12 апреля 1985 г. – 12 апреля 2025 г.: 40 лет авторства (Устные-письменные,
печатные-онлайн публикации) - III
In two earlier articles, I expanded
on my early experience of authorship back in the middle 1980s. In the present
article, I will describe the academic, intellectual and spiritual changes that
I underwent during the said period, and I will explain how all these
adjustments interacted with my activity and identity of author.
You can find the first
article of the series, which is rather short (less than 1500 words), here:
12 April 1985–12 April 2025: 40 Years of Authorship, Oral-Written,
Printed-Online Publications – I
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2025/04/12/12-april-1985-12-april-2025-40-years-of-authorship-oral-written-printed-online-publications-i/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/128082287
https://www.academia.edu/129167881/12_April_1985_12_April_2025_40_Years_of_Authorship_Oral_Written_Printed_Online_Publications_I
You can find the second
article of the series, which is rather long (almost 11000 words), here:
12 April 1985–12 April 2025: 40 Years of Authorship, Oral-Written,
Printed-Online Publications – II
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2025/04/13/12-april-1985-12-april-2025-40-years-of-authorship-oral-written-printed-online-publications-ii/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/128241623
https://www.academia.edu/129208972/12_April_1985_12_April_2025_40_Years_of_Authorship_Oral_Written_Printed_Online_Publications_II
As a matter of fact,
the latter text offered the complete description of my first period of
authorship (1985-1991); in the present article, I will present in brief the
subsequent stages of authorship (1991-1998, 2001-2013, 2014-2025) and my major
contributions that I penned, exploring, reflecting, and explaining the moments
of the past and the preserved heritage that I examined closely (when the
infinitesimal detail mattered) and/or from distance (when the correct
contextualization was sought after).
Содержание
I. Известное и неизвестное авторство, или подтверждение
всех скрытых вещей
II. Написание книг о древних текстах
III. Первые книги
1. Перипл Ганнона
2. Приключения Венамуна
3. Корабль Сулеймана
4. Перипл Красного моря (также известный как Перипл
Эритрейского моря)
5. Книга путешествий Вениамина Тудельского
6. Шесть звёзд Востока
7. Турецко-греческие отношения и Балканы. Взгляд историка на современные
проблемы
8- Türk Yunan İlişkileri Ve Balkanlar. Bir Tarihçi Gözü İle Bugünün Sorunları (Турецкий перевод книги № 7)
9- Mardheniet Turko – Greke dhe Ballkani. Nje Vleresim Historik i
problemeve te sotme (Албанский перевод книги № 7)
IV. Научные публикации, открытые лекции, участие в конгрессах и
конференциях, курсы предлагаемые в университетах, и различные статьи
V. Научные исследования, концептуализация всемирной истории и присоединение
к исламу (в возрасте 36 лет, в 1992 году)
1. Западная наука в смятении
2. Этнография: незаменима для истории, литературы, истории религий и
мифологий
3. Сегодня религий нет; их заменили идеологии.
4. Историческая преемственность монотеизма: естественное и честное
восприятие Божественного
5. Ислам как прибрежные земли восприятия Божественного
6. Нет религии без культуры
7. Отдалённые места, где сегодня можно найти истинные религии
8. Технологии, современность и политика убивают религию
9. Ислам до ислама и необходимость восточного исламского Ориентализма
VI. Встреча с университетскими коллегами и студентами и выводы об
академической жизни 1990-х годов и её полной бесполезности
1. Общение (ежедневные встречи) со студентами из разных стран
2. Общение с турецкими и турко-кипрскими коллегами
3. Общение с коллегами из стран бывшего СССР
4. Общение с западноевропейскими и англосаксонскими (США, Великобритания)
коллегами
VII. Выбор
между научной истиной и академической работой
VIII.
