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
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:
Few days ago, an Egyptian friend wrote to me and commented on my article ‘Plea for Jean Baptiste Duroselle’s Brilliant Book, Europe: A History of its Peoples’:
I. How Simple People can utterly destroy today’s World
II. Jean Baptiste Duroselle and Yahya Ibn Zakariya
III. Lassalian Monks and Schools
IV. Western European Elites hide their Manichaean Nature and Evil Faith
V. “Gods” do not accept Multipolar Worlds!
VI. A Greek World Leader and False Messiah: One of the several Antichrists to come
VII. The Duroselle Affair in Greece, and I
I. How Simple People can utterly destroy today’s World
His pessimistic viewpoint forced me to write a rather long response, because it is an essential issue of Moral and a supreme moral obligation for anyone not to associate himself with the injustice and the lawlessness of today’s world, and even more so, to do all that it takes to dissociate himself from the surrounding environment, to reject it and to denounce it as inhuman, impermissible and subject to monstrous, terminal annihilation.
It is only due to the prevailing worldwide, overwhelming and compact materialism, evolutionism and relativism that people lost their faith and cannot duly assess the eventually great spiritual power of the wish and of the negative wish. A faithless person that does not truly believe in the spiritual world cannot bring forth results in either wishes or negative wishes; I have to point out that I fully distinguish between negative wish and curse. In the latter case, one person invokes something harmful to someone, whereas in the former case, one demands forcefully that a negative development be averted or cancelled. Although a curse may be at times morally imposed to be uttered, a negative wish is essential to be thunderously expressed every time one person encounters a case of injustice, a wrongdoing, evilness, and any sort of falsehood, deceit, perfidy, scheme, chicanery or lie.
Today’s faithless Muslims, Christians, Confucians, Taoists, Hindus, Buddhists and others have lost real faith in the spiritual, ‘supernatural’, world. They stupidly believe only in diverse stories and unimportant narratives, which -in spite of their possible veracity- do not constitute an inherent part of the true religion; their faith to God is only nominal. The ensuing catastrophic consequences lead to indiscriminate feelings of inefficiency, impotency and, even worse, self-depreciation. Due to this situation, they become effectively irreligious, because they practice their religion only mechanically (imitating ancestors) or hypocritically (to show to the society that they are faithful); but this is utter disbelief. What follows this encumbering situation is spiritual apathy; this involves also emotional indifference, and full purposelessness in life. These people are characterized by moral depravity indeed, not in the sense of being genuinely corrupt, but for not reacting, for keeping silent, and for tolerating the wrongdoing.
A positive wish can do wonders for many; and a negative wish has the power to prevent many evil acts and ominous developments from happening. Virtually any taciturn or vociferous person, who has strong faith, can express formidable negative wishes and bring forth results. This actually happens, but today’s idiotic materialists simply cannot ‘see’ or understand it. A very well focalized negative wish cancels everything; from a simple governmental act to an assassination attempt to a war. And I can conclude that the chaotic situation in which all the powerful and evil lobbies of today’s world find themselves, failing to achieve what they intend, has much to do with highly synchronized negative wishes that resolutely cancel the Satanic plans of all the ‘Christian’, ‘Jewish’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Hindu’, ‘Buddhist’, ‘Taoist’, ‘Confucian’, ‘Shinto’ or other governments, which sooner or later will disappear in utmost ruination.
In fact, all the forthcoming disasters come -also- from the negative wishes expressed in our world by people who -thanks to their moral standards and irrespective of their religion- fully understand that this world is impermissible to exist and has therefore to vanish in monstrous extermination. All negative wishes expressed against today’s lawless world are the path of the few to the Paradise; and every sort of reluctance, every form of indifference, and every aspect of apathy toward today’s criminal governments, Satanic presidents, demonic prime ministers, and other anomalous magistrates open the Gates of the Hell to all the idiots who think that Eternal Life can possibly hinge on meaningless cults hypocritically performed just to ensure later ‘reward’.
Quite unfortunately for the present, diabolical but perishing world’s establishment, God is not as malleable and as stupid as they delusionally imagine He is; and I am not referring to the ‘Demiurge’….
You can herewith find my friend’s comment and my lengthy response.
— A friend’s comment about my Plea for J. B. Duroselle’s Book —
Very interesting story about this guy Jean Baptiste! His name reminded me of my college: College St. Jean Baptiste De La Salle in Bab El Louk, then Khoronfich, then in Daher…
This shows how Europeans are like the other crooks, how they plan things in advance, and they pass them on.
What do we have in our hands to change things, except to write and express our views, without any results…
——————– My response ——————
Dear Awadallah,
Thank you for your response, which so well shows that you understand that the Jean Baptiste Duroselle affair (in Greece 1990-1991), although it looks like an ‘internal’ European story (as an indication of the barbaric, ultra-nationalist and paranoid character of the basically uneducated and absolutely uncultured Greek society), has indeed wider implications. That is true.
II. Jean Baptiste Duroselle and Yahya Ibn Zakariya
All neighboring states must demonstrate a particular concern when, in a wretched country, people react with such hysteria, every time the lies that they stupidly believe in are overwhelmingly rejected by the world’s leading scholars.
Your email offered me the chance of a flash back and of a self-reappraisal; I will tell you what I mean.
However, let me start with a funny episode of the Greek, absurd and paranoid, reaction (back in 1990-1991) against Duroselle’s book, which is nowadays the cornerstone of all the EU member states’ secondary education — except for the backward trash of Greece where the education manuals are more racist than those in Nazi Germany at the time of Hitler.
In the fever of the anti-Duroselle madness that turned the average Greeks to rabid dogs back in 1989-1991, every famous person felt stupidly obliged to contribute to that mental and intellectual cholera, to promote the local chauvinism, and to speak against Jean Baptiste Duroselle.
The ignorant, uneducated and clownish «poet» Odysseas Elytis wanted to add his childish nonsense to the insults aired against the excellent French academician and his pertinent book. Bear in mind that his fake Nobel Prize was purchased by the Greek government of Constantine Caramanlis with the money of the idiotic average Greek taxpayer! I have to also add that Elytis’ real surname is Alepoudellis, which sounds very low and even derogatory in Greek (as it means «puppy fox» or «fox-relative»), and that is why he changed it (due to his enormous psychological complex of inferiority). By the way, you have to also know, when it comes to the filthy rascal Elytis, that when he found out that his wife had multiple sclerosis, he locked her in a clinic to get rid of her and to enjoy his cursed life with the company of a young prostitute.
So, this stinky trash of Elytis, in order to «prove» (!!!??!!!) that Jean Baptiste Duroselle was wrong for not including events of the otherwise unimportant Ancient Greek History in his comprehensive book of European History, said the following silly sentence: «Duroselle forgot that even his name is Greek»!
This is an allusion to the academician’s two personal names, namely «Jean Baptiste».
Although it appears that the French names originate from the respective Latin names (Ioannes Baptista), and that subsequently the Latin names derive from Ancient Greek, this is simply false.
The conclusion is that Duroselle, when baptized as a Christian, got from his parents the two names ‘Yohannan ha’Matbil’ (Hz. Yahya ibn Zakariya) as personal names in their own language (French). His parents wanted apparently to commemorate the forerunner of the Christian faith.
There is no Greek involvement in this, and surely Yohannan ha’Matbil (Hz. Yahya) did not bother to learn Greek or any other foreign language.
This episode shows clearly that chauvinistic ideas, concepts and thoughts are prevailing in the pseudo-European state of Greece.
III. Lassalian Monks and Schools
This being one point, I have to add that I also know the Cairo-based institution that you attended when a schoolboy.
France is inundated with colleges like the one where you you took secondary education courses in Cairo.
The first of all of them was launched by the saint Jean Baptiste de la Salle himself, when he was in life. The instructors and administrators were members of the religious order that he also initiated.
They are known as Lassalian monks (after «de La Salle»).
IV. Western European Elites hide their Manichaean Nature and Evil Faith
Now about Europe I wrote many articles back in the middle 2000s; I don’t intend to repeat myself. Friends turned the most important of them into a video:
When the good friend of mine, who expressed his readiness to make of this article a video, asked me what music to add, I said «undoubtedly Uighur instrumental»! The result was excellent. I really love Uighur instrumental music.
Russian friends turned the slides prepared my friend to be used in the video, and they published my article as a presentation (although it is in English):
No one understands that today’s real centers of power and secret societies, which shape the Western European process, are all Oriental of origin and they simply try to hide their Oriental past and identity by appearing as descendants of the Greeks and the Romans. That’s why they persistently over-magnified the significance of the Roman civilization, they fabricated the myth about Ancient Greece’s supposedly important ancient civilization, and they threw all this filthy stuff to the eyes of stupid and uneducated people worldwide as a smokescreen.
As a matter of fact, there cannot be one Europe (not because the Germans, the Russians, the Italians, the French, and the Spaniards cannot hypothetically cohabitate in a sizeable Confederacy, but) due to the fact that the powerful secret societies that hide in the coulisses, behind the impotent governments, have different plans and divergent projects for Europe.
What average people do not know is that all these groups of power (the Jesuits, the Freemasons and the Zionists) have opposite plans of eschatological and messianic character. In simple terms, this means that all these groups prepare (or rather have already prepared) their own Messiahs, one for each of them, and they intend to launch them in public. Soon, you will see new, very influential statesmen to appear in clash with one another. They will be slandering one another as the Antichrist.
These centers of power existed for thousands of years; they are not new. And they existed mainly for this reason: in order to launch their Messiah (each of them). So, the clash will be ferocious and it will bring devastating disasters. Countries or people do not matter for them. What matters for each of them is their plan (by saying this, I mean its implementation). They will make entire countries disappear. What you saw in Pakistan is nothing. Bangladesh will disappear in one day.
V. “Gods” do not accept Multipolar Worlds!
Putin understood it very correctly and said it openly. What you and I believe about Allah, Islam, the Quran, etc. does not matter to them. These people believe utterly that they are «God». And they behave like that, using their power to destroy the enemy and the enemy’s pawns. One group of them, the Jesuits, has the secret plan of Russia’s Consecration to the Heart of Virgin Mary.
Do you know what this means? This means that the execrable Satanist, i.e. the Anti-Christian pope Francis I, does not consider Russia as a Christian state. He wants to turn it first to a Catholic dependency and then to use it. He tries to mobilize every stupid and idiotic politician anywhere on Earth for this purpose. Stupid and fake Muslim politicians, who have relations with this subordinate of the impending Antichrist (Masih al Dajjal), will lose their countries in a matter of few weeks (when the confrontation will start), because their enemies will manage to take benefit of the developments.
Now, the people who launched European Union (back in the late 40s and the early 50s), like Jean Monnet and all the others, known as founders of the European Union (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_fathers_of_the_European_Union), were opposite to the Jesuits. But they did not protect their project (European Union) well. Then, after the late 1980s, the Jesuits marked a significant comeback.
Duroselle was a close associate of Jean Monnet and a French Freemason. But their plans about Europe included also the split and destruction of Russia (then known as USSR). This became very evident with de Gaulle, who did not say the words «Union soviétique» (or U.R.S.S.) even once. He used to call that state «la Russie». So, de Gaulle spoke about a Europe «de Lisbonne aux Ourals», which means a de facto split of Russia.
Charles de Gaulle and David Ben Gurion
But naive Russians misread this very threatening discourse, by taking it as friendly!!!
Quite unfortunately, guileless Lavrov, like the absolutely idiotic Gorbachev, thinks that de Gaulle meant «one state from the Pacific to the Atlantic».
There could not be worse reading than that. He keeps speaking in a most apologetic manner instead of invading Ukraine in its entirety, and ending the problem once forever. About:
The Russian establishment keeps maintaining useless, fraudulent hopes. They only confuse themselves and endanger their country.
Stephan Kessler, Daniel & Cyrus in Bel’s Temple
Every word uttered by English, Americans, French, Canadians and Australians is a ruse and a fraud.
China makes the same disastrous mistake, speaking about a new multipolar world.
There isn’t going to be any new multipolar world.
The evil, crypto-Manichaean forces that control the Western world, when they will understand that, in their fight against one another, they allowed significant part of force to be obtained by others (Russia, China, India, Brazil, but also Turkey and Iran), will launch suddenly and unexpectedly a nuclear war — not at the scale that most people are afraid, but a nano-nuclear war like what you saw in Beirut.
VI. A Greek World Leader and False Messiah: One of the several Antichrists tocome
Then, there is also a fake Freemasonic lodge that wants to make of Greece a larger state with control over both sides of the Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus – after the Treaty of Sevres.
They don’t hate Turkey and Islam only; they despise Christianity enormously, and they want to bring back the charlatan – pseudo-gods of the Ancient Greeks. They want also to create a phantasmagoric appearance of UFOs and extraterrestrials, who will ‘land’ on Mount Olympus; of course, as you can guess, these will be fake extraterrestrials.
In reality, they will be demons in humanoid form and they will start having sex in the brothel-temples of Ancient Greece that they will entirely rebuild. Every story that you heard about homosexuality, prostitution, sexual orgies, etc. revolves around this project.
For 1600 years, Theater was -thank God- banned among Christians, but with the establishment of Modern Greece, the French and the English started pushing for the return of the old, evil habits.
