Speaking at the 5th Annual Conference of the Network of Oromo Studies (NOS), which took place on 27th February 2021 on Visual Technology, I exposed one more Western colonial distortion, falsification and machination; the title of my speech was: “Fake Nubia: a Colonial Forgery to deprive Cushitic Nations from National Independence, Historical Identity and Cultural Heritage”.
The text of my contribution was published without the notes here:
I herewith publish the first two notes of my speech; they constitute a brief but direct denunciation of the major Western anti-African forgeries, namely
– the Nubianization of the East African Cushites and of their historical past and heritage,
– the disparagement of the Berbers, and
– the denial of the existence of the Hamites.
Although short, this text provides readers with a comprehensive insight into the evil, racist and systematic efforts of distortion of the African past by the Anglo-French and the American criminal fraudsters and biased pseudo-academics.
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Northern Africa is entire Hamitic, not Hamito-Semitic, not Afro-Asiatic!
The fallacy of the term ‘Afro-Asiatic languages’ is a byproduct of the forgery of Pan-Arabism. There are no Arabs in Africa; there are only Pan-Arabic and Islamist dictatorships that tyrannically imposed Arabic as official language.
The true map of Northern Africa
The educational tyranny of Arabic must be abolished across Africa.Berber, Coptic and Cushitic languages in Eastern Africa must be declared as official languages.
Whatever is said in the BBC is an evil lie; one of them revolves around the Nubianization of the Cushitic-Meroitic heritage of the Modern Oromos and the other Cushitic Eastern African nations.
Extensive politicization, political exploitation of Nubians’ socio-economic problems in either Egypt or Sudan, colonial falsification of the History of Cush, and usurpation of Cushitic monuments and archaeological sites where most Nubians live today are parallel endeavors of Western academics, diplomats, politicians, Human Rights activists, mainstream media, international NGOs, and other groups of pressure: this is called ‘Nubianization’. The existing vast literature has the evident target to push toward the dismemberment of Egypt and Sudan, by cutting off sizeable territories from both countries (namely South Egypt and North Sudan). For this reason, the old Nubian resentment for the construction of the Aswan High Dam is every now and then rekindled, as Nubians in Egypt never liked their relocation to newly built villages north of Aswan, pretty much like Nubians in Sudan did not enjoy at all their enforced relocation to New Wadi Halfa.
The three Christian kingdoms of Sudan, i.e. true, historical Ethiopia: Nobatia was a Nubian kingdom, but Makuria and Alodia were entirely Cushitic.
The problem would be limited in the purely political sphere, if the Western colonial plotters did not involve an enormous deal of confiscation of Cushitic monuments, usurpation of ca. 5000 years of Cushitic History, expropriation of historical past from today’s Cushitic nations, and disastrous division among the descendants of the Ancient Hamitic-Cushitic nations of Kemet (Masr-Egypt) and Cush (Arabic-speaking Sudanese and Oromos, Somalis, Afars, Sidama, Kaffa, etc).
In fact, there is not and there cannot be any divide between
a) Arabic-speaking Cushites-Hamites in today’s Egypt and Sudan, and
b) Cushitic-Hamitic native speakers from the African Atlas and the Sahara to the Nile Delta and thence, across the Eastern African inland and coast, down to Mombasa.
The Pyramids of Napata, at today’s Karima in Northern Sudan, nearby the Mount (Jebel) Barkal; Napata was the capital of the Cushitic Kingdom of Ancient Sudan (the true Ethiopia). These monuments are common heritage to Arabic speaking Sudanese (who are ethnically Cushitic) and to modern Cushitic nations of Eastern Africa, notably the Oromos, the Sidamas and the Kaffas.
{In this case, the postmodern rejection of a) George Reisner’s false identification of the Ancient Cushitic nation of Sudan as Negroid and b) his racist assumption as per which Ancient Sudan’s (i.e. Cush’s) “native negroid race had never developed either its trade or any industry worthy of mention, and owed their cultural position to the Egyptian immigrants and to the imported Egyptian civilization” comes as a new type of even more distortive racism like that of the notorious Stuart Tyson Smith, who has embarked on a more obscure project of overwhelming Nubianization of the Cushitic / Meroitic past of Ancient Sudan (i.e. real, historical Ethiopia)}. Even worse, the new racism is absolutely Zionist of inspiration and benefit.
h ttps://undark.org/2018/02/19/nubia-sudan-amara-west-archaeology/
The pyramids of Meroe (near modern Bagrawiyah) represent a later period of the Cushitic kingdom of Ancient Sudan (i.e. Ethiopia); these pyramids are not ‘Nubian’.
Amongst others, the Khan Academy takes a particular interest in diffusing the Nubianization dogma. The same is valid for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is known for its most mistaken online presentations. This propaganda is coupled with misleading presentations featured in the National Geographic.
{Note: It is interesting to observe the frequent mistakes of the various web pages of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s portal; in the link above, go straight to fig. 8! The legend reads: “The kiosk on Philae Island probably built by the Emperor Augustus (30–14 B.C.) Photo by Adela Oppenheim”! Well, Octavian Augustus reigned from 27 BCE to 14 CE; not just 16 but 41 years!!}
Núria Castellano, Rival to Egypt, the Nubian kingdom of Kush exuded power and gold
The extraordinary confusion of the terms ‘Kushite’ and ‘Nubian’ really exudes from this worthless publication; the two terms are used alternatively and overlapping one another during the whole article, thus fully confusing specialists and non-specialized readers alike. Cushites and Nubians are however ethnically, linguistically and culturally as different from one another as Sumerians were from Elamites or Romans were from Franks.
Indicatively nonsensical excerpt: “Kushite culture blended Egyptian customs into its own, creating a distinctive, visual style. Truncated and with steep sides, the pyramids left by the long line of Nubian kings populate the desert near the site of Meroe”.
How well fallacious colonial historiography and Western political interference propaganda are interconnected one can admire in the site of the Minority Rights Group International (https://minorityrights.org/about-us/). Excerpts:
“The Nubian city of Meroë”: not one Nubian lived in Meroe in the past, and not one Nubian lives there now!
“Coptic Christianity spread to Nubia, where a Christian kingdom existed from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries. At the end of this period Nubia adopted Islam, 700 years later than the north of Egypt”: that’s totally wrong! Three Christian kingdoms (not just one) existed in South Egypt and North Sudan over the said period (“from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries”), but only the northernmost was Nubian. The other two Christian kingdoms were Cushitic, not Nubian. As Nobatia merged with Makuria, it lost its northern territories. Aswan became Muslim in the beginning of the 10th c., i.e. only 300 years “later than the north of Egypt”!
The temple of Maluli (Mandulis) at Tarmes/Talmis (modern Kalabsha) is one of the very few truly Nubian monuments. This is so because during the Antiquity the Nubians were culturally assimilated into the Egyptians and the Cushites /Meroites. To be saved from the rising waters of the lake behind the High Dam of Aswan, the temple was transported 75 km from its original site not far from the western side of the High Dam.
The Nubian God Mandolis in the Kalabsha temple near the High Dam of Aswan
With the exception of a) the Nilo-Saharan nations, b) the Niger-Congo ethnicities, c) the Bantu ethnic groups, d) the Khoisan group of people, and e) the Semitic-Yemenite origin Abyssinians (Amhara-, Tigrinya-, and Tigre-speaking), Africa is home to Hamitic nations.
Contrarily to the Semites, who originate from Asia, the Hamites are indigenous in Africa. As a matter of fact, the Hamitic group of nations is Africa’s largest in terms both of geographical area and number of native speakers. The Hamitic nations are the only to have created high-level civilizations in Africa, contrarily to the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, Bantu and Khoisan nations, which -due to advanced tribal fragmentation- did not develop major empires and thus remained at a primitive level of social organization until recent historical periods.
The temple of Wadi as Sebua (150 km south of Aswan) was built by Ramses II on the same location of an earlier temple constructed by Amenhotep II. To be saved, the temple was transported 4 km from its original place.
The two temples of Abu Simbel (275 km south of Aswan), close to the modern borderline between Sudan and Egypt, were built by Ramses II to function as mortuary temples for him (the great temple) and for his queen Nefertari (the small temple). To be saved, the two temples were transported to a higher elevation.
In the Antiquity, the Hamitic nations covered already Africa’s largest part, namely the entire northern half from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, Sahara included, and the Eastern part of Africa down to the area of today’s Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The Ancient Kemetians (Egyptians), the Ancient Cushites (Ethiopians – so, unrelated to Abyssinians), the Ancient Kingdom of Somalia (Punt), and the Ancient Berbers (called ‘Libyans’ by the Ancient Greeks and Romans) of the wider Atlas region, who inhabited the vast space from Modern Egypt’s western confines to the Atlantic Ocean, were the major and the most advanced Hamitic nations fostering civilization throughout Africa and Europe during four millennia of pre-Christian era.
Except the Hamites, the Phoenicians (a North-Western Semitic nation) developed great centers of civilization in Africa; but they were mainly concentrated in the northern coastal areas where they settled and developed several colonies like notably Carthage which was founded in 814 BCE. The Carthaginians (Qart Hadasht means ‘New City’ in Ancient Phoenician) became totally independent of the Phoenician city-kingdom of Tyr from where they originated; they created a formidable African maritime empire, colonizing Sicily, Sardinia, the Baleares, Spain and Portugal, other South European coasts, and the entire North-Western coasts of Africa. However, what we now call ‘Carthaginian’ or ‘Punic’ (from the Latin word for ‘Phoenician’) Civilization is a mixed, Phoenician and Berber (Hamitic African) synergy and interaction. Africa’s circumnavigation undertaken by Phoenician navigators, who were employed by the Berber (‘Libyan’) Pharaoh Nechao II (610–595 BCE), was another major Hamitic-Semitic interaction that took place in the Antiquity.
Significant Hamitic-Semitic cooperation also took place in the Horn of Africa region during the Late Antiquity, when first the Ancient Yemenite kingdoms of Qataban and later Sheba (the Sabaeans) and Himyar colonized the region from the Horn itself (Raas Caseyr or Ras Asir in Af Somali; known as Cape Guardafui in Western languages) down to Dar es Salaam (Rhapta in Ancient Greek) and entered in extensive intermarriages with the local Somalis to consolidate their regionally unmatched commercial supremacy. This, vast, Eastern African colony of the Ancient Yemenites was named ‘Azania’ by an anonymous Alexandrian Egyptian merchant and captain, who authored the Periplus of the Red (‘Erythraean’)) Sea (2nd half of the 1st c. CE); in contrast, the exceptionally informative and accurate writer called the Northern Somali coast (from the Bab el Mandeb straits of the Red Sea to the Horn itself) ‘the Other Berberia’.
‘Azania’ corresponds to the historical Chinese term Zesan (澤散), which was in use already in the 3rd c. CE. Contrarily to Azania, which at those days was ruled by the Marib-based Yemenite King of Sheba, ‘the Other Berberia’ was self-ruled (with the local elders in control after the Yemenite fashion, i.e. similarly with the ‘mukarrib’). The use of the name ‘the Other Berberia’ for the entire region of Northern Somalia clearly suggests close ethnic relationship with the coastal Cushitic inhabitants of the today’s Eastern Sudanese regions, because those lands were called ‘Berberia’ in the aforementioned text that was written by a well-informed entrepreneur and voyager, who had apparently traveled extensively between Egypt and Indonesia, if not China. The term also denotes the close relationship between the North-Western African Hamites of the Atlas region (Berbers) and some of Eastern Africa’s Cushites.
The colonial, academic etymology of the noun ‘Berber’, as supposedly related to the Ancient Greek onomatopoetic term ‘barbaros’ (barbarian), is a racist invention and aberration. There has never been any historical, philological, ethnographic, linguistic or ethno-sociological proof about an eventual association between the ethnonym ‘Barbar’ / ‘Berber’, as used by several ancient authors, and the word ‘barbarian’. To offer an example, in the sixth paragraph of the Periplus of the Red (‘Erythraean’) Sea, the use of the adjective ‘barbarika’ has clearly an ethnic connotation (Berber), being totally unrelated to the common Ancient Greek adjective “barbarian’:
“ιμάτια Βαρβαρικά άγναφα, τα εν Αιγύπτω γενόμενα, Αρσινοϊτικαί στολαί”
(imatia Barbarika agnafa, ta en Aigypto genomena, Arsinoitikai stolai)
The grossly identification of the ethnonym ‘Berber’ with ‘barbarians’ and the deliberate colonial etymology of this ethnonym from the Ancient Greek word ‘barbaros’ (barbarian) demonstrate the enormous hatred harbored by colonial historians against the Berbers and the Hamites. Involving causality between a hypothetical, fictional status of barbarism among the Eastern Hamites-Cushites of the coast of today’s Sudan and North Somalia and the appellation that the Ancient Greeks and Romans used to denote these and other Ancient Hamitic-Cushitic nations is an outrage. However, it helps today’s unbiased academics from China to Africa to Latin America realize how monstrously distortive the colonial Greco-centric model of History is.
It is however necessary at this point to underscore the fact that this provocative colonial bias does not reflect any eventually racist consideration among the ancient authors; on the contrary, all of the ancient authors expressed a great part of esteem and consideration for the Hamitic-Cushitic Berbers. In modern times, the first attempt to establish a causality link between the ethnonym ‘Berber’ and the Ancient Greek word ‘barbaros’ (barbarian) is attested in the case of the so-called ‘Barbary Coast’, a noxious, racist term coined for the coastal region of North Africa from today’s Libya to Morocco.
The extremely derogatory term was extensively used from the 16th to the 19th c. (until these provinces of the Ottoman Empire were colonized by the Western European racist gangsters) and, even worse, served as pretext for colonial wars, projection of Eurocentric falsehood of History, and exportation of European and North American Yankee criminality on those parts of Africa. Still today, the verses “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” (from the disreputable and evil US Marines’ Hymn) remind us of the monstrous association of the ethnonym ‘Berber’ with the Ancient Greek word ‘barbaros’ (barbarian), and of its dangerous impact. More details about this forgery one can get here:
Even worse, over the past decades, colonial historians, linguists, archaeologists, and ethnographers went further adrift and even rejected (without a proper academic refutation) the existence of the Hamitic nations, which had been accepted earlier and for more than 250 years of Western European scholarship. The absurd rejection of the existence of the Hamitic nations is only the result of extreme Jesuit, Freemasonic and Zionist fanaticism and colonial forgery; it first started with the farcical subordination of the Hamites to the Semites and the subsequent construction of the erroneous term ‘Hamito-Semitic linguistic group’. Over the past 6-7 decades, all sorts of nonsensical justifications, pretexts and innuendos have been incessantly used so that the highly politicized authors, known for their heavily ideologized motives, possibly ‘prove’ that the Hamitic languages do not exist as a fully independent linguistic group.
To carry out the unprecedented forgery, as per which there have never been Hamitic languages (sic!), numerous biased explorers and bogus-academics, incredible pseudo-intelligentsia, and mysterious apparatchiks
1) separated Hausa and several other Hamitic languages from the rest, identifying them as ‘Chadic’ (which is tantamount to shameless academic terrorism);
2) pretended that the ‘remaining’ three branches of Hamitic languages (Berber, Egyptian-Coptic, and the Eastern Cushitic group of languages) do not form an exclusive phylogenetic unit of their own (which is a paranoid lie);
3) viciously denigrated many great scholars, historians and linguists, of the 19th c. and the early 20th c. as ‘racists’, because they correctly and extensively underscored the Hamitic-Cushitic cultural superiority over all the other African ethnic-linguistic groups (which is a hysteric form of historical revisionism);
4) generated the pseudo-theory of scientific racism, which is a scheme as per which the criminal Jesuit, Freemasonic and Zionist pseudo-academics disreputably and nonsensically disparage at will numerous great scholars of the 19th c. and 20th c., who had steadfastly rejected such evil theories and inhuman concepts diffused by those villains;
5) deliberately and defamatorily associated many great European scholars and specialists of various Hamitic languages and civilizations with colonialism (which is preposterous and false);
6) attempted to refute the evident relationship between the Hamitic nations and the Caucasoid peoples;
7) fabricated an absolutely meaningless, erroneous, and pathetic term ‘Afro-Asiatic languages’ in order to depict the Hamitic-Cushitic family of nations as totally subordinated to the Semitic nations; and
8) theorized that the modern academic bibliography about the Hamitic nations (that they mistakenly rejected) was mainly due to religious (sic!) reasons pertaining to the fake Biblical and Talmudic story, which is known as the ‘Curse of Ham’. This idiotic approach and bogus-theory bears witness to sheer dementia, because many scholars, who had correctly accepted the reality of the Hamitic nations, languages and civilizations, were known for having totally rejected Judaism and Christianity. Consequently, they could not therefore be influenced by these religions and the related holy books in their research.
The absurd rejection of the existence of Hamitic nations, languages and civilizations by the militant pseudo-scholars and propagandists of today’s collapsing Western World has so many internal contradictions that easily one can identify, refute and irrevocably denounce the inconsistencies of the advanced arguments. However, it is important for all to bear in mind that the pseudo-scientific fabrication ‘Afro-Asiatic languages’ and the associated anti-Hamitic / anti-Cushitic hysteria, are due to two main targets sought after by the colonial academia and regimes:
First, this dogmatic nonsense allowed politically motivated academics and colonial diplomats to incessantly propagate the abhorrent fallacy of Pan-Arabism, as per which the Arabic-speaking populations of North Africa are Arabs (and therefore of Semitic origin), whereas in reality, not even one drop of Arab blood flows in the veins of today’s Egyptians, Libyans, Sudanese, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Mauritanians. Linguistic Arabization has been a marginal phenomenon that was promoted by the colonial powers and their local stooges only during the last 220 years.
There have actually been innumerable Arabization campaigns in the colonially detached provinces of the Ottoman Empire; they were all carried out by the evil local tyrants-puppets of the colonial powers. Whether they have one native language (speaking Arabic, Berber and Coptic) or they are bilinguals, all the populations of Northern Africa are Hamitic of origin and therefore totally unrelated to Arabs or Semites. Assuming that the Egyptians, the Tunisians or the Algerians are ‘Arabs’, just because they speak Arabic, is tantamount to pretending that the African Americans, who are English native speakers, are / can ever be (considered as) …. Anglo-Saxons!!
Second, the paranoid abnegation of the existence of Hamitic nations, languages and civilizations helped politically motivated academics and diplomats to
a) boost an enormous Pan-Bantu propaganda movement, which tries to fallaciously increase the importance of the Bantu contribution to the History of Africa;
b) emphasize erroneously the otherwise nonexistent relation between the Hamitic Ancient Egyptians and the Bantu tribes of Africa’s southern parts;
c) carry out a project of extensive Nubianization of part of the Ancient Kemetian (Egyptian) historical heritage (across Modern Egypt’s territories located south of Aswan); and
d) delete the Ancient Cushitic historical heritage (which belongs to i) today’s Arabic-speaking people of Sudan’s central provinces and ii) today’s Eastern Cushitic nations, namely the Oromos, the Sidamas, the Kaffas, etc.), by fallaciously attributing it entirely to today’s Nubians, who live in North Sudan. Selected bibliography on the topic can be found here:
The aforementioned fallacies may be crucial for the future of all Cushitic and Hamitic nations of Africa, either they enjoy nominal national independence or not, either they retain their historical language or not. As a matter of fact, it probably heralds a well-programmed political subordination to Semitic groups, a systematically prepared projection of evil faiths, cults and practices, as well as of anti-Cushitic/anti-Hamitic immoral norms and behavioral systems among today’s Eastern African Cushites (Rastafarianism), and the racial amalgamation of Eastern Cushites with Bantu tribes of the African South.
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu (Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
Pre-publication of chapter XXIII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapter XXIII constitutes the Part Nine (Fallacies about the Golden Era of the Islamic Civilization). The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
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Known rather through his cognomen (‘Paradisiacal’) and his kunya (teknonym: Abu’l Qassem, i.e. ‘father of Qassem’), Ferdowsi was born (ca. 940) in Tus (Khorasan, NE Iran) around the time Muhammad ibn al-Askari, son of Hasan al-Askari and 12th Imam, went into his Major Occultation (941). The apocalyptic eschatological fascination of those days is explicitly shown in Ferdowsi’s own name, because the quest for the Paradise is the epitome of every reliable Messianism (: Soteriology) and Eschatology.
Ferdowsi is a worldwide unique case of highly venerated poet whose work is absolutely immense and whose known details of life are incredibly minimal; although he was historically referred to as the leading epic poet, erudite sage, and unsurpassed master of Farsi (and there have been several historical biographies of him), we don’t know even his real name. Judging from his son’s name, Ferdowsi (940-1020) was a Muslim, but there stop all the important biographical details that we know. In fact, Ferdowsi’s life is enveloped in mystery and legend similarly with the contents of his monumental and sublime epic; we know however that he had a great Turanian sponsor: the formidable Conqueror and Emperor Mahmud Ghaznavi (971-1030; the founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty), who invaded the Indus Valley, Punjab and the Ganges Valley, unifying territories that stretched between the Caspian Sea and today’s Bangladesh.
Ferdowsi mausoleum, Tus – Iran
Ferdowsi’s unsurpassed masterpiece, the Shahnameh (: the Book of the Kings) is the world’s largest epic totaling more than 100000 (one hundred thousand) verses. In terms of Iranian Literature, it was not the first epic composed under this title. Thanks to his historical biographies, we know that Ferdowsi started the composition of the enormous opus in 977, initially viewing it as the completion of a similar effort earlier undertaken by another Iranian poet, Abu Mansur Daqiqi, who did not have the chance to advance his Shahnameh much before being assassinated. However, Ferdowsi’s epic differs greatly from all the other Shahnameh epic poems or prose compositions in many ways; although similar narratives have been attested in other Iranian and Islamic epics, Ferdowsi places his heroes in an atemporal field of semiotics whereby they function as symbols of spiritual ideas, moral principles, and eternal values.
Was Ferdowsi a ‘Sunni’ or a ‘Shia’? The question sounds irrelevant; although it is evident that he was a Muslim and a strong monotheist (which also applies to several forms of pre-Islamic Iranian religions), Ferdowsi does not contain the slightest portion of reference to the Early Islamic History into his legendary opus.
Is pre-Islamic Iranian-Turanian History reflected in Ferdowsi’s epic? In a way, yes! But it is an ahistorical reference to a series of dynasties that modern Iranologists, philologists, specialists in Comparative Literature, historians and historians of religions, experts in Mysticism Studies and Symbolism try in vain to accommodate within the scholarly known frame of the Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sassanid dynasties. This is however quite impossible a task to carry out; and Ferdowsi is the only reason for this. Although there is not a single indication that Ferdowsi divided his masterpiece into ‘periods’, the entire Shahnameh is divided, on the basis of typical literary analysis, into three sections: mythical age, heroic age, and historical age.
As per this – absolutely wrong – categorization, all the aforementioned pre-Islamic Iranian dynasties belong to the third section (historical age). But more than two thirds of the enormous epic’s verses are dedicated to the narration of episodes of the so-called ‘heroic age’. An analysis of Shahnameh goes beyond the scope of the present book, but with the above brief description I wanted to point out that Ferdowsi mainly focused on pre-Achaemenid eras and that his intention was to illuminate the spiritual ideas and the human valor that predestined historical Iran-Turan to be what we know through regular historical documentation that it was. Despite the numerous distortive presentations and worthless analyses, if one stays close to Ferdowsi’s verses, one concludes easily that, as per the illustrious poet and mystic, Iran-Turan constitutes an indivisible world.
Was Ferdowsi a Persian or a Turanian? This question in and by itself reveals total ignorance of Iranian and Turanian History, Culture and Civilization. The undisputed and definitely unequaled mastership of Farsi to which the majestic composition of Shahnameh bears witness does not make of Ferdowsi a Persian. Across the ages, many Turanians excelled in Persian poetry. Ferdowsi’s origin from Khorasan (a region traditionally inhabited by Turanians and Persians alike) and his close relationship with the great Turanian Emperor Mahmud Ghaznavi show that it is quite plausible that Ferdowsi was a Turanian. Mahmud Ghaznavi vanquished the Samanid state (995-999) pretty much like the Seljuk Turks had destroyed the Buyids half a century later. Consequently, we can conclude that Ferdowsi ostensibly sided with Turanian institutions and rulers against Persian states and kings.