Решимость популяризировать академически известные, но публично скрываемые
знания
IX. Разнообразная онлайн-активность: участие в форумах и публикация статей
на порталах
X. Академический опыт в Сомали и окончательная концептуализация африканской
проблемы
Contents
I. Known and unknown
authorship or the validation of all hidden things
II. Writing books about
ancient texts
III. The first
books
1- The Periplus of
Hanno
2- The Adventures of Wenamun
3- The Ship of Suleyman
4- Periplus of the Red
Sea (also known as Periplus of the Erythraean Sea)
5- The Book of the
Travels
6- The Six Stars of the
Orient
7- Turkish – Greek
relations and the Balkans. A Historian's Evaluation of Today's Problems
8- Türk Yunan
İlişkileri Ve Balkanlar. Bir Tarihçi Gözü İle Bugünün Sorunları
9- Mardheniet Turko – Greke dhe Ballkani. Nje Vleresim Historik i problemeve te sotme
IV. Scholarly publications,
open lectures, participation in congresses-conferences, courses offered in
universities, and various articles
V. Academic
explorations, conceptualization of the World History, and adhesion to Islam (at
the age of 36, in 1992)
1- The Western
scholarship in disarray
2- Ethnography:
indispensable for History, Literature, History of Religions and Mythologies
3- There are no
religions today; they have been substituted by ideologies.
4- Historical
continuity of Monotheism as the natural and honest perception of the Divine
5- Islam as the
riparian lands of the perception of the Divine
6- There is no religion
without culture
7- The remote locations
where true religions can be found today
8- Technology,
modernity and politics kill religion
9- Islam before Islam,
and the need for an Oriental-Islamic Orientalism
VI. The encounter with
university colleagues and students, and the conclusions drawn about the
academic life in the 1990s and its total uselessness
1- Socializing (daily
meetings) with students originating from different countries
2- Socializing with
Turkish and Turkish Cypriot colleagues
3- Socializing with
colleagues originating from the countries of the former USSR
4- Socializing with
Western European and Anglo-Saxon (US, UK) coworkers
VII. The choice made
between scholarly truth and academic employment
VIII. The determination
to popularize academically known but publicly concealed knowledge
IX. Diverse online
activities: participation in fora and publication of articles in portals
X. Academic experience
in Somalia and the ultimate conceptualization of the African problem
I. Known
and unknown authorship or the validation of all hidden things
To many, authorship is
an extroverted activity during which a writer publishes a text in order to
inform others about something that he knows or contemplates or believes in or
comprehends. This can be characterized as the most common case of writers; all
the same, in such cases, the false knowledge, the erroneous contemplation, the
vile belief, and the evasive comprehension turn authorship into a most
destructive force. A great number of people would be highly surprised if
someone revealed to them how their lives were ruined by otherwise innocent
texts of theoretically respected authors, who happened -in fact- to be the
cruelest of all criminals because of the filth that they released, the
ignorance that they spread, the delusion that they served, the faithlessness
that they promoted, and the confusion that they caused. But Life is an exam,
and everyone pays for the idiocy that he harbors.
To me, authorship is an
introspective action during which an author writes a text in order to transform
himself at will, thus preparing the next stages of his material experience,
establishing a deep and strong connection with his inner self (i.e. his soul),
assessing the spiritual nature of all vigours, acts, trends, events, movements,
situations, and conditions, and identifying his mission in the worldly affairs.
This can definitely be characterized as the most rare case of writers; however,
in such cases, the moral formation, the personal identification, the spiritual
intuition, and the transcendental sensation, which have been achieved,
demonstrate that the simple effort of writing can be turned into a mystical
occurrence similar to that of the Qabbalah, which, long before the Ancient
Hebrews came to existence, was extensively practiced in Mesopotamia and Egypt
in superior manner. In this regard, the limit for the author is the
Firmament.