To fully prepare for the aforementioned, absurd and evil project, they re-introduced Ancient Theater in Modern Greece only in the 1950s, i.e. 130 years after the country became independent. Due to the shameless pseudo-art of Theater, Modern Greeks lost their religion and they indulge in every abomination, being the shame of their Eastern Roman Christian Orthodox ancestors.
This villainous Freemasonic lodge wants to make of Greece the center of the world and their Messiah will be ruling from Crete where enormous treasures are going to be discovered (these Freemasons know the details). This is the whole secret behind the French-Greek alliance. You have a lot to wait in this regard.
מנא מנא תקל ופרסין
VII. The Duroselle Affair in Greece, and I
And for this reason, the duplicitous and evil Western European authorities rapidly covered the scandal «Greece», which exploded around the book of Duroselle.
Few people remember it today, but it is good to bring it to the surface and to show the level of ignorance and the fake education that prevails in that country in which still today private universities are not allowed to open and function.
Do you know why?
– In order not to allow anyone to challenge the tyrannically imposed bogus-historical dogma of Hellenism.
«Hellenism» is worse than Nazism. Unfortunately, «Hellenism» is merely the filthy, disreputable showcase; but in the abominable backstage, you have an exorbitantly disproportionate dose of sexual anomalies among the evil spirits that the ignorant and uneducated Ancient Greeks accepted as possibly ‘gods’! All to the glory of Satan whose Ancient Greek name was Zeus!
Many friends asked me why I defended Duroselle, although my worldview is different and my approach to European History is very divergent from his.
I responded that their evaluation is correct, but they basically misunderstood me, if they thought -even for a moment- that knowledge is a value for me. Knowledge is never a value. In the past, wisdom was accepted by the spiritually and intellectually superior as the real value. Ultimately, wisdom means accurate evaluation, pertinent judgment, and moral utilization of knowledge. There is no wisdom without Moral, and there is no Moral without Spirituality.
What are then the proper criteria of evaluation and the standards of investigation?
Nothing else except those stated clearly by the Moral.
Without Moral there is no religion, there is no faith, and spirituality ends up in black magic.
Revisiting these days the Duroselle affair and getting a brief retrospective view on it, I noticed how much it helped me.
In younger age, I had never thought to live in Greece; since my childhood, my future was «set» in the regions, lands and cities that my grandparents narrated to me. I then can say that, during the period 1978-1990, a) my postgraduate studies in France, England and Belgium, b) my doctoral studies in Germany, and c) my archaeological explorations in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and Iran fully equipped me with detailed knowledge and understanding.
The barbarian, ignorant, narrow-minded and intolerant stance of the Greek elite, society and state, as expressed in the Duroselle affair, simply showed to me that I had to take distance from, and never return to, Greece.
I then drew the conclusion that a rubbish-collector in Sudan, Yemen, Chad, Somalia or Tanzania is superior to a professor of university, an academician, a prime minister or a president in Greece. Why? Because rubbish collectors are cleaner than all those who are plunged in the Satanic contamination and the falsehood of Hellenism!
Then, it did not matter whether I agreed or not with Duroselle; what mattered was that I disagreed with the disgusting sewerage of Greece. Ever since, my position has been irreversible, intransigent and unconditionally uncompromising.
I. Ancient, Christian, and Muslim historiographers
II. Oversights and errors attested in the existing bibliography
A. ‘Battle techniques’
B. ‘Two great empires exhausted and weakened’
———- EXCURSE I: HISTORICAL FOCUS —————-
Borders, fronts, rebellions, divisions and fights
1- Post-conquest Iran
2- Eastern Roman Empire
3- Upper Egypt and the Sudan (: historical Ethiopia)
4- Internal conflicts transported from Hejaz to Syria and Mesopotamia
——————————————————————————-
C. ‘History of states’ and not of peoples and cultures
D. Poor conceptualization of the early Islamic conquests by modern scholars
—— EXCURSE II: ETHNO-LINGUISTIC & RELIGIOUS FOCUS ———
Ethno-linguistic groups
Religious groups
i- the Christian Aramaeans of the Syriac Orthodox Church (Monophysites)
ii- the Christian Aramaeans of the Great Church of the East (Nestorians)
iii- the Gnostic Aramaeans
iv- the Manichaean Aramaeans
v- the Copts (Monophysitic Christian Egyptians)
vi- the (Aramaic-speaking) Jews, followers of Rabbinical Judaism
vii- the Persians and other Iranians followers of various Iranian religions
viii- the Eastern Roman Orthodox Christians, who sided with the Patriarchate of Constantinople
———————————————————————————
E. The demographic structure of the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Western Iranian provinces: the Aramaeans
F. The central provinces of the Islamic Caliphates: the lands of the Aramaeans.
G. Lack of historical criticism in Islamic Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies
III. The astounding scarcity of contemporaneous sources
IV. Critical incidents during the Battle of Yarmouk
V. The true dimensions of the Battle of Yarmouk and of its outcome
An early 7th c. drawing on a 5th c. biblical manuscript: the unusual and unnecessary representation of Job and his family is correctly viewed by modern scholars as a cryptographic representation of Heraclius and his family, notably his second wife Martina, his sister Epiphania, and his daughter Eudoxia. There is a clear reason for this allegory; by associating Heraclius with Job, the calligrapher and painter interpolated the concept of the Righteous Suffering and projected it onto Heraclius. The apparently Monotheletist artist wanted to praise the Monotheletist emperor for his patience and tolerance toward the Orthodox extremists among the Constantinopolitan clergy, who incessantly insulted the basileus. He therefore identified him with the Biblical person that embodies the concept of the Righteous Suffering, which is of entirely Assyrian-Babylonian origin as the illustrious epic Ludlul bel nemeqi – https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1189&context=cop-facbooks
The battle that led to the withdrawal of the Eastern Romans (‘Rum’ – therefore not ‘Greeks’) from Syria, Palestine, and North Mesopotamia has been the object of numerous studies, essays, chapters of books, and treatises. Modern Orientalist historiographers distorted and/or concealed the historical realities that determined the fact. They impacted their writings with unnecessary astonishment, unsolicited admiration, bizarre bewilderment, and at times childishly subjective descriptions. It is as if they are either blind or predetermined to disorient readers from the historical truth. It is most unfortunate that this situation prevails, despite numerous military experts delving into historical texts, many philologists scrutinizing posterior sources, and several historians publishing the corpus of the textual evidence as regards the event.
The confusion of the average reader and learner is completed with the modern, definitely unscholarly, Islamist pamphleteering as per which ‘the faith in the only true God’ gave the victory to the less-experienced, numerically inferior, and surely ill-equipped and poorly armed (if compared with the Eastern Romans) Muslim armies. I will not expand on this nonsense, because it would only prove that all victors and conquerors were true believers and all the defeated armies belonged to disbelievers – which is absurd.
I. Ancient, Christian, and Muslim historiographers
At this point, I have to highlight that, when it comes to the attitude toward History and historiography, there is a deep chasm between our modern world (after 1500) and past generations that lived in the Antiquity or during the Christian and Islamic times. The modern theories that History can ‘teach’ and that, by studying History, one can avoid past mistakes did not exist before the modern world; these theories are wrong, insane, inhuman and disastrous.
‘History’ does not ‘teach’, and not one Muslim, Christian, Manichaean, Gnostic, Zoroastrian, Babylonian or Egyptian ever thought or expected that History could possibly ‘teach’ him anything. In their perception of the world, there was clarity whereas modern minds are terribly confused about a critical issue: recording facts (historiography) is not History. History is what happened. No one can reconstitute it in its entirety, except by living in the past and being present in the events.
Historiography, i.e. simple recording of facts, did indeed happen for more than five millennia, but not for the purpose of ‘teaching’ or being ‘taught’. This reality determined all ancient historical records, be they Ancient Egyptian Annals, Babylonian Chronicles, Assyrian Annals, Greek and Roman history writing, Christian and Muslim Chronography or other. And for the purpose of objectivity, in most of the cases, the authors eliminated their personal views and considerations; and this is quite normal, as we all understand that a fact is always a fact per se, irrespective of the author’s (or narrator’s or historian’s) personal favor and/or understanding.
For the above reasons, serious, decent and valuable ancient authors did not include in their narratives what was evident to all: the historical context. Contextualization would be tantamount to self-devaluation for an historian like Tabari or Theophanes or the anonymous, 7th c. CE, Aramaean author of the Syriac Chronicle of Kirkuk, which is mainly known as ‘History of Karka de Beth Selok’. About:
(Throughout the present article links to the Wikipedia are included only for further research and access to historical sources and bibliography – not for the contents of the entries that are often impertinent and biased and the ensuing conclusions misplaced)
Ka’ba-ye Zardosht (Zoroaster’s Kaaba): one of the holiest shrines of the Sassanid Empire of Iran at Naqsh-e Rustam, ancient Achaemenid necropolis; it is to be noted that there were several pre-Islamic times’ holy buildings in rectangular shape. They were located in Iran and in Yemen. The Kaaba of Najran was the Christian cathedral in Yemenite Najran (currently under Saudi occupation).Saint Sophia: the Eastern Roman Empire’s greatest cathedral was not a holy shrine for the Monophysitic and Nestorian Aramaeans and the Copts (Egyptians), because they viewed the Patriarchate of Constantinople as heretic. This played an enormous role and impacted the historical developments back in the 630s.
II. Oversights and errors attested in the existing bibliography
Contrarily to Ancient, Christian and Muslim authors and people, who did not expect ‘History’ (but their holy books) to teach them the correct path in life and who did not repeat past mistakes by delving into moral depths (and not into useless historical manuals), we need extensive contextualization to accurately perceive and correctly understand epochs that totally differed from ours. This is what is terribly missing from the studies of almost all the scholars who were interested in the Battle of Yarmouk.
Yarmouk battlefield in Jordan today
A. ‘Battle techniques’
Many scholars focused on the battle techniques of Khalid ibn al-Walid (592-642 CE). But however successful these techniques may have been, military dexterity does not explain why the bulk of the indigenous populations of the eastern provinces (North Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica) of the Eastern Roman Empire did not rebel against the early Muslim rule. The battle of Yarmouk may have been won by the Muslims, but 10 or 20 years later a violent local rebellion could have eventually terminated the foreign rule. But this did not happen.
Typical samples of worthless bibliography and lectures:
One of the wrong diagrams that one can find in the Internet nowadays; suffice it that you read Tabari and you will understand the mistakes.This type of diagrams can never explain historical processes; it is therefore wrong, confusing and disorienting.
B. ‘Two great empires exhausted and weakened’
Several authors explained the early Islamic victories by referring to the exhaustion of the then known world’s two greatest empires, namely the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran. This is correct and true, but still it does not help us understand why the outright majority of populations of the western provinces of Iran and the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire did not rebel against the foreign invaders in the first 2-3 decades of Islamic rule. However, this fantasy is reproduced even in serious UNESCO documentation on the Silk Road: https://fr.unesco.org/silkroad/sites/default/files/knowledge-bank-article/vol_III%20silk%20road_the%20arab%20conquest.pdf
The Sassanid Empire of Iran and the Eastern Roman Empire at the time prophet Muhammad was bornMain movements of Eastern Roman and Sassanid Iranian armies
———- EXCURSE I: HISTORICAL FOCUS —————-
Borders, fronts, rebellions, divisions and fights
In this regard, it is noteworthy to point out a quadruple phenomenon that took place in the first decades of Islamic rule in the Caliphate’s central provinces:
1- Post-conquest Iran
The first rebellions against the new rule started early in Iran, but they occurred in remote provinces (Gilan, Mazandaran, Azerbaijan) that were inhabited by nations other than those living in the former western provinces of Iran. In any case, both great empires, the Eastern Romans and the Iranians, were multi-ethnic imperial structures.
2- Eastern Roman Empire
The first line of Eastern Roman defense against the Islamic Caliphate was created alongside the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains, whereas the upper flow of Euphrates became the border between the two empires. This is the location where the formidable Akritai appeared to fight and stop every advance of the Omayyad or Abbasid armies to the West, apparently coordinating with the Islamic opposition to the pseudo-Islamic rule of the caliphs.
3- Upper Egypt and the Sudan (: historical Ethiopia)
Upper Egypt totally escaped the Islamic rule, as Nobatia was incepted as Christian Coptic kingdom with capital at Faras (almost on the present Egyptian-Sudanese borderline). The Islamic rule in Masr (Egypt) did not exceed beyond the region between Al Minya and Assiut (ca. 350 km south of Cairo), and while Seville, Cordova, Sicily, Crete, Samarqand and the Delta of Indus belonged to the Islamic Caliphate, Coptic monasticism flourished in Thebes of Egypt (today’s Luxor; from Al Uqsur, ‘the military camps’) where all ancient Egyptian temples and antiquities, notably Deir al Bahri and Deir al Madina, had become monastic cells. Two other Christian Sudanese kingdoms rose further in the South: Makuria and Alodia, limiting the Islamic presence in Eastern Africa to the Red Sea coastland.
