluch of Pakistan’s coastland, the Hazaras of central Afghanistan, and the Tajiks, who inhabit the Valley of Fergana and the Pamirs, have ostensibly different cultures. This shows that the (‘official’) religion is not as determinant as Culture in the national life of every nation. And this was something that, for the case of Anatolia, Kemal Ataturk understood very well and very early. This fact marks indeed his irrevocable superiority over all the ignorant and pathetic sheikhs of Al Azhar, Mecca, Medina and today’s Diyanet (a Turkish ‘office’ that must be abolished).
DEFINITION
In brief, the Culture of a nation is the reflection of its collective spiritual entity on the material life of the population.
D. Legend
As in all the previous cases, all the existing definitions of the term ‘legend’ are ideologically motivated and severely distorted in order to deprive the term from its spiritual nature and dimensions. This fact has calamitous consequences on our understanding of past and present cultures, traditions and nations; furthermore, similar definitions destroy the originality of the national education in every country where these definitions and the associated ideas are accepted. Example: ‘a story from ancient times about people and events that may or may not be true; this type of story’ (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/legend?q=legend)
In the Wikipedia, the notions of lore and folklore are entirely confused; this affects the definition of ‘legend’, which is associated with the folklore, and not the lore of a nation. The definition of the ‘legend’ becomes therefore the epitome of the most absurd materialism: ‘a genre of folklore that consists of a narrative featuring human actions, believed or perceived, both by teller and listeners, to have taken place in human history’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend). It is very interesting that neither the word ‘myth’ nor the term ‘symbol’ are mentioned in this monstrously distorted definition. In the rest of the definition, we notice the systematic effort to avoid the use of the words ‘spiritual’, ‘faith’, ‘heroism’, ‘heroic’ and ‘spirituality’: ‘narratives in this genre may demonstrate human values, and possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude. Legend, for its active and passive participants may include miracles. Legends may be transformed over time to keep them fresh and vital. Many legends operate within the realm of uncertainty, never being entirely believed by the participants, but also never being resolutely doubted’. It is clear that such definitions constitute a severely biased attitude of scrupulous militants, who want to deliberately plunged readers in ignorance and confusion.
A legend is by definition a constituent element of the identity of a community, society or nation. There cannot be nation without legend or it will be a fake. At the earlier (and most important) stage, a legend is an oral story / tradition that can give birth to an associated epic, i.e. a long poem orally remembered from generation to generation due to memory techniques (mnemotechnics). Whether the epic is written down or not is immaterial. If this happens, the legend itself and the epic may follow totally different orbits.
DEFINITION
As an oral story, the legend describes heroic deeds of superb men, who fight ferocious enemies in magnificent battles – epitomes of the contrast ‘Good and Evil’. In other words, there cannot be a legend dissociated from the high moral standards that must be cherished by all those, who want to be true humans and carry out the great deeds that everyone has to perform in the material world before returning to the eternal, spiritual world whereby the only possible reward is to be sought after.
There is no legend for disbelievers, materialists, consumerists, modernists, sectarian idiots, filthy plotters, evil crooks, and most of the common types in decayed periods like ours. At times, legends serve to overwhelmingly denounce devious egocentric and greedy imbeciles for whom material benefits are all that matters in life. In this regard, various legends memorized, recited and cherished among many different nations constituted the means to preserve healthy, moral and human societies of people, who were/are diametrically opposed to the sexually devious and perverse, worthless and idiotic consumers of today’s materialist and corrupt Western World.
In other words, the legends offer exemplary paragons of life and perfect paradigms of honorable men, who should become the models for children and adolescents to follow in life. The legends functioned therefore as educational systems able to sustain the local societies or nations for centuries and millennia. The various legendary heroes and valorous characters became part of the national soul, which maintained the encapsulated virtues as national traits throughout ages. We can therefore safely claim that the legends reflected the national spiritual entity and epitomized the lofty values for which the brave ancestors of each true nation died.
As narrative, a legend is composed by people, who fully accept the existence of the spiritual world and are therefore fully acquainted with the mythical language and the symbols that stand between the spiritual and material worlds as lighthouses and landmarks. The mythical perception of the spiritual and material universes and the ensuing mythical language are the only possible manner by which realities of the spiritual world can be communicated to humans and understood by them.
The legend of Fereydun, antedates the splendid poetry of Ferdowsi (Shahnameh), which merely gave literary value to an old story that the diffusion of Islam in the Iranian-Turanian world proved unable to erase; even the Ottoman Selim I, when exchanging insulting letters with Ismail Safevi before the battle of Chaldiran (1514), identified himself with Fereydun.
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This is so because supernatural and supratemporal situations have to be conveyed at (or converted to) the material plane and this inevitably involves concepts, which are nonexistent at that level. For this to be achieved symbols have to be created at the intersection of the two worlds (spiritual and material); they don’t represent what is actually seen (in them) but what they stand for as encoded notions within a field of semiotics.
The mythical language was earlier known to all; later, due to several calamitous developments mythologized as the ‘Flood’, it became a privileged instrument for priesthood; it subsequently lost most of its coherence and original meaning. This apparent deterioration of the human conditions of life generated major hindrances (notably polytheism, organized religion, doctrinal narratives and evil themes) in the path of average persons toward the spiritual world and increased the distance that they had from it (turning people to material cults, liturgies, black magic, superstition and idolatry).
Despite the fact that the mythical language always existed within the context of spirituality, religion and popular religion, many theologians of various religions tried deliberately to leave it aside or diminish its importance in order to spiritually control the followers of their religion. Philosophers and scientists tried to oppose them but failed. At the end, the mythical language was decomposed and it remained as the incomprehensible part of a nation’s culture and popular religion, serving as unfathomable foundation for the epics and the legends, the fairy tales, and the traditions of the said nation.
E. Popular religion
About the popular religion, I already expanded in Unit I; however, at this point, I will add a definition. In striking contrast to the nonsensical definitions that are available today, popular religion is the leading part of a nation’s culture. It is far more important than the official religion itself, in the sense that it is alive. It has nothing to do with the concepts and theories of a Talmudic Rabbi, a Father of the Christian Church, and a Muslim Initiator of Madhhab (School of Jurisprudence) or with the interpretation and the hermeneutics of modern theologians of any religion. Verbosity is by definition not a virtue in every popular religion worldwide.
DEFINITION
Popular religion stands often in striking contrast with the official religion; in that case, the popular religion is far more original and trustworthy. Popular religion, to start with a simple definition, is the way people feel their religion in their daily lives, involving the physical activities, the moral values, and the imaginative power of every faithful as regards mythically conceived and narrated facts or historical events of cardinal importance, legends, and exemplary attitudes of brave believers, who preferred salvation in the spiritual world than success and pleasure in the material world. When it comes to popular religion, imagination is far more important than thought, reason, and rationalism.
Reasoning cares, argumentations, and ‘proofs’ are nonexistent as entirely worthless within the context of popular religion; it is all about impetuous compassion, impulsive expression of religiosity, cultic devotion, piety, and other forms of emotional self-accomplishment effectuated on the lines of transcendental experience, repentance, truth, and magnanimous altruism.
Official religion is experienced in religious litanies, ceremonies, liturgies, feasts, congregations, festivals and solemn celebrations on specific occasions. It can be at times pompous, grandiloquent and imperious.
Popular religion is lived in every single moment of a person’s life.
It is therefore intricately intertwined -in every single believer differently and markedly individually- with other spheres of the culture of the local community or population or nation, i.e. the historical traditions and the legends, the myths about the origin of the nation, the lore and the folklore, the annual cycle of agricultural activities, and the behavioral philosophical system that emanates from the customs and the habitudes of those people.
Official religion may or may not depend on a hierarchical organization that carries out the material schedule of the religious activities; there have been religions with minimal structure in their organization and religions with multilayered, perplex and sophisticated structure.
More perplex the material administration of a religion is, more polytheistic the religion may be; in such a case, the spirituality becomes weaker among the adepts, an increased dose of fear, superstition, and negative emotions is spread across the popular religion, the daily life takes a less heroic dimension, and materialistic concepts and concerns prevail in the minds of the people, turning them to heartless beings.
The triumph of the popular religion can be attested in every believer’s balanced stance at the very center of a triangle from the three corners of which depart paths leading to exploits of unprecedented gallantry, examples of magnanimous solidarity, and acts of humble devotion.
Soviet stamp commemorating the Nowruz (نوروز / Новруз) in Azerbaijan (left); Iranian family commemorates the major feast (New Year’s Day) in Nishapur. Neither the Soviet instructors of Marxism-Leninism nor the Islamist theologians of Iran could uproot the popular religion, although they both hated it, because it represents the true social life of a nation.
Tajiks celebrate Mehregan (مهرگان), a traditional pre-Islamic Iranian feast which is still cherished among Zoroastrians, Parsis and Muslims; originally dedicated to Mithra (also known as Mehr), the feast coincides with the fall as it starts ten days after the fall equinox.
Feasting Yalda (winter solstice) or Shab-e Yalda (شب یلدا) in Zibad, NE Iran
Typical Yalda tables
Chaharshanbe (چهارشنبهسوری) festivities on the eve of Nowruz
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III. History of Religion: Incompatible with Western European Manichaean Weltanschauung
Having clarified issues pertaining to the correct definition of the aforementioned terms (in the previous unit), I can now continue responding to your comments.
You speak of the ‘god of freedom’ and of ‘the forces of tyranny’. This is exactly what you say: “The god of freedom defeating the forces of tyranny only makes sense because the American Revolution and its gods defeated the British monarchy. That is why the revolutionary trope is repeated in so many cultural artifacts of the west”.
I find your approach as mechanically Manichaean and I disagree; there is no ‘god of freedom’! What you call as ‘the forces of tyranny’ are not literally so. They are simply sick and paranoid gangsters, tools of the Evil, and enemies of the Mankind; their evildoing is not limited in the case of their colonies in North America. By using these terms, you only confuse yourself. The humans are created free, and for this reason ‘tyranny’ is basically an evil effort to strip humans from their normal condition. But I don’t take part in that conflict; the Americans, who wanted to ‘be free’, were in reality English or other West Europeans, who carried out a shameful genocide of the highly civilized indigenous populations (falsely called ‘Amerindians’).
Because of their clash with the English at the time, the Americans did not have their sins atoned. Even worse, approximately one century after their independence, the Americans were again invaded by the English in a more subtle and clearly invisible manner. Historically viewed, the American Independence is merely … ‘too much ado for nothing’. The oppression and the persecution of the indigenous nations of those lands is a shame for the entire Mankind. For all the other states of the world, this fact consists in a clear reason for immediate termination of every possible contact with the US. The same concerns the relations of third countries with UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
Above: As divine trinity, Mithra performing tauroctony (Sterzing, Tyrol) in presence of Cautes (: sunrise), at the right, and Cautopates (: sunset), at the left, who hold their torches. / Below: Crucifixion, in the earliest manuscript illumination from the Rabbula Gospels {written by the Aramaean monk Rabbula (ܪܒܘܠܐ)}, which were copied in the Monastery of St. John of Zagba, near Apamea (close to Hama), Syria (late 6th c.).
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When referring to the sacrifice of Christ, you become eminently schematic. You write: “The victory of the sacrifice of Christ over the militant Hebrews only makes sense because the Hellenic-Romans that adopted some Semitic customs took control over the Roman Empire”. Unfortunately, this can never lead to correct conclusions and understanding. It is not a black and white affair; actually, it is not the sacrifice of Christ, but that of Mithra! The Mithraic slaying of the Bull! Strange? No! First, the bull-sacrifice was transformed into a Crucifixion. After people for almost 2000 years believed that ‘god’ killed himself in order to be resurrected, the survivors (i.e. eight billion people) are now being processed into the next stage. And the unrepentant Jesuits still today intend to perform the ritual and, instead of a bull, sacrifice the entire Mankind, leaving only five (5) million people alive after the well-planned double nuclear extermination. They expressed regret in public for several cases of Catholic evildoing; true! But they never rejected (let alone repented for) the evil teachings, the duplicity, the mendacity, the heinous mentality, and the atrocious deeds of the founder of their religious Order, Ignacio de Loyola, and of his followers.
So, long before the Romans “adopted some Semitic customs”, they had accepted Iranian faith, mysteries and cult, initiation rites and divine attributes, traditions and cosmological concepts. Certainly the Romans embraced also Hamitic cultural, spiritual, intellectual, religious and esoteric rites and traditions, notions and world views, by seeking salvation in the Ancient Egyptian Iwnw Heliopolitan Isiac dogma. Nevertheless, a certainly strong Semitic spiritual component made its way to Rome, due to the diffusion of several Aramaean and Phoenician religions throughout the Roman Empire; but it has little to do with the Rabbinical (: Talmudic) Judaism of those days. You should know and remember that!
If you forget Elagabalus, you allow every Western European and Anglo-American racist pseudo-scholar to fabricate and spread his evil pseudo-historical dogma of ‘Greco-Roman civilization’. This is not only totally false and viciously discriminatory, but also harmful and destructive for the national interests of all modern Oriental states concerned (Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, etc.). This is so because the young Roman Emperor of Aramaean Syrian origin, who reigned from 218 to 222 CE, replaced the cult of Roman Jupiter with that of the Aramaean god whose name he was bearing.
Elagabalus (204-222; reigned from 218) coin minted in Antioch; high priest of the homonymous Aramaean god of Emessa (Homs) before becoming Roman Emperor, he posed a major threat to those who wanted to prevent the diffusion of Aramaean and Babylonian festivities (Akitu) that would block the later imposition of sacrifice-related festivals. That is why Elagabalus was slandered in unprecedented manner.
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Semitic impact on the Roman Empire was multifaceted; when you discover this fact and you propagate it worldwide, you will produce an enormous friction between the colonial gangsters and the rest of the world, fully justifying your national position and canceling all worthless claims to ‘Western’, ‘Greco-Roman’, ‘Hellenic’ civilization and to Indo-European supremacism. Otherwise, you allow your villainous enemies to tell you ‘you came from Central Asia and Siberia; go back there’! This statement is of course entirely false, but if it is left unanswered, it can become the first paragraph in an entirely false (but widely acclaimed) discourse, which would back any sick type of colonial irredentism.
That is why the importance of Manbij (Menbiç/ مَنْبِج) hinges on Ancient Aramaean past, heritage, cults and sacredness, and not on Islamic eschatological considerations. Known as Mabog in Syriac Aramaic, this location in today’s NW Syria was the religious center of the ‘Syrian goddess’, i.e. Atargatis. To make her mysteries and cults known to the Greeks and the Romans, the Aramaean author, philosopher and erudite scholar Lucian of Samosata (Samsat; now under the waters of the Ataturk Reservoir Lake) wrote his treatise ‘On the Syrian Goddess’. For all Turks, Syrians and Lebanese, this text is more important than all the Hadith of prophet Muhammad, because these states face perplex colonial threats, involving historical revisionism, territorial irredentism, military attacks, financial war, and political plots from the US, England, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Holland, NATO and their local stooges and pawns.
Atargatis, the Syrian goddess of Manbij; the remains of the ancient castle of Samosata (Samsat) before the erection of the Ataturk dam and the formation of the dam lake
Of course, I understand that not all the people will become specialized historians and intellectuals; however, it would be absolutely essential for Turkey’s national identity, academic-cultural orientations, international stance (notably in UNESCO), foreign relations, and bilateral affairs to closely monitor educational patterns in Italy and duly implement them locally, after effectively replacing/readjusting all mistaken parts of the contents. When facing the financially backed Armenian irredentism, the pseudo-Kurdish nationalist discourse, and the paranoid bogus-theory of Hellenism of Greece, Turkey does not need Islam in its cultural, educational, intellectual and academic discourse.
On the contrary, Turkey needs a creative, proactive reassessment of the Anatolian historical heritage (in all of its components and in its most genuine, comprehensive and vivacious interpretation) and its effective application in the formulation of the country’s national identity internally and externally. For this to be done, the useless syllabuses of Turkish Primary and Secondary Education -with their meaningless, ineffective and rather childish references to Early Islam- must be resolutely thrown to the rubbish basket and entirely replaced with translations of sacred texts, historical documentation, and epigraphic material originating from all ancient civilizations that flourished in Anatolia – and of which the only true descendants are today’s Turks.
No Armenian can speak of Commagene and no Greek can speak of Ionia more than a true Turk of Modern Turkey; because in fact, by introducing the name Türkiye in replacement of the Ottoman Shame, Kemal Atatürk meant ‘Anadolu’ (Anatolia), and this can be shown in the truly first Turkish Constitution (ratified on 29th October 1923). It is implicit, not explicit, but still very clear in the formulation of the founding text. You must therefore realize that any great achievement at the international level starts always with the correct, efficient and up-to-the-point Secondary Education.
Anytime anywhere and under any circumstances whatsoever, people are linked to the Earth, their own land, and not to the silly bogus-religious story of an ignorant and uneducated imam who confuses religion with theology. Irrespective of their veracity or fallacy, historicity claims including references to the Antiquity cannot be opposed by idiotic Islamist literature; they can be rejected only by opposite claims which go back to more ancient times. But this must not be one author’s conviction or one diplomat’s erudition; it must be shared by the entire nation, as it vividly happens in Iran.
In fact, by consciously or unconsciously accepting Western colonial misinterpretation of the historical facts, by adopting typically Manichaean, bipolar stories that Western intellectuals intentionally produced, and by failing to know the history of every part of your land and its spiritual-cultural radiation, you only serve your country’s worst enemies, duly facilitating their plans. Whatever the name of your country may be, Turkey, Russia, Iran, Egypt or Yemen, with your attitude you unfortunately play only into the game of your enemies. That’s why the English colonial diplomats enroll and use idiotic puppets, like the Muslim Brotherhood and the fanciful leader of Pan-Turkism Alparslan Türkeş (a Turkish Cypriot!), in order to confuse sizable parts of population and attract them to sterile, counter-productive ideologies which do not reflect Anatolia’s cultural heritage, historical tradition, and spirituality.
The rise of Islam, as preached by prophet Muhammad, was not a “militant Jewish victory”. Again, your approach is mechanically Manichaean; you write: “The militant Jews had a second opportunity with the advent of the Prophet Muhammad as the Semitic-speaking Aramaeans took control over the Middle East”. If you were correct, every Anti-Roman and Anti-Constantinopolitan Christological dispute would be the product of Jewish militants. However, no one among Arius, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Eutyches, Nestorius and many other theologians, who were denounced as ‘heretic’, was Jewish or pro-Jewish. More importantly, the History of Early Christianity and of the Christological disputes must be an indispensable part of the Turkish Secondary Education, because these ongoing disputes concern populations that still live in Turkey (the Monophysitic/Miaphysitic Aramaeans/Suryani) and, without good knowledge of the History of Anatolia, no Turk would effectively function as an Anatolian – duly rejecting foreign claims.
A man from Germanikeia / Kahraman Marash elaborated a Christian theology that was diffused without war throughout Asia and expanded more than Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, yet today’s average Turks now nothing about him: Nestorius Patriarch of Constantinople (386-451). It goes without saying that when don’t claim your own cultural wealth, others do.
Above: Nestorians celebrating Palm Sunday from a wall painting in Qocho-Turfan, Eastern Turkestan/Xinjiang-China / Below: Nestorian tombstone from Chifeng Inner Mongolia-China
The Tengrist-Buddhist Emperor Hulagu Khan (هلاکو خان / 1217-1265; grandson of Genghis Khan) and his Nestorian wife Doquz Hatun (دوقوز خاتون)
The Council of Chalcedon (in today’s Kadıköy, on the Asiatic side of Constantinople / Istanbul; 451 CE) condemned and rejected Nestorianism; when almost two hundred years later the early news about Islam reached the Eastern Roman Empire, they viewed the preaching of prophet Muhammad as a new, extreme version of Nestorian theology.
