Мой духовный, моральный, академический, интеллектуальный, культурный и географический путь по Азии и Африке
Cosmas - Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis as Eastern Roman Orthodox Christian, Irreligious and Muslim for 70 years
Кузьма - Мухаммад Шамсаддин Мегаломматис как восточно-римский православный христианин, нерелигиозный и мусульманин на протяжении 70 лет
The following lengthy text is merely a response that I sent to an American friend of mine who asked me the subsequent, very brief question:
- Why did you go from Eastern Christian to Islam?
Precisely because, as question, it was false, my response became very long. This sentence is wrong, because I first rejected Christianity, and then lived for more than seven (7) years as an irreligious person with a strong faith to God; later, I adhered to Islam after extensive readings, investigations and studies.
The question had been asked by many other friends and acquaintances, students and colleagues, readers and subscribers for years. But it was never duly responded. It is perhaps this fact that turned the present answer into an insightful auto-biographical text.
Contents
My response to a question about my faith change
I- There is no scientific-academic research devoid of moral evaluation and emotional-sentimental reaction
II- I did not reject Christianity in order to accept Islam!
A. Family background
B. The background of my graduate, postgraduate and doctoral studies
C. How and why I rejected Christianity, becoming officially an irreligious Greek citizen
D. Two clarifications
III- The long path of a faithful, irreligious Orientalist toward the currently unknown, real and historical Islam
A. Spiritual, moral, and academic processes of personal evolution
B. Academic, cultural, and moral processes of personal evolution
C. Cultural and spiritual processes of personal evolution
D. Note about my spiritual & academic evolution before and after adhering to Islam
E. Note about the use of the words "you", "West" or "Western World"
F. Perception of the indispensable mythical and legendary dimension of the historical reality: the cornerstone of my life's major change
G. Rejection of the pseudo-academic professionalism and careerism
H. When spiritual and moral transformation made me understand everything differently
I. My study of Islam, of the Quran, and of the Hadith was not methodologically Western – contrarily to those of all Muslims of today.
i- observe how things were in the other side of the 'borders'
ii- examine historical developments from the viewpoint of peoples and populations, and not exclusively from the perspective of states
iii- see things in historical perspective.
iv- utterly reject the 'official' version of narratives when excruciating crimes were carried out
v- realize that Islam was the religion of Adam and the essence of all previous monotheisms
vi- identify in-depth the major difference between Christianity and Islam
vii- comprehend the presence of the Divine, the essence of human life as a passage from the Earth, and the destiny of the Man
Saint Sophia, Constantinople-Istanbul & Qubbat as-Sakhra (Dome of the Rock), Jerusalem-Al Quds ash-Sharif
Содержание
Мой
ответ на вопрос о смене моей веры
I. Не существует
научно-академических исследований, лишенных моральной оценки и эмоционально-сентиментальной
реакции
II. Я
не отверг христианство, чтобы принять ислам!
А.
Семейное происхождение
Б.
История моего обучения в аспирантуре, магистратуре и докторантуре
В. Как
и почему я отказался от христианства, став официально нерелигиозным гражданином
Греции
Г. Два
уточнения
III.
Долгий путь верного, нерелигиозного востоковеда к ныне неизвестному, реальному
и историческому исламу
А.
Духовные, моральные и академические процессы личной эволюции
Б.
Академические, культурные и моральные процессы личной эволюции
В.
Культурные и духовные процессы личной эволюции
Г.
Заметка о моей духовной и академической эволюции до и после принятия ислама
Д.
Заметка об использовании слов «ты», «Запад» или «Западный мир»
Е.
Восприятие неотъемлемого мифического и легендарного измерения исторической
реальности: краеугольный камень главных перемен в моей жизни
Ё.
Отказ от псевдоакадемического профессионализма и карьеризма
Ж.
Когда духовная и моральная трансформация заставила меня понять все по-другому
З. Мое
изучение ислама, Корана и хадисов не было методологически западным — в отличие
от всех современных мусульман
i-
наблюдать за тем, как обстояли дела по другую сторону «границ»
ii-
изучать исторические события с точки зрения народов и населения, а не исключительно
с точки зрения государств
iii-
рассматривать события в исторической перспективе
iv-
полностью отвергать «официальную» версию событий, когда совершались ужасающие
преступления
v-
осознать, что ислам был религией Адама и сущностью всех предыдущих монотеистических
религий
vi-
углубленно определить основные различия между христианством и исламом
vii- понять присутствие Божественного, сущность человеческой жизни как перехода от Земли и предназначение человека
Saint Sophia, Constantinople
My response to a question about my faith change
Dear Joe,
Hope you are fine!
Thank you for your continued
interest, two emails, and numerous questions!
These days were very hectic; that's
why I could not respond earlier.
The unusually wide range of topics
mentioned and discussed, the 'strong feelings' at times involved in some of my
sentences, and my life experience in many different countries of Asia, Africa
and Europe are the reasons of the personal questions that you logically make to
me, and to which I will respond.
Qubbat as-Sakhra Al Quds ash-Sharif
I- There is no scientific-academic research devoid of moral evaluation and emotional-sentimental reaction
Sometimes, you make wrong assumptions about me; so, there is rather an urgent need for me to reply first to the email with more personal questions, namely the second.
Still, I will pick up an excerpt from your first email of the 18th August, because the response to it (in my case) is not academic, but mainly personal.
You write:
"When such strong emotional reactions come out of scholarly people, I begin to think there is a reason why these scholars, who are allegedly committed to seeking the truth, would form such strong opinions on a subject for which there is so little documentation".
My answer to this is not academic of content; yes, indeed! There is a reason. This pertains to my personal conviction about life itself. Do not rush to describe it as 'philosophical'! This would be the permanent guarantee of your total misunderstanding of me!
There is no such thing as 'philosophy' for me. Consequently, I am not a philosopher, and I reject every attempt of a person to label me as such.
What is called 'philosophy' is an inherently deficient effort to bring the Divine as low as to fit the various humanly constructed concepts; this is blasphemy and barbarism.
The so-called Ancient Greek (the term is fallacious) 'philosophers' (who were Ionians, so Anatolians - which means Asiatics, not 'Europeans') knew that they were 'lower' than 'sages' ('sophoi') and that they did not possess the 'wisdom' ('sophia'); that's why they modestly called their low-level effort 'philosophy' ('being friendly to wisdom').
So, the reason for the 'strong emotional reactions' in my case is double:
a- first, it is "moral"; there cannot be human without Moral. Every single act, attempt, movement, activity, word, feeling, impulse, sense, perception, evaluation, concept, idea or thought of a human being, if it is not inculcated in Moral (his inherently existing moral commands, his personally maintained and even improved moral standards, and his moral approach to everything), instantly renders the said individual an unnecessary barbarian and a dangerous monster that must cease to exist.
You would perhaps tell me that, with a so absolute approach, I almost delete the outright majority of the humans; that eventual statement would be comical, because you already know that and this is exactly what is going to inevitably occur to all the humans in the years ahead. Mankind is doomed and it will perish exactly because of the disappearance of Moral. When did this start? With the rise of the Western world in the 15th and the 16th c.! It was perfectly moral for Genghis Khan and for Timur to exterminate those whom they killed and it was totally immoral for the Spaniards to kill even one Mexican; when you will find the truth behind this statement, you will realize what happens today.
b- second, the 'strong emotional reactions' must exist because without sentimental perception of the material and the spiritual universes, the human being is totally unbalanced, dangerous, and almost useless. If you don't perceive sentimentally and emotionally the facts, the conditions, the situations, the developments, the changes and upheavals, you cease to be a human. 'Thought' is a low level human process, and the brain is not the central organ of the human body; the heart is.
The true human science, which was perfectly well known to the ancient high priests of Sumer, Egypt, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylon, which was maintained in Iran, China and India, and which was later reconstituted and reassessed in the secular milieu of Abbasid Baghdad and the multicultural environment of the Islamic empires of the 9th–15th c. that are called "Iranianates" (Persianates is a false term, because there was never a state called 'Persia'; it is "Iran"), involved 'strong emotional' approaches and reactions to the topics searched, studied, explored, fathomed and used. You cannot become an alchemist without 'strong emotional reactions'.
This is one more reason, for which modern science is a fake, and it does not lead anywhere else except to the destruction of mankind; furthermore, this constitutes the cause for which today's scholars fail to comprehend texts of Islamic scientists, sages, mystics, and alchemists. They read texts, comprehend all the words, but fail to duly understand the overall meaning of texts like those of Abu Bakr al-Razi (865-935 CE; أبو بکر محمد بن زکریاء الرازي/Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi), notably his Kitab al-iklil fi'l-tibb, a treatise on medicine and health.
To recapitulate, the moral evaluation of the evildoing of the Mithraic Magi and my sentimental rejection of them, if they are not included in my study of the topic, in my discussion about it, and in my written presentation of it, would make of me a liar. You cannot possibly describe a crime with a 'neutral' or 'indifferent' sentence; this would immediately imply that your humanity is 'absent'.
Do you see what you are saying? "Committed to seeking the truth"!
Exactly! This makes the difference!
The truth is absolute, and the lie is relative.
This irreversible reality, in and by itself, is enough to totally exterminate the failed mankind. The powers-that-be are fully aware of that fact; and they merely try to postpone their end, by generating wars which deflect the force generated by the various developments. But this approach is totally vain.
Do you see what you are saying? "Subject for which there is so little documentation"!
You make me laugh! Terribly!
Yes, from one side, you seem to be correct! Of course!
Little documentation about the deeds of the Mithraic Magi in Babylon, in Armenia, in Pontus, in Commagene, in Western Anatolia, in Dura Europos, in Egypt, in the Balkans, in NW Africa, in Rome, in Central and Western Europe …
In spite of the hundreds of monuments and the dozens of Mithraea excavated, you can call it 'little documentation' – philologically and archaeologically. Truly!
But not morally!
It would be tantamount to demanding 1000 testimonies present at the scene of the crime; that's an absurdity.
One only bas-relief with the representation of a repugnant tauroctony is enough for a true scholar (namely a moral academic) to assess the monstrosity and the evildoing of the Mithraic Magi. This is what slipped your memory!
II- I did not reject Christianity in order to accept Islam!
From now on, I will select excerpts from your second email and comment/reply. First, I must correct your following question:
"Why did you go from Eastern Christian to Islam"?
That's totally wrong; it did not happen, and if one assumes that this development took place, he irreversibly misunderstands me, also deleting some years of my life! Still, I lived during all these years (1985-1992), and they constituted some of the most critical moments of my formation and life. What is it about?
A. Family background
Before explaining to you the situation, I have to briefly describe to you my family background:
I was born Christian Orthodox and baptized as Cosmas Megalommatis in Athens, 1956. My father's family originated from Central Anatolia (Turkey) and there were always Christians (Orthodox) and Muslims in the family; and this has always been quite common in Anatolia. My father's uncle Murat was an Ottoman army officer, who fought against the English in Basra and Baghdad in 1914-1917.
Changing religion was easy in either direction; there was never Western (: Catholic-Protestant) sectarianism in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. My father's father was however Christian (named Cosmas). My family name (Megalommatis) is merely the Modern Greek translation of the original (Turkish) family name: Gözübüyükoğlu. They both denote the 'person with big eyes'. My father's father was born in Kayseri (Caesarea), his mother was born in Kastamonu (Paphlagonia), and my father was born there too (1919); in 1922, they resettled in Istanbul, and in 1932, they sailed to Athens.
My mother's family was an entirely Christian (Orthodox) family from Izmir (Smyrna) and Akhisar (the ancient Macedonian city of Thyateira established by soldiers of Alexander the Great). My mother's mother was daughter of a priest. (Or if you prefer, my maternal great-grandfather was a priest). And my mother's father was (like my father's father) a merchant and he traveled across the Ottoman Empire, in (Qajar) Iran, in the Russian Caucasus, and in Alexandria. As he was young in September 1922, when the army of Kemal Ataturk arrived in Izmir, he could not sail (only men younger than 21 and older than 45 could) like the rest of the family, but was taken as prisoner. However, he soon escaped and walking to other cities, he impersonated a Turk refugee from the Caucasus region, as he was fluent not only in Turkish but in Arabic, Farsi and Georgian. He sailed to Piraeus (Athens) in 1925 (with the exchange of populations as per the terms of the Lausanne Treaty) and found his family.
As they were true (non-Western) Christians, there was no 'rancor', 'hatred', 'racism' or 'arrogance' in them; my father's uncle Murat became Christian when they sailed to Greece (1932) and was baptized 'Evdokimos'. For the deracination of all the Christian Eastern Romans (falsely named 'Greeks') of Anatolia, my mother's father never accused (let alone hated) the Turks and, quite contrarily, he liked Kemal Ataturk very much. All the blame was to be placed on the French, the English, the Italians and the puppet-government of Athens.
Similarly, during the German Occupation of Greece; my mother's younger brother was arrested in the last roundups that the Germans made in August 1944, before leaving Athens in September; he was deported and lost. But as a correct Christian family, my mother's family did not place the blame on or hate the Germans.
B. The background of my graduate, postgraduate and doctoral studies
Before explaining to you the situation, I have to establish a chronological table for you to understand the critical years of my formation:
1962-1974: Primary and Secondary Education in the French School of Athens
At home we spoke Greek and Turkish; in the school I learned French, and I had at home private courses of Italian and German. I traveled often abroad and from very young age (already at 8), accompanied by my parents (because my father was the Associate Director and then the Director of the Division 'International Exhibitions' of the Greek Ministry of Commerce; so, he had to be present with other employees, set up the Greek stand and represent the Greek state wherever and whenever they participated in international exhibitions. So, whenever it was possible my mother and I traveled with him).
I have to add that, for the years 1965-1969, I was an altar boy in the nearby Church of St. Antony in our district in Athens; back at those days, I knew the Saint Liturgy of John Chrysostom by heart.
1974-1978: Athens University, School of Philosophy, Dept. of History and Archaeology (4-year schedule), Graduation (with a very strong background in Ancient Greek and Latin)
(in parallel: courses of many foreign languages in order to perfection those I already knew and in addition, to learn Russian, Spanish and English)
A total of 60-65 hours of course attendance per week (of 6 working days)
1978-1981: Paris (parallel attendance of numerous seminars and courses in 8 different universities, institutions and schools)
Specialization in Egyptology (Egyptian hieroglyphics), Assyriology (Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform), Iranology, Biblical Studies (Phoenician, Aramaic, Punic and Ancient Hebrew), Ancient History, Archaeology, Languages and Religions of the Near East, Northern and Eastern Africa, Sovietology, Gnosticisms and Manichaeism, and Oriental Christianisms
A total of 60-65 hours of course attendance per week (of 6 working days)
1981-1982: London (School of Oriental and African Studies) Assyriology
1982-1983: Brussels (Université libre de Bruxelles); Commission of EU (traineeship in the Translation-Interpretation Services)
1983-1984: Muenster University (inscription in the first year of PhD, 'Promotion') in Germany and Damascus University in Syria
1984-1985: Jerusalem (Mount Scopus University) and Muenster University
1985-1986: Baghdad (Al-Mustansiriyah University) and Muenster University
1986-1989: Tehran (Madrasah-i Shohada; Ayatollah Yahya Allameh Nouri) and Muenster University
C. How and why I rejected Christianity, becoming officially an irreligious Greek citizen
During my graduate studies in Athens, I became familiar with Greek translations of the works of Robert Ambelain. At this point, you have to stop reading my response and go through (using software translator) the Spanish, the French and the Russian versions of the Wikipedia because they are far more informative than the brief English entry.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ambelain
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ambelain
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Амбелен,_Робер
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ambelain
Robert Ambelain's three books that impacted me most are the following:
- Jésus ou le Mortel secret des Templiers, París, Robert Laffont, « Les Énigmes de l'univers», 1970
- La Vie secrète de Saint Paul, París, Robert Laffont, « Les Énigmes de l'univers», 1972
- Les Lourds Secrets du Golgotha, Robert Laffont, « Les Énigmes de l'univers», 1974
I met personally Robert Ambelain in Paris many times; my French professors knew that I had a great consideration for his works and they also spoke to me about him with outstanding esteem. An outstanding Freemason!