4- Internal conflicts transported from Hejaz to Syria and Mesopotamia
The only conflicts that took place in the early Islamic Caliphate’s central provinces (i.e. the lands that belong today to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, SE Turkey, Iraq, SW Iran, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar and the northern parts of Saudi Arabia) were those related to the ‘new’ faith, prophet Muhammad’s preaching, and the interpretation of this faith’s prescriptions as regards the governance of the state. This means, in other words, that the Arabs of Hejaz, brought with them to Syria-Mesopotamia the deep divisions that characterized their society (acceptance, rejection and/or distortion of prophet Muhammad’s religious revelation) even before prophet Muhammad’s death (632 CE). These divisions were ferocious and the bloodshed tarnished irrevocably the History of Islam, although it really paled if compared with the bloodshed caused after the official imposition of Constantinopolitan-Roman Christianity as the sole religion throughout the Roman Empire. And the early converts from the newly occupied lands that earlier belonged to the Eastern Romans and to the Sassanid Iranians vividly participated in these divisions, debates, polarizations, conflicts and civil wars.
This quadruple phenomenon was never studied per se until now, and to duly investigate it one needs to delve in the ethnic and religious/theological conflicts that took place in the two great empires (the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran) for about 300-400 years before the Battle of Yarmouk. This clearly demonstrates that not one specialist of the Early Islamic History can be taken seriously without the knowledge of at least two among the following languages and religious/literary traditions: Coptic, Syriac Aramaic, Middle Persian, Medieval ‘Greek’ (‘Roman’: the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire), Manichaean, and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (: the language of Rabbinical Judaism).
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C. ‘History of states’ and not of peoples and cultures
Numerous authors write on the topic, while focusing on State History (Eastern Roman, Sassanid Iranian, Omayyad and Abbasid Islamic); this is one way ticket to misperception, misunderstanding, and distortion. States are not representative of subject nations and peoples, but of ruling elites and their doctrines; in their effort to secure their interests, states destroy all historical, literary, religious or theological documentation that would challenge them. States are to some extent the reason for the scarcity of documentation that characterizes the 7th and the 8th centuries CE (or, to put it otherwise, the first 100-150 years AH/anno Hegirae).
D. Poor conceptualization of the early Islamic conquests by modern scholars
Most researchers failed to contextualize the early Islamic conquests, because they were unable to properly conceptualize the historical developments in the first place. Battles are undertaken by social groups or eventually states, but socio-cultural processes and historical developments are generated by peoples and nations. So, the proper manner to approach the topic is to view it as an affair of various nations and ethno-linguistic and religious groups that lived in the wider region between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, from the Taurus Mountains to the Indus River Delta, and in-between the Nile and Syr-Darya (Iaxartes River) in Central Asia.
——– EXCURSE II: ETHNO-LINGUISTIC & RELIGIOUS FOCUS ————
In this regard, it is essential to conclude from the aforementioned that the only pertinent manner to tackle the topic is via interdisciplinary studies. Until now, no effort was displayed in this direction; and yet, there can be many combinations of interdisciplinary studies applying to this case.
Ethno-linguistic groups
During the 6th–7th c. CE, the main nations which lived in the lands that, after the Islamic conquests, became the central provinces of the Islamic Caliphate were:
i- the Aramaeans,
ii- the Copts,
iii- the Persians and other Iranians, who manned the imperial administration at Tesiphun (Ctesiphon) and controlled the Iranian military outposts,
iv- the (Aramaic-speaking) Jews, and
v- the Eastern Romans, who were organized in small communities living in the major cities of the eastern provinces of the empire, notably around the Chalcedonian patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria.
This means that at those days the outright majority of the populations living in lands belonging to today’s SE Turkey, Syria, Iraq, SW Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and the North of Saudi Arabia were Aramaeans.
And the outright majority of the populations living in the Nile Valley were Copts.
Urhoy-Edessa of Orhoene-Urfa (SE Turkey): a major Aramaean cityNasibina-Nisibis-Nusaybin (SE Turkey): a major Aramaean city Hatra (NW Iraq): a major Aramaean city Dura Europos on Euphrates (Eastern Syria): a major Aramaean cityTadmur-Palmyra (Central Syria): a major Aramaean city Bosra (Southern Syria): a major Aramaean city Rekem (Petra, Jordan): a major Aramaean city of the Nabataean dynastyHegra, the necropolis of the Aramaean Nabataean kingdom, at 350 km distance north of Yathrib (Madina)Charax Spasinu (South Iraq): a major Aramaean city
Religious groups
When it comes to ethno-religious and linguistic groups existing at those days (6th–7th c. CE) in the aforementioned region, we enumerate the following:
i- the Christian Aramaeans of the Syriac Orthodox Church (Monophysites) Although entirely anti-Constantinopolitan, the Christian Aramaeans were divided into Miaphysitic (Monophysitic) anti-Chalcedonian Christians and Nestorian anti-Ephesine Christians (see below no ii).
Christian Aramaeans of the Syriac Orthodox Church (Monophysites) formed the outright majority of the populations living in the Eastern Roman provinces of Syria, North Mesopotamia, and Palestine.
The term Monophysitic (Monophysitism/Monophysites) being quite pejorative, it is currently replaced by Miaphysitic (Miaphysitism/Miaphysites). The most common appellation of the church is Jacobite, after St. Jacob Baradaeus (also known as Jacob bar Addai).
Deir Zafaran (also known as Mor Hananyo) Monastery, near Mardin (SE Turkey): a high place of Syriac Jacobite (Miaphysitic/Monophysitic) Christianity
It is also necessary to underscore that the noun/adjective ‘Syriac’ is totally unrelated to the land of Syria (in such case the adjective is ‘Syrian’), but denotes a late phase of Aramaic that survived down to our days, being one of the main liturgical languages in the History of Christianity. Syriac alphabet derived from Aramaic alphabet (in the 1st c. CE) and, similarly, Arabic alphabet derived (in the 4th c. CE) from Nabataean Aramaic alphabet; Aramaic and Hebrew were the two original languages in which the Old Testament was written.
Syriac Aramaic in Serto writingSyriac Aramaic in Estrangelo writing
Monophysitic Aramaeans were essential for the formation and the diffusion of historical Islam. Their overwhelming rejection of the Constantinopolitan theology and of the anti-Aramaean policies of the Eastern Roman Empire totally alienated the Aramaeans from the authorities that ruled them. For Monophysitic Aramaeans, the Eastern Roman Empire was ruled by heretics. And as the illustrious Aramaean theologian, historian and erudite scholar Tatian (112-185 CE) demonstrated in his magnificent opus Oratio ad Graecos (Address to the Greeks), the enormous cultural gap between Aramaeans and Greeks played a considerable role in the destabilization of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire (and subsequently of the Eastern Roman Empire), because the Constantinopolitan authorities cooperated basically with the Greek-speaking minority.
The determinant role played by the Monophysitic Aramaeans in the formation and the diffusion of historical Islam is highlighted by the case of Sergius Bahira, the Syriac Jacobite (Monophysitic) monk, who encountered prophet Muhammad in young age, when he accompanied his uncle Abi Taleb ibn Abd el Muttalib to Syria and other provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire.
ii- the Christian Aramaeans of the Great Church of the East (Nestorians)
These Aramaeans followed Nestorius in his doctrine that was a radical form of what is called Diophysitism (belief in two natures/hypostases of Jesus); they are called Nestorians, although the term is not regarded as correct (being tantamount to calling the Muslims ‘Muhammedans’). Nestorians rejected the Council of Ephesus (431 CE), pretty much like the Monophysites/Miaphysites rejected the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE).
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Dair Mar Eliya (Monastery of St. Elijah) in North Iraq: Nestorian monastery of the 6th c.Nestorian Gospel in SyriacThe Anikova plate: representation of the Siege of Jericho; masterpiece of Sogdian Nestorian Art from Semirechie (southeastern Kazakhstan and northeastern Kyrgyszstan). Probable date: 8th-9th c.Ecclesiastical provinces of the Nestorian Church in the 10th c.Nestorian communities in the 10th-11th c.
Christian Aramaeans of the Great Church of the East (Nestorians) formed the outright majority of the Sassanid Iranian provinces of Central and South Mesopotamia, South Transtigritane, and Arabia, namely Huzistan, Meshan, Asurestan, Nodshiragan (Adiabene), and Arabestan.
Nestorian Aramaeans were essential in the formation and diffusion of historical Islam. Their staggering rejection of both, Constantinopolitan Christianity and Sassanid Mazdeism (the official Iranian imperial religious dogma that consisted only in a later form of the Achaemenid Zoroastrianism), was highly determinant for the early success of the caliphs. At this early point, I only state the well-known (but not deeply understood) fact that, for ca. 180 years before the arrival of the Islamic armies in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, the Nestorians called Virgin Mary ‘Mother of Christ’ and not ‘Mother of god’, in striking opposition to the Constantinopolitan theologians, monks and courtiers. In this manner, Nestorian Aramaeans proved to be the real precursors of prophet Muhammad and his teachings. As a matter of fact, at the beginning of the 7th c. CE, the Nestorians were closer to the early Quranic text, which may have reached them through hearsay (before the early Islamic armies), than to the Nicene Creed.
Constantinopolitan theology and the anti-Aramaean religious and economic policies of the empire totally alienated the Aramaeans from the ruling authorities. Even worse, in Iran, the Nestorian Aramaeans were persecuted in definitely crueler manner than the Monophysitic Aramaeans were in the Eastern Roman Empire. And the ceaseless Eastern Roman – Sassanid Iranian wars devastated -more than any other territories- the lands inhabited by the Aramaeans.
Their surviving remnants are nowadays the Mandaeans. There are about 100000 Mandaean Aramaeans worldwide, but due to the ongoing persecution and oppression, most of them live currently in the Diaspora, and not in their historical land, i.e. Central and South Mesopotamia (Iraq) and South Transtigritane (SW Iran).
Gnostic Aramaeans were essential in the formation and diffusion of historical Islam. Their participation in Muslim spiritual life is at the origin of the formation of groups like the legendary Ikhwan Safa, whose rituals have been later reproduced by numerous Islamic mystics, spiritualists, occultists and scholars from the Qarmatians and the Isma’ilis to all types of Batiniyya (‘esoterism’) wise elders and great spiritual scientists, like Muhammad al Fazari, Al Ghazali, Abu ‘l Qassim ibn al Saffar, Maslam al Majriti, and Muhyieldin ibn Arabi.
Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, (‘Epistles of the Brethren of Purity’), Book I – on the mathematical sciences; Western Iran, ca. 14th c.
Even the communication manners and literary style of the Ikhwan Safa’s treatises and manuals appear to be Gnostic in their essence. What is nowadays erroneously called ‘Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity’, which is in fact the compendium of their wisdom, consists of letters or ‘messages’ (رسائل), being thus a reminiscence of the typically Gnostic manner of sharing knowledge, wisdom and spiritual practices.
The religion composed, proclaimed and propagated by Mani was displayed in 242 CE in front of the formidable Sassanid shah Shapur I to whom the prophet of Manichaeism dedicated one of his books, titled Shabuhragan. Shapur I did not adhere to the new religion, but he realized its imperial importance for the Sassanid state and supported the young prophet (born in 216 CE) in his mission. It is not wrong to consider Manichaeism technically as a type of Gnosticism, but it was indeed a Gnostic system apart from the rest.
Aramaeans, Persians, Iranians, Sogdians, Turanians, Mongolians, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Romans, Armenians and many other nations wholeheartedly accepted Manichaeism, which was the first religion in the world to have adepts from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The last Manicheans performed their rites in China’s eastern coastland before 150-100 years. Following the rise of Mazdeism (a later form of Iranian Zoroastrianism) and the prevalence of Kartir among the Sassanid courtiers, Manichaeism was persecuted and Mani was tortured to death, but the diffusion of Manichaeism was not impacted; quite on the contrary! Mani’s faith spread and many Manichaean communities existed at the times of the Islamic conquest in both, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran. Aramaean Manichaean communities in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine greatly impacted Islam in many dimensions.
Almost 400 years before prophet Muhammad postured to be the last of the prophets, the prophet of Manichaeism claimed to be the ‘seal of the prophets’. Manichaean hierarchy seems to have been diffused among many Muslim esoteric spiritual orders. Some of the greatest historians and chronographers of Islamic times, like Tabari, al Biruni, and al Nadim, expanded on Mani and the Manicheans. The five prayers that a Muslim must perform daily seem to have been a compromise between the four daily prayers of the Manichaean ‘hearers’ (laymen) and the seven daily prayers of the elects (ecclesiastical hierarchy). Prophet Muhammad’s discussions with earlier prophets, during the Isra and Mi’raj nocturnal voyage to the Celestial Jerusalem, seem to exactly reflect similar considerations. Furthermore, the ablutions before the prayer appear to be a repetition of Manichaean practices. In addition, the Ebionite and Elcesaite impact on Manicheans seems therefore to have been passed on to the Muslims.
Was Mani crucified? The question remains unanswered, as several Islamic sources reported a dire end following a terrible persecution unleashed by the Sassanid imperial priesthood against the prophet of Manichaeism.The diffusion of Manichaeism eclipsed that of any other religion before the Modern Times; but Manichaeism was state religion only once: among the Uyghur nation of Central Asia.