Instead of knowing the names of several culturally and nationally useless locations in Hejaz, Turks must come to know very well locations such as Mopsuestia (today’s Yakapınar, Yüreğir, Adana) and Germanikeia (Maraş) where Nestorius, a leading Christian theologian and patriarch of Constantinople, was born. His theological system served as foundation of the most important Christian denomination, i.e. Nestorianism (Nestûrîlik), which spread among many Asiatic nations, notably Aramaeans, Arabs, Yemenites, Indians, Iranians, Turanians, Mongolians and Chinese. Persecuted in the Eastern Roman Empire and in the Sassanid Empire of Islam, Nestorianism became the most widely diffused branch of Christianity before the 16th c., involving many churches and parishes in Eastern Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran, India, Central Asia, Mongolia and China. The grandson of Genghis Khan, Hulagu Khan, the magnificent Mongolian emperor who terminated the Abbasid Shame in Baghdad, had a Keraite (Keraitler) Mongolian Nestorian wife, namely Doquz Khatun (Dokuz Hatun), but still today’s Turks do not learn in their schools that it all started Germanicia/Kahramanmaraş. Only your worst enemies must have condemned you to this disastrous situation!
So, my conclusion about your points is that to best avoid this type of Western traps (which have engulfed dozens and at times hundreds of millions of people into fake dilemmas), you need to best study the historical heritage of your country, the wider region, and the Orient in its entirety. Stories about the wives of prophet Muhammad are useless in 2022; and, contrarily to the silly ideas of the uneducated sheikhs of Al Azhar, this conclusion of mine does indeed represent the correct Islamic approach to the topic.
IV. Governance, Religion, Theology and Politics
A. Governance
Before responding to your last points, I must expand and clarify several terms and situations that are disastrously confused nowadays by almost all people worldwide. This is due to your reference to historical, cultural, educational and intellectual matters that hinge on governmental decision-making. I have to also add that the confusion about which I speak exists only to the benefit of the Western colonial states, and of their respective agendas.
As you see, I mention four terms in this unit’s title and you can easily understand that most of the people worldwide would associate one of these terms with another, thus forming two pairs, i.e. a) Governance & Politics, and b) Religion & Theology.
These two groups of terms are very different in the sense that, with respect to the second pair, both ‘religion’ and ‘theology’ always existed, whereas as regards the first pair, only ‘governance’ existed always.
The two groups differ also in another manner; whereas ‘religion’ and ‘theology’ are considered and defined as different (despite the fact that many people confuse them and at times view them as interchangeable), ‘governance’ and ‘politics’ are ostensibly confused whereas they are different, in the sense that ‘politics’ is only one form of ‘governance’. In this regard, one must add that an enduring, multi-layered and systematic effort has been deployed worldwide over the past 100 years (and more) to deceitfully portray all types of ‘governance’ as ‘politics’ and to make the average people believe that the way societies were always ruled or governed can be called ‘politics’. That’s very wrong.
To further implement this calamitous forgery and widely diffuse this disastrous delusion, Western colonial academics constructed the absurd term ‘Political History’, which helps them engulf hundreds of millions of unsuspecting students into an enormous misconception that leads only to incomprehension and to a mistaken interpretation of historical facts. In fact, ‘Political History’ existed only in lands where, and in periods when, ‘politics’ was the locally prevailing system of governance.
Erroneous definitions of ‘governance’ make the term so generic that it can fit even companies, corporations and organizations; it is subsequently thought to be purely materialistic of nature, as if the governance of a country could possibly be an affair absolutely deprived of spiritual and moral dimensions. This most unfortunate and disastrous situation leads to extreme vulgarization of the society, which is governed by idiotic, pathetic and ominous people who believe that governance can possibly be unrelated to spirituality and morality. Prompt consequences of such a decayed and utterly worthless social environment are the catastrophic rise of lawlessness among rulers (: their laws are not laws), and the spread of criminality, monstrosity and bestiality among the people, who inhabit that deviate society and country; then the final decomposition and the ultimate disappearance of that country are highly ostensible. Examples: ‘the action or manner of governing a state, organization, etc.’, and ‘the activity of governing a country or controlling a company or an organization; the way in which a country is governed or a company or institution is controlled’
At times, verbosity is tantamount to nothingness; the English Wikipedia constitutes a good example in this regard, because it helps diffuse the confusion I already spoke about (‘governance’ and ‘politics’): ‘Governance is the process of interactions through the laws, norms, power or language of an organized society over a social system (family, tribe, formal or informal organization, a territory or across territories). It is done by the government of a state, by a market, or by a network. It is the decision-making among the actors involved in a collective problem that leads to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and institutions. In lay terms, it could be described as the political processes that exist in and between formal institutions’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governance
To add insult to injury, the same site adds the following as part of the definition: ‘A variety of entities (known generically as governing bodies) can govern. The most formal is a government, a body whose sole responsibility and authority is to make binding decisions in a given geopolitical system (such as a state) by establishing laws. Other types of governing include an organization (such as a corporation recognized as a legal entity by a government), a socio-political group (chiefdom, tribe, gang, family, religious denomination, etc.), or another, informal group of people’.
Every definition of the term ‘governance’ that happens to be associated with this approach is entirely false and does not represent in anything the historicity of the term, the way societies were governed, and the conviction of people from different backgrounds, civilizations and times as regards how their governance was, why it was so or who specified how humans should be governed.
To effectively block every access to the aforementioned issues, which are not reflected in modern times’ definitions of the term, modern scholars incessantly produce articles and books, using the false term ‘Political History’ whereas this term is historically irrelevant in most of the cases.
There were no ‘politics’ and ‘Political History’ in Ancient Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Cush, Hittite Anatolia, Yemen, Iran, Turan (Central Asia and Siberia), China, India, Thrace, Macedonia, Illyria, Mexico and Peru; and similarly, there were no ‘politics’ and ‘Political History’ among the Ancient Somalis (Punt), the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Armenians, the Georgians, the Scythians, the Celts, the Cimmerians, the Achaeans, the Ionians, the Etruscans, the Teutons, the Slavs, the Huns, the Mongols, and the numerous African and Asiatic nations that were organized as either proper kingdoms or tribal confederations.
Similarly, there were no ‘politics’ and ‘Political History’ in the momentary empire of Alexander the Great, in the various kingdoms of his successors (Seleucid Syria, Bactria, Ptolemaic Egypt, Attalid Anatolia, and Macedonia) and in the Roman Empire (from Octavian to Constantine I the Great and afterwards until 1453 and the Fall of Constantinople).
Equally, there were no ‘politics’ and ‘Political History’ in the Christian Nestorian communities in Asia, in the Manichaean Uyghur kingdom, in the early Islamic community around prophet Muhammad in Medina and in Mecca, and in the Islamic caliphates, emirates, sultanates, khanates, sheikhdoms and kingdoms down to 1923 and the abolition of the caliphate. The period of Western colonial involvement and interference and the time of the subsequent decadence and decomposition are of course excluded in the aforementioned statement for obvious reasons; it was then that the evilness of ‘politics’ started being malignantly introduced, masqueraded as ‘progress’, ‘modernization’ and similar nonsensical lies.
Last but not the least, there were no ‘politics’ and ‘Political History’ in the Soviet Union, in the state of Kemal Atatürk (Türkiye), and in the Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo (中华人民共和国/People’s Republic of China).
With the exception of the aforementioned three modern states, which were/are unrelated to politics and which were established over the past 105 years, throughout the History of the Mankind, ‘Governance’ was always conceived and accepted by all the inhabitants of a country and by all the members of a society, nation, tribe, clan or family as divinely inspired, spiritually implemented, morally guided, religiously endorsed, culturally corroborated, and intellectually-artistically praised.
DEFINITION
Governance has inalienably been the quintessence of human activity on Earth before we pass -generation after generation- away to Immortality; governing the smallest social cell or the tiniest group of humans (i.e. a family) demands wisdom superior to that needed for morally conducting one’s own independent life. From the earliest Sumerian agglomerations and pre-dynastic Egypt to the Tengrist beliefs of the first Siberian and Central Asiatic nomads and from the first small societies in China to the most rudimentary social structures in Africa, in the land of the Olmecs, and in the Andes at the time of Caral-Supe culture, Governance was viewed as the human effort to solemnly reflect the perfection of the spiritual universe on the surface of the Earth.
The best definition of Governance is the shortest and the oldest: ‘as above so below’. This maxim reflected the concept and the world view behind every empire in the History of Mankind. From the world’s earliest empire, that of Sargon of Akkad, to the Turanian Empire of Timur (Tamerlane), governance was in the hands of an Emperor, and not a high priest. Despite the incessant, antediluvian and postdiluvian efforts of an evil priesthood to introduce forms of Papo-Caesarism, the History of the Mankind was a permanent quest for the perfect Caesaropapism. That is why the spiritually most conscious emperors (those of Assyria), before being rulers of their land, they were ‘Kings of the Universe’ (sar kissati).
In Kemet (Ancient Egypt), the pharaohs were divine, and every one of them had to plainly declare his universal world view and to spiritually color his governance in the five Pharaonic names that he would chose as his, at the time of his coronation. Furthermore, each and every pharaoh had to perform as an exemplary embodiment of Horus, the Egyptian Savior and Messiah or Mahdi, who will eliminate Seth, the Ancient Egyptian Satan and Antichrist (Masih al-Dajjal), in an epic battle at the End of Time, thus ushering the Mankind into a paradisiacal society.
Horus, the Egyptian Messiah (left) vs. Seth, the Egyptian Antichrist (right)
Representation of the final battle between the Messiah (Horus) and the Antichrist (Seth) on the inner side of the external wall (western part) of the Horus Temple at Edfu, in Upper Egypt; depicted as double (on the shore and on the sailing boat) and superb, Horus demolishes Seth, portrayed as a small hippopotamus (and in other relief panels of the same wall as an insignificant crocodile).
Similar eschatological concepts and epics we attest in Assyria and in Hittite Anatolia, but there was never an eschatological notion without the respective cosmogonic narrative, cosmological description, and imperial quest. The reason is very simple: irrespective of the number of inhabitants (just 10000 people or even 1000000 people, which was a huge number in the Antiquity), the empire had to always be the perfect reflection of the divine order and of the spiritual universe on Earth. This had to be so because Man was created as a king, and he had therefore to act as a king; in reality, a king or emperor was only the divinely blessed ‘king of kings’ and in the successful empires, all men were treated as noble and royal humans by the emperor. The same concept was preserved in Islam, as per the principles of which Man is declared as the Caliph (lit. ‘Representative’) of God on Earth; that’s why the term ‘caliphate’ was used.
The modern notion of the term ’empire’ is materialistic, quantitative and therefore meaningless. People designate as ’empire’ a kingdom that happens to expand out of its traditional border; that’s silly. In the Antiquity, the distinction between ‘king’ and ’emperor’ was made thanks to few exceptional terms that were used in the case of the several kings whose spiritual force, intellectual clarity, and material deeds justified the distinction: ‘king of the four quarters’ (meaning that the empire was a reflection of the initial Paradise, which was divided into four parts by the four initial rivers), ‘stable king’, ‘strong king’ or ‘king of kings’.
The concept that Man was created as a ‘king’ is the cornerstone of Jesus’ teaching as documented in the Gospels; what all humans must seek, according to Jesus, is the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, which is the effective function, fruitful performance, and conscious synergy of all the components of the human being (soul, character and body) at the ethereal plane exclusively. By deliberately using the term ‘kingdom’ (and not ‘sphere’, ‘plane’, ‘level’, etc.), Jesus made it clear that the sole possible way of governance humans have been created to have is a divinely inspired, spiritually implemented, morally guided, religiously endorsed, culturally corroborated, and intellectually-artistically praised kingdom.
In other words, ‘Governance’ has nothing to do with the barbarian, inhuman and evil Athenian ‘Agora’ or Roman Senate, let alone the modern Western states’ disreputable brothels that are euphemistically called ‘parliaments’. In any case, one must add that the Athenian deviation and the Roman misfortune are not due to local conditions. As a matter of fact, the example was given to both of them by the system of governance that the Phoenician colons established throughout the Mediterranean in each and every of their colonies; whereas in Phoenicia, the small local states were organized as kingdoms (Arad, Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, etc.) after the earlier (2nd millennium BCE) Canaanite model (notably Ugarit, the earliest Translation Center in World History), the Phoenician colonies overseas during the 1st millennium BCE were organized as democratic republics.
Centuries before the ignorant barbarians of Rome and Athens established their wretched non-monarchical systems, the greatest Phoenician colony Carthage (Qart Hadasht: the ‘New City’) was founded in 814 BCE, and it was governed by the democratically elected Shoftim (plural of Shophet). The Shoftim (lit. ‘Judges’) were entrepreneurs and traders, captains and owners of companies specializing in the exploitation of Carthaginian colonies’ (in Libya, in the Iberian Peninsula, in Sicily, in Sardinia, and throughout NW Africa as far in the South as today’s Sierra Leone) natural resources, their extraction and collection, their transportation, and their sale in other parts of the Mediterranean, notably Phoenicia, Egypt, etc., and further beyond to the sole superpower of the then world, Assyria. In fact, what happened in Modern Times between England and America occurred first between Tyre and Qart Hadasht in the 1st half of the 1st millennium BCE: the colony totally eclipsed the metropolis. In fact, within 200 years, Carthage outshined all the maritime kingdoms of Phoenicia combined, thus providing the first historically documented ‘sea power’ in World History.
Carthage today and in historical representation; the Carthaginian Empire (map)
Within this context, one can easily understand that the world’s earliest parliament (from which originate all similar institutions in South Balkans, the Italian Peninsula, Western Europe, and North America) was the ultimate venue for long discussions and debates about the exploitation of natural resources located within the sphere of the immense maritime Carthaginian (or Punic) Empire, the transportation, storage and sale of goods and merchandises, the navigation, further explorations, and the division of this wealth among the great magistrates and potentates of Carthage, as well as about the commercial profit and the business improvement, i.e. simple and low level activities of humans that are totally out of the sphere of the spiritual world. In other words, the Carthaginian Senate was properly speaking a merchant house, meticulously recording and fixing financial details, solving conflicts of interest, and examining other trivial issues pertaining to the material life and the financial profit of the representative body’s members.
That’s why they did not have a proper king (let alone an emperor) and no real monarch could ever exist among them, because no true sovereign deals with petty affairs like those of the Carthaginian Republic. This system affected very negatively the local people, namely the Carthaginians, all the Phoenician newcomers, and, preponderantly, the indigenous Berbers, who ensured the land and desert routes across the Atlas and the Sahara. There were of course many temples in Carthage, but religion became a rather ceremonial story, featuring cults and feasts in guise of tradition, detonating the average believer’s sentimentalism in the process, but having almost nothing to do with spirituality, except for black magic; this is so because the Carthaginian ‘gods’ were effectively subordinated to the material benefit that they defended and even ‘consecrated’. And black magic is nothing more than the blasphemous consecration of material benefits as the ultimate rejection of the Creation, and of the Destiny of the Mankind.
So, we can safely claim now that the correct definition of the devious Carthaginian system of governance was at the very antipodes of that of the traditional imperial system of governance: ‘as below so above’. This counterfeit system brings forth utter disorder, explicit paranoia, extreme immorality, overwhelming lawlessness, vicious individualism, and irreversible inhumanity. The invisible force that generated this immense negativity is, of course, the sea; such a monstrous system of governance could never be formed in a great plain, in a fertile valley, in a major plateau or atop of hills and mountains – only in a misfortunate coastal city or in an island.
This ominous situation -viewed as a concept- had nothing to do with the traditional trade of the Oriental Empires, as documented by numerous historical texts, notably Hatshepsut’s Expedition to Punt; the early commercial contacts and affairs were absolutely subordinated to the spiritual needs of the entire Empire, being totally deprived of any notion of individual profit. But in the case of Carthage and all the similar, posterior states and pseudo-empires, due to the vicinity of the sea, what was really happening was that, in reality, the entire state was a form of ‘institutionalized trade of individual character’.
This evil system of governance was diffused across the Mediterranean and prevailed in some tiny Ionian and Dorian cities in South Balkans, notably Corinth and Athens; as one could surely expect, it produced intentions of imperial character in a small scale of course, and it inevitably ended up with the destruction of Athens by Sparta (404 BCE), the subsequent subordination of Corinth and Athens to Macedonia (336 BCE), and the Roman obliteration of Corinth (146 BCE). Even worse, with the Roman conquest and ruination of Carthage (146 BCE), the basics of the Carthaginian concept of evil governance (institutionalized trade of individual character) spread among the earlier impecunious but militaristic and traditionalist Roman senators and ultimately became the reason of the collapse of the Res Publica Romana, and of the rise of the Imperium Romanum.
The idiotic Roman Emperors did something even worse that the pecunious Punic Shoftim had been wise enough never to attempt; they tried to use the material profit, which was over-centralized in one person’s hands (something that had never been the case in Carthage), in order to systematically wage invasions and wars, finance a terrible mechanism of local oppression, and subsidize unprecedented pompous ceremonies and festivities in a desperate attempt to imitate the Oriental Empires. This was absolutely pathetic for three reasons:
First, these ceremonies were entirely deprived of spirituality, mainly geared for the elite rather than the entire nation, and ostensibly distinct from the local popular religion.
Second, as concept, the ‘maritime empire’, which is merely institutionalized trade of individual character, cannot be a proper universal empire. It cannot combine trade across the seas and land expansion, which is a trait proper to all the true and original empires and which involves a strong dose of military doctrine, absolute order, and unmatched self-command. Quite wisely, the Carthaginians did not bother to invade the entire NW Africa, making a continental empire from Libya to Cameroon. They knew that such an effort would be absurd.
The ill-fated Roman Empire intended to walk at the same time on two roads leading to opposite directions. For a universal empire, it was located in the wrong place; for a ‘maritime empire’, it had impossible universal aspirations and an unnecessary militaristic character. The Romans failed to become the prosperous successors to the maritime Carthaginian Empire and they were unable to effectively inherit the supreme Oriental imperial tradition, namely that of Assyria. The catastrophic Roman wars with Iran, which lasted almost 700 years, were all due to both empires’ rivalry about the Imperial Heritage of Assyria; but imperial aspirations and maritime expeditions against the Yemenite kingdoms of Sheba and Himyar (like the one undertaken by Aelius Gallus in 26-25 BCE) can never make an effective combination.
The temple of Marib (capital of the ancient Yemenite kingdom of the Sheba / Sabaeans) and, below, the remains of the ancient Marib dam
Zafar (capital of the ancient Yemenite kingdom of Himyar); Aden (below)
Third, with the diffusion of Oriental cosmogonies, cosmologies, eschatologies, cults, religions, popular religions, mysteries and cultures in the Roman Empire, Rome ceased to be a proper empire in terms of spirituality, moral, popular religion, culture, cosmology, and eschatology. The vast extent of this unprecedented phenomenon draws a deep line between the genuine Oriental Empires (Akkad, Egypt, Hittite Anatolia, Assyria, Babylonia, and Iran) and Rome.
Pompeii Iseum (temple of Isis); Pompeii villa of the mysteries (below)
Rome, Mithraeum (temple of Mithras) in the Basilica of San Clemente
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Before Rome, there was never an empire flooded by foreign religions and cultures, which were particular to another empire. As a universal structure of governance, every empire based its material function on spiritual considerations of universal order, eventually containing spiritual and cultural subsystems (other nations’ religions and cultures). However, Egypt was never flooded by Assyrian cults, concepts and myths, and Assyria was never impacted by Egyptian spirituality, mysteries and culture. The same was valid for Nabonid Babylonia and Achaemenid Iran.
Due to its self-contradictory components and inclinations, internal inconsistencies and external cataclysmic impact, the Roman Empire finally collapsed only to become a typical Oriental Empire with a theologically composed religion (Christianity), very different in essence, nature, functions, attributes, symbols, and narratives from the religions of the ancient empires. While becoming finally a universal empire with Christianity as the official state religion, the Roman Empire lost its aspect of maritime empire; and this is very clearly noticed, when comparing the state and its commercial and maritime activities in the early 2nd century and in the late 4th century.