There are also some other indicators that must be taken into consideration, as regards Ferdowsi’s identity: although his legendary narratives reflect the foremost values of the Achaemenid Civilization and represent the Zoroastrian conceptualization of the Universe, the contents of Shahnameh do not stringently correspond to the world of Parsis, namely those among the Sassanid times’ Persians who managed to escape the Islamic onslaught and survived in Iran and in India, preserving a posterior form of Mazdeism (and Zoroastrianism) that we presently call ‘Parsism’. Several PhD-level dissertations can be elaborated to properly demonstrate that on many critical issues Ferdowsi’s viewpoint on the pre-Islamic Iran and the Parsis’ traditions pertaining to the Sassanid (and earlier) past differ greatly.
In Shahnameh, one cannot find the slightest support for the Parsi faith, let alone of the Parsis’ anti-Islamic feelings. There is not a single sign that Ferdowsi saw his grand opus as an Iranian ‘comeback’ (let alone ‘revenge’), as an instigation of pre-Islamic Iranian ‘patriotism’ among Iranian Muslims or as anti-Islamic fascination and mobilization. On the contrary, throughout Shahnameh, there are incessant references to Turanian gallantry and passion, bravery and confusion, unity and division, crime and punishment, discipline and order, mysticism and divination, honesty and treachery, clarity and confusion.
The Iranian – Turanian epic presents a magnificent equilibrium among all tendencies and characters, trends and exploits, attempts and regrets. Shahnameh attains a spherical perfection, contains no pointless element, locates all elements in their correct place whereby everything meets its reverse reflection and all spirits are accompanied by their opposites. All this is put in perfect Farsi, in lines of 22 syllables, in rhyming couplets (masnaviyat), and in metre 1.1.11.
Where does Ferdowsi stand among his time’s mystics, orders, kings and warriors, erudite scholars and theological jurists?
Was he close to late Sassanid Zervanism? Certainly not as much as Tabari, a fully accredited Islamic exegete and theologian, founder of a major madhhab, and the Islamic world’s supreme historian! Tabari dedicated the introductory chapter of his voluminous History to a theoretical analysis of the Time (: Zervan or Zurvan, a late Mithraic figure that was the central god of a late branch of Mithraists). But Ferdowsi started his epic with Keyumars (Gayomard of the late Zoroastrian texts), the first man and first king (Pishdad dynasty); this approach makes of royalty the first human virtue.
Was Ferdowsi close to the late Sassanid followers of Gayomard? Not quite! His focus on the recapitulation of themes related to heroic combats gives us the impression that Ferdowsi envisioned a dynamic universe in which Cosmogony and Eschatology consisted in an indivisible entity of spiritual and material order based on a permanent movement back and forth between Being and Becoming.
From all the major groups of early Muslims and from all the followers of then extant Iranian religions, the Khurramites, the Parsis, the Manichaeans, the Mazdakists, the so-called Twelver Shia, the Isma’ilis, between the Mazdeists and all the rest, Ferdowsi seems to be equidistant.
The same attitude appears in the Shahnameh; between the Turanian Afrasiab and the Iranians Siyavash and Kay Khosrow, Ferdowsi pursues a narrative that does not favor any of the combatants, while presenting brave deeds and mythical facts as the straight result of the great legendary heroes’ spiritual choices and divine providence.
In fact, Ferdowsi is to be found at cosmic distance from all his contemporaneous mystics, poets, erudite polymaths, historians, scholars and theologians. Next to him, all the rest appear infinitesimal. That’s why we can safely claim that within the wider context of Islamic Civilization across Eurasia only Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh proved to be as influential a book as the Quran. The great epic impacted all the Islamic nations, ethno-linguistic groups, mystical orders, intellectuals, poets, authors, and artists so irrevocably that, from the beginning of the 11th c. onwards, it would perhaps be more accurate, instead of speaking of Iranians and Turanians, to start referring to them as Ferdowsians. About:
Kay Qobad (Kay Kawad) on his throne; a leading figure of the Kayanid dynasty that was transcendentally constructed by Ferdowsi
In fact, one cannot speak about the Seljuk Turks, before briefly presenting Ferdowsi’s Cosmogony within the Islamic world. This is so because the Seljuk dynasty, along with the Ghaznavids, proved to be the first and the most enthusiastic adepts and supporters of the heroic worldview narrated by Ferdowsi, of the spiritual ideas revealed in Shahnameh, and of the moral values respected by the great heroes of the legendary, atemporal and apocalyptic Pishdadian and Kayanian dynasties. In fact, only this phenomenon, i.e. the Ghaznavids’ and the Seljuk Turks’ wholehearted acceptance and overwhelming promotion of the Universe as reassessed by Ferdowsi, makes of the grand master of Farsi Literature the national poet of all Turanians.
Quite contrarily to the historical facts, the criminal Western Orientalists depict a terribly tarnished and viciously distorted image of this reality; as per their false and nonsensical interpretations, the Seljuk Turks accepted Islam through Persian culture. This is as idiotic as an eventual, irrelevant assumption according to which a (fully hypothetical) educational jury was supposedly awaiting at the northeastern Iranian borders for the Seljuk Turks to come, and then upon their arrival, they told them: “pass your Ferdowsi exam, and come-in”! So pathetic and ludicrous is the Western Orientalist approach to the topic! Things did not happen that way, and this reality shows that it is absolutely absurd and utterly calamitous for any Turkic and Iranian nation to accept the presence of Anglo-American institutions in their territories or to allow their nationals to study in Western universities or even to visit West European, North American, and Oceanian countries.
The heroic, legendary, cosmological and eschatological order revealed by Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh was the basic oral culture of all Turanians and Iranians, Persians included, for millennia. Simply, this cultural background was not (and could not be) the religious dogma of Zoroastrianism (and of its subsequent forms, i.e. Arsacid Zendism and Sassanid Mazdeism) as attested in the holy texts of that religion and in the imperial inscriptions of the faithful Kings of Kings.
The fallacy of Modern Western Humanities, as developed in the racist, colonial, criminal pseudo-universities of Western Europe and North America, is due to the paranoid (but intentionally implemented) method of compartmentalizing the historical truth and the exploration thereof; this occurs in total contradiction to the universal, comprehensive and holistic approach and method (of viewing and examining the historical truth) that prevailed among all the great historical civilizations (whereby there was no compartmentalization). This vicious method leads colonial historiographers to the distortive division of topics into separate ‘academic fields’: history, archaeology, philology (‘literature’), linguistics, history of religions, ethnography and social anthropology, philosophy, history of arts, history of sciences, architecture, and so on. Consequently, this makes researchers separate their various study topics between “written cultures” and “oral cultures”; but by so doing, they totally misperceive and misrepresent entire historical periods.
As a matter of fact, Ferdowsi did not ‘invent’ (or ‘envision’ or ‘conceive’ or ‘devise’ or ‘create’) his narratives; he only managed to compose them in an incomparably genuine and superior poetic manner. All the terms, names and ideas of Shahnameh’s stories antedate Ferdowsi for about 1500 years – to say the least; this is something that all Orientalists accept. But they fail to see that these terms, names, ideas and stories constituted the oral culture of all the Iranians and the Turanians long before the heliocentric fallacy of Mithras was first propagated among them in the first half of the first pre-Christian millennium. Ferdowsi wrote down this millennia-long Turanian and Iranian oral anti-Mithraic cultural tradition in a literarily majestic manner. And by doing so, he did not ‘give’ the Seljuk Turks their culture (which was already theirs and their ancestors’), but the wings that they needed to conquer the world and implement their millennia long values and virtues as reinstated in the Quran and reinterpreted in the Shahnameh.
Of course, there is a reason the colonial historiography appears to have some success in plunging readers into deceitful schemes, distortive narratives, and nonexistent popups; if you are naïve enough to believe that the Seljuk Turks came from the North Pole or the Moon, then you will certainly accept the fallacy of the so-called Seljuk acculturation in Iran, and you will start believing the nonsense of the Turanian nations’ ‘persianization’. But the Seljuk Turks were neither in the North Pole nor in the Moon! In fact, they had been -for several centuries- just on the other side of the Islamic Caliphate’s northeastern border. And for cultures, for nations, for faiths, and for civilizations, there are no borders; even more importantly, borders do not apply to oral cultures.
Even more absurdly, “border historiography” cannot exist across the Silk Road; by ‘stopping’ their premeditated and therefore fallacious description of historical facts at the borders of the various modern states, the criminal Western pseudo-historians intentionally implement their evil political axiom ‘divide et impera’ throughout Humanities. This is the way most of the people worldwide have been deceived in this regard.
For several centuries, the ancestors of the Seljuk Turks lived within the wider Yabyu (English: Yabghu) territory within the land of the Oguz/Oghuz (Oğuz) nomads’ state. Its location stretched across vast territories of the modern states of Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and (to smaller extent) Uzbekistan. Yabyu spanned east of the Khazar Khaganate (or Khanate), between the Caspian Sea and Aral Lake, and north of the border of the Islamic Caliphate. The forefather of the Seljuk Turks was a formidable Oghuz combatant named Seljuk, who served also in the Khazar army, before clashing with other Oghuz warriors, migrating to southeast (around the year 980), and settling in Transoxiana (Arabic: Mawarannahr / ماوراءالنهر), next to Syr Darya (Iaxartes) river. At that original stage, the ‘Seljuk Turks’ (i.e. the family of Seljuk) were less than 1000 people in total.
Seljuk made an alliance with the Samanids (a mainly Persian kingdom) and fought against the Kara-Khanids, a Turanian Khaganate, mainly known as the House of Afrasiab (آل افراسیاب / which means that they were named (as early as the 9th c.; so before Ferdowsi) after the most important Turanian hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The development was not good for the Seljuk family, and Seljuk’s grandsons Tughril and Chaghri had to further migrate (ca. 1040) to the South (Khorasan). The son of Mahmud Ghaznavi, Mas’ud I of Ghazni, tried to prevent them from advancing, and the battle of Dandanaqan (near Merv in today’s Turkmenistan) opened the way for the Seljuk rise. Tughril’s and Chaghri’s victory (1040) was tantamount to Seljuk prevalence in Khorasan. Ten years later (1050), Tughril invaded Isfahan and established the Great Seljuk Empire.
However, only to prove the inalienable, indissoluble, and indelible nature of the Turanian–Iranian civilization and identity, the early Seljuk success across the Iranian plateau would have no historical continuity and impact without the astounding contribution of a Persian original: Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi, who is rather known through his incredible title ‘Nizam al Mulk’ (:”Systems of Royal Governance”). Nizam al Mulk (1018-1092) was born two years before Ferdowsi died, but his inclination and genius covered a totally different field than that of the greatest epic poet of World History. Originating from Khorasan, Abu Ali Hasan ibn Ali Tusi left his position at Ghazni, the capital of the Turanian Ghaznavid Empire and entered the service of the Seljuk Turks (1043); there he was entrusted, among other tasks, with the education of Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri (mainly known as Alp Arslan), i.e. the son of Chaghri and nephew of Tughril, the founding sultans of the Seljuk empire.
The assassination of Nizam al Mulk
Consequently, the rise of the Seljuk Empire is entirely due to the wise advice, the outstanding guidance, and the governance systematization introduced by Nizam al Mulk, a Persian; of course, all this would prove to be useless without the Seljuk bravery and thunderous attacks. One can call the Seljuk Empire a ‘Turanian’ (or ‘Turkic’ state); but it was equally ‘Iranian’ – notwithstanding the historical forgeries of the Orientalist gangsters of the Anglo-American universities.
Nizam al Mulk is perhaps the person, who studied best the infinite intrigues that occurred on daily basis among all the rulers who enjoyed some portion of power due to the already discussed phenomenon of the Abbasid Caliphate’s fragmentation. Highly respected and incessantly consulted by Tughril, Chaghri and their children, Nizam al Mulk methodically guided them in the splendid attempt to terminate the Abbasid Caliphate’s fragmentation. First, they consolidated their control across the northern part of the Iranian plateau until 1046-7. In 1048, they attacked an Eastern Roman – Georgian army near today’s Pasinler (or Hasankale), east of Erzurum, in the less publicized but historic battle of Kapetron. After ensuring a great capital for themselves at Isfahan (1050), in the Iranian plateau’s southern part, Tughril invaded Baghdad (1055), terminated the Buyid dynasty, and (according to modern Turkish Islamist bibliography) ‘liberated’ the Abbasid Caliph; this is however not accurate because it was not possible anymore to restore the original power of the Abbasid Caliphate. The Abbasids remained a weak and impotent dynasty for another 200 years.
Nizam al Mulk set up a series of academies named after him, ‘Nizamiyah’; his major opus Siyasatnameh (‘the Book of the Governance’) was the basic manual that was taught, discussed, and in-depth understood there, after the completion of an entire basic circle of studies. The numerous Nizamiyah academies that the indefatigable Nizam al Mulk founded in various parts of the expanding Seljuk territory were not similar either to the earlier appeared jurisprudential madhhabs or to the regular madrasas (theological schools).
The graduates of every Nizamiyah acquired first a spherical, encyclopedic knowledge, and at a second stage, an excellent command of the diverse methods of a successful administration of the state (one could vaguely compare them to various modern ‘national schools of administration’). Nizamiyah graduates could man the Seljuk administration and deliver spectacular results, due to the innovative and resourceful mindset that they were taught to build and thanks to their persistence on avoiding bureaucracy. Despite his indisputable imperial and administrative genius, Nizam al Mulk was also a combatant, and – contrarily to the worthless and corrupt, modern bureaucrats – he often accompanied his shahs in their campaigns.
Nizam al Mulk was ostensibly against the group of Isma’ilis and their system of secretive and elitist governance. In his book, he expanded on them; this however does not make of him a ‘Sunni’, as modern forgers pretend. He and his Seljuk emperors were Muslims, who did not accept either secretive governance or the particularities of various eschatological, messianic groups like the Isma’ilis (today mistakenly named ‘Sevener Shia’) or the apocalyptic adepts of the Ahl al Bayt (today erroneously called ‘Twelver Shia’), who expected the imminent reappearance of the 12th imam. This is an extra proof that throughout History there is no such sectarian division and false identification as “Turkish Sunni” and “Iranian Shia”; this is a colonial lie and a shameful Orientalist forgery.
All the same, because of the colonially imposed (during the 19th and 20th centuries) sectarianism, which prevails among today’s deceived and disoriented Muslims, Nizam al Mulk is totally unknown among African Muslims and Saudi-impacted Muslims in Southeast Asia, because he is idiotically viewed as “Iranian and therefore Shia”. This externally imposed pseudo-historical dogma is enough to reveal the criminal nature of the colonial countries France and England, of their successor state (USA), and of the various associated structures, like Canada and Australia.
The rise of the Seljuk Empire was the result of great bravery, heroic fascination, and superb imperial administration that greatly contributed to arts, letters, sciences and spirituality; but it was practically speaking the affair of one family. Few victories were enough to catapult the Seljuk Turks to world predominance between China and Rome. This was due to their wisdom, universal culture, and ability to compose out of many diverse elements; they therefore became a pole of major attraction. Within the general context of Modern Turkology, most of the researchers are specializing in the Ottoman Empire (eventually because of the abundance of historical sources) and have a certain predilection and admiration for the Ottomans, who also functioned as one family – only to the detriment of the Empire that they acquired and that they inherited. But this scholarly attitude is very subjective, highly sentimental, and therefore wrong.
In reality, the Ottomans were superior to the Seljuk Turks only quantitatively. They controlled larger territory and they lasted longer; that’s true. But if one examines the data qualitatively and evaluates comparatively, one easily concludes that the Seljuk were remarkably superior to the Ottomans. However, their undeniably inherent weakness, which consisted in numerous internal conflicts and in incessant, yet unnecessary, family divisions, antagonisms and rivalries, predestined them to fast decay. In fact, the Seljuk Golden Era lasted ca. 100 years: from the dissolution of the Buyid dynasty (1055) to the death of Ahmad Sanjar (1157). After that term, the Seljuk Empire split to several sultanates. The most remarkable among them was certainly the Sultanate of Rum, but that was an Anatolian state, not a major empire across Eurasia. All the same, the History of Mysticism and Spirituality in Seljuk Anatolia eclipsed the Imperial History of that branch of the Seljuk family.
Even Alp Arslan (1063-1072) and Malik-Shah I (1072-1092), who represent the top of Seljuk power, had to engage in battles to eliminate contenders to their throne, and the contenders were none else than their formidable uncles, Kutalmish and Qavurt respectively. Thanks to Nizam al Mulk, Alp Arslan organized a mixed form of feudal empire, at the same time sedentary and nomadic, and for this, he was praised by many Persians like Saadi Shirazi, whereas with the rising sectarianism of the 13th c. he was terribly scolded by Turanians like Shams al-din ibn Kızoğlu (Sıbt İbnu’l-Cevzi). Thanks to Nizam al Mulk’s concepts and Alp Arslan’s rule and practices, a great process of Turanian sedentism across Iran, India, Caucasus, Anatolia and Syro-Mesopotamia was initiated only to strengthen the local populations and transform the Central Asiatic and Siberian nomadism. More importantly, this ingenious idea and brilliant execution introduced -across a vast region- a new social system of mutual social interdependence among sedentary and nomadic populations, thus fortifying the states that would rule these populations. Many populations that still preserve their nomadic nature and traditions across the vast lands from the Mediterranean to the Indus River and from the Persian Gulf to the Tian Shan Mountains and the Siberian permafrost reached the regions where they currently live in the period between the arrival of the Seljuk Turks and the rise of Mughal Empire.
Contrarily to Orientalist deceitful schemes and deliberate misinterpretations, Malik-Shah I did not clash with the dangerous Isma’ili enclave of Hassan al Sabah (1050-1124) in Alamut and in various surrounding locations in the Alborz Mountains because of a hypothetical ‘Sunni’–’Shia’ dispute or an ethnic Persian–Turanian conflict. Simply, as a student of Nizam al-Mulk, he fully accepted and implemented his tutor’s and adviser’s recommendations as regards the nature of the imperial administration and state.
First of all, the small and perfidious Isma’ili state constituted real dynamite in the foundations of the Seljuk Empire; second, the treacherous nature of the Assassins consisted in permanent threat for all the local populations that wanted to live in peace across the Seljuk territory, and not in ceaseless strives. Above all, Malik-Shah I rejected the concept of elitist rule and the existence of spiritual orders with material aspirations. Unfortunately, his successors proved to be quite incompetent and totally unable to face the challenges that they encountered. Because of them and due to their internal discord, the Seljuk Empire was not prepared to oppose the Crusades that started at that moment. For a period of 26 years (1092-1118), four monarchs ruled the vast state that was gradually being decomposed; their incompetence triggered the secession of various lands that formed independent sultanates under the control of various members of Seljuk’s family.
Ahmad Sanjar (1118-1153) was the luckiest of the sons of Malik-Shah I, because he managed to defeat successive invasions from the Kara-Khanids (Afrasiab) of Central Asia, the Ghurids of Khorasan, and the Ghaznavids of the Indus River Valley; however, he faced a crushing defeat at the hands of the Siberian Turanians of Kara Khitan (at the Battle of Qatwan; 1141) and a disastrous uprising among his fellow Seljuk tribesmen (1153). After Ahmad Sanjar’s death, the Turanians of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) conquered the northeastern part of the Seljuk Empire, whereas the vast territory was finally divided among the Seljuk sultans of Hamadan and Baghdad, the Seljuk sultans of Kerman, the Seljuk emirs in Syria, and the Seljuk sultans of Rum (i.e. Romania-Ρωμανία: the Eastern Roman Empire). The endless internal strives of the Seljuk dynasty are no 1 reason of the Crusaders’ success in the Orient. In 1157, Muhammad II ibn Mahmud (1128–1159), Sultan of Seljuk Empire from 1153 to 1159, failed to conquer Baghdad, despite the siege that he laid to the city; this shows that the Great Seljuk state was already weak and that tensions often existed between Baghdad’s impotent caliphs and the various monarchs who ruled in his name.
The Seljuqian-e Rum (1077-1308 / سلجوقیان روم) lasted longer and became the forerunners of the Iranian-Turanian oral culture and the standard bearers of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in the most important regions of the Eastern Roman Empire. If you only have a look at the list of the Seljuqian-e Rum monarchs for a moment, you come to realize that their spiritual world and their imperial identity originated from the all-encompassing Turanian-Iranian Universe of Shahnameh: among the 18 sultans, who ruled during a period of 231 years, there were three (3) named Kayqubad, two (2) named Kaykaus, and three (3) named Kaykhusraw. This means that almost half of this dynasty’s rulers named themselves after the most illustrious legendary Iranian kings of the Kayanian dynasty, which represents the focal point of Ferdowsi’s sublime Iranian-Turanian epic poetry.
Throughout Human History, we have known a great number of historical kings, who posthumously entered the world of the legend; but the Seljuqian-e Rum were the only to incarnate the legend and to make out of the realm of the spiritual intuition and the transcendental vision an undeniably historical reality. This fact irrevocably marked the central position that they occupy within the indivisible Iranian-Turanian world. About:
The prevalence of the Seljuqian-e Rum in Anatolia transformed this land into the high land of Islamic Civilization, Spirituality and Mysticism. Pretty much like the Islamic world’s gravitational center shifted from Arabia to Mesopotamia with the foundation of Baghdad and the establishment of the Bayt al Hikmah in the middle of 8th c., the Islamic world’s center of imperial power, mysticism and spirituality was relocated from Iran and Caucasus to Anatolia in the late 12th and early 13th c. For many centuries, Anatolia had lost its worldwide radiation; after the end of the Eastern Roman Isaurian dynasty (717-802), the defeat of the Iconoclasts (842), and the downfall of the Paulicians (dispersed in 872 and massively relocated in 970), Anatolia was in ramshackle. The overwhelming rejection of the evil Constantinopolitan theology by the quasi-totality of the Anatolian population irrevocably predestined their future and facilitated the forthcoming Islamization. The spiritual successors to the Iconoclasts and the Paulicians were to be the Mevlevis, the Bektashis, and above all the Qizilbash. The indigenous, traditional Anatolian mysticism predetermined the historical evolution.
The beginning of the Seljuk prevalence in Anatolia is entirely due to Kilij Arslan I (1092-1107; Kılıç Arslan / قِلِج اَرسلان), the first Seljuk to have Konya-Iconium as capital. He managed to defeat three Crusader armies and to secure a sizeable portion of Anatolia for his expanding state. He was a great warrior and an illustrious mystic. However, many scholars want to deliberately forget the fact that the two names of this sultan became the emblem of the Iranian Safavid Empire 400 years later! If this sounds somewhat strange, the English translation of the two names will be enough to clarify the case: “Kılıç Arslan” means “the sword holding lion”. See the emblem:
However, the main part of the preparatory work for the rise of Seljuk Anatolia was done by Rukn al-Din Mesud I (1116-1156; Rükneddin Mesud /ركن الدین مسعود) who was able to defeat two Crusader armies (led by the German Conrad III and the French Louis VII) in 1147 and 1148 and to welcome the adhesion of significant portion of the local Eastern Roman population to Islam. Even illustrious members of the Comneni / Komnenos imperial family, like John Komnenos Tzelepes (grandson of the Eastern Roman Emperor Alexios I Komnenos) who married Rukn al-Din Mesud I’s daughter, became Muslim around the middle of the 12th c.
Rukn al-Din Mesud I’s son and successor, Izz ad-Dīn Qilij Arslān bin Masʿūd (rather known as Kilij Arslan II (1156-1192; Kılıç Arslan / عز الدین قلج ارسلان بن مسعود) represents a very successful consolidation stage of the Seljuqian-e Rum; his critical victory at Myriokephalon (SW Turkey: between Isparta and Konya) in 1176 sealed the end of Eastern Roman presence in Anatolia. Kilij Arslan II, who claimed to be a far relative of Heinrich der Löwe (German prince of the Welf family and Teutonic Knight), expanded at the detriment of the Turkmen Danishmends and the Eastern Roman, but, despite his alliance with Saladin, proved to be unable to possibly stop Frederick Barbarossa’s Third Crusade; however, the numbers speak for themselves: for 76 years, the Seljuqian-e Rum were under only two kings – which is tantamount to great stability.