The religion of Mani may have by now gone extinct, but its impact on Islam was tremendous. Many scholars tried to retrace fundamental concepts of Islam to the beliefs of several Jewish or Christian groups and notably the Nazarenes, but it would make more sense to closely examine how some of Mani’s innovative concepts found their way into prophet Muhammad’s cardinal tenets and world conceptualization.
Although Christianity accepted the Ancient Hebrew prophets as such, Islam is characterized by a definitely different approach, as it makes of Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isma’il, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, David and Solomon prophets as well (also extending the status of prophet to John the Baptist and Jesus). Furthermore, it is noticeable that Islam’s position on prophethood is flexible enough to encompass other historical figures or outstanding persons not directly known to the small Meccan community of the times of Muhammad ibn Abdullah. However, this fresh approach to World History, which is a novelty for Christianity and Judaism, was absolutely Manichaean or origin. Mani first introduced the concept by accepting Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus as earlier prophets and by thus giving to his religious system a universal-imperial dimension that was badly needed for a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious empire.
Manichaean Aramaeans were systematically persecuted in both, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran; it was therefore quite normal for them to support the replacement of the double yoke with an Arab state and administration that they would be able to fully staff and operate (along with other Aramaeans who were followers of other religions, notably Christianity), taking into consideration the fact that the uneducated, uncultured and primitive Arabs of Hejaz, who had never formed any kind of proper state, would be definitely and absolutely unable to face such a challenge.
In the early Islamic times, there have been many notable Manichaean scholars, who prospered in the Islamic Caliphate; as Abbasid Baghdad became a center for either Manicheans or Manichaean converts to Islam, many Manicheans of other origin flocked there to contribute to the illustrious Beit al Hikmah (بيت الحكمة/House of the Wisdom) university, library, archival organization, academic center of translations, research center, botanical garden, and observatory. Abu Hilal al-Dayhuri, a Berber from Maghreb, was one of them. On the other hand, elements of the criticism that Abu Isa al Warraq addressed to Islam and to prophet Muhammad seem to be Manichaean of nature.
However, one must admit that, despite similarities, loans and impact, Islam and Manichaeism soon became rival systems and most of the Islamic erudite scholars portrayed Mani in a rather negative manner. This approach made of Muslims the major opponents of the Manicheans, after the Christians and the Jews; but this situation is attested in rather later periods (9th–10th c.). However, this is not quite strange, if we take into consideration the fact that the Old Testament god Yahweh was portrayed as the Demiurge (i.e. the Satan) by Mani.
v- the Copts (Monophysitic Christian Egyptians)
As close allies of the Monophysitic Aramaeans (see above unit i-), they were ferocious enemies of the oppressive Constantinopolitan administrative hierarchy and Patriarchate. Similarly with the Monophysitic Aramaeans, who belonged to the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and rejected the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch (which sided with Constantinople), the Monophysitic Copts followed the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and rejected the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.
Coptic manuscript with illuminationsCoptic manuscriptCoptic Gospel with illumination representing the four Evangelists.Coptic manuscript with illuminations
Similarly with what happened in North Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine where the followers of the Constantinopolitan doctrine-related patriarchates (in Antioch and Jerusalem) were not numerous, as they constituted the Greek-speaking minority of those regions, in Egypt, the followers of the Constantinopolitan doctrine-related patriarchate (in Alexandria) were few, and they constituted the Greek-speaking minority of Egypt.
This leads to a detrimental conclusion as regards the Eastern Roman Empire and its chances to maintain control across its eastern provinces, namely North Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica; both, the Constantinopolitan authorities and their local stooges were loathed and reviled by the outright majority of the local populations that would certainly do all that it took to get rid of the heretical rulers at Constantinople. All they needed was an opportunity, and prophet Muhammad’s preaching in Hejaz was apparently more important for them (as a tool) than to Arabs (as a faith).
vi- the (Aramaic-speaking) Jews, followers of Rabbinical Judaism
After the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE) and the failure of the Bar Kokhba (136 CE) rebellion, the Sadducees, the Essenes and the Zealots did not have a chance to survive as religious-spiritual-intellectual systems among the Judaic Jews. Ever since, Judaism has revolved around the Pharisees, who thus formed what is now known as ‘Rabbinical Judaism’. As Ancient Hebrew was already a dead language, all Jews were already speaking Aramaic. Expelled from Aelia Capitolina (former Jerusalem), Jews could stay in Palestine or preferably settle in Arsacid (and after 224 CE, Sassanid) Iranian Mesopotamia.
They then (and over several centuries) elaborated a new religious book that marks a clear line of separation between their ancestors’ religion (Ancient Hebrew religion based exclusively on the Old Testament) and their new religion; this book is the Talmud, which is the product of the criminal priests who never repented for having killed the ancient prophets of Israel. Today, most scholars hide the critical fact that Judaism (i.e. Rabbinical Judaism or Talmudic Judaism) is totally different from and diametrically opposed to the Ancient Hebrew religion. As priestly literature and theological exegesis, the two different Talmud collections, namely the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalemite Talmud, were written in Aramaic.
Manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud with text from the tractate KiddushinManuscript of the Babylonian Talmud with text from the tractate Rosh ha-shannah
Contrarily to the Judaic Jews, who were marked by the composition and the diffusion of the Talmud among them, the Aramaean Jews in their totality turned to Early Christianity; this concerns the Samaritans of the time of Jesus and many other Aramaean Jewish communities that prospered in Syria and Mesopotamia, notably in Dura Europos where the Synagogue fully reveals the impetus and the magnificence of Aramaean Art. By the time of prophet Muhammad there was no Aramaean Jew.
Although late 6th c. and early 7th c. CE Jews wholeheartedly supported the Sassanid Iranians in their wars against the Eastern Roman Empire (in striking contrast with the early Muslims of the period 610-628/629, who clearly regretted the early Iranian advance and conquests, and later rejoiced with the final Eastern Roman victories) and in spite of many unfortunate incidents that occurred between the early Muslims and the Hejaz Jews (during prophet Muhammad’s lifetime), the early (634-651 CE) Islamic conquests were enthusiastically accepted by the Jews of the wider region, who found their ally and protector in the ominous figure of Omar ibn al Khattab, as he allowed them to enter Jerusalem, no less than 568 years after they were kicked out of there by the Romans. Jews actively supported the early Islamic Caliphates, notably the Umayyad state of Damascus, the Abbasid Empire of Baghdad, and the Umayyad caliphs of Córdoba (Andalus).
vii- the Persians and other Iranians followers of various Iranian religions
Being only one of the Sassanid Empire’s nations, the Persians lived in the province of Fars, which in Ancient Greek was translated as Persia; there cannot be confusion between ‘Persian’ and ‘Iranian’. Persians were/are only one of the Iranian nations.
The Persians controlled the administrative machine of the Iranian Empire during the Achaemenid times (550-330 BCE) and during the Sassanid times (224-651 CE), whereas the Parthians, another Iranian nation of Turanian origin, controlled the administrative machine of the empire during the Arsacid times (250 BCE-224 CE).
The Iranian Empire had always many imperial capitals, notably Pasargadae, Persepolis, Susa, Babylon, Ecbatana, Nisa (Mithradatkirt/Parthaunisa), Qumis (Hecatompylos), Ray (Ragae), Tesifun (Ctesiphon), and Istakhr; on the other hand, Praaspa (Adur Gushnasp/Takht-e Suleyman), at an elevation of 3000 m, in the northern part of Zagros Mountains, was permanently the Zoroastrian religious capital of the empire.
In the Mesopotamian provinces of the Sassanid Empire of Iran, there were few and rather small Persian communities; in these western provinces of Iran were also settled people originating from other Iranian nations that were indigenous in the central, eastern and northern provinces of the empire. They were dispatched to the imperial administration at Ctesiphon and they served in the army. But they were a minority among the indigenous Aramaeans of Central and Southern Mesopotamia, Transtigritane, and the Persian Gulf’s southern coastlands.
This reality has not been either assessed or revealed by any type of specialists who studied and wrote about the topic of the early Islamic conquests. Yet, it is uniquely determinant and utterly explanatory. It changes drastically our scholarly approach to the topic (see below unit E).
Another critical dimension that impacted greatly the fate of the Sassanid Empire of Iran was its religious multi-division. If we leave the Nestorian Aramaeans, the Gnostic Aramaeans, the Manichaean Aramaeans, other Manichaean Iranians (notably the Sogdians), and the Aramaic-speaking Jews aside, the Persians and the other Iranian nations of the Sassanid Empire were spiritually and religiously divided. Among them, there were adepts of the following religious systems:
1- Mazdeism: the imperial religion and Zoroastrian doctrine established by Kartir;
2- Mithraism: the popular religion that made of Mithra a god of polytheistic features;
3- Zurvanism: Mithra broke away from Zoroastrianism and Zurvan from Mithraism;
4- Mazdakism: the subversive socio-religious system of rebellious mobedh (priest);
5- Gayomardism: an offspring of Mazdeism and Mithraism, with monotheistic traits;
If one adds to the numerous aforementioned religions, several religious systems prevailing among nations of the Iranian periphery and border regions, notably Buddhism, Turanian Tengrism, and other Central Asiatic and Indus River valley religions, one gets a complete picture of the internal divisions that existed in the Sassanid Empire of Iran and finally lef to its destruction.
Sassanid Iranian relief with representation of the high priest, mystic and reformer of Zoroastrianism Kartir, a primary initiate who can be viewed as the founder of Mazdeism, i.e. the late form of Zoroastrianism that was instituted as official dogma in Sassanid Iran. Possibly Turanian (Turkic) of origin, Kartir (or Kerdyr) can be held as main responsible for the execution of Mani and the persecution of Manicheans in Iran until the end of the Sassanid times. Long before the Arabs of Hejaz heard of the Mi’raj story (prophet Muhammad’s nocturnal, transcendental travel to the Temple Mount and thence to the Celestial Jerusalem), the Iranians learned about Kartir’s celestial journey in the Heaven. There is also another (parallel?) Middle Persian story about the celestial journey of the sublime initiate Arda Viraf in the Heaven; however, the Middle Persian manuscripts of Arda Wīraz namag seem to date back to the 9th c., although the entire narrative echoes Sassanid traditions. About: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/kartir / https://www.academia.edu/37850211/The_nature_of_spiritual_journeys_in_Zoroastrianism_based_on_Kartir_and_Arda_Viraf_tripsThe Mithraic temple of Anahita at Bishapur near KazerunThe heroic elements of the Sassanid times’ Mazdeism were preserved in the Iranian epics of Islamic times, thus leading to a very different form of Islam than what Muhammad preached in Mecca; Esfandiyar faces Simurgh. Without Iranian epics composed 300 years after the death of prophet Muhammad, one cannot possibly identify correctly the cultural-spiritual-intellectual-artistic-educational environment of Iranian, Turanian, Central Asiatic, Caucasus and Indian Muslim societies. In fact, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh became the second Quran for Ottoman sultans, Mughal emperors, Iranian shahs and Eurasiatic Muslims.Gayomard (Keyumars) fighting evil spirits; a reminiscence of Gayomardism of the Sassanid times was preserved in the Iranian epics of Islamic times.The execution of Mazdak, the preacher of the world’s first religion which evangelized a communist social structure without property, as represented in Islamic times’ miniatures of manuscriptsRepresentation of Zurvan, the all-consuming ‘god’ of time
viii- the Eastern Roman Orthodox Christians, who sided with the Patriarchate of Constantinople
As I already said, the few Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Orthodox Christian communities, settled in Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and several other cities in North Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica, supported the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Constantinopolitan imperial administration, but they were largely outnumbered by the local Aramaean (in Asia) and Coptic (in Africa) populations (which rejected the Patriarchate of Constantinople and its local stooges). That is why the few Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Orthodox Christian communities were greatly loathed: they ultimately functioned as tools of the imperial oppression and persecution of all those who disagreed with the Constantinopolitan theologians.
These populations and their ecclesiastical authorities, namely the Patriarchate of Constantinople and its dependencies in the East, i.e. the three minor institutions at Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria that were unrepresentative (as they were accepted as ‘patriarchates’ only by the tiny local minority of the Greek-speaking populations of the respective cities), wanted to monopolize the term ‘Orthodox’, but this was merely their propaganda, against those whom they called ‘Monophysites’. It would be however wrong to imagine that there was concord within the sphere of influence of the Patriarchate of Constantinople; there was discord and division instead.
Caesarea of Cappadocia (Kayseri): the city walls erected by Justinian in the middle of 6th c. The early Islamic conquests were stopped in the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains beyond Cappadocia. The bulk of the Eastern Roman population was centered between Caesarea and Smyrna (Izmir) whereas Cappadocia was the holy land of Eastern Roman Christianity.The rupestrian Cappadocian Art: one of Christianity’s most stupendous contributions to ArtTypical sample of rupestrian Cappadocian ArtThe highland of Cappadocia where many hundreds of cells and churches have been built and hewn in the rock.Caesarea: The basis of the Eastern Roman defense against the Islamic Caliphate for more than 400 years
The new theological-Christological dispute revolved around the ‘energy’ and the ‘will’ (thelesis) of Jesus, in the sense of whether they were one or two (human and divine) and, if two, what the relationship of the two energies or two wills was. As a matter of fact, it was the resurgence of the old dispute (about the ‘nature’ (physis) of Jesus), which had given birth to what we now call Miaphysitism/Monophysitism.