The entire process was completed at the times of Justinian I (527-565 CE), and despite the Reconquista of so many lands around the Mediterranean, the Oriental state takes firmly the appearance of a universal (now called ecumenical) empire headquartered in Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and the Balkans and endowed with several ‘colonies’, notably in the Italian Peninsula, Carthage, Sicily, and the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula.
Taking the Roman Empire as the model state, all the modern colonial states of Western Europe (Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England) and the United States signed their own death warrant, because the model is defective, morbid and abortive of nature. On the contrary, the Eastern Roman Empire could be taken as an imperial universal model, but in this case, Heraclius (610-641 CE) is de facto much closer to Sennacherib (745-681 BCE, reigned after 705 BCE), Shalmaneser III (893-824 BCE, reigned after 859 BCE) and Sargonid Assyria (722-609 BCE) than to Sulla (138-78 BCE), Crassus (115-53 BCE), and the Roman Republic.
B. Religion
Using this term, I herewith speak exclusively of the ‘official’ religion of a state, nation, population or community – not the popular religion about which I already spoke in Unit II E. Religion is widely confused with spirituality and theology; this confusion is deliberately caused by the institutions that administer every ‘official’ religion. The reason for this confusion is that, without it, the religious institutions will lose their entire grip on the wealth, the natural resources, the economy, the society and the governance of the community, population, nation or state.
Most of the existing definitions of religion are nowadays false, deliberately mistaken, intentionally ideologized, and utterly distorted; alternatively, they can be so general that they become useless. A good example is offered by the English version of the Wikipedia: ‘Religion is usually defined as a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion).
Everyone can understand how ridiculous the following phrase is: “a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations”! It seems they want to provide readers with a definition that is not a definition! Same of the ludicrous choice of words: “spiritual elements”! There cannot be ‘spiritual elements’ without a ‘spiritual universe or world’, but this truth is prohibited throughout this site of atheist militantism.
Other definitions focus on beliefs without mentioning anything about the central organization that administers each religion; they mention only ‘buildings’! Example:
‘Religion is belief in a god or gods and the activities that are connected with this belief, such as praying or worshipping in a building such as a church or temple’ (for religion as uncountable noun) and ‘A religion is a particular system of belief in a god or gods and the activities that are connected with this system’ (for religion as countable noun) https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/religion
To deliberately decry the term and offer a most corrupt, deviate and vicious idea of it, the felony of Cambridge atheism suggests two definitions: ‘the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or any such system of belief and worship’ (which is too general) and ‘an activity that someone is extremely enthusiastic about and does regularly’ (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/religion), which is an outrage, because it takes the mistaken and distorted use of the term, which was produced within a degraded and corrupted environment, in order to present is as possible part of the definition. The criminal act of the Cambridge dictionary is tantamount to deliberate spiritual genocide, and it will inevitably trigger a truly devastating punishment. Vicious institutions that become the very mechanisms of systematic distortion have always an exemplary end, because the nature itself rejects them.
If almost all the contemporary definitions of the term ‘religion’ are erroneous and worthless, this does not mean that 20th and 19th c. encyclopedias and dictionaries offered pertinent definitions. In fact, the term was always troublesome. Within the context of the Ancient Oriental Empires, religion was the way the average people could be connected with the spiritual world; however, in most of the cases, it was a matter of indirect contact through intermediates (i.e. the priests and the high priests) and of representation of the divine and the spiritual world by means of symbols.
This situation ended up with the average adepts feeling an incandescent love for the aspects of the divinity represented to them; this subconscious love was expressed via reliefs, statues, and icons. This developmentwas a priestly crime, because in this manner they straightforwardly exploited the innocent believers, absorbed their spiritual, sentimental and mental energy, turning them to polytheists and depriving them from their spirituality, i.e. their chance to establish a connection among their body, their character and their soul. This fact constituted complete dehumanization of the humans. The ‘religion’ in which the souls of the faithful are held captive by the priests is a criminal and inhuman institution; one can describe these priests as the worst crooks, thieves and embezzlers -or even zombies- in the History of the Mankind.
Karl Marx called this type of religion as the ‘opium of the people’ and he was very right; but this statement did not end but only launched the discussion about the existence of the spiritual world, the spiritual drive of the human being, and the imperative need of all humans to establish -each one independently- a fully operable interconnection among the three parts of their being.
With minimal exceptions (noticeably those of the adamant monotheist Pharaoh Akhenaten in 14th c. BCE Egypt, prophet Jonah’s who preached in Sargonid Nineveh at the end of the 8th c. BCE Assyria, and prophet Zardosht / Zoroaster, who introduced monotheism among the early Achaemenid rulers in 7th/6th c. BCE Iran), all the ancient Oriental religions became the spiritual prison of unfortunate and misguided nations that went astray and sailed adrift. Still, those religions fully predetermined the faiths of the Hebrews, having subsequently a cataclysmic impact on the formation of Christianity and Islam.
That is why the greatest effort to exit from that world was deployed by Mani, and Manichaeism was a far more comprehensive system than Christianity (in any of its diverse Christological forms) or Islam in rejecting the earlier History of the Mankind; simply, it was so negative that it mistook the corrupt elements of the then already decayed world as ‘negative’ whereas they were ‘positive’ in their origin. However, contrarily to Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Zoroaster, Jesus and Muhammad, who sought to demonstrate that, in spite of the undeniable fall, there could be salvation for the Mankind (via repentance), Mani attempted to provide salvation through extinction, which can hardly be viewed as compatible with the Creation. That is why in Islam we find diametrically opposed views on Zoroaster and Mani; the latter was never accepted as a prophet throughout the Islamic Ages, and the Manicheans were viewed as an evil group of infidels.
How could one define the Ancient Oriental religions? They consisted truly in a ‘state within the state’, because as organizations of faith and cult administration, they also assumed the absolute control of several other major fields of social life. Exploration, science, research, education, intellectual life, cultural activities and traditions, public administration and socio-professional formation (not in all but in many fields), along with spirituality, divination, moral tutorship, cosmogony, cosmology, mythology and eschatology depended on the temples. The temples functioned as universities, schools, research centers, secret societies, initiation organizations, mystical orders and -to some extent- governmental bodies.
The vast temple complex of Karnak, involving the temples of Amun, Mut and Khonsu
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The temples controlled a significant part of the socio-economic life and constituted the only center of power, except the palace and the army; it should be added at this point that the palace also functioned as the main center of the government and as real headquarters of the army. All the same, this situation must not be viewed as a dictatorial, tyrannical rule, because in reality, there was not one religion or one temple, but many; different priesthoods waged real and interminable wars one upon the other. Among the many different religious-theological systems and temples that existed within one country there was a really ferocious clash of power.
The palace and the army were also involved in these developments for many reasons; first, each pharaoh was formed / educated by, and therefore used to side with, this or the other priesthood. So, as one could normally expect, each pharaoh would wholeheartedly favor his spiritual ‘brethren’, resentfully depriving opponents of their privileges. Second, the palatial priests, scribes, translators and advisers, as well as the army officers, who belonged to the class of major land owners and noble families, had also been earlier formed / educated in the different temples; they should therefore be expected to systematically support ideas and concepts cherished only by that part of the religious establishment, while opposing the other.
Consequently, we can conclude that the ancient religions were simply ‘spirituality institutionalized in a manner to effectively interrupt the direct contact with one’s soul that every person can and must achieve’. Ancient Oriental religions exemplified the interposition of priests between the human being and God. For this to be effectively achieved, the cult had to occupy a central part, whereas the spiritual exercises had to be reserved to the well trained and initiated priests, noblemen, generals and land owners, who would be irrevocably tied to one specific temple (namely the one where they were formed and initiated in the mysteries) and would promote that temple’s interests during their entire lifetime. Long liturgies, litanies and festivities along with ceremonial procedures had to replace spirituality, so that the spiritual force of the followers be permanently absorbed and used by the numerous high priests–zombies that became powerful only because their adepts were reduced to powerless, spiritless beings.
DEFINITION
Religion was not meant to be something so dirty and evil; whereas spirituality is the practical ability of the human being to act in full synergy of his soul, character and body, religion has to be the cerebral column of the human being’s character (founded on a person’s heart, mind and solar plexus). Religion, as sentimental and mental activity, involves the comprehension of the world (world perception), the knowledge of the universes (spiritual and material), the full understanding of the divine orders and the moral standards, the willingness to act according to the Divine Ideas, the permanent desire to discover and tell the Truth, the resolute decision to be always Just, Impartial and Selfless, the love to please the Creator, the need to express one’s own piety toward the Lord, and the magnanimity toward the other creatures of God.
When simple people nowadays define religion as ‘the means to contact God’, they make a mistake, because they
a) do not know what spirituality is,
b) amalgamate religion with spirituality, and
c) imagine that the heart and the brain can contact God, whereas only the human soul can possibly contact God.
Mental or sentimental belief is not tantamount to the true, spiritual belief. Believing in God via words, feelings and thoughts is a far lower level of belief; of course, it is not objectionable. Not at all! But it is not sufficient. It brings minimal results, while also exposing the believers to offenses expressed by the unfaithful, the atheists and the enemies of the Faith. This is how people were led to the extreme misuse of the verb ‘to believe’ in all the languages. Only because of the disappearance of the spiritual belief (a fact for which the religious organizations are responsible) can one misuse the verb ‘to believe’ as in the following sentence:
“Mr. A believes in Communism and Mr. B believes in Christianity”
or alternatively
“Mr. X believes Karl Marx and Mr. Z believes Jesus”
(note: it goes without saying that, in the first part of the two sentences, various ideologies, theories, philosophers and intellectuals can invariably replace the examples given, and similarly, in the second part of the two sentences, the names of different religions and of other ‘founders of religion’ can possibly alternate with those mentioned).
The limits between spirituality and religion are nowadays so confused that I have to offer some examples. When Moses (Musa) and Aaron (Harun) go to the Pharaoh to petition him about the right of the Israelites to go, we have an event included in a religious narrative; the Book of Exodus mentions this story. When Moses’s staff becomes a snake and then turns back into a staff (Exodus 4:2-4), we have an incident that reveals the divine initiation of Moses. This fact relates to spirituality.
When Jonah flees from before Yahweh and goes down to Yaffo to sail to Tarshish (Jonah 1:2) or when Jonah goes one day’s walk into the city of Nineveh and starts preaching (Jonah 3:4), we read about events that are important for a religious narrative. But when Jonah was in the belly of the sea creature three days and three nights (Jonah 2:1), we learn about an incident that reveals the divine initiation of Jonah. This fact relates to spirituality.
When Jesus speaks to people saying that “a prophet has respect, but not in his homeland nor in his family. And because they didn’t believe in him he didn’t do many miracles there” (Matthew 13:57-58), we read about the teachings of Jesus, whom the Fathers of the Christian Church defined as the founder of their religion. This excerpt is a religious narrative, and this point of Jesus’ teaching is an inalienable part of the Christian religion. But when Jesus and Peter are said to have walked on the water (Matthew 14:26-32), we attest a case of spiritual initiation of Peter, offered to him by Jesus. This fact relates to spirituality.
When Muhammad accepted the second pledge at al Aqabah (few kilometers far from the historical center of Mecca), during which 75 residents of Yathrib (later known as Medina) declared loyalty to him (during the Tashreeq Days: 11th to 13th Dhu’l Hijjah 622 CE), we learn about an important episode that triggered the famous Hijra (i.e. the migration from Mecca to Medina). But when we read in the Quran about prophet Muhammad the verses “And he certainly saw that (angel descend) a second time at the Lote Tree (Sidrat al-Muntaha) of the most extreme limit (: in the seventh heaven), near which is the garden of (eternal) residence (: the original Paradise), while the Lote Tree was overwhelmed with ‘divine’ splendors!” {Surah 53 (An-Najm):13-18}, we understand that this was part of Muhammad’s nocturnal travel (Isra’ and Mi’raj). This fact relates to spirituality.
Exactly because the religion is the cerebral column of the human being’s character, consisting in a sentimental and mental activity shared by every faithful, religion in its original form is not a systematic dogma, let alone an organization. A truthful and original form of religion is preached by a luminous mystic and messenger of God, who is the embodiment of the perfect spiritual master for the population to which he is sent. These few, supreme and sublime people do not care about the material goods and posterior reputation; this is so because there is nothing important in the material universe for a spiritual ‘pole’ to possibly care about. Of course, several names have been recorded, but one must bear always in mind that these are only a few among those luminous people.
The ‘messengers’ of God or ‘prophets’ or luminous mystics did not preach ‘religions’ – in any sense the term has had during its long history. I say so because historically the term ‘religion’ has been associated with various perceptions of ‘systems’, but in reality there cannot be anything ‘systematic’ in the reflection of the spiritual universe and order in the material universe.
In fact, the core of the divine teaching of all the ‘prophets’ is the quintessence of the Creation, the reminder of the ‘secret code of the Creation’ that the humans have totally lost after the first fall, being uninterruptedly deprived of it afterwards. The notion of the ‘system’ pertains to the finite world; but the spiritual universe is infinite and therefore the reflection of the spiritual universe and order in the material universe is of absolutely unfathomable nature for average humans.
At this point, one has to make a clarification, which is very easy for many to make, but all prefer to dodge it; all religions are conditioned on the initial fall of the Man. There is no ‘religion’ in the initial Paradise; instead, there are absolute spiritual consciousness and perfect synergy of the soul, the character and the body. Only because of the original fall and following many other subsequent falls, several prophets ‘had’ to be sent in order to demonstrate to all humans what they had meanwhile forgotten.
There is no ‘reason’ in Human History, and there is no ‘reason’ in the human nature; what people called ‘reason’ in different times was the common denominator of their abject ignorance, sinfulness, and delusion. Knowing this and having a supratemporal conception of the material universe, the prophets and the messengers, the mystics and the initiates ‘translated’ the divine reality into the various human languages and into the reasoning of the time they lived and preached in. Each of the sacred books of all the religions reveals therefore only an infinitesimal part of the Divine Truth that the prophets and the mystics were sent to convey.
There is no supratemporal validity in any sacred book in its totality; on the contrary, there is supratemporal truth in many specific excerpts of each sacred book. That is why the idea that a holy book is on a par with God constitutes extreme blasphemy. But the blasphemous religious organizations have the need to diffuse this villainous falsehood in order to justify their raison d’être. That is why there is no ‘prophet’ or luminous mystic who did not fight against an earlier established religious society or organization.
This shows that, when organizations undertake the hypothetical task to perpetuate earlier teachings of mystics and preaching of prophets, every true spiritual and supratemporal element goes, the temporal notion prevails over the supratemporal, and the real meaning of both, the revealed sacred texts and the mystic’s or prophet’s discourses, get fully distorted, deliberately misinterpreted or even concealed and forgotten. Gradually, out of the small circle of followers, disciples and adepts of a mystic or prophet a larger circle is created and then an even larger and so on – only to take more and more distance from the original preaching of the mystic or prophet. In the process, the ‘original’ religion loses its contact with spirituality, inevitably becoming captive of ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘theologies’, which can comfortably portray Satan as the true God – on the basis of the distorted sacred texts and mystics’ or prophets’ discourses.
Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children adoring the Only God, who was symbolized as a solar disc with emanating rays that end in hands offering Life (Ankh)
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That is why Akhenaten, who changed his original Pharaonic name Amenhotep IV, closed down all previous, idolatrous and polytheistic temples of Egypt, terminating all the priests, banning all fake gods (because all the earlier perceived ‘aspects of the Divine’ had already been individualized and believed as independent ‘gods’), and prohibiting the anthropomorphic representation of the Only God. He relocated the capital to Middle Egypt to ensure that the old priesthood and the associated social context would not affect the return to the original, monotheistic religion of Ancient Egypt that he so fervently preached. The great pharaoh, high priest, spiritual master, groundbreaking thinker, visioner and poet can definitely be considered as a ‘prophet’ on the basis of Islamic principles and evaluations. His hymns to Aton were copied, translated into Ancient Hebrew, and included in the Biblical Psalms. The religion instituted by Akhenaten had minimal cult, few priests, intense spirituality, stressed piety, and no mysteries. However, Akhenaten failed and the polytheistic religion of the Theban Trinity (Amun, Mut and Khonsu) was restored.
We cannot properly say that Moses literally speaking ‘preached’ a religion. He took the Hebrews and the monotheistic Egyptians out of Egypt; he guided them in terms of spirituality and morality, but the depravity of the average people forced him to shatter the Tablets with the Ten Commandments. He so much failed that he was not even allowed to enter the Promised Land, and he died alone in the wasteland of the Sinai. Posterior Hebrew priests added however tons of ‘religious’ laws to effectively fabricate the enormous Pentateuch that Moses certainly did not write. Later, during the time of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, in most of the cases when prophets are mentioned, we notice immediately that they are in straight clash with the kings and the priests, due to the wicked manners that prevailed due to these two institutions, namely the palace and the temple.
Jonah marked a spectacular success in Nineveh, but the Assyrians were the main, central and supreme nation of the Ancient World; the Assyrians were the first nation in the History of the Mankind to identify themselves as the Chosen People tasked by God with the world governance and the administration of the worldly affairs. Not only did they accept Jonah’s preaching, but they also repented and acted accordingly. Reconfirming their role as the focal point of the End Times, they abandoned their land at the end of the reign of Assurbanipal, taking also the Ancient Israelites with them, as this population had already been transported to the NE confines of the Assyrian Empire. Jesus spoke explicitly about the crucial role that the Assyrians will play at the End of Times and the Quran referred to the issue. After completing his preaching, Jonah sat under a small tree on the opposite side of Tigris (Dicle) River in order to observe the developments; however, Jonah understood that he failed to guarantee the permanence of the Assyrians in their own land throughout the ages, and for this he saddened greatly.
As Emperor of the Universe, Assurbanipal (reign: 669-625 BCE) was literarily bearing the entire universe over his head.
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Jesus rejected the Jewish religious establishment of the Pharisees in a most ferocious manner. Examining Jesus’ terminology in order to accurately understand what evil system of beliefs, practices, intentions and purposes Late Antiquity Judaism had been transformed into, we safely conclude that, in the name of the Mosaic Law, the evil and villainous rabbis of Talmudic Judaism purposefully implemented iniquity, lawlessness, arrogance, fanfare and wickedness, eliminating spirituality from among the faithful. Jesus understood clearly that, due to the sensationalism that the evil Pharisees provoked among the Jews of those days, the priests extorted the spiritual force of the average people in order to ensure material benefits and privileges for themselves. Jesus evidently tried to show how average people could find the true path to Faith, but this was not a religious ‘system’, let alone a ‘church’.
Jesus’ utter rejection of the Pharisees’ raison d’être is not a historical event, but a supratemporal instruction; it is tantamount to absolute repudiation of the Christian Church (this is said with respect to all past and present denominations) and of the similar Muslim structures and organizations. Jesus failed to overthrow the Pharisaic establishment; furthermore, we can even state that he knew very well that, in his name, an evil establishment would then be formed – in the near future. That’s why he took distance from that: “for the ruler of this world comes, and in me he has nothing” (John 14:30).
Muhammad rejected the religious establishment of the then Christian churches in a most ferocious manner, while also making a critical distinction among the Christian monks and priests. Quite interestingly, Muhammad’s distinction between good and evil Christians has nothing to do with the then existing denominations, namely the Nestorians, the Miaphysites (known also as ‘Monophysites’, but the term is clearly derogatory), and the Orthodox (who were not accepted as such by the Miaphysites, who reserved this term for themselves, utterly considering the Orthodox as heretics). Neither the Quran not the Hadith (oral traditions) of prophet Muhammad contain references to these names. However, the distinction is very clear and it is mentioned repeatedly in the Quran.