At this point, I have to make clear that, although I was fascinated with his demolition of the 'historical truth of Christianity' that he carried out in his books, I did not want to make of this topic the center of my studies, researches and explorations. It was already very ostensible to me that, in spite of his unparalleled erudition and staunch criticism of the official version of Christian History, Robert Ambelain did not see or did not expand on the impact of the Ancient Oriental religions on Christianity. So, I persisted in my aforementioned studies to which I soon added my visits to many museums and numerous archaeological sites and my life among the descendants of all those Ancient Oriental nations whose civilizations I had already studied.
So, in 1985, it became clear to me that -spiritually, intellectually, sentimentally, mentally, academically, culturally, and personally- I was standing somewhere in-between the monotheists of Assyria, Egypt and Iran, but I had nothing to do with Christianity and its Biblical past.
So, if Robert Ambelain killed Christianity in me, ……….
………………….. my overall studies in Orientalism killed Ancient Hebrew religion and the so-called Biblical world in me.
To make things clearer, my direct knowledge of ancient Oriental sources, my perception of the historical developments, and my evaluation of historical persons was such that, not only Jesus was just a human, probably an Essene,
….
but also Moses was an insignificant marginal chieftain compared to the Divine Pharaoh Akhenaten, who proclaimed the only cult of the Only God Aten, …
and
…. even more importantly, the Biblical Noah was reduced to a pale figure if contrasted with the Assyrian-Babylonian Atrahasis (Ut-Napishtim), etc.
In other words, the sense of "Divinity" abandoned the so-called 'Biblical' or 'Judeo-Christian' world (which was a posterior construct) and resided with Mesopotamia and Egypt.
That's why in 1985, I wrote a "Law 105 declaration" (Ypefthyni Dilosi v. 105; this is a formal written legal document where an individual states personal facts or details under their own responsibility) as per which I fully denied that "Jesus was the expected Messiah", I rejected Christianity overwhelmingly, and I declared myself as an "irreligious" (άθρησκος) Greek citizen; following this, a special certificate (registry act) was issued by the Athens Registry Office, as per which, I was an "irreligious Greek citizen". On the basis of this document, I issued another Greek identity card where the term "irreligious" was stated in the special rubric for "religion", which still existed at the time. Even more importantly, I prepared an official translation of the document and, most happily, sent copies to all of my professors in order to keep them updated about the fact and my spiritual, religious, intellectual and mental itinerary/condition.
It goes without saying that, if someone told me in 1985 that, in seven years, I would become Muslim, I would immediately explode in laughter.
So, you understand, my friend, this is not going to be a brief response! Because of the aforementioned, it will not be easy for you to hypothesize the rest. Do not expect an easy story!
This is so because …
a- I don't believe that Orientalists do correctly their job in the face of the existing sources (that they mostly misinterpret or avoid interpreting or minimize or conceal)
and
b- I am convinced that neither today's deliberately misguided and misled Muslims nor Western specialists in Islam dare to reveal that the true Islam was very different and the original Quran, which was greatly dissimilar to the present, deliberately and monstrously distorted, false and -therefore not binding- copy.
D. Two clarifications
At this point, let me make two clarifications! They will tell you that my name 'Shamsaddin' is an Arabic name; it actually means "the Sun of the religion" (Shams al-din, in its correct spelling). But ….
Only the article (al) is Arabic! 'Shams' is a derivative of the Assyrian-Babylonian word and name 'Shamash" (Sun). 'Din' meant originally 'law' or 'judgment' in Arabic.
But the meaning 'religion' is due to the Middle Persian word for religion: 'den'/'din'.
Second, without 3-4 millennia of Oriental History, neither Jesus nor Muhammad would have come: this is the only truth. They cannot therefore be comprehended but within the correct context, which is the true enemy of all Western academics and of all pseudo-Muslim muftis, cadis, imams and sheikhs.
Continuing my response, I have to point out that it will not be easy to present it in fully streamlined narrative, because it in involves many parallel processes that took place always in the very brief (for others) and very long (for me) period from 1985 (when I was 29) to 1992 (when I was 36).
Please avoid -in your discussions with me- the very abnormal and most inhuman, heinous and evil term "conversion" or "convert"! I can stop writing to you, start writing a lengthy article under the title "Stop calling the acceptance of another religion 'conversion', stupid!", publish it, and then continue my discussion with you.
In any case, it will not be the first and, surely, it will not be the last time I will use the adjective "stupid", when publishing criticisms about today's fake Muslims and false Islam! Look at this article here (first published in 2005)!
https://www.academia.edu/25906093/Abolish_your_fake_Ramadhan_stupid_by_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis
The following is the second part (published few days later, in 2005; and republished in 2007 and 2016):
https://www.academia.edu/26051016/Tyrannical_Ramadhan_as_part_of_Islamic_Terrorism_by_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis
I also have to add that, in this section of my site in academia.edu, you can find no less than 13 autobiographical articles, which shed also some light onto my life's past and on the topic you asked me about.
https://independent.academia.edu/ShamsaddinMegalommatis/Autobiographical
III- The long path of a faithful, irreligious Orientalist toward the currently unknown, real and historical Islam
I just spoke about "many parallel processes", which took place in my life and gradually led me to Islam. I was never a unidimensional individual.
A. Spiritual, moral, and academic processes of personal evolution
First, because I maintained that Christianity is a forged religion, consisting in complete rejection of the true nature of Jesus' preaching, and also involving a most distorted account of the so-called Ancient Hebrew religion and the purely self-styled Biblical past (out of which another, differently forged religion, namely Judaism, emanated), this did not mean that I ceased to be an entirely dedicated faithful.
So, the first process of my personal development, expansion, and evolution was spiritual. I never thought or imagined or concluded that humans happen to feel, to sense, and to accept the existence of the spiritual universe only because they believe in a religion, which says so; that would be extremely idiotic and the name of the idiocy in this regard is: 'Nominalism'. William of Ockham was not a human, but a demoniacally possessed, degenerate, and monstrous being.
The absolutely average, normal and natural condition of every human is to feel as inherent, to sense as present, and to therefore accept the existence of their soul in themselves, thus also perceiving the eternal and endless spiritual universe. Because of the Creation, in every human, the soul, the character, and the body are inextricably intertwined and impossible to dissociate from one another – except in a calamitous case of degeneracy, corruption, and externally imposed distortion of the human being.
So, irrespective of my rejection of the intentionally malignant identification of Jesus with the supposedly Messiah (in fact, this as concept antedates all possible dates for the Biblical constructs 'Moses', 'Abraham' and 'Noah"), I continued believing in the existence of soul, spirits, elements, and spiritual hierarchies, which were however abundantly mentioned and described in Ancient Oriental texts that I studied in many universities in a most serious and not superficial manner.
Unfortunately for them and for all of their other students, all my professors in Assyriology, Egyptology, Iranology, and other fields of Orientalism dealt with these topics, read texts about them, knew the most minutious details about the writing of these names, the textual records in which one could gather data about them, and the historical involvement of these spiritual entities (as stated in a multitude of texts), but never bothered to duly examine and interpret the spiritual validity of Lamassu and the divine hypostasis of Assur, the Only God.
Because of my inherent and irremovable faith (which is so to all humans), I was able to identify preposterous attitudes and biased styles of teaching that constituted a deliberate distortion of the historical Truth. Although superficially accusing one another, all Soviet and Western Orientalists acted in perfect concordance. The former were very laborious and very productive in analyzing the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Anatolian, Canaanite, and Iranian societies of the past! Endless dissertations about the taxation, lengthy articles concerning the economic policies of a major emperor, voluminous books focused on commercial exchanges, and absolutely monotonous speeches on all the material concerns of those societies! You truly needed to shout at them angrily:
- You, stupid! All these people, about whom you keep talking so uselessly, truly recorded their economic deals as you say, but above all, they believed in Assur or in Marduk or in Nergal, and they attended the solemn liturgies, the grandiose feasts, and the majestic festivals organized about them, ostensibly considering them as the formidable masters of the Divine world, as the cornerstone of their life, and as the paramount judges of the human passage from the material world. So, you, fake scholars, how dare you misrepresent and misinterpret, conceal and omit them from your supposed researches and publications?
The Western Orientalists were even worse in their criminal, prejudiced, distorted, heinous, and inhuman presentations. Look now at the bizarre occurrence that these fools were able to generate without even understanding that a perspicacious student and a shrewd observer could easily discern and therefore comprehend their beastly attempt!
When in the classroom there was a course of Biblical Hebrew, the instructor -after identifying the writing signs, the lexicographical details, the grammatical traits, and the syntactical features, after describing issues pertaining to manuscript tradition, and after examining textual parallels- analyzed the excerpt from a religious, spiritual and eventually cosmological or eschatological viewpoint. "So far, so good", you will tell me; and I will agree. But …
When in the classroom there was a course of Egyptology or Assyriology, the instructor underwent all the aforementioned processes of study and investigation; however he never analyzed the excerpt from a religious, spiritual and eventually cosmological or eschatological viewpoint. It was villainous, malignant and evil.
This was an overwhelming discrepancy; the search of knowledge, the investigation of data, the exploration of the unknown, and the establishment of science as a method to achieve the correct understanding, and through erudition to reach the wisdom of a situation, have meaning only when we are true to ourselves and able to spell out the reality, even when it causes detrimental damage to our earlier beliefs, concepts, worldviews, ideas and norms. There is no such thing as 'confirmatory-of-our-preconceived-schemes,-ancestral faiths,-and-social-norms science'!
There are no interests, parties, companies, governments, social classes, states, secret organizations, peoples, nations, philosophies, ideologies or so-called religions above Truth. It is either this or the End of the World – and the end of this world is coming.
Even worse for the simplistic viewpoint and the foolish idea that an early conclusion could possibly be enough, science -exactly because of its nature as a human endeavor (which means that potential, unwanted, errors can be later identified due to more acute observation, discovery of new sources and additional data, and improved contextualization)- is an interminable effort of self-amelioration, as well as the only genuine and permissible initiation of the Man (after the Fall).
So, in the late 1980s (after I rejected Christianity, becoming 'irreligious', and after I started publishing my first articles and giving my first speeches), it was very clear to me that I had entered a permanent status of across-the-board re-examination, re-assessment, and re-consideration in order to verify -every now and then- my earlier conclusions and perceptions. In this case, it was ostensible that I had to frequently become the devil's advocate against myself and to attempt to challenge previous deductions and assumptions, assertions and interpretations. And so I have been doing ever since!
B. Academic, cultural, and moral processes of personal evolution
Second, my life in several Middle Eastern countries and my complete insertion in the local everyday life (I did not live like those silly and absolutely useless diplomats who stay secluded in elite districts and luxurious venues) fully convinced me that my earlier feelings were very correct and that there were grave methodological issues, which impacted negatively the research, the activities, the knowledge, the conclusions, and the overall 'science' of my Orientalist professors.
These feelings had nothing to do with the discrepancies mentioned in the previous sub-unit. They concerned the overall position of the Orientalist disciplines as a social, socio-educational, and socio-academic phenomenon. What I had felt already in Paris and throughout Western Europe, with respect to Orientalist research, was confirmed as pertinent, when I lived in Syria, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, SE Turkey, and Iran. Later, in the 1990s, I re-confirmed the veracity of my earlier conclusions in Eastern, North-eastern, Northern and North-western Africa.
In fact, the Orientalist science of all of my professors was truly a dead fish! In spite of the pertinence of their typological study, the result of their descriptions was a lifeless text totally disconnected from human action, joy, culture, and behavioral vivacity. The pleasure of life, the abundance of the wealth, the adversities of certain years, the piety of the average people, the ferocity of the battling armies, the spiritual potency due to which Ramses III's blessed Egyptians repelled boarders, the divine secrecy kept around the spiritual-material sciences, and a multitude of devotional acts testifying to the outstanding faith of the Ancient Oriental nations were out of the glacial texts and the emotionally chilled books of all those scholars. To be sincere, I have to admit that some of my professors differed; in their discourses, lectures, and texts, they tried to make the difference indeed. But they were few: Jean Bottéro and Maxime Rodinson.
In their quasi-totality, these horrid 'scholarly' texts were the product of silent work in libraries, museums, and offices very far from the daily life of non-Western nations with whom my professors did not have but occasional contacts – mainly when they needed some service during the time they were in academic mission. Although all of these professors would agree that the local modern nations are the descendants of the ancient peoples whose civilizations, cultures, languages, arts, and religions they studied and investigated, none of them found it necessary to mingle, interact and merge with people at the local level, extensively study them at the socio-behavioral, sentimental, pietal, moral, spiritual, and cultural levels, and thence extract necessary parallels with past traditions that may have survived in some form down to their days (they were academically active from the 1940s to the 2000s).
Of course, I knew that what I had in mind was in fact a certain fusion between the methodological processes of History and Ethnography; I even found it bizarre why my professors did not see the urgent need for this approach. I must say that only after several decades I discovered that a French Orientalist and specialist on early Islam, Ms. Jacqueline Chabbi, fully embodied this approach with spectacular results. About:
(read it in software translator) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Chabbi
(quasi-useless) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Chabbi
One of her excellent presentations:
Chabbi Coran Anthropologie Historique
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsznNHKPUk
Brief but up-to-the-point:
The Qur’an and Historical Anthropology: Reading Jacqueline Chabbi
https://iqsaweb.org/2013/01/28/tqaharjc/
Of course, I know that you and others will ask me the following:
-But if History and Ethnography can eventually fuse to help us understand better the Muslim societies from the time of Muhammad down to our days, how do you expect a similar attempt to be possibly useful when it comes to several strata of earlier cultures and civilizations with different faiths and cults?
This is exactly the point!
Western Orientalists make this terrible mistake (namely to assume that the fusion of History and Ethnography would not bring forth a better understanding about the ancient Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Iranians, etc.), mainly for two reasons:
i- professional convenience and conformism (they do not want to open the door to dramatic methodological changes and to an impressive overhauling of the existing Assyriological, Egyptological or Iranological narrative/bibliography)
and
ii- premeditated repudiation of every effort to demonstrate that there is a cultural continuity from Sumer and Akkad -through the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Aramaeans and the Iranians- to the Muslims of the Golden Era of Islam and the decayed cultures of today's so-called 'Middle East'.
But in Ethnography we do not only study flourishing cultures; we also focus on decomposed and disintegrated societies.
Such an effort would therefore change totally the overall picture that people have of World History.
Furthermore, it would present a historical justification of Islam,
i- positioning the Islamic civilization as the pivot of historical evolution;
ii- throwing the barbarian Western world to the dustbin of history;
iii- imposing only two chronological systems worldwide, namely
Anno Mundi (the Christian Orthodox calendar) and
Anno Hegirae (the Islamic calendar); and
iv- banning the present, Satanic (Gregorian) calendar, because
first, Jesus was not born before exactly 2026 years, and
second, it is evil to date historical events on the basis of a preposterous fabrication, and of a fake god.
So, you see! You don't need to be Muslim in order to see the Truth; and already in the late 1980s, I was discovering truths that are unknown to the fake Muslims of our times, because precisely their religion is false and has nothing to do with the true, historical Islam.
Undertaking a methodological fusion between History and Ethnography within the Orientalist disciplines would also help show to all the Muslims what the character of their correct rejection of the West should have been, namely not pseudo-religious (in fact: ideological) but historical, cultural/multi-cultural, spiritual, and secular.
All the aforementioned approaches, fields of research and exploration, and points of examination impelled me to extensively intermingle with local people in the wider Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, and investigate closely their cultural identity, the integrity of their traditions, the tenets of their behavioral systems, and the best preserved elements of their multilayered heritage. In fact, I became one with them, and they felt it so, frequently pointing it out to me.
