Secular
Education, Oriental Empires, Cultural Nations, Spirituality, Religion &
Theology down to Renaissance - Part I
The present article
consists in a brief outlook of the nature of the diverse educational systems either
in the rising and falling imperial realms or in the chaotic and worthless republics
that lack sanctity, legitimacy, and humanity. Here you will find its first
part.
I. Education,
Social Unity, and Transcendence in the Ancient Oriental Empires
In ancient times,
Education was at the hands of the spiritual-sacerdotal-imperial savants and the
instructors did their ingenious best to educate their pupils by making them
fully aware of the Laws of the spiritual and the material universes, which were
also reflected in the average culture of all the inhabitants of the ideal,
paradisiacal empire that mirrored the celestial world on the surface of the
Earth. There was absolutely no disconnection between the educated and the
uneducated, because the latter comprehended in general -via mythical, cultural,
education- what the former mastered in detail through systematic scientific
exploration, archiving and education.
This was how the
emerged great kingdoms and formidable empires were structured in Mesopotamia (Sumer,
Akkad, Assyria-Babylonia, Hurrians, and Elam), Kemet (Egypt), Hittite Anatolia,
Cush (Ancient Sudan), Phoenicia-Carthage, Iran and Turan, China, and Indus
Valley and the Deccan. There was Unity in Education, as all the people understood
the supreme language of the Myth and the Symbols that exist between the
spiritual and the material universes, and as a consequence, they all had the
same world view, the same spirituality and culture, and the same moral
standards, which defined the sanctity of their empire.
II.
Lack of Sacerdotal and Imperial Authority in the Low Educational Systems of the
Ancient Greek and Roman Barbarians
Ancient Greece and
Rome, as small, divided and unsophisticated local societies, were ignorant,
barbaric and marginal lands as regards the Ancient Oriental empires; there was
no spirituality, no imperial tradition, no sacerdotal scholarship, and no unity
of Education. There was division in society, disunity among the various tribes,
and clash among the various philosophers who were educated not locally but in
the great temples of Egypt, Phoenicia, Babylonia, and Iran. Ancient Greek
religion was a petty version, a miserable imitation, and a pale reflection of
the Ancient Oriental religions.
There was no
transcendence, no contemplation, no meditation, and no sanctity in Ancient
Greece; the gods of the Ancient Greeks were mere human projections onto the
spiritual world, and as such they were inferior to the aspects of the Divine
World, which formed the fundamental truths of the archetypal Oriental myths.
Lacking spiritual authority, scientific knowledge, and moral wisdom, the Ancient
Greeks became mere 'friends of the wisdom', which is the real meaning of the Ancient
Greek word 'philosopher'. In their otherwise worthless education, they replaced
the transcendental truth with useless verbosity, the mythical symbolism with
puerile anthropomorphism, the sacrosanct theatrical events with their debased
public theater, and the Imperial Paradise with their Civil War.
III.
Education and Culture in Imperial Rome: Result of an Overwhelming
Orientalization
Rome became an Empire
very late, and achieved a level of Orientalization too late. As a matter of
fact, there was no unity in education, and consequently, there was a total
disconnection between the educated and the uneducated. This is said with
respect to the Romans themselves, the citizens of Rome during the times of the
Res Publica ('Republic': 510-27 BCE). This phenomenon was the result of the
formation of an elite/elitist class with increased focus on material interests,
lower degree of piety, and total lack of imperial world view and tradition.
When people deliberate
in public, the focus is shifted away from spirituality, moral standards, and
culture to petty personal interests and elite privileges. Then, few
representatives can take decisions on common issues, discord and disunity
appear only to prevail across the society, while social class divisions become
the reason of endless strife; the ensuing social stratification destroys or
prevents unity in culture and education.
