In the four earlier texts of this series, I described the bilateral needs that Egypt and China have to urgently address, therefore entering in an advantageous, multileveled and grand alliance, which will not only consolidate Egypt’s national security and boost China’s expansion in Africa, but also help drastically transform, pacify and unify the Black Continent’s northeastern corner, notably Sudan and Libya. All previous parts (titles, contents and links to the publications) are to be found at the end of the present article.
In the present, last article of the series, I will focus on the final targets that the Egyptian-Chinese alliance should set in view of Africa’s complete decolonization, de-Westernization, and rehabilitation. These issues are relevant to educational, cultural and political-military affairs; to eliminate the curse that fell on the Black Continent, Africans should
a) remove English and French as foreign languages,
b) interrupt the educational, academic and scientific links that almost all the African countries have been forced (through means of colonial interference) to maintain with England, France, Belgium, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US,
c) terminate the economic subordination of almost all the major African private companies, corporations and state institutions or organizations to the above mentioned countries and to the international schemes that the Western countries have established (IMF, World Bank), and
d) minimize if not obliterate the presence of Western diplomats, military or tourists on Africa.
And China must help the Black Continent do exactly this. Africa was never part of the Western World, and no African needs to be part of this corrupt and ailing part of the Mankind.
Contents
Introduction
I. Chinese as the First Foreign Language in Egypt
II. Systematic Dissociation and Separation from Western Europe and North America
III. The Egypt – Sudan – Libya Confederation
IV. How the Chinese-Egyptian Alliance will reshape Africa into Five Mega-States
Introduction
For China to achieve an irrevocable breakthrough in Africa, it is essential that the Chinese statesmen, diplomats, administrators, military advisers, academics and businessmen envision their presence and activities on the African soil in a long term perspective.
Any short term perspective vision of China’s presence in Africa will fail exactly as it happened with the USSR. For some time, several African countries became the allies of Soviet Union; later, in different moments and for variant reasons, they broke their relations with the USSR or Russia and started unfortunately being again dependent on their former colonial masters, namely France and England, and/or America, which has ceaselessly tried to substitute itself for the traditional colonial powers. I presented this topic in brief, in an attempt to identify the reasons; my article was first published in 2008 and then republished recently here:
The article was translated into Russian by the Russian News Agency INOSMI, and it was widely read, quoted, discussed, mentioned in the bibliography of Ph.D. dissertations, and republished;
In that article, I explained why other superpowers or great powers will always fail when expanding influence on earlier colonized lands. The reason is simple; Western colonization involved the establishment of an enormous infrastructure at the mental, educational, academic, scientific, intellectual, religious, spiritual, socio-behavioral and cultural levels. As this extensive infrastructure has been dictatorially imposed, intensively propagated, incessantly reasserted, highly documented and greatly deep, it generates a new ‘world’ for the misfortunate, colonized individual, clan, tribe and/or nation. This is apparently an alien, undeserved and execrable ‘world’ -or a prison if you prefer- and consequently it does not / cannot subside with a simple regime change, military coup or superficial economic infiltration. Even more so, since it also appears to be advantageously rewarding with the colonial slave’s promotion, namely the perspective of being a rubbish collector or a sexual tool in the colonial metropolis!
The complete failure of the USSR in Africa: Western rationalism and materialism in Africa help only perpetuate the Anglo-Saxon and French colonialism.
The colonized nations were thus turned to altered beings, automatons or subaltern populations; they were made to think, reflect and act according to patterns invented by the colonial powers as per their own interests. Africa’s colonized nations were not properly westernized; their colonial masters did not want them to be like them. They wanted them to become functional tools of the Western supremacy, and this is what most of the Africans have become without even understanding it and irrespective of religion, ethnic background, and origin. Certainly, several anti-colonial intellectual forces were formed and socio-political reactions expressed in Africa; all the same, they mostly formulated their rejection of the colonial powers in colonial languages and terms. As it can be easily understood, this situation has highly jeopardized their chances to bring forth tangible results.
Consequently, one could safely conclude that only a long term vision of the Chinese-African partnership can be possibly beneficial to both, Chinese and Africans. Egypt’s position, background, identity and colonial experience are extremely helpful in this regard. That’s why Kemet (or Masr) is by definition China’s gateway to Africa.
I. Chinese as the First Foreign Language in Egypt
Inaugurated before 20 years (in 2004), during the early period of the first tenure of President Hu Jintao, the Confucius Institutes are non-profit educational institutions affiliated with the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China; more specifically, they are operated by Hanban (namely the Office of Chinese Language Council International, which became known as Center for Language Education and Cooperation in 2020). They are established jointly in a great number of countries and they always operate in cooperation with local partners. As of 2019, there were more than 500 Confucius Institutes all over the world. The stated aims are the promotion of Chinese language and culture, the support of local Chinese teaching, and the facilitation of bilateral cultural exchanges.
Basically, there are two Confucius Institutes in Egypt; the first is associated with Cairo University and the second with Suez Canal University. More recently, in 2015, an agreement was signed between Pharos University in Alexandria and Confucius Institute – Cairo University, thus creating the first Confucius unit to teach Chinese in Alexandria. As it happens in numerous other cases, professors from the largest Chinese universities teach in the Alexandria-based Confucius unit. Background:
Quite interestingly, NATO StratCom (Strategic Communication Center of Excellence) considered it necessary to meticulously spy on Confucius Institutes and to publish the following document, thus demonstrating their deep and awful fears that the days of the Western hegemony are numbered. https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/confucius_institutes.pdf
Although the aforementioned beginning was quite successful and well-done, by now it is not anymore sufficient. Focusing on the bright future of the Chinese-Egyptian cooperation, the administration of Confucius Institutes should set up a committee to study the ways needed to intensify the process of Chinese language penetration and to suggest a plan as to how Chinese will replace English as first foreign language in Egypt – in a mid-term perspective.
China has to deploy all the necessary resources in order to systematically, resolutely and comprehensively terminate the 2-century long, colonial period of predominance of French and English languages at all costs. In this great endeavor, Beijing should bring its influential allies into the game; Russia, India, Brazil, Iran and Turkey must also develop their Africa-de-Westernization policies, opening cultural institutes, establishing partnerships, promoting their languages, and founding bilingual universities. Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Russian, Portuguese, Farsi and Turkish are far more useful for Africans than English and French.
One thing must be made clearly understood to all Africans: the ‘easiness’ of the ‘already known’ (namely English and French) is the curse that plunged Africa into darkness, slavery, corruption and evilness, while also enabling the colonial gangsters to develop plans providing for Africa’s depopulation. It is as simple as that:
– Learn English and French, so that the Western colonial gangsters kill you all and repopulate the Black Continent with White supremacists!
Chinese language penetration in Egypt will then serve as a model and as a success story to implement in other African countries; while developing stronger bilateral relations with every state in the Black Continent, Beijing should dedicate special interest to help increase sound bilateral relationships among all African lands and nations. There are many speaking about ‘peace in Africa’, but there will never be peace in the Black Continent, as long as between an Sudanese and a Somali stands English as a means of communication, while a Malian and an Algerian converse in French.
When Nigerians and Egyptians communicate in English or Algerians and Malagasy speak to one another in French, problems appear always. In my proposals for the establishment of the first Afrocentric University in Africa, I made it clear that the proper end of the colonial period will never take place before 20 major African languages are regularly taught, each in a separate department of university, in at least all the major states of the Black Continent. See (notably Unit 4):
Western languages are parasitic plants in Africa. Mande, Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Tuareg, Oromo, Somali, Berber, Malagasy, Zulu, Shona, Sidama, Afar, Arabic and several other languages should become the official languages of a truly non-colonial African Union with duly de-Westernized member states. Consequently, by supporting African languages’ international status upgrade, China will demonstrate Beijing’s good will and readiness to contribute to Africa’s de-Westernization. At any given moment, China should not become and should not look like a colonial or neocolonial power. This will be the ultimate success of Confucius Institutes in Africa.
II. Systematic Dissociation and Separation from Western Europe and North America
China’s role in Africa will never be effective and fruitful without a complete de-Westernization at all levels; the Chinese-African partnership depends on extensive exchange of experience, study of colonial examples common and repugnant to both partners, quest for national heritage, re-affirmation of cultural identity, and defense of moral integrity. In striking opposition to the racist, colonial practices, Chinese and Africans should reciprocally identify the exact correspondence between the moral-behavioral values of their respective cultures and civilizations and examine how every single of their values is differently contextualized in China and in Africa. The ensuing cultural interexchange and mutual understanding of the ‘other’ will then help form the foundations of the Chinese Africology and the African Sinology.
Chinese and African academics, intellectuals, and scholars should then undertake the common, bilateral rejection and refutation of the Western model and the Eurocentric pseudo-historical dogma at a worldwide stage, also involving their partners in India, Russia, Iran, Turkey and many other Asiatic and Latin American countries. World History should therefore be written in an unbiased, trustful, and honest manner for the first time in the History of Mankind.
This is what anti-Western Chinese and African scholars, academics, intellectuals, scholars and explorers should understand deeply and up to the point of making it the foundation of their common description of the deeds, the thoughts, and the faiths of the humans: to be perfectly anti-Western and to constitute the full refutation of the racist Eurocentric model of historiography, one does not need to be either Sinocentric or Afrocentric; on the contrary, he must be humanocentric.
Afrocentric approaches and substantive criticism of the colonial academics, although positive and necessary, have not yet helped people grasp even a tiny portion of the Ancient Oriental Spirituality, Science, Moral, Wisdom, Universality, and Divinity. The Assyrian-Babylonian (Mesopotamian) and the Egyptian heritage has only been profaned within the barbaric, ignorant and dark periphery of the so-called Hebrews, Greeks and Romans. The Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran have only a reminiscence of the Sacred as revealed in the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian, and Iranian scriptures.
Not even one king among the Ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Macedonians and Romans managed to attain the sacredness and the spiritual force of Thutmose III.
Within the context of the fallacious Eurocentric model of historiography, which was based on the aberration of ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ and the absurdity of ‘Greco-Roman civilization’ (that the colonials imposed worldwide), Africa occupies a truly marginal, subordinate position, as if the entire Black Continent depended on the developments that took place in South Balkans and in Rome. This racist construct consists in total distortion of the History of Mankind; it was established as a mere reflection of the 19th c. colonial invaders’ disdain of the African nations that they colonized at the time. They narrated as ‘History’ what they viewed as their own African subjects whom the Europeans never bothered to truly and deeply study as per the local African, standards and measures, thus erroneously, unjustly and undeservedly evaluating them after the worthless, malignant and utterly racist European criteria.
The correct, Chinese view over, and version of, the Silk Road
The false, Eurocentric view of the Silk Road
Within the context of the fallacious Eurocentric model of historiography, which was based on the aberration of ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ and the absurdity of ‘Greco-Roman civilization’ (that the colonials imposed worldwide), China occupies a really peripheral position ‘at the very end of the world’, somewhere in the East. The History of the Silk Road is not the same for Western and for Chinese academics, scholars and explorers – let alone diplomats, politicians and statesmen. Within the Western bogus-narrative, China has always been depicted as if it has been a faraway country only periodically, slightly and occasionally connected with the Mediterranean World, which was erroneously presented as the supposed center of the world or the axis around which the History of Mankind revolved.
China, Egypt and all the other African countries should work systematically to totally dismantle and obliterate the Eurocentric Western fallacy. There will never be decolonization without complete de-Westernization, and this apparently demands a major effort of full de-Mediterraneanization of the World History, which is a racist, false and poisonous product made in the West. Over the last six millennia, all the humans lived in a great variety of locations and lands, often developing different cultures and civilizations, but contact has always been maintained; so, the criminal conquistadors of the barbarian and pseudo-Christian Pope of Rome never ‘discovered’ anything.
More importantly, the axis of World History revolved always around the arc that links Egypt -through Mesopotamia, Iran and Central Asia- with China, involving also concavities and convexities that end in the African Atlas, in the Horn of Africa, in Yemen, in India, in Anatolia and the Balkans, in the Caucasus region, and in Siberia. On these basic lines took place all the major events of World History.
That is why it is essential that China, India and Egypt launch together a major anti-colonial project named ‘歷史 – इतिहास- تاريخ’ (Lishi Itihaas Tarih/’History’ in Chinese, Hindi and Arabic respectively) and involve in it their numerous Asiatic and African partners in order to genuinely compose -for the first time in World History- a truly unbiased, multilateral and comprehensive History of the Mankind, plainly reveal the importance of the major lands of History (as stated in the previous paragraph), and irrevocably reduce the role of European peoples to their true proportions, secondary dimensions and negative impact. This collective work should then be translated to all the Asiatic, African and Latin American languages and subsequently serve as the fundamental documentation which all the school manuals and the textbooks will reproduce, thus eliminating the hitherto prevailing false, colonial Eurocentric historiography. About the three terms:
Even the notion of ‘Europe’ must be deleted; actually, it does not truly exist. It never did – for the overwhelming majority of the world population. The lands located west of the plains of Russia, of the Black Sea, and of the Anatolian plateau are also parts of Asia. As a matter of fact, what Westerners called ‘Europe’ is the most western and the most troublesome peninsula of Asia. The undeniable fact that Ancient Greek and Latin texts make this distinction does not concern Africans, Caucasians, Turkic nations, Iranians, Arabic-speaking people, Indians, Siberians, Chinese and other Asiatic nations, because those sources are alien, unknown, unimportant, indifferent and useless to them. Europe does not have the status of a continent by any means.
Working together at the academic, scientific, intellectual, and cultural levels, China and Egypt will thus put an end to the colonial links that have been imposed on Asia and Africa over the past 250 years. The campaign motto for China, Egypt, and their partners should be: “No Oriental student in Occidental universities”.
III. The Egypt – Sudan – Libya Confederation
After re-establishing the national unity and sovereignty of Sudan and Libya due to full scale military intervention and political pacification processes, China and Egypt should work hard with local authorities in Khartoum and Tripoli as to how to best interconnect and bind all three nations. In the third article of the series (see below; units IV and V), I offered few examples in this regard, stressing particularly the sector of Transport. High-speed railways will certainly bring closer the three capitals, the three elites, and the three nations. With ca. 175 million people and an area of about 4.6 million km2, the three lands make the 7th state of the world in terms of surface and the 8th largest country by population.
As it can be surmised, the desire for a concerted unification of Egypt, Sudan and Libya does not reflect a delusional target like going higher in the list or just looking bigger; it addresses the common need of all the local societies and governments to acquire greater economic depth and have a faster rhythm of development. With the help of China, mega-projects similar to those I proposed in the fourth article of the series (see below: units I-V) have to be launched also in Sudan and Libya. With interconnected systems of canals and associated irrigation plans that carry water from the Nile, parts of the Butana desert in the eastern part of Sudan can become cultivated lands, thus exponentially increasing the agricultural production of the country. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butana
The three countries will always have three seats in the UN General Assembly, also maintaining independent governments and separate parliaments; however, they can launch a one-year long rotating presidency and engage in several unification projects at the political, military, economic and educational levels. With full respect for all the existing ethnic groups, their languages, traditions and cultures, with concertation and synergy among the respective private sectors, with a unitary vision as regards their common vast territory and past, and with the strong support of China, the three countries can engage in the path of reunification on a purely secular basis. This will finally be the beginning of the end of the colonial era in Africa.
As it is well known, borders anywhere in Africa do not reflect ethnic territories and national realities, as they should have, but remind us of aspects of the colonial past. They are all false, and that’s why the criminal colonial gangsters, namely the English, the French and the Americans, want still to preserve the present, impermissible and untenable, borders in Africa. The reason for this vicious, insidious and inhuman policy is simple; practically speaking, there are no proper borders among nations throughout the Black Continent. There are only limits between the graves into which all the African nations have been buried by the guilty White Man.
Because the colonial powers want to preserve these illegal borders, these lines of sin, shame and hatred must be abolished. China should not have any illusion in this regard; the very existence of the colonial borders, the terrible absence of substantive infrastructure, and the imposed historical distortion, which is taught in the schools as an undisputed dogma, constitute the three major hindrances to Africa’s liberation and to Beijing’s perspectives in Africa. Of course, it will not be an easy thing to abolish the colonial borders in the Black Continent.
The effort should start with the formation of regional alliances and small unions of few states in several zones. Thus, the establishment of a confederation among Egypt, Sudan and Libya will mark a critical step in this regard. It is important for Beijing to methodically conceive and gradually carry out this project, because a successful union of three major African states will certainly stimulate many others to undertake similar efforts in other parts of Africa.
For this project, China should dedicate dozens of thousands of specialists, explorers, scholars and advisers; first, Beijing should create them. It is essential for the Chinese leadership to understand that, despite their good will and all the hitherto deployed efforts, China still does not truly know Africa; at least, not up to the level the colonial powers do. That is why China will urgently need 20000 Africanists, departments of African Studies in at least 50 Chinese universities, a plethora of linguists specializing in all the African languages, and researchers in Ethnography. A true Chinese army of explorers must disembark in Africa.
Similarly, in striking opposition to the highly ideologized, extremely biased, and utterly insidious Western academic policy against the Northern African Hamites and the Eastern African Cushites, China should become the worldwide center of Hamitic, Berber, Tuareg, Hausa, Cushitic, Oromo and Somali Studies.
Last but not least, China will certainly need 2000 Egyptologists and Coptologists with parallel background in Phoenician-Carthaginian, Latin and Ancient Greek in order to help present and future Egyptian and African scholars overwhelmingly refute the Eurocentric bogus-historical dogma, which prevails in the propagandist pseudo-universities of Western Europe and North America. They will have to plainly demonstrate to the world academic community the fact that the African Genius of the Hamitic Kemetians (Egyptians), Berbers and Cushites-Meroites and the Asiatic-Semitic Intelligence of the Carthaginians brought civilization to the islands of the Mediterranean Sea and to the southern extremities of the Balkan, the Italian and the Iberian peninsulas.
The topic is certainly interrelated with the urgent need of the Chinese academia to undertake a real overhaul of the Western disciplines of Orientalism, but this topic demands a new series of articles about the development of the Chinese disciplines of Assyriology, Hittitology, Iranology, etc. on entirely anticolonial and anti-racist basis. Establishing parallels between the Chinese Hundred Schools of Thought and Ancient Oriental (Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian, Iranian, Aramaean, Phoenician) schools of wisdom, universalism, spirituality and science or the Gnostic systems of Northern Africa or Western Asia would help all the people better perceive and fully assess the enduring interconnectedness of Asiatic and African cultures and civilizations. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Schools_of_Thought
IV. How the Chinese-Egyptian Alliance will reshape Africa into Five Mega-States
It may be a long process, but an early vision and a correct approach always matter. In order to totally change Africa, effectively block the presence or the return of the colonial powers, and instinctively trigger pro-Chinese feelings among all Africans, thus permanently consolidating Beijing’s leading role in the Black Continent, China must totally undo everything that the Western colonials did in Africa.
Taking into consideration the ethnic identity, the cultural integrity, the historical heritage of all the African and non-African nations that currently live in Africa, and taking into account the demanded conditions of socioeconomic development and international life, one can come to the conclusion that Africa should be re-organized in five great confederate states:
1- Kemet/Egypt, Cush/Sudan, and Rebu-Libu/Libya
This confederate state will be made out of the three ancient lands of civilization and modern countries, as briefly described in the present article. About:
2- Cush/Ethiopia, Punt/Somalia, and Eastern Africa (with a small enclave for Amhara-Tigray Abyssinia)
This confederate state will be established out of lands, which are currently parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia (Somaliland being not a state but a local MI6 office), Kenya, and most of the Swahili-speaking Muslim inhabitants of the coast of Tanzania. Apparently, the Cushitic nations of the Oromos and the Somalis will be the largest entities within the confederacy, which will comprise Cushitic, Nilotic and Bantu people.
Taking into consideration the fact that the Semitic Amhara and Tigray tribes (: the Abyssinians) have had a most tumultuous and very negative relationship with the regional Cushitic majority, repeatedly made war upon them, and persistently persecuted them, it will be wise to envision an Abyssinian enclave within the confederacy; this will be formed out of lands belonging to the Eritrean North and to the Tigray and Amhara regions of today’s untenable Ethiopia. About:
3- Carthage-Tunisia/Algeria, Berber Atlas, and Hamitic Sahara
This confederate state will be formed out of several NW African states that draw on the Carthaginian, Berber, Tuareg, Hausa and Saharan Muslim heritage and tradition of the wider region, i.e. Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and the northern half of Nigeria. An ominous and excessive colonial project of linguistic Arabization and extremist Islamization (based on disastrous, pseudo-Muslim and Anti-Islamic theologies) has been carried out in this region for long in order to totally transform the identity of the indigenous nations, eliminate the originality of their heritage, destroy their cultural integrity, divide the local societies, trigger divisions, split the families, and produce useless bloodshed only for the benefit of the colonial powers of the West.
The paramount target achieved due to the Western (mainly French) colonization concerned the establishment of a fake dilemma that was imposed on all the local societies (since the 19th c.), namely to
– either imitate the French and get intoxicated with Western lies and pseudo-science
– or become an extremist and die for a fake Islam that did not reflect the well-known historical civilization, culture and religion.
It is within this abominable divide that the traditional popular religion, wisdom, and culture have been sidestepped by the fanaticism of the ferociously anti-African and deeply anti-Islamic Hanbali, Ibn Taimiyyah, and Wahhabi theologies and forgeries.
By bringing to surface and reviving old traditions, forgotten identities, and moral integrity, and by interconnecting them with modern Afrocentric trends, China will be able to help permanently uproot extremism and obliterate French, English and American presence from the vast region which can certainly unite in a powerful, wealthy and progressive African confederacy.