This was repeatedly reflected in my publications. I was the only journalist and war front reporter in the world to write in favor of Iran and against Iraq in the middle and late 1980s, but I did not support the local political regime at all! I supported the spiritual, moral, cultural, and personal superiority of the average Iranians: those of the villages, the provincial towns, and the rustic environments! I was not a Muslim, but their traditions, their legends, their myths, their fables, their fairy tales, and their traditions, their piety, and their transcendental faith filled all my publications with warmth, love, vivacity, joy, and humanity. All sorts of Satanic words, like "interests", "economics", "politics", and "technologies", were banned!
C. Cultural and spiritual processes of personal evolution
Associating myself with so many people in remote villages, and provincial towns, befriending informers, and becoming part of their daily life, I was able to
i- sense their feelings and devotion,
ii- identify the elements of their culture,
iii- see how spirituality and the local spiritual tradition (maintained in tariqas going back to the 13th c.) are integral part of their life,
iv- comprehend how human characters are naturally formed in the rural parts of those societies (whereas they are fabricated as monstrous beasts in the West), and
v- draw some of most critical conclusions that I have inferred in my life.
So, it is as a former Christian Orthodox and then irreligious explorer and historian that I realized that
1- there is no religion without culture, the latter encompassing by far the former; religion without culture (assuming that it could ever exist) would be sheer evilness;
2- there is no religion without spirituality, and the reason for the existence of every religion is the reinforcement of the spiritual endeavors of a society;
3- there cannot be a society without spirituality, because this would turn humans into inhuman insects;
4- the succession of various religions in a society matters very little, because a religion can never be the original fact in a society, this being always the spirituality and the spiritual endeavors of the society in question;
5- consequently, the continuation of spiritual traditions and endeavors (irrespective of the religions) is what matters for a historian, and this is what he has to identify first;
6- the only personal environment within which spirituality can survive is the mythical perception of the Divine developed by a local society; this perception is articulated in mythical terms;
7- the mythical world conceptualization, which is based on cultural-epic-legendary traditions and maintained in all the expressions of social life, is -as a comprehensive system- far more important than the various religious narratives (even those of a sacred/holy text), because it offers the proper context within which the correct religious narratives can possibly acquire cultural value and importance;
8- the mythical world conceptualization constitutes the best social environment within which humans can maintain their spiritual traditions and endeavors, moral standards, and cultural integrity; on the contrary, doctrinal prescriptions, theological inferences, political discourses, and the so-called technological infrastructures badly damage the mythical world conceptualization attested within a community, directly endangering social continuity and national identity;
9- theology is the worst enemy of every spirituality, faith and religion; and
10- religions cannot be classified only as 'monotheistic' and 'polytheistic', but also as 'doctrinal systems' and 'transcendental faiths'.
Although I assessed the above points before 1990-1991, I did not proceed with an immediate effort to classify them and to further expand on them, because I felt that this would betray my approach and my understanding of the original Oriental societies as free entities and as living creatures devoid of absurd and useless Western classifications and categorizations.
I then realized that whereas in the Orient,
…… you live, you feel, you sense and you create, …
in the degenerate and rotten part of the Orient that seceded and became the 'West',
…… you are dead, you think, you perceive nothing, and you kill by classifying, alienating, and dividing everything.
I also understood what my tasks -as regards my comprehension, interpretation and representation of Ancient Mesopotamia, Iran and Egypt- were very different from those of my professors and colleagues, who were predestined -because of their own lack of interest- never to comprehend the genuine spirituality of the supreme humans of all times: those whose Fall was limited at an original stage only.
Identifying symbols would not be enough; determining that Isis represented the spiritual ancestors of today's Freemasons and Nephthys stood for the transcendental forefathers of the modern Jesuits would not suffice. I would have to meticulously read plenty of texts, to find one point here, another there, and establish a potential link between them, and also to scrutinize concepts that were not explicitly written in texts but immortalized as architectural structures able to carry in their parts and members the encrypted terrible notions that the Ancient Egyptians would never dare to write. In brief, I would have to reconstitute the Ancient Oriental Genius in all of its aspects and dimensions.
This would not be a thesis written in order to obtain a useless university degree, but for the sake of my own soul, for the rediscovery of my connection with my inner self (i.e. my soul), for the elimination of moral inadequacies, and for the posterior quest that I intended to undertake: the delineation of the transcendental itinerary of mankind.
It was then that I understood that I had to recognize every potential remaining trace of the atemporal, transcendental perception of the Divine that the early humans had or every ingenious effort to reconstitute this supreme human sense. I came to realize that rumination is not thought, contemplation is not thought, and meditation is not thought.
Conceiving became then understood as perpetuation of the human malfunction.
Perceiving would subsequently become a priority.
However, the perception should be liberated from the subliminal tyranny.
Otherwise, it would not function as genuine intuition.
The entire modern construct (the Western world) had to be obliterated – in me!
The evacuation or decomposition of all elements of my subconscious was urgency.
Living a dreadful situation, I was graced with my life's greatest encounter: Ferdowsi!
His majestic Shahnameh, written 1000 years ago, was for me the sublime final return.
There is only one sublime final return for every human, if he is fortunate enough.
This is the arrival back to the world of his childhood or his grandparents' fairy tales.
Reading excerpts from the Shahnameh, I found the origin of all the folk tales and the fables narrated to me by my grandparents; the spiritual potency, the moral decency, the exuberant joy, the daring attempt, the due punishment, and the incorruptibility of the true, real world came back in force to my heart, solar plexus, and mind. Suddenly, the 'international community' of the late 1980s and early 1990s lost its meaning for me; it could very well get lost. It would be better.
It was not easy to decipher the incredible stories of Ferdowsi and to comprehend their true meaning that has nothing to do with chivalric romance as many foolish Westerners attempted to interpret it, disregarding a multitude of data that directly contradict this interpretation. I read, re-read, tried to understand it, and failed. I then went through many other leading Muslim mystics, poets, authors and scientists, notably Nizami Ganjavi (12th c.; the national poet of the Azeris) and Amir Khusraw (13th-early 14th c.; the national poet of Hindustan).
It was only after many repeated efforts over several decades -and after I became Muslim- that I realized that with voluminous masterpiece, Ferdowsi managed to recast the entire World History, as viewed from the spiritual universe, and narrate it as a transient eternity and as an eternal moment at the same time.
D. Note about my spiritual & academic evolution before and after adhering to Islam
By now I have managed to streamline the narrative and I wrote down the titles of the pending sub-units that will help me complete my response; as I already said, several of the processes described in the present letter continued after my formal adhesion to Islam, and that's why it would be very wrong for you (and for any other person) to consider me as a fossilized form of Muslim who believes, considers, evaluates, concludes, and thinks in 2026 in exactly the same manner as he did in 1992.
I was certainly not dead all these years, and I actively improved my knowledge, understanding, evaluation, conceptualization and contextualization of facts, penetration into -and interpretation of- historical sources, texts, and documents tremendously over the past 34 years. I have always been a vivacious person and an arduous explorer, always exhausting myself in meticulous research and inquisitive examination of data; by the way, this does not involve only my new readings of historical Muslim authors, mystics, and scientists, but also my understanding of diverse conditions and situations outside the Dar al Islam (a mostly misinterpreted term).
Only someone, who does not know me at all, would possibly think that I have now about Christianity the same idea that I formed when reading the books of Robert Ambelain and conversing with him back in the late 1970s; this does not mean that I rejected his approach! No! I did not! But I expanded it, viewed it from many different viewpoints, contextualized it better, and identified many other parameters that he could have taken into consideration, but he did not, and so on.
To hint at just one topic in this regard, I would say that Robert Ambelain did not bother to examine the piety, the spirituality, and the asceticism of the Akritai fighters and defenders of the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire (the term 'Byzantine' is false, malignant, and blasphemous) at the time of the Isaurian dynasty (717-802 CE); yet, they were sacred and legendary combatants who defeated many times the fake Muslim soldiers of the Umayyads and the early Abbasids. And the true Muslims, opposing the cursed dynasties, were the secretive allies of the Eastern Romans. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akritai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digenes_Akritas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acritic_songs
E. Note about the use of the words "you", "West" or "Western World"
Before continuing and completing my response, I have to write for you a brief, explanatory note, even more so because I read your last email several times (already yesterday evening) and I thank you for your kind words and understanding. This clarification concerns the use of words "you", "Western world" and 'West", which could perhaps have been taken personally by you; it also involves all the strong statements of mine that you already read and all those you will read in the future.
Like all humans, I don't believe all the facts, situations, items, etc. that I happen to know with the same strength; for some points I am absolutely convinced, whereas for others I am not quite sure and I need to find more reliable sources. Similarly, when it comes to the moral evaluation and the final judgment about a fact, person, narrative, concept, text, etc., I have very different assessments per case. So, if I don't make a strong statement about something that I consider indeed as an abomination (and Tauroctony is an abomination!), I immediately feel that I become a hypocrite. This is very bad when I address a friend (like you and others), and -even worse- this is a sin. So, the strength of a conviction must be also shown in a conversation or a written, epistolary communication.
You have to understand that this has nothing to do with my adhesion to Islam; I grew in a Christian Orthodox environment for all the paragons and parameters, values and concepts of which the "lie" was/is a "crime". A lie is like a murder; when you lie, you kill a part of the universe. The only punishment for the lie is "death". The "lie" is the quintessence of Satan; this is exactly what you can read in the Gospel by John (8:44). And the end punishment of Satan will be that of all liars.
Now, when I use the pronoun 'you', I don't mean you personally, but generally what is now called 'the collective West'; you can certainly find very deprecatory comments and descriptions written by me about the West. I certainly say what I mean and I mean what I say; however, the term "West" or "Western World", used by me, does not describe a permanent and diachronic divide between the "civilized Orient" and the "barbaric Occident". Simply, I imply that the Western part of the European Peninsula, after a certain moment, became decayed and depraved, being thus differentiated from the rest of the Orient.
What was contemptuously rejected in Iran (the Mithraic Magi) and in Egypt (the Memphitic priesthood of Ptah) made its way to Rome and managed to make a home there, thus forcing Constantine the Great to transfer (324-330 CE) the true essence of Rome to Nova Roma (New Rome) - Constantinople. Empowered by the spurned disciples of Mani (who from Alexandria proceeded to NW Africa and then to the degenerate Rome), the evil priesthood of Rome spread barbarism among the Lombards, the Goths, the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans and others. I don't mention the Romans, because all the sound Romans moved to New Rome. About:
https://www.philipharland.com/Blog/2023/04/persians-emperor-diocletian-and-others-on-strange-and-monstrous-manichaeans-manichees-third-fourth-centuries-ce/
https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/article/policy-of-roman-empire-towards-manicheans/
But the westernmost confines of Asia (what people call 'NW Europe' nowadays) were earlier inhabited by the highly civilized Cimmerians and Celts, who left many great monuments, as you know, in Eastern Europe, Germany, Gaul (Gallia), Britain (Britannia; Caledonia), and Ireland (Hibernia/Ierne). By the way, I fully reject the notion of Europe being a 'continent'; like India, Indochina (part of which is the Malay Peninsula), and the Arabian Peninsula, Europe is just one of Asia's peninsulas.
F. Perception of the indispensable mythical and legendary dimension of the historical reality: the cornerstone of my life's major change
As I already wrote, my encounter with Ferdowsi and Shahnameh was most impactful, fascinating, and transformative. This was the point where spiritual, academic and moral processes merged to cause a significant personal transformation in my life.
It was not just the incredibly resourceful, spiritually imaginative, and heroically exhilarating epic that was repeatedly and explicitly described, throughout the ages, as the 'Second Quran' anywhere between the Balkans and China and from Siberia to India!
It was not just the supreme text that enthralled all nations, combatants, warriors, mystics and emperors between the Mediterranean and China!
It was not just the sublime poem that offered the exemplary characters and the divine heroes with whom Selim I -the Ottoman- and Ismail I -the Safavid Iranian- identified themselves, while exchanging insulting letters prior to the Battle of Chaldiran (1514).
And it was not only the cornerstone of the education of every brave boy from the days of the Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who commissioned Ferdowsi to write the true History of the Iranian (not Persian) Emperors, to those of Timur, his son Shah Rukh, and his grandson, Ulugh Beg, the world's foremost astronomer in the middle of the 15th c.!
It was the fact that -for almost one millennium- all the Iranians and all the Turanians perceived, learned, and accepted as their National History and as World History the exuberantly majestic visions of transcendentally described events, which were comprised in the 100000 lines of the majestic poem.
The shock was terrible for me, because it meant that I had to re-read, re-assess, and re-comprehend a multitude of Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian, Hittite and Iranian texts that I had already studied but understood in a wrong, flat, composed, calm, sedated -or if you prefer 'dead'- manner. It was an incredible awakening. History was not what I was told.
First, my previous, disastrous misreading of the fundamental Assyrian-Babylonian epic 'Gilgamesh and Enkidu' caused me detrimental sorrow; I felt that humans were created in order to literally levitate and fly in the skies and I, misguided by my professors and fooled because of my passive acceptance of the Western barbaric nonsense, was insisting that humans were created to crawl on the ground.
It was then that for the first time I realized that, although Orientalist scholarship energetically tried to enrich the collective knowledge by excavating monuments, deciphering scripts, and translating ancient texts, Orientalism constituted a very extraordinary effort of distortion of the Genius of the Ancient Orient due to the disastrous yet incessant projection of absurd and putrefied Western ideologies onto the translation, commentary, analysis, and interpretation of texts and onto the overall elaboration of manuals and books about the ancient nations of the Orient.
I realized that my main mistake was that I had divided ancient texts into
a) 'religious', 'mythical', 'epic', etc. and
b) 'political', 'economic', 'social', etc.
This was extremely wrong!
The texts had to be described as
a) 'spiritual' or 'transcendental' or 'mythical-epic' and
b) 'secular'.
First, what we call 'religion' in the Ancient Oriental religions is mainly spirituality free of dogmas and theological doctrines.
Second, the indispensable mythical and legendary dimension of the historical reality permeated most of the secular texts. For instance, the quadrilingual inscription of the Achaemenid Emperor Darius I the Great on the occasion of re-opening of the Ancient Egyptian Suez Canal is filled with references to Ahura Mazda. About:
https://www.academia.edu/43492808/Darius_the_Greats_Suez_Inscriptions_Birth_Certificate_of_the_Silk_Roads
Now look at the criminal distortions of Wikipedia, the filthy tool of the Satanic Jesuits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_inscriptions_of_Darius_the_Great
By specifying the following "partial transliteration and translation of the inscription", they monstrously deceive their unsuspicious readers!
I therefore comprehended that I would have to re-read everything, trying always to identify and assess the omnipresent spirituality of the ancient nations of the Orient, searching in every single moment of their historical past the indispensable mythical and legendary dimension of their life. This was the first moment I realized that the so-called Ancient Greeks and Romans were peripheral, marginal, and lower, because exactly these dimensions either did not exist or were minimal or proved to be subject to ridicule in the monstrously barbarian agglomerations of Athens and Rome.
At the time, a strong criticism of the Western academic fallacies and forgeries appeared with the series of books 'Black Athena' by the erudite savant Martin Bernal; I read them, supported his demarche, spoke with him over the phone, and also congratulated him. However, I believed that, trying the demonstrate the impact of the Oriental civilizations on the disparate and marginal tribes of Western Anatolia and South Balkans that are falsely named "Ancient Greeks", he did not expand on (or even mention) the unprecedented flood of Oriental cults, cosmologies, eschatologies, world conceptualizations, faiths, mysticisms, and religions that covered the Balkans, Rome, the Roman Empire, and Europe outside the Roman borders during the later periods, from the 5th c. BCE to the 4th c. CE.
It was then that I went through the famous book 'Orientalism' by the Palestinian Christian scholar Edward Said (first published in 1978); it was very helpful for me, and I certainly agreed with his approach and publicized it widely, but I found it very limited in Literature and Art. Edward Said did not expand on the decipherments and the reconstitution of the History of the Ancient Oriental empires on the basis of original, contemporaneous texts. There he would find the most partial and the most dreadful results of the deeds of the Orientalists. Nevertheless!
One had to wait until the early 2000s, when Donald Malcolm Reid came up with his revelatory and insightful 'Whose pharaohs?: Archaeology, museums, and Egyptian national identity from Napoleon to World War'. This is an excellent book that I strongly recommend to anyone anytime anywhere and under any circumstances whatsoever.