Indicatively, in the third Sura (chapter) of the Quran (titled ‘the Family of Imran’, i.e. Ioachim, the father of Virgin Mary), we read the following: “They are not all the same. Among the people of the Book is a community standing in obedience, reciting the verses of Allah during the night and prostrating in prayer. They believe in Allah and the Last Day, and they enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong and hasten to do good deeds. Those are among the righteous. Whatever good deeds they do will never be denied, for Allah knows well the righteous” (verses 113-115).
Similarly, in the fifth Sura of the Quran {titled ‘the Table’ (al Ma’idah/ ٱلمائدة), we read the following: “and nearest among them in love to the believers will you find those who say, ‘We are Christians,’ because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant. When they listen to what has been revealed to the Messenger, you see their eyes overflowing with tears for recognizing the truth” (verses 82-83).
Tabari’s excerpts about the mission of Dihyah al-Kalbi to Emperor Heraclius and the details of the discussions that prophet Muhammad’s envoy had with the Eastern Roman Emperor fully reconfirm the aforementioned approach, which is recorded in the Quran. In Constantinople and in Rome, there were two totally different groups of priests and monks fighting one upon the other. That is why Heraclius, who had personally accepted Muhammad as prophet even before the arrival of Dihyah al-Kalbi (while speaking with Muhammad’s most ferocious enemy Abu Sufyan, little time after his victory over Iran and his return to Jerusalem in 628 CE), failed to impose his belief on his own empire.
The letter of Prophet Muhammad to Emperor Heraclius that Dihyah al-Kalbi presented.
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The ‘messengers’ of God or ‘prophets’ or luminous mystics did not properly found ‘religions’, as it is constantly stated today, but they rather reminded people what the only, true and original religion is (as stated in the definition above): a sentimental and mental effort to support -in each person independently- the spiritual life and its modalities.
Religion, in its original state, has little to do with narratives; Moses did not narrate stories about Abraham’s abandonment of his fatherland in South Mesopotamia. Jonah did not go to Nineveh to teach Ancient History of the Hebrews. Jesus did not expand on the relationship between Solomon and the Yemenite Queen of Sheba. Similarly, Muhammad did not describe details about Aaron (Harun), David (Dawud) and Yahya (John the Baptist). Prophets and luminous mystics are not historians and it is very erroneous to take them as such. Sent by God, presented by Archangel Gabriel and uttered by Muhammad, the Quran contained indeed many Biblical stories from both, the Old and the New Testament; but this is due to the role of Muhammad who sought to culturally Aramaize the Arabs for the needs of his preaching and to his struggle to dissociate his fellow countrymen from the ancient culture of Hejaz.
But for the religious organizations, the maximization of the importance of the various narratives helps as a smokescreen in order to fool the believers, to distract their interest from issues of spirituality, and to turn them to spiritless pawns. For this to be done, a good deal of ‘Theology’ is needed.
C. Theology
Most of the existing definitions of ‘theology’ are nebulous enough to allow people to believe that ‘religion’ and ‘theology’ are overlapping notions. Example: ‘a set of beliefs about a particular religion’ and ‘the study of religion and religious belief’ (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/theology).
An even worse and deliberate distortion made in this regard concerns the utter confusion between
a- the true ‘theology’ (of a historical religion), which involves vast historical documentation (‘theological texts’), as in the case of Christianity the texts of the Fathers of the Christian Church (St. Basil bishop of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius the Great, etc.), and
b- the modern academic discipline of Theology, which is taught in universities.
It goes without saying that the latter is entirely unimportant and meaningless within the scope of a pertinent definition.
Example: ‘Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the supernatural, but also deals with religious epistemology, asks and seeks to answer the question of revelation. Revelation pertains to the acceptance of God, gods, or deities, as not only transcendent or above the natural world, but also willing and able to interact with the natural world and, in particular, to reveal themselves to humankind. While theology has turned into a secular field, religious adherents still consider theology to be a discipline that helps them live and understand concepts such as life and love and that helps them lead lives of obedience to the deities they follow or worship’. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology)
DEFINITION – PART I
Theology is in reality what most people across the Earth call ‘religion’ today; in every case of a different religion, this calamitous achievement was the result of the unfair, laborious, incessant, systematic, multifaceted and multilayered endeavors of the organization that administers the religion. I do describe these endeavors as unfair because they cannot be unbiased. Theological texts are written by humans in order to interpret, explain, and popularize sacred texts and discourses of persons deemed to be ‘holy’ or ‘sent by God’ (by the adepts of each religion). As such, theological texts inevitably express one person’s view of a spiritual or religious issue, consideration, affair or narrative; they therefore consist in a de facto alteration of the original issue, consideration, affair or narrative, as a personal projection onto the original fact. They therefore do not represent the genuine spiritual or religious occurrence and text, but another person’s understanding of them.
Either it occurred (according to Christianity) or it did not (as per the testimony of Islam), the Crucifixion is a spiritual eventuality; the texts of the New Testament and the Quran about the topic are religious texts concerning this spiritual eventuality. But what the Fathers of the Christian Church and the early Islamic theologians write about this topic constitute a (Christian and Islamic respectively) theological approach and interpretation. The theological texts do not have the value of a sacred or holy text, but they are able to (first slightly) modify the original text’s reception (by the believers) by adding extra details (disguised as explanations) of absolutely personal nature.
In striking contrast to the religious texts (generally deemed to be ‘sacred’), the theological texts are voluminous, very lengthy, and at times extremely biased; this is due to the fact that in reality the theological texts -almost all- were written with the intention to
a- add vast part of unsolicited and even reprehensible cult (liturgies, litanies, mysteries, festivities, representations and invariably pompous ceremonies) to the few, early religious traditions and spiritual practices,
b- attach excessive, interpretational literature to a briefly discussed story,
c- adjust the sacred texts and the religious narratives to the arbitrarily drawn conclusions of an author/theologian,
d- adapt several excerpts to the evolved beliefs of the faithful after several centuries,
e- transform the quintessence of the preaching of the supposed ‘founder of a religion’ into a pathetic acceptance of the prevailing worldly conditions many centuries later,
f- attack and disparage other interpretations of a spiritual occurrence or a religious narrative (even describing the proponents and their adepts as ‘heretics’ – which in reality is a nonexistent term),
g- assault other religions, theologies, philosophies, mysteries, esoteric schools, dogmas and cultures,
and/or
h- justify the spiritually unacceptable, religiously unnecessary, and therefore immoral formation and rise of an organization hypothetically ‘tasked’ (by whom? !!) to administer the faith and the cult of the adepts.
Theology contributes to the strengthening of an organization that administers the religion; and reversely, the religious organization that controls the faithful may produce tons of theological literature in support of their claims.
Theology may be very evil or very good; it can be God-sent or Satan-incited. Each single text or excerpt of a theological treatise has to be examined independently so that we draw a just and accurate conclusion about it. Throughout Human History, there was never a religion without an adjoined theology; there are few exceptions in this regard. The only period of a religion during which there was no theological activity is the original, i.e. the very beginning of a religion. In presence of the early humans, there was no theology; before the eyes of Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Jesus and Muhammad, there was no theology. This says much about this rapacious activity that wants to eliminate the ‘other’, if the ‘other’ brings forth criticism, disagreement or simply a different perspective. Trying to do the best, theology can bring forth the evil.
When people say that “religions cause wars”, they are either evil liars or idiotic fools. In reality, theologies cause wars, because as utter rejection of spirituality, a theology wants always to bring about the Paradise ‘hic et nunc’ – which is of course absurd and false. All the same, what we know nowadays as ‘religions’ are not properly speaking religions, but vast expanses of theological seas that contain a small island, as their religious nucleus; the only exceptions are several spiritual-religious faiths and practices that are cherished among remote indigenous nations – all those who are blessed enough not to have invented a writing system for their language.
However, today, it is utterly impossible (or even unthinkable) to reject the religious-theological incorporations or amalgamations and to reconstitute the original stage of a religion; this is due to the fact that we don’t have the necessary sources, while also lacking the vast resources needed for the task. Any simple attempt to reconstitute the original stage of a religion, by depriving it of the theological body that was gradually attached to it throughout the centuries, is unfortunately a fully ahistorical approach, which -in reality- leads to nowhere (or to an impasse). Contrarily, such an attempt is eventually possible only at an individual spiritual level.
This attempt may eventually bring forth results and correct conclusions if it happens to be undertaken at the academic-scientific-intellectual level, involving therefore access to hitherto unstudied sources and mobilization of an extraordinary number of unbiased scholars. But at the very religious level, it is evidently nonsensical. This is so because only a spiritually distinct personality, a ‘prophet’ or a luminous mystic can bring the faithful back in the correct track; then, when this spiritually distinct personality comes, we don’t have a laborious academic endeavor, but a new spiritual beginning. This was done with Moses, Jonah, Jesus and Muhammad. And it will occur again at the End of Time with the leading spiritual personalities whom all the religions heralded.
This fact shows how useless the modern science is; even if an enormous and unique effort is undertaken by unbiased researchers in possession of known and hitherto concealed sources, the hypothetically complete discovery of the original stage of a religion, void of the ulterior theological adjunction, will never be able to properly trigger a new spiritual-religious beginning or restart. This is due to the fact that the intellect is part of the material world and therefore intellectual-academic endeavors are in reality lifeless; this is so because life emanates only from the spiritual universe.
Seneca, Ancient Rome’s most erudite person ever, could never bring forth the reinstatement of the Ancient Roman religion in its original form; his monstrous suicide only confirms that knowledge without spirituality is worthless or even harmful.
Seneca (4 BCE – 65 CE)
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Similarly, Arius and Nestorius failed whereas Muhammad marked an undeniable success; the two great theologians acted at the mental-intellectual-theological (i.e. material) level only. Either they knew it or not, their eventual success would hinge only on material resources (impact on the emperor, control of the army, tremendous increase in the number of their followers, etc.). But Muhammad initiated a new spiritual beginning, which apparently had the same fate as Moses’, Jonah’s and Jesus’ teachings, preaching, and divine calling.
Similarly, what Luther attempted -obliterating the Fathers of the Christian Church- was doomed to fail and it failed totally. His followers -historically viewed- are not Christians; this is so because rejection of the historical Christianity immediately turns a person into a non-Christian. All the so-called modern Christian denominations are not parts of Christianity in reality; they are bogus-religious systems of political scope, origin, purpose and target. In other words, they are fraudulent, deceptive systems that represent the ugliest form of evilness; that’s why their ‘pastors’ scream like the most ulcerous Taliban.
First Council of Nicaea at the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel; Luther could not understand that without the Fathers of the Church there no ecumenical councils, which is tantamount to dissolution of Christianity.
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DEFINITION – PART II
In reality, theology is a creeper and a parasite, developed usually around a religion. Despite its vast contribution to the formation of the cult, theology absorbs the believers’ sentimentalism, turning the faith into doctrine and utterly promoting intellectual terrorism, mental rigorism, and verbal belligerence. In other words, theology alters the original religion and often clashes with popular religion; it definitely mortifies Moral, turning it from a lovely, voluntary contribution to the universal balance into an austere and heartless imposition of rules and prescriptions. Ultimately, theology kills spirituality, because theologians never need their adepts to achieve direct contact with their souls and thence with God. Speaking about these topics, I only mention the norm; it goes without saying that there are also exceptions, but they only confirm the veracity of my statements.
Theology existed since the early stages of the Ancient Oriental civilizations; a great number of Ancient Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian, Hittite, Hurrian, and Ugaritic theological texts have been unearthed, translated and published until now. Theologians were not very verbose and theological treatises were not very long at those days; it was sufficient to establish a new list of ‘gods’ (i.e. aspects of the Divine), to compose a radically different hymn to a ‘god’, to write the name of a ‘god’ or ‘hero’ differently (with several variable cuneiform Sumerograms or Assyrian-Babylonian syllabograms), to offer a distinct version of narrative, myth, epic, etc., or to elaborate a new epic or apocalyptic myth.
It is at times difficult to define where theology begins and religion leaves off within the context of the Ancient Oriental civilizations; the most common case is the attribution of different nature, characteristics, and activities to a ‘god’ (of one priesthood) by another priesthood. When the Iwnw (Heliopolitan) priests describe the benevolent activities and marvelous exploits of Isis, we have a ‘religious’ text. When the Memphitic priests of Ptah compose a structurally different and even alien Isis for the needs of their religion, thus attempting the spiritual subordination of Isis to Ptah, we apparently read a purely theological text.
Ptah temple at Memphis (above); statuette of Ptah (below)
Osiris (: Wser, i.e. the ‘Well Being’) and Isis-Hathor from Seti I temple at Abydos
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The complexity of this issue and the extreme ferocity of the theological wars that took place within the palaces and the temples of Mesopotamia and Egypt became apparently known to Zardosht (Zoroaster), who revealed Avesta while prohibiting the writing of the holy text of Zoroastrianism. Becoming well acquainted with the terrible wars between monotheistic Assyria and polytheistic Babylonia and Elam, Zoroaster identified the problem very well and tried fervently to eliminate the chance of a creeper that would absorb his revelation and eliminate the spiritual climax of his preaching – only for the material benefit of the Jesuit-styled Magi. Zoroaster entrusted the divine revelation of Avesta to the Achaemenid tribal leader (before the formation of a proper kingdom and later empire under Cyrus the Great), his family, and their secluded court priests.
Above: Magus with barsom from the Oxus treasure in Central Asia (stolen by the British Museum); Middle: rock relief of Magus with barsom in Dukkan-i Daoud, near Sar-e Pol-e Zohab (Kermanshah, Western Iran); Below: Magus with barsom and haoma cup from Phrygia (Ankara Museum).
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Zoroaster’s witty device infuriated the Magi, forcing them to abandon the epicenter of the vast Achaemenid Empire where the different nations were duly initiated to the faith preached by Zoroaster. That is why only in Caucasus, Syria and Anatolia the Magi were able to preach their Mithraism in guise of counterbalance to the official Iranian Achaemenid religion that we conventionally name ‘Zoroastrianism’. The exasperated Magi diffused incensed anti-Achaemenid propaganda, and this is what we encounter in texts about Ancient Ionian mystics like Pythagoras, in essays by Athenian philosophers like Plato, and in treatises by Lydian historians like Xanthus. Whatever people in Western Anatolia and South Balkans learned about Zoroaster was totally false and vertically contradictory to the imperial Iranian truth; this is so because it was filtered by the evil Mithraic Magi.
Ahura Mazda, the sole God of the Achaemenid emperors, who forcefully imposed Zoroastrianism among Iranians, thus enraging the Mithraic Magi.
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From the above, it becomes crystal clear that initially and for several thousands of years, theology was inextricably associated with religion. A very low-level theology is what we nowadays call ‘philosophy’. In the ancient civilizations of the Orient, spirituality, religion and wisdom were absolutely indissociable; but as it is widely known, every achievement of the Ancient Oriental Empires was due to the methodic organization of their vast temples, which -as I already said- functioned as research centers, universities, libraries, and centers of initiation; thousands of priests lived and worked there specializing in all sectors of spiritual and material sciences. Quite contrarily, the tiny temples of Western Anatolia and South Balkans functioned exclusively as centers of cult; their minimal scientific knowledge and their quasi-nonexistent spirituality forced several people to migrate for studies in the East: Assyria, Babylonia, Phoenicia, Egypt and later Iran. Consequently, Carians, Lycians, Ionians, Aeolians, Thracians, Macedonians, Illyrians, Dorians and many other individuals from peripheral lands traveled to the Valley of the Nile, the coasts of Phoenicia, the plains of Mesopotamia, and the plateau of Iran, seeking the wisdom, the spirituality and the spiritual-material sciences that they could not find at home.
It goes without saying that the lunatic priests of Dionysus, the heinous sorcerers of Hephaestus, and the fanatic sacerdotal colleges of Poseidon did not possess the foremost spiritual force of the Assyrian priests of Ishtar of Arbela, the scientific knowledge of the Babylonian hierophants of Nabu in Borsippa, the cosmological expertise of the astronomers / astrologers of Hathor at Denderah (Upper Egypt), and the eschatological hindsight of the prophets of Horus of Edfu. When the Ionians, the Aeolians and the Dorians, who went to study for many years in the Oriental temples, returned to their homelands and understood how fake the spiritual force of the local priests was, how deceitful their ‘miracles’ (euphemistically called ‘theurgy’) were, how minimal their knowledge was, how insignificant their skills were in terms of Cosmogony / Cosmology, and how nonsensical their eschatological lies were, they revolted. Out of humility toward their Oriental masters, they did not claim to possess their wisdom, and they coined a new term to describe themselves; they therefore were (not true ‘wise men’ but) simply the ‘friends’ or ‘lovers’ of wisdom (meaning that they had not yet achieved to reach and possess it): ‘philosophoi’ (philosophers).
Formidable spiritual symbolisms: Ishtar of Arba-ilu (Erbil)
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That is why I already said that the so-called Ancient Greek philosophy is a low-level theology; making analogies between the ancient religions of the countries where they had migrated to and studied and their local religion, the so-called Ancient Greek philosophers were theologians who tried to explain the world to their limited audience, by using mythical concepts in non-mythical wording. In its original stage, ‘philosophy’ did not have anything to do with ‘reason’ or ‘reasoning’. Modern definitions are once again nebulous, irrelevant, nonsensical, and misleading.
Ancient Greek philosophy ceased to be a theology, as soon as agnosticism surfaced; this development was due to the total lack of spirituality among the philosophers of the late 5th c. BCE. However, one must admit that it was not like that in the very beginning (6th c. BCE); Pythagoras had apparently a certain spiritual power and he was credited with the performance of several ‘miracles’ or ‘wonders’. Only this is enough to demonstrate the low level of the so-called Ancient Greeks and their poor culture and rudimentary civilization; apparently, due to their ignorance in terms of spirituality, spiritual sciences, material sciences, and genuine religion, they perceived the spiritually ordinary and common as materially extraordinary and uncommon.
It becomes clear that even the modern scholarly classification of those deemed to be ‘Ancient Greek philosophers’ is absolutely erratic, inconsistent and mistaken. Among them, there were mystics, theologians, philosophers, simple orators and pathetic fools, who thought they had the right to spread in public their ignorance and idiocy. Even worse, the best among them acted as independent individuals, and that is why they failed to function as a well-organized and systematized sacerdotal college and to truly, comprehensively and effectively ‘transplant’ the textual, cultic and spiritual ‘corpus’ of an Ancient Oriental religion in their homelands. Consequently, Western Anatolia, South Balkans, Thrace, Macedonia, and Illyria remained peripheral to the center of the world, which revolved around the Iranian Empire.
The detrimental failure of the so-called Ancient Greek philosophers is due to their confused understanding of the Ancient Oriental civilizations; this has nothing to do with what is called ‘Interpretatio Graeca’, which is not necessarily wrong. They did not the following cardinal points:
– there cannot be spirituality, wisdom and knowledge without a well-structured priesthood (involving enormous temples-universities-research centers-libraries) that serves a well-defined dogma and doctrine; an individual’s path in the spiritual universe is only personal. It is not enough to bring forth general results and to transform societies and nations.
– there cannot be spirituality and religion without an imperial state structure that is perceived as divine, sacred and universal. Imperial societies do not need to be big, but they have to be universal.
– there cannot be spirituality, religion and universal empire nearby the sea; the vast knowledge of all the Ancient Oriental scholars and priests in terms of Geographical Determinism fully demonstrates why there could never be an important empire and a center of knowledge, religion, theology and science in Western Anatolia and South Balkans. Nineveh, Assyria, Kalhu (Nimrud), Babylon, Eshnunna, Kish, Nippur, Borsippa, Hattusha, Susa, Iwnw (Heliopolis), Niwt (Thebes of Egypt), Men-nefer (Memphis), Pasargadae, Persepolis, Aram Dimashq (Damascus), Samaria and Jerusalem are located far from the sea. Ether, Earth and Soft Waters produce the correct habitat for humans to dwell and prosper spiritually and materially – not the Salt Waters (Sea).