To the court of the Seljuqian-e Rum started flocking numerous Muslim mystics, spiritual masters, erudite polymaths, theologians, interdisciplinary scholars, great architects and artists, philosophers, leading medical doctors, poets, and other prominent intellectuals of those times. Konya had gradually become a major pole of attraction for the world’s leading wise men. In fact, Seljuk Anatolia eclipsed all other parts of the world in terms of spirituality, mysticism, letters, arts and sciences. This is not strange; despite the great confusion caused by colonial Orientalists and Western Medievalists, who elaborate a distortive and highly politicized representation of this historical period by focusing on the Crusades and the bloodshed caused by Papal Pseudo-Christianity, the 13th c. proved to be above all the peak of the Golden Era of Islamic Civilization.
Those were the times when Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209; today celebrated as the national poet of Azerbaijan), based in South Caucasus, composed his illustrious epics Khusraw and Shirin (1177-1180), Eskandar-Nameh (: the Book of Alexander the Great; 1196-1202), and his apocalyptic eschatological masterpiece Haft Peykar (: the Seven Beauties; 1197), in which he detailed the troubles of seven major lands of civilization that will rise at the End of Time, when a formidable punishment will be adjusted to the evil perpetrator of crimes against those nations. The sublime epic is monstrously misinterpreted by materialistic Western pseudo-academics as “erotic poetry”, because those corrupt and worthless forgers cannot understand what apocalyptic symbolism is all about. The seven nations / lands of civilization are personified by
– Furak (or Nurak; India),
– Yaghma Naz (China, described as the land under the “Khaqan of the Turks”),
– Naz Pari (Turanian Central Asia, named ‘Khwarazm’/Chorasmia),
– Nasrin Nush (Russia, which is in reality Tatarstan, i.e. the Land of the descendants of the Rouran Touranian Khaganate),
– Azarbin (or Azareyon; Africa – called Maghreb, but viewed generally as the ‘West’)
– Humay (the Eastern Roman Empire’s lands), and
– Diroste (Iran, described as the House of Kay Ka’us, an illustrious Shah of Fardowsi’s heroic Kayanian dynasty whose deeds cover the largest part of Shahnameh).
Miniature from a manuscript of Nizami Ganjavi’s Haft Peykar: Bahram Gur in the Turquoise Pavilion with Azarbin, the personnification of Maghreb
Quite indicative of the Rum Sultanate’s court’s proclivity to mysticism, Turanian heroic tradition, and attachment to Ferdowsi’s epic genius is the fact that, only 14 years after Nizami Ganjavi wrote the incomparably revelatory Haft Peykar and only 2 years after he died, the new Seljuk sultan of Rum, Kaykhusraw I’s son, was named Kaykaus I (1211-1220). It was a time of extensive intermarriages with the Eastern Roman imperial family of the Comneni / Komnenoi. Kaykhusraw I (1192-1196 and 1205-1211) was fluent in Roman (‘Medieval Greek’) language and had evidently double Turko-(Eastern) Roman culture.
Kaykaus I’s mother was an Eastern Roman princess, daughter of Manuel Komnenos Maurozomes (Μανουήλ Κομνηνός Μαυροζώμης), who was an Eastern Roman nobleman. Ala ad-Din Kayqubad bin Kaykavus (1220–1237; Alâeddin Keykûbad / علاء الدين كيقباد بن كيكاوس) was the most illustrious sultan of the entire Seljuqian-e Rum dynasty. At the times of his son and successor Kaykhusraw II (1237-1246) starts the fall of the Anatolian Seljuk imperial power, basically due to the religious rebellion of Baba Ishak (1240-1243) and the Mongol victory at the battle of Köse Dağ (1243) where Baiju Noyan (appointed by Ögedei Khan) prevailed. As a matter of fact, this battle is the Seljuk equivalent of the Ottoman defeat in Ankara (1402) by Timur (Tamerlane).
In 1204, one of the most influential dignitaries of the Anatolian Seljuk court invited Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi (1165-1240; full name: Abu Abd Allah Muḥammad ibn Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn Arabī), the Islamic world’s foremost mystic and spiritual master, to Anatolia; Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi’s Futuhat al Makkiyah (: ‘the Mekkan Initiations’) is the greatest text of spiritual revelations (effectuated as result of successive initiations experienced under the guidance of supreme spiritual beings – not after the human fashion) that was ever written in the History of the Mankind. The incredible size (560 chapters or 37 volumes totaling ca. 10000 pages of modern books) of this unique masterpiece of spirituality matters very little when compared to the enthralling contents, which go up to the level of mystical communication with a) the souls of beings that were alive and inhabited the Earth during several generations prior to ours, and b) supreme hierarchies of spiritual beings, intelligences, spirits of elements, and numerous ethereal potentates.
h ttps://ibnarabisociety.org/futuhat-al-makkiyya-printed-editions-claude-addas/
Born in Andalusia’s coastal city of Murcia to parents of Arab and Berber origin, Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi studied in Seville, met and discussed extensively with Ibn Rushd (Averroes), worked as secretary in the city governorate, and undertook incessant travels across North Africa, Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Anatolia. His travels’ most determinant stages took place in Mecca (where he wrote his celebrated masterpiece), in Mosul, in Damascus, and in Eastern Anatolia where he met the students of the great mystic Abdal Qadir Gilani (1078-1166), who was one of the leading mystics of an earlier generation and also the founder of the Qadiriyah mystic order.
Opening pages Konya manuscript Futuhat, handwritten by Ibn Arabi
It is interesting to notice the details of the theological and jurisprudential affiliation of that great mystic, who was born in Gilan (i.e. Caspian Sea’s southwestern coast) and lived most of his life in Baghdad and in various other locations of Mesopotamia. He was a descendant of Hasan ibn Ali, the second imam and grandson of Prophet Muhammad, but did not belong to Ja’far al-Sadiq’s madhhab; however, if one sees the world through today’s colonially imposed, sectarian and distortive lenses, Abdal Qadir Gilani should have been a Ja’fari. In fact, the great mystic and ascetic was a Hanbali and follower of the jurisprudential school that is nowadays said to be (whereas originally it was not) the most ‘anti-Shia’ or ‘anti- Ja’fari’.
The Qadiriya order had many followers in Anatolia and later in the Balkans, although its diffusion from Mesopotamia to China, to Somalia and to Western Sahara regions was spectacular. The sectarian viewpoint in this regard is posterior and it started with the catastrophic distortion of Ibn Hanbal’s doctrine by the vicious theologian Ahmed ibn Taimiyya whose pseudo-Islamic theology represents a sort of Christianization of Islam. The propagation of his fake Islamic ideas triggered obscurantism, ignorance, and utter hatred for the sciences and the arts among the Muslims; as a consequence, extreme fanaticism prevailed among the gradually decayed, spiritually debased, and increasingly ignorant Muslims of later periods (late 14th – early 16th c.), and then the Safavid reaction (as of 1501) to this situation only added oil to the fire.
Ala ad-Din Kayqubad (Kayqubad I) held in great esteem and sponsored numerous mystics, erudite scholars, poets, architects, artists and spiritual masters. His court was also frequented by very exceptional figures like Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162-1231), a great spiritual master, alchemist, physician and polymath, who explored antiquities at both, the spiritual and the material, levels, thus being an early, Muslim Egyptologist.
Following Kayqubad I’s invitation, the great mystic, theologian and jurisprudential scholar (of the Hanafi madhhab) Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad (1151-1231), a Persian originating from Balkh/Bactra (Khorasan), arrived and settled in Konya with his entire family in 1228; this event would have an everlasting impact down to our days. The entire Seljuk royal family was fond of the newly arrived scholar and mystic, who had earlier faced negative treatment from Ala ad-Din Muhammad II of Khwarazm (Chorasmia) in whose state Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad used to live. Khwarazm was a Turanian state with constant problems with the Seljuk sultanates, and the main reason Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad had problems with his shah was the fact that in Khwarazm’s court the most influential mystic and theologian was Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, the scholar who invented the concept of Multiverse (: the parallel existence of many Universes) and with whom Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad had terribly clashed. It was therefore only normal that, to flee the Mongol invasions and to get rid of Ala ad-Din Muhammad II’s enmity and disgrace, Baha’ al-Din Muhammad Walad found a subterfuge in Seljuk Anatolia. The everlasting impact is due to the prodigious poetry composed and the mystical exploits performed by his son, Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Rumi, who is also known as Mawlana or Mevlana.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273; جلالالدین محمد رومی) surpassed by far his father’s fame, literary mastership, mystical experience, intellectual acumen, spiritual ingenuity, and posthumous fame, being one of the Islamic world’s foremost mystics, poets, and holy men. Bringing spiritual activities at the epicenter of material life, Rumi turned dance into active meditation, and thus made of Anatolia the worldwide epicenter of all later Islamic mysticisms. He is considered as the founder of the Mevlevi Spiritual Order (the ‘tariqa’ of the ‘whirling dervishes’), although it is very clear that his son and his disciples founded the Order after Rumi’s death. In younger age, he was fascinated with the literary masterpieces of the mystic Sana’i Ghaznavi (1080-1141); remarkable influence on Jalal ad-Din Rumi was also exerted by his father, by the famous Persian Khorasani mystic and poet Farid ud-Din (1145-1221; known as Attar of Neyshapur), and by Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi. But the close companionship he had with Shams-e Tabrizi (1185-1248), a supreme spiritual hierophant and mystic, was the most determinant factor of his spiritual advance, mystical comprehension, sublime poetry, and whirling dance conceptualization as meditation technique.
Did Jalal ad-Din Rumi actually meet Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi?
This question has been raised by many modern scholars, although on the basis of several historical sources there is clear evidence that they first met during Rumi’s first arrival to Damascus, and later again during Rumi’s formative years there. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that several disciples of ibn Arabi (notably Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi) were companions of Rumi and that Shams-e Tabrizi knew personally ibn Arabi very well. In addition, several literary patterns and terms testify to a spiritual, intellectual and philosophical connection, despite the fact that the essence, the contents, and the forms of both masters of Islamic spirituality and mysticism differed greatly, pretty much like their respective quests, explorations, devotions, spiritual exercises, and transcendental experiences did.
Mausoleum of Jelaleddin Rumi Mevlana, Konya – Turkey
Rumi was a human, who discovered the divine world through love and through strict imitation/repetition of Prophet Muhammad’s manner of life; Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi was a man contacted by spiritual hierarchies, entrusted with the revelation of spiritual occurrences, and endowed with unique qualities to describe in human words unfathomable situations comprehended only through spiritual initiation. An enlightened man like ibn Arabi could never be strictly bound to only one religion.
Closer to Muḥyiddin ibn Arabi was indeed Haji Bektash (1209-1271; Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli / حاجی بکتاش ولی); born in Neyshapur (Khorasan), he was a descendant of Musa Kazim, the 7th imam and son of Ja’far al-Sadiq. He fled westwards because of the Mongol invasions and he arrived in Seljuk Anatolia in the late 1220s or early 1230s. He belonged to the Ja’fari jurisprudential tradition (madhhab), which is quite normal as he retraced his ancestry to the 6th imam’s son. Given his Arab ancestry, it is ridiculous to entertain discussions about his ethnicity (Persian or Turkic) as Western nonsensical Orientalists do; Haji Bektash was certainly acculturated among all Iranians and Turanians between Central Asia and Anatolia. However, this issue can allow us to better assess the locally prevailing ethnic and cultural environment; if a person of Arab descent, like Haji Bektash, living in Khorasan, preferred to bear a Turkish name, i.e. Bektaş, this means that we cannot afford anymore to consider that vast NE Iranian region as exclusively Persian (as fallacious colonial Orientalists do), but as predominantly Turanian. In his young age, Haji Bektash was apparently fascinated with the mystical poetry of the Turanian spiritual master, mystic, and Hanafi theologian Ahmed Yesevî (1093-1166; قوجا احمەت ياساۋٸ), the founder of Yasawiyah (Yeseviye) order.
The oldest painting of the Muslim mystic Haji Bektash Veli
Modern forgers and Western impostors try to associate Haji Bektash with the Qalandariyah Order (which is wrong) and with Baba Eliyas al-Khorasani, another Khorasani mystic who had settled in Anatolia and instigated the Babai revolt that was led by Baba Ishak in 1239. That’s totally false, because Haji Bektash, despite his Batiniyya approach to Islam’s holy scriptures (as per which all holy scriptures have ‘external’ and ‘internal’-mystical meaning), reprimanded the Isma’ili enclave in Iran, denounced Baba Ishak’s plot for the establishment of a Crypto-Christian state in Amasya (Anatolia), and condemned Baba Ishak’s infamous pretensions that he was a ‘prophet’. As a matter of fact, Haji Bektash was greatly esteemed by everyone in the Anatolian Seljuk court where they appreciated his contribution to the combat against the rebellion and to the refutation of anti-Islamic concepts among Turanian nomadic settlers in Anatolia. All the same, the early Bektashi Order accepted in their lodges (khanqah) many earlier adepts and followers of Baba Ishak, who had repented and regretted, and numerous participants in the failed rebellion. The Bektashi Order played later a determinant role in the formation of the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate and in the relations between the Ottomans and the Safavids.
The Seljuk Turks managed to assimilate among them a great number of Anatolian, Eastern Roman populations. This topic is critical in understanding later historical developments in the region. Whereas the Achaemenid Iranians failed to plainly assimilate Anatolia during their rule (546-330 BCE) and finally only later (during the Seleucid and Roman times) we clearly attest an undeniable Iranian cultural impact on the various Anatolian kingdoms, the Rum Sultanate proved to be far more efficient in rapidly shaping a diverse yet inclusive Anatolian Muslim identity which revolves around the Iranian-Turanian epic traditions and legends and an Islamic interpretation of the Eastern Roman Christianity. About:
III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians
IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials
V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials
VI. What Russia and China must do
Introduction
Fourteen years ago, on 4th December 2007, I published an article under title ‘Russia, Islam, and the West’, which -within few days- was officially (ИноСМИ / Inosmi) translated into Russian (‘ Россия, ислам и Запад’). I wanted to briefly elaborate on how things would develop and to also identify possible allies for Russia within the so-called ‘Islamic World’.
As the translated version of the article was extensively reproduced, I noticed that it was also well understood. Example: the great portal Centrasia (www.centrasia.org), while republishing the Russian translation, added an over-title for the use of its readers to state the following: “Экспансия западного мира не столько решала проблемы, сколько распространяла их вширь” (The expansion of the Western world did not so much solve problems as spread them in breadth). Indeed, there could not be better summary of my article’s contents. The over-title was indeed an excellent reflection of my original perception and ultimate conviction, namely that the West wanted to use the senseless Islamic World against Russia.
In that article’s last part, I put a title that appeared very odd, even to several Egyptian and other African friends of mine (at the time, I was living in Cairo): “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. In that part, I explained why only these two countries could possibly be Russia’s allies against the Western colonial contamination that threatens the entire world. The reason for this statement is that only these two countries had maintained until that time a correct sense of historical-cultural identity and an imperial-level establishment and diplomacy. As a matter of fact, the rest of the so-called Islamic world is constituted by fake states-puppets of the colonial powers (from Morocco and Nigeria to Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia); unfortunately, the uneducated, ignorant, and idiotic elites of these neo-colonial structures never realized what ‘national integrity’ means.
I. Fake states of fake Arabs and fake Muslims
This is so because, by describing these states as ‘puppets’, I don’t only suggest that the local governments receive and execute orders dictated by the Western colonial capitals (Paris, London, Washington D.C., etc.), often being also blackmailed by them in the most obscene manner, but I also specify that these states were entirely pre-fabricated by the colonial elites and administrations to the slightest detail.
What I imply by mentioning the ‘detail’ is simple: not only the location of the false and troublesome (notably in the Halaib triangle) borderline between Egypt and Sudan was decided by the English colonials long before the two modern states came to exist (in order to offer their successors in the colonial institutions and governments the chance of future manipulation of either local ‘governments’), but also the lack of railway connections between first Cairo and Khartoum and second Suez and Port Sudan had been programmed before the beginning of the 20th c. So, colonialism means also ‘deeds carried out with long-term perspective’; actually, it does not occur in a wide array of sectors of social activities, but across the board.
Neo-colonial governments in Algiers, Riyadh, Baghdad, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere were totally deprived of any substantive nation-building tools; entire nations were stripped of their historical-cultural identity, and their elites -which used to have idiotically been sending their children to ‘study’ in French, English, US, Canadian and Australian universities- were plunged into a scrupulously elaborated delusion that turned them into pure and permanent servants of their former colonial masters.
Even worse, all Muslim, African and Asiatic nations have been scrupulously disconnected from one another, and thus, to study Egyptology and Coptology a Nigerian has to move to England or America, whereas a Moroccan willing to specialize in Assyriology or Iranology needs to pursue university studies in France. Similarly, Muslims in Senegal and Sierra Leone have no idea about Islamic History, Art History, Architecture, Sciences, Wisdom, Spirituality and Literature in Central Asia, whereas Egyptian and Syrian Muslims know nothing about the great Islamic dynasties that ruled Eastern or Western Africa and the existing Islamic monuments there. In other words, the fake neo-colonial structures have been totally disconnected from one another at the intellectual, academic, cultural, educational and scientific levels, each of them being calamitously tied to its former colonial center.
The aforementioned unprecedented ignorance and reciprocal disconnectedness was complemented by colonially promoted confusion and darkness. When it comes to the confusion that prevails among Muslims worldwide, the first point to mention is the materialistic evaluation of human interests, which is an entirely anti-Islamic trait and an alien element among historical Muslim societies that revolved around axes of spiritual, intellectual and scientific endeavors.
The short-sighted materialistic viewpoint on the human endeavors and interests was projected by the colonial elites onto the local Muslim populations and it permanently destroyed the Islamic moral order, eliminating all cultural values that had prevailed for many long centuries (in several cases for more than a millennium) and turning therefore all Muslims into miserable replicas of corrupt Westerners. The very use of money, the existence of the Banking system, the shameful fallacy of the so-called ‘Islamic Economics’, and the economic structure itself of today’s Muslim countries are an anathema against prophet Muhammad.
The colonially promoted confusion took also the form of a pathetic race for ‘socioeconomic development’, involving the catastrophic deformation of the traditional urban landscape throughout the Islamic world. As -generation after generation- young students were pushed to Engineering and Economis, all the neo-colonial structures and the corrupted or demented pseudo-Muslim societies were even more strongly tied to the Western colonial capitals.
Last, backwardness, obscurantism and darkness were diffused in the form of false theories, disruptive ideologies, and nonsensical theologies; by believing in the Pan-Arabic falsehood, hundreds of millions of non-Arab Aramaeans, Yemenites, Copts (Egyptians), Sudanese Cushites, and NW African Berbers were permanently prevented from achieving proper nation-building. By embracing Nasserism, Baathism and other catastrophic schemes, dozens of millions of people engulfed themselves in wars, conflicts, bloodshed, abject poverty, and irreversible misfortune.
And by accepting the pathetic, anti-Islamic doctrines of today’s totally uneducated and deeply ignorant pseudo-theologians and bogus-imams, African and Asiatic Muslims were diverted from Islamic spirituality, wisdom, moral, sciences, intellect, education, religion, culture, and civilization. Even worse for them, they were diverted to a trivial and pathetic, bogus-Islamic theological indoctrination of which all the foundations, all the elements, all the concepts, all the parts, and all the words had been previously examined, considered, authorized and approved by the Western Orientalist colonial academia, before being projected onto the local masses due to the determinant commitment of the military, administrative, diplomatic and political gangsters who controlled the vast lands of the Mughal Empire, the detached territories of the Ottoman Caliphate, the colonial puppet state of Pahlavi Iran, as well as many other earlier Muslim sultanates, khanates and emirates.
Wherever there was a sound, secular, culturally original, socially strong state, as in the case of Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia, the criminal English, American, Canadian, Australian and French diplomats employed all possible means to diffuse the fake Islamic theologies, the nonsensical political doctrines, the absurd politicization of the Muslim societies, and the villainous ideologization of the deliberately kept-ignorant masses. In total negation of today’s fake Muslim societies, there cannot be politics in a historical Muslim society; and there was no politics in both, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia.
In other words, all the present dimensions of social-intellectual-educational-political life in today’s fake Muslim countries had been pre-fashioned by the colonial powers in order to permanently function detrimentally against all their users, adherents, admirers, supporters and followers onto whom they were projected systematically, tyrannically and criminally. I expanded on this topic in my article titled ‘Why Former Ottoman Provinces cannot become Proper States’ that I published before 10 years: https://www.academia.edu/26064731/Why_Former_Ottoman_Provinces_cannot_become_Proper_States_By_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis?auto=download
CHINA, INDIA, RUSSIA, IRAN AND TURKEY: THE WORLD’S FIVE MOST IMPORTANT CONTINENTAL EMPIRES FIRST CANNOT BE REVIVED AND SECOND CAN PROSPER ONLY AS SECULAR STATES
Ming dynasty Emperor Zhu Houzhao (朱厚照; 1491-1521)
15th c. painting of the Forbidden City
Forbidden city Beijing
Qing China map 1820
Qing dynasty Emperor Kangxi (康熙帝; 1661-1722)
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Superior to the paranoid lunatic Ottoman Selim I and stronger than the lascivious Ismail Safavi, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad rather known as Babur (1483-1530) was the founder of the Mughal Empire; incomparably the most adventurous, the most impulsive and the most intellectual emperor of his times.
EmperorHumayun (1508-1556) and his son Akbar
Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) receiving the four-year old Abdul Rahim following the assassination (1561) of his father Bairam Khan, who was Akbar’s leading general and mentor: miniature from the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), which was commissioned by Akbar as the official chronicle of the reign. It was written by Abu’l Fazl between 1590 and 1596, illustrated between c. 1592 and 1594.
Diwan-i-Aam (Hall of Public Audience) in the palace of the Great Mughal Emperor in Agra
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‘Moscow under Ivan the Terrible’ (1902) is a famous painting by Apollinary M. Vasnetsov; the 19th-20th c. impression that the Russians had about the beginning of the tiny Muscovy principality before 350 years was very inaccurate, erroneous, and biased. This is so, because they projected their own ideas on their own past that they viewed through the binoculars of their distorted education and historiography.
Mikhail Romanov (1596-1645) and his father, the patriarch Philaret, distribute alms, in an illustration of the first Romanov coronation. From the Coronation Album of Mikhail Fedorovich; the manuscript “The Book of the Election to the Highest Throne of the Great Russian Tsardom of the Great Sovereign Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail Fedorovich of All Great Russia Autocrat” was produced in Moscow few decades after the event (in 1672-1673). From the 1856 reprint edition.
Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg; when Russia ceased to be Russia and started imitating Western Europe corrupt pseudo-kingdoms, insidious academics, fake intellectuals, and uncivilized politicians, the divisions and the discords started. Peter I and Catherine II are the true reason of the fall of the Romanov.
When you have Western European theater, opera and dance in a theoretically Christian Orthodox Empire, sooner or later your contaminated state will collapse; Nicholas II could not save anything (here in his coronation along with Alexandra Feodorovna, 1896).
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Shah Tahmasp I of Iran & Emperor Humayun of the Mughal Empire Hindustan enjoying Nowrouz festivities, as depicted on the Chehel Sotoun palace in Esfahan
Shah Abbas I the Great (1571-1629)
The imperial Naqsh-e-Jahan (‘The Image of the World’) square in Esfahan, Safavid Iran’s most flamboyant capital
Safavid Iran, 1511
General view of the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Shah Mosque (below), and the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (in the middle), Isfahan
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Stupid Ottomans! They abolished the only valuable military units they had, namely the Janissaries; the absurd development took place at the time of the idiotic Sultan Mahmoud II (1785-1839). Instead of killing all the uneducated, ignorant, dark and pathetic sheikhs, muftis, qadis and imams that contaminated and destroyed the Ottoman Empire with the fallacy of their anti-Islamic “sunnah”, Mahmoud II closed down the illustrious Bektashi Order and the formidable Janissary elite infantry, thus issuing the death warrant of his otherwise wretched state. Today, people confuse two totally different terms: ‘Ottoman Empire’ and ‘Ottoman Civilization’. All factors of the Islamic civilization in the territory of the Caliphate were indeed persecuted by the pathetic, corrupt, cruel and villainous Ottoman dynasty. As it used to be said at the time, to be a member of the Ottoman family you had to have killed your brother! The ominous empire was the World History’s most anti-Turkish state.