This new division concerned mainly vast populations living in the central provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, namely Anatolia (Turkey), Constantinople, the Balkan Peninsula, southern and eastern Italy, Sicily, and Carthage. The division had already reached the top of the imperial structure, as Emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople were accused of Monoenergism and Monothelitism. And the fact that Heraclius got married with his niece Martina (as second wife) unleashed an abysmal hatred against him from the part of the uncompromising ‘Orthodox’ theologians, monks and priests, as they viewed the marriage as incestuous.
This, briefly presented, was the situation in which the two great empires, the Eastern Romans and the Sassanid Iranians, found themselves in the eve of the battles that ended with the loss of the eastern provinces of the former and the final dissolution of the latter. As I said in the last paragraph of the EXCURSE I: HISTORICAL FOCUS, there has to be an academic focus on interdisciplinary studies and research, which will certainly unveil many points and elements of common faith shared by Muslims and followers of other religions (notably Manicheans) or Christian denominations (notably Miaphysitic/Monophysitic and Nestorian). This will greatly impact our understanding of the Eastern Roman and the Iranian defeats, because it may reveal that these early battles (and the Battle of Yarmouk was only one) had been already won before they were fought; furthermore, it will also explain why the situation, which arose as a consequence of these battles, proved to be irreversible for many long centuries.
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E. The demographic structure of the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Western Iranian provinces: the Aramaeans
No scholar examined in detail the demographic structure of the populations that inhabited the central territories of the early Caliphate outside Hejaz and Yemen. This has much to do with the above EXCURSE II: ETHNO-LINGUISTIC & RELIGIOUS FOCUS. A detailed demographic study covering the period 224-750 CE would reveal that the bulk of the Aramaean populations living in the Western Iranian provinces and in the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire were
1- ethnically different from the nations that ruled both empires (the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans and the Persians);
2- religiously opposed to the official imperial religions of both empires;
3- systematically persecuted and marginalized by both imperial administrations and armies;
4- detrimentally devastated by the incessant wars fought between the two empires, because the ordinary battlefield was precisely located in their own lands, namely the Western Iranian provinces and the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire (and consequently the bulk of the populations of the ruling nations, namely the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans and the Persians, was not significantly affected by these wars); and
5- linguistically very close to the Arabs of Hejaz, because in fact Arabic was a southern Syriac dialect and the Arabic writing derived from Syriac Aramaic.
Ctesiphon: the remaining part of the then world’s most magnificent palace. Taq-i Kisra (or Al Mada’in) was the Sassanid palace in Mesopotamia and the archway is the largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world. One of the best samples of pre-Islamic Aramaean-Iranian Art.In fact, Ctesiphon (Tesifun) in today’s central Iraq was an enormous agglomeration involving four cities; one of them, Seleucia, known as Mahoze in Aramaic, was the worldwide center of Nestorian Christianity.The Great Mosque of Damascus is a masterpiece of Aramaean Art.
F. The central provinces of the Islamic Caliphates: the lands of the Aramaeans.
No scholar noticed that, in addition to the aforementioned points, for about five (5) centuries (661-1258), the central regions of the Islamic Caliphates (Umayyad or Abbasid) were exactly the lands of the Aramaeans. The first Islamic capital was at Madinah, but this was soon terminated, as the Umayyad dynasty was based in the Aramaean city par excellence: Damascus. The determinant impact of the Aramaean universities, academies, monasteries and scriptoria (notably those of Urhoy/Edessa, Nisibis/Nusaybin, Tur Abdin, Mahoze/Ctesiphon, and Kerkha/Kirkuk) on the formation of the Islamic educational, academic, intellectual and scientific life changed totally the backward, uncivil and primitive environment in which prophet Muhammad’s preaching was undertaken.
The Sassanid Empire of Iran in its greatest extent at 621 CEHeraclius’ campaigns’ 611-628
This historical process and development made of the early Arab fighters, the so-called Sahaba, a marginal element that played almost no role in the History of Islamic Civilization. In other words, the Islamic Civilization in its early stage was clearly an Aramaean – Iranian civilization with significant Coptic, Yemenite and Jewish contributions; at a later stage, Berber, Turanian, African and Indus River Valley contributions to the Islamic civilizations have also been attested. However, there was never an ‘Arab civilization’ or -as per the French Orientalist forgers- “une civilisation arabo-musulmane”.
This automatically cancels the theoretical importance of the early Islamic conquests that are absurdly amplified and incommensurately over-magnified by both Western scholars and Islamic terrorists; in fact, the real winners were the inhabitants of the central regions of the Islamic Caliphates, i.e. the Aramaeans, who saw others fighting for their cause (to get rid of the double, Eastern Roman and Sassanid Iranian, yoke), for the transfer of the imperial capital into their land, and for the establishment of an imperial elite manned basically by them. In addition to the Aramaeans, the Persians and other Iranians and Turanians managed also to make their way into the new imperial administration. But prophet Muhammad had never spoken about an … ‘Islamic’ empire….
G. Lack of historical criticism in Islamic Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies
Taking all the aforementioned determinant parameters into account, reading the historical sources from the viewpoint of historical criticism, and viewing the historical facts in the light of the hitherto unevaluated critical factors, modern scholars can come up with a totally different interpretation/interrelation of sources and a dramatically contrasting reconstitution of the historical past, which would be diametrically opposed to the nonsense of military experts, who focus exclusively on battle techniques, and to the absurd and paranoid, pseudo-religious belief, as per which ‘god’ was involved in the events that took place in the 630s and 640s and shook the world between the Mediterranean, the Indus River valley, and Central Asia. Historical criticism of all sources relating to these events is indispensable and inevitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_criticism
Hadhrat Ali’s tomb in Najaf; Ali ibn abi Taleb (599-661) was designated as the first caliph, but after meeting fierce opposition, he was accepted as the fourth caliph. The early divisions of the small Muslim community after the death of Prophet Muhammad are an extra reason for historians to apply today extensive historical criticism and to reject the absolutely reconstructed and erroneous version of History.The tomb of the 3rd imam Hussein ibn Ali (626-680) at Kerbala. The sons of Ali had to become caliphs in his stead. But the grandson of prophet Muhammad (Hussein) was slaughtered by the son of prophet Muhammad’s worst enemy (Mu’awiya ibn Abī Sufyan / Muawiyah son of Abu Sufyan). If this situation does not impose extensive historical criticism, this means that today’s fake academics receive orders from the powers that be as regards what to study, what not to explore, and how to investigate the topics of their research. Yet, what happened in Kerbala (680 CE) illuminates very well what occurred after the Hudaybiyah treaty when Abu Sufyan rushed to Palestine to meet Emperor Heraclius and deceive him.
III. The astounding scarcity of contemporaneous sources
The first serious difficulty that every modern historian faces, when dealing with the early Islamic conquests, is the extreme scarcity of contemporaneous historical sources. A recent and highly commendable scholarly publication, titled ‘Seeing Islam as Others saw it: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam’ (by prof. Robert G. Hoyland), enumerates ca. 140 different authors, manuscripts, texts or inscriptions (categorized as a. sources; b. apocalypses and visions; c. martyrologies; d. chronicles and histories; and e. apologies and disputations) that involve various narratives in Syriac Aramaic, Coptic, Greek, Armenian, Middle Persian, Christian Arabic, Jewish Aramaic, Latin and Chinese primary sources, which date back to the period between 620 and 780 CE.
As it can be easily understood, most of the above mentioned texts were not written with the specific purpose to detail the battles and the events that took place in the area under study in the 630s and the 640s; consequently, their mention of facts and their references to episodes were rather brief, because the main scope of the narrative was other. The Eastern Roman chronicler and monk Theophanes the Confessor (758-817) presented the longest description of the events by an Eastern Roman author. His text is to be found in Medieval Greek and Latin translation: J. P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, cviii (vol.108, col.55-1009). But when Theophanes wrote his venerated Χρονογραφία (Chronographia), at least 150 years had passed after the Battle of Yarmouk was fought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophanes_the_Confessor
Still this is fine if compared with the Muslim Arabic sources; the scarcity of 7th c. CE Islamic sources is spectacular. The Islamic sources of that period are much scarcer than the non-Islamic sources. Even worse, as the Arabs of Hejaz were not civilized and kept no historical records of their otherwise primitive and therefore dreary societies, a long formative period had to first pass, until -under clear Aramaean, Persian, Coptic and Jewish guidance- some rudiments of historiography be formed.
Most of the first, important historians of Islamic times were of non-Arab origin:
1- Muhammad ibn Ishaq (704-767) was the grandson of an Aramaean young boy held captive in a Christian monastery in Shetata (Ayn al Tamr) in Mesopotamia;
2- Al Waqidi (747-823) was the son of a Persian lady of noble ancestry whose family introduced letters, arts and music to uncivil and primitive Hejaz;
3- Tabari (or rather Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari/ محمد بن جرير الطبري; 839-923) was an Iranian born in the southern coastlands of the Caspian Sea (Tabaristan), a location to which he owes the name by which he became widely known. Tabari’s Chronography was not different from the Eastern Roman historiographical tradition, as he started his narrative from the Creation. Tabari accumulated an enormous, unprecedented documentation, and he mentioned explicitly his sources for each and every part of his colossal text (a recent, unilingual English translation needed 40 volumes of ca. 300 pages each to be published), making it unattractive to the non-specialists. But Tabari wrote no less than 230 years after the Battle of Yarmouk was fought.
The situation is even worse, when it comes to Islamic religious, theological, biographical, and hagiographical literature. The earlier manuscripts that survived down to our days date back to the 8th, 9th and 10th c., while few existing exceptions are in truly fragmentary condition and cannot be taken as ‘proofs’ properly speaking.
The scarcity of the contemporaneous sources makes the interdisciplinary research imperative for the case of the early Islamic conquests and for the study of the first decades of caliphs’ rule. The contrast or the agreement between two different sources and the often divergent perspectives offered can help drastically stimulate the research orientation and push scholars toward hitherto unidentified areas, which may then grant a far better understanding of the historical facts than present-day clichés do.
The Teaching of Jacob (Διδασκαλία Ἰακώβου/Didaskalia Iakobou; Doctrina Jacobi) is an example in this regard; preserved partially in Medieval Greek manuscripts and integrally in Latin, Arabic, Ge’ez and Slavonic translations, the text consists in a debate among Jews as regards their eventual conversion to Christianity. It seems to be dated back to 634 CE, and it provides some of the earlier references to the Islamic conquests. In fact, it contradicts all Islamic sources, because it describes prophet Muhammad (without naming him) as waging wars in Palestine. However, the brief excerpt that concerns these facts makes state of an alliance between Palestinian Jews and the Arab armies. On the other hand, those among the Palestinian Jews, who had converted to Christianity (or rather were forced to), saw in the person of the ‘warrior prophet’ the Antichrist and even expected the imminent return of the Christ, also regretting that it took them long to identify Jesus with the Biblical Messiah.
The Syriac ‘Chronicle of 640’, written by Thomas the Presbyter, consists in a particular Christian Chronography down to the year 640 CE; the scribe, who copied the manuscript ca. 85 years later (724 CE), added an extra text containing the list of the Umayyad caliphs, who had reigned until that year. The Chronicle contains critical references to the early Islamic attacks and conquests, also stating that an enormous bloodshed followed the battle “between the Romans and the Tayyaye of Muhmd (the Arabs of Muhammad)”, which took place on 4th February 634 CE in Palestine, east of Gaza. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Presbyter
Two years later (636 CE), the Syriac ‘Chronicle of 640′ mentions explicitly the Sassanid Iranian debacle (without however naming the Battle of Qadissiyyah) and the subsequent arrival of the Islamic armies in NE Mesopotamia and notably Mardin (today in SE Turkey), which was the religious capital of the Tur Abdin Aramaean Miaphysitic/Monophysitic monasticism; these events also caused great bloodshed there. However, by dating these events in 636 CE {year 947, indiction 9, of the Seleucid Era (starting 312-311 BCE)}, the author makes it impossible for us to date the Battle of Yarmouk in 636, which is nowadays the tendency of several scholars who rather follow Theophanes’ text. On the contrary, Tabari makes it very clear that the Battle of Yarmouk occurred days after the death of Abu Bakr in August 634 CE.
Another brief and fragmentary inscription written on a blank page of a 6th c. Syriac copy of the Gospel of Mark makes state of the failure of the Eastern Roman army to properly defend the eastern regions of the empire; the same expression is used in Syriac (Tayyaye of Muhmd), but the dating is arbitrary. The inscription may well have been written in the 630s, but we cannot specify when exactly. Modern scholars have the tendency to deliberately mistrust the historical authors in order to fabricate the version of historiography that pleases them, and that is why several specialists assumed that the inscription’s author mistook Gabitha for Yarmouk; the inscription mentions a battle between the Eastern Romans and the Muslims in Gabitha (Jabiyah, in Syria) and the modern scholars translate it as ‘Yarmouk’ (in Jordan). It would be however more interesting to focus on similarities and dissimilarities between Syriac and Arabic, because practically speaking the same noun (Gabitha, Jabiyah) ended up having two totally different meanings. If one applies Syriac reading to the Quranic text before vocalization, the surprises may be phenomenal.