Carthage, 218 BCE
For Chinese scholars and diplomats to see the hidden reality of the African Atlas and the wider Sahara region, four major academic fallacies have to be totally disregarded, refuted and dismantled by them first, notably
a- the false construct of ‘Afro-Asiatic languages’ (a fabrication that enables Western scholars to occasionally change their earlier conclusions as per the political needs of their criminal governments);
b- the colonial promotion of Arabic, which was never an identitarian element or a national language in Africa (it was basically a lingua franca for Muslims, and it was promoted by the French in order to deliberately destroy the Berber identity of the vast region);
c- the systematized effort to discredit the ethno-linguistic Hamitic group (by calling it ‘Hamitic hypothesis’), which is due to Western colonial biases against the Hamitic-Cushitic ethnic-linguistic-cultural unity that can help bring together the northern half of Africa (namely parts 1, 2 and 3 of the present unit) in just one state; and
d- the vicious attempt of the racist French colonials to uproot the national Berber identity of all the North African populations that have been deceitfully categorized by the colonial gangsters into Berber speaking people, bilinguals and Arabs. There were never Arabs in North Africa; today’s Arabic-speaking populations from Sudan to Morocco are Cushites and Hamites who have been gradually Arabized because they accepted Islam as religion. However, they remained culturally and ethnically African (Hamitic and Cushitic); consequently, in the Atlas region, there are only Arabic speaking Berbers, bilinguals, and Berbers who do not speak Arabic at all. We have therefore to conclude that Arabic can have only status of religious language throughout Northwestern Africa. About:
4- Manding, Atlantic Congo, Volta-Congo and Central Africa
This confederate state will consist of numerous ethnic groups and coastal nations of Western Africa that speak Manding, Atlantic Congo, Volta Congo and Central African languages, notably Wolof, Mende, Bambara, Dogon, Dyula, Yoruba, Igbo, Gbaya, Zande, etc. Including states like Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, the southern half of Nigeria, parts of Cameroon, and the Central African Republic, this confederation will also incorporate the Fula (Peul) people, who live in the southern part of their lands and have not therefore been comprised within the borders of the confederate state no 3 (see above). About:
This confederation will constitute the southernmost of Africa’s five mega-states. It will comprise Bantu people from coast to coast, therefore uniting all African lands south of a hypothetical line going from Equatorial Guinea to Uganda and thence to Tanzania and Mozambique. A Khoisan enclave should be instituted in order to gather together these ethnic-linguistic groups. About:
By helping set up five mega-states in Africa, Beijing will not only bring unity, concord and cooperation to the Black Continent, but it will also make it sure that peace is no further endangered due to the interests of the Western White Man, his heinous mentality, and his anti-Black stance. The absence of the divisive and merciless American, English and French colonial gangsters, racist missionaries, and plotting diplomats from Africa will certainly enable African nations to establish major states the size of Brazil or Russia and thus acquire the main prerequisite to socioeconomic development, namely economic depth. Empowered by China, India and Russia, the aforementioned five African mega-states will then be able to throw the barbarians of England, France and America into the dustbin of World History.
This will certainly constitute China’s greatest revenge for the Opium Wars.
Bantu languages
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Previous articles of the series (titles, contents, and links to the publications):
A Special Military Alliance with China is Egypt’s Only Chance for Survival – I
I. Western Hatred against Egypt and Plans against Mankind
II. The End of Egypt may be very close
III. Egypt and the Pulverization of Sudan and Libya
IV. The Renaissance Dam in the light of the Abyssinian ‘Prophecy’ against Egypt and Sudan
The rise of China as a world superpower has hitherto been a long path marked with several successes and advances, but also significant drawbacks and failures. The Arab Spring can be seen from many viewpoints and interpreted as per its impact on diverse states, but it was indisputably a severe impediment to China’s attempt to penetrate in Africa and offer the numerous African nations a trustworthy perspective and a valuable support in terms of nation building and sustainable development. It goes without saying that, if the Chinese establishment truly intends to bring forth a groundbreaking change at the worldwide level, Beijing must carefully take the lesson of those circumstances before 13 years and overwhelmingly modify China’s understanding of perplex situations and approach to long standing problems, notably the European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere.
In the first part of this series of articles, I expanded on a) the centuries-old Western hatred of Egypt, b) the existing historical threats against the Valley of the Nile, c) the gradual process of decomposition that the criminal Western gangsters applied to Libya and the Sudan over the past 12 years, and d) the direct relationship between the otherwise worthless Renaissance Dam (also known as GERD), which has been built in the Occupied Benishangul land (currently province) of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia), and the Abyssinian ‘Prophecy’ against Egypt and Sudan. This is the link:
In the present article, I will complete the presentation of the Egyptian approach to the need of the Egyptian-Chinese Military Alliance and I will expand on the Chinese perspective towards the topic.
Contents
I. The War in Gaza and the Destabilization of the Red Sea Region
II. The Rise of China as a World Super-power
III. The Irrevocable Prerequisites of China’s Worldwide Predominance
I. The War in Gaza and the Destabilization of the Red Sea Region
The War in Gaza, which started with the attack of the 7th October 2023, has nothing to do with the supposed liberation of Palestine (and even less with the formation of a Palestinian state); even more importantly, it is absolutely unrelated to the Islamic world. Hamas has been acknowledged as a functional outfit of the Israeli, English and American secret services, which envisioned, fabricated, established, promoted and imposed it on all the Palestinians, duly fooling them with associated nationalist and Islamist literature as well as numerous silly lies that only the already besotted populations could possibly take seriously. The fact that the secret services of Israel, England and America had their own stooges in the shameful outfit, tried to pull it closer to the interests of one or another country, and kept struggling for prevalence in and control of Hamas is of secondary importance. What matters is that Hamas was never a truly Palestinian let alone Muslim organization in spite of the public prayers of their leaders. They thought they were genuine, independent and unrestrained but in reality they were always closely manageable and totally maneuverable.
The War in Gaza has the meaning that its true instigators want to give it. This is essential to understand. The conflict is neither local nor regional; it is a worldwide conflict or, if you prefer, a World War. It has local repercussions in the sense that Gazan Palestinians -due to their leaders’ foolishness- lost their homes forever. It does have a regional impact indeed; this concerns mainly Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and to lesser extent other countries (Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran).
Although Lebanon and Syria have repeatedly been the targets of Israeli attacks (as far as Haleb/Aleppo), I mention Egypt first because the potential danger is greater and imminent. If the entire Gazan population is further pushed to the border, the government of Egypt will find themselves in an almost impossible position. With a chaotic situation in Libya, with Sudan plunged in civil war (in which one of the fighting factions depends exclusively on external factors and forces that are inimical to Egypt and friendly to the criminal, dictatorial and racist Amhara regime of Abyssinia/Fake Ethiopia), and with the Renaissance dam (GERD) filled, Egypt faces a havoc in the only part of the country’s national borders that was truly safe: that shared with Israel and Gaza. What is even worse is that there is an enormous distance between the governmental policy of the newly re-elected President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the popular feelings against Israel. Updates and readings:
Maintaining peaceful relations with Israel is necessary for the Egyptian president in order to come up with eventual solutions for the urgent needs of the evicted Gazan populations, to appear as a mediator should a circumstance arise, and to ensure that the Gazans will not be pushed by the Israeli soldiers up to Egyptian borders. All the same, this position is extremely delicate because Egypt cannot possibly accept to accommodate the populations of Gaza that the Israeli government subtly tries to force out once for all; indeed, the quasi-totality of the Egyptian population would not possibly accept such a development, which would automatically turn out to be tenure-terminator for any leader of the country. On the other side, any further deterioration of the poor conditions of life to which two millions of destitute Gazans have been exposed may deeply anger the average Egyptians up to the point of launching protests, which would further weaken the lukewarm support that the Egyptian president has.
As it was clearly understood from the first weeks, Israel’s military intervention in Gaza and the ensuing destructions and systematic killings of civil populations must be assessed as a long-term military operation that may last many months if not years. If at any moment, Gazan populations are pushed toward the Egyptian border, the war may become inevitable. Even worse, if thousands of uncontainable Gazans pour into the Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian government will be viewed by its citizens as truly impotent. Then, the newly elected president may be challenged by the protests (even more so because the economic outlook is rather gloomy) or removed by a military coup. For more than a decade, it has been clear that serious forces within the Western world (all those who have promoted Turkey’s Islamization over the past two decades) have a deep-seated hatred of Egypt. If France and a part of the US establishment supported the present Egyptian establishment, England and other states created and promoted a steadily anti-Egyptian sentiment.
But it is not only a matter of a turmoil limited in the Sinai Peninsula’s northernmost extremities. With the military activities launched by the Houthi government of Yemen against Israel, the Gazan conflict took another dimension that is seriously dangerous for the national security and safety of Egypt. As the Red Sea is Egypt’s eastern flank, it was always viewed as the safest region of the country; any condition of instability created in those governorates (Red Sea, Suez, and South Sinai) will severely endanger Cairo in many aspects. If maritime companies cancel the Red Sea – Suez Canal passageway, the Egyptian economy will take a disastrous hit. Map:
Under current circumstances, Egypt definitely needs a major ally beyond the well-conceived and auspiciously undertaken adhesion of Cairo to the BRICS+. The 2023 decision to enlarge the intergovernmental organization (from 5 to 10 member states) with the participation of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and UAE is highly important, particularly for Egypt’s economy. About:
However, the aforementioned wise decision of the Egyptian government has to be completed and consolidated with the selection of a main strategic partner and ally at the military and technological level. With Russia being focused on Ukraine, the Balkans, the Caucasus region, and other parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, China appears to be Egypt’s long-term close partner and ally of choice.
II. The Rise of China as a World Super-power
As a major imperial state, China has a historical tradition and a cultural heritage that very few other nations can claim today. China survived longer than other ancient empires like Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, (pre-Islamic) Iran and Rome.
Instead of being an empire identified with one religion, like the Christian Eastern Roman Empire and the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, China managed to compose a unified state dogma where Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism coexisted in peace and, at the same time, to plainly incorporate religions that came from the West, namely Mesopotamia: Manichaeism (either in its Sogdian form or in its Uyghur doctrine, fully blended with Buddhism), Nestorian Christianity, and Islam.
As a fully continental empire, China was one of the world’s five most civilized realms and foremost empires in the middle of the 16th century, along with the Mughal Empire (Hindustan), the Safavid Empire of Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the then nascent Muscovite-Russian Empire.
The five continental empires represented humanity and civilization, whereas the five maritime colonial empires (Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England) diffused barbarism, monstrosity and hatred, killing scores of indigenous populations, ruining great, highly civilized empires (Aztecs, Incas), spreading terror, inhumanity, diseases and falsehood, while also imposing tyrannically (and after deliberate genocides) the fake religion of the Western European heretical Christians (Catholics & Protestants).
In the span of 350 years (1570-1920), due to their sheer complex of inferiority, vicious plots, incessant cheating, wicked rancor, malignant lies, and systematized fallacy, the five maritime colonial empires (Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England), managed to
– fully invade and colonize one of the five continental empires, namely the Mughal Empire (which was far richer than Louis XIV’s France);
– totally dismember another continental empire, namely the Ottoman Empire, on the territory of which absurdly stand nowadays no less than 30 states;
– significantly reduce, temporarily occupy, and interfere in the local governance of another continental empire, namely the Qajar Empire of Iran (which succeeded the Safavid and the Afshar dynasties, but was subsequently replaced -following English intervention- with an ignorant and idiotic soldier who was later labeled ‘Pahlavi’ by his colonial master-‘adviser’);
– systematically undertake two Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) -in order to heinously corrupt the Chinese people- and then invade, occupy and dismantle the Qing Empire of China, first by attempting to divide the country into zones of foreign occupation and later by pitching the Japanese against the Chinese; and
– methodically turn Russia repeatedly against its natural allies, namely the above mentioned four empires and the equally continental empires of Austria-Hungary and Germany.
We have to consider the years 1945 and 1991 as the peaks of the maritime empires’ prevalence, because the United States substituted for the earlier Western colonial empires. As a matter of fact, in 1945, the very costly victory of a continental state (USSR) over another continental state (Nazi Germany) and the slow recovery of China, which was still plunged in Civil War, allowed the US to appear as the sole world superpower. Later, although the Soviet Union managed to soon become the second superpower, its dissolution in 1991, at a moment the People’s Republic of China had not yet risen to prominence, gave again the impression that the US was the world’s only superpower.
Now, 33 years after 1991, everything looks impressively different, because of the spectacular economic, military, technological and geostrategic ascent of China; all the same, the overwhelmingly transformed international environment is also due to Russia’s astounding comeback in terms of military modernization, administrative rehabilitation, socioeconomic reorganization, scientific breakthrough, technological advance and worldwide impact. Furthermore, the dramatic change has to also be attributed to India’s striking rise to the level of major economic, military, scientific and technological power, and to the remarkable progress that several middle level powers (Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Egypt, etc.) have made in the meantime, thus becoming notable regional powers and centers of gravitation that the Western colonial countries cannot anymore fully impact, influence or intimidate.
III. The Irrevocable Prerequisites of China’s Worldwide Predominance
All this may really augur very well for China, but unfortunately, it is not enough. And the real issue for China is not to outperform its own performance in terms of military and technological breakthrough or economic-commercial penetration. What matters -in the transformation of a traditional continental empire to a worldwide superpower- is the elimination of the existing drawbacks and obstacles. China may nowadays look far stronger and more important than France, a traditional maritime colonial empire, but things are not that simple when we examine both countries’ impact and influence on Africa.
Chairwoman of Russia’s Federation Council Valentina Matviyenko speaking with the President of Algeria Abdelmajid Tebboune (March 2023) said that “France must repent for colonial crimes”.
France controlled major lands of civilization for hundreds of years and imposed its own scientific method, academic system, moral-intellectual values, educational context, and socio-cultural environment. Fully colonizing the Algerian society, Paris
– imposed the study of 18th c. philosophers by Algerian schoolchildren;
– deleted Algeria’s Islamic and pre-Islamic historical and cultural heritage from Modern Algeria’s education, intellectual life, political discourse, academic research, cultural milieu, and artistic explorations;
– prevented a proper nation building process from being undertaken by Algerians;
– turned the average Algerian into either an entirely subaltern French or a fully reactionary Muslim predestined to doom in his vain effort to ‘Islamize’ his country and -even worse- not even to imagine that there is no return to national originality without an exhaustive de-Westernization;
– made of the average Algerian’s religion (Islam) a mere ideological caricature; and
– appended all the concepts and all the notions that an Algerian may develop or devise to French (and therefore Western) standards, measures and criteria, thus irrevocably preventing generations upon generations of Algerians to ever achieve cultural ingenuity, intellectual originality, and national authenticity.
That’s why one can easily observe that, even at the moment of the closest Soviet-Algerian or Russo-Algerian (after 1991) relationship, the ideal place for an Algerian to be was always Paris – and never Moscow!
What is even worse is that the French did the same in each and every of their colonies, whereas the English acted accordingly. And when the Americans arrived to take over, they followed the same pattern, offering scores of scholarships to the youth of the earlier colonized nations so that they get re-colonized after the American fashion (or version). This is how Morocco, to offer an example, was methodically managed and gradually turned against France. The Americans called it decolonization, but in reality the shameless process was a full re-colonization; they did not care about the local nations and the troubles caused to them by the European colonization process that had lasted perhaps 100 or 200 years before the American arrival. However, one has to take into consideration the fact that this was possible for the Americans to achieve because America was already a byproduct of the Western world.
12th c. manuscript of A’azzu Ma Yuṭlab by Ibn Tumart
But Russia is not part of the Western world and the same is valid for China. So, to be on the safe side, when a Russian or Chinese diplomat or statesman speaks, discusses or negotiates with an Algerian statesman, politician, military officer administrator, businessman, he must always bear in mind that in front of him does not stand a descendant of Ibn Tumart or a proponent of the Almohad doctrine, but a wretched person confused about his identity and choices, ignorant of his national past, and fooled by the -systematically administered to him and his compatriots- colonial Euro-centric fallacy. About:
As the above example constitutes only one case of troublesome encounter, Chinese must realize that, on the best occasion, they will meet similar cases everywhere. This means that, by imagining that Chinese financial aid, state loans, technology transfer, military advice, political partnership, foreign investment, infrastructure works, and sustainable development plans will suffice to make of an African country a strong and permanent ally of China in the Black Continent, Chinese diplomats, advisers and statesmen only fool themselves and lose their money. And this is not only due to the existent -among African governments- overwhelming corruption.
The Chinese must therefore realize that first, last and above all, they need to set the foundations of their presence in Africa- something that until now they have never done. This must be massive and, luckily, China can certainly afford it. It would perhaps be even better to undertake parallel efforts, namely through the Chinese embassies, consulates and universities and, also, via BRICS-based partnerships.
First, China must study in-depth all the African nations as per their own declarations of identity; if the Chinese authorities are contented with the superficial study of the colonial caricatures that the Modern African states are, it is better for Beijing to forget the dreams of worldwide predominance once forever. The Oromos of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia), the Bejas (Blemmyes) of Eastern Sudan, the Copts of Egypt, the Berbers of the African Atlas, the Mehris and the Soqotris of Yemen, the Luo, the Somalis, the Kikuyu, the Bantu Muslims of Kenya, and all the other nations and the ethnic-linguistic-religious groups of Africa must be meticulously studied in China.
The reason for this enormous academic-political endeavor is simple: Western colonial countries have done so for ca. 200 years. And without their enormous study, knowledge and documentation, the Western colonial administrations would have never asserted the firm control that they had and still have over Africa. It would perhaps be quite useful for Chinese scholars to first investigate the extent and the depth of Africanist or African Studies in Western Europe and North America. Russia has developed this academic discipline but not up to the level Italy has. The African colonial past of Rome (in Libya, Eritrea, Somalia and Abyssinia/Fake Ethiopia) did indeed play a certain role in this regard. Actually, the European colonialism was never an exclusively military affair; it was rather a combined enterprise based on universities, libraries, museums, companies, armies, secret services, and governments. It is essential for the Chinese to always keep this in mind. About: https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article-abstract/69/275/163/57603?redirectedFrom=PDF&login=false
At the same time, Chinese scholars must examine the indigenous scholarship-led attempt to establish Afrology or Africology at the antipodes of the Western colonial discipline. Africans involved in the development and implementation of concepts such as Afrocentricity and African Renaissance must be taken seriously by the Chinese, first as a topic of study and then as a potential partner in numerous hitherto undefined pro-African and pro-Chinese, anti-Western projects. It is really a joke for Chinese statesmen to think that, with only few hundreds of billions of dollars and due to governmental cooperation in bilateral trade, infrastructure projects, and political relations, Beijing will establish a deeply-rooted presence in the Black Continent.
In this manner and without a deep study of the entire continent (as I already said), China is going to lose most of the money spent for this scope. Few corrupt partners (ministers, generals, thugs-in chief, etc.) will pocket part of the Chinese money, but later some of their colleagues or subordinates will probably report this development to their French, English or American masters, and then China’s fraudulent trustees may get a bullet in their head or simply removed from power; their monies will be confiscated, and the country will be lost for China – pretty much like Libya was stripped from Beijing in 2011.
Second, China must deeply study African History without taking into consideration the existent borders. The down-to-Earth reality is simple: colonial borders are good only for the colonial powers, but never for the colonized nations. So, China cannot accept them – at least before duly studying how and why all these fake lines were drawn by the French and the English in order to work only to their benefit. By this, I don’t mean that one should break all the existing African countries to pieces. No! In some cases, one can produce one very sizeable, new African country out of two or three states – but the decision must be well-founded and based on the study of the local reality, and of the colonial perverse rule and evildoing. I will now offer an example.
Very old map of north africa with Focus on Egypt, other countries on this map are Libya, Sudan, Nigeria, Algeria. Main countries which were occupied by Britain in the early 20th century.
Egypt, Sudan and Libya could have easily made one enormous state; combined the three countries have a total area of ca. 4.7 million km2 (larger than India and smaller than Australia). This means that, if united, they would make the 6th largest state in the world. However, the following fact highlights the systematic English evildoing that took place and the perverse, calamitous nature of colonialism: despite the fact that the English colonized both lands, controlled the local societies, and built the infrastructure that they needed, including a vast network of railways, the colonial governors took good care never to connect Egypt and Sudan by train. Although the railway network in both lands totaled, back in 1950s, thousands of kilometers and the existing routes from Alexandria to Aswan and from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum covered 1100 km and 900 km respectively, no railway was ever constructed between Aswan with Wadi Halfa (ca. 320 km)!
This fact is critical for the Chinese and for anyone else to know, because it unveils the secret targets of the colonial powers, namely to rule Africa first locally and later remotely – through use of idiotic indigenous stooges-traitors, who were first selected to study in English or French universities and then there formed as to how to rule their lands as per the plans of their colonial masters and not in a way to reflect the true interests of their nations. That is why, after Sudan’s independence (1956), no Sudanese and no Egyptian statesman had ever the idea of linking the two countries by two railways – one crossing the Valley of the Nile (from Alexandria to Khartoum) and another running alongside the Red Sea Coast (from Suez to Suakin).
So, to conclude about this example, I would say that it is very good for the Chinese leaders to intend to launch many infrastructure projects in Africa, but it would be far better for them to also come to know which plans and designs were never proposed (let alone built) by the colonial powers, although they could have been undertaken, and for which reasons; this would reveal to the Chinese authorities who is going to certainly plot against China’s penetration in Africa, where, when and for which reason.
Third, China should deeply study African Antiquity and Oriental Antiquity in order to uncover the fallacious nature of the Western narrative, denounce it at worldwide level, and refute it solemnly, thus liberating world nations from the pro-Western, racist dogma, which generated tyrannies and genocides across the Earth. Chinese universities must lead the world academia in critical disciplines like Egyptology, Assyriology, Hittitology, Iranology, Turkology and many other crucial sectors of Orientalism, which reveal the truth about the History of Mankind that the Western academia wanted to conceal, distort and replace with the absurdity of Greco-Roman civilization, Hellenism, and Eurocentrism.
While being energetically involved in this majestic project, with the participation of dozens of thousands of African and Asiatic students, China should deploy a great effort in interconnecting universities in Africa and Asia. This will help irrevocably disconnect African and Asiatic universities from the vicious centers of falsehood, namely the Western European and North American universities, which plunged the world in distortion, racism, anomaly, darkness and wars.
Fourth, China must prepare a young generation of China-educated, Chinese-speaking African leaders, who will spend 4-7 years in China, before returning home to work in the field of their specialization and thus to demolish the remaining chains of colonialism, misconceptions, misperceptions, biases, and white man’s schemes and deceptions. These young Africans will form their countries’ new middle classes and they will be instrumental in irreversibly cutting the relations of their nations with the criminal colonial states of England, France, US, Holland, Canada, Belgium, New Zealand, and Australia. English and French must be irrevocably deleted from Africa’s collective memory.
This enormous project will also entail the establishment of annexes of dozens of Chinese universities throughout Africa; in every single African state, several Chinese universities, numerous high schools, and various institutes will have to open and operate. The penetration of Chinese as the first foreign language must therefore be considered as key to China’s presence in Africa. For this reason, it has to be fully supported at all levels, notably the Internet, blogging, social media, etc. Chinese press establishments must open Asia in general and China in particular to all Africans, while incessantly slandering the Western world in every dimension.
Fifth, China must develop an enormous program of cultural exchanges, involving visits of African artists to China and vice versa, African schoolchildren holidays in China and vice versa, traveling bilateral exhibitions (a China-Tanzania exhibition in Egypt or an Algeria-China exhibition in Kenya, and so on), ‘Africa and the Silk-, Spice- and Perfume-routes’ Annual Seminar, and a vast program of sister city or a twin town relationship.