Topkapı sarayı at the time of Selim I (1512-1520)
Official ceremonies in the Ottoman palace were a spectacular and costly affair that was impermissible in an absurd state ridiculously governed by pathetic, biased and ignorant theologians who took their stupid theology as tantamount to the religion of Islam.
Topkapı sarayı (طوپقپو سرايى) in Ottoman Constantinople; the historical name ‘Istanbul’, which was attested in sources for more than 100 years before the fall of the Eastern Roman imperial capital (1453), became the official name of the city only thanks to Kemal Ataturk. The absurd measure of turning Ayasofya Museum to a fanciful pseudo-mosque for political circus automatically cancels the popular city name and imposes the re-introduction of the old name that was the official appellation when the monumental edifice was operating as a real mosque (1453-1923).
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II. Turkey and Iran: the two exceptions
The two most notable exceptions from this chaotic and nefarious situation have been Turkey and Iran; the Turkish exception is entirely due to the greatness of the scope and the depth of understanding of Kemal Ataturk, who was one of the very few minds to timely, accurately and plainly identify the colonial goals. The founder of Modern Turkey had understood that Islam as religion was already defunct during his time and that the uneducated, ignorant and worthless Muslims of the early 20th c. were to be re-educated from scratch and on the basis of their own culture in order to later rediscover the true historical Islam in all its width, depth and height.
Kemal Ataturk knew that all that the criminal colonial imperialists of France, England and America wanted to do was to aptly utilize and duly instrumentalize the uneducated and silly Muslims of his time, turning them to fully operable tools of Western hegemony. The basic tools of this instrumentalization were the following:
– the deceitful ideologization (theologization) of the Islamic religion,
– the execrable politicization of the Muslim societies,
– the Orientalist falsification of the History of all Asiatic and African nations, and
– the linguistic, educational, academic and cultural subordination of all, Muslim and non-Muslim, Oriental nations to the Western European and North American barbarism and inhuman model of life, which was produced in Western Europe starting with the Evil Renaissance and diffused worldwide due to the genocidal colonialism
But theology is not religion; today’s fake Muslims do not believe Islam as religion, but pseudo-Islamic theological systems that contain a modern and ahistorical bogus-interpretation (i.e. a misinterpretation) of the values of Islam, thus fully eliminating Spirituality and turning Moral from a profound understanding of virtues to a silly obedience of other humans, which is “shirk” (شرك) according to the dogma of Islam.
It goes without saying that the aforementioned situation (or condition of being) does not only consist in religious deviation for Muslims but also constitutes supreme humiliation and final demise for any nation. Kemal Ataturk was triumphantly confirmed by all the historical developments that followed his death.
The uneducated, ignorant and stupid Muslims of Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, etc. fell exactly into the trap of their utilization and instrumentalization by the West; from 1948 to 1967 to 1973, the fake Muslims of the wider region did indeed function as fully programmed automatons. More they hated the Zionists, stronger the state of Israel became. This does not mean that the Zionist state is rightful and correct; it is not. But this does not matter (or does not play any role) anymore, when the Aramaean Muslims of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine and the Coptic Muslims of Egypt are so wrong as to become dehumanized automatons focused on wrong choices that can bring only grave deterioration and final destruction.
Having no national identity, believing in a pseudo-theology (that they mistook for religion), being truly disconnected from one another, being totally unaware of one another’s historical past and cultural heritage, and acting -at the political level- like conveniently submissive monkeys of the Westerners, these fake Muslims do not have a chance in the billion to ever win. Automatons do not win; humans do. Automatons act as per their pre-fashioned mechanism and then get decomposed to pieces.
The Iranian exception was basically due to the earlier imperial tradition (Safavid, Afshar and Qajar). The English interfered in Iran in the early 20th c. in a multifaceted and multilayered manner. They deposed the true, imperial dynasty and imposed an ignorant soldier as ‘king’, after duly cheating, bribing and corrupting him; this poor and uneducated guy did not even know the historical Iranian name ‘Pahlavi’ and its meaning, but the academic instructor and tutor, whom his colonial masters assigned to him, gave him this name as ‘royal family name’ – which constitutes the most shameful and most disgraceful stigma of Iranian History.
The reason for the English intervention in Iran in the late 19th and early 20th c. is still unknown to most people worldwide. For many long centuries, the evil Anglo-French diplomacy, vicious colonial trickery, and incessant machinations pitched the silly Ottomans and the naïve Iranians in interminable wars that weakened both empires; even worse, when Constantinople and Isfahan/Tehran did not fight against one another, most probably one of the two ailing empires made a war with the Russians. This unprecedentedly disastrous series of developments occurred despite the fact that both, the dynasties and the populations of the two empires, were Turanian in their majority and the local culture in both realms was a millennia long Iranian-Turanian amalgamation.
But with Kemal Ataturk turning the world’s most anti-Turkic empire (namely the wretched Ottoman Empire) into Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, the path was open for the much needed merge of the two great states into one; but this eventuality (that had been fully materialized by Tamerlane in 1402) was the real horror of the Western colonial powers for no less than four centuries (1500-1900).
The reason of the colonial fear was the fact that the Ottoman state and the Iranian Empire were equally Iranian and Turanian at the same time; in either case, the majority of the local population was Turanian, whereas the popular culture and tradition constituted an amalgamated Turanian (nomad / military-martial) and Iranian (settled / academic-intellectual) common heritage. So, by intervening colonially in Iran, the English intended to
– devilishly ‘Persianize’ Iran (an attempt that had no historical precedent),
– reduce the universal-ecumenical Empire of Iran into a ‘national Persian kingdom’, and thus
– transform untouchable Iran into a malleable ‘Persia’.
By so doing, the evil colonials knew beforehand that they would trigger enormous reactions from the part of Azeris, Turkmens and others, who would never accept ‘their’ Iran (so, a Turanian-Iranian entity) to be degraded into a Farsi (‘Persian’) state.
However, not even an interference of this scale was enough for the English and the French to fully control developments in Iran. As the English occupied the formerly Ottoman land of Mesopotamia (Aram-Nahrain or ‘Iraq’), the colonial conspirers mobilized several naïve Shia religious leaders and turned them against the puppet soldier king Reza, whom they had imposed on his fake throne in the first place.
As the colonial ‘explorers’, ‘advisers’ and ‘friends’ pushed the idiotic, credulous and unsuspicious Reza to westernize Iran and to stupidly send his son, the crown prince Muhammad Reza, to Switzerland for ‘studies’ (which would also further westernize him: 1931-1936; at the age of 12-17), they instigated anti-royal hatred among the silly ayatollahs and the other useless religious leaders, whom they urged to react against the ‘atheist’ king Reza, whom they had raised to power for a start. This has always been the criminal nature of the Western colonial evilness: you don’t only raise a silly puppet to prominence and power; you also prepare the puppet’s opponents and eventually the puppet’s murderers.
The situation went out of control, when the soldier’s son, after being educated as crown prince in Switzerland, proved to be a perspicacious successor to the much undeserved throne of Iran. As a matter of fact, and clearly to his credit, Muhammad Reza, by noticing the conflicting agendas of the various colonial powers and by identifying tremendous discrepancies in the ultimate goals of the major lobbies of power (or secret societies) in the Western World (Jesuits, Freemasons and Zionists), understood a large and critical part of the overall scheme, took therefore his role seriously, and following the path of Kemal Ataturk, attempted to modernize Iran in order to make it truly competitive to Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and the major Western nations. This was exactly what the evil Western colonials did not want to happen, because Kemal Ataturk has always been the man whom they hated most and for a good reason: if there were another 3-4 men like the founder of Modern Turkey, as perspicacious as he was, as determined as he was, and as audacious as he was, then the entire colonial rule would crumble in Asia, Africa and Europe, ultimately and rightfully plunging the Western World into the well-deserved final implosion and irreversible decomposition. That’s why Iran’s position has severely degraded since 1979 and the so-called ‘Islamic revolution’.
III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians
It could not happen otherwise, because the nonsensical theory published by Khomeini and known under the name ‘Velayat-e Faqih’ {‘the Governance of the (Islamic) Jurisprudents’} did not exist (and consequently was not practiced) earlier, throughout the History of Islamic Caliphates; it is a modern concept, although many efforts were made to attach some historical credibility to it. As far as the so-called ‘Shia Muslims’ are concerned, quite unfortunately, this theory was the effective counterpart of the ‘Political Islam’ that the colonial Orientalists, diplomats and politicians diffused among /imposed on the so-called ‘Sunni Muslims’. I use the expression ‘so-called’, because in reality the distinction into Sunni and Shia Muslims is also fake, but this is not a topic on which I can further expand here. About: https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_
The degradation of Iran’s position at the international level was stopped to some extent (not because an improvement was made in the unfortunate realm ruled by a puerile elite that failed to identify the anti-Iranian and anti-Turanian schemes of the Western colonial gangsters but) due to rather external factors. Despite the fact that Turkey followed a different trajectory, also Ankara’s position at the international level started gradually being severely degraded in 2002-2003, when the Western colonial fabrication ‘AKP’ was forcefully imposed on Turkey’s political life by direct and multileveled Western colonial interference.
The Turkish generals were constantly, boldly and gravely threatened by the US, NATO, EU, UK, and other governments and international bodies not to intervene, not to undertake a -much needed- coup, and not to cause the -much demanded- physical death of the disreputable US-UK-Israel puppet Erdogan, Turkey’s silliest, most ignorant, most uneducated, most pathetic, and most ludicrous prime minister and president.
The fact that Turkey’s Islamists came to and stayed in power only due to systematic Western colonial support clearly shows their absolutely non-Muslim, evil nature, and their servile character, which is the epitome of the disbeliever, the unfaithful and the perfidious. It also heralds the forthcoming destruction of Turkey, because this is the ultimate goal of the Western colonials, who brought the stupid Islamists of the AKP to power in order to duly, effectively and irrevocably utilize them for their plans.
Having a decomposed, divided and useless army (due to ceaseless post-2016 purges), a collapsed economy, half a trillion external gross debt, and a current account deficit of $36.7 billion in 2020, Turkey will need more than a decade to recover from the nonsensical and paranoid governmental policies of the idiots, who imagined it possible to govern a 21st c. country with oral utterances of a prophet who lived before 1400 years and with the prescriptions of a holy book manifested to indigenous people in Hejaz 300 years after the Roman Empire became Christian.
What is even worse for the brainless humanoids that support Turkey’s impossible Islamization is the fact that Muslim kingdoms and empires during the Islamic times were not governed (and did not have to be governed) on the basis of the Shariah in the way today’s uneducated and ignorant Muslim theologians understand this very vague and currently misinterpreted term. Quite contrarily, many times caliphs and sultans ruled against the Islamic Law; this is a vast topic that goes out of the scope of the present article, but at this point, I want only to indicate the original mistake and the defective approach to which are due the false interpretations and the erroneous conclusions of almost all modern Muslim theologians.
IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials
Instead of duly studying and carefully examining what truly occurred during all the periods of Islamic History and subsequently concluding thereupon, today’s fake Muslim theologians theorize on the basis of various historical texts (Quran, Hadith, Fiqh, Kalam), which by definition they cannot understand in their original, correct and accurate contextualization. When you hear silly people using this style of wooden language «theologian X said: ‘about this topic prophet Muhammad said that’», you can be sure that you have in front of you an idiot duly utilized by the colonial powers in order to harm all interlocutors who would accept such fully unrealistic purposes, positions and pretensions.
This is so, because whatever prophet Muhammad (or any other individual, prophet, high priest, mystic or layman) said does not truly matter; what really matter are the moral principles, the spiritual concepts, and the divine values that are contained in what the prophet (or any other person) said. Actually, words have worth only as expression of principles, concepts and values; otherwise they are absolutely empty, meaningless and useless.
Why the use of wooden language consists in an absurdity possible to be perfectly utilized by one’s own enemies is easy to understand; the safe losers are always the ignorant, the idiotic, and the unrealistic people, as they can be easily entrapped.
First, it is a matter of idiocy to imagine that, by using citations, one can replace 1400 years of History. Citations are tantamount to nothing; only diachronic practices reveal what Islam has been.
Second, only due to lack of proper education can one think that one may be able to understand any text written or words uttered before 1400 years in the exact sense and with the correct connotation that they had at the time; this is so irrespective of language, ethnic origin, religion, literature and culture. Connotations of words always change, and this is nothing ignorant theologians can possibly speak about. Now, the much needed task to identify the specific connotation that a word had when used within a specific text would demand the skills of honest and consummate scholarship, but unfortunately there cannot be acceptable scholarship in cases of indoctrination.
Third, the easiest persons to manipulate are always the imbeciles, who believe in a doctrine, while abstracting its elements and giving to the doctrine’s terms the meaning that they want (which did not exist historically) or can (due to their ignorance and lack of education). Such unsophisticated people usually attribute to their doctrine’s words absolute value, whereas the only absolute value is that of the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind each word’s original meaning.
However, due to their crudeness, these people cannot imagine that, before duly comprehending the meaning of a word, they have to recover first the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind it. So, they end up projecting their own, debased personal beliefs and conclusions onto the texts that they mechanically read (or at times learn by heart) without ever reaching the true meaning of the texts’ contents; but this process is well known to colonial academia.
Consequently, these persons convert their own personal misery into a permanent fight for egoistic self-confirmation and self-justification, and the abstractly taken elements of the doctrine that they believe in have unfortunately -in reality- only a subliminal psychological importance to them.
The hysterical screams of today’s fake preachers, sheikhs and imams during the Friday prayer khutbahs (sermons) are not a matter of Religion to be studied, but of Psychology. The same is valid for the various heretical pseudo-Christian pastors of the West, namely the Evangelicals, the Baptists, the Mormons and their likes.
There is no religion that forces the believers to scream hysterically; only theological-ideological indoctrination can cause this devious and disastrous behavior. However, this form of pseudo-Islamic indoctrination is what the colonial powers want to achieve among today’s fake Muslim preachers, sheikhs and imams, because only under these circumstances they can easily manipulate these miserable people subliminally.
This subliminal passion fully detaches these people from down-to-Earth reality, rendering them pliable enough for all those, who -for one reason or another- want these ignorant and misfortunate persons to fight for their unrealistic purposes, thus causing enormous damages to themselves, to their societies, and to their country’s national interests, institutions, and governments.
And that’s why Turks must drastically and resolutely remove Erdogan and AKP from power at all costs and as soon as possible. Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey is not a fake state like Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia or Saudi Arabia; and -as I already said- it cannot be ‘Islamized’. If a pseudo-Islamic dictatorship is imposed in Ankara, Turkey will simply cease to exist.
As soon as the basic traits of the state will be altered and stop functioning, Turkey will be dangling in the vacuum. This will not turn the entire structure into ‘Islamic’, as the corrupt and besotted Islamist slaves of the US, NATO, EU and UK believe before and after making their cursed and useless prayers. After the alteration of Turkey’s basic traits, the state will soon disappear, as it will have been canceled. The entire country would then suddenly find itself under the status of the Treaty of Sevres. The decomposition, which will ensue, will be far worse than that of the Ottoman Empire or, more recently, of the USSR; it will rather look like the present case of Yemen.
V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials
So, more than 15 years have passed after I published the aforementioned article, but I still stick to my conclusion: “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. This is still valid, not because the two countries improved their standards and strengthened their positions, but mainly due to the fact that many other Muslim countries totally collapsed and fell into chaos or fully capitulated to the evil elites of the Western World. Many countries still existed back in 2007, but do not exist as such anymore: Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Sudan. And many other countries, like Turkey and Iran, saw their power waning: Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. However, the situation of Turkey and Iran no longer concerns Ankara and Tehran only, due to the considerable changes that occurred at the international level with respect to the world balance of power.
Internal conflicts accentuated the growing social tension in the US; the refugee crisis plunged EU and UK into an impasse; despite the undeniable mistakes made in the Ukraine crisis (2013-2014 and 2022-2023) and in parallel with the successes marked in Syria (2015-2023), Putin managed to re-establish an impressively rehabilitated Russia at the epicenter of international relations; India and Brazil made themselves felt in the world affairs; Germany remained the sole economic power of EU; and China was transformed into one pole of the bipolar system that seems to prevail for the time being. Despite Beijing’s continuous affirmation of its dedication to a forthcoming multipolar world, we still do not -properly speaking- attest such a situation. It rather seems that many powers would find a China-US bipolar world good for them, at least for some time.
Turkey and Iran, under similar conditions, can cause serious trouble – not only if pitched against one another, but also if transformed into an obstacle on a country’s way to rising to prominence. The same is also valid for the fate of all other Muslim countries; an eventual dismemberment of just one of them or also a potential war between two of them can dramatically affect the interests of a major power. For the time being, Russia, China and Iran have managed to establish an alliance at many levels, involving also Tehran’s recent adhesion to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (as a full member state). About: https://www.academia.edu/53029736/From_the_Great_Game_to_the_Final_Game_Iran_Full_Member_State_of_the_SCO_as_the_Greatest_Event_of_the_21st_Century_text_pictures_and_legends_
Contrarily to Iran, Turkey followed an erratic path for all intents and purposes. After having been a fully accredited, modern Western state and society (thanks to Kemal Ataturk), Turkey got contaminated after 2002 by Islamism, anachronism, extremism, radicalism, obscurantism and self-destructive hysteria to significant extent. But as a Muslim country, Turkey is the sole NATO member state. This hiatus consists in a tragi-comical situation that can no longer exist; it leads to extinction.
In a rather recent article published in Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s foremost newspaper, on 21st September 2021, the distinguished Prof. Dr. Erol Manisali (1940-2022), a leading Kemalist intellectual and academic, made an extraordinary comparison; his article’s title was quite indicative in this regard (Erol Manisalı, AKP’nin ‘Osmanlıcılığı’, İngilizin ‘Brexit’ine mi benziyor! / https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/erol-manisali/akpnin-osmanliciligi-ingilizin-brexitine-mi-benziyor-1870529): «Does AKP’s ‘Ottomanism’ look like the ‘Brexit’ of the English?»
Prof. Manisali was absolutely right; Brexit was disastrous indeed for England, and Ottomanism (also known as Neo-Ottomanism) is definitely calamitous for Turkey. However, Prof. Manisali still clarified several points in which Brexit is (and is made) less disastrous than the forgery and the paranoia of Ottomanism. On the other hand, it is true that the two options have indeed something in common. Both political concepts constitute a form of retreat or isolation that can end up in seclusion and implosion.
VI. What Russia and China must do
In the present article, I don’t intend to examine the troubles that will be caused by so virulently unrealistic purposes. I will come up with another article to examine the catastrophic perspectives that inconsistent, nonsensical and pathetic doctrines like Neo-Ottomanism, Neo-Safavism, Neo-Mughalism, Neo-Czarism, and Neo-Qingism may eventually cause if given some consideration and trustworthiness. Here, I intend to discuss the dangers ensuing from the subtle and smart utilization of such delusions that the crumbling Western colonial powers may make. For the Russian and Chinese aspirations to establish a multipolar world, these dangers may be lethal. That is why I will also suggest several measures that Moscow and Beijing must take; in addition, I propose the introduction of these methods to several other countries.
Before all the rest, it is essential for many people worldwide to understand how the colonial powers of Western Europe and North America managed to survive. Both, the EU and the US seem to be collapsing and disintegrating nowadays; NATO has already been described as ‘dead’ by a member state’s head! And after five centuries of English colonialism, two world wars, one cold war, an unnecessary adhesion to the EU, and a final Brexit, England looks like a 15th c. country in a 21st c. world. The 15th century was a terrible period indeed for Western Europe, which was a barbarian periphery that experienced many wars and lost much blood in the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). At the very end of the 15th c., Western Europe was plagued with so many problems that the local kingdoms would irrevocably implode and disappear, if they did not expand colonially.
This reality must be carefully observed today by Chinese and Russians alike, because similar situations do not exist in their own national past. Consequently, the presently ailing Western states may well manage to survive by repeating exactly the same method, i.e. by exporting their own problems to others; their tactics in Ukraine do clearly confirm my assessment. Certainly, this involves more wars, more conflicts, more bloodshed, and greater risks; but the paranoid Western elites do not try to avoid them! Quite contrarily, they try to trigger them.
The silly but dangerous AUKUS bellicose rhetoric is just one example. It is absurd to take the Western political propaganda about ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ at face value. They did not want to impose ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. They are criminal enough to want to trigger only the situation that the entire world has clearly attested in the aforementioned misfortunate countries. The same can also happen eventually to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Algeria, Indonesia, and so on.
This means that the ensuing dangers are real and great, because the pulverization of numerous countries will cancel the long propagated dream of a peaceful multipolar world and significantly modify the scope of the historically founded and humanely prepared, multiply beneficial strategy One Belt One Road (OBOR/一带一路). How can Russia and China react to the chaotic plans of the Western World? To this question I will respond in the next part of this series of articles.
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu (Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
Pre-publication of chapter XVI of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XIV, XV and XVI belong to Part Five (Fallacies about Sassanid History, History of Religions, and the History of Migrations). The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
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Hsiung-nu soldier from Saksanokhur, Tajikistan
However, soon afterwards, Europe faced two major threats that lasted many centuries: the Islamic armies and the Manichaean subversion. Despite their ferocity and their conquests, at a certain point the Islamic armies were stopped either in Western or in Eastern Europe. But the Manichaean tidal wave that hit Europe back was disproportional and beyond any expectation. Starting from the Eastern Roman Empire and the entire Caucasus region and as early as the 7th c. CE, the Paulicians triggered an enormous religious, social and imperial destabilization across vast lands. The famous Eastern Roman Akritai, i.e. the imperial Eastern Roman guards and frontal forces against the Islamic Caliphate, were – all – Paulicians, having rejected the Christian Orthodox Constantinopolitan theology. Digenes Akritas, the Eastern Roman Empire’s greatest hero and Modern Greeks’ most revered and foremost legendary figure was a Paulician, not an Orthodox.
Constantinopolitan patriarchs, emperors and theologians persistently described the Paulicians as Manichaeans; they used the same term also for the Iconoclasts. This does not mean that these religious, spiritual and esoteric systems of faith were ‘Manichaean’ stricto sensu, but they were definitely formed under determinant Manichaean impact. The same concerns the Bogomiles across the Balkans, Central and Western Europe, starting in the 10th c., the Cathars across Western Europe from the 12th c. onwards, and also many other religious, spiritual and esoteric systems that derived from the aforementioned.
The Muslim friends, partners and associates of the Paulicians were also groups formed under strong Manichaean impact and historically viewed as such; known as Babakiyah or Khurramites or Khorram-dinan, the 8th c. religious group setup by Sunpadh and led in the 9th c. by Babak Khurramdin made an alliance with the Eastern Roman Emperor Theophilos (829-842), an outstanding Iconoclast, and not only repeatedly revolted against the Abbasid Caliphate but also fought along with the Eastern Roman army in 837 in the Anti-Taurus Mountains to recapture Melitene (Malatya), and on many other occasions. The Khurramite commander Nasir and 14000 Iranian Khurramite rebels had no problem in being baptized Iconoclast Christians and taking Greek names (Nasir became then known as Theophobos), which shows the Manichaean origins and affinities of the Iconoclasts and the Khurramites.
The state of the Paulicians
The massacre of the Paulicians
Kale-ye Babak, the impregnable castle of the Babakiyah (or Khurramites) near Kaleybar – East Azerbaijan, Iran
Afshin brings Babak as captive in Samarra. from a manuscript miniature of the Safavid times
Babak Khorramdin statue from Babek city in Nakhchivan province of Azerbaijan
Within the context of early Islamic caliphates, the Manicheans prospered, definitely marked by their superiority in terms of spirituality, letters, sciences, philosophy and cosmology. It was relatively easy for them to reinterpret the Quran as a Manichaean scripture; it was totally impossible for the uneducated and naïve early Muslims to oppose Manicheans in open debate or to outfox Manichaean interpretative schemes. Among the leading Muslim erudite polymaths, mystics, poets and translators of the early period of Islamic Civilization (7th – 8th c.), many defended all major pillars of the Manichaean doctrine and even the dualist dogma; Ibn al Muqaffa is an example. The illustrious translator of the Middle Persian literary masterpiece Kalila wa Dimna into Arabic was a crypto-Manichaean Muslim, and surely he was not the only. Ibn al Muqaffa was executed as per the order of Caliph al-Mansur (754-775), but the first persecution of the Manicheans started only under the Caliph al-Mahdi (775-785); however, this was the time many groups and movements or Manichean origin started openly challenging Islam and the Caliphate in every sense. However, it is noteworthy that the greatest Caliph of all times, Harun al Rashid (786-809), had a very tolerant and friendly stance toward Manicheans of all types.