In brief, the various peoples of Western Anatolia and South Balkans lacked the architectural magnificence and perfection of the Ancient Oriental temples, the unsurpassed spiritual and material scientific expertise of the Oriental sacerdotal colleges, and the systematic hierarchization of the universal empires of the Ancient Orient. Worse, they were not even blessed with a prophet or luminous mystic like Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, Jonah, Jesus and Muhammad. And if we take, on the basis of the Alexander Romance, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and Nizami Ganjavi’s Eskandar-Nameh, Alexander the Great (identified with Dhu’l Qarnayn) as a prophet and king, then we have to conclude that what he did was to abandon his fatherland, move to the Orient, and die there; Alexander the Great was the most explicit and the most vociferous rejection of the Ancient Greek philosophers.
Prophet Jonah (Yunus) receiving instructions from God (above); when facing the cetaceous (below)
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What the philosophers failed to understand, a king of Macedonia apparently realized and attempted to make its kingdom part of the Orient, by invading the then ailing Achaemenid Empire (at the end of 4th c. BCE): Alexander the Great. However, he soon realized that his native city and fatherland did not have the capacity to become an imperial capital and a universal center. That’s why he finally settled in Babylon.
Is it truly impossible for a theological system to exist without religion?
The answer to this immense question is given by several theologians of the Late Antiquity who are collectively known as the ‘Gnostics’; this appellation is very wrong, because these mystics and theologians elaborated very different doctrines or dogmas. The endeavors of all the Gnostics, i.e. the likes of Simon Magus, Bardesan (Bardaisan), Basilides, Valentinus, Marcion and others, were undertaken at all levels: spirituality, religion, theology.
Constructed Gnostic symbols
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Compared to Plato, Antisthenes, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, and their likes, the Gnostics were incomparably greater, wiser, nobler and closer to the truth. Some among the philosophers were talking childish nonsense, whereas all the Gnostics realized very well that the origin of everything is the human soul and the spiritual universe. Although some of the Gnostics were spiritually powerful (often due to immoral methods), they were not strong in formulating the basic tenets of a religion or in introducing extensive cultic material in their systems.
This failure prevented them from dragging vast masses of population to their dogmas / doctrines. They never went beyond the limits of a community or some communities (dispersed in various locations). Compared with either the ancient religions of the lands around the Mediterranean or the Oriental religions diffused throughout the Roman Empire and in Europe beyond the Roman borders during the Late Antiquity, the various groups of Gnostics remained a peripheral phenomenon, pretty much like the early Christian groups and sects which had minimal cultic material in their belief.
D. Politics
Modern times’ tyrannies and their instituted paraphernalia deploy a great effort to obfuscate the true meaning of the term ‘politics’, expand its extent, and transfer its application to almost all spheres of human activity and daily life. The reason for this paranoia of politics is very easy to discern; ‘politics’ is the inhuman foundation of all atrocities committed in the modern world. When discussions and debates are made around the different ‘political’ systems, involving bourgeois parliamentarianism, Fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism (Soviet Communism), Third World socialism, post-Soviet liberalism, and the leprosy of neo-conservatism, all participants are deceived, deluded and led to a moral, mental, intellectual, socio-behavioral, governmental, national, religious and cultural impasse.
Why this happens is easy to explain: politics is entirely inhuman, genuinely evil, and utterly Satanic. There is nothing ‘good’ or ‘positive’ or ‘humanly possible’ within ‘politics’. Simply, politics must not exist; wherever it does, it inevitably brings forth inhumanity, degeneration, disorder, destruction, decomposition and putrefaction. There was never a case of country where politics was implemented without awfully calamitous results. What is even worse is that, from Day 1, politics viciously cancels the ability of humans to accurately perceive the reality; people live therefore within the Satanic madness of politics until the tribulation comes, and then -of course- it is too late. This is so because the real essence of politics is a deceitful delusion.
This fact can be easily understood if a correct and accurate definition of the term is provided; that’s why all existing definitions are pathetic generalizations, so that readers never manage to identify the real origin of the term and then realize why nothing good can possibly emanate from politics. Examples of definitions: ‘the activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between parties having power’ and ‘the activities involved in getting and using power in public life, and being able to influence decisions that affect a country or a society'(https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/politics?q=politics)
It is important to notice that the malicious definitions never comprise the term ‘system’! This is due to the fact that the present world’s wardens do not want to offer the prisoners, i.e. the entire Mankind, the chance to sense and feel the compact nature of their imprisonment within politics. Only a ‘system’ could bring the Mankind to their knees, if implemented, and this system was politics. Another example of definition: ‘the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics)
All the same, there can never be a perfect lie and that is why the unknown authors of the Wikipedia entry unwillingly provide full demonstration of the fact that politics is indeed a ‘system’. Under a picture, they include the following legend, which relates to ‘political philosophy’: ‘Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), from a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics secured the two Greek philosophers as two of the most influential political philosophers’.
The Epitome of Fallacy, Delusion and Evilness: Rafaello’s hallucinatory School of Athens (Scuola di Atene. 1509-1511) decorates the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican palace.https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Politics#/media/File:Sanzio_01_Plato_Aristotle jpg
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Philosophy involves various systems of understanding and consideration, and therefore ‘political philosophy’ encompasses the systems of political organization that ‘political philosophers’ conceived mentally and wrote about. Either consisting in the implementation of a theoretical, philosophical system or emanating from simple everyday life and experience, ‘politics’ is a system of governance.
DEFINITION
Politics is the system of governance that prevails in a ‘polis’ deprived of monarchical rule. In Ancient Greek, ‘polis’ means ‘city’, and it is a noun; the associated adjective is ‘politikos’ (masculine), ‘politike’ (feminine) and ‘politiko’ (neutral). The neutral adjective in the Plural makes ‘politika’. This was the title of a treatise written by Aristotle concerning the description of the system of governance of a city – not a country, not a kingdom, not an empire. Out of this, in modern times, the term ‘politics’ was coined to describe one type of system of governance; however, as term, it was absolutely misplaced. Politics can be only a system of governance of a city – not a country, not a kingdom, not an empire.
Even worse, Aristotle was very influential among Western European and North American, anticlerical and anti-Christian, Freemasonic and Zionist philosophers, intellectuals and theoreticians who attempted -absurdly and calamitously- to elaborate and propose systems of ‘politics’ for their countries or -even more criminally and dictatorially- for all the countries of the world. I describe the effort as absurd because the so pompously and ludicrously glorified thinkers of the times of the Enlightenment failed to make the distinction between ‘city’ (polis) and ‘country’, ‘kingdom’ or ’empire’. In their biased madness, these fools (the likes of Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau) imagined that it would be possible to implement in a country the size of France an arbitrary system envisioned by an ignorant guy before two millennia for a town – not a sizeable country. In other words, even if it had been correct as a system of governance, ‘politics’ would have been inappropriate for countries bigger than San Marino, Andorra or Lichtenstein.
In the above definition, I describe Aristotle as an ‘ignorant guy’ for a very good reason; he wanted to write about what he had never properly studied. This is surely the irrelevance of philosophy in general, but we can now focalize on Aristotle and his diatribe.
Aristotle’s opinion about the governance system of cities is biased, untrustworthy and irrelevant; he failed to understand that the governance of a country, a kingdom or an empire that one needs more than a month to cross on a horseback is not the same as the governance of a city. He viewed things structurally from his office and without acquiring fundamental knowledge by being present in other countries and getting firsthand information. He even did not have the sense of what it is to rule a country the size of (only) Egypt, because he did was not there – he never traveled. So, we can first conclude that the simple, physical-natural, geographical reality escaped totally his mind.
Second, Aristotle did not have a clue about what he was talking about. Failing to learn foreign languages and assuming a lot, Aristotle proved to be unable to even imagine the vast and complex theoretical systems, which had been formed in the Oriental Empires. Founded on the spiritual sciences and experience, supported by immense religious-theological systems that were maintained by thousands of scientists-priests, and epitomized as imperial doctrine, these Oriental theoretical systems, different from one country to another (Egypt, Babylonia, Iran), were totally beyond Aristotle’s capabilities to study and learn, let alone fully understand and correctly evaluate. To properly acquire therefore this spiritual, religious and imperial theoretical background, Aristotle would need to spend at least ten (10) years in some Egyptian or Babylonian or Iranian temples as a low level pupil and, after learning well the local language(s) and scripts, to study the fields of sciences, which would enable him to get a proper understanding of the topic. On his ignorance are based the modern Western European and North American failures, injustices and absurdities.
The impossibility to implement in a small modern country the size of Albania a system of governance practiced within the limits of a tiny Ancient Greek city (of 40000 people) is not the only reason for which ‘politics’ is an impermissible system of governance. The fact that ‘politics’ is impossible for big countries would only lead to failures. But beyond Aristotle’s hollow theorizing, politics is evil and, as such, it ends up in injustices and absurdities. Speaking about Carthage (in Unit IV A), I described the nature of the Carthaginian Republic and its democratic system, also explaining the reason for them; Carthage started as just a Phoenician colony. In addition, I made a brief comparison between the Carthaginian Republic and the Oriental Empires, highlighting the incomparable superiority of the latter.
In his second book of Politics (out of a total of eight), Aristotle details what he found as the three most exemplary models of politically ruled cities or countries. This part of his treatise (translated in Modern English, it makes around 95000 words) is the most concealed, because Aristotle’s best paradigms do not involve Corinth, Thebes, Argos or Athens, but Sparta, Gortyna (in Central Southern Crete) and Carthage. He states the following: “the government of Carthage seems well established, and in many respects superior to others” (Book II, chapter xi)
The problem with ‘politics’, as an ancient system of governance, is basically moral, spiritual and religious. As I already discussed when speaking about Carthage, this system of governance revolves around material considerations and interests. However, in Western Anatolia and in South Balkans different reasons led to the unfortunate establishment of a similar regime; either the sedentarization of some tribes occurred in parallel with the maintenance with the tribal Kurultay (Kurultai: general assembly) or an early kingdom was overthrown by a gang of disfavored rascals who made of their gang a ‘general assembly’, monstrously killing enemies, ostracizing rivals, discriminating women, and turning servants to slaves, i.e. ‘things’. The collapse of the early kingdom in Rome and in the petty cities-states of South Balkans is a sacrilege, a barbarous act, and a heinous, immoral incident.
Representation of a Turanian Mongol kurultai and coronation of emperor (perhaps Genghis Khan) from a double-page illustration of Rashid-ad-Din’s Gami’ at-Tawarih; Tabriz (?), beginning of the 14th century
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Totally deprived of any legitimacy, the criminals who attended these fake assemblies postured as ‘gods’ of the misfortunate local society, deciding upon their destinies as if their filthy, monstrous and evil interests entitled them to decision-making. Even if representative and majoritarian, the decision making of a society does not lie with the people, who care about material interests, but with a brave fighter and his well-prepared, duly grown, severely trained, and comprehensively educated offspring, generation after generation. This person should not be a ridiculous leader (Führer), as the vicious needs of the deviate Western societies command, but a real king (or emperor), who -because he is spiritually enlightened, morally balanced, religiously just, culturally genuine, and nationally prosperous- will be able to uplift the entire population, making of every man a king and of every woman a queen, imposing the natural order ‘as above so below’, and eliminating the material interest and every form of egocentrism.
That is why there is no difference among ‘tyranny’, ‘oligarchy’ and ‘democracy’ as per the very erroneous distinction made by Aristotle, who failed to perceive what the Oriental Empires were (as I already said): the underlying concept of all these heinous systems is politics, i.e. the notion that people can be governed without primarily examining
– the spiritual order of the universe,
– the moral standards set by the Creation (Cosmogony and Cosmology),
– the scope of Life as exemplified in the eschatological narrative of every original religion and mythology, and
– the compulsory reflection of the spiritual universe that every universal empire must consistently be.
Aristotle failed to read either Atrahasis (above) or Gilgamesh (below); in addition, he proved to be unaware of the vast theoretical system, i.e. the Assyrian imperial universalism, which was attested on thousands of texts, particularly of the Sargonid (722-609 BCE) times; that’s why Aristotle is anything between irrelevant and nonsensical.
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It really does not matter whether a society is ruled by a tyrant, the few oligarchs or the adult masculine population that is not considered as ‘slaves’. The wretched system of politics corrupts the population, profanes the youth, and insults the elders. Politics is therefore the system of governance that deprecates the human soul, destroys the human character, kills the human mind, and putrefies the human heart.
Politics triggers a rift between spirituality and everyday life; politics cancel Moral, turning entire societies into realms of gangsters and liars; politics castrates Culture, transforming it into a hilarious caricature; politics eliminates heroism, therefore plunging majestic legends into a swamp of effeminate coyness and metamorphosing heroes into lobbyist rats.
Politics hates popular religion because it maintains people in life, hearts in warmth, and minds in soundness; owed to this polarity, politics cannot coexist with religion. Besotted people think that the two notions can, but their mistake is due to their inability to see things in perspective and realize that, within a political context, religion is gradually reduced to a parody of meaningless, tragi-comical ceremonies. However, the absurd and paranoid thought that politics and religion can possibly subsist side-by-side within a society is partly due to the prevailing confusion of religion with theology.
Last, politics tarnishes, injures and contaminates theology, by forcing it to deal with affairs that are morally impermissible to deal with, by obliging it to cope with an evil environment in which theology can survive only in a monstrously altered form, and by appending it to all the atrocities, the profanities and the anomalies that politics -by its nature- brings forth.
That is why the Christ of the Christian Democrat Party in Germany is the Antichrist.
For this reason, (the fake) Allah of the political islam (which is not Islam) is Satan.
Wherever and whenever politics and theology coincide, if there is no clash for the total elimination of one of the two notions, Theology becomes Satanology.
Politics is the Gates of the Hell.
V. Anatolia, Turkey, Culture, Spirituality, Religion, History and Education
Having defined and clarified the aforementioned notions, I now intend to reply to your last points; you understand correctly what I mean about today’s Turkey’s historical narrative. You write:
“I guess that what you try to say in this post is that the current ‘historical narrative’ of Turkey lacks of gravitas to pull traction into its direction”.
The present historical narrative of Turkey is a fake. It has nothing to do with what Kemal Ataturk established. The ignorant and idiotic liars, crooks and gangsters Erdoğan and Bahçeli, surrounded by the disreputable imbeciles of Diyanet, are talking nonsense. And by so doing, they erase the very raison d’être of Turkey.
I will herewith enumerate few cardinal points:
A. Today’s Turks are mainly Islamized Eastern Romans at the ethnic-cultural level
First, today’s Turks are only partly of Turanian/Turkic origin; if we don’t take into account the Zaza, the Kurmanji, the Aramaeans (Suryani), and the Arabic-speaking Aramaeans (the Muslims of Hatay), the Azeris, the Kyrgyz of Van, and few other ethnic groups, the Anatolian population consists in an amalgamation of Eastern Romans (Rumlar / Romioi) and various Turkmen nomads. The latter arrived in different successive waves of small populations over the span of several centuries; their sedentarization opened the way for intermarriages in the urban centers that were of predominantly Eastern Roman ancestry.
The early (11th–15th) Islamization in Anatolia was not enforced because the indigenous Eastern Roman populations embraced the Seljuks for some important historical reasons. For many centuries, the Anatolian Eastern Romans had rejected the Constantinopolitan theological tyranny, as they were Iconoclasts and Paulicians. The arrival of the Seljuks offered them therefore a wonderful opportunity to get rid of the heinous Constantinopolitan guards and tax collectors. With the establishment of the Sultanate of Rum, a very long process of Islamization started only to last for many centuries; but at its origin, there were religious clashes that had lasted for centuries before the arrival of the Seljuks.
Bülent Ecevit (1925-2006): evidently an Eastern Roman of Anatolian and Balkan descent (left); (right) Tuğrul Bey (993-1063; ابوطالب محمد تغریل بن میکائیل / Abu Talib Muhammad Tughril ibn Mika’il): apparently a Turkmen.
Seljuks defeat Ghaznavids, another Turanian dynasty, in 1040 (above); Seljuk art from Iran(below)
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Religious differences were at the origin of the Eastern Roman loss of Eastern Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia in the 7th c. with the early arrival of Islam. And religious differences were also at the origin of the Eastern Roman loss of Central and Western Anatolia during the 11th–15th c. It is therefore imperative nowadays for every Turk, in order to truly assess his national identity and cultural integrity, to learn about the Constantinopolitan persecution of the Anatolian Eastern Roman Iconoclasts and Paulicians. These were the ancestors of the majority of today’s Turks. Their persecution is concealed as per the racist pseudo-historical dogma of Modern Greece, which defends the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate’s historical version. It is necessary for Turkey to reject the historical falsification as carried out as regards this point and many others.
By consciously identifying themselves as descendants of the Anatolian Iconoclasts and Paulicians, today’s Turks automatically refute and cancel the New Megali Idea that the racist Greek regime has systematically promoted after 1974 (involving a great number of lies, notably the fake genocide of the Pontus region Greeks, etc.) This means that Modern Turkey can overwhelmingly reject the Greek nationalist version of pseudo-history as per which ‘some Turks came from Mongolia’ and ‘it is the task of today’s Greeks to send them back to Central Asia’. Kemal Ataturk was wise enough to realize that what mattered was the true, uninterrupted historical continuity in Anatolia. But this means exactly what I am saying to you and therefore today’s Turks must feel as basically indigenous Anatolians and reflect this in their sociopolitical life, pretty much like they show it, without realizing it, in their cultural life.
For today’s Turks, Truva (Troy) is more important than Medina; that’s why Turkish schoolchildren must study more about the Hittites, the Luwians, and the Trojans than about the beginning of Islam in Hejaz. Otherwise, they leave vital space empty for others to occupy. Political Islam in the Turkish Education is open invitation for others to attack and invade.
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This means that next time Greek newspaper or TV Channel preposterously reacts about festivals organized by Turkey in Truva (Troy/Çanakkale), there must be an overwhelming response by the Turkish people, academia, intellectuals, and the state at the international level, fully denouncing the pseudo-historical, chauvinistic and paranoid claims of Greece. But for this to be done, Turkish politicians and academics alike must first understand that Greek nationalism is not a political phenomenon but initially an academic-educational-intellectual racist version of History, which has been imposed as state dogma in that country. The uneducated idiots of political Islam are mentally corrupt and absolutely unable to understand anything.
The only way to avoid a war with Greece (backed by France and others) is to fully demonstrate that today’s Turks represent the entirety of the Anatolian, Eastern Roman, Ionian, Trojan and Hittite historical heritage and that in their majority they are the descendants of the Eastern Romans, who had been persecuted for supporting Iconoclasm and Paulicianism and for rejecting the Constantinopolitan version of Christianity. This is actually what truly happened and thus, by claiming Eastern Roman ancestry ethnically, culturally and imperially, today’s Turks reveal that Modern Greece consists merely in a disruption and discontinuity triggered by the early 19th c. Western colonial intervention. As a matter of fact, until the last day of the Caliphate, the Ottoman Sultan was also Qaysar-i Rum, i.e. (Eastern) Roman Emperor.
Mehmet II as Roman Emperor (قیصر روم/ Qaysar-i Rum) and Gennadios II
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To conclude with, the clash between Turkey and Greece must be transferred from the political-military level and the silly purchases of arms to the academic-educational-intellectual-cultural level.
B. Parts of Turkey’s National Soul are all the Anatolian Civilizations, Cultures and Religions
Second, with my personal approach to the topic, I don’t mean that Turkey’s historical narrative should be exclusively associated with the Eastern Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman identity of the majority of today’s Turks. Not at all! It has also to be related to the Cappadocian, Pontus, Roman, Aramaean, Phrygian, Lydian, Ionian, Trojan, Lycian, Carian, Hatti, Luwian, Hittite and Assyrian heritage of Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia. It is not only stupid to waste pupils’ and students’ time with prophet Muhammad and his stories in Mecca and Medina; it is also lethal. Religion does never form the national identity of a people; culture does. And with neighbors maintaining an ulcerous chauvinistic discourse, what matters most is historicity. Islam is just yesterday’s story; you cannot oppose Greece’s nationalistic paranoia with Islam.