Sixth, China must build an unmatched military presence in Africa. It is better to first establish bilateral military relations with several countries of the Black Continent and then launch the next stage of expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In order to better involve its allies, Beijing could introduce the concept of trilateral military alliance and presence; to offer an example in this regard, within the context of an Egyptian-Chinese military alliance, China could involve India and thus set up a Chinese-Indian-Egyptian brigade after the example of the Franco-German Brigade. On other occasions, a Chinese-Russian-Algerian brigade would reduce the chance of war in the African Atlas that the secret services of England and America work hard to instigate, and a Chinese-Russian-Niger and/or a Chinese-Russian-Mali brigade would eliminate the threat of Islamic fundamentalism throughout Sahara, therefore fully canceling the evil Anglo-Saxon plans.
China’s military presence in Africa can function as vector of peace throughout the Black Continent; it must start with a strong bilateral military agreement with Egypt. What the scope of a Chinese-Egyptian military alliance can be and how fruitful it will turn out to be I will present in the next article of the series, which will be the last.
The Western World hates Egypt terribly; that’s why all the administrations of the country -pseudo-royal (khedivial), presidential (military) or Islamist (republican)- were always appointed after French, English and/or American decision or active involvement and with Western support only to function as local ignorant servants definitely unable to fathom the deeply self-destructive nature of the acts that their foreign masters force them to implement, and absolutely unsuspicious of the venomous hatred that their beastly superiors harbor against the Holy Land that is the Valley of the Nile down to Khartoum.
Contents
I. Western Hatred against Egypt and Plans against Mankind
II. The End of Egypt may be very close
III. Egypt and the Pulverization of Sudan and Libya
IV. The Renaissance Dam in the light of the Abyssinian ‘Prophecy’ against Egypt and Sudan
The Blue Nile River is seen as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam reservoir fills near the Ethiopia-Sudan border, in this broad spectral image taken November 6, 2020. NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team/Handout via REUTERS/File
I. Western Hatred against Egypt and Plans against Mankind
The criminal colonial governments of the West that plunged the world into inhuman colonialism, scores of yet unknown (to most of the people) genocides, two World War, moral and cultural degeneration, and linguistic Anglo-tyranny did not hate Egypt for nothing. They are fully aware of the exclusively predominant role that Nahrain (Mesopotamia) and Kemet-Kush (Egypt and Sudan, i.e. the true Ethiopia) played in the History of Mankind; the evil gangsters of the Western countries want to hide the Truth that was found in Egyptian and Meroitic hieroglyphics and in Sumerian-Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform texts, to incapacitate those great lands, to propagate worldwide their fallacious story (namely the nonexistent Hellenism, the perversely presented Greco-Roman civilization, and their abnormal derivatives), and to undertake the extinction of all the other nations and civilizations by means that they intended to prepare and have already produced.
Which is the unfathomable force of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Assyrian cuneiform texts that Western academics, mystics and evildoers know and the rest of the world does not?
This is easy to answer! Fully studied and duly assessed, the early documentations of Human Civilization demonstrate perfectly well the fallacy of every single point of the Fake History of the Mankind that the criminal Western universities, those centers of suffocating darkness, absurd falsehood, and utmost barbarism, diffuse worldwide only to carry out their plan which provides for the extinction of the rest of the Mankind. It is not a matter of coincidence that, only 100 years after the decipherment of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion, was an Egyptian Egyptologist properly formed at last; it was a critical paragraph of the lewd colonial criminals’ working plan. Only by fooling the rest and by keeping them unaware of the historical truth, they would effectively immobilize them until the moment of their destruction comes.
The Western narrative was composed out of thousands of points of systematic falsehood and due to an always superbly misleading contextualization. Even non-specialists, who happen to be perspicacious researchers and rich conceptual thinkers, like Prof. Jin Canrong (School of International Relations, Renmin University of China), have seen the endless flaws of the Western fallacy. In October 2023, Prof. Canrong claimed that the supposedly major philosopher of the Antiquity, namely Aristotle, is actually a fictional character.
Prof. Jin Canrong
That’s correct; suffice it to study the spiritual, academic, moral, and intellectual life in Egypt from the arrival of Alexander the Great of Macedonia to the arrival of Octavian Augustus (332 BCE – 30 CE)! There was no place for Aristotle in the then debates; the same occurred elsewhere, notably in Antioch, Ephesus and the other great centers of learning and science of the Ptolemaic/Seleucid, Arsacid and Roman times.
In fact, Aristotle is mainly a fabrication of 9th-11th c. Catholic Benedictine monks who hated the Eastern Roman Empire and Orthodox Christianity and in the process, fabricated an enormous amount of fallacious manuscripts of the supposed Aristotle’s treatises – no less than 1200 years after the extant but minor philosopher had died. The character that is currently known as Aristotle is quasi-entirely fictional and represents the Benedictine Order’s adjustment of Christianity to their evil needs and counterfeit concepts. They projected onto the supposed treatises of Aristotle what they had in mind and they subsequently ‘Aristotelized’ (or ‘Aristoteleanized’) Catholic Christianity.
For this and for many other reasons, Western diplomats, academics and ‘advisers’ craftily managed to fool and disorient Egyptian academics, statesmen, intellectuals and pedagogues up to the point of totally skipping -in the Egyptian Secondary Education historical manuals- the entire period from Ramesses III to the arrival of the Islamic armies (ca. 1200 BCE – 642 CE); this means that almost 40% of the 5000-year long Egyptian History remains deliberately unknown to Egyptian schoolchildren.
It is yet in this period that the radiation of the Ancient Egyptian civilization eclipsed that of all the other main lands of civilization (Aramaean Mesopotamia, Iran, Turan, India, and Berber North Africa), as numerous Egyptian cults, mysticisms, systems of world conceptualization, Cosmology, Cosmogony, Eschatology and Soteriology, mythological symbols, spiritual and material sciences properly speaking flooded the Roman Empire, Greece, Rome and even Europe outside the imperial borders. Greeks, Macedonians, Illyrians, Dacians, Panonians, Romans, Germans, Celts and many other nations in Britain and Spain believed Isis, Horus, Osiris, Anubis, Thot, Maat, and many other elements of the Ancient Egyptian Transcendental Wisdom and Spirituality – and yet no Egyptian schoolchildren learn about this fact.
LONDINI AD FANVM ISIDIS (To London at the temple of Isis)
The other side of the evildoing is attested in the Western world; many specialized Egyptologists know and write about these topics, but their articles and books are never known to the great public, because this would gravely damage the Greco-Romano-centric (Euro-centric or Occidentalocentric) narrative and the associated bogus-historical dogma that Europeans want to permanently impose on their former colonies and worldwide.
Of course, it is clear that the national security and safety of Egypt is not a matter of Education, Academic Research or intellectual debate. However, the two issues are intertwined. Better one understands the historical reality and better one assesses distortions and fallacies diffused by an enemy, smarter he becomes in fighting the enemy’s plans. And what can the plans against Egypt be?
One tiny example is offered by the Georgia Guidestones that stood from 1980 to 2022 {unveiled by US congressman Druie Doug Barnard (1922-2018) on 22nd March 1980} in Elberton (Elbert County, Georgia). It would be naïve to believe that the target of world population reduction to 500 million people involves Chinese, Indians, Africans and Latin Americans. Eugenics has been exclusively a Western European pseudo-science. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptions
Druie Doug Barnard
II. The End of Egypt may be very close
Very well-known is the anti-Egyptian and anti-Sudanese nature of the various successive governments of Abyssinia, which has only recently (in the 1950s and after French guidance) been fallaciously renamed as ‘Ethiopia’. In fact, the usurpation of the historical name of Ancient Sudan (Cush) by the (Yemenite origin) Abyssinians only completes the Amhara-Tigray colonial wars, annexation of many Cushitic nations and kingdoms, perpetrated genocide, and systematic persecution and enslavement of the subjugated Oromos, Kaffas, Afars, Kambatas, Sidamas, Hadiyas, Gedeos, Shekas, Agaws, Nuers, Anyuak, Bertas, Ogadenis and other nations.
Prof. Mekuria Bulcha
During the 19th c., subtly divided by the colonial English, the Egyptians and the Sudanese were not united in their reaction against the then expanding barbarian pseudo-kingdom of Abyssinia, which was criminally supported by the colonial hypocrites of France and England. Oromo Diaspora Prof. Mekuria Bulcha proved quite convincingly (in his ‘Religion, the slave trade and the creation of the Ethiopian empire in the nineteenth century’, 1997) that the colonial powers, which pretended hypocritically to be against the slave trade across the Earth, deliberately permitted the Abyssinians to continue their slave trade in order to purchase firearms that they used in their attacks against so many civilized African kingdoms.
The formation of the racist, genocidal state of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) is a permanent direct threat against the existence of Egypt and Sudan as states, and against the life of all the Egyptians and the Sudanese. If this fact is not taken seriously by all the Egyptian and the Sudanese statesmen, administrators and military, the end may be very near. The fact that the Egyptian governments failed to use Coptic academics, priests, monks and intellectuals as state agents to study the tribal and tyrannical regime of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia), get insightful, unveil local secrets, and thus accurately assess the permanently dangerous situation is also due to all types of colonial involvement and interference in Egypt.
Western diplomats, statesmen, journalists and military advisers always tried to assuage Egypt’s rightful worries about the malignant intentions of the racist Amhara rascals and underestimate the lethal threat originating from Abyssinia and the unprecedented Abyssinian hatred against Egypt and the Sudan. Limiting the topic to the sphere of military reprisals is puerile, whereas concerted action with the numerous liberation fronts (Oromo, Ogadeni, etc.) would have been very good in the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s, but by now is not sufficient.
There are indeed many historical sources documenting the evil intentions of the Amhara and Tigray anti-Sudanese and anti-Egyptian racists. They date back to the pre-colonial times, when the tiny, pseudo-Christian, barbarian Amhara kingdom developed the unprecedented hatred under the form of eschatological wishes and apocalyptic dreams of destruction that would befall on the Egyptians and the Sudanese. Many foreign authors, explorers, commentators and historians took note of the evil dreams that are harbored in the sick, heinous minds of the Abyssinians.
Alexander Ksaverievich Bulatovich
I will herewith name only one source, but the topic would easily become that of a PhD dissertation. The Russian military officer, monk, explorer and author Alexander Ksaverievich Bulatovich (1870-1919; tonsured Father Antony), who became later the main theoretical proponent of Imiaslavie (a heretical movement in Eastern Orthodox Christianity), was dispatched by the last Russian czar, Saint Nicholas II, to Abyssinia (1896-1897); there, he accompanied the tribal thug Abba Dagnew turned Abyssinian ‘king’ Menelik in some of his military expeditions and conquests where Abyssinian soldiers used firearms sold to them by England and France against the primitive arms of the African defendants of several ancient and noble kingdoms. Bulatovich wrote many accounts of his sojourn in Abyssinia, notably ‘ With the Armies of Menelik’, ‘ From Entotto to the River Baro’, etc. In one of his descriptions, the Russian envoy narrated the anti-Egyptian and anti-Sudanese dreams of the Amhara soldiers, as per below:
“In one of the prophecies of Raguil to Atye Zadyngylyu (he received revelations in his sleep and then wrote them down), it is said that a king from the north will be with a king of Ethiopia one in spirit and one in heart. In another prophecy of Angel Auriel to Sahle Selassie, it is said that a king of the north and of Jerusalem will meet with a king of Ethiopia in Mysyr (Egypt) and will conquer Egypt. After this, they will divide among them all the land”.
You can find an interpretation, a commentary and all the related details in the following article of mine (first published in 2010 and then republished) in which I included several excerpts from an English edition of Bulatovich’s works:
This article is part of a long series of articles about Bulatovich’s valuable information and authentic description of the events that took place in Eastern Africa in the 1890s.
You will find the entire list of my articles (which contain fragmentary republication of Bulatovich’s English edition) here:
III. Egypt and the Pulverization of Sudan and Libya
On Tuesday, 21 December 2010, the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Libyan leader Muammar Al-Gaddafi held closed talks with Sudanese President Omer Hassan al-Bashir and his Vice President Salva Kiir; the discussion focused on the South Sudan referendum that was to take place in three weeks’ time. The Egyptian and the Libyan heads of state tried to exert some pressure in order to avert the separation of South Sudan from Sudan. Quite unfortunately, it was too little too late. https://sudantribune.com/article37051/
All the same, no less than seven (7) years earlier, I had warned President al-Bashir about what was coming; it was published in three successive articles (in 2004); here you can find them republished:
Neither al-Bashir nor Mubarak nor Gaddafi could ever imagine how deeply the Western elites reviled them and prepared the destruction of their countries. To Mubarak, they appeared friendly as long as he implemented the policies that they wanted him to carry out. But every product has an expiry date, and so did the cheap colonial product named ‘Hosni Mubarak’.
When it comes to Sudan, Western diplomats through corruption and machinations triggered the Darfur genocide; they did not care either for the Furis, the people of Sudan’s NW confines, or for the Janjaweed, the idiotic Islamists and Pan-Arabists, who stupidly butchered the Furis only for the sake of the Western interests against Sudan. The reason for the Darfur genocide was the Western resolution to cut Sudan to pieces. To do so, they had to inculpate the pathetic and silly leader of Sudan, and this they achieved thanks to the International Criminal Court. After 2009, they had him at their mercy; a scared military officer is the world’s most submissive doll. LOL! The only tangible result is that by now South Sudan is a dysfunctional entity whereby colonial diplomats appoint ministers, top military officers and crooks turned to ‘businessmen’, whereas Sudan is divided and plunged in a civil war. https://www.icc-cpi.int/darfur/albashir
Mubarak’s overthrow had long been prepared against him; his last minute effort to prevent the secession of South Sudan only exasperated his fake allies whom Mubarak stupidly considered as friends and believed in their ‘good intentions’ for no less than three decades. So, no more than a month after his worthless trip to Khartoum, the events, which prompted his removal from power, were kicked off. Disreputable gangster Hillary Clinton was calling the old sick man of the Nile to shout “Mr. President, go! You kill your people”. Good friends!
When the sick madman Barack Obama visited Egypt on the 4th June 2009, he was escorted to the pyramids by the then Secretary General of Antiquities Zahi Hawass; there, the enemy of the Ancient Egyptian spiritual heritage Barack Obama was well prepared and fully instructed as to what to comment when seeing an hieroglyphic sign in the tomb of Qar; he said that the sign “looked like him”.
2300 BCE Barack Obama’s first incarnation!
Basics in Egyptology are enough for someone to understand that the US president heralded the fall of Mubarak, but apparently all the Egyptian Egyptologists were good for nothing.
On the 11th February 2011, i.e. the palindrome 11 02 2011, Mubarak was forced out by the same administrations that had praised him in the past; the same attitude has been displayed toward President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi over the past ten (10) years. Why? This is simple to answer. It is certainly not out of love; apparently, Egypt’s turn for chaos was not the year 2011.
As soon as Mubarak was out, major protests broke out against Gaddafi and his government (17 February 2011). The Libyan military strongman lasted until the 20th October 2011, having thus plenty of time to regret for his policy change and for assuming relations with the Western colonial powers.
Hosni Mubarak lasted 18 days (25 January 2011 – 11 February 2011).
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali lasted 31 days (17 December 2010 – 14 January 2011); so, he was stronger.
Muammar Gaddafi lasted 8 months (February-October 2011); apparently he was the strongest of the three North African leaders, who were removed from power before 13 years.
With Libya and Sudan in civil war, internal strife, and disarray, it will be difficult for Egypt to keep as a standalone country for too long. Omar al-Bashir was already overthrown in a coup d’état on the 11th April 2019. Sooner or later, the instability (to say the least) attested on Egypt’s western and southern borders will spread across the country, which faces now one new challenge, i.e. the end of self-government in Gaza and the forced eviction of the Gaza Palestinians from their homes, which were turned to ruins.
IV. The Renaissance Dam in the light of the Abyssinian ‘Prophecy’ against Egypt and Sudan
Meanwhile it is noteworthy that the construction of the Renaissance Dam (GERD: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam) in the Benishangul province of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) started in April 2011, only two months after Mubarak’s fall. The enormous dam built on the Blue Nile just few kilometers before the Sudanese border (height 145 m; length 1,780 m; elevation at crest 655 m; surface area of the reservoir 1874 km2) triggered many serious controversies. All the same, several discussions were entertained about the impact of the dam on Sudan and Egypt and the potential reduction of water (due to the filling of the reservoir and because of the subsequent evaporation); but few people in Egypt and the Sudan have hitherto questioned few crucial engineering issues.
Yet, the major danger may not be due to reduced flows of water downstream to Sudan and Egypt, which would affect the agriculture and the hydropower of the two states, but to the safety of the overall construction. This is so because of an exposed sliding plane in the rock basement of the area; this could eventually cause a sliding process downstream and a release of dozens of cubic kilometers of water. Several scholars highlighted this point and numerous case studies have been published in this regard. Example:
Flood propagation modeling: Case study the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam failure
Water Resources Professor at Cairo University Hani Sweilam (currently Egypt’s Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation) said in April 2021 that there is a 50% chance the Renaissance Dam will collapse, due to the presence of faults characterized by steep slopes allowing the occurrence of flooding carrying big amounts of silt. He specified the following: “It’s also common in Ethiopia to build dams without enough studies and that is the case with the Renaissance Dam whose capacity was raised from 11 billion cubic meters to 74 billion cubic meters on no scientific basis. Building such a large dam in a location that is higher than Khartoum by 350 meters puts Sudan in peril. As the dam is close to the Sudanese borders, if it collapses, the water of its reservoir would hit the Roseires Dam having seven billion cubic meters. …. After 150 kilometers, lies Sennar Dam whose capacity is less than a billion cubic meters (causing the destruction of Sudan)”.
It is quite interesting to notice that the ominous perspective of a major dam collapse matches perfectly well the above mentioned ‘Abyssinian prophecy’ as regards the destruction of the lands of Sudan and Egypt. The calamitous prediction would be materialized following a dam collapse, because the entire Valley of the Nile would be erased by the ensuing tsunami that would reach the Mediterranean and only the populations living east of the Eastern Desert Mountains in Sudan and Egypt would be spared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Desert
Under such circumstances and with only few millions of people survived in the Sudan and Egypt, it would be easy for Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) and Israel to invade and partition the lands of the two countries that are located east of the Eastern Desert Mountains.
Pre-publication of chapter VII 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 VI, VII, VIII, IX and X form Part Three (Turkey and Iran beyond Politics and Geopolitics: Rejection of the Orientalist, Turcologist and Iranologist Fallacies about Achaemenid History) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapters VIII, IX and X have already been pre-published.
Until now, 20 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the present book; this chapter is therefore the 21st (out of 33) to be uploaded. At the end of the text, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in green color.
In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.
The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.
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Darius I (named Dara I in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh) receives his imperial crown from his Mother Humai (from 16th c. manuscript); in the mythical language of the epics, there is no spiritual correspondence to material terms. So, in this regard, Darius I’s mother in the epic has nothing to do with the Achaemenid Shah’s physical mother. And this makes the great difference: whereas worthless colonial Western academics spent volumes of ink and incredible quantities of electronic waste to analyze Darius I’s imperial lineage and his rise to the throne, the simple Iranians knew the absolute truth as to how and why he rose to power: his spiritual Mother Humai brought to him the crown. Now, what spiritual epics and symbolic narratives mean and how they are written are entirely different and vast topics that would take very long to explain here. All the same, colonial academics and Western materialistic historians failed to even attempt to duly analyze these crucial matters, although they knew that Shahnameh constituted the undeniable foundation of Iranian History for all Iranians until the beginning of the 20th c. They disregarded these topics entirely, while absurdly and heinously removing Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and many other masterpieces of Iranian-Turanian spiritual epics from the corpus of sources of Iranian History.
The Orientalist, Turcologist and Iranologist fallacies reach a culminating point with the study of the 1st millennium BCE Mesopotamia, Iran, Anatolia and Central Asia. The epicenter of the Orientalist distortion is the History of the Achaemenid dynasty of Iran (550-330 BCE). This dynasty proved to be the central period of World History between the Oriental Antiquity (Sumer, Elam, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Hittite Anatolia, Canaan, Egypt, Cush, Punt, the African Atlas, and China) and the Christian – Islamic times. Because of this fact, the multifaceted distortions of Achaemenid History had indeed far reaching consequences and implications.
And truly, the misrepresentation of the world’s greatest civilization and foremost imperial superpower of the middle of the 1st millennium BCE is instrumental in concealing the historical truth, generating overwhelming confusion, fabricating an unprecedented alteration of the Ancient History of the Orient, and producing a totally false and unrepresentative division of the World History, namely Antiquity – Middle Ages – Modern Times.
There are several patterns of historical–linguistic distortion that are always easy for forgers to apply. One of them involves the fabrication of an otherwise nonexistent concept or supposed entity and the preposterous effort to link to it various existent data, known pieces of info, and real elements. Similarly, you fabricate a counterfeit concept, supposedly at the antipodes of the first. In this manner, you effectively manage to produce in reality two nonexistent concepts or entities that you portray as ‘strikingly different from one another’ and you link to each of these two entities many other known pieces of info and various existent data, thus promptly and comfortably generating a division, which in reality does not exist.
This pattern involves therefore postulating, theorizing, and then adding masses of data to the fabricated but non-confirmed, hypothetical schemes. In this regard, by creating a nonexistent Proto-Indo-European and by dogmatically and arbitrarily attaching to it the totality of the vocabulary attested in Old Achaemenid Iranian inscriptions, Western Orientalists attempted to intentionally disburden every Turkic word that can be identified in the Old Achaemenid cuneiform texts. About:
Actually, the colonial Orientalists did not start the falsification of Iranian History with the misrepresentation of the Achaemenid dynasty; they ended up there! They started their forgery with a much later historical period for which they had abundant texts; and they did not start the systematic disfigurement of the historical reality with historical texts and inscriptions but with epics and literature. They misinterpreted Ferdowsi’s references to Iran and to Turan within his enormous – Iranian and Turanian – epic, the Shahnameh.
Darius I the Great (above) & Xerxes I the Great (below) depicted on bas-reliefs-Persepolis What Western Orientalists failed to understand is not just an array of monuments or a number of ancient texts; they failed to realize the phenomenon of life and the genius of an atemporal civilization in which the past, the present and the future are all intermingled thanks to masterfully elaborated oral traditions, which fully encapsulates in mythical (i.e. in the only worthwhile) terms the totality of Human History, thus preserving the real essence of the facts and the true knowledge of History. But this essence cannot be perceived by the absurd, mentally defective, rationalist minds of the Western academics, who stick to the surface of the events, merely projecting their naïve and failed perception of the world onto the minds of the ancient constructors of monuments, authors of imperial texts, and artists. In fact, this entire attempt is as dead as a museum; there is no life to it. Unfortunately, it does not help us understand; it prevents any sort of genuine comprehension instead.