However, I have to accept that there are no equivalent books to Reid's masterpiece with respect to the Orientalist biases in the decipherment of ancient scripts and the reconstitution of the Ancient History of Mesopotamia, Iran, and Anatolia. But the fact that Westerners like D. M. Reid express this sound and constructive criticism gives you already a certain impression about the in which all those fake Muslims of our times find themselves.
The truth is that neither Edward Said nor D. Malcolm Reid expanded on the reasons for which Orientalism (or, to be honest, the unprecedented usurpation of the Ancient Oriental heritage and of the pre-Islamic past of all the Oriental nations, which was undertaken by the Western colonials) 'happened' to the modern Oriental peoples and states'; even worse, because the states under question were not small but formidable empires and, more critically, at the time of the Golden Era of Islamic Civilization, a most genuine interest in the pre-Islamic past of the Orient had been expressed by a great number of Muslim historians, astronomers, scientists, scholars, and erudite savants. However, this stupendous effort would certainly demand a very strong background in Christian and Islamic History.
Back at those days, I read with great attention a mysterious novel published by the illustrious Italian Freemason (in fact: pseudo-Freemason) and scholar Umberto Eco. It attracted my attention and I wrote an extensive book-review in Greek ('Is History secretive?'), after reading both, the Italian original and the Greek translation: 'The Pendulum of Foucault'. You will need software translator to read it:
https://www.academia.edu/110469313/Η_Ιστορία_Μυστική_Βιβλιοκρισία_ΔΙΑΒΑΖΩ_
In my book review, I stated that similar spiritual, mystical/esoteric, and religious polarizations (between sacerdotal orders and opposite priesthoods) existed also in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. But it is only after many years, in the 2010s, that I remembered a sentence used by Umberto Eco in order to describe the Qabbalistic category Malkuth, and I realized that it was indeed a blasphemy: "Malkut è Malkut e basta" ("Malkuth is Malkuth, and that's it.").
This is the execrable excerpt:
Che io abbia scritto o no, non fa differenza. Cercherebbero sempre un altro senso, anche nel mio silenzio. Sono fatti così. Sono ciechi alla rivelazione. Malkut è Malkut e basta. Ma vaglielo a dire. Non hanno fede. E allora tanto vale star qui, attendere, e guardare la collina. È così bella.
("Whether I wrote or not, it makes no difference. They would always look for another meaning, even in my silence. That's how they are. They're blind to revelation. Malkuth is Malkuth, and that's it. But go tell them. They have no faith. So we might as well stay here, wait, and look at the hill. It's so beautiful.").
https://www.articolo21.org/2016/02/il-professor-eco-ha-segnato-la-nostra-esistenza/
Saying that "Malkut è Malkut e basta" is a sacrilege.
But it is only due to my attraction to Ferdowsi, to my admiration for Shahnameh, to my subsequent, dramatic change of worldview and of world conceptualization, and to the mobilization of my intuitional skills that I was able at last to perceive as real blasphemy a so calmly written sentence that looks as innocuous as a dove.
G. Rejection of the pseudo-academic professionalism and careerism
I soon realized that the scope of my life was very different from an academic career; I was very conscious of this fact since my childhood, but my frequent, dynamic and whole-hearted presence in universities, institutes, museums and libraries made me forget it.
To work as extensively as it was demanded for me to achieve the goal of revising the enormous documentation that I had collected, I had to find only diverse temporary freelance employments, which would offer me the chance to make ends meet, while also allowing me to have enough time every day for investigating texts, monuments, terms, notions, potential alternative readings, and diverse interpretations.
The customary academic environment -to my eyes- looked as bureaucratic, as boring, and as immoral as cheating students and fooling people while shamelessly providing falsely conceptualized and partly contextualized data, which would mislead anyone willing to learn. I found it extremely hypocritical for me, who was always attracted by the search for truth, to accept the typical conventional jargon of either the Western world's decayed universities or their replicas, namely the universities of Westernized countries that pretended to be anti-Western only to further worsen their condition of ignorance, idiocy, and falseness.
Some things were very clear to me; the fall of the Eastern European countries in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 were developments marking the end of entirely Western regimes that had been imposed on far less Westernized countries, namely Imperial Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Imperial Germany. Communist China with or without capitalism was also a typically Western state; India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka were also typical colonial products; all the pseudo-Muslim or pseudo-Islamic states were ludicrous colonial constructs – with the sole and most honorable exception of Kemal Ataturk's Turkey. All African states had to be fully dismantled because they were false, and all borders had to be redrawn because they were illegal, heinous and inhuman.
Even worse, wherever, whenever and under whatsoever conditions it appeared, Anti-Westernism (also known as Anti-Occidentalism) or Anti-Americanism only helped the extant per place Westernization to be preserved, become more deeply rooted, and eventually expand. The reason for this assessment was very ostensible to me; acting, evaluating, assessing or thinking in any sense, every postcolonial state, nation, people, community, ethnic group, government, organization or person functions -either they understand it or not- as a colonized (i.e. Westernized) being or entity. It cannot be otherwise because this was the real purpose of the colonization: contamination of the rest of the world, cancelation of the human nature, and total transformation of all men into monstrous yet ridiculous replicas.
All the rest, as study and explanation of the phenomenon of colonialism, is merely superfluous and worthless literature; this is so because in fact all other aspects of colonialism (socio-economic, political or military) are minor. And that's why all the major colonial powers had many criminal and fallacious academics, who wrote lengthy and supposedly truthful, yet absolutely nonsensical, treatises to denounce the economic exploitation of the colonized lands, to castigate the socio-political interference, and to decry the brutal behavior of their own soldiers in faraway lands; all this is the ignominious cover up!
More specifically, you cannot possibly pretend that you are an Eastern Orthodox Christian, after being colonized, if you are a Russian/Ukrainian/Belarusian, a Romanian, a Bulgarian, a Serb, an Albanian, a Macedonian, a Greek, a Cypriot, a Georgian, etc. Colonization, i.e. Westernization, does not necessarily involve military occupation. For example, Russia was extensively colonized starting with Peter I the Great. The creation of the modern Balkan states was a scrupulous transfer of colonial structures from the colonial Western countries (France, England and Italy) or from the partly colonized and westernized empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany.
Similarly, you cannot possibly pretend that you are an Oriental Orthodox or a Nestorian Christian, a Muslim, a Yazidi, a Parsi, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Taoist, a Confucian or a Shinto, after being colonized. This reality covers the entire Earth and the very few lucky peoples, who escaped this excruciating and inhuman experience, are those living in very remote lands totally void of any type of Western colonial infrastructure. You understand, of course, that there are fewer cases of similar provinces now than before 35-40 years; so, I have also to admit that I was lucky for having been born in 1956 and for having the chance to examine closely similar regions in the 1980s and the 1990s.
It was therefore Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh that helped me fully comprehend how Westernized a product Ayatollah Khomeini and his stupid theologians were; these conclusions were almost immediately generalized for all the theologians, the pathetic monkeys of the bogus-Islamic universities, the prohibited (in Islam) and therefore evil 'religious authorities' of the so-called Muslim countries, and all the treacherous local regimes that shamelessly betrayed their heritage, national identity, cultural integrity, historical past, and civilization by fully enslaving their state to the criminal and barbaric colonials.
And for this reason the Satanic bogus-Muslims around Khomeini hated and wanted to ban Ferdowsi (a total impossibility in Iran); it was not due to 'their version of Islam', but owed to their fallacious, forged, and fake Islam, i.e. the construct of the colonial Orientalists.
In fact, it was already well known to me that, between a) Syria and Cappadocia (from one side) and b) India and China (from the other side), all the Iranians and the Turanians, after the emergence of the Iranianates in the 9th c. CE (so long before Ferdowsi was born), could mainly (but not exclusively) be grouped in three factions, namely
- the Parsis (who preserved a later form of Sassanid Mazdeism down to our time);
- the Muslims with epic-legendary cultural tendencies (best expressed by Ferdowsi);
and
- the Muslims with spiritual-mystical-eschatological devotion (around Ahl-al Bayt).
Khomeini and his idiotic, demented and uneducated followers and supporters did not represent any of the three groups; they proved to be an execrably alien element, namely the historically nonexistent stupidity of 'Wilayat al-faqih'. English colonials had pushed him to that islamically nonsensical concept in order to use him in time.
I thus concluded that, above all, Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, and the mythical and legendary reading of the historical reality constituted the true pole of absolute Truth among humans, i.e. the absolute opposite of the decayed and putrefied West that endlessly produced corrupt notions, sick thoughts, and degenerate ideas.
As such, the true pole of absolute Truth among humans, would help me not only
- correct my perception of the world and my intuitional skills,
- disintoxicate and decontaminate myself from my earlier, long exposure to sick and useless Western 'thoughts', 'ideas', 'ideologies', 'philosophies', 'models', 'examples' and trends, and
- revise and rectify my earlier readings and the conclusions of my studies of Ancient Oriental civilizations,
but also
- comprehend the entire phenomenon of Islam in every sense, dimension, and aspect, duly contextualizing it, effectively identifying falsehood and distortion in historical sources, and unveiling monstrosities perpetrated in the name of Allah.
At this point, I must add that I had an early feeling that my search would probably help me unveil plenty of preposterous factoids purportedly attributed to the so-called 'early Muslims', many among whom happened to bizarrely have had a weird similarity with the filthy Wahhabi rascals and villains, who were by then active in Afghanistan, being on the payroll of the World History's most impermissible state, namely the shithole called 'Saudi Arabia'.
In this regard, Ferdowsi and Shahnameh effectively and irreversibly deleted -during my tense effort to realize what the true Islam was and who Prophet Muhammad may have been as character and behavior- the absurd misconceptions and the nonsensical lies of all Western specialists, the likes of Maxime Rodinson (my professor), Bernard Lewis, Edmund Bosworth, and others. In this regard, there was a pivotal moment; this occurred when I found myself in front of the very well-known passage in which Ferdowsi curses the Muslim armies, which attacked Iran at the time of Yazdegerd III (reign: 632-651), last Sassanid emperor and grandson of Khusraw II.
This excerpt was one of the reasons for which the anti-Iranian, westernized regime of the Ayatollahs often attempted to curb the immense cultural-educational-intellectual impact that Ferdowsi still exerts and to remove him from the primary and secondary education manuals in Iran. Even worse, several idiotic and pathetic Westernized elements of the disastrous regime tried to discredit the verse itself and to portray it as unauthentic. Yet, the reality is very simple: the verse is original, and true, faithful Muslims used to curse indeed for more than 1000 years the so-called 'early Islamic armies', which brought the Sassanid Empire down. How was this possible?
That's easy to assume: the so-called 'early Islamic armies' were not Islamic. That is a lie!
Thus, I started studying the History of the Muslim states and the Islamic civilization very passionately, because I realized that I would find astounding truths, hitherto unknown facts, and groundbreaking revelations.
H. When spiritual and moral transformation made me understand everything differently
Working simultaneously on many layers (better comprehending the standards and the mechanisms of the Divine as narrated in the Shahnameh; re-reading Ancient Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Hittite, Egyptian, and Iranian texts through the eyes of Ferdowsi; developing genuine human contacts with my friends and informers on the basis of Oriental norms), I was able to make a great progress in the overhaul of my knowledge and consciousness (this is not a term I often use; I prefer to speak about the following: 'perception of life and of the universe').
My conclusions were therefore a matter of Spiritual Ontology (the term 'Metaphysics' is fake, null and even comical). I herewith use the term in the sense that it is only one of the disciplines of the 'Spiritual Sciences'; I had already understood that they exist totally independently from what we now call 'sciences' (which are literally speaking 'material sciences' and therefore inherently false). They were perfectly well known to many ancient nations and later, with the advanced degradation of mankind, they were recaptured by selected mystics and scientists here and there; that's why what we now call 'Islamic sciences' is totally misrepresented, because the Islamic scholars were versed in the highly interconnected 'Spiritual and Material Sciences' which cannot be possibly understood today.
It became ostensible to me that no one can possibly learn, let alone understand or make the wisdom of anything, prior to his total denial and rejection of himself. The silly trickery, namely that you just acquire knowledge quantitatively and then know 'more', is for cockroaches.
There are no countries, states, lands, societies, governments, ministries, companies, religions, religious organizations, ideologies or peoples (let alone 'nations', which is a fake modern construct) to whom you belong – except you are predestined to live among them, with them, and for them; this may be as good as it gets. When all these unnecessary forms of conventional environment get corrupted, you don't need to stay attached to them. On the contrary, you have to run away as fast as you can.
Humans are not mere particles of rotten carrots, forced to stay where they are.
I was not predestined to live in Greece where I was born, being the only member of my family to have been birthed there (all the others came into the world in Turkey); and no fate ordained me to reside in the land of my ancestors where I lived for 3-4 years in the 1980s and 1990s; I certainly know and cherish, visited and explored that country many times. But I was attracted by the lands where my maternal grandfather traveled and worked as merchant; the wonderful narratives that I heard about the Orient made of me a permanent explorer, whereas my studies and researches in Orientalism and my life in several of these lands incited me to go further and further.
The only way by which one can force another person to be 'tied' to a place, person, etc. is black magic; that's why today's false Freemasons, who see everything through the lens of their bogus-god, tell you in a most distorted manner that the Christian baptism is a mystery that stays with you forever; that's ridiculous because the will of Man is above all mysteries. And this was fully demonstrated throughout History; actually this evil and inhuman theory was never expressed by Nestorian, Oriental Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox Christians. It consists in an extraordinary lie of the false Christians of the West.
There is no 'tie' that keeps you attached to anything; the supreme force of the Divine, in the material world, is the Human Will. Of course, it has to be moral; certainly, it has to be adjusted to the purpose of the Creation; definitely, you have to go toward the direction that your inner self (: soul) indicates to you. But, you must first be sure, that what you sense as your soul is truly your soul and not
- sick spiritual constructs (also known as 'astral larvae') of your earlier, worthless life
- idols formed inside your impermissibly full subconscious
- detrimental spiritual entities able to absorb your energy (electro-magnetic fluids)
- demons-protectors assigned to you by the evil masters of esoteric orders which initiated you into their evil mysteries – in this case, your soul is held captive by those protectors whose spiritual signature becomes later your material signature.
Next to simple farmers and shepherds I came to learn how the Islamic spiritual orders (tariqas) functioned; it was an early approach to Islam - much more original than whatever can be found in any book written about these orders. When learning details about the Safavid Order (which founded the most formidable Iranian empire after the arrival of Islam) from the lips of tribesmen who belonged to one of the major tribes, which supported the Order and the Empire, I did not think about becoming Muslim in spite of my advanced familiarization with the History of Islam.
However, I was about to vomit, because I realized how disgustingly sick the Western world, the Western Orders -Catholic (Benedictines, Jesuits, etc.) or profane (Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, etc.)-, and every attempt of spiritual exercise attempted in the West have always been. There was no secrecy in the Islamic spiritual orders; anyone could become a member anytime anywhere.
Instead of the secluded Satanic venom of the West, the luscious, fragrant and affable humanity of the pre-colonial Orient…
I certainly understand that the total denial and rejection of one's self may eventually have one limitation: every person's innate and natural obligations to his parents and grandparents. But beyond these tasks that you have to carry out with due diligence, there is nothing that can tie you to the past and to the mistakes of your life that the inhuman Western society induced you to make, thus fully dehumanizing you.
I then remembered why I had always detested the nauseating English expression "Be who you are"! You are never yourself in the cursed Western world; you are the always execrable construct that the inhuman society fabricated for its own, most undeserved, continuity. Only when you reject your fake self, which was constructed because of your innocence, your ignorance of the real nature of the social milieu, and your foolishness to accept the Western standards as normal, you have the chance to recover or unveil your true self.
I then recalled why I always detested the bogus-science of Psychology; it is a vicious anomaly geared deliberately to block one person's itinerary to his own soul and his attempt to establish the (missing after the Fall) unity of body, character and soul on the basis of the inherent moral code of the Creation. I then realized that the correct term for this discipline, which certainly contains aspects of genuine truth (never forget: there cannot be absolute lie!), would be 'Characterology'.