Abu’l Abbas al-Saffah proclaimed as the first Abbasid Caliph: the Abbasid dynasty opened the door for a cataclysmic Iranian cultural, intellectual, academic, scientific and spiritual impact on the Muslim world.
However, it is only as late as the time of Caliph al-Muqtadir (908-932) that the Manicheans, persecuted in the Caliphate, left Mesopotamia in big numbers, making of Afrasiab (Samarqand) and Central Asia the center of their faith, life and activities. This was not a coincidence; many Turanians had already been long date enthusiastic Manichean converts and adepts, whereas several Manichaean monuments unearthed in Central Asia date back to the 4th c. At the time of al-Mansur, the Uyghur Khaqan (: Emperor) Boku Tekin accepted Manichaeism as official state religion in 763; the Uyghur Khaqanate stretched from the Tian Shan mountains and the Lake Balkhash (today’s Kazakhstan) to the Pacific. For more than one century, Manichaeism was the state religion across the entire Northeastern Asia.
During the same time, Manichaeism was diffused in Tibet and China. Similarly with what occurred in the Islamic Caliphate, Manicheans in Tibet and China had it easy to reinterpret Buddhism in Manichaean terms. As a matter of fact, Chinese Buddhism is full of Manichaean impregnations. For this reason, several anti-Buddhist Chinese emperors (like Wuzong of Tang in the period 843-845) confused the Manicheans with the Buddhists and persecuted them too. However, Manichaeism was for many centuries a fundamental component and a critical parameter of all social, spiritual, intellectual and religious developments in China. And this was due to the incessant interaction of Turanians and Iranians across Asia. About:
During the Sassanid and early Islamic periods, the central provinces of Iran had to embrace many Turanian newcomers. This was one of the numerous Turanian waves that the Iranian plateau and its periphery had to welcome across the millennia. A vast and critical topic of the World History that was excessively distorted and systematically misrepresented across various disciplines of the Humanities is the chapter of the major Eurasiatic Migrations. Various distorting lenses have been used in this regard. It is surely beyond the scope of the present chapter to outline this subject, but I must at least mention it with respect to the persistent Orientalist efforts to divide and dissociate Iranian from Turanian nations across several millennia.
If one accepts naively the ‘official’ dogma of Western colonial historiography, one imagines that all the world’s major civilizations (Sumerians, Elamites, Akkadians-Assyrians/Babylonians, Egyptians, Cushites-Sudanese, Hittites, Hurrians, Urartu, Phoenicians, Iranians, Greeks, Romans, Dravidians, Chinese, etc.) were automatically popped up and instantly formed by settled populations. Modern historians, who compose this sort of nonsensical narratives, are monstrous gangsters intending to desecrate human civilization and to extinguish human spirituality. All civilizations were started by nomads, and there was always a time when all indigenous nations (each of them in its own turn) were migrants.
But modern Western historians intentionally and criminally misrepresent the major Eurasiatic Migrations in a most systematic and most sophisticated manner, by only introducing – partly and partially – aspects of this overwhelming and continual phenomenon, like spices on gourmet dishes. I do not imply that the Eurasiatic Migrations were the only to have happened or to have mattered; there were also important migrations in Africa, the Pacific, and the continent of the Aztecs, the Mayas and the Incas. However, I limit the topic to the migrations that are relevant to the History of Iran and Turan. So, those who study Ancient Roman History are customarily told that, ‘although everything was fine and civilized Romans prospered in peace’, suddenly some iniquitous barbarians arrived to invade Roman lands and to embarrass the civilized settled populations altogether; this type of bogus-historical presentations is a Crime against the Mankind, because it distorts the foremost reality of human history, namely that we have all been migrants.
There is no worst bigotry worldwide than that of settled populations.
Yet, every manual of history would be easily rectified, if few extra chapters were added, at the beginning and during the course of the narration, to offer an outline of parallel developments occurred in the wider and irrevocbly indivisible Eurasia.
The discriminatory, truly racist, manner by which the civilized migrants are presented in various manuals of (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Cushitic, Anatolian, Roman, Greek, European, Russian, Iranian, Dravidian, and Chinese) History helps only reinstate the vicious and immoral axiom that ‘History is written by the victors’. Every historian, who does not consciously write in an objective manner to reveal the truth and to reject the paranoia of the aforementioned adage, is an enemy of the Mankind.
Beyond the aforementioned points, many historians today will try to find an excuse, saying that, by writing about let’s say the so-called ‘barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire’, they intentionally reflect the Roman viewpoint, because they rely on Roman historical sources. This could eventually be accepted, if stated in 1820, when the modern science of history had not advanced much, and only few archaeological excavations had taken place. But if this is seriously expressed as an apology today, it constitutes an outrage. The least one can say to these forgers is that they must first obtain an interdisciplinary degree, before publishing their nonsensical manual, or – alternatively – study several paperbacks on the History of the Migrant Nations (in this case: Huns, Vandals, Goths, etc.).
An even greater mistake that modern historians make is that they present the continual phenomenon of Eurasiatic migrations in a most fragmentary manner; this creates, by means of Nazi propaganda, the wrong idea and the distorted impression that all of a sudden, every now and then, new migrants appear in the horizon, coming out of the vast Asiatic ‘nowhere’. This is an aberration and a fallacy. The absurd factoid, which is deceitfully called “Invasions of the Roman Empire” and is peremptorily dated between 100 CE and 500 CE, is merely an academic fabrication. Why?
First, there were incessant migrations before and after the said period.
Second, the aforementioned factoid is a fallacy due to the fact that, during the same period, other migrations took also place, but the specialists in Roman History do not mention (or even do not know) them; however, these migrations (that they fail to even name) constitute intertwined phenomena with those that they present in their manuals, and consequently their presentation is a conscious and plain distortion.
Third, the events are always portrayed as a menace of barbarism, as breach of Roman legitimacy, and as violation of a hypothetical right of the Roman Empire to exist. This is an outrage; the Roman Empire was not a sacrosanct institution. In many aspects, its lawless formation, barbaric expansion, and bloody wars constitute some of the World History’s bleakest pages. But criminal colonial historians never discussed ‘unpleasant’ topics with the correct terminology; they did not write for instance about the barbarian Roman demolition of Carthage, the monstrous Roman sack of Corinth, the savage Roman invasion of Seleucid Syria or the lawless Roman annexation of Egypt.
This is the disgusting bias of the Western colonial historiographers: when a negative development takes place against Rome, it is ‘bad’; and quite contrarily, when an undesirable occurrence happens to others, it is ‘good’. And in order to represent this vicious bias as ‘historical truth’, they mobilize a great intellectual effort, involving many methods. In this regard, the Eurasiatic migrations are absurdly fractured into many parts, and many of these parts are deliberately concealed, when focus is made on only one of them. The pseudo-academic methods involved to disguise and conceal the topic are numerous.
First, some migrations are not presented as such, but named after the migrant nations; examples: Scythians, Sarmatians, Celts. And yet, these nations are basically known due to their migrations across vast lands.
Second, other migrations are not mentioned as such, but called after the name of the location where excavations brought to light the material remains of a migrant nation’s civilization; example: Andronovo culture, Afanasievo culture, etc.
Third, several migrant nations of different origin are regrouped after the geography where they spread; this is totally paranoid, because no one can possibly ‘regroup’ the Vandals, who crossed Central and Western Europe, reached North Africa, settled in Hippo Regius and Carthage, and then attacked Greece, Sicily, Rome, Sardinia, Corsica and the Iberian coastlands, with the Huns, who crossed Siberia, Russia, and Ukraine, settled in Eastern Europe and attacked the Balkans, Italy and Gaul.
Fourth, several migrant nations are dissociated from one another migrant nation of the same ethnic origin (example: Huns and Turkic nations), whereas in cases of severe distortion, different names of the same nation, attested in diverse historical sources, are tentatively presented as names of two different nations (example: Huns and Hsiung nu whose name is erroneously spelled Xiongnu).
Fifth, several parts of migrant nations are arbitrarily dissociated from their ethnic counterparts and presented separately as settled nations (example: White Huns or Hephthalites).
Sixth, the ethnic origin of several migrant nations is confusingly presented (example: the Bulgars, who were a Turkic nation, are often included in Europe’s ‘Migration Period’ and categorized along with Slavs, whereas they should have been mentioned in the ‘Turkic migrations’!).
To the aforementioned inaccuracies, distortions and prejudices, a plethora of false maps is added to comfortably reduce the size of kingdoms, empires and nations whose existence did not happen to please the discriminatory minds of the perverse Anglo-French and American colonial historians. About:
The end result of this systematization of Western colonial falsehood is that great and highly civilized conquerors and emperors like Attila, Genghis Khan, Hulagu Khan, Kublai Khan, Timur Lenk and others appear as mysterious meteorites, who came from “nowhere”, as barbarian invaders, and a “scourges of God”, whereas in reality they all (and many others) were far more educated, more cultured, more competent and more heroic than any Greek, Macedonian, Roman or European king or general. To the aforementioned historical reality additional, deceitful tactics and insidious procedures have been added by the criminal, racist, Western European and North American ‘historians’: they definitely proved to be able to write 100000 words to deplore the destructions supposedly caused to the Human Civilization by Attila, Genghis Khan, Hulagu Khan, and others, but when they happen to write about the fact that Alexander the Great burned Persepolis, they remain malignantly and partially silent, abstaining from any due criticism.
King Attila with the Turul bird in his shield (Chronicon Pictum, 1358)
It would be far easier for all to tell the truth: ‘Asia is Turan’ for most of its territory. And the moral lesson must be drawn: the existence of a ‘state’ is not a reason for anyone not to invade its lands. States are not sacrosanct; and in any case, the territory occupied by the nation that setup the local state, in all cases of historical states, was also invaded by the ancestors of that nation in the first place.
The biased Western colonial historians carry out all these distortions as tasks in order to promote the lawless interests of their own disreputable states; for this reason they always concealed the following unwavering reality: throughout World History, various fundamental concepts like ‘land’, ‘state’, ‘nation’, ‘sacred place’, etc. have had different connotations among nations of nomadic migrants and nations of settled populations.
Furthermore, several fundamental concepts, which are valid among settled nations, have no validity at all among nomads and migrant nations, and vice versa. In addition, some basic concepts that exist among nomads and migrant nations start being altered and becoming different if and when these nations happen to settle somewhere ‘permanently’. The concept of ‘universe’ and the deriving imperative of ‘universalism’ are fundamental notions of nomads and migrant nations; notably, the Akkadians (early Assyrians – Babylonians), who first produced significant literary narratives to detail the concept, were also a migrant nation that had settled only few centuries before writing down in cuneiform texts their world views.
The History of Eurasiatic Migrations, in and by itself, highlights the extensive presence of Turanians in Iran since times immemorial. Thanks to the Turanians of the Achaemenid Empire, the Turkic nations of Central Asia, China and Siberia came to get detailed descriptions of faraway regions and lands, such as Mesopotamia, Syria-Palestine, the Caucasus Mountains, the Anatolian plateau, the plains of Ukraine and Central Europe, the Balkan Peninsula, and Egypt. Consequently, further the interaction between Iran and Rome progressed, more details about the western confines of Europe reached the Turanian nomads who were moving around Lake Balkhash (Kazakhstan), Yenisey River and Baikal Lake (Siberia), Orkhon River (Mongolia), the Tarim Basin (China), the Oymyakon River (Yakutia, Eastern Siberia) and other circumferences. The incessant waves of migrations to the West and to the South were not blind and desperate movements of uninformed barbarians, who ran like crazy on their horses; only the distorted publications of Western colonial historians contain similar, nonsensical conclusions.
The pattern of the Turanian military horsemen and skillful soldiers is absolutely prominent and protruding in the History of the Early Caliphates; but it is merely the continuation of a millennia long tradition. This consists in a very embarrassing fact for all the Western Orientalists specializing in Early Islamic History, and more particularly with focus on the 8th c. CE, the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate, and the rise of Abbasid Baghdad. They therefore constantly come up with incredible assumptions, farfetched arguments, nonsensical explanations, and sly innuendos to explain how and why so many Turanian soldiers and military heads appear in the Islamic Caliphate. In fact, without Turanian military skills, the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus may have not been overthrown.
It is well known that the early Islamic armies advanced up to Merv in today’s Turkmenistan (651) and they stopped there. For the next hundred years, the only Islamic advance in Asia was effectuated only in today’s Baluchistan province of Pakistan; only at the end of the 7th c. and the beginning of the 8th c., the Islamic armies reached the Indus Delta and Gujarat. But how the Islamic Caliphate started being flooded with Turanian soldiers as early as the last decades of the Umayyad rule, if there had not already been massive Turanian populations in the Sassanid Empire of Iran? If the Turanian nations were confined ‘somewhere in Eastern Siberia and Mongolia’ (as per the distortions of colonial Orientalists), why did they appear to be so deeply involved in battles and developments that took place in Mesopotamia and Syria during the first half of the 8th c.? The answer to this question is very simple: there were always massive Turanian populations in the Pre-Islamic Iranian empires.
Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia
6- Western Orientalist historiography
The modern Western European specialists on Iran were first based on the Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Latin sources and on travelers’ records and descriptions. On his way to China, the Italian Franciscan monk Odoric of Pordenone was the first European to probably visit (in 1320) the ruins of Parsa (Persepolis) that he called ‘Comerum’. The site was then known as Chehel Minar (چهل منار /i.e. forty minarets) and later as Takht-e Jamshid (تخت جمشید/i.e. the throne of Jamshid, a great hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography about which we discussed). The Venetian Giosafat Barbaro visited the same location in 1474 and, being the victim of the delusions about which I spoke already, he attributed the erection of the majestic monuments to the Jews!
After the rise of the Safavid dynasty and the formation of the two alliances (the French with the Ottomans and the English with the Iranians), an English merchant visited Persepolis in 1568 and wrote a description that was included in Richard Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages’ (1582). Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions were first noticed and reported by the Portuguese António de Gouveia, who visited the site in 1602 and wrote about it in 1611. It is only in 1618 that the Spanish ambassador (to the court of the Safavid Shah of Iran Abbas I/1571-1629; reigned after 1588) García de Silva Figueroa associated the location with the great Achaemenid capital that was known as Persepolis in the Ancient Greek and Latin sources.
The Italian Pietro Della Valle spent five years (1616-1621) in Mesopotamia and Iran, visited Persepolis (1621), made copies of several inscriptions that he noticed there and took them back to Europe, along with clay tablets and bricks that he found in Babylon and Ur. This was the first cuneiform documentation brought to Europe. With respect to Persepolis he wrote that only 25 of the 72 original columns were still standing.
Good indication of the lunacy that Western Europeans experienced at those days due to their erroneous reading of the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historical sources about Achaemenid Iran is the following fact: after traveling in Asia and Africa, Sir Thomas Herbert wrote in his book (1638) that in Persepolis he saw several lines of strange signs curved in the walls. These were, of course, Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions, but at the time, the modern term ‘cuneiform’ had not been invented; however, excessively enthused with Greek literature about Ancient Iran, he ‘concluded’ that these characters ‘resembled Greek’! He mistook cuneiform for Greek! So biased his approach was!
The term ‘cuneiform’ (‘Keilschrift’ in German) was coined (1700) by the German scholar and explorer Engelbert Kaempfer, who spent ten years (1683-1693) in many parts of Asia. The monumental site of the Achaemenid capital was also visited by the famous Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruijn (1704) and the famous jeweler Sir Jean Chardin, who also worked as agent of Shah Abbas II for the purchase of jewels. He was the first to publish (1711) pertinent copies of several cuneiform inscriptions.
The German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr took the research to the next stage when he copied and published (1764) the famous rock reliefs and inscriptions of Darius the Great; in fact, he brought complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe. He realized that he had to do with three writing systems and that the simpler (which he named ‘Class I’) comprised 42 characters, being apparently an alphabetic script. Niebuhr’s publication was used by many other scholars and explorers, notably the Germans Oluf Gerhard Tychsen, who published the most advanced research on the topic in 1798, and Friedrich Münter, who confirmed the alphabetic nature of the script (in 1802).
The reconstitution of the Iranian past proved to be far more difficult a task than that of the Ancient Egyptian heritage. This is so because, if we consider the Old Achaemenid Iranian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyphics as the earliest stages of the two respective languages and scripts, Coptic (the latest stage of the Egyptian language) was always known in Europe throughout the Christian and Modern times, whereas Pahlavi and Middle Persian (the corresponding stages of the Iranian languages) were totally unknown. For this reason, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, the first French Iranologist and Indologist, played a key role in the decipherment of the cuneiform writing, although he did not spend time exploring it. But having learned Pahlavi and Farsi among the Parsis of India, he managed to study Avestan and he translated the Avesta as the sacred text of the Zoroastrians was preserved among the Parsi community. Pretty much like Coptic was essential to Champollion for the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic, the pioneering work of Anquetil-Duperron and the knowledge of Avestan, Pahlavi, Middle Persian and Farsi helped the French Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the German Georg Friedrich Grotefend make critical breakthroughs and advance the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid.
Grotefend’s Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1802, but it was rejected; in fact, he had deciphered only eight (8) letters until that moment, but most of his assumptions were correct. He had however to wait for an incredible confirmation; after Champollion completed his first step toward the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822, he read the Egyptian text of a quadrilingual inscription on the famous Caylus vase (named after a 18th c. French collector). Then, Champollion’s associate, the Orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, announced that Grotefend’s reading of the imperial Achaemenid name ‘Xerxes’ did indeed correspond to what the Egyptian hieroglyphic text testified to. This situation generated an impetus among Orientalist scholars and explorers; until the late 1830s and the early 1840s, Grotefend, the French Eugène Burnouf, the Norwegian-German Christian Lassen, and Sir Henry Rawlinson completed the task.
Shush (Susa), an Elamite and later an Achaemenid capital, was explored in 1851, 1885-1886, 1894-1899, and then systematically excavated by the French Jacques de Morgan (1897-1911), whereas Pasargad (the early Achaemenid capital) was first explored by the German Ernst Herzfeld in 1905. Persepolis was excavated quite later, only in the 1930s by Ernst Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Not far from Hamadan (the ancient capital Hegmataneh/Ekbatana of the Medes), the splendid site of Mount Behistun (Bisotun) had become world-famous even before it was excavated (initially in 1904) by Leonard William King and Reginald Campbell Thompson (sponsored by the British Museum). This was due to the fact that the famous trilingual Behistun inscription and the associated reliefs were carved at about 100 m above ground level on a cliff, and explorers had to scale the cliff. Several fascinating descriptions of the extraordinary location were written by travelers and visitors, before academic work was carried out there. Putting his life in risk, Rawlinson copied the Old Achaemenid text in 1835, and this helped him advance considerably the decipherment of the script.
Without the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid, it would be impossible for Rawlinson to decipher the Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, and later for others to read the Hittite script which enabled us to have access to the most important and the most original Anatolian literature of pre-Christian times.
Behistun (Farsi: Bisotun / Old Iranian: Bagastana, i.e. ‘the place of God’) was mentioned by Ctesias, who totally misunderstood the inscription, attributing it to the ‘Babylonian’ Queen Semiramis and describing it as a dedication to Zeus! In reality, the text is part of the Annals of Emperor Darius I the Great, duly detailing his victory over a rebellion; the Iranian monarch dedicated his triumph to Ahura Mazda. Now, Semiramis seems to be an entirely misplaced Ancient Greek legend about the historical Queen of Assyria (not Babylonia!) Shammuramat. The Assyrian queen was consort of Shamshi Adad V and co-regent with her son Adad-nirari III (during his reign’s early phase). But the Assyrian Queen had nothing to do with Mount Behistun and the Achaemenid Iranian inscription.
In the early 17th c., Pietro della Valle was the first Western European to come to Behistun and sketch the remains. As a matter of fact, many European travelers and explorers visited Behistun, saw the impressive inscription, and disastrously misinterpreted it, due to their preconceived ideas, mistaken readings, and unrealistic assumptions.
A foolish English diplomat and adventurer, Robert Sherley, visited the location in 1598, and he considered the astounding reliefs and the inscriptions as ‘Christian’! Napoleon’s subordinate, General Claude-Matthieu, Comte de Gardane, visited the place in 1807 only to see in the monuments the representation of ‘Christ and his twelve apostles’! In 1817, Sir Robert Ker Porter thought that the impressive relief and inscriptions detailed the deeds of Emperor Shalmaneser V of Assyria and the transportation of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel to the NE confines of Assyria. Last, quite interestingly, the German spiritual-scientific society Ahnenerbe, which used Hitler for their non-Nazi, highly secretive projects, explored Behistun in 1938.
7- Early sources of Iranian History: Assyrian-Babylonian Cuneiform
The early sources of Iranian History are Assyrian-Babylonian historical documents pertaining to the military, commercial and/or administrative activities of the Neo-Assyrian kings in the Zagros mountains and the Iranian plateau; these sources shed light on the earliest stages of Median, Persian and Iranian History, when the ancestors of the Achaemenids were just one of the many tribes that settled somewhere east of the borders of the Assyrian Empire.
Since the 3rd millennium BCE, Sumerian and Akkadian historical sources referred to nomads, settlers, villages, cities, strongholds and at times kingdoms situated in the area of today’s Iran. Mainly these tribes and/or realms were barbarians who either partly damaged or totally destroyed the Mesopotamian civilization and order. That’s why they were always described with markedly negative terms. On the other hand, we know through archaeological evidence that several important sites were located in the Iranian plateau, constituting either small kingdoms or outstanding entrepôts and commercial centers linking Mesopotamia with either India or Central Asia and China.
For instance, settled somewhere in the Middle Zagros, the Guti of the 3rd millennium BCE constituted a barbaric periphery that finally destroyed Agade (Akkad), the world’s first empire ever; and in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the Kassites descended from Middle Zagros to Babylon, after the Old Babylonian kingdom was destroyed (in 1596) by the Hittite Mursilis I, and they set up a profane kingdom (Kassite dynasty of Babylonia) that the Assyrians never accepted as a heir of the old Sumerian-Akkadian civilization.
As both ethnic groups learned Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian, their rulers wrote down their names, and thus we know that neither the Guti nor the Kassites were a properly speaking Iranian nation; the present documentation is still scarce in this regard, but there are indications that some of these people bore Turanian (or Turkic) names.
For thousands of years, South Zagros and the southwestern confines of today’s Iran belonged to Elam, the main rival of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria. Viewed as the true negation of the genius of Mesopotamian civilization, Elam was ruled by the ‘kings of Shushan and Anshan’; the two regions corresponded to Susa (and the entire province of Khuzestan in today’s Iran) and South Zagros respectively. The name that modern scholarship uses to denote this nation and kingdom is merely the Sumerian-Akkadian appellation of that country. In Elamite, the eastern neighbors of the Sumerians called their land ‘Haltamti’. Their language was neither Indo-European (like Old Achaemenid and Modern Farsi) nor Semitic (like Assyrian-Babylonian); it was also unrelated to Sumerian, Hurrian and Hattic, the languages of the indigenous populations in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Recent linguistic research offers tentative approaches to the relationship between Elamite and the Dravidian languages, thus making of it the ancestral language of more than 250 million people.
Elamite linear and cuneiform writings bear witness to the life, the society, the economy, the faith and the culture of the Elamites, as well as to their relations with the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But they cannot help us reconstitute the History of the Iranian plateau, because the Elamites never went beyond the limits of South Zagros.