This rather scarce type
of authorship is not as infrequent as many people may think; there are
innumerable texts that are never published (even now with the internet) for the
very good reason that their authors do not give a damn for the rest, the public
or the society at large. It goes without saying that I am not referring to
simple notes taken from a book, personal schedules for workflow, diverse to-do
lists, and diaries of young girls, although the latter certainly have a
transformative force and value. Beyond the different aspects of the trivial
level of writing, countless numbers of texts have been written, edited,
re-written, finalized, semi-finalized or remained incomplete for God only knows
what reasons. Those millions of texts were never intended for publication, but
they certainly pleased their authors or underwent the amendments and the
modifications needed for their writers to be satisfied.
These numerous but
unknown, isolated but frequent, disparate but consistent, occasional but
methodical texts are the implosion of past mistakes that bring forth new
expectations, the explosion of future passions that take us away from old
principles, and the complosion of all azimuths that associate every point of
the universe with the rest. Writing as an enslaving act? Writing as a
liberating action? Both directions exist, exactly as it happens in Qabbalah
formulas in which you can evoke the evil or exalt the divine; there it is all
about combinations of sounds. But here it concerns a person's deeply engraved
lines of thoughts, compactly stamped sentiments, and overwhelmingly undulated
desires. Spiritually olfactory and materially satisfactory, these never
publicly known texts remain for their authors as cylinders of levitation,
helices of amelioration, baetyli of transfiguration or simply the four pillars
of divination (四柱命理學).
II.
Writing books about ancient texts
The demarcation between
my first and second periods of authorship has much to do with books; while I
continued all my earlier activities in terms of academic research, exploration,
study of archaeological sites, monuments and museums, publications and other
professional occupations, I started writing books; to be more accurate, in the
beginning, it was about translating and commenting Ancient Egyptian and Ancient
Greek texts. Some of the texts were relatively small in size, e.g. no more than
15 or 25 pages each (in Modern Greek translation). However, these texts were
quite important for various reasons, and for this reason I added not only the
necessary preface, introduction and comments (along with the original text and
the translation) but also extra chapters of historical contextualization in
order to help the average reader, who was totally ignorant about either the
lands, regions, continents, and seas where the narratives took place or the
historical periods in which they occurred.
Due to the fact that
there had never been an Orientalist Department in any Greek university and only
irrelevant, worthless, and unscholarly books about similar topics had been
translated into Modern Greek, I had to initiate a totally different style of
publication, which would enable the readers to possibly comprehend the wider
context where the exploits, events, and situations described in those texts had
happened; in fact, not only the ancient texts were unknown to them, but also
the civilizations of which they were integral part.
How the unusual books
would be received by the public was not a matter of concern for me; first, I
would not get paid royalties on my books; second, money was never a concern;
and third, the small, symbolic amount of money, which I received, consisted in
payment for the translation of the brief texts. In fact, I viewed the overall
endeavor as an extra challenge that I would have to face among all my other
tasks, activities and interests, while moving incessantly and passionately from
Germany to Sudan, from Egypt to Russia, and from Turkey to France, while also
passing from Athens to see my father.
As a matter of fact, these
books were written partly in more than 5 or 6 countries each. From the
libraries of the Cabinet d'égyptologie and the Cabinet d'assyriologie in Paris'
Collège de France to the reading rooms of the Deutsches Archäologisches
Institut in Berlin, Istanbul, Cairo and Athens, as well as those of the Institut
français d'études anatoliennes and the Institut français d'archéologie orientale,
and from the lobbies and the rooms of various hotels in Africa and Asia to my
father's home in Athens, these projects were completed in a most vehement
manner. There was never an atmosphere of calmness, stability, and serenity
around those manuscripts; but there was an environment of disciplined work,
systematic investigation, and enthralling enthusiasm that encompassed them.
It could not be
otherwise; the first of these books (see below) was about a very small ancient
text that I had first read in its entirety in a Greek encyclopedia, when I was
a pupil in the high school, no less than 20 years before I wrote a book about
it; more importantly, back at those days (1971), I had dreamed of learning so
much about the region, the period and the civilization involved as to write an
entire book about it. Finally, this was the first book worldwide about the tiny
text (less than 700 words).