From managing to reject yourself to achieving genuine (and not false, 'Western') knowledge, there is a long distance to go. Reaching chastity is important, but the reconstitution of the individual normalcy is not tantamount to learning.
In fact, there cannot be proper self-knowledge without the correct knowledge of the 'other'.
Indeed, there is no knowledge without the acceptance of the 'other' as per the other's genuine terms and standards. Projecting onto the others your own values, norms and view of them is not only an absurdity and an idiocy, but also a grave sin. As a matter of fact, by so doing, you kill the other. Your own misrepresentation of the other in yourself is your own, most unfortunate, malfunction that ends up with the execution of the other.
It was back at those days and due to all the released processes that I came to realize how hypocritical and inhuman every political denunciation of supposedly dictatorial regimes has been; they were accusing them of killing innocent people, when some dozens or hundreds of civilians were attacked. All the same, the criminal Western world exterminated billions of souls, leaving the surviving soulless bodies in the midst of monstrous ideologies, sick lifestyles, fake needs, and delusional interests, namely chthonian prisons out of which they would move only when dying.
Examined from this viewpoint, the descriptive phrase, used by historians and writers to summarize the cultural imperialism, "Make the world England" consists in the most inhuman monstrosity ever conceived and implemented, because it was exactly the total rejection and cruel extermination of the 'other'. The fact that such a vicious concept contradicts the nature of the spiritual universe heralds the total collapse and the inevitable demolition of any material order based upoon such an attempt.
Accepting the 'other' and becoming the 'other' (if only for the temporary needs of investigation and comprehension) are only the beginning of a spiritual-academic exercise.
No proper understanding can ever be obtained without the researcher/explorer taking the position of the 'other' and seeing everything from the 'other's viewpoint'.
It then became to me clear that self-perception and perception of the universe are in fact one process during which one has to advance in two opposite directions. But it would take decades for me to effectively feel and comprehend the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
As a matter of fact, there is no wisdom without the simultaneous comprehension of the function of all the parameters of a space, which means that you have to see everything from the viewpoints of all the items of a milieu; when it comes to the spiritual universe, it involves the ability to perceive all the 'others' from all the 'points of the universe', each point being a spiritual being.
I. My study of Islam, of the Quran,
and of the Hadith was not methodologically Western – contrarily to those of all
Muslims of today.
Before starting this last sub-unit
of my response, I need to briefly narrate to you a real fact from my life, i.e.
a brief conversation that took place between me and a lady in 1994; it is quite
illustrative. She asked me the following:
- Why did you become Muslim?
I replied instantaneously; my answer
was very brief, correct and true; but it is very difficult for the
non-specialists to fathom:
- Because Islam is not what you
think it is!
The lady was dumbfounded; she did
not say anything, and apparently she did not understand; this may even be good
for her! Not all the people have come to this world in order to understand.
Sinners cannot understand; they believe that the surrounding environment is
'normal', but -of course- it is not.
One may easily call 'idiots' the
people, who believe that 'everything is fine in this world', and this label may
look correct, but in fact it is not; basically, they are very sinful without
having any moral compunction to realize that their daily life is an endless
perpetuation of sins. The condition of sinning impacts humans in a most
disastrous manner, turning them to idiots, but this is not the original
condition of the people. That's why -almost in their quasi-totality- two
billions of Muslims are truly faithless and spiritually lost; they are sinners
who fail to fathom the crimes that they perform.
During the brief tenure of former
President Morsi (and the silly pseudo-Muslims of the so-called 'Muslim
Brotherhood'), members of the Egyptian Parliament wanted to pass a law
explicitly allowing humans to have sexual intercourse with corpses for a
30-minute period after the death of the person. If this is 'Islam', it is
better to burn their mosques, madrasas, and libraries.
As I already said, I came to early
know that the so-called 'early Islamic conquests' consisted in a factoid; but,
I had to fully prove it to myself first, to plainly document it, to realize the
conditions under which these events happened, and to comprehend the true reasons
for which they occurred. At those days, today's best specialists were also
under formation; so, I did not have the chance to go through the articles, the
lectures, the speeches, and the books of Jacqueline Chabbi, Mohammad Ali
Amir-Moezzi, Guillaume Dye, and several other scholars. And the earlier
bibliography was too descriptive, too conventional, and too superficial.
I had to access the plain truth,
which is also accepted by all Muslims, but covered by voluntary falsification;
you know, there is always an instinctive tendency for forgery in the rotten
hearts and the silly minds of many people, who know the details but try to
forget them and not to duly highlight them to themselves first. So, the
absurdly extraordinary reverence of Prophet Muhammad, which is common to many
Muslims as a mistake, leads therefore to hypocrisy and real disbelief; and the
same occurs to followers of many other religions.
So, long before I become Muslim, I
decided to stand face to face with him and tell the truth to myself; I mean
that very truth, which Prophet Muhammad's worst enemies (in the West) and most
comical pseudo-followers (in Dar al Islam) persistently do not want to reveal.
- Who was Muhammad ibn Abdullah at
30, in 600 CE (assuming the dates are correct)?
- He was a lowlife!
This is said in the sense that he
was one of the most misfortunate inhabitants of the small and marginal village
of Mecca or, in other words, a person with very low social rank, even more so
because 6 months before he was born, he lost his father, and at the age of 6
years, he saw his mother dying. Within the specific social environment, the
losses were truly detrimental. No woman would like to get married with a
'loser' like that! Even worse, at the age of 25, Muhammad ibn Abdullah was (or
'had to get') married to Khadija, something that is currently presented in a
most distorted manner, namely as a turn of fortune. That's absolutely
ridiculous!
With this marriage Muhammad was
actually deprived of the most honorable privilege and of the most praiseworthy
right (of which all the young countrymen of his age were dreaming), namely that
of deflowering or, if you prefer, taking the virginity of the woman with whom
he would get married. That was almost a shame.
Of course, in a world filled with
prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians, transvestites, pedophiles, and bastards
like today's Western world, this fact cannot be possibly understood. But I'll
tell you what (also revealing you parts of my method)!
Go to several Muslim countries,
befriend many natives, suggest to a 20-year old boy to get married with an
older and divorced woman, who has children from her earlier marriages, and then
tell me how badly you were smacked and hit because of this terrible imprudence!
Friends of mine stayed unmarried in
their lives in order to avoid the extremely bitter and most negative comments
of relatives, friends, colleagues and associates that their foolishness to get
married with an older and divorced woman would bring about!
They would be socially defaced and
constantly looked at with utmost contempt, if they dared to do something like
that, in spite of the fact that there may have been a love affair between them
and the older and divorced woman. Hmm! The proposed experiment has not yet
ended!
Now, go to ask these persons (who
finally did not get married with the older and divorced woman) why they did not
say to their family and friends that, getting married with such a woman, they
would only imitate Prophet Muhammad!
Please, be prepared to be punched in
the most brutal manner!
So, do not think that you can
understand a religion by reading useless books and by listening to idiots who
propagate the nonsensical lie that, if you read the Quran, you can know what
Islam is! Of course, there are correctly elaborated treatises, collective
works, and informative encyclopedias that are definitely commendable. But all
this is just an introductory effort.
Then, on what can one researcher and
explorer rely on?
My response to this question is
triple: one has to trust
i- numerous historical books written
by the most illustrious Muslim historians, writers, scientists, poets, mystics
and intellectuals
(in this regard, you first resign
from the idea that you can possibly comprehend Islam by yourself and you deploy
a great effort to discern and observe it through the eyes of others; selecting
historically undisputed authorities, you thus embark on an attempt to
understand how exactly the most prominent, the most knowledgeable and the most
distinguished scholars of the Islamic times saw their own religion; in other
words, you try to fathom what Islam was for Al Biruni, Tabari, Al Mas'udi, Al
Khwarizmi, Abu Bakr Muhammad al Razi, Ibn Sina, Al Ghazali, Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi,
Jalal al Din Rumi, Nasir al Din al Tusi, and others.);
ii- numerous close friends made in
remote regions of several Muslim countries, i.e. people who never traveled to
the capitals of their countries and who happen to live in a most genuine
traditional manner, comprehensively reflecting their culture in each and every
sentence they make
(in this case, you add to your
documentation the life experience of today's most authoritative Muslims; these
individuals are not the monstrously uneducated imams of the so-called Islamic
universities, which are worthless annexes of the Western perversion, but all
those who are evidently less contaminated by any concept, notion, conclusion,
political idea, and technology invented in the West.); and
iii- yourself and your systematic
effort to prepare (apologies for my French!) as many 'points de repère'
(landmarks) as you can for the posterior, recapitulative study of
well-selected, key data.
(For instance, the aforementioned
case for Muhammad ibn Abdullah in and by itself tells us only few things; but
combined with many other 'points de repère' that others failed to notice in
their correct dimensions, it can totally change the overall view over the
series of developments under study.)
So, when Jacqueline Chabbi attempts
to depict the early Islamic conquests as simple razzias, which at the end
produced a marvelous development, to some extent she is right, because that was
the right feeling among most of the warriors. The addition of religious color
to those incidents may well have been a later, Umayyad policy; as we have very
scarce and brief sources from the 7th c. CE, it is quite possible that what we
read in the -otherwise respected but not so innocent- historical sources (that
date 200 years after the events) may have simply been a later impression
recorded in the today nonexistent early texts, which served as sources for the
authors whose texts have been preserved down to our days.
But it is always essential to
i- observe how things were in the
other side of the 'borders'
In this case, I mean that the
well-known and widely published story of the Eastern Romans and the Sassanid
Iranians being exhausted in enduring wars is not enough to explain critical
developments that occurred, namely
a) the irrevocable collapse and
disappearance of the Constantinopolitan state in the East (loss of Eastern
Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Libya and Carthage); and
b) the multitude of Iranian
revolutions against the early Caliphates, the secession of many Iranianates
(Muslim kingdoms of totally Iranian culture), and the Iranization of Islam that
took place throughout Asia 200-300 years after the death of Prophet Muhammad.
About: (check details in Unit IV, C, 1
and 2)
https://www.academia.edu/170450584/Iran_2026_the_Pivot_of_World_History_Assaulted_by_the_Barbarians_of_the_West_III
and
https://www.academia.edu/171410400/Iran_2026_the_Pivot_of_World_History_Assaulted_by_the_Barbarians_of_the_West_III_WITH_PICTURES_and_LEGENDS_
By the way, this is an execrable
forgery published only for the purpose of justifying the preconceived fallacies
of the Orientalists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests
ii- examine historical developments
from the viewpoint of peoples and populations, and not exclusively from the
perspective of states
In this instance, I highlight the
fact that both, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran, were
multinational, multicultural, multi-religious or multi-denominational states
and for this reason it is very mistaken to present History as a) result of the
interaction between states and b) consequence of developments that concern only
the elites.
On the contrary, History is mainly
the true description of trends, faiths, cults, beliefs, arts, acts and
practices, situations and conditions, developments and changes lived and
experienced by the people of a location, land, and/or region.
More specifically and with respect
to the so-called early Islamic conquests, even the best specialists seem to
forget that the outright majority of the local populations in SE Anatolia,
Syria, North Mesopotamia, Palestine and Egypt (speaking about the Eastern Roman
Empire) were oppressed, persecuted, and marginalized Aramaeans and Egyptians
(Copts), who were Miaphysites/Monophysites and considered the Patriarchate of
Constantinople and the Church of Rome as heretic and diabolical.
They would certainly and by far
prefer the early preaching of Prophet Muhammad and they would accept any
Arab-Yemenite rule to get rid of the Constantinopolitan garrisons and the
imperial stooges. This was basically the underlying truth of the events that
took place between Libya and Central Asia in the period 634-651 CE.
The Satanic Western lie about the
hypothetical persecution of the Christians by the early Islamic armies must be
rejected with indignation. Many Aramaeans fought against the Eastern Roman
armies and there were naval battles in which almost all the fighters were
Aramaeans from Syria.
The Maronite Chronicle of 664 CE proves
that the Christians sympathized with and appreciated the early Umayyad ruler,
definitely preferring him to the heretic (for them; but this is all that
matters) Eastern Roman armies. About:
https://deadseaquake.info/EarthquakeCatalogOfTheDeadSea/AuthorBios/MaroniteChronicle.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maronite_Chronicle_of_664
Similarly, the Coptic Chronicles
cursed Constantinople and Rome, favoring the Caliphate. No one can write his
own historical forgery by bypassing such texts. The Chronicle of John of Nikiu
(originally written in the 7th c. CE and saved in Ge'ez translation) covers all
major historical developments from Adam to the Islamic conquests; the author
describes these events as a divine punishment for the Chalcedonian heresies of
Constantinople and Rome. Later, in the 10th c. CE, Severus ibn al-Muqaffa in
his History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria reiterates the rejection of both,
the Eastern Roman Empire and the pope of Rome. About:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Niki%C3%BB
https://books.google.ru/books?id=KgZ-DOr77OQC&redir_esc=y
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Patriarchs_of_Alexandria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severus_ibn_al-Muqaffa
The fundamental mistake of the 19th
and 20th c. Orientalists was that they took the conditions, which prevailed in
the pseudo-Islamic Ottoman Empire during its last 350 years, as the permanent
situation in which Christians found themselves in every Islamic state. This
opinion was false and, in addition, it was extremely biased, since many Muslims
were often persecuted worse than the Christians by the perverse and monstrous
Ottoman sultans. But the malignant, colonial supremacists, disregarding a
multitude of historical data and intending to write comprehensively biased
historical presentations, generalized their wrong perceptions, projected them
onto the past, and thought that they were successful in their works.
Similar situations prevailed in the
Sassanid Empire of Iran. In Mesopotamia, the majority of the local population
consisted of Nestorian Aramaeans; they were often oppressed and persecuted, and
for this reason many among them relocated to rather peripheral provinces of the
empire in Sindh (India) and Central Asia. Persecution was also continuous and very
severe against the Manichaeans, the Nazarenes, the followers of Zaradosht (also
known as Second Zoroaster), and later those of Mazdak (the first preacher of a
society liberated from the concept of ownership). About:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_Sasanian_Empire#Internal_Organization_of_the_Church_Before_410_CE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_Sasanian_Empire#State_and_Church_in_the_5th%E2%80%936th_Centuries
(notably:) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_Sasanian_Empire#Inter-Church_Conflicts_in_the_Early_7th_Century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani_(prophet)#Imprisonment_and_execution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism#Life_of_Mani
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism#Persecution_and_suppression
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism#Iran
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazarene_(sect)#Nasoraean_Mandaeans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Zoroaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdakism
Opposite this flood of new religions
that Iran is worldwide unique in generating, the imperial priests considered
themselves as the guards of the prophetic (Zoroastrian) legacy, spiritual
rigor, and monotheistic orthodoxy. However, their righteousness was bountifully
rewarded with celestial journeys, like those of Arda Wiraz and Kartir, a
phenomenal figure of tremendous spiritual potency who proved to be able to
irrevocably cast Mani, a foremost spiritual potentate but founder of a
counterfeit religion, out of Iran forever. About:
https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/arda-wiraz-wiraz/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Arda_Viraf
https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kartir/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartir
https://www.avesta.org/mp/kz.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka%27ba-ye_Zartosht
It is not therefore strange that
biased Jesuit historians from Western universities, pathetically ideologized
pseudo-Muslim academics from Iranian universities, and pseudo-Christian Iranian
stooges on the payroll of the Mossad -in spite of their many differences- agree
on one vicious point: the persistent, yet unjustified, denigration of Kartir,
one of World History's most formidable sacerdotal masters. Apparently, his
definite preponderance in 3rd c. CE Iran must be a most scathing development
for them. Example: https://hezbeama.com/en/history/
Also: https://www.academia.edu/105117675/Sassanid_Iran_Turan_Kartir_Roman_Empire_Christianity_Mani_and_Manichaeism
This supreme spiritual experience of
a celestial journey (that was easy for me to comprehend due to my earlier study
of Assyrian-Babylonian Cosmology and World conceptualization) was apparently at
the origin of the Isra' and Mi'raj, i.e. the celestial journey of Prophet
Muhammad (in the beginning of 620 CE, i.e. 18 months before Hegira). About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isra%27_and_Mi%27raj
The conclusion that we can safely
draw from the aforementioned points is that, similarly with what happened in
the Eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Aramaeans of the Western
provinces of Sassanid Iran found in the early Muslim armies their occasional
savior. The affinity between Syriac Aramaic and Arabic, a langue that was
written thanks to the Nabataean Aramaic alphabet (which derived from Aramaic),
played also a decisive role in the acceptance of, and the collaboration with,
the attacking troops, which were apparently ill-equipped, less prepared, and
barely experienced if compared with the imperial armies. Irrespective of the
true goal of the attacking forces (razzias; spread of a faith; both; other),
the outright majority of the populations between the Eastern Mediterranean
coastland and the Persian Gulf viewed in them an intermittent benefactor. The
collapse of the two imperial administrations in the said region was -for the
local populations- the utmost deliverance.