What happens in reality is simple; one day, the emperor dies, the empire falls, the palace is demolished, and the texts are burned and destroyed. The details of the deeds, the sequence of the acts, and the order of the decisions are lost. Their secrets vanish and their plans are no more. But the truth stays. It is not in the remaining ruins, and it cannot be found in unearthed statues and deciphered texts; all this is dead, even after we excavate, restore and make it available to visitors. The truth is the life that these people lived; it encompassed their spirituality, piety, imagination, energy, creativity, commitment to rightful choices, efforts and targets. Nothing of all this died; it consists in an enormous but serene, inalienable and ineradicable context of spiritual vibrations, conscious pulsations, subliminal oscillations, olfactory undulations, sound reverberations, and iridescent fluctuations.
This invariable reality can be accessed by any skilled spiritual master and moral mystic with due respect to the specific location and the unequivocal space of time; he can then reconstitute the living image of those lost days, the quintessence of the facts, and the transparence of the spiritual, sentimental and mental consciousness of the main factors (kings, knights, priests, soldiers, heroes, etc.) by means of mythical verses which, being packed with symbols, represent the never lost life of those days in a most vivacious manner to posterity. However, with the above example, I don’t suggest that the arrival of a mystical poet or a spiritual master able to bring about the perfect reflection of the past is compulsory or necessary. All the (average) people had significant spiritual power in the past; they could therefore preserve the living image of the past days as a poem, legend, series of fables or other forms of oral literature and tradition. There is no difference between societies with strong oral tradition and communities accustomed to keeping written records. It is only part of the racism, the monstrosity, and the bias of the Western World that colonial intellectuals and academics pretend that societies with written records are ‘more civilized’ than the rest.
What does all this mean?
It simply means that, wherever the mythical language was preserved among a traditional, moral and pious society, and the local spiritual epics, the legendary traditions, and the heroic fables of universal character were highly valued and cherished, the traditional narrative and the related depiction in a manuscript miniature are definitely closer to the true historical reality than the ancient reliefs and the texts which have been excavated and deciphered. In brief, the very first picture included in this document, although it dates back to the 16th c., represents the spiritual and material life of Darius I better than the bas relief from Persepolis (second picture in the present document). Despite the fact that the bas relief dates back to the reign of Darius I whereas the manuscript was written and decorated more than 2000 years later, the miniature offers a truer and more vivacious reflection of life around Darius I.
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Shahnameh constituted for more than 900 years the true Iranian History that Iranians and Turanians cherished and respected; disreputable Western bogus-scholars started describing this epic as ‘chivalrous’, either because they failed to deeply understand it or due to their materialistic preconceived ideas and anti-heroic misery and savagery.
Writing his majestic (more than 100000 verses in Farsi) epic, which is the world’s largest ever, in the late 10th and the early 11th c., Ferdowsi presented a dynamic interaction between Iran and Turan across ages. The intertwined relationship of Iran and Turan generated all major historical developments and in the process, it literally produced the human civilization; this is the essence of Ferdowsi’s monumental and phenomenal narrative, which is of course rendered in a highly spiritual, mythical and symbolic manner. The imperial families of Iran and Turan were evidently interlinked with mixed marriages across Ferdowsi’s masterpiece, which is the World History’s unsurpassed pivot of spirituality and civilization. In his foremost universal and Universalist epic, Ferdowsi created also an archetypal environment of moral clash between two realms: the world of good, enlightened, orderly and civilized Iran and the threatening periphery of evil, tenebrous, chaotic and barbarian Aniran. In fact, Aniran means “the Non-Iran”. But Aniran has nothing to do with Turan, which is alternating with Iran, being intertwined with it, as I already said.
The above is not my conclusion or my opinion; it is the historical reality. It consists in the most accurate and most pertinent interpretation made available in symbolic (not rationalist) terms within the world’s most illustrious epics. If Iran and Turan were opponent inimical and prejudicial to one another, Iranian culture would never be wholeheartedly shared by Turanians, because it would be viewed as defamatory and loathsome. If Turan and Iran were opposite, inimical and prejudicial to one another, Turanian culture would never be wholeheartedly accepted by major Iranian poets, mystics, spiritual masters, writers, scholars and emperors. But we know that such things did not happen; we know very well that Iranian kings and emperors of the Islamic times spoke in Turkic languages to their soldiers and that Turanian kings and emperors of the Islamic times wrote, memorized and recited verses of the Iranian epic poetry in Farsi.
We know that historically in the minds of all Turanians and Iranians there was no concept of opposition between Iran and Turan, because in reality, and as I already said, the two terms alternate in an everlasting dialectical relationship in order to shape World History. It is herewith worthwhile to mention as example that, prior to the Battle at Chaldiran (1514), Selim I in his letter to Ismail I (which was written in Farsi) described himself, although being an Ottoman, as ‘Fereydun’, namely a fully accredited and highly revered Iranian hero and king of the Pishdadian dynasty, the first family of divine rulers who originated from Keyumars (Adam). Had there been any sense of enmity, animosity, rivalry or strife between Iran and Turan, among Iranians and Turanians, between Iranian culture and Turanian culture, this would not have happened. About:
Parsa (Persepolis), the great Achaemenid capital; few Western Iranologists bothered to examine why this vast, majestic and solemn location is named Takht-e Jamshid in the Iranian folk traditions and popular culture. They certainly know that in various regions of Asia and Africa, Muslims named numerous places after several persons of the Biblical and Quranic traditions; they also know that in all the lands that had been impacted by the Iranian-Turanian civilization, this tendency further encompasses the distinct religious forms of Zoroastrianism before and after the arrival of Islam. However, their expertise ends there and they have a very confused opinion about, and understanding of, the interconnection between the Iranian literary epic tradition (such as Ferdowsi’ Shahnameh) and the Iranian popular religion.
They thus fail to identify pre-Islamic mystical traditions that were kept in various forms of popular culture and, amongst others, impacted great poets and mystics like Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi, Amir Khusraw, and others. But the Iranian popular religion is an entirely independent body of concepts, faiths, values, and narratives out of which emanate countless Iranian folk traditions and the popular culture.
The appellation ‘Takht-e Jamshid’ is not due to Ferdowsi or any other poet’s ‘Shahnameh’ but represents a genuine expression of the Iranian-Turanian nations’ folk traditions. Ferdowsi only helps us fathom the awesome heights to which the popular culture, fully preserving Achaemenid mysticism, catapulted the location of Persepolis: the Throne (Takht-e) of Jamshid, as description of the Achaemenid capital, makes of the place the epicenter of the divine rule (‘throne’) of the third descendant of Adam (Keyumars). This transcendental reality explains why Darius I transferred the capital from Pasargad (Pasargadae) and had the majestic site constructed. Now, when you ask yourself “why Takht-e Jamshid, and not Takht-e Zahhak or Takht-e Fereydun?” (referring to two other legendary figures who were respectively the son and the grandson of Jamshid), you come face to face with all the hitherto unanswered colossal questions of the Iranian spirituality, popular religion, and folk traditions that even Ferdowsi and Nezami Ganjavi failed to properly make. Introductory data (not correct analysis), you can find here:
I don’t want to expand more here, because I am only making a flash-forward while speaking about the Achaemenid times; I therefore want only to indicate the sources from which the evil colonial scholars first got the knowledge and second discredited the sources in order to deprive hundreds of millions of Iranians and Turanians of the historical truth, the cultural integrity, the national identity, and the transcendental wisdom that they had for millennia.
Subsequently, the criminal colonial scholars of England, France, America, Canada, etc. malignantly invented the ahistorical and fake ‘Iran – Turan’ divide, which they later projected onto their deliberately falsified reading of Achaemenid History. I will further discuss this Orientalist distortion in other chapters, but at this point I want to underscore the alternating nature of the two terms; this means that in fact Iran is Turan and Turan is Iran.
People should also bear also in mind that the historical-geographical terms do not apply literally in transcendental epics like Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh! Quite contrarily, everything takes a symbolic connotation and dimension, and you cannot apply terms like “Iran” and “Turan” in the manner many do nowadays, separating Iran from Turkic-speaking Central Asiatic states. All this is meaningless in Ferdowsi.
To give you an example, when the great atemporal hero Fereydun leaves Iran and goes far to find the Sublime Key Qubad and drive him to Iran where he is called to become the King of Kings, Fereydun goes merely to Alborz Mountains! In the simple geographical connotation of the term, these mountains separate Tehran from the Caspian Sea shore in today’s Iran. But as I pointed out, “historical-geographical terms do not apply literally in transcendental epics”. About (I include the links below only indicatively, because most of the contents are erroneous):
At a distance of about 7 km from Takht-e Jamshid – Parsa (Persepolis) stands the Imperial Achaemenid necropolis: the majestic cruciform tombs of Darius I, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I and Darius II are hewn in a rocky mountain. Less spectacular but undeniably very remarkable monuments (bas-reliefs, inscriptions, edifices, etc.) from later periods (notably Sassanid) can also be found in the superb location, which is named Naqsh-e Rustam, i.e. ‘the Image of Rustam’. Being the son of the mythical king Zal and the princess of Kabul Rudaba, Rustam is one of the greatest heroes and most paramount fighters of the Iranian popular religion and epic literature. But he markedly lives at the end of the Pishdadian and the early Kayanian dynasties, so certainly ‘later’ than Fereydun and much later than Jamshid.
For all those who fail to strictly apply spiritual, transcendental and atemporal values and standards to every form of creativity attested within the Iranian folk traditions and popular religion, there is a very simple question:
– Why is the location of the Achaemenid tombs related to another mythical king and hero (Rustam) than the place where the same Achaemenid royals (Darius I, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, Darius II) reigned (Parsa / Persepolis), which is associated with a much earlier hero (Jamshid)?
Also:
– In what sense is an imperial palace described as a throne (‘takht’) but a tomb is called ‘the image’ (Naqsh) of a hero?
In any case, concerning Naqsh-e Rustam, many leading Iranologists make the terrible mistake to associate the term ‘naqsh’ (image) with the Sassanid bas reliefs. This must have been so blasphemous if said during the Sassanid times! The Sassanid rulers knew the sacrosanct significance of the location; they were honored to be represented there too. But the divine benediction belonged to earlier times.
So, the early Orientalists, who were 18th and 19th c. colonial explorers, antiquarians, adventurers, agents of secret services, and diplomats, transfigured the meaning of Ferdowsi’s text and altered the symbolic terms used in the epics according to their own interests. They therefore first made the equation “Turan equals Aniran”, and they subsequently misinterpreted the majestic Iranian epic, which was believed as the ‘true History of Iran and Aniran’, reducing it to untrustworthy legendary stories that could not be taken into account their forged historiography.
Furthermore, the Western scholars projected this fictional, unsubstantiated and nonexistent polarization onto all parts of ‘Iranian History’ (pre-Islamic and Islamic), presenting Iranian emperors and Iranian culture as diametrically opposed to the Turkic emperors and to Turanian (or Turkic) culture. At the end, they also attempted to reflect their fake divide within the context of the Achaemenid times, a historical period for which the earliest existing documentation was mainly the untrustworthy, partial and external Ancient Greek historical sources.
Not only had the Western colonial scholarship failed to apply serious criticism to the highly biased and evidently racist Ancient Greek sources, but they also proved to be unwilling to duly popularize among Iranians and worldwide the Old Achaemenid sources after they were deciphered. Early excavations were resumed in Iran during the 19th and the early 20th c., only for the overwhelming Orientalist campaign of systematic distortion of ‘Ancient Iran’ to start.
In other words, the absurd, miserable and lowly Western scholars deprived the greatest nation of Asia (Iranians and Turanians) of their true, vivacious, sagacious, and transcendental History and they forced them to learn the Ancient Greek racist lies that the silly Pahlavi dictators and the stupid Islamist politicians proved equally unable to refute in public.
Beyond the fabrication of nonexistent concepts, entities, and schemes, other patterns of distortion revolve around a) polarization between non-opposite elements, b) systematic purification of a historical period, culture or civilization from undesired elements, and c) extrapolation from the forged past to the reconstructed present.
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FORTHCOMING
Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey
2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu
(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
CONTENTS
PART ONE. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities
A. Examples of fake national names
a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!
b) Tataria – Not Russia!
c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!
d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!
e) Khazaria – not Israel!
f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!
B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish
C. The Preamble to My Response
CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.
CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.
CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment
A. Orientalism
B. Conceptualization
C. Contextualization
D. Concealment
PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT
CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece
PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY
CHAPTER VI: The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times
CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists
CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan
CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES
CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period
CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty
CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids
PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS
CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire
CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism
CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates
PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM
CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE
CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet
CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam
CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History
PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’
CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’
PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’
CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate
PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash
PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM
CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor
PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED
CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another
CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’
CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur
CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World
CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West
CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk
PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?
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List of the already pre-published chapters of the book
Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.
CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
Pre-publication of chapter XXVII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI and XXXII form Part Eleven (How and why the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals failed) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
Until now, 16 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 17th (out of 33). At the end of the present pre-publication, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in gray color.
In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.
The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.
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Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Ali Qapu Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Western historiography enters a stage of exorbitant falsification when attempting to reconstitute the History of the Safavid dynasty of Iran (1501-1736). What stands at the forefront of the Western forgery and distortion of the History of Iran during the said period is the theory that the Safavid dynasty was ‘Shia’, and also that they ‘converted’ the Turanian population of 16th c. Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. Of course, such fictional conversion never took place, and the Safavid rulers would reject the fake division of Islam into two denominations, since they always proclaimed their Islamic authenticity and integrity, fully refuting the concept of a ‘divided Islam’.
However, this fake division is instrumental for the colonial distortion of History, because on this fallacy hinges the entire Western involvement in the Orient and the conflicts that the criminal and evil states of England, France and America generated across Afro-Eurasia. In order to fully and irreversibly embed the vicious divisive scheme of a supposedly bi-polar Islamic world revolving around two rival empires, namely the ‘Sunni’ Ottomans and the ‘Shia’ Safavids, the Western Orientalists, agents, explorers, diplomats, and statesmen invented the fallacy of the so-called “Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam”.
Of course, at the time (: early 16th c.), the Western colonial powers did not have the chance to impose their false version of History on the Ottomans and the Safavids; they even had not developed Oriental studies properly speaking in their already established pernicious universities. At the time, History was in the making. The only thing that the colonial empires could do, and which they viciously did, was to frame the divisive plot and to pull their diplomatic strings in order to trigger as many Ottoman – Safavid wars as they could. The distortive interpretation and the evil misrepresentation of these facts would come later – in due course of time.
And the malignant fallacy ‘happened’ truly when it ‘should’ have; when the collapsing Ottoman and Iranian empires were eroded through colonial infiltration and evil subversion, then the colonial gangsters and the 19th c. Orientalists started carrying out the projection of the already preconceived forgery onto the Western powers’ local stooges, who by means of shameful bribery and high treason (termed as ‘scholarships for studies in Western Europe’) started diffusing pathetic nonsense and bogus-academic lies in their respective countries only to fit the needs of their masters, namely the colonial powers. At the last stage, the monstrous and murderous forgery of France and England was presented as “History” worldwide only because their colonial empires subjugated almost the entire world and imposed the racist Anglo-French intellectual-academic contamination.
So, the historical forgery that the Western academic murderers have been teaching for over two centuries in their bogus-universities as “Oriental History” is merely the coverage of their inhuman deeds, which plunged Afro-Eurasia into ceaseless local and regional wars, countless rebellions, and two world wars. But the original concept behind the inhuman diplomacy of England and France was already there at the beginning of the 16th c., when they started fallaciously calling Iran, namely a totally Turanian country, “Persia”; this was preposterous. Soon afterwards, they started also naming the Ottoman Empire “Turkey”, which is another expression of their evilness and forgery, because the Ottoman Empire was in reality the most anti-Turkic state in World History.
No less than eight (8) times the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran came to war during the period of 235 years of Safavid rule over Iran. Actually, the wars started in 1514 and ended 1736 with the fall of the Safavids; of course, the historical fact of 8 wars does not mean in this case only 8 years consumed in wars! Most of these wars lasted many years. And actually, the Ottoman-Iranian wars did not end with the demise of the Safavid dynasty. Wars were resumed at the times of the Turanian Afsharid dynasty of Iran (1736-1796) and also during the period of the Turanian Qajar dynasty of Iran (1789-1925). So, from 1514 until 1823, in only 309 years, the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Empire made eleven (11) wars one upon the other. In total, during 309 years, the two empires were engaged in wars against one another for no less than 81 years. About:
If one takes also into consideration the fact that both empires made many other wars with numerous neighboring empires (such as the Mughal Empire, the lately risen Russian Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) and several colonial kingdoms (Spain, Portugal, France, England, etc.), one concludes easily why the two empires gradually collapsed. Furthermore, taking into account first, the diplomatically instigated and deliberately machinated twelve (12) wars between the Ottomans and the Russian Empire, which took place during a period of 350 years (1568-1918) and lasted for no less than 57 years, and second, the five (5) wars between the Iranians and the Russians, which occurred over the span of 177 years (1651-1828) and kept going for 19 years, one can plainly assess the evilness of the divisive intrigues that the Western European colonial diplomats instigated across Afro-Eurasia, and the unprecedented bloodshed that they caused.
Gate of Felicity (Bâbüssaâde), Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Imperial Hall with the throne of the sultan, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Central Hall, Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Open recess (iwan) of the Yerevan Kiosk, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Scene from the Surname-ı Vehbi, located in the Topkapı palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Battle of Chaldiran (1514); Grand painting at the Chehel SotounPalace (despite the fact that the battle ended with Ottoman victory), Safavid Isfahan
The Third Courtyard of the Topkapı Palace in the Ottoman Constantinople, as depicted in a miniature of the Hünername, 1584
Paintings in the main hall of the Chehel Sotoun Palace,Safavid Isfahan
All the wars, which were machinated and instigated by the colonial English and French diplomacies, needed a sophisticated coverage, e.g. some fake reasons, which would ‘explain’ or ‘justify’ to anyone why these wars happened (or ‘had’ to happen). To be convincingly fake, these reasons were based on a total distortion of the identity of both empires, the Ottoman and the Safavid; these distorted identities, which ‘explained’ the Ottoman – Safavid wars to the average public opinion in Europe at the time, became later the vertebral column of the fallacious Western Orientalism and its entirely fake branches, namely Turkology and Iranology.
To describe the extent and the depth of the Western Orientalist fallacy, suffice it that I herewith state the following: a major topic for Turkologists to study should become the Safavid Empire of Iran as a Turanian state, because it was ethnically a Turanian Empire whereby the outright majority of the population used to speak diverse Turkic languages as their native tongues.
Similarly, a major topic for Iranologists to study should become the Ottoman Empire, because an overwhelmingly Iranian culture permeated the state to such extent that, when Mehmet II entered Constantinople on 29th May 1453 and proceeded to the Palace of the Eastern Roman Emperors, the first words that he uttered were neither in Ottoman Turkish nor in Medieval Greek nor in Arabic, but in the classical, literary language of all Turanians, i.e. in Farsi.
The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes;
the owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.
These verses written c. 180 years before the conquest of Constantinople (1453) by the great Iranian poet Saadi (known as Saadi Shirazi, 1210-1291) reveal
– the absolutely identical nature of the Turanians and the Iranians,
– the common cultural background of all Iranian and Turanian nations,
– key elements of the Iranian-Turanian apocalyptic and soteriological eschatology,
– the last moments of the ailing Iranian rule (Chosroes: the last major Sassanid emperor Khusraw Parvez; 570-628), and
Mehmed II, by uttering these verses, clearly indicated that he viewed his victory in terms of Iranian-Turanian culture and eschatology, before all the other eventual or hypothetical parameters involved in the topic (Palaeologi-Ottoman imperial family rivalry; Christian-Muslim religious conflict; Eastern Roman-Turkic ethnic quarrel; economic interests).
In fact, there should have never existed Turkology and Iranology within the context of Western Orientalism, if this unit of academic disciplines were to serve the true purpose of exploration and search for the historical truth. The reason is simple: Turan and Iran have always been an indivisible historical – cultural entity.
However, the false portrait of the Ottoman and the Safavid empires, which had been systematically produced by the 16th c. colonial powers, involved two dimensions of distortion of the reality, namely religious and ethnic. Then, 19th and 20th c. French and English academics and explorers misinterpreted the 16th c. Ottoman – Safavid wars that their countries’ duplicitous diplomats had instigated as of both, religious and ethnic, reasons; and in both cases, these scholars lied, pretty much like today’s Orientalists lie when presenting, teaching and propagating the following forgery: “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids”.
In fact, at the beginning of the 16th c., with the exception of Eastern Iranians (namely the Tajik / Dari speaking populations), there was not one Persian ethnic alive; Iran had already been almost entirely Turanized at the ethnic-linguistic level. Farsi was a highly respected and widely used language of Literature, History, Spirituality, Art, Architecture and Culture that all the educated people felt obliged to learn in young age at the various madrasas of the cities, the towns and the villages of Iran. But in reality, Farsi was at the time a dead language like Latin in 16th c. Germany.
Only later and mainly during the 20th c., following the aggressive and extensive English involvement and the shameful colonial rule of Iran, which was carried out by local puppets, a ‘new’, systematized ‘modern education’ was imposed on all Iranians, the true, traditional Iranian History (based on Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi and many other illustrious epic poets) was forcefully and calamitously replaced by the fake, materialistic, atheistic and evil Iranian ‘History’ of the Orientalists, and Farsi became obligatorily the meaningless ‘national’ language. These tasks have been completed by the pathetically ignorant, uneducated and charlatanesque soldiers, who were later called “Pahlavi dynasty shahs”.
The Universal Empire of Iran disappeared, and a fake, nationalistic, ‘Persian’ pseudo-kingdom was established only to implement the ensuing culturally anti-Iranian and ethnically anti-Turanian, nationalist tyranny. It was a villainous Freemasonic plot and eschatological conspiracy against Iran, involving many ulcerous English, French, American and other enemies of Imperial Iran, who postured as ‘friends’ of ‘Persia’ or ‘admirers’ of the ‘Persian civilization’. They only wanted to fool the Iranians and to insult Iran diachronically, after the absurd and abominable example given by ancient rascals like Herodotus and Aeschylus.
While the rocambolesque and even wacky Pahlavi pseudo-dynasty was in power, the criminal English colonials prepared their substitute, namely several pseudo-theologians, who composed pathetic theoretical systems, triggered absurd religious fanaticism, and engulfed the entire Iranian nation in colonial dilemmas and utmost confusion of political nature. Farsi, as the language of the systematized Western education, was indeed revivified particularly among the incessantly increasing urban populations, who started forgetting their native tongues, notably Azeri, Turkmen and other.