With the rise, expansion and prevalence of Assyria (from the 14th to the 7th c. BCE), we have for the first time a Mesopotamian Empire that showed great importance for the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau; consequently, this means that, for the said period, we have more texts about these regions, which earlier constituted the periphery of the Mesopotamian world, but were gradually incorporated into the ever expanding Assyrian Empire. Thanks to Assyrian cuneiform texts, we know names of tribal chieftains and petty kings, cities, fortresses, ethnic groups, etc., and we can assess the various degrees of Assyrianization of each of them; but it is only at the time of Shalmaneser III (859-824 BCE) that we first find a mention of the Medes and the Persians. The former are named ‘Amadaya’ and later ‘Madaya’, whereas the latter are called ‘Parsua’ (or Parsamaš or Parsumaš).
Assyrian cuneiform texts about the Medes and the Persians more specifically are abundant during the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BCE) and at the time of the Sargonids (722-609 BCE). It is noteworthy that the Parsua were first located in the region of today’s Sanandaj in Western Iran and later they relocated to the ancient Elamite region of Anshan (today’s Iranian province of Fars), which was devastated and emptied from its population by Assurbanipal (640 BCE). After the great Assyrian victory, which also involved the destruction of Susa, Assyrian texts mention the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, Cyrus I, as Kuraš, king of Parsumaš. He sent gifts to Nineveh and he also dispatched his eldest son (‘Arukku’ in Assyrian from a hypothetical ‘Aryauka’ in Ancient Iranian) there – nominally as a hostage, but essentially as a student of Assyrian culture, sacerdotal organization, and imperial administration and procedures.
The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III
Tiglathpileser III
Sarrukin (Sargon of Assyria) with his son and successor Sennacherib (right)
8- Pre-History in the Iranian plateau, and Mesopotamia
During the 4th, the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE, the major hitherto excavated Iranian archaeological sites are the following:
Tepe Sialk
Located near the modern city of Kashan, in the center of the Iranian plateau, and excavated in the 1930s by the Russian-French Roman Ghirshman, the site was first occupied in the period 6000-5500 BCE. The remains of the zikkurat (dating back to around 3000 BCE) show that it was the largest Mesopotamian style zikkurat. Tepe Sialk IV level (2nd half of the 4th millennium BCE) testifies to evident links with Sumer (Jemdet Nasr, Uruk) and Elam (Susa III). The site was abandoned and reoccupied in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BCE (Tepe Sialk V and VI). Its location and the archaeological findings let us understand that the site was a key commercial center that linked Mesopotamia with Central Asia and China.
Tureng Tepe
Located close to Gorgan in Turkmen Sahra (NE Iran) and excavated by the American Frederick Roelker Wulsin in the 1930s and by the French Jean Deshayes in the 1950s, the site was inhabited in the Neolithic and then continually from 3100 to 1900 BCE, when it appears to have been the major among many other regional settlements and in evident contact with both, Mesopotamia and Central Asia. There was a disruption, and the site was occupied again only in the 7th c. BCE (Tureng Tepe IV A) by newcomers.
Tepe Yahya
Located at ca. 250 km north of Bandar Abbas and 220 km south of Kerman, the site was of crucial importance for the contacts between Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley; it was also in contact with Central Asia. Excavated by the Czech-American Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky, the site was inhabited from ca. 5000 to 2200 BCE and then again after 1000 BCE. The genuine ‘Yahya Culture’ covered the first half of the 4th millennium BCE. The Proto-Elamite phase started around 3400 BCE (Tepe Yahya IV C); few proto-Elamite tablets have been unearthed from that stratum. This period corresponds to the strata Susa Cb and Tepe Sialk IV. During the 3rd millennium BCE, the site appears to have been the center of production of hard stone carving artifacts; dark stone vessels produced here were found / excavated in Mesopotamia. Similar vessels and fragments of vessels have been found in Sumerian temples in Mesopotamia, in Elam, in the Indus River Valley, and in Central Asia.
Not far from Tepe Yahya are situated several important sites that testify to the strong ties that the entire region had with Sumer and Elam in the West, the Indus River Valley in the East and Central Asia in the North; Jiroft gave the name to the ‘Jiroft culture’ which is better documented in the nearby site of Konar Sandal and covers the 3rd millennium BCE. Further in the east and close to the triangle border point (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan), Shahr-e Sukhteh was an enormous site which thrived between 3200 BCE and the end of the 3rd millennium BCE. It was associated with both, the ‘Jiroft culture’ and the Helmand culture, which was attested in several sites in South Afghanistan. Elamite texts were also found in that site, which already offered many surprises, involving the first known artificial eyeball and the earliest tables game with dice.
Several important prehistoric Mesopotamian sites demonstrate parallels and contacts with the aforementioned sites, notably
– Tell Halaf (near Ras al Ayn in NE Syria; the Neolithic phase lasted from 6100 to 5400 BCE, and the Bronze Age covers the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE),
– Tell al Ubaid (near Ur in Dhi Qar governorate; 6500-3700 BCE),
– Tell Arpachiyah (near Nineveh; the site was occupied in the Neolithic period, like Tell Halaf and Ubaid),
– Tepe Gawra (close to Nineveh; the site was occupied from 5000 to 1500 BCE),
– Tell Jemdet Nasr (near Kish in Central Iraq; 3100-2300 BCE), and
– Uruk {near Samawah in South Iraq; type site for the Uruk period (4000-3100 BCE), it was a major Sumerian kingdom and it was the world’s most populated city in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE with ca. 40000 inhabitants and another 90000 residents in the suburbs}.
In the next course, I will present a brief diagram of the History of the Mesopotamian kingdoms and Empires down to Sargon of Assyria – with focus on the relations with Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau.
Tepe Sialk
Tureng tepe
Tepe Yahya
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To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1Α
Introduction; Iranian Achaemenid historiography; Problems of historiography continuity; Iranian posterior historiography; foreign historiography; Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia
1- Introduction
Welcome to the 40-hour seminar on Achaemenid Iran!
It is my intention to deliver a rather unconventional academic presentation of the topic, mostly implementing a correct and impartial conceptual approach to the earliest stage of Iranian History. Every subject, in and by itself, offers to every researcher the correct means of the pertinent approach to it; due to this fact, the personal background, viewpoints and thoughts or eventually the misperceptions and the preconceived ideas of an explorer should not be allowed to affect his judgment.
If before 200 years, the early Iranologists had the possible excuse of studying a topic on the basis of external and posterior historical sources, this was simply due to the fact that the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing had not yet been deciphered. Still, even those explorers failed to avoid a very serious mistake, namely that of taking the external and posterior historical sources at face value. We cannot afford to blindly accept a secondary historical source without first examining intentions, motives, scopes and aims of it.
As the seminar covers only the History of the Achaemenid dynasty, I don’t intend to add an introductory course about the History of the Iranian Studies and the re-discovery of Iran by Western explorers of the colonial powers. However, I will provide a brief outline of the topic; this is essential because mainstream Orientalists have reached their limits and cannot provide us with a real insight, eliminating the numerous and enduring myths, fallacies, and deliberately naïve approaches to Achaemenid Iran.
In fact, most of the specialists of Ancient Iran never went beyond the limitations set by the delusional Ancient ‘Greek’ (in reality: Ionian and Attic) literature about the Medes and the Persians (i.e. the Iranians), because they never offered themselves the task to explain the reasons for the aberration that the Ancient Ionian and Attic authors created in their minds and wrote in their texts about Iran. This was utterly puerile and ludicrous.
And this brings us to the other major innovation that I intend to offer during this seminar, namely the proper, comprehensive contextualization of the research topic, i.e. the History of Achaemenid Iran. To give some examples in this regard, I would mention
a – the tremendous, multilayered and multifaceted impact of the Mesopotamian World, Civilization and Heritage on the formation of the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, and more specifically, the determinant role played by the Sargonid Empire of Assyria on the emergence of the first Empire on the Iranian plateau;
b – the ferocious opposition of the Mithraic Magi to the Zoroastrian Achaemenid court;
c – the involvement of the Anatolian Magi in the misperception of Iran by the Ancient Greeks; and
d- the utilization of the Ancient Greek cities by the Anti-Iranian side of the Egyptian priesthoods, princes and administrators.
To therefore introduce the proper contextualization, I will expand on the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Sargonid times, not only to state the first mentions of the Medes and the Persians in History, but also to show the importance attributed by the Neo-Assyrian Emperors to the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau, as well as the numerous peoples, settled or nomadic, who inhabited that region.
There is an enormous lacuna in the Orientalist disciplines; there are no interdisciplinary studies in Assyriology and Iranology. This plays a key role in the misperception of the ancient oriental civilizations and in the mistaken evaluation (or rather under-estimation) of the momentous impact that they had on the formation of the World History. There are no isolated cultures and independent civilizations as dogmatic and ignorant Western archaeologists pretend.
Only if one studies and evaluates correctly the colossal impact of the Ancient Mesopotamian world on Iran, can one truly understand the Achaemenid Empire in its real dimensions.
2- Iranian Achaemenid historiography
A. Achaemenid imperial inscriptions produced on solemn occasions
Usually multilingual texts written by the imperial scribes of the emperors Cyrus the Great, Darius I the Great, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, Darius II, Artaxerxes II, and Artaxerxes III, as well as of the ancestral rulers Ariaramnes and Arsames.
Languages and writing systems:
– Old Achaemenid Iranian (cuneiform-alphabetic; the official imperial language)
– Babylonian (cuneiform-syllabic; to offer a testimony of historical continuity and legitimacy, following the Conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great, who presented himself as king of Babylon)
– Elamite (cuneiform-logo-syllabic; to portray the Persians in particular as the heirs of the ancient land of Anshan and Sushan that the Assyrians and the Babylonians named ‘Elam’ and the indigenous population called ‘Haltamti’ / The first Achaemenid to present himself as ‘king of Anshan’ is Cyrus the Great and the reference is found in his Cylinder unearthed in Babylon.)
and
– Egyptian Hieroglyphic (if the inscription or the monument was produced in Egypt, since the Achaemenids were also pharaohs of Egypt, starting with Kabujiya/Cambyses)
Imperial inscriptions are found in: Babylon (Cyrus Cylinder), Pasargad, Behistun, Hamadan, Ganj-e Nameh, Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rustam, Susa, Suez (Egypt), Gherla (Romania), Van (Turkey), and on various items
B. Persepolis Administrative Archives
This consists in an enormous documentation that has not yet been fully studied; it is not written in Old Achaemenid as one could expect but mainly in Elamite cuneiform. It consists of two groups, namely
– the Persepolis Fortification Archive, and
– the Persepolis Treasury Archive.
The Persepolis Fortification Archive was unearthed in the fortification area, i.e. the northeastern confines of the enormous platform of the Achaemenid capital Parsa (Persepolis), in the 1930s. It comprises of more than 30000 tablets (fragmentary or entire) that were written in the period 509-494 BCE (at the time of Darius I). The tablets were written in Susa and other parts of Fars and the territory of the ancient kingdom of Elam that vanished in the middle of the 7th c. (more than 130 years before these texts were written). Around 50 texts had Aramaic glosses. More than 2000 tablets have been published and translated. These texts are records of transactions, distribution of food, provisioning of workers, transportation of commodities, etc.; few tablets were written in other languages, namely Old Iranian (1), Babylonian (1), Phrygian (1) and Greek (1).
The Persepolis Treasury Archive was found in the northeastern room of the Treasury of Xerxes. It contains more than 750 tablets and fragments (in Elamite) and more than 100 have been published. They all date back in period 492-458 BCE. These tablets are either letters or memoranda dispatched by imperial officials to the head of the Treasury; they concern the payment of workmen, the issue of silver, and other administrative procedures. Only one tablet was written in Babylonian.
The entire documentation offers valuable information as regards the function of various imperial services, namely the couriers, the satraps, the imperial messengers, the imperial storehouse, etc. The archives shed light on the origin of the imperial administrators, as ca. 1900 personal names have been recorded: 10% were Elamites (who had apparently survived for long far from their country after the destruction of Susa by Assurbanipal (640 BCE), fewer were Babylonians, and the outright majority consisted of Iranians (Persians, Medes, Bactrians, Sakas, Arians, etc.).
C. Imperial Aramaic
The diffusion of the use of Aramaic started already in the Neo-Assyrian times and during the 7th c. BCE; the creation of the ‘Royal Road’, the systematization of the transportation, the improvement of communications, and the formation of the network of land-, sea- and desert routes that we now call ‘Silk-, Spice- and Perfume- Road’ during the Achaemenid times helped further expand the use of Aramaic. The linguistic assimilation of the Babylonians, the Jews and the Phoenicians with the Aramaeans only strengthened the diffusion of the Aramaic, which became the second international language (‘lingua franca’) in the History of the Mankind (after the Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian). Gradually, Aramaic became an official Achaemenid language after the Old Achaemenid Iranian.
Except the Aramaic texts attested in the Persepolis Administrative Archives, thousands of Aramaic texts of the Achaemenid times shed light onto the society, the economy, the administration, the military organization, the trade, the religions, the cults, the culture and the spirituality attested in various provinces of the Iranian Empire. At this point, only indicatively, I mention few significant groups of texts:
– the Elephantine papyri and ostraca (except Aramaic, they were written in Hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Coptic, Alexandrian Koine, and Latin) – 5th and 4th c. BCE,
– the Hermopolis Aramaic papyri,
– the Padua Aramaic papyri, and
– the Khalili Collection of Aramaic Documents from Bactria (48 texts written on leather, papyrus, stone or clay, dating from the period 353-324 BCE, and mainly from the reign of Artaxerxes III whereas the most recent dates from the reign of Alexander the Great).
Here I have to add that the widespread use of Imperial Aramaic and its use as a second official language for Achaemenid Iran brought an end to the use of the Elamite (in the middle of the 5th c.) and, after the end of the Achaemenid dynasty and the split of the state of Alexander the Great, contributed to the formation of two writing systems, namely Parthian and Pahlavi which were in use during the Arsacid and the Sassanid times. Imperial Aramaic helped establish many other writing systems, but this goes beyond the limits of the present seminar.
3- Problems of historiography continuity
There are no historical references to the Achaemenid dynasty made at the time of the Arsacids (Ashkanian: 250 BCE-224 CE) and the Sassanids 224-651 CE); this situation is due to many factors:
– the prevalence of another Iranian nation of probably Turanian origin, namely the Parthians and the Arsacid dynasty,
– the rise of the anti-Achaemenid, anti-Zoroastrian Magi who tried to impose Mithraism throughout Iran during the Arsacid times,
– the formation of an oral epic tradition and the establishment of a legendary historiography about the pre-Arsacid past during the Sassanid times, and
– the scarcity of written sources and the terrible destructions that occurred in Iran during the Late Antiquity, the Islamic era, and the Modern times (early Islamic conquests, divisions of the Abbasid times, Mongol invasions, Safavid-Ottoman wars, Western colonial looting, etc.).
This situation raised Western academic questions of Iranian identity, continuity, and historicity. But this attempt is futile. Iranian historiography of Islamic times shows that these questions were fully misplaced.
4- Iranian posterior historiography (Iranian historiography of Islamic times)
With Tabari (839-923) and his voluminous History of Prophets and Kings we realize that there were, in spite of the destructions caused because of the Islamic conquests, historical documents on which he was based to expand about the Sassanid dynasty; actually one out of the 40 volumes of the most recent translation of Tabari to English (published by the State University of New York Press from 1985 through 2007) is dedicated to the History of Sassanid Iran (vol. 5). And the previous volume (vol. 4) covers the History of Achaemenid and Arsacid Iran, Alexander the Great, Nabonid Babylonia, Assyria and Ancient Israel and Judah.
Other important Iranian historians of the Islamic times, like Abu’l-Fadl Bayhaqi (995-1077), Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318) who wrote the truly first World History, Alaeddin Aṭa Malik Juvaynī (1226-1283), and Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi (ca. 1370-1454), did not expand much on pre-Islamic periods as the focus of their writing was on contemporaneous developments.
However, the aforementioned historians and all the authors, who are classified in this category, represent only one dimension of Iranian historiography of Islamic times. A totally different approach and literature have been illustrated by Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings). Abu ‘l Qasem Ferdowsi (940-1025) was not the first to compose an epic in order to standardize in mythical terms and legendary concepts the pre-Islamic Iranian past; but he was the most successful and the most illustrious. That is why many other epic poets followed his example, notably the Azeri Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209) and the Turkic Indian Amir Khusraw (1253-1325).
Within the context of this poetical historiography, historical emperors of pre-Islamic Iran appear as legendary figures only to be then viewed as materialization of divine patterns. The origin of this transcendental historiography seems to be retraced in the Sassanid times, but all the major themes are clearly of Zoroastrian identity and can therefore be attributed to the Achaemenid world perception and world conceptualization.
It is essential at this point to state that, until the imposition of modern Western colonial academic and educational standards in Iran, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and the corpus of Iranian legendary historiography was the backbone of the Iranian cultural, intellectual and educational identity.
It is a matter of academic debate whether an original text named Khwaday-Namag, written during the Sassanid times, and now lost, is at the very origin of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography. The 19th c. German Orientalist Theodor Nöldeke is credited with this theory that has not yet been proved.
All the same, the spiritual standards of this approach are detected in the Achaemenid times.
5- Foreign historiography
Ancient Greek (in reality, Ionian and Attic), Ancient Hebrew and Latin sources of Achaemenid History exist, but first they are external, second they appear to be posterior in their largest part, and third they often bear witness to astounding inaccuracies, fables, untrustworthy data, misplaced focus, excessive verbosity without real substance, and -above all- an enormous and irreconcilable misunderstanding of the Iranian Achaemenid reality, values, world view, mindset, and behavior.
The Ancient Hebrew sources shed light on issues that were apparently critical to the tiny and unimportant, Jewish minority of the Achaemenid Empire; however, these Biblical narratives concern facts that were absolutely insignificant to the imperial authorities of Parsa. One critical issue is concealed by modern scholars though; although all the nations of the Empire were regularly mentioned in the Achaemenid inscriptions and depicted on bas reliefs, the Jews were not. This undeniable fact irrevocably conditions the supposed ‘importance’ of Biblical texts like Ezra, Esther, Nehemiah, etc. All the same, these foreign historical sources are important for the Jews.
The Ionian and Attic accounts of events that were composed by the Carian renegade Herodotus, the Dorian Ctesias, and the Athenian Xenophon present an even more serious problem. They happened to be for many centuries (16th – 19th c.) the bulk of the historical documentation that Western European academics had access to as regards Achaemenid Iran. This situation produced grave biases among Western academics, because they took all these sources at face value since they had no access to original documentation. The grave trouble persisted even after the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing and the archaeological excavations that brought to daylight original Iranian imperial documentation.
Only recently, at the end of the 20th c., leading Iranologists like Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg started criticizing the absolutely delusional History of Achaemenid Iran that modern Western scholars were producing without even understanding it by foolishly accepting Ancient Ionian myths, lies and propaganda against the Iranian Empire at face value. This grave problem had also two other parameters:
– first, there was an enormous gap of civilization and a tremendous cultural difference between the Iranian imperial world view, the spiritual valorization of the human being, and the Zoroastrian monotheism from one side and the chaotic, disorderly and profane elements of the western periphery of the Empire. The so-called Greek tribes in Western Anatolia and in the South Balkans were not only multi-divided and plunged in permanent conflict; they were also extremely verbose on common issues, they desecrated the divine world with their nonsensical myths and puerile narratives, and they defiled human spirituality with their love stories about their pseudo-gods. But, very arbitrarily and quite disastrously, the so-called Ancient Greek civilization had been erroneously taken as ‘classics’ by modern Europeans at a time they had no access to Ancient Oriental sources.
– second, the vertical differentiation between Imperial Iran as the blessed land of divine mission and the disunited and peripheral lands of conflict, discord and strife that were inhabited by the Greek tribes was reflected on the respective, impressively different types of historiography; to the Iranians, few words written by anonymous scribes were enough to describe the groundbreaking deeds of divinely appointed rulers. But for the Greeks, the useless rumors, the capricious hearsay, the intentional lie, the nefarious expression of their complex of inferiority, the vicious slander, and the deliberate ignominy ‘had’ to be recorded and written down.
The fact that Herodotus’ and Xenophon’s long narratives have long been taken as the basic source of information about Achaemenid Iran demonstrates how disoriented and misplaced modern Western scholarship is. But by preferring to rely mainly on the Ancient Greek lengthy and false narratives, and not on the succinct, true and chaste Old Achaemenid Iranian inscriptions, they totally misrepresent Ancient Iranian History, preposterously extrapolating later and corrupt standards to earlier and superior civilizations.
And whereas Ancient Roman authors, who wrote in Latin (Pliny the Elder, Seneca the Younger, etc.), and Jewish or Christian historians, who wrote in Alexandrine Koine, like Flavius Josephus and Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima, reproduced the style of lengthy narratives that turns History to mere gossip, the great Babylonian scholar Berossus was very reluctant to add personal comments to his original sources or to allow subjective considerations and thoughts to contaminate his text.
In any case, the vast issue of the multilayered damages caused by the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historiography to modern Western academics’ perception and interpretation of Achaemenid Iran is a topic that deserves an entirely independent seminar.
————–
To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1Α
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:
Le célèbre académicien français Jean Baptiste Duroselle a été chargé par la Commission de l’Union européenne (Communautés européennes à l’époque) et Jacques Delors personnellement d’écrire une Histoire européenne de l’Europe. Ce livre justifierait la création de l’Union européenne dans la 2e moitié du 20e s. comme la couronne de tous les efforts antérieurs pour établir un État à travers le continent. Le livre a été écrit en français (L’Europe : histoire de ses peuples, Paris, Perrin, 1990, 708 p.) et il était destiné à devenir (comme il est en effet devenu) le manuel de base d’histoire européenne pour l’enseignement secondaire de tous. États membres de l’UE. Pour cette raison, de nombreuses traductions ont été produites au niveau local, et le livre est ainsi devenu la pierre angulaire de l’identité européenne ; en ce qui concerne les pays qui n’étaient pas membres en 1990 mais le sont devenus plus tard, le livre a été traduit dans la langue officielle (ou les langues officielles) de chaque pays après son adhésion.
Comme on pouvait s’y attendre, l’État grec chauvin, raciste et pseudo-européen a fait exception.
Des Slaves pris pour des Grecs
Produite par les puissances coloniales de la France et de l’Angleterre en tant que pseudo-État et outil des stratagèmes d’Europe occidentale contre l’Empire ottoman, la « Grèce » est devenue pour la première fois dans l’histoire mondiale le nom d’un État, à la suite des traités d’Edirne / Andrinople, en 1829 et le Protocole de Londres en 1830. Dans le passé, ‘grec’ (‘hellène’) était un terme des plus péjoratifs pendant plus de 1100 ans de règne chrétien romain et romain oriental (330-1453), alors que ‘Grèce’ était simplement un terme géographique utilisé pour désigner cette province marginale et autrement inutile.
Cette province fut le dernier réceptacle du cataclysmique afflux slave durant le VIe s. de notre ère. Cette invasion massive a mis un terme irrévocable à l’existence des personnes grécophones dans les Balkans du Sud. L’empereur romain d’Orient Constantin Porphyrogenitus a écrit à ce sujet, mais les pseudo-historiens de l’État grec raciste d’aujourd’hui reçoivent leurs salaires de faux professeurs afin de discréditer cet empereur hautement intellectuel!
Confession du néant grec ancien
Même avant la christianisation de l’Empire romain, le célèbre édit de Caracalla (Constitutio Antoniniana; 212 CE) indiquait clairement qu’il n’y avait pas de «Grecs» sauf en tant que particularité linguistique au sein de l’Empire romain; en acceptant sans condition de devenir citoyens de l’Empire romain, tous les peuples de langue grecque des Balkans (au sud de la Macédoine), d’Anatolie (Asie Mineure) et d’ailleurs ont admis qu’il n’y avait pas d’identité grecque intellectuelle, idéologique, impériale ou politique, socio-comportementale et étatique. Avant les invasions romaines et l’unification ultérieure de toutes les terres autour de la Méditerranée, la « Grèce » était simplement un terme géographique désignant les terres au sud de la Macédoine et de l’Illyrie ; mais il n’y avait pas d’unité ethnique, tribale, linguistique, intellectuelle, spirituelle, religieuse et encore moins gouvernementale. C’est pourquoi ils s’entretuaient comme des mouches ; et leurs historiographes de bas niveau, qui n’ont jamais atteint le niveau d’initiation spirituel et impérial requis pour devenir des scribes impériaux appropriés, impersonnels et objectifs, ont écrit leurs absurdités (comme Thucydide) en décrivant inutilement les guerres civiles – qui ont encore proliféré la haine, la rancœur, les conflits, l’inimitié et des guerres parmi ces misérables populations.