IV. Critical incidents during the Battle of Yarmouk
Tabari starts his narration of the events of the year 13 AH (634-635) with the Battle of Yarmouk; it expands on the illness and the subsequent death of Abu Bakr later. This cancels automatically the falsely reconstructed entry of the Wikipedia that dates the event back to 636 CE. Tabari’s two previous units are:
– Those who say Abu Bakr led the pilgrimage
– Those who say Umar led the pilgrimage
It is quite interesting that, in the introductory text for the events of the year 13 AH (before the description of the Battle of Yarmouk), Tabari states clearly that Abu Bakr, after his return from Mecca to Madina (when the hajj was completed), prepared the armies to be sent to Syria. Tabari narrates the developments, based on many different chains of earlier sources. There were many recruits of Yemen, because the Yemenites had recently accepted Islam (630 CE). So, even in these early battles, we cannot speak of ‘Arab armies’, but of Arab and Yemenite armies; the Yemenites are a Semitic nation, but as different from the Arabs as the Jews are from the Aramaeans, and pre-Islamic Yemenite languages and writings were very different from Arabic.
At this point, one has to point out that, before and after the death of prophet Muhammad (632), the early Islamic state in Hejaz, Yemen, Oman and the desert was in a tumultuous situation and incessant rebellions were exploding every now and then here and there, which means that the Islamic army units were in continuous readiness. However, despite this fact, the preparations for the dispatch of the army to the southern confines of Palestine and Syria, as narrated by Tabari, seem to have been rudimentary. In other words, I want to state that, for an event of so cataclysmic importance, the preparations were minimal.
This can only mean one thing: there were ongoing communications and coordination with Aramaeans based in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia as regards a) attrition activities that they would possibly undertake against the Eastern Roman armies, b) defection of Aramaean soldiers from the Eastern Roman armies, and c) public opinion preparation for the forthcoming arrival of the Islamic armies and for the acceptance of the early Islamic faith (which was not what people think today that Islam is). And these developments (in Syria, and not in Hejaz) are exactly what made the difference, irrespective of the battle outcome. Otherwise, an early Islamic victory and invasion could be met with local population resistance and then the dispatch of another imperial army from Constantinople or Cappadocia would demolish once forever the initial state structure that the Arab and Yemenite armies may have imposed for a year or two in Damascus, Emessa (Homs), Caesarea Maritima, and Jerusalem.
Four separate armies were dispatched from Madina at the same time and each of them took a different road, but when they reached the region of Yarmouk River, they decided to unite, because the Eastern Romans outnumbered them. The same tactic was followed by the Eastern Romans. In some early skirmishes a Muslim force under Khālid ibn Saʿīd was defeated. Tabari states that the two armies encamped at a relatively close distance from one another without fighting for several months.
At that point, Tabari gives the date of Abu Bakr’s death, namely in the middle of the month Jumadah al Akhirah of the Islamic calendar (16 August 634), and specifies that the event took place “ten days before the victory (in the battle of Yarmouk River)”. It is noteworthy that prophet Muhammad’s worst enemy and late convert to Islam Abu Sufyan bin Harb accompanied the army and was appointed as the ‘preacher’ (qass). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%C4%81%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%A3
During the description of the battle, Tabari mentions the arrival of the messenger from Madinah, namely the rider who announced the death of Abu Bakr only to Khalid bin Walid, the army leader, keeping it secret from all the fighters for obvious reasons. Tabari narrates also discussions that took place in intervals between Khalid bin Walid and George (Jurjah bin Budhiyah; also mentioned as Jarajis), one of the commanders of the Eastern Roman armies, who finally accepted Islam, performed a brief Islamic prayer (only two prostrations; rak’atayn), and then fought with the Muslims against the Eastern Roman army.
At another point, Tabari mentions an incident between Al-Ashtar (Malik bin al Harith al Nakha’iy, also known as Malik Al-Ashtar; a Yemenite origin Muslim) and ‘a man of the Romans’, who suggested a single combat with any Muslim fighter – a challenge that Al-Ashtar accepted. After the two combatants exchanged many blows, Al-Ashtar said to the ‘Roman’ opponent: “Take that, because I am a youngster from the Iyad tribe”! The ‘Roman’ fighter responded: “May God increase the number of people like you among my people; because, by God, if you were not of my people, I would have supported the Romans (meaning the Eastern Romans), but now I will not help them”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malik_al-Ashtar
The hills around the Yarmouk riverYarmouk RiverMaps and diagrams about historical developments are useless, as they only offer information of one dimension; one grasps the reality as regards the Battle of Yarmouk only when understanding that the outright majority of the local Aramaean populations passionately desired and wished for an Eastern Roman defeat, expecting the Muslim warriors as liberators. This occurred not because these populations believed in the faith preached by prophet Muhammad, but due to their need to use the Muslim armies in order to get rid from the tyrannical Eastern Roman rule. This truth has been systematically obscured by Western historians who came up with cheap propaganda and empty rhetoric, in order to repeat the divisive clichés that are necessary to the criminal colonial regimes of the West.
Incidents like the aforementioned totally change the image that modern scholars have created as distortion of the historical reality. The Islamic army did not actually need to be numerous; the battlefront would not be the most critical location as regards the battle outcome. Even more so, because if the first battle had been lost, the second would have been victorious in any case!
V. The true dimensions of the Battle of Yarmouk and of its outcome
The linguistic affinity between Aramaeans and Arabs was such that we can easily infer that most of the Islamic fighters could easily communicate in the language of a sizeable part of the Eastern Roman army (the Aramaean soldiers recruited from the lands of today’s SE Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine). There is no doubt about the knowledge and use of Syriac Aramaic among Arabs, due to their long professional involvement across the frankincense and spice trade routes. Even more importantly, the well-documented diffusion of Christianity among the Arabs bears automatically witness to their great skills of Syriac Aramaic in terms of reading comprehension, listening comprehension, written composition, and usage. How close to prophet Muhammad may this situation have been? Extremely close!
The cousin of his first wife, a learned man named Warraqah (: lit. ‘paper’) ibn Nawfal was a Christian convert. The religiosity of those days was such that we can safely claim that Khadijah’s cousin was reading every day excerpts from the Peshitta (the Syriac Bible). To all those, who discuss issues pertaining to prophet Muhammad’s education, knowledge and familiarity with Christological disputes, although it is certain that Khadijah’s husband -in young age- traveled repeatedly to territories of the Eastern Roman Empire (where he may have had month-long discussions with monks, theologians and learned merchants), the easiest response would be:
– Already in Mecca, there were Peshitta copies of the Bible, in the small houses of prophet Muhammad’s relatives!
Peshitta manuscripts with miniaturesAramaean Art of the Book
Also many Aramaeans involved in the trade between Yemen and the Mediterranean could communicate in the provincial Hejaz dialect that we now call ‘Quranic Arabic’. Language issues are mentioned in the Quran, and not without reason. In fact, Arabic sounded like a rough and uncouth dialect to the Aramaeans of Damascus or Antioch, two great cities each of which had larger population than the totality of the (Hejaz and desert) Arabs. On the other hand, the lexicographical poverty of pre-Islamic Arabic, if compared to the treasure of Syriac Aramaic (which also contained loans from other languages), was viewed by the Hejaz Arabs as ‘linguistic purity’; this situation led them to the aberration that their dialect was more ‘ancient’ or more ‘original’, whereas in fact it was more ‘isolated’ and more arid than Syriac Aramaic. And this situation is reproduced nowadays when people, who are well versed in the Quranic text (which stays close to the pre-Islamic Arabic’s ‘purity’, although it is far more elaborate), try to read Ibn Sina’s Al-Isharat wa al-Tanbihat; they fail to grasp anything.
The religious-cultural similarity between the Arabs, who had just accepted prophet Muhammad’s preaching, and the Christian Aramaeans (either Nestorian or Miaphysitic/Monophysitic) was even more stupendous. Of course, when it comes to religion, tiny differentiations are known to have been reasons of terrible strives and wars, but in this case, there was a tremendously different issue. The Arabs had already rejected their idolatry and polytheistic concepts in order to adopt a faith that had a great number of common points with both, Nestorian and Miaphysitic / Monophysitic Christianity. In other words, they had made the first step in the direction of Miaphysitic/Monophysitic and Nestorian Christianity, and this was how the Christian Aramaeans viewed them; of course, to some Aramaean monks, the Arabs were perceived as heretic, but still this is far ‘better’ than just ‘heathens’.
The truly negative view of Islam was particular only to Constantinople and to Rome; but this detrimental judgment of Islam had basically imperial and material motives; in other words, Muhammad ‘was’ for the imperial ruling class the Antichrist, because his religious system was effective in seriously and irreversibly damaging their imperial posture, material benefits, and ecumenical appeal. Suddenly, the major challenges of 300 years of Christian imperial rule (namely Arius, Eutyches and Nestorius) that the Constantinopolitan theologians had managed to overcome appeared to be extremely weak and minor compared with the latest: Muhammad.
The difference was simple; the earlier challenges (namely Arius, Eutyches and Nestorius) emanated from within the Roman Empire, and the Constantinopolitan elite proved to be able to squelch them, oppressing and persecuting leaders and followers of the ‘heresies’. But Muhammad emanated from outside the Roman Empire. He early managed to secure an independent basis for his faith, and thence he attacked the Eastern Roman provinces that were inhabited by populations, which overwhelmingly rejected the Constantinopolitan doctrine; it was only normal for these populations to massively opt for the standard bearers of the new faith.
In fact, they perceived the arrival of the Muslim armies as liberation from the Roman – Constantinopolitan tyranny. The Anti-Muhammadan rhetoric of the Medieval Latin sources is merely an evil propaganda of the losers; the reality is simple: either they accepted Islam or remained Monophysitic, Nestorian, Gnostic or Manichaean, the Aramaeans, who constituted the quasi-totality of the local populations in Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and the southern coastland of the Persian Gulf, did not rebel against the rule of the Caliphate. And the Arab rulers accepted the importance of the lands of the Aramaeans, and that’s why they abandoned their marginal towns and sketchy villages in Hejaz and set up their capitals in the lands of the Aramaeans.
After all, this new doctrine appeared at the time as merely a new Christological dispute and heresy, and its followers were few and originated from lands that had never been historically important and which remained historically unimportant. But the loss for the theological elites of Constantinople and Rome was abysmal; in fact, pretty much like Constantinople was the New Rome, Damascus and Baghdad were meant to be the Final Rome. That is why Arius, Eutyches and Nestorius were never called ‘the Antichrist’, but prophet Muhammad was!
The Umayyad Mosque at Damascus: a masterpiece of Aramaean ArtGrand Mosque of Damascus: the spectacular mosaics in the arcade around the iwan reveal the splendor of the Aramaean Art.
At this point, I terminate the present, first article of the series; in a forthcoming article, I will reveal other critical points explicitly mentioned in the historical sources that modern Western scholars sulphurously disregard, conceal or misinterpret only to advance their historical forgery and intellectual fallacy; in this they are imitated and followed by the disreputable, ignorant and vicious, pseudo-Muslim sheikhs, imams, professors, muftis, qadis and preachers, who have been fabricated and put in place by the English and French colonials in full disruption of the Islamic historical continuity. Yet, these -widely unknown- points help us first achieve a deep and comprehensive understanding of the facts that took place in the 620s-630s and then get the real picture of the entire historical process without the smokescreen of today’s misplaced version of historiography.
In fact, what most people believe today as History of Islamic Conquests and Early Islamic History is entirely false. It is a fairy tale that turns a) most of the Westerners into absurd Muhammad-haters and Islam-deniers and b) most of the Muslims into useful-idiots and naïve believers of a pseudo-Islamic theological doctrine that has nothing in common with the religion preached by prophet Muhammad and ever since advocated by hadhrat Ali and his descendants. It is not a matter of Westerners accepting Islam and Muslims accepting Christianity as faith, but as historical process. Islam was not preached by prophet Muhammad in order to be imposed worldwide. That’s why both groups need to first interpret Emperor Heraclius’ evident reluctance to fight against the Islamic armies. This was the only man in the world who, before meeting with prophet Muhammad’s personal envoy Dahyah al Kalbi, encountered his worst enemy.
Over the past decades, the Uyghurs have gradually become one of the most favorite topics of the distorting propaganda undertaken by the Western colonial powers; it is a pity that a great and historic nation turned out to be the indispensable mascot of every disinformation and misinformation campaign carried out by the Western mainstream media and by some of the leading social media in the Internet. More recently, themes related to the illustrious Turanian nation were promoted to the forefront of the clash between China and the corrupt, ailing and worthless Western world.
However, in the case of the Uyghur nation and their land, i.e. the Tarim Basin, the lies diffused nowadays only pale if compared to the methodically established in the 19th c. and systematically expanded ever since academic fallacies about the Uyghurs, all the Turkic nations, Central Asia, Siberia, China, India, Iran, the so-called Middle East, and in general, the History of Asia. The same concerns of course Africa as well.