During the time of the Pahlavi bogus-Iranian ‘shahs’ (1925-1979), a ‘white’, nationalist terror was imposed on the misfortunate nation; the use of other languages was strictly prohibited. However, this linguistic revival is a fake, and it looks like an awakening of the mummy. The people, who speak Farsi as a native language in today’s Iran, are of Turanian ethnic origin in their outright majority; even worse, their culture is entirely Turanian–Iranian, and their most celebrated rulers and beloved emperors are all Turanians, like Shah Isma’il I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty.
This does not mean that there are not several genuine Iranian languages spoken today in Iran by native speakers; of course, there are many: they speak Baluch, Lori, Bakhtiari, Gorani, Faili, Kalhori, Gilani, Laki, Talysh, etc. But these ethno-linguistic groups represent rather small minorities in Iran. These populations are certainly of Iranian ethnic origin, but they share the common Iranian-Turanian culture with all the populations of Turanian ethnic origin in Iran and in many other countries.
The present situation in Iran looks strange and absurd to all the local victims of the diffusion of Western propaganda of educational-academic-intellectual character; in fact, the systematic propagation of the erroneous Western notion of ‘nation’ or ‘ethnic group’ triggered only troubles and conflicts. This noxious development relates to the inhuman intellectual perversion that is called ‘Enlightenment’ in the Western world. This consists in intellectual darkness and educational paranoia that caused numerous wars over the past 250 years.
For millennia, various ethnic groups -Iranian and Turanian- speaking different languages, shared always their common culture and tradition without feeling or caring about the unsubstantiated and otherwise nonexistent, fake borders and the evil division lines that the 18th c. Western European concept of ‘nation’ produced worldwide. This historical reality of Turanian-Iranian indivisibility was irrevocable within the universal Iranian Empire, which was the supreme blessing of God and the best present that the divine world had bestowed upon Mankind.
Whatever fallacy the Western Orientalists may eventually invent and include in their often nonsensical bibliography falls apart in the light of all historical sources and texts. If the modern Western academia and intellectuals cannot understand the true reality, this is due to their degenerate minds, the advanced rottenness of their decomposed educational and social structures, and the nauseating putrefaction of their moral core.
Then, the fabrication of the fake divide “Turks vs. Persians” helped the criminal colonial powers spread divisions among the Turanians of Western, Central, Southern and Northern Asia, and the Caucasus region. The parallel creation of the fake divide “Sunni Muslims vs. Shia Muslims” was instrumental in plunging the entire Islamic world in permanent strife. Then, the combined fallacy “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids” is an explosive mixture geared to prolong and perpetuate the catastrophic division of all the populations living between the Bosporus and the Indus River Delta.
However, if they destroy the evil deeds of the local puppets of the Anglo-Saxon colonial governments, these populations could triumphantly unite in a secular super-state of ca. 450 million people and thus become the new superpower and Western Asia’s real locomotive of nations. Alternatively, if the existing colonial divisions are allowed to further exist, they can trigger new fratricidal wars among the Turks, who are culturally Iranian, and the Iranians, who are ethnically Turks.
For all the aforementioned national divisions and historical distortions to be duly presented and propagated worldwide by the Western historical forgers in a complete manner, a key point had to be invented: the supposed Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. This Orientalist fallacy hinges of the misrepresentation of the mystical Safavid Order, which founded an entire empire for themselves: the Turanian Empire of Safavid Iran.
However, the falsification of the identity and the deeds of the Safavid Order would never be successfully undertaken worldwide, if the entire Western world was not already totally confused about two totally different issues, which were systematically presented to the average people of all the Western countries as supposedly ‘one’ by their religious, academic and intellectual authorities alike: spirituality and religion.
Nevertheless, spirituality and religion are totally distinct activities of the spiritual and the material hypostases of the human being.
Sultanahmet Square in Ottoman Constantinople: the Eastern Roman hippodrome and Obelisk of Theodosius, which was transported from Luxor
Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Safavid Isfahan
Procession of the guilds in the hippodrome as per a miniature of the Surname-i Vehbi (1582)
Naqsh-e Jahan, the imperial square in Safavid Isfahan
—————- BLUE MOSQUE, OTTOMAN CONSTANTINOPLE —————-
Blue mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii): built between 1609 and 1617
Blue mosque, part of the interior decoration
Blue mosque, the mihrab (center) and the minbar (right)
—————– SHAH MOSQUE, SAFAVID ISFAHAN —————————-
Shah Mosque (Masjid-e Shah): built between 1611 and 1629
The winter hypostyle
The dome
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FORTHCOMING
Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey
2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu
(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
CONTENTS
PART ONE. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities
A. Examples of fake national names
a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!
b) Tataria – Not Russia!
c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!
d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!
e) Khazaria – not Israel!
f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!
B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish
C. The Preamble to My Response
CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.
CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.
CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment
A. Orientalism
B. Conceptualization
C. Contextualization
D. Concealment
PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT
CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece
PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY
CHAPTER VI: The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times
CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists
CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan
CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES
CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period
CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty
CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids
PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS
CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire
CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism
CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates
PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM
CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE
CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet
CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam
CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History
PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’
CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’
PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’
CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate
PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash
PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM
CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor
PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED
CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another
CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’
CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur
CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World
CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West
CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk
PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?
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List of the already pre-published chapters of the book
Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse : Des Intellectuels Jadidistes à Brejnev et à Poutine – Nécrologie
Элен Каррер д’Анкосс: от интеллектуалов-джадидистов до Брежнева и Путина — некролог
Contents
Introduction
I. D’Encausse is not Encausse!
II. L’Empire éclaté
III. Bobojon Ghafurov, the Tajik Soviet Orientalist, and his Hajj
IV. The Islamic Republic of Mecca & the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
V. Broadened horizons: Orientalism and Sovietology
VI. ‘Le pouvoir confisqué’ & Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s writing style
VII. Suslov, Pravda, and ‘The State and Revolution’
VIII. My classmates at Sciences Po: today’s ignorant, worthless and miserable administrators and politicians
IX. Nicos Poulantzas’ suicide & the Western leftist intelligentsia’s funerals
X. Either Leonid Brezhnev or Ronald Reagan – or get lost!
XI. How the Jadid Intellectuals impacted the formation of the Hélène Carrère d’Encausse School of Sovietology
XII. Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse
XIII. Soviet Union, Spirituality, Religion and Eschatology
XIV. John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Polish quagmire
XV. Viewpoint from the Mount Elbrus
XVI. The European convictions and the pragmatism of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse
XVII. The limits of historiography: a History of leaders and governance or a History of peoples and culture?
Содержание
Введение
I. Д’Анкосс – это не Анкосс!
II. «Расколотая империя»
III. Бободжон Гафуров, таджикский советский востоковед, и его хадж
IV. Исламская Республика Мекка (Теракт в Мекке) и советское вторжение в Афганистан
V. Расширение кругозора: ориентализм и советология
VI. «Конфискованная власть» и стиль письма Элен Каррер д’Анкосс
VII. Суслов, «Правда» и «Государство и революция».
VIII. Мои одноклассники в Science Po: сегодняшние невежественные, никчемные и жалкие администраторы и политики
IX. Самоубийство Никоса Пуланцаса и похороны западной левой интеллигенции
X. Либо Леонид Брежнев, либо Рональд Рейган — или проваливай!
XI. Как интеллектуалы-джадиды повлияли на формирование школы советологии Элен Каррер д’Анкосс
XII. Шарль де Голль, Жорж Помпиду и Элен Каррер д’Анкосс
XIII. Советский Союз, Духовность, Религия и Эсхатология
XIV. Иоанн Павел II, Рональд Рейган и польская трясина
XV. Смотровая площадка с горы Эльбрус
XVI. Европейские убеждения и прагматизм Элен Каррер д’Анкосс
XVII. Пределы историографии: история вождей и правления или история народов и культуры?
Permanent Secretary of the French Academy, Helene Carrere d’Encausse and her husband Louis Carrere d’Encausse attend the Private View of “Icones de l’Art Moderne, la Collection Chtchoukine” at Fondation Louis Vuitton on February 20, 2017 in Paris, France.
Introduction
She died 94; I am 67, and I was her student before 42-43 years, back in 1980-1981 at the illustrious Institut d’études politiques de Paris (also known as Sciences Po or IEP). Back at those days, the Anglo-Saxon countries and ‘universities’ were filled with nonsensical Kremlinologists, who were mere Anti-Soviet propagandists rather than objective scholars and impartial researchers.
It is certainly to the credit of my late professor, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse (6 July 1929-5 August 2023), that she killed this term in France, across the member states of the Francophonie, and throughout the Francophone world. The extremely absurd term ‘Kremlinologie’ never existed in French, as it was duly replaced by the far more reasonable word ‘Soviétologie’ – to large extent thanks to the deceased academician.
In fact, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was the founder of the French School of Sovietology; she actually entered the academic arena in 1963 with her celebrated thesis “Réforme et révolution chez les musulmans de l’Empire russe, Bukhara 1867-1924” (Reform and revolution among the Muslims of the Russian Empire; Bukhara 1867-1924) {Préface de Maxime Rodinson (Thèse, Doctorat 3e cycle; Histoire Paris)}. But I am digressing! About:
Соболезнования в связи с кончиной Элен Каррер д’Анкосс
I did not move to Paris (in October 1978) for postgraduate studies in Sovietology and Political Science; there was a time when I did not know her grand name. If someone asked me in 1978 whether I knew “d’Encausse”, I would certainly reply positively only due to my own misunderstanding, because I would recall my earlier readings and my research about Gérard Anaclet Vincent Encausse (also known as Papus), the illustrious French Freemason, occultist, hypnotist, thaumaturgist and mystic (1865-1915). Of course, as you can imagine, ‘Encausse’ was not ‘d’Encausse’, but still there was a certain Franco-Russian connection in this case, because Papus was sought after by none else than Nikolai Vtoroy (Czar Nicholas II)!
Facing social unrest after a calamitous and very humiliating defeat by the Japanese (1905), the Russian Emperor invited the famous mystic to Tsarskoye Selo (now known as Pushkin, 25 km from St. Petersburg), the imperial residence. It is said that in a particular séance, Encausse-Papus evoked the spirit of Alexander III (father and predecessor of Nicholas II, who had died one year earlier), and the … ‘spirit’ gave counsel for more repression (this was understandable at least) to ‘avoid a revolution’.
The ‘spirit’ must have apparently come from another universe, because ‘it’ did not know that the revolution had already taken place and it had been duly squelched. However, one of the most intriguing rumors maintained that Encausse-Papus said to the distressed Nicholas II that the fearsome revolution would not break out as long as he himself was in life (note that he died in 1915). About:
As a matter of fact, I relocated to Paris in order to undertake postgraduate studies in Egyptology, Assyriology, Hittitology, Northwestern Semitic languages, History of Religions, Gnosis, Manichaeism, and Oriental Christianism; soon afterwards I added Iranology, thus covering a vast area from North Africa to Central Asia and from Anatolia to the Indus River Valley. I also studied Russian Literature, thus continuing my earlier intensive studies of Russian language at the Greek Soviet Friendship Association in Athens (греко советское общество дружбы; 1975-1978), during my undergraduate studies. The interest for Russia/USSR was permanent, as part of my family had lived there.
It was in early 1979, in a rainy Saturday afternoon, that I found a fascinating book while spending some time in a bookstore; the title was ‘L’Empire éclaté’ (the Shattered Empire). It was published in 1978 and the author’s name was Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. As you can guess from the previous paragraphs, it was easy for me to retain the name! Reading few lines from several pages that belonged to different chapters, I realized that the core purpose of the well-written book was the solemn announcement of the forthcoming fall of the USSR. About:
Saying something like that at the time was not a joke; it was an entrance ticket to the madhouse. In 4-5 minutes, I was able to find out the major reason that the author evoked to support her claim; the Muslim populations of Central Asia and Caucasus were creating a major demographic challenge for the Russians, who -after some decades- would end up as the minority within the borders of the Soviet Union. It was enthralling. I bought the book and in the next few months, in parallel with my heavy schedule, I managed to read it all. It was certainly a best-seller in France. But there was a reason for this. On 16th January 1979, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi left Iran, and on 1st February 1979, the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran.
In her ‘L’Empire éclaté’, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse did not discuss issues pertaining to Islamization or radicalization; but the scarecrow of a USSR -with the Russians as minority and the Turkic Muslim nations of Central Asia as the majority- could after some decades end up with either a nationalist revival or an Islamic theological conservatism.
It was not a bluff; there were many indications for this, well beyond the events in Iran. I was then shaping my understanding on the basis of diverse data and pieces of collected information. As I was studying the past of many countries of North Africa and the so-called Middle East, I befriended many students originating from those nations; they were next to me as we attended together various courses (Egyptology, Assyriology, Aramaic & Phoenician, History of the Red Sea region, etc.) and, before the courses started or ended, they used to become my source of information for what happened in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Iran, etc. I was constantly discussing with them in order to evaluate how the overall situation was from Morocco to Pakistan and from Turkey to Yemen. There was no Internet, no mobile telephony, and not even computers at those days, but people corresponded with others, and the news from Soviet Union did not look like the governmental or partisan propaganda of the last Brezhnev years.
III. Bobojon Ghafurov, the Tajik Soviet Orientalist, and his Hajj
The story of Bobojon Ghafurov was known to me already in 1979; Igor Diakonoff (Игорь Михайлович Дьяконов; 1915-1999), the famous Soviet Assyriologist, was friend of my French professor, the renowned Orientalist Jean Bottéro (1914-2007), and like that, I started corresponding with him; in parallel I also knew several other academics in USSR through my Communist connections. The Bobojon Ghafurov story was included in Diakonoff’s auto-biographical ‘Book of Memories’ (Книга воспоминаний) and it can be found in the Russian Wikipedia entry about him, but the news had already spread those days, because Ghafurov had just died.
The great Tajik Soviet statesman (Бободжан Гафурович Гафуров; 1908-1977) was also an outstanding Orientalist; he was the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Tajikistan from 1946 to 1956, and from that date to the end of his life, he was the Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. His doctorate thesis about the Ismailiyah (الإسماعيلية; the Isma’ili Order of Muslim mystics) was a most recommendable publication, and his contention about the Tajiks and Tajik History became easily a matter of grave polarization (Are the Tajiks ‘Persianized Turks’ or are the Uzbeks ‘Turkified Eastern Iranians’? / at the time, I did not side with either position, but now I accept the Ghafurov thesis, which is the second leg of the aforementioned dilemma). I have to add here that the Tajik Orientalist had become known to me through his academic partner and co-author, the Greek Soviet historian Dimitrios Tsibukidis (Димитриос Цибукидис; 1921-2006).
However, in 1974, Ghafurov found the correct political pretext (namely the initiation of some state contacts) to get a special permission to travel for Hajj to Mecca and Medina – at a time there were no diplomatic relations between USSR and Saudi Arabia; but apparently the real reason for this travel was a latent faith that had been meanwhile developed. No diplomatic improvement happened following this trip, but when the Tajik Orientalist returned, he made shocking revelations to all of his Orientalist colleagues; more specifically, he said that for him his career as statesman was meaningless, his academic employment was pointless, but the pilgrimage that he had just performed was highly considered among his friends and neighbors in the village. Afterwards, he lived the rest of his life at home. About:
These words constituted an indirect confession of Muslim faith; the rumor spread among academics, Orientalists and partisans throughout the vast country and also beyond the borders; it was actually the time when Roger Garaudy (1913-2012) had become a Muslim. With her ‘L’Empire éclaté’, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse had caught the pulse of the moment. This made of her one of the very few people worldwide who predicted the fall of Soviet Union more than 10 years before it occurred. Two critical events took also place in 1979, setting the new stage of Soviet-Muslim polarization.
IV. The Islamic Republic of Mecca & the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
First, from 20th November to 4th December 1979, the short-lived Islamic Republic of Mecca shook the foundations of the obsolete Saudi monarchy, particularly if we take into consideration the fact that king Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (1906-1975) had been assassinated. This development ended up in terrible bloodshed, but it acquired a fascinating eschatological dimension in the minds and the hearts of hundreds of millions of Muslims; now, it is somewhat forgotten and deliberately minimized as the ‘Grand Mosque seizure’, but it then made many Muslims believe that the arrival of Mahdi and Prophet Jesus was a really imminent affair, i.e. for the people of this generation. Actually, all the discourses and speeches made by the Juhayman group were strongly eschatological of character. It goes without saying that they undertook this operation, apparently guided by the criminal rascals of the English secret services.
Few days later, the Soviet army entered Afghanistan (24 December 1979) thus directly involving Moscow in a confrontation with the local stooges of the CIA. Contrarily to what many believe today, the Soviet operation in Afghanistan was not a mistake; things went wrong only because the Marxist-Leninist authorities did not realize that the Western secret services were not the enemies and the opponents of the Islamists but their producers, protectores and promoters; even worse, the Soviet leadership did not have a correct plan as to what to do after invading the country, which is a difficult mountainous terrain inhabited by many different nations that have nothing in common. About:
However, thanks to the then existing SSRs of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, a large part of Afghanistan should have been divided and annexed by these three Central Asiatic SSRs. Another large part of Afghanistan should have been established as the Hazara SSR and then adequately helped to integrate with the USSR. The rest would form the secluded Pashtun territory and Pashtun populations from other parts of the fake state of Afghanistan should have been relocated there. After the resettlement of all the populations as per the aforementioned arrangements, the Soviet army would only need to militarily occupy the Pashtun territory which would not be larger than 150000 km2. But all the good Soviet Orientalists had failed to realize that there is no Afghan nation and that Afghanistan was (and still is) a fake country fabricated by the English colonial gangsters of the East India Company as a means of weakening the Iranian Safavid-Afshar-Qajar Empire.
V. Broadened horizons: Orientalism and Sovietology
For me, my studies and my understanding, the books of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse constituted an exquisite opportunity to establish bridges between Russia and the Ancient Orient, Russia and Central Asia, Iran and Central Asia, and Russia and Africa. It was then that I became fully conscious of a fact that I already knew somewhat superficially: that Russia was part of the ‘Orient’, and not of the ‘Occident’. This was actually the first territorial expansion of my research interests.
That is why after two years of postgraduate studies in the aforementioned disciplines of Orientalism, I decided to also enroll in the department for doctoral studies in Sovietology (Cycle Supérieur d’Etudes sur l’URSS et l’Europe Orientale) where, in addition to the seminar offered by the head of the department, I would also follow courses conducted by the Polish-French scholar Eugène Zaleski (a very remarkable specialist on Political Economy and Soviet economic planning), Patrice Gélard (who became later a senator), who scrutinized Soviet Constitutional Law, and many others. It was a well-organized department superbly put in order by Renée Sergent, an excellent administrative assistant who was of great help for all the students. About:
VI. ‘Le pouvoir confisqué’ & Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s writing style
It was then (1980) that a new book just published by France’s best Sovietologist confirmed that my aforementioned decision was correct and that I should truly add Sovietology to the other fields of my Orientalist specialization: ‘Le pouvoir confisqué’ (‘The confiscated power’). I read it while taking intensive summer courses of Russian Literature at the (run by the French Jesuits) Centre d’Etudes Russes Saint Georges à Meudon; my intention was to have very strong linguistic skills in Russian, adding the Christian Orthodox czarist jargon (that had been obliterated in USSR). Little did I know at the time! My professor had indeed preceded me there by a quarter century. This ‘detail’ I learned many years later. It was truly amusing to learn the alphabet that Lenin had abolished. About:
Before having the compulsory interview with the head of the department prior to the final decision (September 1980), I knew already much about the very personality of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. The way she was elaborating her books was very different from the writing style of all my other professors in the disciplines of Orientalism. With this I do not mean the contents or the stylistics of the text, but her temperament and powers of attraction. She was writing to pugnaciously convince the reader and she was engaged in her struggle to make others accept her approach, analysis, and descriptions.
Only two among my Orientalist professors, the Assyriologist Jean Bottéro, and Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004), a very exceptional connoisseur of the Orient (mainly for the Late Antiquity, Islamic and Modern times), were writing with great passion and/or empathy for the topics that they analyzed and the historical persons that they portrayed. But Carrère d’Encausse, who had also been the student of M. Rodinson, did not express any feelings for the subject of her text; on the contrary, she displayed passion in her effort to convince.
Maxime Rodinson
In French, this is not called ‘amour’ (love), but ‘amour propre’ (self-esteem). She was struggling to convince her readers about her judgment, evaluation and conclusions; she was therefore using the French language and structuring her sentences for this purpose, making always grammatically strong statements. The titles of her two books that I had already gone through offer a very good example in this regard; the structure ‘noun + past participle’ is in French far stronger than any similar structure in any other language.
VII. Suslov, Pravda, and ‘The State and Revolution’
Her seminars were attended by European, Asiatic, African and American students; we were all urged to subscribe to Pravda (Правда) and follow the directives as to how to decipher and interpret those heavily impacted by ideological jargon articles that had to always get an ‘imprimatur’ (official license) by hierarchical bureaucrats, who formed the Soviet equivalent of the Western ‘bourgeoisie aisée’ under the ‘spiritual’ or ‘sacerdotal’ or ‘ceremonial’ auspices of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov (Михаил Андреевич Суслов; 1902-1982). And, to my eyes, this was a very serious problem.
No 2 in the Soviet hierarchy after Leonid Brezhnev, the ‘theoretical Custodian’ of the October Revolution, Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1965-1982), Senior Secretary of Ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1948-1982), and (to use a Western vulgarity) ‘Chief Ideologue’ of the Communist Party of USSR, had failed to detect something truly crucial that was so obvious to my eyes: from the impulsive language that Lenin had used in his venerated ‘The State and Revolution’ (Государство и революция) there was nothing left in the routinely written, bureaucratic, apathetic, crystallized jargon of the Pravda scribes.
Irrespective of his ideas, opinions and choices, Lenin wrote in a vivid, sentimental manner with strong contrasts impressively painted thanks to his well-selected words; there was indeed life in his sentences. But Pravda texts in the 1970s were fossilized combinations of grammar, syntax and lexicography. I have to also add at this point that my familiarity with the ancient scribes of Mesopotamia and Egypt and with their role in the formulation of imperial and Pharaonic Annals helped me greatly understand that the role of the Pravda scribes in reality endangered the existence of the revolutionary Soviet state. Turning a ‘revolution’ to mere ‘ceremony’ is tantamount to funerals.