So drop Islam out of the governance, the education and the international relations! In terms of historicity, Anatolia is overwhelmingly more important than the South Balkans; this means that today’s Anatolian Turks must reconnect with their Hittite past. Excerpts from all types of Hittite texts (historical, religious, epic, etc.) must be taught in the Secondary Education in Turkish translation. By identifying Modern Turks as the cultural descendants of the Hatti, the Hittites and the Luwians of the 2nd millennium BCE (which is exactly what Kemal Ataturk sought to achieve in his outstandingly pioneering effort), by restoring the Anatolian cultural integrity via systematic Education, and by offering the Turkish pupils a genuinely multicultural vision of their past, you establish a historically correct Education, a strong National Identity, a formidable Sovereignism and an impregnable discourse in refutation of the nonsensical Modern Greek nationalism.
Sunset over the ruins of the old castle, Urfa, Turkey
Urhay / Urfa / Edessa of Osrhoene: the Aramaean Christian Monophysitic heritage of Turkey and the history of the Abgar dynasty (134 BCE – 242 CE) are far more important than Muawiya and Yazid of the Umayyad Caliphate for today’s Turks.
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Even more importantly, by so doing, you promote the victorious historical model of cultural continuity, in full rejection of the obsolete (launched in the 19th c.), racist theory of ethnic (racial) continuity, thus ushering the Turkish society into future, while the anachronistic concepts and the Anti-Turkish paroxysm that prevail in Greece will be good enough to provoke the implosion and the decomposition of that unfortunate land with the deceived population and the schizophrenic elite.
Tengrism, Hittite and other Anatolian religions, Assyrian-Babylonian religion, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Manichaeism, Orthodox Christianity, Nestorian Christianity, Monophysitic Christianity and Islam are all parts of the Anatolian-Northern Mesopotamian cultural heritage of Turkey. You cannot favor one part and misrepresent the other parts. For the historical heritage that is entrusted in the hands of Turks today, Islam is only a minor and secondary part; it cannot become the central part of Turkey’s National Education, because it will bring ruin and destruction.
What I am saying to you now can be described also in a more technical terminology; it is an enlargement of the national-cultural-historical basis of the Turkish state and nation. This is tantamount to solidification; opposite to what I am discussing, you have the paranoid destabilization of the Turkish nation, which is carried out by the idiots of AKP and Erdoğan. Why? Because compared to all the rest, the existing and truly important Islamic historical heritage of Turkey constitutes an undeniably narrower historical basis. In very simple words, you cannot have ten gold coins and care only about one!
C. Neo-Ottomanism is an Anti-Turkish Paranoia and a Subtle Western Trap against the State of Kemal Ataturk
Third, today’s Turks must entirely liberate themselves from the Western colonial myth of the ‘Ottoman Empire’. This shameful institution was rightfully terminated by Kemal Ataturk; it was a real liberation, as important as the military victory over the colonial armies of France, Italy, England and Greece. But when Kemal Ataturk was about to die, a notorious Zionist Orientalist was about to get his postgraduate degree in France with professor the colonial Orientalist Louis Massignon: Bernard Lewis (1916-2018).
Louis Massignon
Man of extreme erudition, of Jesuit formation, and of vicious rancor, Massignon (1883-1962) was an enemy of Islam, of the Ottoman Empire, and of Turkey. He was almost killed in his adventures in the SE Ottoman provinces as a French agent; he was masqueraded as a scholar. Perhaps his best description would be ‘the French Laurence of Arabia’, but he was definitely far more erudite and certainly far more mystical than the English prototype. Massignon taught Bernard Lewis the iniquitous art of academic hypocrisy, and the student excelled in it. Although accepting Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey as an exemplary Muslim state, Bernard Lewis taught Islamic History in a most distorting manner and with misplaced focus, while speaking and writing extensively about the cultural inferiority of Islam; but he failed to stand critically and properly explain the reasons for it.
Bernard Lewis (left) with H. Kissinger
Bernard Lewis (left) with B. Netanyahu
Bernard Lewis and Halil Inaclik, the ‘academic father’ of today’s Turkish Islamists
Along with Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) and the French School of the Annalistes (Annales school), Bernard Lewis politicized the History of the Islamic World and projected 20th c. concepts and approaches onto 15th – 18th c. History; he therefore failed to distinguish between the Ottoman state itself and the Ottoman civilization. Lewis had a calamitous impact on Halil Inaclik (İnalcık: 1916-2016), a Tatar historian who left Crimea in young age, settled with his family in Turkey, studied there and then, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, moved to Western Europe for research purposes. As he became a pioneer of the rapprochement between Turkey and post-WW II Europe and America, it was normal for him to diffuse a Western colonial interpretation of the History of the Ottoman Empire, at the very antipodes of the acts and the thoughts of Kemal Ataturk. However, trying to portray ‘Tanzimat’ as normal is preposterous; in reality, it was the death warrant of the Ottoman state. This approach helped spread an enormous confusion in Turkey; gradually, a nauseating nostalgia for the Ottoman times was produced among many idiots.
The stage was set for the theatrical act of Neo-Ottomanism, when Inalcik tried to refute the dark and murky portrait of Mehmet II Fatih that Franz Babinger (1891-1967), the famous German anti-Nazi historian, had drawn. The Turkish political elite, the academic class, and the average Turk fell into the trap, viewed the topic through nationalistic distorting lenses, and thus a subconscious ‘rapprochement’ with the shameful Ottoman Empire began. This was not Islamic of nature; it was Satanic.
Franz Babinger
The confusion continued with Ilber Ortayli (İlber Ortaylı; born in 1947), a scholar who (after having been the student of both, Bernard Lewis and Halil Inalcik – !! ??) has consciously served the colonial plots of England that provide for the Islamization of Turkey – a project that is absolutely impossible to materialize. This is so because, if the Turkish population is paranoid enough to accept the filthy excrement of political islam, Turkey will simply cease to exist a secular state and society, which in turn will automatically bring us back to the Treaty of Sevres and the decomposition of Turkey as per the terms of the only post-WW I treaty that was not implemented thus far – only thanks to Kemal Ataturk.
İlber Ortaylı
So, for all Turks today, Kemal Ataturk is definitely and undeniably far more important than prophet Muhammad. And if someone disagrees on this, he must be eliminated at once for high treason.
Ortayli is notorious for having contributed to the contamination of Ottomanostalgia.
Every naïve and ignorant person, who happens to entertain positive feelings for the Ottoman Empire, is the victim of an enormous propaganda mechanism launched by the Satanic English colonial state (MI6, Foreign Office, etc.). The incessant distortions, lies, and historical falsifications comprise also a great deal of concealment of the historical truth and unprecedented confusions. The following diagram contains only the major points that have been concealed, distorted or mystified as regards the Ottoman Empire which was calamitous already for Turks and Muslims, not only Aramaeans (Suryani), Copts, Berbers, Yemenites, Sudanese, Yazidis, Armenians, Eastern Romans/Rumlar (deprecatorily called ‘Greeks’) and many others:
a- the main contributors to what is called ‘Ottoman Civilization’ were enemies of the vicious, criminal and bogus-Islamic Ottoman family;
b- this generates an extraordinarily hiatus that very few scholars have sensed: the terms ‘Ottoman Empire’ and ‘Ottoman Civilization’ are therefore not synonyms but antonyms;
c- the real spiritual, academic, scientific, artistic and intellectual force of the Ottoman Empire were the great mystical orders, the Qizilbash, the Bektashi, the Mevlevi, etc. But as you know, Selim I waged a war and killed thousands of Qizilbash in Anatolia; he exiled 20000 of them to Mora (Peloponnesus), and persecuted the rest. For 400 years the greatest spiritual force of the Islamic World was under incessant, merciless persecution because of the wretched Ottoman family (should I say the ‘brothel of the gangsters’?). The disreputable and idiotic Mahmud II closed down the Bektashi in the 1820s – only to confirm that spiritual, intellectual, academic and scientific life was prohibited in his wretched state;
Rare double portrait of Haji Bektash from a 17th c. manuscript (above); tomb of Jelaleddin Rumi (Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî), mosque and Mevlevi museum in Konya (below)
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d- in other words, the Ottoman family hated what we now call ‘Ottoman Civilization’ which is in fact ‘Islamic Civilization’ continued under the Ottoman Sultans mainly until the end of the 16th c. In reality, the Islamic civilization was terminated with the destruction of the Istanbul Observatory (1580) by the fanatic and ignorant mob, which was guided by the villainous rascal that happened to be the then ‘sheikhulislam’;
The prevalence of Ali ibn Abi Taleb, Hassan and Husayn over the Umayyad infidels is the cornerstone of Anatolian popular religion.
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e- the main contributors to what we call ‘Ottoman Empire’ and ‘Ottoman Army’ were the Janissary. Without the Janissary, the Ottoman armies would have never reached the faraway lands that they controlled; but the Janissary knew that the evil sheikhs under the sheikhulislam would finally destroy the empire, and that is why they repeatedly clashed with them. Following the deceitful advice of the worst enemies of the Ottoman Empire, i.e. the English and the French, Mahmud II dissolved also the Janissary in the 1820s – a decision that is tantamount to death warrant for the Ottoman army; without the Janissary, the stupid Ottomans were always losing, until they got lost.
Above: typical representation of a Qizilbash; below: the founder of the Great Mughal dynasty of Southern Asia Babur offers a banquet in honor of Qizilbash and Hindu, who came to present their valuable gifts (1528).
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Above: typical Janissary; below: the secret but real, historical revenge of the Janissaries over the worthless Ottoman state: the victory of Kemal Ataturk, here represented (in the Taksim Square monument) as accompanied by his allies Clement Voroshilov (1881-1969) and Semyon Aralov (1880-1969), the Soviet army officers and statesmen.
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f- basics in Turkish Literature are enough for someone to understand that the Ottomans were the worst enemies of the entire Turkmen nation of Anatolia. You certainly know that the central part of the Anatolian Turkish literature is Ağıt Halk Edebiyatı, i.e. the Popular Literature of Lamentations. Very different from other nations’ popular lamentations, the Anatolian Turkish (in reality Turkmen) ağıtlar are closely interconnected with the ‘destanlar’, i.e. epics, legends and narratives of brave deeds undertaken by people who rejected the cursed Ottoman rule and the pseudo-Islam of the sheikhulislams, opposing the ensued oppression and persecution of the Anatolian Muslim Turkmen by the loathed soldiers of the ruthless Ottoman state.
g- the formation of the official position of the sheikhulislam in the 1300s and the officialization of the position by Murad II in the early 15th c. is an abomination. It consists in straightforward Christianization of Islam. Prophet Muhammad actually liberated the believers from the tyranny of the clergy, as he had early made a very clear distinction between faithful and disbelievers among the Christian priests and monks; this fact relates to both, personal understanding and divine revelation. Every person can randomly be the sheikh of the prayers in a mosque. There cannot be institutionalization of the sheikhs, because this is not only a deviation in terms of Islamic cult but also an evil act that suits perfectly well the interests of the worst enemies of Islam. So, you understand that, when you say about the Islamists and the present administration of Turkey “maybe because they take the Islamic faith in full”, you really mean that they mistake it in full!
h- Last, when it comes to Turkey’s Islamic past, I surely understand that it plays a cardinal role in today’s Anatolian Turkish culture, popular religion, folklore, moral integrity, and national identity; but it is mainly based on the Seljuk heritage and spirituality, the Iranian legendary traditions, and the Anatolian beyliks that have also been disastrously disregarded and misrepresented in the Modern Turkish Education.
The Artuqids of Mardin, the Danishmend of Sivas, the Saltukids of Erzerum, the Ionian beylik of Smyrna, the state of Eretna, the Hamidid dynasty of Eğirdir and Antalya, the Isfandiyar dynasty of Kastamonu, the Ladik beylik of Denizli, the famous Dulkadiroğulları of Marash, the Mentesh beylik of Milas, and many others are the strong trunk, the great boughs, and the soft twigs of the Kızıl Elma (Red Apple) tree of Anatolian culture, mysticism, identity, and integrity. Yes, this tree had indeed Ottoman green leaves, but to be honest, they consisted of Muslim and Christian populations that were equally and monstrously oppressed by the cruel Ottoman family.
Silver coin (dirham) minted by Nasir ad-Din al-Mansur Artuq Arslan (597 – 637 H. / 1201 – 1239) in Mardin, in the year 635 H
Mangir (mangır) or mankur, bronze coin from Kastamonu (Isfandiyar dynasty)
Akkoyunlu state (1378-1503)
In brief, the illustrious Akkoyunlu dynasty is more central to today’s Turkish national identity than the Ottoman family; even more importantly, the Akkoyunlu were able to merge in one state the eastern half of Anatolia and the entirety of the Iranian plateau. And, as you know, neither the Ottomans nor the Safavids were able to achieve this exploit.
D. Do not call the Anatolian Sea ‘Aegean Sea’!
Fourth, as I said, the entire historical narrative of Turkey is a fake; even worse, it functions destructively for the country. While staying close to facts and processes and denouncing falsifications and concealments of the historical truth that may have been undertaken by other regimes or establishments, the historical narrative of a country is not merely the historiography that the country’s academics teach in universities and historical societies. It can also be composed by well-educated diplomats, who not only know the past comprehensively, but also envision the future ingeniously.
This means that the historical narrative of a country must be to some extent creatively ‘invented’, i.e. constructed on the basis of truthful historical conclusions and state needs. You understand, of course, that by saying ‘invented’, I don’t mean ‘fabricated’ and ‘forged’ but ‘formulated’, ‘conceived’ and/or ‘re-discovered’, One example is the case of Mavi Vatan and Ege Denizi; the latter is merely a part of the former, but it is very wrong for Turkey to further use the term ‘Aegean Sea’.
Certainly this historical term, which relates to Ancient Ionian mythology, is historical and truthful; it was used in several languages (Arabic: بحر ايجه) and its historicity is undeniable. But this does not mean that no one can introduce a new name, which would correctly reflect the historical dynamics of this maritime expanse. As you know, the History of the Mankind is exclusively a ‘history of lands’, not a ‘history of seas’. Humans never lived in seas, because this is practically impossible. Seas served only as one of the existing means of communication. People traveled always across lands and deserts to meet and deal with other people or eventually resettle; and they did the same across seas. But seas are uninhabitable and no one can live there; all the islands that may exist -here and there- are in reality spots of land within an unlivable space. In fact, seas do not exist; they only do in relationship with the lands around which they may be located.
Viewing the Aegean Sea within the wider context of the lands among which this maritime expanse exists, one can draw determinant historical conclusions. The Aegean Sea is located west of Anatolia, south of Balkans, and east of the southern projection of the Balkan Peninsula, namely the land south of the theoretical line between Salonica and Vlore (Vlorë) in Albania. Projecting out into the Mediterranean body of water, the southern part of Balkan Peninsula is separated from the Italian Peninsula by the Adriatic and the Ionian seas.
As the Aegean Sea consists in merely a part of the Mediterranean Sea, we have to add that it is located north of Africa, because the island of Crete is in the middle of two maritime expanses, namely the main part of the Mediterranean Sea and the Aegean Sea. In fact, Crete is a historically African, Canaanite and Anatolian island, whereas the Çember Adaları (Kiklatlar or Kiklad Adaları / Cyclades Islands) originally were entirely African islands, as the so-called Cycladic Art (end of 4th–1st millennium BCE) testifies to, in spite of the racist interpretations, the falsifications, and the distortions that colonial academic gangsters publish in order to once again usurp African cultural heritage, monuments and art and shamelessly portray that culture as possibly European and White,
During the last five millennia, all the major historical developments that took place in the Aegean Sea originated from Anatolia. This is due to the fact that Anatolia proved to be the epicenter of several empires, whereas there was never an empire based in the Balkans, let alone the southern projection of the said peninsula. The Hittites expanded in the Balkans; Troy was their enemy, and the Hittites called upon their Ahhiyawa (Achaeans) cousins to solve the problem (and the Achaean military expedition became known as the ‘Trojan War’), as Hattusha was mainly focused on the Southeast, i.e. Northwestern Mesopotamia, Syria and Canaan. The Luwians and the Carians from Anatolia expanded to Crete and the other islands. Contrarily to the Indo-European theorists, the Achaeans, the Ionians and the Aeolians, coming from Central Asia, crossed from Anatolia to the southernmost confines of the Balkans.
The indigenous populations of the South Balkan extremities, namely the Peleset (Pelasgians), who were ethnically-linguistically-culturally unrelated to the Achaeans and loathed the Achaean supremacy, did not expand or migrate, except during the late 13th c. and early 12th c. BCE invasions that we now call ‘Sea Peoples’ Invasions’; after they revolted against the Achaeans, burned the Mycenaean acropolises, ended the Achaean rule, invaded Anatolia, Cyprus and Canaan, destroyed the Hittite Empire and its allies, they attacked Egypt. They were then destroyed and dispersed by the victorious Egyptian armies of Ramses III; after their defeat, they settled in the coast of South Canaan and became rather known as the ‘Philistines’, i.e. the ancestors of the Palestinians.
The Achaemenid Iranians invaded and controlled more than two thirds of the Balkan Peninsula as the Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscription (unearthed in 1937 and published in 1954) of Gherla (in Transylvania, Romania) demonstrates. Alexander the Great of Macedonia, after subjugating the South Balkan petty states, only crossed Anatolia to invade Iran, and then he fully disregarded the Balkan Peninsula in its entirety and made of Babylon his capital; his wife was not a Macedonian beauty, but the Sogdian princess Roxane, who was born in Central Asia. Later, during the reign of the Epigones, i.e. the successors of the Macedonian emperor, the South Balkan confines and the islands belonged to the Seleucids of Syria, the Attalids of Pergamum (Bergama), the kingdom of Macedonia, whereas Crete belonged to Ptolemaic Egypt.
The Romans came from the West to Anatolia; however, they did not originate from the Balkans but from the Italian Peninsula, as it is well known. More importantly, and on the basis of what the Romans thought of themselves, they did not actually ‘invade’ Anatolia, but they only returned there, since Aeneas, their ancestor, was a Trojan who left after the destruction of the kingdom that the Hittites called Taruisha (Troy) and/or Wilusa (Ilion). During the Roman times, the Balkan Peninsula served mainly as a passageway between the Italian and the Anatolian peninsulas. During the Eastern Roman and the Ottoman empires, all important movements, like the Paulicians and the Bektashis, were diffused from Anatolia to the Balkans; and all critical historical developments started in Anatolia and impacted the Balkans and the islands located in the sea that separates Anatolia from the South Balkans.
Achaemenid Empire of Iran
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So, you cannot call the sea west of Anatolia ‘Aegean’ (Ege); it is the Anatolian Sea par excellence. This term may be new, but it is historically truthful and academically defendable. Consequently, when you write about my approach that “while you advocate for a model where the history of Turkey absorbs all the residents of the Anatolian peninsula”, I have to respond that this is rather an oversight; I do advocate an entirely continental model of History, as per which Turkey absorbs all the residents of Anatolia and their peripheral lands and seas.
You cannot therefore have ‘strategic depth’ (stratejik derinlik) as the ignorant and uneducated Ahmet Davutoğlu pretended in his silly book; actually you don’t need it because it only brings disaster. What you need is historical identity and cultural integrity; you cannot possibly imagine that you are closer to the Algerian and the Somali Muslims, and not to the Aramaean Monophysitic Christians of Mardin, Midyat and Tur Abdin. Simply, it cannot be; it has calamitous results like Erdogan’s stupid involvement in the war that the criminal Western powers declared on Syria in 2011. So, with your either nonexistent (before 2002) or silly (2002-2022) methods, while willing to become again an imperial power, you miserably fell into the status of puppet of the English and the Americans. It is a shame for the state of Kemal Ataturk. Eliminate Erdogan and cancel all his paranoid policies at once and by all means!