Each and every historical distortion is due only to the evil political needs of the colonial powers, i.e. their attempt to subdue the world, by fooling the others in various ways that the colonial academia are not ashamed to call ‘Orientalism’, ‘Humanities’, and ‘unbiased science’. That’s why only very few scholars today have an idea about the true dimensions of the colonial falsehood, the extent of the historical falsification, and the disastrous targets that the colonial powers attempted through their enormous academic fallacy. This unfortunately concerns also the Uyghurs themselves because, due to various circumstances occurred over the past 300-400 years, they have been detached from their past and dissociated from part of their extraordinarily remarkable historical-cultural heritage, thus failing to achieve a proper nation building process.
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Uyghur Civilizationconstitutes one of the most fascinating parts of the Turanian and Oriental Cultural Heritage; more than any other nation in the World History, the Uyghurs developed civilization through five (5) different religions: Tengrism, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity, and Islam.
Buddhist Uyghur princes depicted on wall paintings of Bezeklik Cave 9Manichaean Elects (priests) as depicted on walls of the Manichaean temple at Qocho Wall painting from the Qocho Church; a process of Nestorian priests commemorating Palm Sunday (7th-8th c.)The famous map featured in Mahmoud al Kashgari’s masterpiece Diwan Lughat al-Turk (“Compendium of the languages of the Turks” / 11th c.), which is a monumental work that shows the advanced level of scholarship that the Uyghurs had reached among all Turanian and Muslim nations.The tomb of Mahmud al Kashgari, one of the most illustrious Uyghur scholars and erudite academics – Kashgar, Eastern Turkestan/XinjiangUyghur Christian Nestorian priests, architects and merchants built the Daqin Pagoda-Church in Xi’an, the ancient Chinese capital Chang’an, during the 11th c.The travels of the Uyghur Nestorian Chinese diplomat Rabban Bar Sauma (13th c.)
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Ignorant and idiotic people, who believe the lies of the criminal gangsters of the Western countries against China and accept the Western propaganda about the so-called oppression or persecution of the Uyghurs in Eastern Turkestan by the Chinese authorities, are the disgrace of the human race, and they will soon have to pay an enormously high price for their ignorance and idiocy. This concerns also several foolish politicians in Turkey, notably Mansur Yavaş, the mayor of Ankara, and Meral Akşener, the head of Iyi Parti, who recently took disastrous positions against China, therefore only proving that they are on the CIA payroll.
Their sick sentimentalism and evil rhetoric heavily damage Turkey’s national interests, which are irrevocably linked with China. Not one Turk can today possibly support and defend positions that help -in any sense- Turkey’s enemies, namely US, UK, EU, NATO, Canada, Australia and their likes. Either both, Mr. Yavaş and Ms. Akşener, will return to common sense or they will contribute to the disastrous failure of Turkey, which has been the quintessence of the miserable and anti-Turkish AKP governments’ policies since 2002.
On the contrary, sticking to Kemal Ataturk’s secular concepts, principles and practices, today’s Turkey can become instrumental in solving the Uyghur problem, in offering Beijing great assistance and effective advice in the matter, and in dragging the embattled Uyghur nation far from the useless pseudo-Islamic theological indoctrination, which has been diffused -in a most nauseating and disgusting manner- by the ignorant, uneducated and villainous sheikhs and pseudo-professors of Al Azhar, Madinah and other similar, backward and pseudo-Islamic universities of today’s decayed Islamic world.
Better than anyone else, Turkey’s Kemalists, and more particularly the members and the deputies of CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), are in a position to convincingly explain to the Uyghurs the worldwide unique achievements made by Kemal Ataturk and to pull them far from the evil manipulation undertaken by the colonial Western countries against -not only the Uyghurs but also- all the Turanian nations.
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When different maps of Eastern Turkestan / Xinkiang uploaded in different versions of the Wikipedia reveal the hidden intentions of scheming colonial diplomats
Eastern Turkestan / Xinjiang autonomous region of the People’s Republic of ChinaDzungaria (in red) and the Tarim Basin (in blue) are the two parts of XinkiangUyghurs, Han Chinese, and Kazakh: Xinjiang nationalities by prefecture – Date: 2000The entry East Turkestan of the English version of the Wikipedia features this ridiculous map, which has no historical credibility, but it only shows the territories that the CIA and the State Department order the so-called ‘World Uyghur Congress’ to publicly demand for secession! This treacherous organization terribly harms the interests of the Uyghur Nation.
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If today’s Uyghurs believe -in any way- even a single word uttered to them by the monstrous, paranoid, disreputable and criminal statesmen, military, politicians, diplomats, agents, academics, analysts, journalists, etc., they will all fall victims of a scheme providing for the cynical utilization of their nation, and in the process they will bring upon themselves their destruction. Any sort of contact, communication, association or cooperation between the Uyghurs and any representative of the US, UK, EU, NATO gangsters will only end with the fatal and total eradication of the Uyghur nation, and the only responsible will be the naïve Uyghur pundits and activists who thought it possible to communicate with the leeches and the parasites of the Western world.
It has nothing to do with ‘religion’, and it is as simple as that: the inhuman monsters, who rule the US, UK, EU, NATO, etc., do not give a damn about the Uyghurs and their lives, let alone their souls. Already, these evil governments and their insidious academia abominably disfigured and deliberately minimized the History of Uyghur Nation in a shameful manner, concealing major achievements of the illustrious Turanian nation. The demented, inhuman and devilish atheists, who rule London, Paris, Brussels, and Washington D.C., do not care whether the Uyghurs pray in the mosques or fast in Ramadhan; under other circumstances, they would be pleased to throw thousands of insulting caricatures of prophet Muhammad inside the Uyghur mosques and thus profane them. They only care to generate problems to their principal rival: Beijing.
That’s why the gangsters of US, UK, EU, NATO, etc. use the Uyghurs like their most worn out shoes. The descendants of a major Turanian nation should not therefore fall victims of the fetid and bestial pedophiles of the West, who first pay some millions of dollars to the Uyghur traitors of the ‘World Uyghur Congress’, and then calmly enjoy their abnormal lives, destroying young children’s lives.
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Who pays the bill for the World Uyghur Congress and for all the lies published in Western mass media against China?
Those who pay one category of their puppets, namely the atheist and Zionist cartoonists, to publish disreputable cartoons ridiculing prophet Muhammad, …
View of the premises of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in Paris, France, 02 November 2011, after they suffered destruction due to an incendiary bomb attack overnight. According to Police sources the fire started around 01.00 am. Charlie Hebdo had published a special edition on 02 November related to the Arab Spring, renaming the magazine Charia Hebdo for the occasion, in reference to the Ennahda Islamist party victory in Tunisia and the transitional Libyan executive’s statement that Islamic Sharia law would be the country’s main source of law. The cover featured a cartoon of the Mohammed, saying: ‘100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!’.
those who pay another category of their puppets, namely the Islamic extremists and terrorists to fire-bomb the offices of the newspapers that published the disreputable cartoons …
….. are those who pay the otherwise ‘good Muslims’ and ‘patriotic Uyghurs’ of the World Uyghur Congress to betray their nation, their religion, their history and their heritage, just for … a fistful of dollars!
And how do the world’s most criminal countries, France, England and the US, i.e. the states that perpetrated the world’s most abhorrent crimes, happen to care now about the nonexistent ‘genocide of the Uyghurs’ after they exterminated all the American Indians and the African and Asiatic nations that they colonized?
Only idiots and fake Muslims believe these lies – only to end up in the Hell that they deserve.
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The present series of articles will shed light on the evil deeds and the criminal plans that the mendacious and duplicitous Western ‘supporters’ of the Uyghurs have long carried out and it will underscore the imperative need for a cordial alliance between Turkey and China, which will reshape the world and ditch the anomalous, colonial West in the landfill once for all.
Contents
I. The Dispute about the Uyghur Past and Heritage
II. A Brief Diagram of Uyghur History
III. Eastern Turkestan: the Clash of Terms for the Center of the World
IV. Turkey: the Turanian and the Islamic World’s Foremost Example as a Secular State
V. Islam: turned to a Theological System, Islam does not exist anymore as Religion VI. China and the Problems of Eastern Turkestan – Xinkiang
VII. Kemal Ataturk: the Only True Salvation for today’s Uyghurs
I. The Dispute about the Uyghur Past and Heritage
Uyghurs ( ئۇيغۇرلار- Уйғурлар /Uygurlar/維吾爾/ Уйгуры) are one of the most ancient and most important Turanian (Turkic) nations; as per a conventional, flawed and Western colonial linguistic classification, Uyghur belongs to the Karluk category of Turanian languages, like Uzbek. On the contrary, Turkmen, Turkish, Azeri and other languages belong to the Oghuz (Oğuz) branch of Turanian languages, whereas Tatar, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and several other languages form the Kipchak (Kıpçak/ Кипчак – Кыпчак) group of Turanian languages.
Uyghur History covers four (4) millennia documented in several languages and an endlessly increasing material record; however, it has been detrimentally distorted by Western colonial explorers and academics, notably English and French, since the time of what was termed as the Great Game. This ominous term denotes basically the 19th c. antagonism of primarily German, Russian, English and French Orientalists, explorers, scholars, secret agents, diplomats and statesmen for the fabrication of the borders that each great power wanted to impose in a vast area to which none of these powers was related (Russia reached that area only by invading other kingdoms and empires).
The Great Game: the Afghan Emir Shir Ali between the Russians (bear) and the English (lion)
The various borderlines that were envisioned by the respective headquarters and expressed only the wishes of Berlin, St. Petersburg, London and Paris needed to be backed-up by aptly, properly and systematically falsified historiography, and consequently, History ‘had’ to be written in a way so that it can be adjusted to each of the aforementioned political interests that were opposite to one another. That’s why several gangsters and thieves, like ‘Sir’ Aurel Stein, masqueraded as scholars, crossed many thousands of kilometers and penetrated in dangerous deserts to search, find and distort/misinterpret antiquities first. The entirely fake science of ‘geopolitics’ was also fabricated at that time only to theorize the nonsensical colonial claims raised by every white racist criminal. There are no historical lines that can possibly divide Asia. The true historical process, as documented in written sources and the archaeological material record, totally discredits every hypothetical line drawn by any biased ‘political scientist’.
It is crucial at this point to underscore the fact that the useless Ottoman Empire, although primordially concerned by the aforementioned developments, was totally absent from the Great Game, pretty much like the ailing Qajar Empire of Iran. The roots of the Asiatic Great Game could to some extent be attributed to the Napoleonic scheme of an eventual French-Russian alliance geared in order to invade the then still expanding English colonial force in South Asia (the so-called ‘India’). As it can be understood, the collapsing and terminating Mughal Empire (Gorkanian) was (in the early 19th c.) at the brink of extinction due to the ceaseless plots and colonial wars undertaken by Portuguese, Dutch, French and English against it, whereas in Qing China, the emperors Jiaqing (嘉慶帝; 1796-1820) and Daoguang (道光帝; 1820-1850) were only a shadow of their formidable predecessor Kangxi (康熙帝; 1661-1722), and their rule over the land of the Uyghurs was only nominal. So, none of the four great historical Asiatic empires (Ottomans, Iranians, Mughal and China) could be able to withstand or divert the colonial onslaught.
Speaking of today’s Uyghurs, I felt obliged to briefly divert my presentation to issues pertaining to the Great Game for a simple, yet crucial, reason; the outcome of the Great Game determined what we know today as ‘borders’ in the vast lands of Central and Eastern Asia. And as I already said, it also shaped to great extent what is today taught in universities worldwide as History of Asia or Uyghur History. Several modern scholarly juxtapositions and polarizations about various points of Uyghur History are only the result of the systematic, sophisticated and insidious distortion of Asiatic History by Western colonial academia. This is so because tons of deliberately falsified data and material record have not yet been duly refuted and rejected, but they still constitute harmful traps that disorient researchers from a correct and proper conceptualization and contextualization of the historical sources.
Turghun Almas (Тургун Алмас/ تۇرغۇن ئالماس/吐尔贡·阿力玛斯; 1924-2001), a great Uyghur scholar who was persecuted because of his secessionist misinterpretation of Uyghur History, supported the thesis of 6000+ years of indigenous Uyghur History in Eastern Turkestan. Official Chinese historical interpretations associate today’s Uyghurs with the Tiele people, who were part of the vast Hiung-Nu (Xiongnu /匈奴 / Хунну) tribal, confederate Empire, some of whose descendants became later known as Huns in Central Asia, Western Siberia, and throughout Europe. The Hiung-Nu are a major part of China’s History and the Hiung-Nu wars with Han China (133 BCE-89 CE) shaped China as we know it.
Turghun Almas
Their heirs are the so-called White Huns (‘Ebodalo’ in Bactrian/厭帶夷粟陁 – Yethailito/Εφθαλίται-Hephthalites/Эфталиты), who formed various kingdoms in Bactria, Sogdiana and the entire Tarim Basin (Eastern Turkestan). Although vassals of the Rouran Khaganate (see below), they were formidable warriors and defeated the Sassanid armies of Iran several times. The Hephthalites contributed greatly to Civilization, Spirituality and Art, being the enlightened rulers who sponsored superb and majestic monuments like the Qizil Caves of the Tarim Basin (Caves of the Thousand Buddhas) and the Buddhas of Bamiyan (Afghanistan).