The second of the books
was about an Ancient Egyptian text that I had studied in a
postgraduate - doctoral
seminar (Mount Scopus University) in Jerusalem, 8 years before I made of it a
book. That's why I dedicated it to my Israeli professor, after having used the
seminar's notes to write numerous comments. As the text is also small (ca.
10-12 pages of translation into a modern language), only another scholar (a
Russian-Soviet Egyptologist) had published a book about that text before that
time (1992).
The fourth book was about
a slightly larger, albeit small, text (ca. 22-23 pages of translation into a
modern language), which is very dense in terms of data and info contained; more
importantly, it is a crucially important text about a topic that I was studying
at the time, namely the trade between East and West, as well as between North
and South during the Late Antiquity.
My sixth book was in
fact the first; at least partly! Two of its six chapters were written before
all the rest; all the same, I have to admit that they were originally elaborated
without the slightest suspicion that they would one day become the chapters of
a book. They were supposed to be published as independent articles; however,
they were quite long to be accommodated in the different reviews and magazines
of the very parsimonious Greek publishers whose ideological corruption was
execrable and nauseating. The idea of turning them into chapters of a book came
later, in 1991.
This book was not about
an ancient text, but it consisted in a personal itinerary throughout six
provinces of SE Turkey, which mainly correspond to Northern Mesopotamia. Quite extraordinary
as contents, the historical-geographical-spiritual-cultural itinerary featured
lengthy descriptions of the Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian, Iranian and Aramaean
religions, explanations of mythical concepts, presentations of the basic Manichaean
and Yazidi doctrines, and historical narratives as regards the dramatic polarization
of the Western and the Eastern Aramaeans around Oriental Christian doctrines,
namely Monophysitism (Miaphysitism) and Nestorianism, respectively. In addition
to the aforementioned, there were parts of text that were typical descriptions
of my itineraries in the region back in the middle 1980s.
As general interest
books, they would not add anything significant to my career of historian, but
they would certainly demonstrate to the readers that I had nothing in common
with the misery of the Greek pseudo-universities, the execrably low level of
studies available there, and the irrelevant pseudo-scholars who were hired in
order to promote the heinous form of racism, which is known as Hellenism. When
it comes to the readers, the only to count for me were my father and the few
friends who already knew the ignorance and the crudeness, the sectarian mindset,
and the biased character of the Greek bogus-academics. All the same, friends in
other countries could also follow my argumentation to some extent, going
through the notes and the bibliography therein included, which was entirely
non-Greek (basically German, French, English, Russian and Italian).
III.
The first books
In the period between the
end of 1991 and the end of 1994, I published no less than 9 books. Six of them
were written in Greek, whereas one was elaborated in English; the latter was
subsequently translated to Turkish and to Albanian. What follows is a brief
presentation of these books.
1- The
Periplus of Hanno
(Stohastis Publishing House, Athens, 1991; 112 p)
The text is the Ancient
Greek translation of a Carthaginian inscription featuring the colonial
expedition undertaken by King Hanno of Carthage in the middle of the 5th c. BCE
in order to establish Punic colonies in Africa's Atlantic coast and to explore
the unknown coastlands of West Africa down to today's Sierra Leone.
The book comprises of a
preface (on the ancient travelers and navigators), an introduction (about
Carthage, Hanno, his Periplus, and the manuscript), the text, the translation,
and two chapters of historical contextualization, namely on a) the Phoenician
and Carthaginian expansion and colonization of the Mediterranean Sea, and b)
the Ancient History of the African Atlas. At the end, various maps, diagrams,
as well as selected photographical documentation offer an additional insight to
the reader.