This situation became
very ostensible in the early Roman imperial times, when the elite continued
living influenced by the Ancient Greek social lifestyle, involving theater,
philosophy, and public debates (as the Senatus had still some power), but the
Romans, i.e. the average people in their outright majority, had already
accepted different Oriental cults, mysteries, religions, schools of
spirituality, oracles, mythical symbolisms, and dogmas of cosmogony, cosmology,
apocalyptic eschatology and soteriology.
It was only normal for
the old republican traditions and the useless public debates to be soon swept
away by the mysteries of Mithras, Zurvan-Saturn, Isis, Horus, Osiris, Sarapis,
Anubis, Sabazios, Elagabalus, Cybele, Attis, and other Oriental cults and
mystical systems (Chaldeanism, Ostanism, Gnosticisms, Hermetism) to which
almost all the Romans gradually adhered, abandoning their impotent ancestral
divinities and seeking salvation in the dogmas of the Chaldean Aramaeans, the
Egyptians, the Cushites, the Anatolians, and the Iranians.
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Romans abandoned the nonsense of the political discourses, and started carrying about the mysteries of Isis, an Egyptian mythical symbol and central figure of the Ancient Egyptian Heliopolitan eschatology and soteriology.
Zervan, the Iranian god of Time, identified by the Romans of the imperial times with Saturn
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There was a major
difference between Trajan's Rome from one side and from the other side Darius I
the Great's Iran, Sargon II's Assyria, Thutmose III's Egypt, Mursilis I's
Hittite Anatolia, Hammurapi's Babylonia, Urukagina's Sumer (Lagash and Girsu), and
Sargon I's Akkad: different cultural and educational systems existed across the
Roman Empire at the time of its greatest expansion. I don't mean this in terms
of regional differentiation in culture and education among the various nations
that lived in Anatolia, Egypt, Carthage, Numidia, Gaul and other provinces. I
refer to the still existing differentiation between Roman elite culture, world
view, and education from one side and from the other side the popular culture,
world view, and education across the empire.
However, it was only a
matter of time, and finally, the culture, the world view, and the education of
the average people prevailed; they were finally imposed on the Roman elite;
during the 3rd c. CE, Rome looked very much like an Oriental Empire, as the
path from barbarism to civilization had been crossed. It was the time when a
Roman Emperor named after the Aramaean god Elagabalus ruled the vast empire. Little
time afterwards, Mithra, an Iranian god, became the supreme god of the -thus
markedly Iranized- Roman Empire, as Sol Invictus.
IV.
Christian Roman Empire: Doctrinal Culture for all and Doctrinal Education for
few
In fact, the
Christianization of the Roman Empire constituted only the last layer of its
Orientalization. Divided along Christological doctrines, the Christian Roman
Empire reflected Oriental empires in times of division; it looked like Egypt at
the times of Akhenaten, Mesopotamia (Assyria and Babylonia) at the times of
Sennacherib or Iran at the times of Cambyses. Due to the juxtaposition and the
polarization around the nature and the qualities of Jesus, Christianity
produced an enormous amount of theological treatises, endeavors and concerns;
compared to the Ancient Oriental religions, the official version of
Christianity, as practiced in the Eastern Roman Empire, looked like a merely
theological system – not a 'religion'.
Gradually but steadily,
spirituality turned out to become an absurdity, 'miracles' became simply a
matter of narrative and not of demonstration, belief was reduced to mere
acceptance of doctrines interpreting the sacred texts, and people were kept far
from education. It was a time of indoctrination and doctrinal culture. There
was indeed unity in culture and education, pretty much like in the Ancient
Oriental empires, but it hinged on theological doctrine, because official Christianity
was not a religion preached by Jesus. All the same, New Rome (Nova Roma) at the
times of Justinian I (527-565) looked far closer to Xerxes' Persepolis, to
Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, to Esarhaddon's Assyria, and to Ramses III's Thebes
of Egypt than to Caesar's Rome.