I offered the example of the
aforementioned reading of the events of the period 634-651 CE in order to
provide you with an idea about the elementary approaches that I developed as
regards the historical facts that took place after the death of Prophet
Muhammad. As early as 1987, I knew that the entire world was fooled due to the
compact colonial forgery named 'Pan-Arabism'; Pan-Arabism is not just a
political ideology that produced pseudo-states in the territories of the
Ottoman Empire. The monstrous construct is basically a most distorted version
of History as per which there are 'Arabs' nowadays. That's totally false,
although as a filthy lie, it is politically useful (for the subsequent
construction of a ghost against which the supposedly civilized Western world
will 'have' to fight). Either you like it or not, Arabs do not exist in our
time; they are merely a colonial fabrication that has to be canceled, uprooted
and obliterated wherever it happens to persist. As soon as I realized that
fact, I published (in a Greek weekly review) a lengthy article under the title
"Ethnic groups and peoples in the Middle East", which was also
republished in a Greek encyclopedia in 1989.
Irrespective of religion, the
Arabic-speaking populations of SE Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,
Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, NW and NE Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE are
Aramaeans who have gradually been linguistically Arabized because they accepted
Islam over the centuries. This is only a linguistic phenomenon that has no
ethnic-racial or cultural-religious-spiritual dimensions.
Similarly, the Arabic-speaking
populations of Yemen, SW Saudi Arabia, and Oman are Yemenites and Omanis who
have gradually been linguistically Arabized because they accepted Islam over
the centuries. This is only a linguistic phenomenon that has no ethnic-racial
or cultural-religious-spiritual dimensions. Ancient Yemenites were a Semitic
nation, but totally different from the Arabs of Hejaz; it has to be noted that
for more than a millennium before the barbaric Arabs started writing their
language, the Sabaeans, the Himyarites, the Awsanis, the Hadhramis, and the
Qatabanis of Yemen wrote in their syllabary (not alphabet).
For the idiots, who take the Quran
for a historical book (and because they misunderstand it, they think that the
Ancient Yemenites were 'Arabs'), it has to be reminded that, in the last
two-three pre-Islamic centuries (when an alphabet was introduced among the
Arabs), several bilingual inscriptions (Sabaean Yemenite / Arabic; Himyaritic
Yemenite / Arabic) were written (and by now excavated, studied and translated)
- which clearly proves that the Yemenites are not Arabs. I have to also add
that the forged academic terms 'South Arabic' and 'South Arabian' must be
abolished and replaced by the only normal, historical term 'Yemenite', because
Yemen was always unrelated to Arabia.
In the same way, the Egyptians (a
Hamitic nation with some mixture with Semitic immigrants during the Antiquity),
irrespective of their religion, are Copts – if we do not take into account the
Nubians and the Beja in the South and the Southeast, the Berbers in the NW
confines of the country, as well as the Bedouin Arabs of the Sinai Peninsula.
They have gradually been linguistically Arabized because they accepted Islam
over the centuries. This is only a linguistic phenomenon that has no
ethnic-racial or cultural-religious-spiritual dimensions.
Equally, the Arabic-speaking
Sudanese are an Eastern Cushitic (Hamitic) nation; they have gradually been
linguistically Arabized because they accepted Islam over the centuries. This is
only a linguistic phenomenon that has no ethnic-racial or
cultural-religious-spiritual dimensions.
Last, all the Libyans, Tunisians,
Algerians, Moroccans and Mauritanians are Berbers (a Hamitic nation),
irrespective of the language that they speak (Berber, Arabic or full
bilingualism); they too have gradually been linguistically Arabized because
they accepted Islam over the centuries. This is only a linguistic phenomenon that
has no ethnic-racial or cultural-religious-spiritual dimensions. About:
https://www.aramnahrin.org/English/Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Progenitor-of-Wars-And-Tyrannies_29-6-2004.htm
https://www.aramnahrin.org/English/Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Aramaeans-Rise-Middel-East-10-8-2005.htm
https://www.academia.edu/25552905/Islam_the_Cultural_Aramaization_of_the_Arabs_by_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis
Aramaeans_vs_Arabs_The_fight_between_Civilization_and_Barbarism_within_Islam_by_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis
https://www.aramnahrin.org/English/Syriacs_Assyrians_Chaldeans_Arameans_18_12_2008.htm
https://www.turkishnews.com/en/content/2014/09/09/arab-nation-hoax-geared-to-falsify-islamic-history-ruin-varied-nations-disfiguratively-named-arab/
https://www.academia.edu/24440061/Arab_Nation_Hoax_Geared_to_Falsify_Islamic_History_Ruin_Varied_Nations_disfiguratively_Named_Arab_by_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis
You may eventually wish to ask me
why I do not consider today's Arabic speaking populations of Saudi Arabia as
ethnically Arabs; that's simple to answer. During the Islamic times, from many
parts of Dar al Islam (Central Asia, the Caucasus region, Hindustan, Maghreb,
Eastern Africa, and the Balkans) and for various reasons, many Muslims
relocated to Hejaz thus intermingling with the indigenous Arabs and fully
altering the ethnic identity of that populace.
This historical approach was
essential for both,
i- my political understanding
a) of what happened in the divided
(mainly among Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals) Orient during the last 500 years
of Western colonial attack (and more specifically over the last 200 years of
colonial onslaught) and
b) of what is needed for peace to be
established between Morocco and Pakistan {Arabic must be forcefully abolished,
and -in the respective lands (as per above)- Syriac Aramaic, Mehri Yemenite,
Coptic, Berber, and Afaan Oromo must become the official languages. Furthermore,
proper nation-building must be systematically undertaken 1) with the
elaboration of proper historical manuals for the primary and the secondary
education and 2) with the promotion of genuinely perceived and narrated
National History (which will replace the sick educational descriptions about
the wives, the children, and the companions of Prophet Muhammad that do not
concern anyone but privately)}
and
ii- my religious understanding of
early Islam, which was indeed the comprehensive cultural Aramaization that
Muhammad ibn Abdullah wanted to and did actually impose on his fellow
countrymen, the Arabs of Mecca. First and foremost, viewed historically, his
preaching was a civilizing mission. There is nothing wrong with a young Arab
merchant from Mecca who travels to the Eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman
Empire, encounters mostly Monophysite/Miaphysite and eventually Nestorian
monks, gets impressed with them, and wants to transfer the lights of Aramaean
Monophysite or Nestorian culture and civilization to his barbarous place.
Attention! I do not imply that there
was no divine intervention and revelation! But I speak for the years before the
start of his prophetic mission. In other words, it then became clear to me (for
reasons of purely academic understanding and not for my later adhesion to
Islam) that there was a personal, cultural, literary, and spiritual preparation
in the young man who would later undertake the divinely assigned tasks.
Around 1991, I was already viewing
the original faith preached by Muhammad ibn Abdullah (and later distorted by
some, maintained by others, re-comprehended by few, and historically
corroborated by the magnificent spirituality, science, culture, letters, arts,
and civilization that it engendered) as an extreme form of Nestorianism.
The Aramaean historian, theologian,
monk, priest, hymnographer and apologist John of Damascus (7th–8th c. CE; a
major Father of the Christian Church) re-confirmed my approach; in his superb
treatise On the Heresies, he depicts Islam as a Christological heresy - not as
a distinct religion. Here, you can find the complete Greek text:
https://www.impantokratoros.gr/agdamaskinos-de-haeresibus.el.aspx
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Damascus
Of course, if you read the text in a
conventional manner, you will not understand much; but you will realize much
more, if you bring back to the surface of your memory the following important
facts about John of Damascus, namely that
- his father (Sarjun ibn Mansur) was
an official of the Umayyad court at Damascus under Muawiya I, Yazid I, and Abd
al Malik Marwan for almost 40 years;
- his grandfather (Mansur ibn Sarjun)
was an Eastern Roman official reporting to Heraclius and to Khusraw II (during
the Sassanid Iranian occupation) - which means an extraordinarily important
person at the local level;
- he was fluent in Syriac Aramaic,
Arabic, and Greek;
- he was in continuous contact,
because of his family background, with many of the monstrous assassins of the
descendants of Prophet Muhammad, and he had therefore heard from them a false
narrative about Islam, which would be totally rejected by the Ahl al Bayt (:
the Arabic term for the family of Muhammad ibn Abdullah).
iii- see things in historical
perspective
What I mean with respect to this issue
is that what we call 'early Islamic conquests' must not be seen for the period
going from 634 to 651, but we have to start our study at around 560 CE
and put our terminus ante quem at 661 CE. To effectively do so, you
need to gather many points de repère.
At this point, I must make clear to
you the order in which I proceeded in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
- First, I read historical sources
(from many languages) about the early period of Islam, mainly
from the early days of Muhammad ibn Abdullah until the rise of the Abbasid
dynasty (610-750 CE). (Please note that there are few Islamic texts dating back
to that period; so, contemporaneous sources were basically in other languages,
whereas the Islamic sources were -all- later! Example: Tabari completed his
famous 'History'/'Tarikh' almost 300 years after the Hegira!);
- Second, I read historical sources
(from many languages) from the Golden Age of Islam, mainly
covering the period from the rise of the Abbasids to the arrival of the Seljuks
(750-1050). (Please note that I did not read these texts as a study of History,
but principally in order to comprehend the culture, the worldview, the
reasoning, and the argumentation of the authors and to deduce what their
religion was for them!);
- Third, I read rapidly modern
bibliography (Soviet and Western) about the two distinct (aforementioned)
periods, preponderantly to identify misperceptions and distortions; and
- Fourth, only then I started
reading the Quran integrally for the first time. It was in the second half of
1991! Until that time, I had read only excerpts none of which was longer than
20-30 verses (ayat; the Arabic word in Plural).
Soon, I realized that I did not need
to spend much time on it; the urgent task was to establish my own diagrams (out
of my earlier collected points de repère) and have an optical vision of them.
This was done on paper because, as you can guess, the then computer technology
was good only for work at the DOS level (with the very thin, 5.25-inch diskettes
that could be easily cupped within your palm). It would take a book to present
my incessant efforts to see things (historical facts) interactively, but I will
offer you now an example. Pick up the main protagonists, their interaction, and
the end results for the period 560-661! You will fathom everything by yourself!
Basic readings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Sufyan_ibn_Harb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu'awiya_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Muhammad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ja%27far_ibn_Abi_Talib
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najashi
https://madainproject.com/pledges_of_aqabah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_pledge_at_al-Aqabah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Islamic_state
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Medina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Badr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Uhud
How can we interpret these facts which are generally accepted by all?
In few lines, we discern an outline of the rivalry between the two persons as per below:
1- Abu Sufyan's predominant position was threatened by Muhammad's preaching.
2- Abu Sufyan and his supporters did not want a poor orphan to become their chief.
3- First, they persecuted Muhammad and his followers.
4- Second, they fought against them for several years.
5- Muhammad's predominance in Medina made Abu Sufyan's position weaker.
6- At 68 (628; after Hudaybiyah), Abu Sufyan realized he had to focus on posterity.
7- In tribal terms, this meant how Muawiyah would prevail over Ali ibn Abi Taleb.
8- He then did what Muhammad had done in 622 CE: he widened the conflict.
9- If Muhammad brought Medina into the 'game', Abu Sufyan brought Damascus.
The complete, 18-point stratagem of Abu Sufyan was the following:
- He would accept Islam for the sake of appearances.
- He would ask his Meccan supporters to imitate him.
- He would contact his trade partners, the Aramaeans of Damascus (: Monophysites).
- He would present Muhammad as threat to all, asking their regional support.
- He would diffuse -among all Muslims- the idea of spreading 'Islam' regionally.
- He would wait Muhammad to die, as he knew that his rival's health was ailing.
- He would prevent Ali ibn Abi Taleb from becoming caliph, pushing others instead.
- He would use tribal tricks: the elderly don't accept younger people to rule them.
- He would incite true and false Muslims to attack the Eastern Romans and Iran.
- He would discredit Ali for not taking part in the wars (as warned by Muhammad).
- He would gather many fighters due to the acceptance of Islam in Yemen, Oman.
- The Aramaeans would not support the Eastern Roman or the Iranian armies.
- An Aramaean-Arab state would rise from Antioch to Yemen & from Gaza to Basra.
- The capital would stay in Madinah briefly, and then be transferred to Damascus.
- The wealth of the vast lands would become theirs, removed from imperial capitals.
- He would arrange a 'new' Quran to be written with the troubling verses removed.
- With elder people ruling, invading, and becoming richer, Muawiyah would prevail.
- Instead of Muhammad's son-in law ruling Medina, his son would rule Damascus.
And this is exactly what happened:
1- Abu Sufyan accepted Islam mendaciously, followed by the non-Muslim Meccans.
2- Before Prophet Muhammad's envoy reached Heraclius, Abu Sufyan met him (628).
3- Prophet Muhammad, who had prohibited wars for spreading faith, died (632).
4- His daughter Fatima and Ali were prevented from seeing him before he died.
5- Terrible conflicts took place around the dead for three days until he was buried.
6- In an impermissible, unauthorized, partly meeting, Abu Bakr was 'selected' caliph.
7- Ferocious persecution of Ali's followers: alike that against Muhammad before 622.
8- Fatima, pregnant, was murdered by Umar with a punch on her stomach (632).
9- Ali's supporters were hated as they rejected the idea of wars for spreading faith.
10- The pseudo-Muslims viewed the idea as an opportunity for mythical riches.
11- The wars for the diffusion of the False Islam were prepared under Abu Bakr.
12- His tenure (632-634) was marked by the widely misinterpreted 'Ridda Wars'.
13- Fully instrumentalized by Abu Sufyan, Umar promised riches to gather soldiers.
14- As puppet of Abu Sufyan, Umar (634-644) undertook the early Muslim invasions.
15- Ali and his supporters did not participate in the early Muslim invasions.
16- Battle of Yarmuk (636): Abu Sufyan (76) took part to coordinate with his partners.
17- Fallen in Abu Sufyan's trap, Uthman (644-656) arranged a new codex of Quran.
18- The Uthmanic Codex involved the burning of thousands of copies of the Quran.
19- The Mushaf of Ali, the codex of Ibn Mas'ud, and that of Ubayy ibn Ka'b: burnt.
20- The Uthmanic Codex: overwhelmingly rejected as false throughout Islamic times.
21- All tenures of the three caliphs: ridden with rebellions; their rule was rejected.
22- When Ali became caliph (656), the essence of prophetic preaching was lost.
23- Long before Abu Sufyan died (653), Muawiyah was Governor of Syria (since 639).
24- Ali's assassination (661) propelled Muawiyah to the top of a fake Caliphate.