A book review can be
found here:
https://www.academia.edu/23363041/The_Periplus_of_Hanno_King_of_the_Carthaginians_and_explorations_of_West_Africa_before_2450_years
A lengthy discussion of
the topic is available here (in Greek):
Από τον Περίπλου του Άννωνα στον Περίπλου της Ανθρωπότητας και στο Τέλος
της
(From the Periplus of
Hanno to the Periplus of Mankind and its End)
https://periplusofhanno.wordpress.com/από-τον-περίπλου-του-άννωνα-στον-περίπ/
https://www.academia.edu/43245807/Από_τον_Περίπλου_του_Άννωνα_στον_Περίπλου_της_Ανθρωπότητας_και_στο_Τέλος_της
The book can be
downloaded here:
https://www.academia.edu/49680378/Άννωνος_Καρχηδονίων_Βασιλέως_Περίπλους_The_Periplus_of_Hanno
2- The
Adventures of Wenamun (Stohastis Publishing House, Athens, 1992; 160 p)
The text is a report
submitted by Wenamun, an Ancient Egyptian priest of Amun at Karnak, after the
completion of his tormented voyage from Thebes (Luxor) through Sais (in the
Delta) to Byblos of Phoenicia from where he procured precious cedar word for
the subsequent construction of Amun's holy boat. Written in Hieratic on a
papyrus {excavated at al Hibah (near Beni Suef), purchased and published
initially by the Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev (in 1891), and
currently known as 'Moscow Papyrus 120'}, the text was transliterated into
Hieroglyphic by Sir Alan Gardiner in 1932, before being commented by numerous
Egyptologists worldwide.
The book constituted
the first Egyptological publication in Greece and the first direct translation
from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Modern Greek; it comprises of a preface about
the Egyptological material and background in Greece, an introduction on the
modern Egyptological research with respect to the report of Wenamun, the text,
the translation, a lengthy commentary, and an appendix with lists of hieroglyphic
signs (from Gardiner's Grammar), photographical material, maps and diagrams,
thus offering readers an illustrated understanding of the Ancient Egyptian
world.
A book review can be found
here:
https://www.academia.edu/23395318/The_Adventures_of_Wenamun_Egyptian_priest_of_Amun_of_Thebes_in_Phoenicia_edition_Prof_M_S_Megalommatis
The book can be
downloaded here:
https://www.academia.edu/49730654/Οι_Περιπέτειες_του_Ουεναμούν_The_Adventures_of_Wenamun
3- The
Ship of Suleyman (Stohastis Publishing House, Athens, 1993; 304 p)
The text (in Farsi:
Safina'i Sulaymani) is the official report established by the Safavid imperial
scribe of the Iranian delegation, which was dispatched by Shah Suleyman to Siam
(Thailand) at the end of the 17th century (1687 - 1688).
The book consists of a
preface, the Modern Greek translation, numerous notes, and an appendix.
A book review can be
found here:
https://www.academia.edu/23396049/Safina_i_Sulaymani_Shah_Sulaymans_diplomatic_missions_deeds_in_Thailand_edition_M_S_Megalommatis
The book can be
downloaded here:
https://www.academia.edu/87085835/Ιμπν_Μουχάμαντ_Ιμπραήμ_Το_Πλοίο_του_Σουλεϋμάν_Ibn_Muhammad_Ibrahim_Safina_i_Sulaymani
4- Periplus
of the Red Sea (also known as Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Stohastis Publishing
House, Athens, 1994; 272 p)
This great historical
source is an Ancient Greek text (of the middle of the 1st c. CE) written by an
anonymous, but certainly Alexandrian Egyptian, author believed to have been a
merchant and/or a captain with personal experience in the coastlands of Eastern
Africa down to today's Tanzania, in the western and southern shores of the
Arabian Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf, and in the Southern Asiatic coastlines
from the Straits of Ormuz to the Gulf of Bengal, Socotra and Sri Lanka included.
Although there is mention of Indochina-Indonesia ('Chryse', i.e. 'Golden') and
China, the text's author becomes very vague and definitely brief in his
description of those regions, which makes the totality of modern scholars
conclude that he never reached those peripheries personally.