Suslov was at the time portrayed as a ‘hardliner’, but although I was under 25, I was already able to understand that such silly statements and descriptions were typical Anglo-Saxon propaganda good only for the ash-heap of history. But due to the ostensible mummification of the October Revolution, Suslov risked justifying the Anti-Soviet propaganda of the Western world. The long awaited, quasi-Messianic society that Lenin defined as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ had unfortunately died in the meantime due to a malignant tumor named ‘Nomenklatura’. It was very clear to me at the time that the USSR could not live thanks to enthralling, impulsive and enthusiastic movements and ‘revolutions’ generated elsewhere (Vietnam, Cuba, Somalia, Yemen, Angola, etc.), simply because the heart (: Moscow) had already died.
Political science, economics, political economy, law, and international relations were apparently new scientific fields for me and I definitely had to make an extra effort; but the fact that I continued attending all my other courses in Orientalism offered me the unique opportunity to study in parallel international affairs in the times of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (mainly during 1st half of the 1st millennium BCE) and in Modern Times. The comparisons that I was able to then establish in the scholarly approach to either topics was of cardinal importance in my formative years and in the judgment of the modern societies that I was empowered to formulate in striking contrast with political scientists, geopolitical analysts, and politicians who think they know whereas they know nothing. About:
VIII. My classmates at Sciences Po: today’s ignorant, worthless and miserable administrators and politicians
To most of my classmates in Orientalism, political developments and politics were entirely unimportant issues; still, by having learned aspects of the historical past of mankind, they had gradually acquired a certain perspective and they were able to make pertinent judgments, seeing things from far. Quite contrarily, to my classmates in Sciences Po, political developments and politics were of vital importance; to judge based on the passion that they expressed for these topics, I would say that they truly lived in order to monitor and comment politics. This was totally futile and useless, because they knew too many details about a topic for which they did not have any perspective and which they could not see from far. In reality, they could not ‘learn’ (let alone ‘understand’) politics and the ongoing political developments, because they only were part of them, i.e. part of the problem.
However, I have to state that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse stood perfectly well at her level; she was never induced to enter into political discussions that most of my classmates were eager to initiate supposedly making a ‘question about the course’! It was then clear to my eyes that she was not only a shrewd observer and an excellent author, but also a well-disciplined professor and a regimented academic, who never confused the political analysis of a system with the political talk.
Even worse, my classmates, who -in their majority- were graduates in Political Science, Law and Economics, could not distinguish between the fake historical narrative that political instructors of every government, party, elite or regime write and the true, objective, unbiased and impartial History as evidenced by textual and epigraphic sources, archaeological findings, ethnographic data, and the cultural life of each and every genuine nation. Please, note that I don’t mention here anything about spirituality, cult, faith and religion, because had I uttered one of those words, my classmates would have asked me to return to my theological seminar. So, to all of them, ‘History’ was only the historical forgery that their respective governments had forced them to ‘learn’ in the primary and secondary schools; in other words, it was a recently invented sketch that had absolutely nothing with the historical process.
I still remember the reaction of an Algerian schoolmate who was shocked when I spoke to him about the Berbers, the majestic mausoleums of the Ancient Numidian kings, and the Ancient Berber writing system. Having ostensibly been indoctrinated in the colonial falsehood of Panarabism, intoxicated with French Enlightenment, inculcated with Marxism-Leninism, and duly brainwashed against the importance of the Berber Islamic civilization, he wondered how I knew all that! He then started being too apologetic against his national identity (‘there are only few Berbers now’), imperial heritage (‘only for vacations we go to Tipaza’, i.e. the location of the tomb of Juba I of Numidia), cultural integrity (‘we don’t care about old traditions’), and historical continuity (‘no one reads Ibn Khaldun nowadays’). It then became clear to me that, with such people in the administration, Algeria under either Houari Boumédiène (1932-1978) or Chadli Bendjedid (1929-2012) would always be expendable stuff in the hands of either French or Soviet diplomats.
This situation made me realize, already back at those days, the worthlessness of politics; if the people, who study in order to learn and then get involved in politics and in the administration of their countries, first have been indoctrinated due to a totally constructed pseudo-historical narrative (geared only to validate infamous if not criminal political purposes and interests), and second fail to see from far the world in which they are, then ‘politics’ is an interminably reproduced problem that engulfs us all in temporary misery, compact absurdity, spiritual prison, and intellectual swamp with no way out.
IX. Nicos Poulantzas’ suicide & the Western leftist intelligentsia’s funerals
So, in the very last months of 1980 and in the first months of 1981, thanks to my conversations with Sciences Po classmates, I was able to early draw a very correct conclusion about an event that had already taken place before 12-15 months, shaking the academic-intellectual-political establishment of France: the suicide of Nicos Poulantzas (October 1979). Of course, when this event occurred, I did not bother at all about it, and my conventional response to pathetically ideologized friends and acquaintances was always the same:
– You cannot study cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts, learn about Hammurapi and Ramses III, pass exams on Thutmose III’s campaigns in Syria and Neo-Assyrian imperial Annals, and possibly spend one second for worthless leftist intelligentsia.
But I must admit that at the time I could not fathom why this incident happened. All the same, 15 months later, due to my contacts with postgraduate classmates in Political Science, the reason for this suicide was revealed to me quite easily. Simply, it was a natural circumstance. Such were those days of the ideologically leftist lunatics, such was the extreme focalization on absurd ‘thinkers’ and ignorant ‘intellectuals’, and such were the incommensurately high expectations of all these fools, that I conclusively realized that the entirely failed realm of anti-USSR (anti-Soviet) and anti-US (anti-capitalist) European theoreticians was predestined to doom, pulling -in the process- Western Europe (as we called the capitalist part of the continent) to final extinction. In other words, I saw back in 1980-1981 the impasse that many attest in Europe nowadays; it was inevitable.
The paranoia of those days had impacted our distinguished professor too; if you search among Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s publications, books, lectures and public speeches, you will find many great essays and treatises about several czars and valuable presentations of the French-Russian relations; but if you check the dates, you will soon notice that they have all been published after 1991. It was a pity for us back in 1980, but it could not happen otherwise. She could certainly write at the time, as she finally did later, fascinating researches and comprehensive conclusions about Nicholas II, Alexander II, and Catherine II, but few people would read those books back in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.
Alexander II and his groundbreaking tenure are the key to understanding Russia before the Romanov, during the Soviet rule, and also today, but in 1980 most of the people and the students would feel that the brave imperial visionary was closer to Sargon of Akkad than to us! Such was the madness we lived in, and that’s why the people of my generation failed, the global situation deteriorated, and the entire world heads now to an unprecedented but well-deserved disaster. About:
X. Either Leonid Brezhnev or Ronald Reagan – or get lost!
Speaking and writing about Soviet Union at the time necessitated a bold character and guts; this is so, because there were only two positions that you could defend before triggering a ‘tollé’ (an outcry) against you! From one side, you had all the Communists and the PCF (parti communiste français), who routinely reproduced the endless volumes printed by the Academy of Sciences of USSR and supported blindly whatever Brezhnev and his associates would decide.
From the other side, you were constrained to face the dark nebula of anti-Soviet European leftists, socialists, social-democrats, Trotskyists, anarchists, nihilists and atheists, who were so pathetically ideologized, so foolishly unrealistic, and so absurdly outlandish that you could not help but wish them all the same abominable fate as that of the aforementioned miserable self-murderer. All those trivial and useless scoundrels detonated volumes of hatred and negativity, described as hypothetical problems facts that were not troublesome, and -overwhelmed by their enormous psychological complex of inferiority- reached to unprecedented levels of theoretical, ideological, pseudo-scientific, and bogus-intellectual delirium.
Cursed and pathetic figures, the likes of Max Weber, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor W. Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lucien Goldmann, Louis Althusser, Cornelius Castoriadis and many other nauseatingly defeatist faces, are the sole reason for all the problems standing in front of Europe, Africa and many other parts of the world today. But back in 1980 they constituted the ‘holy saints’ for mentally sick, psychologically abnormal, sentimentally dead, intellectually corrupt, and lazy students who had failed to understand first that not a shred of truth could possibly be found in the infernal texts of those petty ‘philosophers’ and second that they did not truly read, understand and appreciate all those texts, but they instantaneously accepted them beforehand only to obtain psychological support, socio-professional status, and economic privileges as ‘consecrated’ and ‘respected’ ‘followers of Adorno’, ‘admirers of Gramsci’, and ‘fans of Max Weber’. All this was disgustingly lowly but fake proletarian.
Opposite the aforementioned two standpoints, every liberal or conservative criticism of the USSR and of the European Left was automatically denounced as ‘betrayal of the labor class’, ‘petty bourgeoisie deviation’, ‘bloody imperialist exploitation’, ‘fascist reaction’ or even ‘feudal resurgence’. Last, the insults were culminating with the following words: ‘bigot’, ‘pietist’ or ‘Russian émigré’. So, it took strong courage and real guts for Hélène Carrère d’Encausse to launch a new, modest but realist, objective (as much as possible), and balanced approach and school of Sovietology. It would even be accurate to state that she created the discipline in France.
XI. How the Jadid Intellectuals impacted the formation of the Hélène Carrère d’Encausse School of Sovietology
Technically, Carrère d’Encausse’s approach must be categorized as belonging to the ‘totalitarian school’, namely all the Western academics who viewed the October Revolution as a historical accident and the Soviet state as a form of totalitarianism. She certainly does not make part of the ‘revisionist school’ that attempted to refute, cancel or condition the arguments made by the opposite school.
Although in her books, she may momentarily give the impression of being a political scientist and astute commentator, Carrère d’Encausse was a historian, and to this testifies her thesis. It was therefore normal for her to see things in perspective and to introduce new parameters to the academic discourse about the Soviet Union, notably the ethnic identity, the cultural integrity, the spirituality, and the religious affiliation.
Having learned Turkish to work on a vast documentation that her professor and mentor Maxime Rodinson guided her to find, having studied the texts of the great Uzbek Jadidist intellectual and scholar Abdurauf Fitrat (عبد الرؤوف فطرت; Абдурауф Фитрат; 1886-1938), and having understood what was at stake in Central Asia for either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse knew very well what and when to put on the table for discussion. Her approach was superior to that of many others, because it was at the same time systematic, realist, serious and comprehensive. About:
XII. Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse
Of course, she had the advantage to have also lived at a time when major statesmen like Charles de Gaulle were constantly giving the tuning note (‘donner le la’) to all the rest, specialists or not. But she was also a perspicacious researcher, and therefore she carefully noted that the illustrious French general and statesman never called the USSR with any of the country’s various appellations; to him, Moscow was always ‘Russia’ – either imperial or soviet. And this is what came to surface with her ‘L’Empire éclaté’.
Carrère d’Encausse was proud to say in one of her recent interviews that the man who welcomed her at the Sciences Po (where she also studied) was none else than Georges Pompidou (1911-1974), the former President of France; but before being elected in the presidency of his country with 58% (1969), Pompidou was the French Prime Minister who faced and vanquished the notorious May 1968 rebellion. And yet, Pompidou had never been elected before his appointment as prime minister (1962), having only been a close associate of General de Gaulle, a professor of French Literature in Sorbonne University, and the PDG (CEO) of the Rothschild Bank (1956-1958).
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse – “À Sciences po, l’homme qui m’a interrogée était Georges Pompidou”
It was therefore only normal for my former professor to conclude that the soviet system had failed to find and implement updates, introduce constructive criticism, and initiate changes that would enable the vast country to cope with the various international socioeconomic developments; as long as the Soviet Union was not a sealed off territory and Moscow maintained commercial relations with other states, it would be imperative for the USSR to renovate accordingly.
XIII. Soviet Union, Spirituality, Religion and Eschatology
I mentioned spirituality earlier; this was entirely absent throughout Soviet Union, at least across the society and the government. The state was entirely composed by partisans who were ‘convinced’ that man was an entirely material entity, because ‘there was no spiritual universe’ and, as Lenin had said, thought ‘is’ the supreme function of the material world.
There were certainly psychics, astrologers, and many clairvoyants in the USSR, and many of them were consulted by the ruling elite of the Communist Party, but their abilities, skills, activities, energies and vibrations were believed to merely be the yet unstudied part of the material universe; it was thought that, once these fields would be duly explored and fully assessed, they would turn out to be new scientific disciplines.
Far from the fooled society and the faithless rulers, spiritual life was the deep, lifelong experience of several individuals, who happened to be indiscriminately Shaman, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish or other; worshipping God does not really demand public space. Even more importantly, it does not demand seclusion and anachoretism or asceticism. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse knew this fact very well. As spirituality is a phenomenon that makes people focus on the spiritual universe and quite often disregard the material world, it was normal for every objective observer to expect that the October Revolution was too tiny an event to possibly eliminate spirituality.
Spirituality is personal, but religion is institutional; as such, religion was almost uprooted in the USSR, despite the fact that Stalin finally started to scale back the anti-religious campaign in 1941, as he needed the moral support of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Great Patriotic War (WW II). Things improved after the meeting Stalin had with the three top clerics of Soviet Union on 5th September 1943. All the same, 35 years later, it would still be absurd to expect things to change in the vast country only due to a religious revival; the Church was closely controlled by the administration. About:
The Russian Orthodox Church during the Great Patriotic War
Pope Benedict XVI is greeted by Gabriel de Broglie, Helene Carrere d’Encausse and Jean Leclant, members of French Institute, during a visit to the French Institute in Paris.
However, there were few peripheral nations from where a possible reversal, originating from a religious revival, could be initiated: Georgia, Armenia, and Poland. At this point, I have to state for the readers, who happen not to know the biographical details of the deceased academician, that she was of Georgian and Russian / German origin (from her mother side); her paternal grandfather was a Georgian statesman of the Russian Empire, whereas her father was Georges Zourabichvili (Георгий Зурабишвили/გიორგი ზურაბიშვილი; 1898-1944), a philosopher, economist, and taxi driver émigré, who was later considered to be collaborator with the German Occupation forces and then abducted and lost in September 1944. This means that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, who was stateless (‘apatride’/’без гражданства’) for the first 21 years of her life, having been born Zourabichvili, knew the Caucasus region directly, pertinently, and authoritatively.
The Western involvement in this region had caused many wars between the Ottomans, the Russians, and the Iranians. But due to the denomination of the Armenians and the Georgians, any new Western interference would not bring spectacular results. Contrarily, Poland could attract a major intrusion, because Poles are Catholics. In this case, the country would serve as tool of a destabilization effort that would target the USSR, which had always been considered as a major opponent by the Roman Catholic Church, even more so because the atheist Soviet state stood on a territory that was never considered as duly Christianized by the Catholic popes, according to what the Third Secret of Fatima reveals (Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary).
This affair extended the otherwise simple ‘religious concern’ for Poland to an apocalyptic ‘eschatological apprehension’ for Russia. Of course, although we all had an idea about the Fatima (Portugal) apparitions back in 1917 (which had already become known to Nicholas II little time before his, and his family’s, bloody and appalling execution), none of us took them seriously as far as USSR/Russia was concerned. All the same, the serious developments, which took place in Vatican (in 1978) and in Poland (in 1979), were closely monitored and adequately highlighted to us by our head of department.
XIV. John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Polish quagmire
Following the brief passage (26 August-28 September 1978) of the assassinated Albino Luciani Pope John Paul I from the ‘Holy See’ (Sancta Sedes / Святой Престол), the controversial election of Karol Józef Wojtyła (1920-2005) as pope John Paul II, which was not accepted as canonical and legitimate by the Sedevacantists and Archbishop Giuseppe Siri, caused vivid discussions due to his origin and because of the fact that the circumstances were bizarre for the much disputed election of a Pole as the Roman Catholic pope. About:
It was certainly a clear indication of degradation, if not degeneration, of the Soviet elite; the ‘old guard of Kremlin’ (namely Brezhnev, Kosygin, Suslov, Ustinov, Gromyko, Chernenko and Andropov) seemed unable to grasp the gravity of the moment and react immediately, resolutely and irrevocably. The result was that, few months only after his ‘election’, John Paul II asked the permission to visit the place where he was born. In fact, the game was lost. The papal visit took place in June 1979, and at this point, I have to herewith republish several paragraphs from a recently published article, which was written by a former American Ambassador to Vatican, only to demonstrate how clearly an astute reader can read in-between the lines of the text the otherwise invisible but extant traces of the anti-Soviet conspiracy.
The title of the article reads: “Nine Days that Sparked the U.S.-Holy See Partnership and Changed the World” (By Callista L. Gingrich, U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See). I herewith include two excerpts:
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From June 2-10, 1979, the Polish pontiff traveled across the nation of his birth, delivering more than 50 speeches, and inspiring a revolution of conscience that would transform Poland and reshape the spiritual and political landscape of the 20th century. Millions of Poles, crushed under the weight of Soviet tyranny, turned out to see the Holy Father. On the first day of his pilgrimage, in Warsaw’s Victory Square, Pope John Paul II declared, “There can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map!”»
«…
Ronald Reagan was elated. At the time, he hosted a popular radio show and dedicated numerous broadcasts to John Paul II’s historic pilgrimage. “It has been a long time since we’ve seen a leader of such courage and such uncompromising dedication to simple morality,” Reagan said.
A few months later in November of 1979, the former Governor of California announced his candidacy for President of the United States. Soon after taking office, the President requested a meeting with the Pope.
The two leaders met in Vatican City in 1982, and it was then that President Reagan asked Pope John Paul II when he thought Eastern Europe would be free from Soviet domination. When the Pope responded, “In our lifetime,” the President took his hand and asked the Pope that together they make it happen.»
The above lines show that the fall of Soviet Union is not merely a Mikhail Gorbachev affair, and that the intention to spread chaos, disorder, wars, moral depravity, and disastrous deterioration of the level of life -by means of fake promises and in the name of the nonsensical terms ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and the rest of the Western world’s evil jargon- existed already in the minds of various groups of power in Western Europe and North America.
It is noteworthy that Wojtyla’s hypocritical and malignant visit to Poland antedates the early strikes undertaken by the Solidarity ‘movement’. So, every Soviet reaction against evil initiatives undertaken by the Anti-Christian West was indeed two steps behind the developments. Thinking retrospectively, an observer may eventually suggest today that Wojciech Jaruzelski’s appointment as Chairman of the Council of Ministers (11 February 1981) should have taken place already before the Gdansk Agreement was formalized (31 August 1980); however, this is quite naïve and very wrong. Jaruzelski’s nomination should have taken place immediately after the ridiculous election of the Polish Anti-pope, and in addition, it should have resolutely and permanently blocked any perspective of papal visit to Poland. About:
In other words, the only way for Soviet Union to survive was to up the ante, and this was then very clear to my eyes. I was not anymore a Communist at the time; in fact, I had accepted that ideology, with the strict exception of its atheistic / materialistic part, for one year (i.e. 1975-1976), and then rejected it. However, a person with moral standards cannot possibly be a sectarian; consequently, he does not need to be a Communist in order to abhorrently disapprove of the US evildoing against the USSR. There is absolutely no Manichaeistic (or dualistic) reality in the realm of politics, states and governments, and only an idiot would believe that the US gangsters are ‘Christian’ and ‘good’, and that the atheistic governments represent the ‘focus of evil’, as per the well-known but ludicrous expression of the grotesque former US president Ronald Reagan.
What was the main mistake in the Soviet policy-making and propaganda? They did not understand that they denounced the US and the Western world in terms that were comprehensible or valid only to them (to the Soviet elite) and not to others. Quite contrarily, they should have identified the reasons for which the US and the other colonial states of the Western world were unacceptable, abhorrent, and also repugnant to others (Africans, Asiatics, Latin Americans, etc.), and they should have decried them accordingly.
The Soviet elite was making a propaganda war against the West, utilizing theories and ideologies instead of strikingly focusing on the down-to-earth reality, which would have offered them the most convincing elements of their anti-Western propaganda. In other words, the West was not contemptible because the theory of Marxism-Leninism defined so, but because numerous, real facts supported this conclusion.
To offer an example in the case of Poland, the pathetic and worthless Yuri Andropov should have identified the final target of Solidarity and he should have therefore warned the Poles that, instead of driving them back to the Christian faith, the secret guides of that execrable movement would impose the ‘freedom’ of prostitution, incest, homosexuality, fornication, and drugs throughout their country; many documentary movies from the abominable Woodstock Music and Art Fair (1969) should have been widely popularized to plainly reveal the true, pseudo-Christian, and execrable face of the lawless and valueless Western world. Even worse, the so-called Christian clergy of the West should have been accused for not campaigning against the Woodstock contamination in their own country in the first place.
But, quite unfortunately, this is the permanent error of every kind of sectarianism: you must never evaluate the ‘other’ as per your measures, standards and criteria, but according to his principles, values and virtues; and Marxism-Leninism had already become a sort of sectarianism in the USSR.
Most of my classmates were anti-Soviet, hawkish idiots, who confused Political Science with politics, and interstate relations with hypocritical and silly propaganda.
It is certainly to the credit of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse that she never allowed the enthusiastic anti-Russianism of our German, American and Polish classmates to affect our judgment and evaluation of the overall situation; it was clear that she was consciously educating future ambassadors, statesmen and diplomats, who would have to take into consideration the weight of History, many other parameters, and the bilateral relations in depth in order to compose. This standpoint was also obvious in her books; she was even criticized for not being an outspoken negator of the USSR. The following book review of one of her earlier published books is an example:
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, L’Union Soviétique de Lénine à Staline, 1917-1953 [compte-rendu] sem-linkGeorges Mond
Immediately after the election of Ronald Reagan (4 November 1980), it was very clear to her that the détente was over, and this was what our professor immediately conveyed to us. The news shocked many of our classmates, who thought that this situation would last for long, whereas others were jubilant; but I was frozenly indifferent. From the heights of Sargonid Assyria or Nabonid Babylonia, which constituted my main field of specialization, my vivid concern, and my basic criteria, every Reagan and every Brezhnev looked to me as an insignificant mosquito. My good professor had actually reconfirmed my inclination repeatedly; if she forced herself to see things from distance, why shouldn’t I do the same?
‘Petite fille du Caucase’ (granddaughter of Caucasus), Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was always able to take the distance and observe from far. Physically, she was in Paris; but her academic and intellectual outpost was at the peak of Elbrus. She was able to discern crucial issues and unnoticed dimensions that no other specialists were able to timely identify – let alone incorporate in their conclusions. The viewpoint from the peak of Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus range of mountains must be very serene. The late academician was confident that, if they wanted, Georgians, Azeris, Armenians and other Caucasus nations could have -all- lived peacefully within one multi-ethnic state instead of mercilessly killing one another.