La capitale d’Alexandre était Babylone, pas Pella, pas Athènes !
Seuls deux rois étrangers, Philippe II de Macédoine et son fils et successeur Alexandre, ont envahi et imposé un ordre temporaire à ces éléments chaotiques. Mais Alexandre méprisait tout ce qui était grec, et c’est pourquoi il choisit Babylone comme capitale et la princesse sogdienne Roxanne comme épouse, après s’être substitué à Darius III, devenant ainsi Shah de l’Empire iranien.
Flatterie coloniale et promesses impériales aux vagabonds des Balkans du Sud
Or, la situation était encore pire dans les confins des Balkans du Sud en 1821-1828, car même pas une goutte de sang de la Grèce antique ne pouvait être trouvée dans les veines des populations locales d’origine slave, albanaise, turque, valaque et autre ; ils parlaient de nombreuses langues différentes et le seul moyen de communication entre eux était le turc ottoman. A ces populations malchanceuses, les gangsters coloniaux criminels, après s’être fait passer pour des «Philhellènes» et raconté des absurdités bon marché pour des idiots, ont vendu l’illusion d’un passé soi-disant glorieux dont cette population misérable serait la progéniture hypothétique.
Fausse langue grecque moderne pour soutenir le racisme pseudo-grec
Croyant au pseudo-mythe vicieusement construit de l’hellénisme, ces populations ont été forcées d’apprendre un idiome préfabriqué (par Adamantios Korais qui était basé en France), qui a été imposé dans les écoles de manière dictatoriale et génocidaire. Ainsi elles ont été dupées pendant deux siècles consécutifs.
On leur racontait sans cesse des mensonges paranoïaques sur la soi-disant splendeur des Grecs antiques fictifs qui « avaient civilisé le monde ». Cela a transformé la pseudo-nation exécrablement misérable et ethniquement bâtarde en fanfarons exorbitants et arrogants dont la vie dépend de mépriser sans cesse et hystériquement toutes les autres nations, voisines ou non (notamment les Macédoniens, les Bulgares, les Albanais, les Turcs et les Iraniens) en tant que personnes culturellement ‘inférieures’ – dont les ancêtres ont été (hypothétiquement encore) ‘civilisés’ par les ancêtres des Grecs d’aujourd’hui !!!
La Grèce d’aujourd’hui est bien l’État raciste par excellence.
Puis, Jean Baptiste Duroselle est arrivé!
Avec son superbe livre, Duroselle a quasi-automatiquement ridiculisé tous les clowns des fausses-universités grecques (encore aujourd’hui, il est interdit de créer une université privée dans la Grèce pseudo-démocratique et crypto-totalitaire) où travaillent (ou performent si vous voulez) des historiens ignorants, des archéologues idiots, des politologues insensés, des hellénistes grotesques et des byzantinologues (sic !) absolument charlatanesques – non pas pour mener des recherches vraies et authentiques mais pour soutenir servilement le dogme criminel et raciste de l’hellénisme, qui est la pire forme de nazisme qui ait jamais existé.
La colère de la foule pseudo-grecque chauvine contre Duroselle
Puis, en 1990, en raison de la demande de l’UE pour une traduction grecque du livre de Duroselle, tous les égouts mentaux de la foule grecque inculte, ignorante et décrépite ont inondé les médias de masse en répandant des insultes sans précédent contre Duroselle, l’UE, l’Europe, les universités européennes et… le reste du monde! Les professeurs d’universités et les académiciens grecs – intellectuellement criminels, intellectuellement malodorants et mentalement pathétiques – ont gardé le silence ou se sont rangés du côté de la foule pour devenir plus populaires en tant que soi-disant défenseurs des «droits» de la nation «grecque». Cette situation témoigne d’une réalité bien cachée ; les faux Grecs des deux derniers siècles, qui sont en réalité une population défigurée privée de sa véritable identité orthodoxe romaine orientale (et non «byzantine»), ne se sont jamais sentis comme une nation «européenne». Leur immense complexe psychologique d’infériorité s’exprime donc chaque fois qu’un événement réel souligne qu’ils sont un pseudo-pays de seconde classe, sans éducation, sans intégrité, sans discipline, sans règle, sans morale et sans raison d’existence.
Les frontières sud-est de l’Europe sont celles de l’Albanie, de la Macédoine et de la Bulgarie.
Je considère comme la réalisation la plus remarquable de ma vie et comme l’honneur le plus distinct que j’ai défendu personnellement Jean Baptiste Duroselle, son livre et son approche académique et intellectuelle contre tous ces coquins (la foule, l’élite et l’état nazis de Grèce), qui ont trouvé mon plaidoyer de 2800 mots pour Le livre de Jean Baptiste Duroselle comme une bonne raison de m’insulter aussi et de me forcer à ne plus renter en Grèce.
L’hystérie anti-Duroselle en Grèce et la fin prochaine de la Grèce
Le plaidoyer a été publié dans l’hebdomadaire grec Oikonomikos Tahydromos le 7 février 1991, bien qu’il ait été rédigé et envoyé le 30 août 1990. Cela a généré plus de 30 réponses absurdes, insultantes et ridicules de la part d’universitaires partiaux (qui ont écrit contre moi uniquement pour « justifier » les postes qu’ils occupaient sans être correctement qualifiés – ce qui est le cas très courant dans le pseudo-État sans mérite « la Grèce » ) ou de la part d’ une foule inculte et des gens qui ont pris la défense de la vérité historique par moi comme une insulte personnelle pour eux! Telle est leur dépravation qu’ils ne peuvent pas se rendre compte que la seule chose qu’ils obtiendront finalement de cette manière est l’anéantissement nucléaire total de la Grèce.
The famous French academician Jean Baptiste Duroselle was commissioned by the Commission of the European Union (European Communities at the time) and Jacques Delors personally to author a European History of Europe, which would justify the establishment of the European Union in the 2nd half of the 20th c. as the crown of all earlier efforts to establish one state across the continent. The book was written in French (L’Europe: histoire de ses peuples, Paris, Perrin, 1990, 708 p.) and it was geared to become (as it really did) the basic textbook of European History for the secondary education of all EU member states. For this reason, numerous translations were produced at the local level, and the book became in this manner the cornerstone of the European identity; as regards countries that were not member-states in 1990 but became later, the book was translated to the official language(s) of each country after its adhesion.
As one could anticipate, the chauvinist, racist, and bogus-European state of Greece made the exception.
Slavs taken for Greeks
Being produced by the colonial powers of France and England as a pseudo-state-tool for Western European schemes against the Ottoman Empire, ‘Greece’ became for the first time in World History the name of a state, following the treaties of Edirne / Adrianople in 1829 and the London Protocol in 1830. In the past, ‘Greek’ (‘Hellene’) was a most pejorative term for more than 1100 years of Christian Roman and Eastern Roman rule (330-1453), whereas ‘Greece’ was used as a merely geographical term for this marginal and otherwise useless province which was the final receptacle of the 6th c. CE cataclysmic Slavic influx that put an irrevocable end to the existence of the Greek-speaking people in South Balkans. Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus wrote about this fact, but the pseudo-historians of today’s racist Greek state get their salaries as fake professors in order to discredit this highly intellectual emperor!
Confession of the Ancient Greek Nothingness
Even before the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the famous Edict of Caracalla (Constitutio Antoniniana; 212 CE) made it clear that there were no ‘Greeks’ except as a linguistic particularity within the Roman Empire; by unconditionally accepting to become citizens of the Roman Empire, all the Greek speaking people in the Balkans (south of Macedonia), in Anatolia (Asia Minor), and elsewhere admitted that there was no Greek intellectual, ideological, imperial or political, socio-behavioral and state identity. Before the Roman invasion and the subsequent unification of all lands around the Mediterranean, ‘Greece’ was simply a geographical term denoting lands south of Macedonia and Illyria; but there was no ethnic, tribal, linguistic, intellectual, spiritual, religious -let alone governmental- unity. That is why they were killing one another like flies; and their low level historiographers, who never attained the due spiritual and imperial level initiation to become proper, impersonal and objective, imperial scribes, wrote their nonsense (like Thucydides) uselessly expanding on civil wars – which further proliferated hatred, rancor, strife, enmity and wars among those wretched populations.
Alexander’s Capital was Babylon, not Pella, not Athens!
Only two foreign kings, Philip II of Macedon and his son and successor Alexander, invaded and imposed temporary order on those chaotic elements. But Alexander despised all things Greek, and that’s why he chose Babylon as capital and the Sogdian princess Roxanne as wife, after he substituted himself to Darius III, thus becoming the Shah of the Iranian Empire.
Colonial flattery and imperial promises to South Balkan vagabonds
Now, the situation was even worse in the South Balkan confines in 1821-1828, because not even a droplet of Ancient Greek blood could be found in the veins of the local populations of Slavic, Albanian, Turkish, Vlachic, and other origin; they were speaking numerous different languages and the only means of communication among them was Ottoman Turkish. To those misfortunate populations the criminal colonial gangsters, after posturing as ‘Philhellenes’ and narrating cheap flimflam for idiots, sold the fallacy of a supposedly glorious past of which that wretched populace would be the hypothetical offspring.
Fake Modern Greek language to support Pseudo-Greek Racism
Believing the viciously constructed pseudo-myth of Hellenism, those populations were forced to learn a prefabricated (by the France-based Adamantios Korais) idiom (which was imposed in the schools in a dictatorial and genocidal manner) and were fooled for two consecutive centuries, being incessantly told paranoid lies about the so-called splendor of the fictional Ancient Greeks who ‘had civilized the world’. This turned the execrably miserable and ethnically bastard pseudo-nation to exorbitantly arrogant braggarts whose lives depend on ceaselessly and hysterically deprecating all the other, neighboring or not, nations (notably the Macedonians, the Bulgarians, the Albanians, the Turks, and the Iranians) as culturally ‘lower’ people – whose ancestors were (hypothetically again) ‘civilized’ by the ancestors of today’s Greeks!!!
Today’s Greece is indeed the racist state par excellence.
Then, Jean Baptiste Duroselle came!
With his superb book, Duroselle quasi-automatically ridiculed all the clowns of the Greek bogus-universities (still today, it is prohibited to establish a private university in pseudo-democratic, crypto-totalitarian Greece) whereby ignorant historians, idiotic archaeologists, nonsensical political scientists, clownish Hellenists, and absolutely charlatanesque Byzantinologists (sic!) work (or perform if you like) – not to carry out true, genuine research but to subserviently support the criminal, racist dogma of Hellenism, which is the worst form of Nazism that has ever existed.
The chauvinist pseudo-Greek mob’s anger against Duroselle
Then, in 1990, due to the EU demand for a Greek translation of Duroselle’s book, all the mental sewerage of the uneducated, ignorant and decrepit Greek mob flooded the mass media spreading unprecedented insults against Duroselle, EU, Europe, European universities and … the rest of the world! The intellectually felonious, academically malodorous, and mentally pathetic professors of universities and academicians of Greece either kept silent or sided with the mob to become more popular as supposedly defending the ‘rights’ of the ‘Greek’ nation. This situation testifies to a well-concealed reality; the fake Greeks of the last two centuries, who are in reality a defaced populace deprived of their true Eastern Roman (not ‘Byzantine’) Orthodox identity, never felt as a ‘European’ nation. Their immense psychological complex of inferiority is therefore expressed every time a real event underscores that they are a second class, uneducated pseudo-country with no integrity, no discipline, no rule, no morals, and reason of existence.
The southeastern borders of Europe are those of Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria.
I consider as my life’s most outstanding achievement and most distinct honor that I defended Jean Baptiste Duroselle personally and his book and academic-intellectual approach against all those rascals (the mob and the Nazi elite and state of Greece), who found my 2800-word Plea for Jean Baptiste Duroselle’s book as a good reason to insult me as well and to force me out.
The anti-Duroselle hysteria in Greece and the forthcoming end of Greece
The Plea was published in the Greek weekly Oikonomikos Tahydromos on the 7th February 1991, although it was written and sent on 30th August 1990. It generated more than 30 nonsensical, insulting and ridiculous responses from either biased academics (who wrote against me only to ‘justify’ the positions that they held without being properly qualified – which is the very common case in the meritless pseudo-state ‘Greece’) or uneducated mob that mistook the defense of the historical truth by me as personally insulting for them! Such is their depravity that they cannot realize that the only thing that they will finally achieve in this manner is the total nuclear annihilation of Greece.
From my correspondence with an African American willing to undertake studies in Egyptology in order to contribute to the his community’s need of cultural and spiritual betterment.
Edfu Temple of Horus
============= FIRSTLETTER ============
Пятница, 3 ноября 2017, 20:43 +02:00 от K P <xxxx@xxx.edu>:
Dr. Megalommatis,
As an African American, I would like to focus on the culture of Ancient Kemet. I want to use aspects of Ancient Kemet culture in a modern sense to uplift the self-esteem and perspectives of my community. I believe history repeats itself and we can learn from it to modify the present to shape the future for the better. African American community in the USA is in dire need of an economic, cultural, spiritual, and worldview revolution that is African centered. I know I must learn the mdu ntr to be able to interpret the culture more accurately as well. Thank you again, Dr. Megalommatis.
Best,
K P
(titles)
============ FIRST RESPONSE =============
Dear Sir
Thank you for your interest and letter!
You are right in using the real name of Ancient Egypt (Kemet), and even more so in searching in one of the world’s two oldest civilizations (the other being Sumer, Akkad, Assyria & Babylonia in Mesopotamia) the spiritual – moral – cultural – societal elements that could save today’s fallen world from final annihilation.
I have always been convinced that what one does matters not; what truly matters is the totality of the conditions and the circumstances under which one does what he does.
Your statement about history repeating itself and about the necessity to learn from it – and for the purpose that you state – can be co-signed by practically speaking everyone – even those who would wish to kill you!
Why do then so opposite elements agree on this?
1. Real History and Fake History made of Personal Concepts, Principles, Ideas, Theories, Thoughts, Feelings and Desires onto History
Because when trying to learn from History, most of the people, who try to do so, do not really do so, because they project onto History their prefab concepts, principles, ideas, theories, thoughts, feelings and desires. Then, they don’t learn History itself, but the version of History that pleases them and which drives them of course to failure – the failure that you see around you in the US and worldwide.
To truly learn History, one must be ready to drastically and resolutely reject what he likes, what he knows, what he loves, what he believes, and what he desires.
The first and worst obstacle in the path of one person willing to truly learn the real History (and not the silly version that pleases him and thus destroys him) is today’s overwhelming materialism.
Do not think that this evil, villainous and criminal materialism is limited only among self-declared materialists, atheists, communists and consumerists! It is omnipresent and prevalent also among all the people who say they are religious, whatever their religion may be.
Of course, as you already know, there has never been one single religion in the world that tolerated / accepted materialism of any form. How now have the followers of all religions become distorted and compact materialists?
That’s simple: over the span of the last 500 years, all the religions (with the exception of those of few – lucky – remote societies that remained untouched from technology and political developments, like some Oromos of Eastern Africa and few others) underwent the final stage of their corruption and they progressively became totally fake, dead systems that their founders and their earlier believers, before 500 or 1000 or 2000 years, would vehemently reject, if they came back to life today.
Yes, it is very correct; nothing can be expected from all the so-called religions of today, except their official Act of Death Certificate.
This will be precisely an evident demonstration of Spirituality, which has always been the focal part of all religions, and …. of which today’s fake religions are totally, irrevocably, and lamentably deprived.
Yes, medu netsher (both, the writing and the sound of the Ancient Egyptian language) will greatly help you access original sources. You must then study them carefully and systematically.
But ……….
There is no guarantee that you will understand their real meaning, if you – like most of the Egyptologists of the last two centuries – project onto them your belief, your Weltanschauung, your background, and your thoughts, feelings and desires. You, in parallel with your studies, must clean yourself from all this stuff.
Contrarily to opposite theories and pathetic assumptions, there was none else but the Ancient Egyptians who before more than 4500 years built the great pyramid. It was a definitely easy task.
How?
They did not carry the burden of thoughts, emotions and desires that makes all of us collapse now and be heavier and therefore weaker and unfit for that simple task. Edward Leedskalnin proved this already with his great work; why don’t you visit his masterpiece which is open to the public, since you live in the US?
Only compact, villainous and Satanic materialism distorts the minds of the people and makes them unable to realize that the Man that God (or Gods – there is no difference; it’s the same!) created was not the fallen trash of today, but greatly capacitated in ways so miraculous that no one today would believe. That’s why it was easy for the Ancient Egyptians before 4500 years – despite the(ir) original fall / sin and expulsion from the Paradise – to perform the tasks needed for the erection of a monument and for many other today incredible tasks.
But I am digressing.
You say that the African American community in the USA is in dire need of a multifaceted revolution ….. that is ‘African centered’.
3. Identity and Integrity
I fully understand your need and your drive for identity and integrity; I respect it.
But do you really believe that the present continents existed before the Flood, which took place after the erection of the great pyramids?
Did the Ancient Egyptians call their land a ‘part of Africa’?
Do you really believe that there were ‘black skin’ and ‘white skin’ and ‘red skin’ and ‘yellow skin’ before the Flood?
We are all the children of the same father.
And are only African Americans those who are today in “dire need” of a multifaceted ‘revolution’ that I should rather call ‘alternation’ and ‘return of the Spirituality’?
All men are indeed in dire spiritual need – worldwide.
And is it the humans or the Spiritual Realm that arranges who leads and who follows this – much needed for all – alternation?
That’s why you must not view your effort as limited only within the circle of your community.
Perhaps your community will have to lead the world.
It is then a universal effort.
This (: the decision about who leads and who follows) is not something that humans can arrange; it is already difficult for us to comprehend the will of the Divine.
I am willing to discuss with you these issues in the depth and the width that you may wish.
……………………………………………
4. Being & Becoming / Being & Non-being
Who knows? We may have met in the distant past, if it truly exists! I say so, because for many (and for the Ancient Egyptians) there is no time at all. Everything is an eternal recapitulation under different forms.
That’s why Being and Becoming were for the venerable Kemet people the two axes of the Existence always in indissoluble unity and in absolute independence.
And out of the wisdom of the Five Elements, they realized that Being and Non-being (or Nothingness) were the two axes of the Creation.
Do you know the Brethren of Purity? 300 years after the Prophet Muhammad they lived in Basrah (South Iraq) and they reinstated the reality that Being is merely an emanation of forms – exactly like the Ancient Egyptians knew 3400-3600 years before the times of those Muslims. Did these Brethren live in Asia, in Africa? Were they Black, White, Red, Yellow?
Where to find the best explanation of the spiritual – material process of the emanation of forms?
Only modern criminal gangsters, impersonating the ‘Egyptologists’, dared malignantly and malefically ‘translate’ the Holy Texts rw nw prt m hrw (The Book of Coming Forth into Light) as ‘book of the dead’.
This happened because most probably those ‘Egyptologists’ were already dead (while they appeared as alive) and wanted the entire mankind to be dead.
That’s why Jesus was right saying ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God’.
5. The Kingdom of Heaven: Personal Transformation into Ethereal Body
Even this sentence of Jesus was translated erroneously, because the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ as term is conveniently vague and unclear.
In Greek, Βασιλεία των Ουρανών (Vasilia ton Uranon) means ‘the kingdom of the skies’, but in reality it means ‘the Kingdom of Ether’ or ‘the Prevalence of Ether’, i.e. ‘the ability (of one human) to act (or prevail) at the ethereal level’. This involves a higher spiritual proceeding (or exercise, if you want) in which the human manages to achieve the full elimination of the other four elements (Soft Waters, Air, Earth, and Salted Waters) at the very material level of his own body.
This proceeding is tantamount to absolute personal control of one’s own Ether and subsequently to complete transformation of one’s body (which is made of five elements) into a material body made of purely Ether. This is achieved through abstinence, imagination, fasting, prayer, and meditation, i.e. faith!
Best,
Shamsaddin
============== SECOND LETTER ==============
Понедельник, 6 ноября 2017, 6:07 +02:00 от K P <xxxx@xxx.edu>:
Dr. Megalommatis,
Thank you, for you in-depth response. You have much knowledge and wisdom. I am willing and open minded person on a journey to seek truth and knowledge. I would be honored to learn from you.
………………………………………………
I believe in paying respect to Nature and the honorable Ancestresses and Ancestors who sacrificed so much for future generations.
………………………………………………
Kemet is my passion and something I have been studying for the last decade on my own. I really want to dedicated my life to study the culture and history of Kemet.
Thank you again for your willingness to even hear me out and take time to respond to me.
Best,
K P
(titles)
============= SECOND RESPONSE ========
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your response ….. !
I have been in the States several times back in the 60s and the 70s (with my parents) and in the 80s. ……………
I know that the first foreign language that Americans have the tendency to learn is Spanish, and this is normal due to the vicinity of the Hispanophone world.
6. Important languages for Egyptological Bibliography
However, when it comes to Orientalism, Egyptology and African Studies, Spanish is of lesser importance, because only recently Spanish specialists delved into the different branches of Humanities that focus on Asia and Africa.
More particularly about Egyptology, the main languages that one must learn in order to have access to the enormous modern bibliography are: French, German, English, Italian and Russian. Even before 1850, there were chairs of Egyptology across today’s Italy (which was not one country at the time), but a Spanish Egyptologist is something that comes with the 2nd half of the 20th c.
You can’t therefore compare Italy to Spain when it comes to Egyptology; the latter is an academic dwarf, and the former a giant. And I don’t even mention the still colonized countries south of the US. Not one of them was allowed to develop Orientalist departments. The worst case of all is the fake country Brazil whereby archaeological excavations have been prohibited by law for the entire coastal zone and for a 50 km distance. You may want to ask why; the answer is simple. Numerous archaeological teams would excavate more Ancient Phoenician, Carthaginian and Egyptian antiquities than those unearthed in today’s Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Egypt. Hundreds of temples! Thousands of inscriptions! As a matter of fact, History as ‘officially’ taught is a well-orchestrated, total fallacy.
I would say that for Egyptology, the three languages, namely French, German and English, are the minimum.
Some other European countries do indeed offer departments of Egyptology in their universities, so Dutch, Danish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Swedish and Finnish can also help. Of all the other countries of the world, only Japan, Israel, Egypt and Sudan have specialized departments of Egyptology, so Japanese, Modern Hebrew and Modern Arabic can be useful too though to lesser extent.
I believe that the first thing you have to do is to find where close to your place you can find a university with a dept. of Egyptology or Ancient Near East.
Would it be possible for you to pursue two curricula at the same time?
…………………………………………………..
From now on, you can also set your own targets and start reading about Ancient Egypt. In this regard, I could come up with suggestions, if you let me know your very specific interests in the matter.
But I have to warn you from now!!!!
7. Hindrances in the Path of Studying the Oriental Past
Reading is one thing and truly learning is a totally different thing.
The world is filled with people who read much during their entire lives and still learned nothing or almost nothing; this is valid indeed for professional Egyptologists who teach in different universities across the Earth.
In this regard, you will surely face (like everybody else) two major obstacles:
First, if you compare today’s scholars to those of the 19th c. – early 20th c. academics, you will realize that there are almost no pioneers anymore. There are few real explorers; most of today’s specialists lose their main topic’s overview because of their over-specialization. They think that ‘academic achievement’ must be sought only in the specific, far-fetched detail that was not noticed before and not in 1) a fresh interpretation of the material record or 2) a new standpoint / look over their topic. Today’s academics became conventional administrators and the disciplines of Humanities look rather like divisions of a ministry whereby no particular initiative is tolerated if coming from the bottom or the outside, and not from the top. In other words, today’s university staffers look like Chinese Mandarins who care only for the preservation of an enormous bureaucracy. Quite unfortunately, wherever bureaucracy starts, Humanities go extinct, civilization collapses, and societies disintegrate.
Second, and even worse, the 19th c. Western European search for Ancient Egypt and the subsequent birth of Egyptology were flawed since Day 1. The same happened to every other Orientalist discipline. Egyptology, as a matter of fact, is an Orientalist branch, like Assyriology, Hittitology, Iranology, Hindology, Sinology, etc. Quite unfortunately, even before sailing to Somalia, India, Egypt and other parts of the Orient (Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe), Western Europeans – academia, explorers, diplomats, agents and adventurers – had a very wrong, preconceived idea (and every preconceived idea is wrong) about the Orient.