However, trying to demonstrate, who arrived first in a specific territory, in order to subsequently issue historicity claims is the least successful method for anyone to get rid of the Anglo-French colonial Orientalist scheme, and of its implications. It is essential to first understand the nature of the Ancient Turanian History and second outsmart the colonial distortion of the History of Asia.
Turanians were nomads or semi-nomads whose acts demonstrate that they were absolutely convinced that home-dwellers were sinners and degenerate people unable to attain the ancestral human originality because of their attachment to one only location. The difference, opposition and clash between Turanian nomads and settled populations are the real axis around which revolves the History of all Turanian nations. This is attested in historical sources, in the archaeological material record, and also in epics, legends and every literary effort of mythologized History. With this in mind, one can comprehend the entire History of Asia far better and perceive the interaction between the Northern Chinese and the Turanians as a historical process that concerns the same family of nations. Actually, many historical and literary sources view the Northern Chinese as simply settled Turanians, and this can provide far better insight into the violence of their wars. In this regard, the Han – Hiung-Nu wars constitute an early episode of the permanent phenomenon of Turanian nomad-settler polarity.
On the other hand, the colonial perfidy in misinterpreting historical evidence and in contextualizing it as per the colonial interests of England and France is easy to assess; it merely constitutes a reflection of their own attitude at the political-international level. Since they viciously generate all types of divisions at the political level, they deliberately proliferate divisions at the academic-scholarly level, when writing down the history of lands that they hate enough to viciously distort, fittingly adjust, and totally subordinate it to the fallacy that they diffuse as their own, ‘Western’ or ‘European’, History. Western Orientalists played therefore with ethnic names, personal names, toponyms, and the vocabulary of languages that they deciphered.
Although it is very well known that an ethnic group can have many diverse names in different historical sources written in several languages, colonial academic forgers intentionally multiplied the historically recorded (in various languages under different names) ethnicities in order to deprive several nations from
a) a past that the Western colonial academics did not want to attribute to them,
b) a presence in remote locations that they did not want to acknowledge to them,
and
c) an achievement that was ‘too great’ so that the Western schemers possibly concede it to all those nations that they viewed hatefully and enviously for their past, cultures, civilizations and achievements.
The subsequent fabrication of, otherwise nonexistent, pseudo-historical nations (which are only the duplicate of other nations known under different names) is a method that was widely used by Western Orientalists in order to disfigure the History of Asia. This fact had a disastrous impact on Uyghurs, China, the History of Uyghur, and the History of China as these topics are presently taught in universities and manipulated in politics.
An example in this regard is offered by another ‘stolen’ part of the Uyghur heritage: the Yuezhi (月氏/ Юэчжи; 3rd c. BCE – 4th c. CE), who became later known as divided (Great Yuezhi and Lesser Yuezhi), are not different from the Hiung-Nu but only constitute a part of them. They clashed with them and they migrated only to be further divided in their migration. But the Yuezhi and the Hiung-Nu were indeed Turanians, and they constitute an authentic part of Uyghur History, pretty much like they are an inalienable part of the History of China, which de facto comprises and is partly identical with the History of Turan.
Eurasia in the time of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty 141-87 BCEHan China expansion in the ‘West’, the Xiongnu, and the Yuezhi at the end of the 2nd c. BCE and the beginning of the 1st c. BCE
The supreme stage of the colonial historiographical distortion contains the disgrace of white racism; this took the monstrous form of excessive Indo-Europeanization of everything. How this was processed is easy to unveil: Friedrich W. K. Müller, a famous German Orientalist of the Deutsche Turfanexpeditionen (German Turfan expeditions) associated the Yuezhi with the Tocharian nation (Τόχαροι/ Тохары/吐火罗人) of the Ancient Greek historical sources. The problem exploded when other Western European Orientalists did not want to identify the Tocharians of Eastern Turkestan with the Tocharians of Bactria, whose language they had arbitrarily identified as ‘Indo-European’.
In brief, they wanted to Indo-Europeanize an essentially Turanian/Chinese continent of which Europe constituted in reality the tiniest, the most unimportant, and the only barbaric peninsula whereby every form of culture and every portion of civilization came from the Orient, i.e. the Asiatic mainland, with significant African additions.
The Uyghur Manichaean Sermon from Manichaean manuscript unearthed in the legendary German Turfan expeditions
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Sampul tapestry from the area of Khotan, today at the Museum of Urumqi, Eastern Turkestan/Xinjiang – 1st c. CE; it depicts a Yuezhi soldier.
II. A Brief Diagram of Uyghur History
Uyghur History apparently involves a very wide range of sites, monuments and historical sources, starting with the famous Tarim mummies that are dated in the 1st half of the 2nd millennium BCE. The modern Uyghur nation was progressively formed following first, the numerous Turanian migrations that determined World History for several thousands of years, and second, the expansion of the Han dynasty of China in the ‘West’, which corresponds to the eastern confines of what we call nowadays ‘Central Asia’. Han expansion in the West is the result of the victorious wars of the Han kings against the Hiung-Nu.
Tarim mummies
However, we cannot discuss of proper ‘ Chinese expansionism’ in the way we use this term in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Phoenicia-Carthage, Iran, Rome, the Eastern Roman Empire, and several Islamic caliphates, empires and kingdoms; it was rather a ceaseless effort to bring order, peace, balance and security to a vast area that was incessantly crisscrossed by migrants, raiders and nomads. Even the expeditions of Ban Chao reflect rather an effort of mercantile interests and diplomatic contacts with other orderly kingdoms, and not a real, genuine effort of militarily undertaken territorial expansion. The wider Tarim Basin was not literarily annexed to China, but rather viewed as a ‘protectorate’. Several preponderantly Turanian kingdoms prospered there for many centuries, succeeding to one another, under only nominal Chinese authority; they constitute the early phases of Uyghur History because, Turanian or not, they have been progressively assimilated, ethnically and culturally, into the Turanian Uyghurs.
Uyghur History and Cultural Heritage encompass the various small Turanian kingdoms that prospered under Chinese tutelage during the last century of the 1st millennium BCE and the first half of the 1st millennium CE, namely the kingdoms of Qiemo (且末), Loulan (or Kroran / كروران/楼兰), Khotan (于闐), Shule (疏勒) in Kashgar, Gaochang (高昌/ of the Jushi people /車師; in the area of today’s Qocho), the kingdom of Kucha (كۇچار /龜茲) which was described in the Chinese Annals as the strongest and largest among the “thirty-six kingdoms of the Western Regions”, and many other states.
Tarim Basin in the 3rd century CE
Colonial historiographers erroneously Indo-Europeanize the pre-Khaganate (First Turkic Khaganate: 552-603) historical periods of Ancient Asia; otherwise, they could not further support the theory of ‘Turkic migration’. This theory is entirely fabricated in order not to disrupt many Orientalist fallacies concerning the history of many different nations and lands that colonial academia intentionally dissociated from Turanians, due to entirely racist political reasons. The phenomenon of Turanian movements across all parts of the Asiatic continent (‘Europe’ included) is true, but it antedates the 6th c. CE, which is the very false date that colonial historiographers comfortably set for the above mentioned purposes. For instance, the Rouran Khaganate (330-555) cannot be dissociated from the Turanian History, and there are many Chinese historical sources testifying to this, because they ostensibly and repeatedly associate the Rouran with the Hiung-Nu.
Rouran Khaganate First Turkic Khaganate / Göktürk Kağanlığı – 575 CEDas erste Kaganat der Kök-Türken im Jahr 575Shoroon Bumbagar tomb: Göktürk period – 7th c., MongoliaThe famous bilingual Bugut inscription (from the Guden Sum temple, which was built at the end of the 17th c.) dates back to the times of the First Turkic Khaganate (ca. 584 CE): this is the part written in Sogdian. Tsetserleg, MongoliaTurkic knights depicted on the wall paintings of the Maya Cave (section 3) in the Kizil Caves of Eastern Turkestan that date back to the times of the Buddhist Uyghur kingdom of Kucha (not to be confused with Qocho) 6th c. Western Turkic Khaganate (On-Ok: 581-742) and Eastern Turkic Khaganate (Oguz: 581-645) Western Turks visit the king Varkhuman of Sogdiana in Afrasiyab (Samarkand) at ca. 650 CE Western Turkic Khaganate Second Turkic Khaganate (682-744)
After the First Turkic Khaganate was divided into Western Khaganate (581-742) and Eastern Khaganate (581-645), after the Tang China campaign against the Eastern Turks (629-630), after the defeat of the Western Turks (657), and after the rise and fall of the Second Turkic Khaganate (682-744), the Uyghurs rose in prominence. The Uyghur Khaganate (744-840) was the first and only Manichaean state in the World History. Following its decline, a certain number of smaller kingdoms were formed, notably those of Khotan and Qocho (843-1132; also known as Kara-Khoja), before they were all gradually absorbed within the Afrasiab (Kara-Khanid) Khanate (840-1212). This confederate Turanian kingdom expanded also westwards in Transoxiana (Υπερωξειανή / ما وراء النهر – Mawarannahr / мавераннахр), in today’s Uzbekistan, and the ruling dynasty adhered to Islam. Around the middle of the 10th c., we attest to a process of systematic diffusion of Islam among the Uyghurs.
Asia around the year 600 CETang dynasty China at 669 CEUyghur KhaganateUyghur Khaganate
This phenomenon continued also when the Qara Khitai (1124-1218; also known as Great Liao) supplanted partly first and entirely later the Afrasiab / Kara-khanids. As a matter of fact, the Buddhist Qara Khitai dynasty was a family of tolerant Turanians who ruled over a population that was Muslim in its majority; they prevailed across vast territories in Central Asia, Central Siberia, and Eastern Siberia, also establishing an alliance, in the ‘West’, with the Turanian Muslim dynasty of Khwarazm (which controlled parts of today’s Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Iran). Muslim, Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, and Manichaean Uyghurs coexisted for several centuries, under either non-Muslim or Muslim dynasties.
Kara-Khanid Khanate at 1006 CEThe Kara-Khanids and their powerful NE neighbor, the Yenisei Kyrgyz KhaganateThe Buddhist Turanian Qara Khitai Empire and the Uyghur Khanates of Turfan and KansuThe maximum expansion of the Qara-Khitai
At the times of the Turanian Mongol Empire (1206–1368), the Chagatai Khanate (1225–1340s), the Uyghurs were incorporated into these vast nomad states, and the Chinese imperial authority over them was only nominal, even during the Turanian Mongol ‘Yuan’ dynasty (1272-1368). Following the Chagatai division into Western Chagatai Khanate (1340s–1370) and Eastern Chagatai Khanate (also known as Moghulistan; 1340s–1680), the Uyghurs were either incorporated into the latter or ruled by various local dynasties; they were still followers of different religions, who coexisted peacefully within a culturally unified environment fostered by common interests, activities and means of communication.
Genghis Khan, his movements and his immense empire The Chagatai Khanate was divided into Western Chagatai Khanate (1340s–1370) and Eastern Chagatai Khanate (also known as Moghulistan; 1340s–1680); this map shows Moghulistan at ca. 1370.The Chagatai Khanate was divided into Western Chagatai Khanate (1340s–1370) and Eastern Chagatai Khanate (also known as Moghulistan; 1340s–1680); this map shows Moghulistan at ca. 1490.
The existence of several prosperous Uyghur kingdoms highlights the spiritual-cultural pluralism that prevailed among them at those days; among them the most important are the Kara Del kingdom (1389-1513), which was predominantly Buddhist, the Islamic Turpan Khanate (1487-1690), which entered into wars with Ming China (1368-1644), the Islamic Yarkent Khanate (1514-1705), as well as the Khojas of Kashgar and of the six cities (Altishahr). Due to the divisions among the branches of Khoja Islamic mysticism, following the troubles they had with Tibet, and after the intervention of the extremist Oirat Turanian Buddhists (rather known as the Dzungarian khanate), the Uyghur lived a real nightmare during the Dzungar – Qing China wars (1687-1757).
East Asia at 1616The Chinese-Muslim Uyghur-Russian alliance against the powerful, extremist Buddhist Dzungar Turanian Khanate (1687-1757)China at the time of the extremist Chinese-Christian Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), which was instigated by the uncontrolled, vicious activities of the American Protestant missionaries and their local puppets, notably Hong Xiuquan
The successful result of the many, consecutive Chinese campaigns against the Dzungar extremists pacified the Uyghurs and determined to great extent the borders of Modern China, allowing also the possibility of several local Muslim rulers to fully govern their realms as vassals of the Qing monarch. It was only then that the last Buddhist Uyghurs renounced their religion. In fact, the Dzungar genocide was the result of an Islamic Uyghur – Chinese alliance. However, the relations worsened when the Manchus controlled China; various atrocities ended up in the Afaqi Khoja holy war (1759-1866), which is at the origin of all posterior problems between the Uyghurs and the Chinese authorities.
Turkestan divided between Russia and China: Russian-Chinese borders and Russian administrative provinces of Western Turkestan in 1900The Chinese-Russian borders in the area of Semirechye (Семиречье), i.e. the ‘Seven Rivers Region’, which is today part of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan
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The territories of the precarious, secessionist First East Turkestan Republic in 1933-1934The territories of the precarious, secessionist Second East Turkestan Republic in 1944-1949
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