This was apparently a rightful conclusion, if one takes into consideration the Special Transcaucasian Committee (9 March 1917), the Transcaucasian Commissariat (11 November 1917), the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (22 April – 28 May 1918), and all the events that took place before the Ottoman and the German involvement in the region. About:
The title of a tour schedule organized by the Connaissance & Partage Association reads ‘Cocasse Caucase’; echoing the name of the mountain, this adjective means ‘funny’ in French. But Caucasus is not funny. It is serious, tense, intense, and grave; and so was the presence of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse: sober, terse and austere. She was able to take her colleagues and assistants to a higher level of understanding, widen the horizons of her readers, and enrich the knowledge of her students with valuable data that they would need considerable time and a certain dose of luck to eventually find. About: https://www.connaissanceetpartage.net/new-blog/2020/11/26/caucasse
She was much demanded in politics (member of the European Parliament for the period 1994-1999), science (elected to seat 14 of the Académie Française, one of the five sections of the celebrated Institut de France on 13th December 1990; voted for the position of Permanent Secretary on 21 October 1999), and public debates (with an extraordinary record of interviews and participation in TV programs), but she always found the time to come up with new, outstanding books, groundbreaking lectures, and pertinent comments about socio-political, linguistic, bilateral and international affairs.
Despite her undeniable Georgian origin (her cousin being Salome Zourabichvili, the incumbent President of Georgia), and notwithstanding her evident congruence with the Russian mindset and mentality, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was indeed a Parisian original. Although she became French only in 1950 at the age of 21, she dedicated herself to the vocation of bringing her own country and that of her ancestors together – and with spectacular success.
– Condolences by President Salome Zourabichvili on the Twitter –
«A la peine du départ de ma cousine germaine se mêle la fierté de son exemple. Historienne de renommée internationale, qui fut également mon professeur à Sciences Po. Femme d’avant garde qui aura, du haut de la Coupole, démontré à tant de jeunes filles que tout leur est possible».
A la peine du départ de ma cousine germaine se mêle la fierté de son exemple. Historienne de renommée internationale, qui fut également mon professeur à Sciences Po. Femme d’avant garde qui aura, du haut de la Coupole, démontré à tant de jeunes filles que tout leur est possible.
— Salome Zourabichvili (@Zourabichvili_S) August 6, 2023
«Issues d’une famille géorgienne ayant combatttu et fui le totalitarisme soviétique, nous avions en héritage une même reconnaissance envers la France et une même conviction européenne qui porta l’une au Parlement européen et l’autre à la Présidence de la Géorgie».
Issues d’une famille géorgienne ayant combatttu et fui le totalitarisme soviétique, nous avions en heéitage une meme reconnaissance envers la France et une même conviction européenne qui porta l’une au Parlement européen et l’autre à la Présidence de la Géorgie.
— Salome Zourabichvili (@Zourabichvili_S) August 6, 2023
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With Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, one was certain that he would learn the truth about the essential of a topic. She was committed to displaying raw material, to making all the data available to the students, and to evaluating the synthesis that we were able to make. Her lies -or to put it better her untruths- concerned basically the form of the narrative or the description of a situation. But it was easy for a shrewd student to discover that this was rather her break time consumed in literary description and not her ordinary, scrupulous work of academic analysis.
To underscore the apparent lack of reassessments, amendments and rearrangements in the Soviet Union that were badly needed for the country’s survival, she used to often speak about «les septuagénaires et les octogénaires», who ruled the world’s leading communist state. The underlying fact was correct indeed; in many aspects Soviet Union was almost ‘archaic’. But the statement itself was deceitful; in 1980, Brezhnev was 74 years old, Suslov 78, Gromyko 71, Chernenko 69, and Andropov 66. But why on earth should the age of the ruling elite of the USSR be truly a matter of concern, when Ronald Reagan was 69, François Mitterrand 64, James Callaghan 68, and Willy Brandt 67? Of course, our professor certainly recalled that Charles de Gaulle returned to power in France (in 1958) at the age of 68 and served as president until 1969 (when 79), Konrad Adenauer was in office until 1963 (when 87), whereas Alcide De Gasperi was prime minister until 1953 (when 72). Furthermore, Winston Churchill served as prime minister until 1955 (when 81), Amintore Fanfani was appointed as prime minister in 1982 (for a fourth time) at the age of 74. However, by duly utilizing the age of the Soviet rulers, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was trying to basically impress young audience.
Serving as adviser to many presidents, the granddaughter of Caucasus could do and actually did many good things for the benefit of the French-Russian relations and to the advantage of France; European Union (then ‘European Communities’) could also capitalize thereon. As she was sought after by the French political elite, she did her best in every sense, but she did not take any political decision as she was never a minister, prime minister or president. And this was the problem for France; because to mostly benefit from her advice, understanding, and perspective, the various elected governments and presidents of France should have taken very different decisions on many other topics, which would affect and also be affected by the Franco-Russian relationship.
For France and Europe, it is as simple as that: you cannot possibly imagine having good relations and strong partnership with Russia as long as you don’t follow the example of Charles de Gaulle against UK, NATO and the US. And it is so, either we live in 1965 or in 2023.
No French president could possibly utilize Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s pertinent advice, as long as he had not taken in advance a long series of measures to restore continental (or if you prefer ‘landmass’) concord and integration and to keep the various maritime powers out of Eurasia. This is the task of Russia/USSR to do, as far as Russian/Soviet territory is concerned; similarly, this is the imperative duty for France, Germany, China, India, Iran, Turkey, Italy, Spain and several other countries to carry out respectively. But to do this, the French political class should first uproot the parasitic weeds and remove the toxic pro-UK, pro-US and pro-NATO elements by any possible means. There are no foreign policy perspectives before the clearance of internal enemies. All the problems that France faces now are due to the absurd and calamitous way the country was governed after 1969, and more particularly after 1981. But an erudite academician and a formidable connoisseur is not a determined statesman.
XVI. The European convictions and the pragmatism of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse
I got my DEA (Diplôme d’études approfondies) in July 1981; the extra part of studies that I wanted to add to my Orientalist formation was completed, and after 3 years of studies in Paris, I moved to London, only to continue next year to Brussels and then to Muenster. Due to Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, many of my convictions were fully confirmed, my horizons greatly broadened, and my perception of the Afro-Eurasiatic continental unity finally born. Only after 1981, I started realizing that borders mean truly nothing; this definitely proved to be indispensable for my life and explorations in the following years, when I moved to the Orient.
The formation that was given to all of us was certainly Western, but thanks to my Orientalist background and my explorations in Eastern Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and other countries, I gradually converted it to the new terms and codes of comprehension that I was then creating in order to better assess the objects of my researches. The education that all my professors in Greece, France, England, Belgium and Germany gave to me and to all of my classmates was good but only up to a certain extent; I confirmed my opinion in Israel. I did the same in Syria and Iraq where I realized that the education given to locals, who had studied in Europe, was in reality ‘bon pour l’Orient’, i.e. a unilateral viewpoint that served the interests of few states in Western Europe, and those of their academic and intellectual elites.
But this education was too little or too erroneous for someone, who intended to objectively assess and comprehend the human genius in its entirety, the history of Mankind in its originality and the living spirit of Man in its integrity. After several years of trouble, self-contradictory opinions, and premature judgments, some time in the late 1980s, while in Iran, I realized that ultimately the academic education offered in Western Europe was ‘bon pour l’Occident’ – only!
It is not a matter of deliberate falsehood, but of partly examination of the topic; having no spherical perspective on a research topic, you condemn yourself in the position of a unilateral observer, who has no multiple viewpoints on his study subject. You cannot possibly evaluate correctly anything if you happen to view it as a parameter of your own interests. The French-Russian relationship has to be viewed from Moscow’s standpoint and from Paris’ point of view. If you don’t view this topic or any other issue in this manner and you apply a one-viewpoint approach to your study, your conclusions will be wrong, because simply you will have become, even without understanding it, part of the problem.
I kept reading books and interviews of my late professor, while living in different countries in Asia and Africa; with the advent of the Internet, I also had the chance to watch many of her speeches and lectures. She certainly gave a new dimension to her career by ‘forgetting’ Soviet Union and delving into the Russian past – well, mainly the 18th and the 19th centuries. But she always reproduced the same pattern that could not allow her to go beyond the level of ‘borders’.
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s Russia is a truthful, genuine Russia that exists only for the interests of the French vision of this world! Is that an extraordinary assessment of mine? Not at all! Read some paragraphs from her books or watch some of her online interviews! The same approach is everywhere: during five centuries, the French-Russian relations existed only for France to tame and civilize Russia! After the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, speaking to a journalist about Sergey Lavrov, she described him as ‘very civilized’! Oh! Really?
– Who provided her with a special counter, a civilo-meter if you want, so that she measures every now and then the degree of civilization of the Russians and the others?
This incredible arrogance and absurd degree of Franco-centrism or Euro-centrism unfortunately does not constitute a personal issue of the deceased academician. It is an inherent part of the Western European education and it can be attested over the past centuries in all the major colonial countries. The personal problem of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse is that her multilingual and multicultural past, family traditions, culture and knowledge proved to be weak opposite her overwhelming (I should say ‘excessive’) degree of Francization. Despite her undeniable advantages and in-depth knowledge, she functioned like a clerical assistant or a high functionary of the state administration. This partiality reduced her effectiveness and limited her pragmatism.
Although she repeatedly stated that the world decisions are not taken any more in Europe or the West world, which is very correct and very exact, she failed to attack and destroy the delusions of all those who undeservedly accused her (and Hubert Védrine) for anti-Americanism. This is not a joke! Read here the typical nonsense or the folly that is being published in France and in other European countries to get an idea:
La pieuvre. Pourquoi le régime de Poutine doit être défait
An even worse sample of absurd disinformation you can find here:
Despite the fact that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse repeatedly admitted in her interviews that it is up to Moscow to decide where Russia belongs, i.e. either in Asia (with China, India, Iran, etc.) or in Europe (with the ‘civilized world’!), she failed to explain to her compatriots three crucial topics:
First, if the entire political-academic-intellectual establishment in Moscow finally comprehends that Russia has always been an Oriental state, this will be the first defeat of a multilateral Western European scheme systematically perpetrated against Russia for no less than 550 years by means of gradual Occidentalization, cultural identity elimination, and socio-economic subordination.
Second, Russia has always been an Oriental state, either this reality was perceived as such by all parts of the Russian Imperial, Soviet and Republican elites or not.
Third, if the entire Eurasiatic alliance, Russia included, appears as a coherently established organization at the international level in the years ahead, the European Union, France included, will have to either adhere to the new superpower or simply disintegrate.
Of course, I am fully conscious of what my late professor’s answer would have been, had I had the chance to discuss with her this topic any time recently! She would find a typical article produced by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and she would respond to me, saying:
– This is not what I only describe! This is what the Russians say about themselves in the first place!
And she would have been right! But I never pretended that this situation concerned only her approach. The problem exists also in the Russian perception of themselves, after many centuries of Western interference and compact effort to westernize Russia. Example (dating back to 2016s):
But, again, I have to admit that these major issues demand statesmanship decision and do not depend on academic advice; in addition, as leading historian and political scientist, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse offered either in-depth presentation of the past or pragmatic evaluation of current circumstances. However, she never attempted to spearhead dramatic changes at the international level; in this regard, she was quite different from her famous ‘heroine’, Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (Александра Михайловна Коллонтай; 1872-1952), to whom she dedicated her last research and book. About:
Former French President of the French Republic Jacques Chirac and Helene Carrere-d’EncausseState Banquet at the palace of Elysee. Helene Carrere d ‘Encausse and the president Chirac in Paris, France on November 20, 2006Jean-Marie Rouart, Valery Giscard D’Estaing and Helene Carrere d’Encausse in Paris, France on December 16, 2004
XVII. The limits of historiography: a History of leaders and governance or a History of peoples and culture?
Great historian is not the one who writes many books and lengthy articles or comes up with the publication of new textual sources, fresh interpretations, resourceful conceptualizations, inventive contextualization of historical events and processes, groundbreaking approaches, and valuable rectifications of earlier errors, distortions, omissions and oversights; great historian is the one whose publications also offer the chance to discuss general issues of History in the light of the superb manner he/she reconstructs and represents a moment of the past throughout one of his/her texts.
Historiography is not History; it is merely a reconstruction, namely a representation of facts, circumstances, conditions, situations or even processes and developments over a certain span of time. Either you write one day or one millennium after a battle, what you write is never ‘History’; it is historiography. Of course, if you share a life experience as a real testimony or if you rely on authoritative documentation and key sources, writing little time after an event happened, your text will be considered as a ‘historical source’, whereas if you examine the historical sources about an event, your text will be classified as ‘bibliography’. However, this is a minor differentiation; the major distinction is between History and historiography; History is exclusively what happened. Even the Annals of Sargon II of Assyria or Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico constitute ‘historiography’, not History.
But by means of a forceful manner of reconstruction of the historical past (or of representation of the historical events and processes) a great historian impacts other historians who may even be specializing in other fields of History. This is due to the fact that, after the adequate completion of the documentation and the comprehension processes, the reconstruction of the data involves intellectual effort, mental endeavor, and a great deal of imagination, more particularly in the identification of data interconnection.
Assessing how each piece of data is (or may be) interconnected with another is a work that can be done by every historian; but there is an enormous difference in this regard, due to the fact that there are scholars, who proceeding mechanically end up writing a dead narrative, and others, who -ingeniously feeling human life in all the pieces of data that they have collected- manage to come up with a most vivacious narrative that fully reflects the events. After all and put in few words, History is inherent and integral part of Life. But only the great historians reach this level of reconstruction. And Hélène Carrère d’Encausse repeatedly demonstrated that she was feeling the life of the environment that she reconstructed in her books. After all, it is the charisma of the great historians to know very well where the limits stand; and by this, I mean the invisible boundaries between historiography and literature.
Reading Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s books, one gets the impression that she wrote a History made by leaders, administrations, elites, structures of governance, and series of successive decisions that impacted one another, always bringing the respective consequences. And this is true! My late professor viewed History mostly as a matter of states and ‘political power’; she kept using the term even when speaking about Soviet Union whereas there was no politics at all in that country, due to the fact that the dictatorship of proletariat -in and by itself- is the living rejection of politics. She was at the antipodes of the renowned Soviet-Russian historian Lev Gumilev (Лев Николаевич Гумилёв; 1912-1992), who was her senior by 17 years.
Strong advocate of Eurasianism, theoretician of the ethnogenesis phenomenon, great conceptual thinker who invented the concept of passionarity, adept of historiosophy, the son of Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova portrayed History in an entirely different manner, giving the impression that History is composed by societies of people with venerated traditions, moral values, folk tales, narrative history, age-old habits, heroic legends, distinct idiosyncrasy, traditional sports, vivid spirituality, daily expression of piety, strong feeling of sacredness, rich material culture, genuine sense of communality, behavioral authenticity, imaginative impulse, unquestionable equality among the society members, strong attachment to their identity, adamant respect for their integrity, unconditional rejection of any corrupt attitude, concept or idea, and uncompromising commitment to community/society preservation.
In this case, there are no ‘leaders’; there is no bureaucracy; the administrative affairs are fast expedited; any notion of state is worthless or evil; and the male members of the community meet to decide on equal basis about every matter. They all fight together, they all migrate together, and they all resettle together. No bravery can possibly qualify for preferential treatment or ‘leadership’, because bravery is the common task for all men, and there is no exception in this regard. On the other hand, all the heroic deeds are immortalized as legends in the oral culture, which is far more valued than worthless written paperwork that can contain lies to confuse posterior generations. This is a History of peoples and culture, because for the historian, who has this vision of the historical developments, even in cases of kingdoms, empires, temples, emperors and high priests, it is culture and civilization that impact their decision-making and not vice versa.
The two schools are irreconcilable like oil and water; however there is a determinate distinction, which is intrinsic to the two diametrically opposed geostrategic models. There cannot be triumphant Eurasianism without a History of peoples and culture.
There cannot be effective Atlanticism without History of leaders and governance. However, all people know that ‘Atlantis’ sank every time; it is irrevocably inevitable.
Despite her attachment to France, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse realized this factor. That is why she tried to preserve the invisible bridges between Paris and Moscow; with all her intellectual force and outstanding eloquence.
Pre-publication of chapter XXVI of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXIV, XXV and XXVI constitute the Part Ten {Fallacies about the Times of Turanian (Mongolian) Supremacy in terms of Sciences, Arts, Letters, Spirituality and Imperial Universalism} of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Until now, 9 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 10th (out of 33). A list of the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the end of this chapter.
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Imam Reza Mosque, Mashhad – NE Iran
Timur was not a monstrous murderer as the Western historiographers depicted him in their vicious and pernicious, and therefore absolutely worthless and totally untrustworthy, narratives. Historical texts written by Western European authors about Timur reflect only the impotency of the hypocritical, sacrilegious, pseudo-Christian, petty kings of Europe. Like Genghis Khan, Timur shared the traditional Eastern Turanian vision of Tengrist Universalism; sectarian, ethnic, and other divisions or divisive lines were meaningless, barbarian, and inhuman to him. As per his worldview, these divisions represented only the interference of Evil in the human world. Contrarily to most of the then world’s kings and to all of today’s criminal politicians and statesmen, Timur did not engage in battles and wars for his personal, tribal, ethnic or national material benefit, but for the overall, true progress of the faithful Mankind.
Beyond being a grandmaster in chess, Timur was a great mystic, a knowledgeable interlocutor, and an emperor who highly evaluated erudition, literature, philosophy, arts, architecture and sciences. If today people get confused about Timur’s religious views, this is not due to an eventual misinterpretation of historical sources, but to the present confusion between spirituality and religion. It is enough for someone to associate spirituality with religion in order to totally misperceive entire historical eras. Consequently, Western scholars have nowadays difficulty to define whether Timur was a Sunni or a Shia; this is only normal, because there are no Sunni or Shia. This forged division cannot apply in Timur’s life. In fact, like every spiritually alive man, Timur was a secular monarch. Historically, he continued the tradition of Harun al-Rashid’s Abbasid Caliphate, the practices of the Seljuk sultans, and the modus operandi of the Ilkhanate: his empire was an absolutely secular state.
Today, the term ‘secular state’ is confused with the paranoia of the post-WW II world, but in reality the ‘secular state’ has nothing to do with atheism, agnosticism, academic elitism, sacrilegious intellectualism, rationalism, materialism, hedonism, pan-sexism, and all the evil modern bogus-concepts (politics, democracy, multi-partite system, human rights, etc.), which have been associated with the supposedly ‘secular’ societies of today’s decayed and putrefied Western world. In honorable distinction from, and in total contrast with, other modern states, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey (more specifically, the 1923 Constitution and the period until 1938) had nothing to do with today’s pseudo-secular Western societies, which in reality are strictly religious, yet scrupulously masqueraded, states with Satanism as secretively and tyrannically imposed dogma.
In Timur’s empire, there was sheer distinction between spirituality and religion, and every person was allowed to believe the religious dogma that he chose; religious authorities of all doctrines had the freedom to perform the rites and fulfill the cults of their faith; and there was no interference of the imperial administration in these activities. Many Western scholars attempted to tarnish Timur’s fame by holding him responsible for the gradual decline of Nestorian Christianity, Buddhism and Manichaeism in Central Asia, Siberia and Mongolia; that is totally misplaced.
Neither Genghis Khan nor Timur were ‘personally’ responsible for this fact. Timur did not tolerate any sectarian act of violence and discrimination. The reasons for which these three religions disappeared in the aforementioned regions have nothing to do with imperial decisions of any sort; they are totally unrelated to the Genghisid and Timurid empires. As a matter of fact, Buddhism was already present in the eastern provinces of Achaemenid Iran. Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity appeared during the Sassanid times.
These three religions had followers among several nations that lived across the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, and the mountainous ranges between China, Indus River valley, and parts of Siberia (Aramaeans, Eastern Iranians, Sogdians, Turanians, Khotanese, etc.). However, the process of their disappearance was complex, gradual and slow, covering ca. 700 years (750-1450); first, the Islamic advance towards Central Asia and the Indus River valley (middle 7th c. to middle 8th c. CE) was detrimental to some nations, notably the Sogdians, who were terribly decimated.
Second, the proliferation of mystical orders, spiritual systems, dissident movements, eschatological-messianic concepts, theological schools, soteriological groups, and literary-poetical reassessments of the historical, pre-Islamic past produced an abundance of attractive alternatives for all the nations of the aforementioned diverse regions (over the period between the 8th c. and the 11th c.).
Third and more important, the overwhelming migrations that took place across Asia between the 11th c. and the 15th c. totally changed the landscape between Central Europe and Eastern Siberia; the newly arrived nomads usually accepted concepts of Islam that suited best their traditions of Tengrism and Shamanism. Then, Nestorians, Buddhists and Manichaeans proceeded to the East (i.e. China), since it was well known that settled communities of their coreligionists existed there too and they lived in peace.
Timur met many leading mystics, scholars, scientists, theologians, architects and poets of his times; his meeting with Hafez (Khwaja Shams-ud-Din Muhammad; 1315-1390), the great Iranian poet from Shiraz, was commemorated for centuries among Islamic rulers and erudite scholars, because their conversation bears witness to Timur’s ostensible ability to appreciate wit, intellect, self-sarcasm, and modesty.
Manuscript miniature depicting the encounter between Timur and Ibn Khaldun
Two pages from a manuscript of Ibn Khaldun’s al Muqaddimah
16th c. copy of Hafez’s Divan with fighting scene
Ceiling decoration of the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz
Hafez’s Mausoleum, Shiraz
Timur met Ahmad ibn Arabshah (1389-1450) during the siege of Damascus; he saved him (along with many other scholars) and then sent him to Samarqand; later, the Damascene author returned to Damascus and proceeded to Edirne / Adrianople, the Ottoman capital at the time; there he composed a voluminous historical description of Timur’s deeds and conquests (Aja’ib al-Maqdur fi Nawa’ib al-Taymur: The Wonders of Destiny of the Ravages of Timur).
One can however instantly understand why Ahmad ibn Arabshah presented a negative image of Timur, who had saved his life: writing while you are at the Ottoman payroll can never be a guarantee for objective description and impartial narrative. Had Ahmad ibn Arabshah written a true and unbiased ‘Tarikh’, the Ottoman sectarian theologians and the rancorous courtiers of Mehmed I and of Murat II would have burned the manuscripts. The Ottoman hatred of Timur and the Timurids lasted until the demise of the Caliphate – only to the detriment of the Ottoman family.
The major and most trustworthy historical biographies and sources for the life, the conquests, and the deeds of Timur are Nizam ad-Din Shami’s Zafar nameh (ظفرنامه, Book of Victory), Sharif al-Din Ali Yazdi’s Zafar nameh, and Abu Taleb Husayni’s Malfuzat-e Timuri and the associated appendix Tuzokat (which is basically the Persian translation of an earlier manuscript written in Chagatai Turkic and found in Yemen; Abu Taleb Husayni presented his work to the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in 1637).