Early Christian Roman Art is full of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian symbols
Justinian I represented in the mosaic of San Vitale in Ravenna
V. Islamic
Civilization: an entirely non-Arab Phenomenon
When prophet Muhammad
preached Islam among an uneducated, uncultured, barbaric, and marginal tribe, namely
the Arabs of Hejaz, he raised the stakes exponentially. Suffice it that you
read the (written by an anonymous Alexandrian Egyptian captain and merchant of
the middle of the 1st c. CE) "Periplus of the Red (or Erythraean)
Sea" (par. 20) and you understand how all the civilized nations of the wider
region viewed the Arabs of Hejaz. With the acceptance of Islam by the Ancient
Yemenites, who were a Semitic nation totally different from and unrelated to
the Arabs of Hejaz, already two years before the death of prophet Muhammad (630
CE), an important change occurred: the majority of the followers of Islam were
non-Arabs.
With the early Islamic
invasions, many Aramaeans of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine, many nations of
the Sassanid Iranian Empire, many Copts (Egyptians), and many Berbers (from
Libya and the African Atlas) accepted Islam, dramatically intensifying the fact
that the Arabs constituted a minimal and unimportant part among the Muslims of
the Omayyad and the Abbasid Caliphates. This generated a new socio-cultural environment
from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of China and the middle of the
Subcontinent.
VI.
Islamic Caliphate: Aramaean & Iranian Education, Sciences, Art, Culture,
Intellectual life, and Spirituality under Arab rulers
The Islamic
Civilization is an entirely non-Arab phenomenon, as it basically consists in an
Aramaean & Iranian civilization with greatly diversified local traits.
Within 150 years, after prophet Muhammad's death, Aramaeans of Mesopotamia and
Syria and Iranians transferred the corpus of the scientific, academic, intellectual,
artistic and educational genius of the Sassanid Empire of Iran within the
Islamic Caliphate.
In fact, Arabic is an
Aramaean dialect written with Syriac Aramaic characters slightly deformed as
cursive writing; without vocalization, almost the entire Quran can be read in
Aramaic. So, Aramaeans (liberated from the yoke of the Eastern Roman Empire and
unrestrained from the Constantinopolitan theological doctrine) and Iranian
Mazdeists learned and used Arabic for the aforementioned purpose. In fact, the
great Aramaean centers of learning, libraries and theological schools of Edessa
of Osrhoene (Urfa), Nisibis (Nusaybin), Antioch (Antakya) and
Seleucia-Ctesiphon (Al Mada'in) and the famous Sassanid Iranian imperial
academy, university, research center, library and museum of Gundishapur, which
was the world's greatest center of learning and wisdom of the 6th c., were
merged and continued in the legendary Bayt al Hikmah in Baghdad.
At the beginning, Islam
appeared to be one more Christological heresy, eventually a more acute form of
Nestorianism. With Late Antiquity Gnostics accepting Islam, it is not bizarre
why Fathers of the Christian Church, like John Damascenus, a leading Aramaean
scholar, poet, and theologian from Damascus, viewed Islam as a counterfeit
version of Christianity. On the other hand, this fact explains fully why the
Islamic Civilization was always (until its end in 1580) the realm of Learning
and Education.
This fact has little to
do with Quranic verses; it is mainly due to the constituent elements of the
early Islamic society. When schools of faith and science, like that of the
sagacious Ikhwan al-Safa (إخوان الصفا)
created the dynamics they did, thanks to their mystical-intellectual endeavors,
scientific explorations, and educational system, it would be impossible for the
Islamic Civilization not to be at the antipodes of the Christian world: a
domain of Learning.
VII.
Islamic Spirituality, Religion and Culture vs. Governance and Theology
As spirituality was initially
limited in the circle of the descendants (Ahl al Bayt) of prophet Muhammad, notably
Ali ibn abi Taleb (who was the son-in law of prophet Muhammad and the prominent
figure of the Ahl al Bayt), but governance was at the hands of the enemies of
Ali ibn abi Taleb, a very strange situation arose. In the deeply and
irreversibly divided (Omayyad and Abbasid) caliphate, education was soon
controlled by the Aramaeans and the Iranians, whereas the military started being
increasingly dominated by the incoming Turanian soldiers; at the same time, spirituality
and religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy remained the exclusive domain of Ahl al
Bayt, notably Ja'far al-Sadiq.