E. Eastern Romans and Turkmen Nomads: History is the History of the Peoples, not of the Elites or the States
Fifth, at a certain point, you highlight what you perceive as a contradiction, stating the following: “For example, Ankara should take Justinian as its own emperor. Here then rises the challenge of how to explain the Byzantine-Ottoman wars. Are they civil wars”?
About the ethnic identity of the Anatolian population, the wholehearted acceptance of the Seljuk rule by the Eastern Roman Iconoclasts and Paulicians of Anatolia, and the ethnic amalgamation that ensued, I already spoke in Unit V A. Here I will only add that the topic that you mention (the ‘Byzantine-Ottoman wars’) is simply a fabricated myth owed to the colonial Orientalist bibliography (to which I already referred briefly in Unit V C). I will now attempt to concisely explain to you what happened and how you came up with this opinion about a factoid – not a fact.
Truthful and trustworthy historiography is basically a matter of accurate and lucid conceptualization and comprehensive contextualization. When this approach is not offered, when the focus is shifted on mere facts, and when the description involves preconceived schemes, abrasive innuendos, erroneous terms, and insipid clichés, the reality is drastically transformed; then readers go through texts, which -although they don’t contain factual mistakes- are entirely misleading. The end result is that, instead of proper historiography, the academic class generates fake myths that are believed as History, whereas they fully misrepresent the historical reality.
More specifically, one can very easily understand that the term ‘ Byzantine–Ottoman wars’ is a fake, i.e. the byproduct of fallacious Western bibliography geared only to continue the division and the enmity, the hatred and the racism that the colonial powers did instigate among the populations of early 19th c. Ottoman Empire. One can search for a comparable element, then establish a comparison, and last find the dissimilarities between the two items of comparison. An example could be what we now call ‘Iranian-Ottoman wars’. By astutely checking the presentation of both items (topics) in modern educational-academic propaganda outfits, you can get some interesting and revelatory points.
First, let me point out that both terms are very wrong and totally false; the term ‘Persian-Ottoman wars’ (as it often stands in Western bibliography) is deliberately fallacious, because the Safavid, Afshar and Qajar empires were all called ‘Iran’, not ‘Persia’. In addition, their territories were not confined to Fars (Persia) but comprised the entire, traditional land of Iran. Similarly, there was never a ‘Byzantine’ Empire; vicious Western forgers use this transvestite appellation in order to name what was historically called ‘Eastern Roman Empire’ or ‘Romania’ (Ρωμανία; unrelated to the modern Balkan state). So, we can speak about Eastern Roman-Ottoman wars, pretty much like we can speak about Eastern Roman-Seljuk wars; by the way, this can also serve as an interesting parallel.
What you can see in the latter is that the entry authors make available a table with wars, dates, emperors, treaties, results, etc. It is absolutely true that for more than 300 years the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid/Afshar/Qajar Empire of Iran entered in a sequence of more than 10 wars that lasted at times not years but decades. However, it must also be added that these wars were the clash of opposite rulers and elites, not peoples.
Quite contrarily, the former Wikipedia entry is a lengthy but vague text without any table; this did not happen just by coincidence. It is related to the very perplex reality of the Eastern Roman-Ottoman relationship, which encountered many ups and downs; in many wars, the two states helped one another. The same is valid for the wars between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Rum Sultanate of the Seljuks, i.e. two states that had exactly the same name. Here is the English Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Seljuk_wars
By the way, can you imagine what would happen today, if two states bore the same name?
Quite contrarily to present circumstances, this fact was considered normal at the time and the Eastern Roman – Seljuk wars were not due to their claims to the same name. This was due to the undisputed reality that the outright majority of the population in both states was indeed Eastern Roman. So, to put it correctly, at those days, the Eastern Romans had two states: one Christian and another Muslim. And in both states, the outright majority was initially Christian; but the Christian population of the Rum Sultanate disagreed with the beliefs and the practices of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. There were no ethnic-linguistic differences among the rulers and the people; they were able to communicate because people were multilingual in the Orient, and they used to learn languages fast and easily. More importantly, the two states had also the same flag: a double-headed eagle! Only the colors were different: yellow and black for the Eastern Romans, light blue and white for the Seljuks.
When you have a complex relationship, you can eventually speak of battles, but they are not the same historical development as the ‘wars’. And the bilateral relationships between the Eastern Romans, the Seljuks, and the Ottomans, were very perplexed. Of course, one can write many books about the topic, but to give you the essence in few paragraphs, I would highlight the following points that almost all the people fail to take into consideration:
a- it would be very wrong to consider the first ‘wars’ between the Rum Sultanate and the Eastern Roman Empire as undertaken by armies manned by ethnically different soldiers; whereas this is certainly valid for the Battle of Malazgirt (Manzikert; 1071), we have to take into account that the said battle was only a very early event. Later, in various battles between the Sultanate and the Empire, there were Seljuk Turkmen and Eastern Romans, who had just become Muslims, fighting together against the imperial army and the Christian Eastern Romans. This reality was repeated dozens of times during the 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th c. (with Eastern Romans and Seljuks and later with Ottomans).
b- the previous point pales compared to this one: only seven (7) years after the Battle of Malazgirt, the young Eastern Roman Emperor Michael VII Doukas (reigned: 1071-1078) asked the help of Suleiman ibn Qutalmish (reigned: 1077-1086; سلیمان بن قتلمش) against the 76-year old, but very influential administrator of a major Eastern Roman ‘theme’ {(administrative division), namely the theme ‘Anatolikon’ (around Ikonion / Konya)}, Nicephorus Botaneiates (1002-1081; reigned after 1078), who had launched an attempt to overthrow the emperor. When Suleiman encountered the small army of Nicephorus, he could win over them, but finally accepted the old man’s proposal and supported him against the emperor. This marked a critical change in the governance of the Anatolian provinces, because Nicephorus’ rise to the throne of Constantinople was a real victory for the Seljuks, who were allowed to settle in the region around Nicaea/Iznik, and a consolidation for the Sultanate of Rum that was established only three years earlier.
Suleiman ibn Qutalmish, Konya
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c- contrarily to what many may think, Suleiman was not an enemy but a friend of the Eastern Romans; he treated Christianity and Islam on an equal footing. His concern was to expand against the Haleb (Aleppo) Turkmen Muslim rulers; this shows that people and states in Anatolia were not organized around sectarian lines, in striking opposition to what modern pseudo-historians pretend in order to adjust History to their filthy interests. Unfortunately, when the emir of Haleb asked urgently the help of the Seljuk emir of Damascus Tutush I (Abu Sa’id Taj al-Dawla Tutush; reigned as emir: 1078- 1092 and as sultan: 1092-1094; أبو سعيد تاج الدولة تتش السلجوقي), Suleiman ibn Qutalmish was abandoned by his soldiers and killed in the battle of Ayn Salm (1086) – by a Seljuk, not an Eastern Roman hand. Similar events took place repeatedly in Anatolia.
d- reversely, Suleiman ibn Qutalmish’s son Kilij Arslan I, held captive in Isfahan after the battle of Ayn Salm, was released after the death of the Great Seljuk Malik Shah I in 1092, returned to Iznik, struck an alliance with Alexios I Komnenos (1057-1118; reigned after 1081; Αλέξιος Κομνηνός), and to please the Eastern Romans, joyfully slaughtered his father-in-law Çaka Bey (reigned: 1081-1093; Tzachas/Τζαχάς), who had ruled Smyrna/Izmir, after having first had good relations with Constantinople, up to the point of being promoted to protonobilissimus (Eastern Roman dignitary)!
This means that after the arrival of the Seljuks in Anatolia, there is no Seljuk History and there is no Eastern Roman History; there is Anatolian History and it has nothing to do with either ethnic origin or religion.
e- the aforementioned few points describe an undeniable reality: there is no ethnic difference and there is no religious difference; Eastern Romans, Turkmen, Muslims and Christians viewed one another at those days very differently from the way today’s stupidly fanaticized Turks and ‘Greeks’ view each other now through the distorting lenses of the ‘political islam’, chauvinism, and other Western ideologies produced by the colonial powers and projected onto numerous targeted nations. The differences were mainly of spiritual nature, and that is why it was normal that some Muslims and some Christians allied with one another against other Muslims and other Christians.
f- you are right calling the various battles between some Eastern Romans and some Ottomans a ‘civil war’, but the reality is far deeper than that. Almost half of all the mothers of the Ottoman sultans were of Eastern Roman origin; but you should not view this historical fact through modern ‘nationalistic’ lenses! Being Eastern Roman does not mean agreeing with one emperor; even more so, because many times, the Seljuk and the Ottoman armies had numerous Eastern Roman soldiers among their ranks. Who is therefore entitled to point out who the ‘traitor’ is? The Eastern Roman soldier, who fought with Mehmet II, or Constantine XI Palaiologos?
There are no responses to questions like this; History is never unilateral, except for sectarian idiots who want to adjust with their stupid beliefs. Actually, theoretical questions similar to the previous one can be formulated about hundreds of analogous events that took place during no less than 400 years (1071-1461: the Fall of Trabzon). There is no Ottoman History without continuous references to the Eastern Roman History; this is so for a very simple and good reason. The Ottoman Sultanate undeniably contained sizeable populations of Eastern Roman origin, who used to view their acceptance of Islam as the correct option for all the Eastern Romans. The Ottoman sultans did not function as either Turkmen chieftains or Muslim lunatics; after a certain point, without understanding it, they viewed themselves as the proper continuation of the Eastern Roman Emperors. And after 1453, they were all named Qaysar-i Rum.
g- there is no ethnic/national dimension in all the fights and the battles that occurred from the late 11th until the late 15th c. in Anatolia and Balkans. In many cases, several young men from the same Anatolian city or town were fighting with the Eastern Roman army and other young men were among the ranks of the Seljuk (and later Ottoman) army. More importantly, the 11th–15th c. Anatolian beyliks were so many that the Ottomans fought more often against other Turkmen than with the Eastern Roman armies. And there is no religious aspect in those clashes and wars, except first, the explicit denunciation of the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate by the Anatolian Eastern Romans (11th–12th c.) and second, the post-1204 division of the Eastern Romans into two, Anti-Union (Anthenotikoi) and Unionists (Enotikoi), factions. The Anti-Union (or ‘Anthenotikoi’) Eastern Romans were all those, who rejected the union of the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate with the pseudo-Christian papacy of Rome; they willingly supported the Seljuks and the Ottomans, although they were Christian Orthodox.
h- until as late as 1925, in villages of the province Aksaray-Gelveri (Cappadocia), the same building was used as mosque on Fridays and as church on Sundays. Today’s Turks are in reality an amalgamation of Eastern Romans and Turkmen. And Modern Greeks are fake Greeks, totally unrelated to the so-called Ancient Greeks, who were disparate tribes (Achaeans, Ionians, Aeolians, Danaans, Cadmeans, etc.) constantly fighting one upon the other; all the inhabitants of Greece are Eastern Romans (Rumlar/Ρωμιοί), who lost their identity and were ridiculously named ‘Hellenes’, which consisted in a derogatory, filthy and disreputable appellation according to the standards of the Christian Orthodox Eastern Romans, because ‘Hellenes’ meant simply ‘corrupted idolatrous and polytheistic pedophiles, prostitutes, homosexuals, and anomalous disbelievers indulging in sexual orgies in their filthy temples’.
i- the historical falsifications and the nationalistic distortions that are carried out in modern historiography produce a real paroxysm among uneducated masses and ignorant people. The famous battle of Manzikert (1071) is a good example in this regard. In today’s Turkey with its misplaced historical narrative, this event is viewed as a Turkish victory over the Greeks and as a Muslim triumph over the Orthodox Christians. And in today’s Greece with its sick anti-Turkish racism and chauvinism, the same event is considered as a heinous defeat of the Greeks and a serious setback of Orthodox Christianity.
All these views and considerations are totally wrong;
1- Manzikert was not a Turkish victory but an Iranian victory;
2- Manzikert was not a Muslim triumph over Orthodox Christians, because Muslims and Orthodox Christians coexisted peacefully in Anatolia; more importantly, the Orthodox Christians did not consist in just one group; had been divided among themselves because of Iconoclasm and Paulicianism for hundreds of years; that is why many of them willingly sided with the Muslim Seljuks;
3- Manzikert was not Greek defeat, because no Greek soldiers fought there; the armies of Romanos IV Diogenes (1030-1071; reigned after 1067) consisted of Eastern Romans and their king was known to all as ‘King of Romans’ (Βασιλεύς Ρωμαίων / Imperator Romanorum – a title that belongs exclusively to Constantinopolitan rulers). There were no Greeks anymore in the 11th c.; and
4- Manzikert was not a serious setback of Orthodox Christianity, because the true setbacks of Orthodox Christianity were mainly the following six events:
-752 CE: Roman rejection of the need for Eastern Roman emperor’s approval for the consecration of the popes of Rome (instituted by Justinian in 537 CE);
-800 CE: Blasphemous Roman recognition of the pseudo-Christian chieftain Charlemagne as ‘holy Roman emperor’;
-869 CE: First Schism (following the excommunication of pope Nicholas I;
-1054 CE: Great Schism (culmination of the Antichristian papal deviation);
-1095 CE: Launching of the Crusades – a long prepared papal project against mainly the Eastern Roman Empire; in fact, the pope of Rome wanted to prevent the Eastern Roman emperor from reconquering Jerusalem from the ailing Abbasid Caliphate; and
-1204 CE: Sack of Constantinople by the Antichristian soldiers of the Fourth Crusade.
As you see, there is no real setback suffered by Orthodox Christianity to be credited to Muslims; the really Antichristian force that destroyed the Eastern Roman Empire was the pope of Rome.
In fact, Alp Arslan’s victory in Manzikert was not a Turkish victory, because Alp Arslan’s mentor, educational master, spiritual guide, and royal counselor was Nizam al Mulk (1018-1092; نظامالملک/known with his regular name in his early age: Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi), the most important socio-educational reformer, Muslim theorist of Governance, and statesman of the Islamic times. Iranian of noble descent, Nizam al Mulk was not only an erudite scholar but also a brave fighter, who accompanied Alp Arslan in almost all his battles. He had even scheduled to be present in the battle of Manzikert, but he had to supervise the transportation of valuable items to Isfahan. Not only Alp Arslan owed his position to Nizam al Mulk (who helped him win over his cousin Kutalmish for the succession of Tughril in 1064), but all the Seljuks were culturally, educationally and intellectually Iranized. In fact, to describe it in its most accurate dimensions, the battle of Manzikert was the most decisive or, if you want, the terminal Iranian victory over the Roman Empire. It was the final Iranian revenge over Emperor Heraclius’ victory over the Sassanid Emperor Khusraw (Chosroes) II Parviz in 628 CE.
The assassination of Nizam al Mulk from an Isma’ili manuscript of the 14th c.
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So, who takes a benefit from today’s Turks’ and Greeks’ inability to see this event without the distorting lenses of the modern Western historiography? Certainly those who want to keep them always divided and plunged in misunderstanding, conflicts, and useless competition in arms.
Another typical example of misinterpreted fact by both parts (Turks and Greeks) of the same nation is the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Last year, I published this article about the topic, rectifying the associated misperceptions and silly narratives: https://www.academia.edu/43199538/29_May_1453_The_most_Useless_Ottoman_Victory
j- beyond the aforementioned points, there is one more reason you find it difficult to accept that Modern Turkey’s historical narrative has to encompass Justinian and the Eastern Roman Empire. This is a methodological trouble of generalized dimensions; it concerns all fields of modern historiography. It is associated with politics and the prevailing socio-educational trends. It is not particular to Turkology, Medieval and Modern History, Orientalism or Classics. It is a vast issue and I can only mention it here. Quite unfortunately, modern scholars write a history of states and elites, and not a history of peoples and cultures. This generates enormous confusion among the readers, as it consists in a monstrous distortion in and by itself. One can attest it on many occasions. This affects enormously the selection of basic points and elements for the establishment of the historical narrative in every country, thus triggering an enormous historical misconception.
To give you an example, the misrepresentation of the Roman Empire in the early imperial times is disastrous; whereas the entire empire was flooded with Oriental cults and religions, mysteries and philosophies, today’s colonial historians still write a totally fake narrative, detailing the deeds and the texts of the Roman elite, senators, philosophers and poets, instead of revealing in public the entirely Oriental beliefs of the average people of the empire. The same style impacts scholars focusing on the relationships between the Eastern Romans, the Seljuks and the Ottomans; their texts revolve around persons, elites, and institutions. The Eastern Romans and the Turkmen as people, culture and popular religion are left aside. That’s why their narrative is unrepresentative and misleading.
F. Why Kemal Ataturk wisely shut the door of Turkey on the Ugly Face of Enver Pasha
Sixth, there is now only one point to further discuss; you asked me the following question: “why do you renounce pan-Turkish in full when the union with Azerbaijan would be fairly feasible”? Thank you for your comment, which helped me further clarify my position and present my approach to the topic!
I believe that today there is an enormous confusion made around this topic; Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanianism are not ideologies or theories that lead people to simply cooperate at an international level; they mainly involve a false, nationalistic reading of Turanian History whereby politics eliminates sound argumentation and objective conclusion. This causes a serious trouble because the true conclusions of History are disregarded.
When it comes to bilateral partnership, regional coordination, and international cooperation, every objective observer would certainly agree with these options, under conditions of good governance, reciprocal respect, under multilateral sincerity.
Unfortunately, the above approach is not good enough for the Pan-Turkists and the Pan-Turanianists; these two movements have been known historically for their support for a definite fusion of all Turkic or Turanian populations into one state. During the 19th and the early 20th c., there were many activists, officers, scholars, intellectuals, theoreticians, historians, and even sheikhs, who fought incessantly and bravely, encountered numerous obstacles, and faced terrible persecution, while trying to promote one of these two movements. I wrote about them in two relatively recent publications of mine:
Many among the Jadid intellectuals in Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union were all-committed to the noble but naïve cause of Pan-Turkism or Pan-Turanianism; this led them at times to extreme reactions, which were quite futile. Personally, I believe that they would be more realistic and they would mark greater success, if they attempted the establishment of one national state, following the example of Kemal Ataturk. In any case, there are major arguments that function as stumbling blocks in front of your eyes:
a- Turkic or Turanian peoples, tribes and clans always fought one upon another.
This omnipresent and ubiquitous trait constitutes a major historical argument, which truly obliterates all the pleas and all the appeals of those who are fervently (but thoughtlessly) in favor of just one Pan-Turkic or Pan-Turanian state; throughout History there has never been a moment (let alone period) in which all the Turkic or Turanian people lived together in one realm. Even more crucially, there has never been the desire for it! Certainly the vast empire of Genghis Khan (Temüjin; 1162-1227) encompassed most of the world’s Turkic or Turanian nations, but still there were several Turkic or Turanian states, peoples or elites that were left out. At those days, the northern part of what is now called India, along with most of today’s Pakistan’s territory, belonged to the Mamluk dynasty of Delhi Sultanate (1206-1290); being Muslim, they did not want to belong to a Buddhist-Tengrist realm.
But who were these Mamluks and who were the inhabitants of that Muslim state? They were Turanians, who dissolved the Ghurid Sultanate (879-1215) that had supplanted the Ghaznavid Sultanate (977-1186); the Ghurids were of Iranian origin, but the Ghaznavids were also Turanians.