The conquest of Baghdad by Timur depicted on the miniature of a manuscript of in Sharif al-Din Ali Yazdi’s Zafar nameh
Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi with Muhammad Amuli; folio from the Majalis al-Ushaq of Kamal al-Din Gazurgahi, which was written and decorated in Shiraz around 1560
The phenomenon that Western scholars describe as Timurid ‘Renaissance’ consists in a serious misperception of the entire historical period; the irrelevant terminology was invented to project Western concepts onto the Islamic world. In general, the term ‘Renaissance’ cannot apply either in the case where there is uninterrupted continuity or in the manifestation of newly invented concepts, ideas, forms, styles or rhythms. Truly, the 2nd half of the 14th century and the entire 15th century were a period of fully-fledged spiritual, academic, scientific, literary, artistic, architectural, cultural, intellectual, and artisan creativity and dynamism across almost all Islamic lands.
However, this phenomenon does not have any trait of revival or rebirth of an earlier experience or condition. Quite contrarily, it consists in the culmination of the Islamic genius as manifested since the days of Abbasid Baghdad, Bayt al-Hikmah, Ferdowsi, Nizam al Mulk, and Nasir el-Din al Tusi. One may eventually express a rhetorical question like the following in order to fully demonstrate the inaccuracy of the Western neologism Timurid ‘Renaissance’:
– What was interrupted, terminated, dispersed, lost or forgotten as Islamic science, art, scholarship and craftsmanship in the days of Nasir al-Din al Tusi (1201-1274), only to restart, resume, and be rediscovered, revived and reborn at the time of Timur?
The answer is very simple: nothing!
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s works, explorations, studies, and astronomical tables and catalogues were continued in the works of Jamshid al-Kashi, Qadi Zadeh al Rumi (of Eastern Roman origin), and Ulugh Beg, Timur’s grandson, third successor, and astronomer emperor. There is an undisputed continuity from the Observatory of Maragheh to the Observatory of Samarqand, pretty much like there is an absolute continuity in Islamic science, academic life, and artistic creativity from Abbasid Baghdad to Timurid Samarqand.
Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad
Aerial view of Imam Reza shrine in 1976
The tomb of Imam Reza
And there was novelty! Timurid architecture, as manifested in Samarqand, Herat, Balkh, Turkistan {Kazakhstan; the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi (1093-1166) which was commissioned by Timur himself}, Mashhad (Goharshad Mosque, built in honor of Empress Goharshad, Shah Rukh’s royal consort), and elsewhere, may have several traits that date back to Seljuk times, and may well represent the next stage of evolution from Ilkhanate architecture. However, in reality, Timurid architecture consists in an entirely different and totally new Islamic style of architecture. With their characteristically elevated, fluted domes, with their deep niches, with their impressively raised iwans (vaulted gateways), with their very typical shabestans (underground spaces), with their innovative muqarnas (also known as honeycomb vaulting), and with their inscriptions on mosaic tiles, all the Timurid mosques, madrasas and mausoleums are unique of style and known for their rule of axial symmetry.
Goharshad Mosque, Mashhad
Goharshad tomb, Herat
High place of Timurid architecture is by definition the Registan esplanade at Samarqand, a vast public square with three astoundingly monumental universities; ‘madrasa’ at the time did not mean only ‘theological school’, because theology was only one of the numerous -more than 20- academic topics taught in the madrasas. The first madrasa built in Registan was the Ulugh Beg Madrasah (construction: 1417–1420); two centuries later, the Sher-Dor Madrasah (1619–1636) and the Tilya-Kori Madrasah (1646–1660) were built at the times of the Janid dynasty (established by descendants of the Khanate of Astrakhan) in exactly the same architectural style. Subsequently, Timurid architecture influenced architectural styles in the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman empires.
Registan Square, Samarqand
Ulugh Beg Madrasah: one of the three masterpieces of Timurid Architecture in Registan
Sher-Dor Madrasah, Registan
Tilya Kori Madrasah, Registan
Many irrelevant European scholars characterized the Turanian Timurid architecture as “Persian style”, but there is nothing ‘Persian’ in it. The enormous iwans may certainly be a reminiscence of the Parthian iwans, but Parthia was not ‘Persia’; quite contrarily, the Arsacid Empire of the Parthians was called ‘Iran’ and the Parthians were not ‘Persians’ but Turanians. Similar cases bear witness to the numerous colonial discriminatory abuses and to the academic, Indo-Europeanist racism.
Bibi-Khanym Mosque, Samarqand; it was built in 1399 by the Tamerlane’s favorite wife, Bibi-Khanym, in honor of his return from the war in India
Timur and Shah Rukh patronized the arts, improving the traditional Art of the Book, sponsoring scholars, scientists and artists, and demanding exquisite illustrations of manuscripts (miniatures). Manuscript illumination became then a highly revered art and several schools (styles) were distinguished in this regard; elements of Turanian, Central Asiatic, Iranian, and Chinese artistic traditions were then blended into a new style. The Timurids in general were remembered as benefactors of scholars, poets, artists, artisans, and architects. About:
Gur-i Emir Mausoleum, Samarqand, Shah Rukh’s headstone 3rd from the left
Tanka (silvr coin) of Shahrukh Mirza (Yazd mint)
Shah Rukh’s reign (1409-1447) is considered as the Golden Era of the Timurid Empire. He ruled over the largest part of Timur’s territory and only after his nephew Khalil Sultan (1405-1409) proved to be totally unable to reign. Timur’s western territories were lost because of the chaos caused by the conflicts between the Karakoyunlu and the Akkoyunlu and following the Karakoyunlu victory over Miran Shah and the Timurid army (1408). Shah Rukh preferred to rule in peace with his neighbors and this helped the scholarly, artistic, artisan and architectural activities that burgeoned in his empire. Shah Rukh created a solid base in Herat (today’s NW Afghanistan) where many Genghisid relatives of his royal consort Goharshad lived, as they were the local administrators.
Goharshad ranked below Shah Rukh’s other Genghisid wife, Malekat Aga. However, due to her family support, to her inclination for letters, arts and public works, and because of her sense of human relations, she became a considerable factor of her imperial husband’s success. As a matter of fact, Goharshad was the daughter of a notable Genghisid prince Giath al-Din Tarkan whose honorary title (Tarkan) was initially bestowed by Genghis Khan himself upon one of his ancestors. It is therefore only normal that, after Shah Rukh invaded Samarqand and was accepted as the final successor to his father by all, he transferred the imperial capital to Herat, leaving his son Ulugh Beg as governor of Samarqand.
Herat had been destroyed by Genghis Khan (1221) but rebuilt during the Ilkhanate; however, the magnificent edifices and architectural monuments erected there at the time of Shah Rukh and Goharshad made of the city one of the Islamic world’s most splendid capitals. The erection of the Musallah complex of Herat (1417), which involved mausoleums, madrasa, mosque and five minarets, is the most important among the many monuments patronized by Shah Rukh’s royal consort. The famous shrine of Gazur Gah (an 11th c. mystic who lived in Herat and is historically known as Khwaja Abd Allah) was also built (1425) under the imperial patronage of the Timurids. And the same is valid for Goharshad Mausoleum that was built (1438) as the tomb of Shah Rukh’s and Goharshad’s son, prince Baysunghur.
Perhaps the most impressive and most colorful monument commissioned by the imperial couple was the enormous Goharshad Mosque built in Mashhad (today’s NE Iran). With a 43 m high dome, with two 43 m high minarets, and with four iwans, the mosque was always considered as one of the most impressive and most beautiful monuments of Islamic architecture worldwide.
Patron of authors, explorers and erudite scholars, Shah Rukh benefitted from the great talent of Hafez Abru, who had first been one of Timur’s most favorite scholars and authors. Abdallah ben Lutfallah (as is the full name of Hafez Abru) accompanied Timur in several military campaigns and was present in all the imperial court feasts and symposia convened by Timur. After the death of the conqueror, he entered the service of Shah Rukh, who commissioned the elaboration of numerous historical and geographical opuses, notably
i. Dayl-e Zafar nameh ye-Shami (continuation of Nizam al-Din Shami’s biography of Timur for the period 1404-1405)
ii. Dayl-e Jame’ al-Tawarih (continuation of Rashid al-Din’s Universal History by an anonymous author who covered the period 1304-1335)
iii. Tarih-e Shah Rukh (History of the reign of Timur’s son until 1414; this text was later incorporated in other historical compilations by Hafez Abru)
iv. Tarih-e Hafez Abru, which is a Universal History and Geography commissioned by Shah Rukh in 1414 (originally it was scheduled to be the Farsi translation of selected geographical treatises earlier written in Arabic, but finally it became an original opus of historical geography); it also involved a map (British Library manuscript Ms. 1577) designed after the methods of the historical Balkh School of Cartography.
v. Majmu’a-ye Hafez-e Abru, i.e. a Universal History commissioned by Shah Rukh in 1418 in order to incorporate Bal’ami’s translation of Tabari’s Tarih to Farsi and Rashid al-Din’s Universal History, which was extended by Hafez Abru until 1393.
vi. Majma’ al Tawarih al Soltani, a Universal History until 1426, written for Shah Rukh’s son Baysunghur.
Shah Rukh established good diplomatic relations with Ming China by sending an imperial delegation to Beijing in 1419-1422. Member of the delegation was Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash, who was tasked to compose the official diary, which was not saved independently down to our times, but was largely incorporated in other historical opuses. As an official account, this text was highly evaluated and therefore translated to various Turkic languages in later periods. The Timurid delegation was received with imperial honor, traditional pomp, and great joy at the Ming court. Shah Rukh created an environment of stability and peace across Asia, systematically exchanging embassies and establishing good relations also with the Sultanate of Delhi (notably Khizr Khan), the Bengal Sultanate (and particularly with Shamsuddin Ahmad Shah), the Akkoyunlu, the Ottomans, the Turanian Ormuz kingdom in the Hormuz straits (then under Bahman Shah II), and even the Mamluks of Egypt.
As the Dravidian ruler (Samoothiri) of Calicut (in the presently occupied Deccan, in South ‘India’) encountered several Timurid officials who, while returning from the Sultanate of Bengal, anchored in his harbor, he decided to send an embassy to Herat. A Farsi-speaking Dravidian Muslim led the official delegation and impressed Shah Rukh, who subsequently dispatched a Timurid delegation to Calicut (Kozhikode; 1442-1443) under Abd al-Razzsaq Samarqandi (1413–1482); the scholar-diplomat wrote an extensive report of his mission that he later incorporated in his chronicle Maṭla’-e sa’dayn va maǰma’-e baḥrayn (the rise of the two auspicious constellations and the junction of the two seas). He thus offered insight into first, the small kingdom of Calicut and the local rulers (named Saamoothiri) and second, the Dravidian Vijayanagara kingdom, because the local king Deva Raya II invited Abd al-Razzsaq Samarqandi to his court.
Shah Rukh had however to fight several battles against the Karakoyunlu (in 1420, 1429 and 1434) and the Timurid army was victorious every time. However, since Shah Rukh did not inherit the brutality of his father, his victories did not solve the problem of the constantly rebellious Turkmen and the unstable situation in the western confines of the Iranian plateau, North Mesopotamia, South Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia continued during most of the 15th c. until the Akkoyunlu managed to achieve a decisive victory (1467) over the Karakoyunlu only to be later supplanted by the Safavid Empire (1501).
After Timur crushed the Hurufi rebellion in 1394, the secret Kabbalistic sect launched a subversive campaign of anti-Timurid hatred and evidently conspired against the empire by placing in the Timurid court several secret members who would be later mobilized against the imperial administration. In 1426, Shah Rukh risked his life in an assassination attempt; he survived and then undertook a great effort to uproot the evil secretive sect that promoted black magic practices by attributing numerical values to letters of the alphabet and then evoking spiritual potentates. Several modern scholars, who happen to be Kabbalists and Satanists, tried therefore to tarnish the fair name of Shah Rukh and to distort the truth by accusing him of ‘anti-intellectualism’, a nonexistent term coined by evil and inhuman gangsters in order to denigrate everyone who makes it impossible for them to conduct their perverse and evil operations. This is pathetic and ludicrous; the historical truth is that Shah Rukh was the patron of artists, scholars, erudite authors and architects. And in any case, an ‘intellectual’, who gets initiated in the secrets of a Kabbalist sect, already ceases to be a human.
When Shah Rukh died at the age of 70 (1447), his firstborn son Ulugh Beg (then at the age of 53; 1394-1449) succeeded him; he was also Goharshad’s favorite son and he had acquired a remarkable experience in travels, scholarly explorations, and imperial administration. He had been the governor of Samarqand and the entire Transoxiana (Mawarannahr) since 1409 (when he was just 15). And since the early 1420s, he was an accomplished scholar, mathematician and astronomer with his own madrasa and his own observatory – the best of his time. About:
Mirza Muhammad Taraghay bin Shahrukh (mainly known as Ulugh Beg, i.e. ‘the great ruler’; 1394-1449) was the unique case of Turanian Muslim Emperor who was also a consummate scholar, a leading mathematician, and the then world’s foremost astronomer. He ruled for only two years and only after having delivered pioneering opuses, notably Zij-i Sultani (زیجِ سلطانی; the astronomical tables of the Sultan, i.e. of himself), which is a collective work of many leading astronomers working under his guidance to produce a list of no less than 1018 stars.
Ulugh Beg was an exceptional man in every sense; he had 13 wives, he spoke ca. 10 languages (Chagatai Turkic, Farsi, Arabic, Syriac Aramaic, Chinese, and several other Western and Eastern Turanian languages), and he seems to have been a prodigious young man, very knowledgeable since his adolescence; and thanks to his numerous travels, he saw great monuments, universities, libraries and centers of learning that impressed him. However, Nasir el-Din Tusi’s observatory in Maragheh seems to have impacted the young imperial traveler more than any other edifice, and this was the reason for which, after he was appointed governor of Samarqand by his father Shah Rukh in 2009, he started to turn the city into the world’s leading academic center.
Ulugh Beg, as depicted by an anonymous painter of the period 1425-50
Ulugh Beg coin; AH 852 (1448-9) Herat mint
Samarqand Observatory, constructed by Ulugh Beg in the 1420s and rediscovered by Russians archaeologists in 1908
Ulugh Beg Observatory; the trench accommodated the lower section of the meridian arc.
Mirzo Ulughbek and Ali Kushchi working in the Samarqand Observatory, as per the imagination of modern local artists
Ulugh Beg created therefore an inviting environment for scholars from various regions and countries, and that’s why many researchers, explorers, scientists and students gathered in Samarqand as early as the 1420s. Ulugh Beg Madrasa was built in the period 1417-1420, and its parts were decorated with tiles of blue, light blue and white colors that all have a great symbolism in Turanian Tengrism. Two years later, the Ulugh Beg Observatory was constructed, as we can deduce from the letters sent by Jamshid al Kashi to his own father; these valuable documents were recently (in the 1990s) found, published and translated. Jamshid al Kashi (1380-1429) was a leading astronomer who worked with Ulugh Beg in Samarqand’s imperial observatory.
Another leading scholar, who contributed to the academic works, scholarly studies, and astronomical tables and catalogues undertaken in the observatory, was Ali Qushji (1403-1474; full name: Ala al-Dīn Ali ibn Muhammad). Ali Qushji was not greatly important only because he participated in the elaboration of the Zij-i Sultani and he made many other contributions to sciences, writing numerous astronomical, mathematical, mechanical, linguistic, philological and theological treatises; he is also credited for having established a real bridge between Samarqand and Istanbul in terms of scientific-academic life, scholarly exploration, and intellectual endeavors.
As a matter of fact, Ali Qushji was one of the very few scholars of his times to have met personally with three powerful emperors, namely the Timurid Ulugh Beg, the Akkoyunlu Uzun Hasan (1423-1478), and the Ottoman Mehmed II (also known as Fatih; 1432-1481). Ali Qushji delivered personally a copy of Zij-i Sultani to Mehmed II, evidently making the Ottoman sultan envy the unequaled superiority of the great Timurid capital Samarqand in terms of science, exploration, scholarship and intellect.
Jamshid al Kashi: opening bifolio of his major opus Miftah al-Hisab
Two pages from a manuscript of Jamshid al Kashi’s Sullam al-sama’
Jamshid al-Kashi’s The Key to Arithmetic; the last page of the manuscript
Pages of a manuscript with treatises elaborated by Ali al Qushji
Other remarkable scholars, who formed Ulugh Beg’s team, were Mu’in al-Din al-Kashi and Qadi Zadeh al-Rumi (1364-1436), a leading mathematician and astronomer of Eastern Roman descent, tutor and mentor of Ulugh Beg; Qadi Zadeh was greatly renowned for his pertinent commentaries on the works of earlier Turanian Islamic astronomers, like al-Jaghmini (full name: Mahmud ibn Muhammad ibn Umar al-Jaghmini; 13th – 14th c.), Shams al-Din al-Samarqandi (ca. 1250 – ca. 1310), and Nasir ad-Din al-Tusi. Students from Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River valley, the Ganges River valley, China and parts of Siberia were flocking to Samarqand to benefit from this worldwide unique environment.
To these great scholars it took no less than 15 years to compose in Farsi the voluminous Zij-i Sultani (completed in 1437), which was the World History’s most accurate and most complete astronomical table and star catalogue up to its time. Zij is an Islamic astronomical book that presents in tabular form various parameters used for astronomical calculations of the positions of stars therein included; as it can be assumed, it takes a great deal of observation in order to establish this type of documentation.
Around 20 different Zij catalogues have been established during the Islamic times, either saved until our times or not. However, Zij-i Sultani surpasses in terms of scholarship all earlier astronomical tables, including the 2nd c. CE Ancient Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy’s Almagest (Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις – Mathematike Syntaxis; المجسطي – al-Majisti). Ulugh Beg’s outstanding masterpiece was later translated to Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and several European languages.
In 1437, ten years before succeeding his father Shah Rukh on the throne of the Timurid Empire, Ulugh Beg specified the sidereal year as being 365d 6h 10m 8s long, which is an error of +58 s as per today’s calculations. Comparatively, Copernicus in 1525 reduced the margin of the error by 28 seconds, but the 9th c. CE Aramaean Sabian astronomer Thabit ibn Qurra (whose works, translated to Latin, were the primary sources of Copernicus) had determined the length of the sidereal year as 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 12 seconds (with an error of only 2 seconds as per today’s calculations).
After Shah Rukh’s death, Ulugh Beg had to fight in order to defend his right to succession; he won in the battle at Murghab (بالامرغاب; in today’s Afghanistan/not to be confused with Murgab in Eastern Tajikistan) over his nephew Ala al-Dawla (son of Ulugh Beg’s late brother Baysunghur/ بایسُنغُر) and advanced to Herat; there, in 1448, carried out a terrible massacre of the local population, taking revenge of their support to his nephew and demonstrating his Timurid originality. Ulugh Beg’s reign was brief and unhappy; his son Abd al-Latif Mirza (1420-1450) had an enormous psychological complex of inferiority toward his authoritatively intellectual and exceptionally erudite father, and he rebelled against him. After Abd al-Latif Mirza’s victory in a battle nearby Samarqand, Ulugh Beg had to surrender (1449), but the treacherous and evil son was not pleased with this, and he had his father assassinated, when the deposed Ulugh Beg was proceeding to Hejaz for Hajj.
The patricidal Abd al-Latif Mirza (in Farsi: padarkush; پدر کش) ruled for less than a year, having the support of evil, ignorant and rancorous theologians, who hated Ulugh Beg’s scholarly integrity, intellectual genius, scientific leadership, and secular rule. However, the outright majority of the population hated the ungrateful son for his two repugnant sacrileges; few days after having his father executed, Abd al-Latif Mirza killed also his brother Abd al-Aziz. So, in 1450 the patricidal and fratricidal ruler was murdered, and then came to power Ulugh Beg’s nephew Abdullah Mirza (son of Ibrahim Sultan, who was son of Shah Rukh and also a renowned artist and calligrapher); he rehabilitated his uncle’s imperial tradition and reputation. About:
After Ulugh Beg’s assassination, the Timurid Empire was in reality dissolved. The trends of imperial disintegration, tribal split, intra-family rivalry, and military localism prevailed at a time when Uzbek and Kazakh migrations were upsetting numerous settled populations in Central Asia. The Timurid Empire underwent a real fragmentation before totally disappearing. Abdullah Mirza was not able to rule for more than a year and only in Transoxiana (Mawarannahr); Timurid princes became independent in parts of Khorasan, Fars, and Iraq-e Ajami (Zagros Mountains).
Abu Sa’id Mirza (1424-1469; son of Muhammad Mirza, who was the son of Miran Shah, third son of Timur) was able to rule (1451-1469) and reunify the central parts of his great-grandfather’s empire. He allied with the Uzbeks (notably Abu’l-Khayr Khan: 1428-1468), but he faced many rebellions from Timurid princes of several provinces that he managed to suppress in terrible tribal massacres. He even executed Shah Rukh’s widow, the legendary dowager-empress Goharshad, accusing her of plotting against him by using her great-grandson. He arranged a temporary peace with the Karakoyunlu, but entered into an ill-fated war with the Akkoyunlu (who were former allies of the Timurids) and their powerful king Uzun Hasan. Finally, in February 1469, in the battle of Qarabagh, Abu Sa’id Mirza was defeated and held captive; Uzun Hasan handed him over to his Timurid allies, who remembering his monstrosity toward Goharshad executed him. Finally, Uzun Hasan sent Abu Sa’id Mirza’s decapitated head to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt Qaitbay, who arranged a proper burial.
Various Timurid princes ruled then in Khorasan, Kabul, Balkh, Fergana, Fars, and Iraq-e Ajami, whereas Transoxiana was first ruled by Sultan Ahmed Mirza from 1469 until 1494 and later divided into Samarqand, Bukhara and Hissar. Most of the northern part of the Timurid Empire was supplanted in 1488 by the Uzbeks, who set up their khanate under Muhammad Shaybani, a Genghisid prince. Soon afterwards, the Kazakh and the Sibir (Siberia) khanates were established, seceding from the Golden Horde. At the same time, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (a great-great grandson of Timur; 1438-1506) ruled (1469-1506) in Herat, continuing the Timurid tradition in terms of patronage of arts and sciences. He thus became a source of admiration for his nephew Babur, who was later the founder of the Mughal Empire of South Asia; but Babur was none else than the grandson of Abu Sa’id Mirza and therefore great-great-great-grandson of Timur.
Last, the southern parts of the Timurid Empire were most;y incorporated into the nomadic Akkoyunlu Empire that also controlled Eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia; however, internal strives decomposed that empire too around the end of the 15th c. It was then that the mystical Safavid Order, instead of supporting or infiltrating a state, decided to launch its own empire: the Safavid Empire. They already had their own army ready however: the formidable and renowned Qizilbash. About:
CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order
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:
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
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