Basics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridda_Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_al-Yamama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yarmuk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Syria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uthmanic_codex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_Allah_ibn_Mas'ud#Uthman's_Compilation_of_Qur'an
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_of_Ubayy_ibn_Ka'b
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushaf_of_Ali
iv- utterly reject the 'official' version of narratives when excruciating crimes were carried out
If I expanded on the above mentioned comparative diagram, it is because I wanted to offer you an example; of course, I understand the developments now better than before 5 years, when I published the following article (to which there will be a second part in the future):
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2021/08/22/the-battle-of-yarmouk-20-august-634-ce-comments-revelations-i-without-the-aramaeans-utilization-of-islam-prophet-muhammads-religion-would-be-blocked-in-hejaz/
Also: https://www.academia.edu/50980200/The_Battle_of_Yarmouk_20_August_634_CE_Comments_and_Revelations_I
Similarly, in 2021, I understood the topic better than in 2011 or 2001; but as early as 1991-1992, thanks to this diagram (in a simpler but not less essential form) and many other analogous outlines, I made clear to myself that there were many parameters hidden behind the overall historical development and that a terrible, yet normal for tribal societies, rivalry did take place at the time, thus leaving irreparable damages to what we now have as collected documentation. More importantly, I understood that
1- the original Quran was not what most people now accept as text;
2- Islam as revealed by Prophet Muhammad and preached by Ali was very different;
3- the evilness or malignancy expressed against Muhammad and Ali were the same;
4- the evildoers' mindset, actions would be inevitably inculcated in Uthman's Quran, and
5- the 'official' version of narratives had to be instantly rejected by a moral scholar due to the crimes and outrages done by the cruel leaders who imposed that version.
So, I early understood that all those, who think today that they are Muslims, while accepting the 'official' version of narratives, are in a way anti-Muslims. The people, who pretend that the Quran and the Hadith have not been tempered with, are indeed criminal liars. Thus they are part of a long chain of ignorant or intentional forgers of the historical truth, who care always about their own material goods and interests, instead of searching for the truth about their faith. Now, if for your religion, the word 'Truth' constitutes one of the Names of God, even worse for your hypocrisy and faithlessness!
When it is known that at the time of Uthman they were burning all copies of the Quran which did not suit their interests, only imbeciles or fraudsters can possibly pretend that its text has been preserved as it was uttered by Prophet Muhammad and written down by Ali ibn Abi Taleb and others. This situation made the continuation of my research truly fascinating.
The overall situation was already well known to me - within the context of another religion! It reminded me of the falsification carried out in the texts of the Gospels and of the enormous distance and the detrimental difference between the words of Jesus and the fallacious preaching of Paul, which finally became the official religion of Rome in the 4th c. CE.
Now, as regards the explicit verses stating that no one can change the words of Allah, their meaning is widely misunderstood or misinterpreted by the Muslims who insist on accepting the 'official' version of narratives. The Word of God is the Word of God and it remains as such; irrespective of any shameless human changes made in a text and regardless of how many Quranic excerpts may have been burnt, human acts never affect the word of God.
However, there were certainly many hypocrites around Prophet Muhammad in the period 628-632, and others were later fooled with the heinous propaganda unleashed against Ali ibn Abi Taleb by Abu Sufyan who wanted his son and not Muhammad's son-in law to be the leader or -even better- a king or shah. If the words of God had a value for the early Muslims, then Uthman would not burn thousands of copies and Abdullah ibn Mas'ud would not accuse the servile and faithless people who worked for him.
Recent collective works by French scholars shed light and confirm many of the above points that I made; more particularly 'Le Coran des historiens'. About:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Coran_des_historiens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quran_of_Historians
https://www.ideo-cairo.org/en/report-en/a-first-reading-of-coran-des-historiens-cerf-2019/
However, in spite of the pertinence of their research, these scholars' approach is biased to some extent. Although they accept Prophet Muhammad as a 'mystic' (as per their own words), they do not write in order to demonstrate the historical truth, but to prove the intellectual superiority of the materialist Western scholarship, totally eliminating the spiritual dimension and the necessity of a moral assessment. Their criticism of the early History of Islam is mostly correct, but -after all- why should any Muslims and non-Muslims study and write about Islam, if not for pointing out the truth? Don't they have the duty to say who were correct and who were wrong at the time?
And how can we trust someone when, although he rejects the existence of the spiritual universe, he writes about people for whom spirituality is inseparable from the material world?
For reasons that are far beyond the limits of the present response, the Islamic civilization gradually collapsed; this was a topic that I also examined (at an early stage) before adhering to Islam. Furthermore, I also found at the time a symbolic date for the ominous development: 1580 (the demolition of the Observatory of Istanbul by the fanaticized masses and the followers of the useless Ottoman muftis, cadis, imams and theologians).
Arriving to Egypt 200 years later, Napoleon and his savants encountered absolute darkness, unadulterated barbarism, utmost ignorance, and compact idiocy. Nothing was left from the spirit of Al Khwarizmi, Nasir el Din al Tusi, Al Biruni, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Hazm, Mohyieldin ibn Arabi, and so many other erudite scholars, mystics, and wise savants. The genius of the Islamic civilization was dead. People were reading only silly stories about the wives of Prophet Muhammad, making stupid comments about the absolutely insignificant topic.
To add insult to injury, for the sake of their vicious colonialism, the French scholars (instead of convincing the Egyptians that they had lost their Islam, that they had to rediscover it, and that for this purpose, their ancient remains -if duly excavated, deciphered and studied- could help) plunged them in even worse obscurantism, deliberately making them hate their past, disregard their own legacy, and stick to an uncivilized, reductionist, and pathetic reading of the Quran, which is at the very antipodes of the great savants, wise scholars, alchemists and scientists, astronomers and astrologers, historians and poets, writers, translators and architects of the Golden Age of Islam.
That's why today's fake Muslims hate to learn anything that goes out of their false and silly theological doctrine which is boringly revolving around the life of Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslim conquests – everything being totally misread, misinterpreted, and misunderstood.
Back in 1992, few months before I became Muslim, I picked up an argument with an Egyptian friend who remains a good friend until now. Willing to check his reaction, I asked him why they speak with such great admiration about their holy book (the Quran) since God sent to people many other prophets and other holy books. My friend agreed and responded that they know quite well that God sent the 'Torah' with Moses/Musa and the 'Injil' (Gospel) with Jesus/Isa, but unfortunately these books were altered; furthermore, the Quran is the last holy book sent. I asked him whether the Acts of the Apostles or the Epistles were also altered but he did not have any idea about them, and in general, the Biblical studies (Old and New Testament) are at execrably low level in all the so-called Islamic universities. So, they have lost the very sense of research, investigation and exploration, being condemned to very limited options and therefore mentally incapacitated. The reason for this situation is their false religious education that must be canceled and prohibited.
I then asked him what he thinks about Hermes Trismegistus and his holy book 'Poimandres' (it was then that Brian Copenhaver's edition had appeared); he did not know anything about that, and over the next few days, he contacted all his friends in Islamic universities in Egypt, asked professors, and searched in libraries. No one knew anything! I realized that I had nothing in common with these people, who simply were not the heirs of the Islamic civilization or the custodians of a faith that they considered theirs but of which they knew not one substantive element.
v- realize that Islam was the religion of Adam and the essence of all previous monotheisms
As I arrive at the end of my response and therefore I come close to the time when I at first realized that I was truly a Muslim (in the original sense of the word, and not someone believing the fake Islam that today's Muslims consider as 'proper', 'correct', and 'genuine'), I have to underscore that I already had a very different knowledge about and understanding of World History from today's Muslims' and Westerners' false ideas and wrong opinions. This is outstandingly important, because not only 'my' Islam was different from 'theirs' (as it consisted in my rather accurate perception of the true, historical Islam), but it was also quite differently contextualized.
As I was seeing things through the eyes of an Orientalist very well acquainted with Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia and Iran, the most important element of attraction on which I focused extensively was the firm and widely known belief and worldview as per which
- Adam was the first prophet and, by means of the Creation, received the divine revelation, knowledge, and wisdom from God, before transferring them to his offspring, and
- History is the continuity of the divine presence among humans, which is highly but not exclusively represented by the line of prophets sent by God (notably but not exclusively Idris/Enoch, Noah/Nuh, Ibrahim/Abraham, Moses/Musa, Yunus / Jonah, Jesus and Muhammad) and by several other unknown prophets who proclaimed Monotheism.
This representation of the human identity and the historical reality reflected my most accurate reading and most profound understanding of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations. I realized that Sumerian piety was indeed the true Islam of Muhammad and Ali; so, Gudea of Lagash was a Muslim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statues_of_Gudea
https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/N_and_N/nn256.pdf
A New Tablet of the Cult of Deified Kings in Ancient Sumer
https://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/journal/08-3/new_tablet_of%20_king_cult.pdf
Assyrian monotheism and imperial universalism were therefore reflected in the, most misinterpreted, Islamic concept of caliph (Khalifah), i.e. representative (lit. 'substitute') of God on Earth (which refers to every human).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/خليفة#Arabic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Universe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Four_Corners
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_corners_of_the_world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Lands
https://nelc.yale.edu/news/assyria-chronicling-rise-and-fall-worlds-first-empire
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-output/archaeology/the-imperialisation-of-assyria
https://www.academia.edu/12695404/Early_Neo_Assyrian_State_Ideology_Relations_of_Power_in_the_Inscriptions_and_Iconography_of_Ashurnasirpal_II_883_859_and_Shalmaneser_III_858_824_
And the atemporal conceptualization of World History, as revealed in the Islamic notion of only one true religion existing through ages, constituted the absolute parallel of the Iwnw Myth (i.e. the Heliopolitan doctrine of the Ennead), presented in simple words. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennead
I then concluded that, as a matter of fact, Akhenaten's religion was 'Islam' too; simply, the Western Egyptologists would never discern this reality, because first, they perversely accepted as 'Islam' the 'official' version of Umayyad narratives (a falsehood reconfirmed by the Western Islamologists) and second, they rejected it altogether as a 'false religion'. Still, the Western Orientalists failed to explain how the Great Hymn to the Aten shares striking literary, thematic, and structural parallels with the Biblical Psalm 104, which was supposedly written many centuries later. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aten
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atenism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hymn_to_the_Aten
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_104
On the other hand, the Egyptian Egyptologists (who were allowed to exist only 100 years after the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion!) are too intoxicated by today's distorted, pseudo-Islamic theology or too scared to tell the Truth. Subsequently, Akhenaten was a 'prophet' too, one of the many unknown prophets, who have existed as per the Islamic beliefs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophets_and_messengers_in_Islam
When I understood the aforementioned points, I realized that, due to the fact that I had already adopted the Iwnw Heliopolitan atemporal world conceptualization and faith as spiritual foundation and as a model for better comprehending the Humanity, the World History, the Creation (later I shifted to the more detailed, more systematic, and more accurate Assyrian-Babylonian Cosmogony, and the Enuma Elish), and the notion of Divinity, I was not only a faithful person, but also a true Muslim indeed. Little mattered whether I practiced the so-called 'Five Pillars of Islam'; actually, the first pillar matters (the Shahada; 'Declaration of Faith') in terms of dogma, whereas the other four 'arkan' (Plural of 'rukn') constitute mainly forms of cult introduced basically in order to make the faithful remember that they are Muslims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Pillars_of_Islam
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ركن#Arabic
So, to describe my adhesion to Islam in brief, one could say that, as an Orientalist, I entered the faith not only revealed by Prophet Muhammad (and by others before him) but primarily conferred to Adam as the inherent divine code of the Creation.
This conclusion may now appear to have been joyful for me to reach, but it was also very painful; this was so because I immediately wondered why today's Muslims did not first acquire the pre-Islamic legacy of Islam (in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hittite Anatolia, Iran, etc.), make it truly theirs, and then study it (at least as authoritatively as the Western Orientalists have done) in order to rightfully offer themselves the necessary historical depth that is de facto needed to them if their purpose is to present an alternative to the fallacious Western model of academic disciplines.
I said to myself: "the first topics that all these useless sheikhs and imams should have to study were cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts, monotheism, and the perception of the Divine in Sumer, Assyria, Egypt, Hittite Anatolia, and Achaemenid Iran, and the History of Faith before Muhammad ibn Abdullah – not the Hadith".
But then I offered to myself a most convincing response: "Already they do not study the masterpieces of Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi (787-886) or at least the Kitab al-Bulhan (Book of Wonders) of Abd al-Hasan al Isfahani that was written before only 600 years! Why or how will they bother to focus on texts written 2000 or 3000 years before their false prophet, who is not the true, historical, yet misinterpreted, Prophet Muhammad, but the projection of their disgusting ignorance and dark psychological complexes onto a delusional construct"?
Having comprehended this, one can evaluate how false today's Islamic universities and theological studies are; so, my advance toward the true, historical Islam was a parallel rejection of both, the Western academic-educational-intellectual colonialism and its byproducts, namely Pan-Arabism, Islamism (political islam, Wahhabism, etc.) and plenty of other misconceptions and constructs. At times, I laughed at myself because, trying to better comprehend the Islamic world, I understood a topic from Ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt that had remained a mystery to me for long or an aspect of colonial monstrosity that I had never noticed.
Closely associated with the concept that Islam constituted the religion of Adam and was the essence of all previous monotheisms is the notion that many people all over the world, who are not officially Muslims and never heard anything about Islam, 'are' actually Muslims without even knowing it. This is explained through a spiritual description of the innate nature (al fitrah) of the human being; the chastity, the state of inherent innocence, and the goodness that characterize every human newborn are elements of human conduct, which -if maintained- can make of any human, who was born to non-Muslim parents in lands far from Dar al-Islam, a real Muslim. The same concerns the instinctive inclination of humans to recognize truth, seek morality, and acknowledge that there is only One God.
This concept was perceived by me as closely associated with the Ancient Egyptian worldview and the faith in Maat, the inherent universal truth, order, justice, equity and morality. Acquiescence with the terms of Maat was imperative as natural form of life for every Egyptian; these virtues and values were believed to be common to all humans, and that's why hospitality was an important task for all the inhabitants of Kemet. Actually, the personal prayers of all Egyptians were 'apologies' to Maat and confirmations that they did what they had to do and they did not do what was not permissible for the universal order to be maintained. This was another critical element of spiritual-historical continuity (from Ancient Oriental civilizations to the Islamic civilization) that I identified when studying Ibn Hazm. About:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Hazm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_of_the_Dove
https://www.muslimphilosophy.com/hazm/dove/ringdove.html
(Please, do not come to tell me that Muslims today do not follow the guidance of Ibn Hazm and do not behave accordingly! I already told you; they are fake Muslims, true hypocrites, and absolutely faithless.)
vi- identify in-depth the major difference between Christianity and Islam
This fact was quite early understood by me, but the depth and the essence of the topic are not easy to comprehend in their true dimensions. In the above unit "III- The long path of a faithful, irreligious Orientalist toward the currently unknown, real and historical Islam", sub-unit 'c- Cultural and spiritual processes of personal evolution', I stated the following "so, it is as a former Christian Orthodox and then irreligious explorer and historian that I realized that", only to complete a 10-point list with the confirmation as per below:
"10- religions cannot be classified only as 'monotheistic' and 'polytheistic', but also as 'doctrinal systems' and 'transcendental faiths'."
Transcendental faiths have very small dogmatically, in striking contrast to the doctrinal systems that can be also characterized as 'theological religions'. This fact is due to the focus on spirituality for which the transcendental faiths are known; being genuinely divine of origin, these religions were preached in order to enable believers to launch their own search for the Truth, removing the absurdity of rational guidance among them and eliminating priesthood.