The caliphs wanted to
justify their unjust and illegitimate rule, while various learners and pundits
decided to make distinguished careers by justifying the unjustifiable; they were
therefore hired by the caliphs and appointed as religious authorities in order
to 'explain' as 'Islamic' the un-Islamic or anti-Islamic deeds of those
caliphs. This attitude constituted an enormous schism between the spiritual
endeavors of the early Islamic community and the religious practices of the
disbelieving and unfaithful rulers, thus opening the path for a fake religion
adapted to immoral, illegal and evil governance. This situation was utterly
rejected by many spiritual mystics and erudite Muslims, and the ensuing
polarization triggered an enormous literature of jurisprudential and
theological contents. So, soon Islam started being turned from a religion to a
theology.
VIII.
The Secular Nature of the Islamic Society, Education, Culture and Civilization
Islam preaches a
secular society, and for many hundreds of years the Islamic caliphates,
sultanates, khanates and emirates were prominently secular of nature. The
secular nature of Islamic education, spiritual and material research, literature,
sciences, intellectual life, artistic inventiveness, and mysticism is
underscored by the burgeoning character of the early Islamic society in which
-for many long centuries- there was absolutely no 'sunnah' in the way this word
is used nowadays by the ignorant 'sheikhs' and the uneducated 'imams' of
Madinah, Istanbul, Mekkah, Al-Azhar, Qum, etc.
The fact that
"there is no compulsion in religion" (Quran, chapter al-Baqara, verse
256) implied that Shariah law was not compulsory. Actually, there was no
Shariah (in the sense this word is meant now) at all in the beginning, for the
very simple reason that the historical prerequisite for Shariah is a school of
Islamic jurisprudence. The Divine Law demanded from humans a 'deep
understanding' (fiqh) of the Quran and the Hadith, and this is the real word
for Islamic Law even today (as concept); to implement the Divine Law in the
human society, the various jurisprudential schools accepted four sources: the
Quran, the Hadith (prophet Muhammad's sermons), qiyas (analogical
reasoning),and ijma (juridical consensus). This automatically terminated
Islam as religion, turning it to a theology.
Abbasid medicine
The secular nature of
the education in the Islamic caliphates and other kingdoms was the result of
the well-diversified nature of the Islamic society, which incorporated many different
cultures. Prophet Muhammad's preaching was accepted differently in various
locations in Asia, Africa and Europe, as it incorporated numerous diverse local
cultures and traditions; this phenomenon generated a multitude of forms of
worship, schools of spirituality and mystical tradition, and perceptions of (and
approaches to) the spiritual and the material worlds, which were -all- called
'Islamic'.
This dynamic spiritual,
academic, intellectual, educational, socio-behavioral, and cultural process created
an unprecedentedly decentralized phenomenon of faith, life, art, intellect and
genius. It was the total opposite of the very centralized Christian churches,
societies, states and educational systems. In fact, Islamic education, science
and intellectual life reduced Islamic theology to small and marginal circles of
dogmatic and indoctrinated imams, who could not impact the advance of Islamic
Civilization and sciences.
Basically, Islamic
education and culture were characterized by cohesion at the local level, only
when viewed independently in the different parts of the Islamic world. However,
in reality, an unprecedentedly wide number of different cults, positions,
practices and beliefs could effectively be labeled 'Islamic', because for
someone to be accepted as Muslim it is actually enough to confess that there is
no god except God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God (which is the
Shahada, i.e. the testimony, of faith / La ilaha illallah muhammadur rasulullah
- لا
إله إلا الله محمد رسول الله).
Islamic education revolved around the basics of the religion, before orienting
students toward the two main directions: spirituality and science.