8. The Divide ‘Orient vs. Occident’ is a Fake!
What is even worse is that they also viewed the entire world as a divide between the Occident and the Orient (West and East). which is preposterous and cannot be accepted as world understanding among those days’ Western Europeans, because they had not yet traveled, explored and studied the world – so they were expected not to form any idea in advance.
Even worse, those who traveled and explored parts of the Orient proved only to be the victims of their own preconceived ideas and schemes, of their own sources {Ancient Greeks and Romans understood the Orient only too little too late – because when Greece and Rome were formed as civilizations, the Orient (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Canaan) had already and for much time entered into a long phase of decadence}, and of the image of Orient they had shaped when back home. To add perjury to infamy, the early Orientalists projected their vision of the Orient onto the real, non-imaginative Orient that they visited and which – too bad for them and for us – they failed to even see!
The above mentioned grave trouble continued from generation to generation of scholars, and the system was reproduced down to our days. Few were perspicacious enough to spot the terrible problem and describe it to the extent that they realized. Edward Said was one of the these few scholars. I don’t know to what extent you are familiar with this scholar and intellectual, and whether you read his illustrious book ‘Orientalism’. This is a must read. It is an essential tool in understanding how critically you must stand toward modern egyptological publications.
Bear in mind that this inherent Western European effort to see the Orient as degraded (and therefore posterior and lower than the Occident) was later transferred to America – a country that gradually moved away from its clearly and overtly anti-colonial foundations only to become a nasty replica of Western European colonialism at all levels. It goes without saying that the aforementioned academic / intellectual standpoint (that can be categorized as ‘racist’ even when it does not concern one specific races but the entire Non-Western World) fully corresponded to the imperial plans of the Western European imperialist countries against the Oriental World which they misrepresented viciously even at the very simple level of … country names.
9. Orientalism – An Invention to Destroy the Oriental States
A friend reminded me yesterday of the fact that the Americans used to call the USSR (Soviet Union) …. Russia!
That was true, but the origin of the distortion is not American; on the contrary, it is French and English; for centuries, the criminal Western European colonial elites used to call
– the Ottoman Empire (i.e. the Islamic Caliphate) ……. Turkey
– the Safavid / Qajar Empire of Iran ………………………. Persia
– the Empire of the Great Mongols ……………………….. India
So, while studying Ancient Egypt, you have to predispose yourself in a way to undergo an initiation – that of your own.
While studying, you will have to reject many times what you earlier learned in order to adjust your mind to clearer or plainer truth.
10. Access to Truth is possible only through Initiation
The Truth all and at once is for God alone. Forget it! Even if one person knows it, he cannot transfer the knowledge to you, because humans are not computers whereby 1000 data can be transferred from one to another. The depth, the width, the height, the color, the tone and the feeling of the understanding differ from person to person, because there is no fabrication or machination or evolution of humans.
In this manner, even if someone had told you the totality of the Truth, this would have been totally useless to you, because you would not have been able to understand it beyond the simple and low level of a mere narrative.
Acquisition of real knowledge, access to truth, and aspiration wisdom are purely personal processes, involving initiation and many other methods and approaches, academic and spiritual.
I published several articles, pinpointing the similarities between the two systems and explaining the survival of Ancient Egyptian beliefs and rituals down to our days.
There is also another point that I have to highlight to you.
11. Studying History is tantamount to Exploring the Fall of the Man
At any moment of your search and path, you must keep this very clear in your mind! The study of Ancient Egypt (and the study of Ancient Orient) is the study of a Fall – the Fall of the Man.
The Fall was never due to anything else except the fight between the Good and Evil at all levels. All Ancient Egyptian Myths are not ‘myths’ (as the word means today) but the Foremost Narrative of the Supreme Truth, i.e. what the highest among the humans contemplated out of the Spiritual World. And this supreme truth is the diachronic battle between the Good and Evil, in all its details that concern their and our past, their and our present, and their and our future, which for the Ancient Egyptian High Priests and Hierophants was just an infinitesimal second because time does not exist in itself.
You will therefore face always the same motive:
In every later period, in every more recent epoch, the top of the wise people and the spiritual leaders, who sided with God and opposed Evil, knew that they were ‘lower’ that they had fallen (comparatively with the earlier stage) and that, because of this, they had lost in terms of clarity and of understanding of the Myth.
12. Ancient Oriental Myth:the Foremost Narrative of the Supreme Truth
This means that the same text of an Ancient Egyptian Myth was understood differently in moments like 2600 BCE, 1450 BCE, 650 BCE and 100 CE. And in every later period, ‘differently’ means ‘lower’.
We even find many attempts to reconstruct the myth, to recapture the earlier meaning (which was lost), and to return to a higher understanding.
The effort was spread among other people who moved to and settled in Egypt: Phoenicians, Kushites from the Sudan, Aramaeans, Berbers, Palestinians, Hebrews, Carians, Lydians, Greeks and Romans.
This effort was overwhelming among the Gnostic systems, the Gnosticisms of the Late Antiquity. Many different schools were then formed and picked up different Ancient Egyptian myths and tried to reconstruct them – even out of the structure and the context of the then decayed Egyptian religion, which although in fall and decomposition influenced Romans, Illyrians, Dacians, Greeks, Celts and many European nations within and out of the Roman Empire.
The above is key to our effort of reconstruction.
These topics are difficult, and many modern schools of mystics think that what they do now was also done among Gnostics in Ancient Egypt! Well, things did not happen that way, but never mind! Modern schools of mystics fail to understand that the spiritual exercises, methods and contemplations of the Late Antiquity Gnostics were already a failed effort to understand and reconstruct Ancient Egyptian and Babylonian Mysticism, Spirituality and Transcendental Wisdom.
Modern schools of mystics fail to realize that the fundamentals of the Late Antiquity Gnostics’ Royal Art were distorted and misplaced, and as such they prevent them from achieving again (as they had wished) the authenticity of Egyptian and Babylonian Antediluvian Spirituality and the ensuing absolute spiritual potency. In fact, living in the times of Late Antiquity, Jesus evidently showed another path for the recapture of Human Originality.
Perhaps, due to the above, later periods of the Oriental Antiquity will be more difficult for you to understand, but who said that easy tasks ever matter?
13. African Spiritual Originality and Black Panthers
Black Panthers were right in their demands, but they failed to understand three points:
– what was done against Africans in America was decided not in America but elsewhere; even worse, it was envisioned by others, before the inception of the US.
– on present US territory, the worst and cruelest persecution did not indeed take place against black-skinned people, but against red-skinned people (: the ‘American Indians’). Failing to admit this reality, to repent for the atrocious crimes committed against the sole owners of the territories present occupied by the US, and to carry out the ensuing tasks is a crime and a disgrace.
– hatred, rancor, rage and revenge are all expressions of evilness; for any simple Ancient Egyptian, if you asked him or her about Seth (Satan) and his manifestation at the material level, it would be easy to tell you that ‘Seth is rage’. Any person expressing rage is invaded by Seth. This may at times bring damage to an opponent, but in fact rage destroys the person that harbors it. On the contrary, millennia before the Biblical figures, Jesus and Muhammad, the Ancient Egyptians knew that Creation – and therefore Prevalence – is tantamount to Love. And Man was created with the purpose to create.
Please, do not misread me! I don’t mean what most of today’s people think that Love is; no sex, no personal feeling involved – at all. In reality, people today have no idea what Love is and can’t even imagine what Faith is; and what they call love is not Love, and what they imagine as faith is not Faith!
But Love is as strong as Death; and what Death destroys Love can bring back in force again.
Closing my response, I have to remind you of another Ancient Egyptian concept. Man was created as a King; therefore royalty is the supreme value of all humans, but again it is not what most believe today. And there are not kings left anymore among those who sit today on thrones or pretend to do so. But there are in our times many kings who are not known to the rest. But they are known to Primordial Atum, and this is quite enough.
As you see, the rediscovery and the recapture of the original meaning of many key words of our present vocabularies is also part of the effort to reconstitute Ancient Egypt in our minds and hearts. Egyptologists study Hieroglyphics, read ancient texts, translate correctly, render Meriamon as “Beloved by Amun”, and think they know, whereas they fail to capture the real meaning of that Ancient Egyptian name.
Best,
Shamsaddin
============== THIRD LETTER ==============
Dr. Megalommatis,
………………………………………….
The era I want to mainly focus on in Kemet is the Founding Father Narmer and the 1st Dynasty. I have many questions about this Great Man and his successors. I want to learn where did they draw upon knowledge from?
And what drew Narmer to say it is time to unite the two lands and take on the Scorpion King for Kingship?
Did the Stars play a role in his decisions?
I would love to commit the rest of my life to the true study and understanding of Kemet.
……………………………………………..
============= THIRD RESPONSE =============
My dear friend,
You ask difficult points that ordinary Egyptologists would have hard time to answer! Let’s take them one by one!
14. Narmer: the First Pharaoh
What is known of the first Pharaoh of the 1st dynasty?
Just one brief inscription on his commemorative ‘palette’ and few other artifacts! Plus an overwhelming and catastrophic desire of colonial Orientalists to project onto Narmer’s times the political needs of their own times; this is tantamount to an enormous volume of misplaced modern bibliography. One must go however through it, keeping himself clean and uninfluenced.
Archaeological data from Narmer’s times are unearthed, but Egyptologists have the tendency to mostly associate them with earlier periods and the Neolithic, viewing only material culture continuity. Focusing on the material culture, they fail to detect the enormous spiritual, mental and intellectual endeavors that were surely undertaken at those times, and not to the benefit of anyone. By this, I mean the emergence of the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing.
15. The Hieroglyphs
One thing we can all agree upon is that writing in Egypt appeared at the times of Narmer. But few historians have made the necessary comparisons between Mesopotamia and Egypt at the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 3rd millennium BCE.
Yet, there is a tremendous difference which is quite telling! In Mesopotamia, namely Sumer and Elam, two different systems of writing appear few hundreds of years before Narmer, around 3250 BCE. These are the very early forms of the Cuneiform Writing; in the beginning, both Mesopotamian writing systems were ideogrammatic, and only after several stages of transformation and adaptation to practical needs, they took the typical, early 3rd millennium, cuneiform shape. The practice of writing and the material on which they wrote were successively adjusted. Each sign, each ideogram took therefore many different forms, before becoming a typical 3rd millennium Sumerian or Elamite ideogram, and then later a cuneiform sign.
But in Egypt, everything was very different. The Hieroglyphic writing system appears to have been first conceived, studied in almost all its aspects, details and design needs, developed, and then publicly used and diffused, never to be adapted to any later practical needs. The same Egyptian hieroglyphic signs remained intact for almost 3400 years!
Of course, the hieroglyphs are ideograms (a more modern attempt is to call them logograms, but it does not change much); the word comes out of the Ancient Greek term ιεροί γλύφοι / hieroi glyfoi (in Plural) which means ‘the sacred glyphs’. From their earliest appearance at the times of Narmer and his successors, the hieroglyphic signs did not change at all for millennia! But were the hieroglyphs holy or unholy?
It is only 1000 years after Narmer that we find the first evidence of the Ancient Egyptian Hieratic writing, which is a cursive form of the Hieroglyphic writing and which was basically used in drafts, on papyri, ostraca, etc. However, on architectural surfaces, we always attest only hieroglyphic writing.
Such is the nature and the scope of the hieroglyphic writing that it is difficult for anyone to assume that it was the product of a intellectual endeavor undertaken during a brief period of time or by one person or by very few people. Even more importantly, the entire Ancient Egyptian Weltanschauung in its entirety seems to be found in this writing all at once, and this appears at the times of Narmer. With my previous sentence I mean that the inception of the hieroglyphic writing, far beyond of being merely a writing system, is mainly the solemn declaration of a fundamental ideology, theory, and worldview that marked the world like no other theoretical or intellectual system.
16. Hieroglyphic Writing: the World’s Foremost Theory, Ideology and Weltanschauung that impacted the Mankind like no other system
Without the Hieroglyphic Writing, there would never be Egyptian Art (Painting, Sculpture) as we know it, because the art forms are in reality hieroglyphic signs that are personified as per each case.
Without Hieroglyphic Writing, there would not be any idols, icons, and representations elaborated for either religious or artistic purposes.
Without Hieroglyphic Writing, there would not be Greek civilization, Roman civilization, Christian civilization, Islamic civilization, Western civilization and Modern ‘civilization’.
Without Hieroglyphic Writing, the three driving forces of the Modern Western World and the Modern World in its entirety, namely the Jesuits, the Freemasons and the Zionists, would never come to existence.
The invention of the Hieroglyphic writing is not the equivalent of the simple and low process of formulating an easy writing system like an alphabet. The Hieroglyphs are the foundation of the Universal Theory and Ideology of Image / Idol. All the signs are ‘images’ or at least are thought to be so.
In fact, no idolatry would ever occur and no need for representation, painting, sculpture, architecture, theater, photograph and cinema would ever exist without the Founding Fathers of the Hieroglyphs, all those deviate and misfortunate magistrates who thought it possible for ‘representation’ to ever exist within the material world.
The colossal task must therefore have been the result of the work of an early college of priests and spiritual potentates. But which one? The Hermupolitan, the Heliopolitan or the Memphitic priesthood? We will probably never know for sure. And yet, this would be of great importance! However, we have the tendency to ascribe the gigantic undertaking that impacted the world like no other system, theory or ideology to the Memphitic priesthood, its earliest form or its predecessors.
17. Hieroglyphic Writing: at the antipodes of the Ancient Egyptian Spirituality
On the other side, the unified field of semiotics that are the Images – Elements of the Hieroglyphic Writing was obviously at the antipodes of the cardinal points of the Ancient Egyptian Spirituality, according to which – and similarly with the Sumerians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians in Mesopotamia – “as above so below”. As a matter of fact, “as above so below” means that the only representation that can exist is the material world itself; it is indeed the representation of the spiritual world. So, this is the Order of the Creation.
Since every item of the material world is the living representation, the reflection and the mirror of its spiritual counterpart, any attempt to fabricate another representation, a fake image within the material world, is an act of counterfeit creation, and as such an abominable deed full of blasphemy and sacrilege.
And this reality (that the hieroglyphs are a form of creation) would be utterly confessed by all Ancient Egyptian priests, scribes, architects and artists; it is actually very well documented. They believed that the hieroglyphic signs, carved as bas-reliefs on the walls of their temples or painted on the walls of tomb chambers, ceaselessly emitted their energy across the material universe.
– What were the Ancient Egyptian temples the architectural structure of which remained unchanged for more than 3000 years?
– A micrography, a miniature of the Universe.
So, covering the miniature of the Universe with signs that emitted their energy and electromagnetic fluids across the universe was indeed an act of Black Magic and an evil effort to alter the Creation and hinder its purpose.
18. Spiritual conflicts, religious wars, theological polarizations
In fact, Ancient Egyptian History was the result of a ceaseless fight among the aforementioned three priesthoods. Only around the middle of the 2nd millennium, the Theban clergy emerged in the South; although totally distinct, Theban theology appears to be the next stage of the old Memphitic system and as the world’s earliest Trinity.
So, if we were able to fully and accurately identify which priesthood invented the Hieroglyphic writing, we would manage to have a superior understanding of the Ancient Egyptian civilization. This is so because the Egyptian royal ideology and spirituality seems to have been composed by the opponents of the priesthood that launched the hieroglyphic writing, after elaborating the theoretical background that supported its invention.
What was Narmer’s role in relation with the priesthoods?
Calling him a ‘Father’ and a ‘Great Man’ will only prevent you from getting an accurate understanding of who he was and of how important he was. You can never project your thoughts, feelings and desires onto a historical subject and then hope to ever be able to understand it. You will never manage to do so. History is frozenly cold; it is totally void of thoughts, feelings and desires. You find all the true events that occurred worldwide only beyond the level of – 274 Celsius. Am I understood in this?
History is an interminable process of acts. Acts have no thoughts, no feelings, and no desires. The persons who carry out these acts do have indeed thoughts, feelings and desires; but these are their mistakes and their sins, and their reason of failure. Do not add your mistake to theirs!
Narmer appears indeed as a mighty warrior and a determined fighter leading an early, miniscule army to battles. At those times, there were almost no armies and no battles. With so limited numbers of ‘soldiers’ (the term is even improper; these were rural laborers, who only paused their daily work for few days or weeks in order to participate in the skirmishes or the expeditions needed), you understand that those military bodies were embryonic.
As a warrior and fighter, Narmer has little chance to possibly be the powerful figure that you imagine and you attempt to venerate. In rare cases, kings and emperors led their armies, engaging in front battles, and when back in their capitals, they acted as high priests, spent time in their libraries, and were versed in spiritual exercises, intellectual endeavors, and academic – educational affairs. This combination of diverse activities is not impossible, but these emperors were truly very few, and they seem to have been common only in the civilizations peak. But Narmer was not a Thutmose III, a Ramses III or a Psamtik (Psammetichus)!
Materialist or senseless Orientalists interpret the emergence of the early states and the appearance of the first armies as mere responses to the material and the economic needs of the inhabitants of a certain land. Little do these Orientalists care about the spiritual and intellectual, cultural and religious concerns, activities and convictions of those people!
There is an undisputed reality; a battle and a war denote the existence of a certain problem, namely that of weakness and impotency. Otherwise, Narmer and his successors could solve their problems, utilizing their spiritual force and avoiding wars and fights. Worse, even his high priests and hierophants could not achieve something in this direction, and they wanted him to fight and engage in battles.
It is true that, across three millennia of Ancient Egyptian History, sometimes few Pharaohs used their spiritual resources against enemies whose material / physical strength was not a match for the spiritual force of the Egyptian high priests. Ramses III and his terrible land and sea battles against the Sea Peoples were an example at the very crepuscule of the Egyptian spiritual might.
During the battle, they called upon their spiritual force and duly expressed it, thus causing immediate disarray in the enemy lines. The Annals of Ramses III, sculpted on the walls of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu (Western Thebes, Luxor) bear witness to this fact. But the spiritual power of the early times had gone.
Medinet Habu – Mortuary temple of Ramses III
We don’t have similar textual references, when it comes to the various skirmishes of the early dynasties’ ‘armies’ and to all the battles during the entire period of the Old Egyptian Kingdom.
On the other hand, as a pharaoh, Narmer must have had the complete series of five names that each pharaoh was invested with since the day of his coronation. We don’t have full five names for all the early pharaohs, but the prevailing sense of continuity and traditionalism makes us believe that Narmer too must have had five, divine and royal, names.
This suggests automatically that he was also viewed as living Horus when alive in the material world and as living Osiris when in the Nether World. The divinity of the Egyptian Pharaoh was the undisputed cornerstone of the Egyptian royalty for millennia. Contrarily, the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite and Elamite kings or Emperors were humans blessed by the Divine Powers, elected by God or Sons of God, but never Gods.
19. Royal Ideology – determined by the Heliopolitan priesthood
With every Pharaoh recapitulating the Heliopolitan dogma (of which Osiris and Horus were two of its foremost elements), we realize that the Egyptian royal ideology was always controlled by the Heliopolitan priests. But how early was Heliopolis (Iwnw in Ancient Egyptian) instituted as a venerated center that shaped part of the local History?
Heliopolitan Ennead
Did it exist at the times of Narmer in the form which made it known in the 2nd half of the 3rd and during the 2nd millennium? We don’t know. If not, where was located its predecessor and earlier form?
Osiris
Was it Henen Nesut? Possibly. Its name means the House of the Royal Child, and this represents already an element of the Heliopolitan theology, as Horus was at times viewed as Hor pa hered, which became more widely known after its deformation to Harpocrates in Ancient Greek.
When the Greeks visited Egypt and heard the local stories, they called Henen Nesut Heracleopolis (i.e. the City of Hercules), which illuminates the divine nature of the location that was inhabited already before Narmer.
Was it Nekhen that the Greeks called Hierakon polis (‘the city of the hawks’) and which evidently existed for centuries before Narmer?
Hermupolitan Ogdoad
Was then the Heliopolitan royal ideology of Narmer in total disagreement or relative compromise with the theological system of the Memphitic priesthood that most probably invented the Hieroglyphics?
20. Egypt was never unified; it existed for millennia as ‘Tawy’ – the Two Lands
And was the federation of the two lands (Upper and Lower Egypt) by Narmer a necessity, a compromise or a victory for some and a defeat for others?
Ptah – main god of the Memphitic priesthood
I use the term ‘federation’, because this modern political practice better corresponds to what the royal practice was in Egypt during three millennia; the two countries never became one and they remained always two. There were never one Ancient Egyptian flag, one Ancient Egyptian emblem, and one Ancient Egyptian crown for the Pharaoh: there were two flags, two emblems and two crowns.
Theban trinity
But why the federation was launched we may never understand. Was it ‘good’ (positive) or ‘bad’ (negative)?
And how different was Narmer’s federal kingdom from the earlier smaller kingdoms at the level of royal ideology, spiritual leadership, and cultural background?
Were all of those small kingdoms before Narmer ruled under the earliest form of the Heliopolitan royal ideology or only some (or one) of them? This is difficult to answer.
Seth fights in favor of Horus and against Apophis.
There are several Ancient Egyptian stories that relate to the pre-dynastic period. But modern historians, after rejecting their own preferences and concepts, values and principles, world perception and background, must also reject those of the Ancient Egyptian scribes and of their mentors, namely of all those involved in the composition of these narratives. This must happen because they too projected their own preferences and concepts, values and principles, world perception and background onto the pre-dynastic period that antedated them by 200-400 years; they viewed in it not its pure reality but what they wanted to view, thus disfiguring and altering the true conditions of life that prevailed in that early and unknown period.
Only then, we will have a clearer understanding and an accurate evaluation of Narmer, his exploits, and his times. It was surely not an easy time.
3rd millennium BCE Egyptians used to see the times before Narmer as a chaotic period. But what does this really mean?
Most probably nothing. We know that there were strives, skirmishes and wars at the times of Narmer and his successors, and certainly in later periods, the wars only increased in number. So, shall we conclude that those periods were also times of chaos?
How objective can one be when he considers the lesser chaos as ‘worse’ than an extended and generalized chaos? It makes no sense.
All accounts made, anytime anywhere any Ancient Egyptian scribe, priest or high priest was the product of his times. All of them were subjective enough to project their mindset, values and interests onto earlier times, when describing them in rather short stories; and the same attitude continued unaltered down to our times. Those scribes and priests are therefore untrustworthy, like all the posterior historiographers, who repeated the early historians’ attitude. In fact, what we can find as reason for their attitude is an effort to ‘justify’ and to ‘beautify’ their own fall. In other words, they were confused enough not to see their fall as proper fall, but as an advancement and a progress.
Temple of Wadi es Sebua – Ramses II offers to Theban trinity
And because they failed to accept that the earlier society without a king, and more particularly without a divine king, was better, they brought incessant disasters to themselves and their societies got disintegrated only for others to come to the forefront, but always at a lower level; and the age of the assured reciprocal and total nuclear annihilation is the very bottom of the entire process.
So, the proper response to your question “and what drew Narmer to say it is time to unite the two lands and take on the Scorpion King for Kingship?” is that Narmer was probably instructed to do so by the high priests of the temple where he belonged. Those high priests were in conflict with those who controlled other smaller states alongside the Nile; they therefore assumed that by controlling the lands of their opponents, they would prevail.
This is a very perilous assumption, for many times across History the winners at the military and material level became the prisoners of the spiritual choices advanced by their opponents. So, the early Heliopolitan priesthood, by using Narmer as a tool, prevailed over the early Memphitic clergy only to be subsequently held captive by the evil founding fathers of the Hieroglyphic Writing and of the Camp of Idols.
Temple of Derr – Ramses II under the auspices of the Holy Tree offers to Ptah
Three millennia of Spiritual Captivity and Decadence is the only pertinent, yet brief, conclusion about Egypt’s real history.
The above are only few thoughts about the existing circles of interests and fields of exploration concerning the times of your beloved Narmer.
I terminate my response here, leaving your last two important questions (I want to learn where did they draw upon knowledge from? / Did the Stars play a role in his decisions?) for another time.
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