This is one of the reasons for which it is totally erroneous to believe that there is 'difference' between the so-called Shia and the soi-disant Sunni; actually this false and ahistorical division cannot be attested in historical sources, being merely a multilayered and subtle colonial fabrication, interference, and projection onto the ignorant and uneducated, modern muftis, cadis, imams, ayatollahs, and theologians. About;
https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_
https://www.academia.edu/105770339/Spirituality_Religion_and_Theology_the_fallacy_of_the_Safavid_conversion_of_Iran_to_Shia_Islam
https://www.academia.edu/105713891/The_fake_Orientalist_Arabization_of_Islam
and
https://www.academia.edu/171410400/Iran_2026_the_Pivot_of_World_History_Assaulted_by_the_Barbarians_of_the_West_III_WITH_PICTURES_and_LEGENDS_
Search in the 'Contents of the parts IV, C, 3 and 4' for:
iii- Ja'far al-Sadiq, and the fabrication of the lie about Sunni and Shia Muslims
The dogma of Islam is very small; as a matter of fact, it consists in the Shahada (as per above). Everyone who says "there is no god except God and Muhammad is his messenger" (La ilaha ila Allah Muhammad rasul Allah) is a Muslim. There is indeed absolute freedom in the devotion, the piety, and the expression of worship of God that a Muslim may wish to experience; there is no uniformity in cult even in prayer, and this is the true Islamic faith, which -even if it occurs- Muslim theologians, as silly and demented Western stooges, do not want to accept. Example: in the Fajr prayer (before the dawn) two units of prayer (rak'ah) are prescribed and each of them contains one ruku (belt-low bowing); but if one faithful wants to pray and perform more units of prayer, he is allowed to do it, and no one will say anything. About:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruku
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rak%27a
In fact, the only law in Islam is the inherent code of the Creation after which the human being has to live in piety, truth, faith and justice. The term 'Sharia' means 'path', namely the (correct) path that one person has to walk in life. Do you know the respective Biblical concept? It is the following sentence: "and Enoch walked with God" (Genesis 5:24). Now, 'Fiqh' (which is usually but mistakenly translated as 'Islamic Jurisprudence') literally denotes human 'comprehension'/'understanding'; and, in Usage, it ended up meaning the understanding of the Sharia (the path).
All the rest is additional, definitely posterior, and utterly transformative of Prophet Muhammad's faith and preaching. He never proposed to his followers to set up the absurd and alien structure of hypocrites (muftis, cadis, etc.), who were paid by fake caliphs in order to justify their immoral and shameful rule, being nowadays absurdly paid by the state in order to define which the punishment should be for every wrong act eventually perpetrated by another person. Last, the term 'qanun' (of Assyrian-Babylonian, not Greek, etymology) was used in cases of rather modern secular laws enacted by a ruler, but it is totally external and alien to Islam.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/شريعة#Arabic
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/فقه
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanun_(law)#Etymology
There is no, and there cannot be, human 'lawgiver' in Islam, because the only lawgiver is God through the Creation. This 'discovery' was fascinating for me, because early in my postgraduate studies, when attending seminars given by the renowned French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro about the Laws of Hammurapi (18th c. BCE), I examined carefully earlier promulgations of "laws", notably the Code of Ur-Nammu (22nd-21st c. BCE) and the reforms of Urukagina (24th c. BCE), the earliest code of laws in the world. About:
https://www.academia.edu/39339291/The_so_called_Reform_Texts_of_Urukagina_Whats_wrong_with_making_the_side_follow_the_rulers_household_and_fields
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urukagina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Nammu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
https://ur-nammu.com/
https://www.scribd.com/document/971845015/THE-CODE-OF-HAMMURABI-AND-THE-CODE-OF-UR-NAMMU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_legal_codes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammurabi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bott%C3%A9ro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bott%C3%A9ro
What I understood (as early as 1980-1981) from my studies in the topic was that more laws you introduce, more injustice comes to the society. Law is only the Divine Law without human intermediaries in its interpretation. What we understand as 'human law' is a form of tyranny that has a positive appearance and a negative consequence.
Comparing with Ancient Egypt where no legal system was introduced and greater importance was attributed to the personal piety and conformity with the world order as encrypted in Maat, I preferred the Valley of the Nile in this regard. About:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egypt#Legal_system
The correct conclusion that I had already drawn many years before becoming Muslim was that a) law, b) state, c) money and d) leisure played a key role in the deterioration of the conditions of human life. That's why I developed a concept of rather eschatological nature, namely that the History of Mankind is a series of falls. The magnificent constructions and the unmatched techniques attested in Egypt and Mesopotamia during the 3rd and the 2nd millennia BCE, the spiritual-material synergy involved in those processes, its subsequent loss, and the attempts of its recovery from the Late Antiquity Oriental Gnostics to the Golden Era of Islam mystics and alchemists convinced me that the faith concealed behind the false 'official' narratives was a genuine revival of the Man. The absence of human laws from Prophet Muhammad's revelation and Ali ibn Abi Taleb's preaching only validated their demarche and confirmed their divine mission to my eyes.
Last, the intellectual freedom, the moral standards, the unequaled ability to place yourself in another's position, as attested in Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi's 'defense' of the Pharaoh, positive evaluation of his stance, and spiritual interpretation of his arrogance, convinced me that all my previous investigations about the true, original Islam, which is by now quasi-invisible, were correct. About:
Binyamin Abrahamov, Ibn Al-Arabi's Fusus Al-Hikam: An Annotated Translation of the Bezels of Wisdom
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28023448-ibn-al-arabi-s-fusus-al-hikam
and
Alison M. Roberts, Rectifying Pharaoh: Ibn 'Arabi, Dhu'l-Nun and the Alchemy of Red Sulphur
https://ibnarabisociety.org/the-quranic-figure-of-pharaoh-denis-gril/
vii- comprehend the presence of the Divine, the essence of human life as a passage from the Earth, and the destiny of the Man
Around the autumn 1992, I did not have any more doubts or questions as regards the divine nature of the prophetic mission of Muhammad. This is a vast topic to discuss in my present response, which became very lengthy, but for me, it was continuously a matter of close investigation. The discussion that Heraclius had with Abu Sufyan, the imperial treatment offered to Dihyah al-Kalbi, envoy of Prophet Muhammad to the Eastern Roman Emperor, and the conversations maintained with him (as per Tabari, vol. VIII (translated by Michael Fishbein), SUNY Press, 1997; p. 100-108) show that there was an expectation for a prophet among the Eastern Romans. One biased historian would dismiss the narratives, but similarly another biased historian would reject all the stories and discussions of Christian historiography; partial or prejudiced approaches are always useless.
To my eyes it is absolutely impossible to dissociate the original nature of the faith revealed by Prophet Muhammad and preached by Ali ibn Abi Taleb from the bulk of Islamic spirituality, sciences, arts, wisdom, culture and civilization; the pertinence and the magnificence of the latter confirm the divine presence in the physical lives, the revelations, and the teachings of the former.
As I had already been liberated from the Western distortion of the notion of Divinity, which is merely reduced to sacrilegious miracles and acts of Black Magic, I was able to understand why Prophet Elijah, who brought fire from the sky (during his famous confrontation with the Phoenician priests of Baal), walked from Beersheba to Mount Horeb in the Sinai, instead of achieving teleportation. Extending this approach to the wider context of Prophet Muhammad's life was essential for me to interpret many of the acts, words, attitudes, and behaviors attributed to him (correctly or falsely).
Understanding the essence of human life as a passage from the Earth (as a temporary journey through the material world) is conditio sine qua non for someone to identify Muhammad ibn Abdullah as a Prophet. It is only after comprehending the destiny of Man that I discerned a divine purpose and mission in the life of the final Prophet of Islam.
In Christianity, everything occurs at the very antipodes of the normal process; one comprehends the essence of human life as a passage from the Earth and realizes the destiny of Man, only after -obligatorily- accepting Jesus as the long awaited Messiah of the Old Testament. But a Messiah without the End of Time is absolutely false, and when it becomes clear that Jesus did not live at the End of Time (but only spoke or, if you prefer, prophesied about it), then the construct collapses. That is why the true perception of human life and the understanding of the destiny of Man have been lost in the Christian (: Western) world. The few exceptions (mainly the Monophysites / Miaphysites, the Nestorians, and some Eastern Orthodox Christians) only confirm the rule.
The Muslims today have a grave problem of Westernization; they have to get fully de-Westernized.
But the Western Christians have today an even greater problem: the Western world. They have to cease to be.
It is noteworthy that, in their case, no de-Westernization option exists; they have to undergo a total spiritual, mental, sentimental, intellectual and cultural annihilation. In other words, they have to reject themselves totally and irrevocably.
For my gradual advance toward the Dar al Islam, I have collected many points de repère (landmarks); I would be correct if I said that the overall process started mainly in Iran, but I am very accurate and exact when stating that the path was completed in Sudan. My first archaeological travel, study and exploration of the Ancient Kingdom of Cush (: Ancient Ethiopia/not Abyssinia) was not only scholarly rewarding, but also spiritually fascinating. It has nothing spectacular though, and it is unrelated to the Antiquity.
Experiencing the daily life in villages and towns of Sudan (between the Egyptian border and Khartoum), I lived like all the natives without electricity, without any technological infrastructure, without any sign of Westernization, and without a shred of uncertainty; sometimes, in Abri, in Delqo, and in Kerma (towns between Wadi Halfa and Dongola), I was looking attentively around me and I was saying to myself:
- Look at this! There is nothing new! If suddenly now Prophet Muhammad came back to life and arrived here, he would not find even one 'new' item!
And I was correct! More than anything else, my conversations with the simple local people (to whom I was a consummate Westerner) convinced me about the innocence of the human character, which is destroyed by the establishment of the Western delusion and by its imposition worldwide via colonialism. You may wish to ask what I exactly mean by referring to 'innocence'; I could give you many examples from my discussions with those people, which I remember very well. One will be enough:
When -in a discussion about computers (about which they had heard few words)- I told them that "Virtual Reality" (as a computer-generated, simulated 3D environment that users can fully immerse themselves in and interact with using special headsets and sensors) would soon be available for anyone to buy in Western countries, they refused to believe me and they started saying that I wanted merely to impress them with extravagant lies, superb descriptions, and impressive delusions. They could not believe that something so useless, so worthless, and so evil would be produced by men.
Of course, I told them that unfortunately I did not have with me the famous weekly magazine that had already announced and popularized the topic (I was meaning either TIME or The Newsweek), which was by them quasi-totally unknown even in Western Europe and North America. But still they did not believe me. I found this attitude as genuinely human and innocent. Humans do not need to fight against evil; that's why only the Westernized Muslims do what they do. Evil is only to be rejected and kept far from the daily life; the nature of this world is arranged -through the encrypted code of the Creation- in a way to always eliminate the evil. If an Oriental kingdom had declared war on Sodom and Gomorrah, it would have only prolonged the existence of the incestuous and cursed agglomerations.
Then, fully conscious of the fact that I was a Muslim and that I really appreciated the rhythm of daily life in the Islamic times (as I felt it in the Sudan), I asked myself why I should be Muslim without also publicly acknowledging it. Then, I announced it first to my father.
The decision changed my daily life dramatically, because before that moment, at the age of 35, I used to express myself, when in the West, as a 20-year old young man with excessive indulgence in physical and sensual pleasures, although I was never drunk, I never used drugs, and I never lost self-control. In any case, my scandalous behavior was often viewed as immoral or sinful. On the contrary, when in Asia and Africa, I was exemplary. Apparently, I had not realized that, trying to find originality in other cultures, I had lost my own cultural integrity. Shortly afterwards, I became officially Muslim in Al Azhar (Cairo) Mosque, choosing my current names, issuing new identity card and passport, and realizing that I had to impose in my private life, also when in the West, the same order and discipline that I had already put in my moral, sentimental, mental, intellectual, academic and spiritual quest, when in the East.
My response ends here, but I have to add, because it is very important, that my adhesion to Islam never became a personal crystallization; I continued being in permanent spiritual mutation. Becoming a Muslim was not for me an extraordinary moment, but one more step in my life. Living close to me, my father sensed the change and was glad for it; it was an evident progress in terms of maturity, rigor, and responsibility.
However, there have been many intellectual, academic, behavioral and spiritual stages in my life after I became Muslim. In each of them, I tackled new issues and bold questions of which I had never thought in the past.
To just give you an idea, I would say that my adhesion to Islam helped me better view Christianity within its diversity as a historical process and as search for the Divine in social morality.
Several times I explored the topic whether from one side the secular Islamic states, which emerged in the 9th c. CE to become known as 'Iranianates' and 'Iranian Intermezzo', with their wealth of sciences, wisdom, arts, epics, and spirituality, and from the other side, the Eastern Roman Empire, with its absolute concentration on faith, piety and devotion, were indeed the two aspects of the same force like magnetism and electricity.
Many times, focusing on popular faith and culture, and trying to identify core patterns, determine root causes, isolate key variables, and assess human behaviors, I asked myself how and why a 'false religion' can produce 'good people' whereas a 'good religion' can produce 'bad people'; this must be taken for granted. There can be many approaches and diverse conclusions to similar observations; but they are all totally unrelated to the so-called Western Christianity, either Catholicism or Protestantism (in all its numerous forms).
These approaches revolve around the Bayt al Hikmah (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad, the Maragheh Observatory of Nasir el Din el Tusi, and the Samarqand Observatory of Ulugh Beg where Muslims, Oriental Christians (Miaphysites / Monophysites or Nestorians), Eastern Christians (Orthodox), and adepts of other religions (Sabians, Parsis, Buddhists, Hindus and Confucians) worked together and in peace.
Having taken some distance and seen things from different perspectives, I realized why Christianity could never properly exist across the territories of the former Western Roman Empire; Justinian's Reconquista was never completed and Belisarius did not enter Rome. The end of Christianity west of the lands of the Eastern Roman Empire has a specific date: 752 CE! The termination of the practice instituted (537-752 CE) by Justinian I, which is nowadays fallaciously described as 'Byzantine Papacy', was the death warrant of Christianity in Western Europe. Even today, the only chance for the heretic Catholics and Protestants to accept Christianity is the Quinisext Ecumenical Council (692 CE) and its disciplinary canons.
The true schism and apostasy were never solemnly announced; they antedate the Photian Schism (863-867 CE). As long as the Roman popes required the approval of the Eastern Roman Emperor for their episcopal consecration, and many popes were selected by the apocrisiarii or the inhabitants of the Eastern provinces, there was a sort of normalcy and the evildoing was impossible to perform; the only exception was the ignominious bogus-pope Martin I (649-654), who was duly abducted by the Emperor Constans II, imprisoned, and exiled in Crimea. I had to become Muslim to understand all this and much more.
However, the crux of my path from Eastern Orthodox Christianity to the vast circumference of the irreligious faith and thence to Islam was the permanent, stark reconsideration of all earlier beliefs and convictions, their corrective reconstitution and rearrangement, and the willingness to perpetually reject one's own self to be again re-incepted at a higher level of integrity. Many Oriental mystics and wise elders achieved this eternal recapitulation, but apparently the only Westerner, who managed to properly fathom and implement it, was Jules Verne's Captain Nemo whose motto was "Mobilis in Mobile". This is the human being.
Best regards,
Shamsaddin
===========================
Download the article (text only and/or with pictures and legends) in PDF:
https://megalommatis.wordpress.com/2026/08/31/my-spiritual-moral-academic-intellectual-cultural-and-geographical-itinerary-in-asia-and-africa/
https://vk.ru/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_16390
https://vk.ru/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_16395
https://www.patreon.com/u82600919/posts/my-spiritual-and-170186022
https://archive.org/details/my-spiritual-moral-academic-intellectual-cultural-and-geographical-itinerary-in-asia-and-africa
https://archive.org/details/my-spiritual-moral-academic-intellectual-cultural-and-geographical-itinerary-in-
https://www.academia.edu/175996395/My_Spiritual_Moral_Academic_Intellectual_Cultural_and_Geographical_Itinerary_in_Asia_and_Africa
https://www.academia.edu/175998220/My_Spiritual_Moral_Academic_Intellectual_Cultural_and_Geographical_Itinerary_in_Asia_and_Africa_WITH_PICTURES_and_LEGENDS_
https://www.4shared.com/office/sxzDhCAsge/My_Spiritual_Moral_Academic_In.html
https://www.4shared.com/file/sGspf-2Xfa/My_Spiritual_Moral_Academic_In.html
https://online.fliphtml5.com/qynhg/fazy/
https://online.fliphtml5.com/qynhg/niow/
https://anyflip.com/fdfzl/fpsf
https://anyflip.com/fdfzl/yoqs/
https://pubhtml5.com/jxyro/ungy/
https://pubhtml5.com/jxyro/eqxl/