IX.
Islamic Education divided between Spirituality/Sciences/Arts and Theology
The only reactionary
group of theologians, who wanted to limit education to the sphere of a dark,
pseudo-Islamic theology, was the pseudo-school (madhhab) of Ahmed ibn Hanbal.
However, this did not influence anyone and either in his days (mainly 9th c.
CE) or later, it was not accepted as proper school of jurisprudence, but as a
type of barbaric and ignorant heretics (Ahmed ibn Hanbal was also imprisoned). Notably,
ibn Hanbal was rejected by Tabari, the Islamic world's greatest historian and
most erudite scholar of those days.
Only after the Crusades
and due to the devastating impact that they had on the Muslims of the Eastern
Mediterranean, a backward theological system demanded the end of Islamic
sciences, the subordination of spirituality, genius and intellect to the
villainous theological doctrine that these ignorant and idiotic people
considered as 'Islam'. This theological system is the baseless and anti-Islamic
teaching of Ahmed ibn Taymiyyah, who was viewed as a heretic during his time
and he was also imprisoned as impostor. His nonsensical theories ostensibly
constitute a form of Christianization of Islam.
With the progression,
the diffusion and the prevalence of this pathetic system, an enormous damage
was caused to the Islamic Civilization; due to the erroneous education, which
was impregnated by the evilness of Ahmed ibn Taymiyyah's ideas, the Islamic
sciences started being abandoned, the Islamic arts were disregarded or reduced
to basic and meaningless forms, and the Islamic intellectual life was
disintegrated. Even worse, Islamic spirituality was slandered as 'black magic',
Islamic wisdom was obliterated and forgotten, and Islamic education was
decreased to the level needed for imbeciles, who could not anymore comprehend
the Quran in the way Muslims were able to understand their holy book two
centuries earlier.
X. The
divide between Islamic Spirituality/Sciences/Arts and pseudo-Islamic Theology
disfigured as Shia vs. Sunni Schism
The reason for this
development is the fact that Ahmed ibn Taymiyyah, following the line of Ahmed
ibn Hanbal, preached that for Muslims' education only theology mattered. This
evil impostor generated a terrible divide between Islamic spirituality and
theology, which lasted down to our days, but was mistakenly and viciously known
as difference between 'Shia' and 'Sunni'. However, this is an evil colonial lie
and an Orientalist falsehood imposed on the colonial slaves of France, England
and America, namely the ignorant sheikhs and pathetic imams of Islam.
In fact, there was
never a historical division between 'Shia' and 'Sunni' throughout the History
of Islam. The fake divide is an entirely modern, colonial fabrication, which
was constructed, when ignorant and idiotic sheikhs, following the remote
guidance and the evil orders of their Western masters, started presenting
themselves as self-styled 'Sunnis'. Western forgers and ignorant imams may
today describe a historical war, let's say the battle of Chaldiran (1514)
between the Ottomans and the Safavid Iranians, as a fight between 'Shia' and
'Sunni', but this is entirely false.
Ottoman army
Selim I: a great soldier, a poor strategist, and a naïve pupil of evil pseudo-Islamic theologians
Neither Selim I nor
Ismail Safavi, the Ottoman sultan and the Iranian shah, who exchanged written
insults before the battle, called one another 'Sunni' and 'Shia'. Neither was
their difference a theological dispute. In reality, Selim I caused a terrible
bloodshed (squelching the Shahqulu/Şahkulu movement) in order to impose a
theological dogmatic tyranny in his pseudo-Islamic Ottoman realm, whereas
Ismail Safavi established in Iran a secular education that allowed people to
free pursue any walk of intellectual life that they wished, either in
spirituality or in sciences, thus eliminating the tyranny of theological
ignorance. The fact that these events are not portrayed in this manner in
today's educational systems of Turkey and Iran only shows how mistaken,
misguided and self-disastrous these systems are. Of course, this is also true
for the educational systems of all the other Muslim countries.
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