The Mamluks of the Delhi Sultanate were unrelated to those who ruled Egypt (1250-1517), but as you know well, all of them were the product of the same historical development; Turkic or Turanian soldiers who accepted Islam, pledged an oath to the caliph of Baghdad and then ruled an entire land in his name, being however absolute rulers of their territories. In fact, Mamluk soldiers were the force that truly controlled Egypt (: Masr) at the times of the Ayyubid dynasty (1171-1260), the Fatimid Caliphate (909-1171; the Fatimids invaded Egypt in 969), the Ikhshidid dynasty (935-969), the Abbasid interregnum in Egypt (905-935), and the Tulunid dynasty (868-905). Ibn Tulun was a valiant Turkic or Turanian soldier.
All these Mamluk soldiers and emirs, pretty much like the Zengid dynasty of Damascus (1127-1250), the Rum Seljuks, the Buddhist and Nestorian Qara Khitai (1124-1218; 喀喇契丹) of Balasagun (in today’s Kyrgyzstan), the Kara-Khanid (قراخانیان/喀喇汗國) Khanate (840-1212) of Afrasiab (Samarqand), and more significantly the Khwarazmian (خوارزمشاهیان) Empire (1077-1231) of Konye-Urgench (in today’s Turkmenistan; the site is unrelated to Urgench in Uzbekistan) were of Turkic and/or Turanian origin. The same is also valid for the Kimek–Kipchak confederation (880-1200) and the Volga-Bulgaria (630-1240). And all of them were in constant fight among themselves before being attacked and destroyed by Genghis Khan. Then, what do these famous, so-called Mongol (in reality: Turanian), invasions consist in and how do we interpret them?
The Battle of Vâliyân (1221) and the collapse of the Khwarazmian Empire (from a manuscript of Rashid al-Din’s Jami’ al-Tawarikh) at the hands of the Mongols
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In reality, all these hostilities were Turanian civil wars and we have to admit that the most constant phenomenon in the History of Asia has been a war between Turkic or Turanian nations. The ferocity of an attack undertaken by a Turanian against another Turanian surpasses every brutality recorded in cases of civil war worldwide. With the few last paragraphs, I attempted to make a brief sketch of intra-Turanian conflicts before the Ottomans and to highlight the fact that historically, prior to the notorious 19th c. Great Game, there had never been recorded any attempt to gather all Turks or Turanians within the same state or empire. As you know, from Eastern Siberia Turks migrated either to the West (Central Asia, Europe, Iran, India, Anatolia, Syria, Egypt and North Africa) or to the South (China); the reasons for the intestine wars of the Turanians may vary and can be discussed in congresses, lectures, periodicals, books and encyclopedias, but they constitute an undeniable fact and a heavy heritage that has cast a long shadow over all modern Turanian nations. And Kemal Ataturk saw this shadow!
I guess that the last six centuries are better known to you; shall we really discuss the topic further? Who was right and who was wrong? Timur or Sultan Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Shah Tughluq, in the battle of Delhi (1398) – when Timur’s flaming camels spread panic among Tughluq’s elephants and secured a victory for the greatest offspring of Genghis Khan? Timur (Tamerlane) or Bayezid I, in Ankara (1402)? Ismail Safevi or Muhammad Shaybani, in the battle of Marv (1510)? Babur (the founder of the Mughal dynasty) or the Uzbeks of the Bukhara Khanate, in the battle of Ab Darrah Pass? Selim I or Ismail Safevi, in Chaldiran (1514)? Suleiman the Magnificent or Shah Tahmasp, in the war of 1532–1555? Nader Shah Afshar or Mahmud I, in the war of 1743–1746?
Selim I (above); Ismail Safevi (below)
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If I insist on this, it is because I understand that, when you will put Uzbeks, Turks, Turkmen and others within the same state, it will explode in a disastrous manner, because all these nations, despite their undeniable common origin, have followed different paths throughout History. Consequently, they cherish different values, varied traditions, and diverse legends, heroes and historical paradigms. There are even situations of animosity; Kazakhs dislike Uighurs, Turkmen dislike Kazakhs, Uzbeks dislike Turkmen, and so on; if I continue on this style, I can fill an entire page. Here, you will find some interesting points: https://stanugeniem.ru/en/physical-culture/shtat-tehas-chimkentskie-eto-chto-osobyi-subetnos-i-pochemu-ih-ne/
That’s why I believe that Kemal Ataturk was wise enough to shut the door of Turkey on the ugly face of Enver Pasha. So, a first point is the very divergent past that will inevitably trigger discord among all these nations, if one day their governments become foolish enough to merge them in one country / state.
b- Countries with unresolved problems gain nothing when merging with others.
There is a second point; it is clear enough to show that a union of even (or only) two Turkic states may appear as an oxymoron. Actually, your suggestion offered me this perspective; you believe that a union between Turkey and Azerbaijan is “fairly feasible”. Great! Then, let us assume that this union is effectuated next year! I am therefore led to believe that the wonderful state that starts in Izmir or Edirne and ends in Baku is an exemplary structure. Perfect! Then, you certainly suggest that, in this merged state or confederation, Turkish will be the language of primary and secondary education in one part of the territory and Azeri will be used in the rest of the country. Superb! Then, why will Kurmanji, Zaza, Arabic, and Suryani (Syriac Aramaic) not be used in the primary and secondary education of provinces where these languages are the native tongue of the local populations? Why do we have to believe that Azeri is more of a language than the other aforementioned languages?
I don’t open this vast discussion and I don’t have the intention to herewith explain why something that was not a problem at the time of Kemal Ataturk became a trouble after 1938; it is certainly a major issue that concerns the entire country. But the problem is neither linguistic nor educational; it is governmental, as it pertains to the system of governance. Turkey is perfect only with the Constitution of 1924. With the changes made after Kemal Ataturk’s death, all the problems appeared – only as a result of those idiotic and catastrophic changes that were subtly suggested by the worst enemies of the mankind, i.e. England, France, America and their allies. As I said, the entire linguistic/educational issue cannot be discussed within the scope of the present article; however, at this point, I have to shed more light on this second troublesome dimension of your suggestion, by asking the following:
– How a country that apparently has unsolved issues can possibly intend to ‘export’ its model to others and incorporate other nations?
A country with a misplaced historical narrative will only lose if it merges with another country, even if the outright majority of both countries enthusiastically support the confederation in a referendum.
– Why?
– Because two blind people on the slope of a mountain, when making an alliance, will fall together in the precipice!
It goes without saying: a ‘union of ignorance’ does not make a national strength. And I can give you an example: it is not only Turkey that has a misplaced historical narrative. Azerbaijan too has a very poor, weak and incomplete historical narrative. At times, Baku gives the impression that it exists only as ‘the anti-Armenian country in Caucasus’. This unidimensional portrait can turn out to be a disaster. Back in 2009, I wrote about that, demonstrating from where the National History of Azerbaijan must start: from Ancient Atropatene, which was the holiest province of Ancient Iran and the land of the earliest settled Turanians in the region.
Ismail Safevi fighting in 1508 against the last remnants of the Akkoyunlu
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In fact, the correct historical narrative of Azerbaijan would not be either a Pan-Turkic or Pan-Turanian absurdity or an Islamist idiocy. It would also be catastrophic for Baku to turn to a modern nationalist version and attempt merely the ‘liberation’ of South Azerbaijan. This would be tantamount to full compliance with the vicious Western European – North American ideological garbage which was geared only to fool Third World idiots. To creatively assess its historical heritage, inventively apply its cultural integrity, and actively invigorate its national identity, Azerbaijan must reappear as it has always been: the spiritual high place and holy land of the Iranian plateau. This would make of the Azeris the standard-bearers of Iran.
Consequently, all the Azeris will have to view the entire historical Iran as their land – exactly in the way Ismail Safevi saw Iran from Tabriz, his capital. This means that the Azeris have to challenge both fake versions of Modern Iran that the English and the French Orientalists fabricated in order to maliciously turn a marvelous empire into a world pariah useful to manipulate according to their own interests: the anti-imperial, nationalistic monarchy of the Pahlavi and the anti-Iranian, pseudo-Shia fallacy of the Wilayat-e Faqih and the pathetic Ayatollahs. The only true victory for the Azeris will be to go beyond the colonial tricks and reconstitute the Safavid state. Then, certainly, along with the Turks of Anatolia, they will be able to start the quest for the Qizilbash Anatolian-Iranian spirituality, moral, popular religion, moral and legends. But this quest will be totally deprived of politics and theology – exactly as Kemal Ataturk demonstrated before one century.
c- Trying to unite few small countries, you lose the greater picture and the best chance!
Last, your question offers me one more opportunity to demonstrate the impossibility or rather the destructiveness of your approach, namely what you call “the union with Azerbaijan”, which “would be fairly feasible”. I am afraid that, trying to achieve the minimal, you lose the maximal.
Previously, I spoke about Azerbaijan and the Azeris of South Azerbaijan, in Iran. But then, what do all these brilliant Pan-Turkist and Pan-Turanian minds think about the South Turkmenistan (i.e. NE Iran), which is also known widely as Turkmen Sahra (ترکمن صحرا / Türkmen Sahra)? I guess that they think nothing else except for trivial deals, useless secessions, and destructive wars; of course, if Iranians and Turanians were two truly different nations, this approach would certainly make sense; but are they? Or is it rather a matter of great historical distortion carried out by the evil colonial powers and projected everywhere onto the unsuspecting victims?
And if we further assume that South Azeris and South Turkmen inhabit the northern part of Iran and make the majority of the local population and if we deduce that territorial continuity can be possibly established among Turkey, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, why should we then leave out of the borders of the multinational state the Turkic nation of the Qashqais, who live in Fars, the imperial center of Iran?
This situation should rather ring the bell to us, showing clearly that we have engaged in the wrong path. It would be meaningless to continue on the same path (secession). And it would be equally senseless, heinous and disastrous to devise the division of Iran. Such an attempt would immediately turn the entire project from benevolent to malevolent and from ‘historical rectification’ to historical distortion. So, where is the mistake in all this? Apparently, every form of nationalism, as a vicious modern Western political invention, leads only to wars due to the deliberate historical distortions and the subsequent misrepresentations of the past. The initial mistake would therefore be an erroneous reading of History through distorting nationalistic (i.e. political) lenses. There cannot be one truthful point in politics; everything contained in or emanating from politics is devilish and disastrous. You cannot be moral and you cannot be faithful (in any religion), when your mind and heart are contaminated with politics.
Iran is perfect, when it is the true, historical Iran, as it has been from the Achaemenid era to the Sassanid period and further on, through the Islamic times, involving the Buyids, the Samanids, the Great Seljuks, the Ilkhanids, the Safavids, as well as the Afshar and the Qajar dynasties. Before and after the arrival of Islam, Iran constituted the best vision and the noblest implementation of the Universal Empire; there were always Turanians and Iranians in Iran. They lived together in peace, and they were all bilingual or rather multilingual; this is the historical truth, which makes the evil and uncivilized cannibals of England, France, Israel and America feel how inferior they are when compared to a civilized nation. This detrimental comparison incites them to show their evil and criminal face, while also instigating in them the need to devise tricks and forgeries in order to plunge all these highly civilized peoples into divisions, strives and wars.
Every word written by an Anglo-Saxon scholar about Iran and Turan is a poisonous lie; people must get liberated from the Western academic cholera and rediscover the historical truth. In reality, since the Achaemenid times and even before, Turanians and Iranians have been one nation with the Turanian languages being mainly used for spiritual and military purposes, whereas the Iranian languages were spoken and written for religious, literary and imperial purposes. During the Islamic times in Iran, almost all the scientists, the historians and the theologians wrote in Arabic, the poets composed epics and other types of poetry in Farsi, whereas the military officers and the soldiers communicated in Turanian languages, notably Chagatai, Turkmen or Azeri.
This situation gradually changed to some extent, thanks to illustrious people like Mahmud al Kashgari (1005-1102), Ahmed Yasavi (1093-1166), and Yunus Emre (1238-1328). All the same, Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209), the national poet of the Azeris, laughed at the idea of writing poetry in a Turkic language, i.e. his own mother tongue; and this reflects very well the reality about the topic. Three centuries later, Zaher ud-Din Muhammad (ظهير الدين محمد), known mainly as Babur (1483-1530), the great military adventurer, superb strategist, and excellent tactician in the battle field, great-great grandson of Timur, and founder of the Mughal dynasty of South Asia, wrote his famous Babur-nameh (بابر نامہ /Book of Babur; a historical text written in the form of autobiography) in Chagatai Turkic.
Reversely, his grandson, Emperor Akbar the Great (1542-1605; reigned after 1556 / Jalal ud-Din abu’l Fath Muhammad; جلال الدين أبو الفتح محمد أكبر), found it propitious to have the historical text translated into Farsi. This attitude shows clearly that the true Turanians, those who were not affected by the Satanic Anglo-Saxon propaganda like today’s idiotic Pan-Turkists and Pan-Turanianists, cherished very much Farsi and felt it as theirs; Akbar’s attitude reflects very well the bilingual nature of all Turanians, and their genuine love of Farsi.
And, as you know very well, all Ottoman sultans, as genuinely multilingual rulers, were fluent in Farsi, which was the cultural language of the Ottoman Empire. And Mehmet II uttered verses (not of the Quran but) of the great Iranian poet Saadi (1210-1292; سعدی; his full name was: ابومحمّد مصلحالدین بن عبدالله شیرازی / Abu Muhammad Mosleh ud-Din bin Abdullah Shirazi) in Farsi, when entering the palace of the Eastern Roman emperors in Constantinople on 29th May 1453:
The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars;
the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.
Saadi
So, you can now understand that all the historical narratives of Iran and all the Turkic or Turanian states are wrong. Iran and Turan are one. I have written a book on the topic and I need to elaborate the last chapters before publishing it; however, I have already pre-published three chapters. You can find them here:
Now, the complex historical relationship between Iran and Turan is not a unique case in Asia; neither is it a matter or an issue confined only to the member-states of the Organization of Turkic States (Türk Devletleri Teşkilatı) and Iran. A similar situation exists also between these states and Russia. You may perhaps imagine that, by saying this, I mean the Turkic nations that are currently living in the Russian Federation. But that is wrong, although I certainly don’t deny the fact that the Tatars of Kazan, the Tatars of Crimea, the Chuvash, the Kymyks, the Kalmyks, the Nogais, the Bashkirs (of Bashkortostan), the Tuvans, the Yakuts, the Altaians, the Balkars, and the Khakas are all Turkic-Turanian people with great traditions, literature, culture, and history.
However, I believe that it would be catastrophic for any supporter of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanianism to imagine that it would be effective, correct and reasonable to demand the national independence or the secession of these nations from Russia; this has nothing to do with the military strength of Russia. First of all, let me point out that, thanks to the balanced system of governance in Russia, the central control in Moscow is fully able to guarantee the survival, the national dignity, the cultural integrity, the progress and the prosperity of all these nations within their traditional cultural and socio-behavioral, spiritual and moral, educational and religious context that they have maintained as part of their ancestral heritage. Every naïve apologist of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Turanianism, who would stupidly call for ‘independence’ and ‘secession’ of any of these nations, would in reality expose them to terrible adversities and malignant persecution. He would truly be their enemy.
In such a case, the silly political pretext of a delusional ‘national sovereignty’ would become the alibi for these nations’ enslavement to the perfidious, criminal, and terrorist countries of the West; it is in exactly the same manner that Slovenia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Estonia and many other small Eastern European nations have been held captive of the inhuman gangsters who rule the colonial countries of Western Europe and North America. If by misfortune they happen to follow this disastrous and nefarious example, all the Tatars, the Bashkirs, the Chuvash, the Altaians and the other Turkic nations of the Russian Federation will be forced to accept the monstrous, tyrannical and absolutely lawless laws of the Western countries and thus shamelessly legalize fornication, adultery, homosexual marriages, transgenderism, gender-free education, and every sort of pan-sexist contamination and evilness. This means clearly that, by gaining a fake independence, these nations will be enslaved in a most shameful manner, and then this calamitous development will end up with their irreversible, spiritual and cultural, genocide.
For any Pan-Turkist and Pan-Turanianist theorist or activist, the aforementioned procedure constitutes a disastrous sectarian approach; in other words, it is a non-option. However, at this point, things do not end, but become the spark of a new start. Similarly with many other sectors of modern historiography, Russian History has been tampered with by Western colonial academics and diplomats, intellectuals and agents, who incessantly attempted to drag Imperial Russia into the Western evilness, inhumanity and sin. For many long centuries, the villainous Freemasons of England and France, the fanatic Protestants of Germany, and the egregious Jesuits of Rome attempted to systematically infiltrate Russia, heinously corrupt Orthodox Christianity, morally – socio-behaviorally contaminate the average Russian people, and systematically distort the Russian historical narrative. The multifaceted effort started already before the reign of Peter the Great, and it was only accentuated over the past three centuries. The end result is that most of the Russians have today a fully distorted idea about their past; down to our days, Russians consider the so-called Mongol invasions as a period unrelated to their past. This is not only very wrong, but also nationally and regionally disastrous.
However, there were always Turkic and Turanian nations that existed in the territory of today’s Russia; Turanians antedate Slavs and Islam was diffused in the present territory of Russia before Christianity. Volga Bulgaria accepted Islam several decades before Kievan Rus embraced Christianity. In fact, Russian History is Turanian History, and Russians are a Turanian nation; Moscow was a Muslim city and there was a mosque inside the Kremlin. The divisions of the Golden Horde created the collapse of the Turanian Muslim rule across the territory of Russia and Ukraine. Under Ivan III (1440-1505; ruled after 1462), Vasili III (1479-1533; ruled after 1505), and Ivan IV the Terrible (1530-1584; ruled after 1533, being tutored and mentored until 1547), the tiny Muscovite state started expanding; during this process, people were forced to accept Christianity, whereas linguistic-educational Russification was systematically and forcefully undertaken for many centuries.
Then, the state historical dogma of Russian continuity from Kiev to Moscow was proclaimed, only to become later the sacrosanct foundation of the Romanov dynasty; but it is meaningless. The majority of today’s Russian natives descend from Turanian Muslims, who -in different moments- accepted Christianity and were subsequently russified at the linguistic level; but the different religion does not reflect a cultural difference. Today, identifying the Russians as the ethnic and religious descendants of Kievan Rus is a racist distortion of the true historical past of the Russian nation. This approach was already advanced by the Soviet-Russian Orientalist historian Lev Gumilyov (Лев Николаевич Гумилёв; 1912-1992), who disturbed enormously the insidiously fallacious Anglo-Saxon view, approach and narrative; that is why he was deliberately accused for his ‘pan-Asiatic’ viewpoint and his supposedly ‘anti-Semitic’ conclusions {notably as regards the Radhanites (Рахдониты/ الرذنية)}.
It goes without saying that if, in the light of the aforementioned, one develops a racist perception and formulates an absurd demand for the re-Turkification and the re-Islamization of the Russians, the results will be disastrous. This insane approach would surely play into the game of the worst enemies of all the Asiatic nations. On the contrary, really beneficial approaches to all would be the following: historical conceptualization, educational cooperation, governmental coordination, and mutual knowledge and understanding. Russia should be cordially invited as an observer state in the Organization of Turkic States (https://www.turkkon.org/). Russian must become first foreign language in Turkey and Iran; many departments of Slavic Studies and Siberian Archaeology must open in Turkish and Iranian universities.
Similar approach should apply to the relations of Turkey and the other Turkic states with Pakistan and India, as well as with China. It will be for the national security of India and Pakistan to better assess and clearly highlight the Turanian dimension of their historical narrative. However, after Bülent Ecevit studied Sanskrit, how many Turks moved to Pakistan and India to study and explore the historical past, while establishing an academic, intellectual and cultural bridge between the subcontinent and Anatolia? The same is valid for China; the sound Turkic and Turanian approach is not to stupidly protest about the fate of some old Uighur mosques in Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang/新疆). The really difficult task is to extensively study and properly interpret the traditional identification of Turan with China within the Iranian Epic Poetry, which constitutes the best key to understanding the Asiatic historical and cultural unity.
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