Abundant in details
about the navigational expertise of its time, the merchandises (imported and
exported), the geomorphology of the coastlands, the geography of the hinterlands,
the cities, the towns, the ports-of-call, the local societies, and the state
authorities of the indigenous nations, this valuable historical source is by
definition the central text in the study of the East - West Trade, i.e. an
interdisciplinary field where more than two dozens of historical branches (Egyptology,
Iranology, Aramaic and Syriac Studies, Meroitic Studies, Coptology, South
Arabian-Yemenite Studies, Classics, Axum & Ge'ez Studies, Rabbinical Jewish
Studies, Gnosis & Manichaeism, Oriental Christianisms, History of Early
Islam, Indology, Sinology, etc.) have been contributing to the scholarly
research and to the academic understanding of the phenomenon in question over
the past 50-70 years.
One has to underscore
the fact that, back at those days, the term 'Red Sea' signified all the water
expanses that we currently name 'Indian Ocean', 'Persian Gulf', and 'Red Sea';
whereas the term 'Persian Gulf' was already valid in the Late Antiquity, the
body of water that we now call 'Red Sea' was called 'Arabic Gulf' at the time.
This was due to the fact that Arabs inhabited only Hejaz, i.e. the mountainous
western part of the Arabian Peninsula (Petraea Arabia), at the time.
Except the text, the
translation, the commentary and the appendix, the book also comprises an
extensive preface that offers an outline of the lands mentioned in the text,
the states which existed and the civilizations which flourished there, as well
as their relations with one another. The central part of the book is the
introduction which (text with numerous notes in small characters) covers more
than half its size (from p. 51 to p. 199), offering an overview of the major
historical phenomenon which shaped to a very large extent the World History:
the development of the trade between East and West.
As basis for a
fundamentally different approach to modern historiography, the introduction
goes way beyond the level of the contents themselves; it consists in a
methodologically distinct text, which introduces a new conceptualization of
World History and, at the same time, makes of it a new way of writing history
today. By taking the imperial-commercial-cultural multipolarity of the world
described by the anonymous author of the Periplus of the Red Sea as an
undeniable historical fact, I made his system of writing mine, therefore
attributing equal significance to each and every land mentioned, society
described, culture narrated, data stated, info divulged, and practice reported.
Within a world of
centripetal expansion like that of the 1st c. CE, precisely due to this
dynamics, there was no more center, no more midpoint, but a well-diversified
array of factors (kingdoms, societies, harbors, trade-centers, local cultures,
and traveling merchants and navigators), which all formed -on equal terms- the
then international community. The author of the Periplus of the Red Sea has reflected
very well this reality throughout his text.
Subsequently I, sensing
the then impending and now prevailing, multipolar world community, composed a
treatise about the aforementioned historical text and the trade across Asia,
Africa and Europe during the Late Antiquity, methodically and comprehensively
elaborating a non-Occidental overview of an Orientalist topic.
A book review can be
found here:
https://www.academia.edu/23401500/The_Periplus_of_the_Red_Erythraean_Sea_O_Periplous_tes_Erythras_Thalasses_edition_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis_A_Book_Review
The book can be
downloaded here:
https://www.academia.edu/50009926/Περίπλους_της_Ερυθράς_Θαλάσσης_Periplus_of_the_Red_Erythraean_Sea
5-
The Book of the Travels (Stohastis Publishing House, Athens-1994; 264 p)
The text is the
Medieval Hebrew narrative (Sefer haMasaoth) composed by Benjamin of Tudela after
his long voyage from Spain through the Italian Peninsula and the Eastern Roman
Empire to the lands of the Islamic Caliphate and thence through Iran, India,
Yemen and Egypt back to Islamic Andalusia. Thanks to his persistent search for
the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and the associated Messianic beliefs, the author
bore witness to the contemporaneous Jewish communities scattered across the
above mentioned lands.
The book consisted in a
tripartite contribution involving two other scholars and myself; I supervised
the Modern Greek translation, and elaborated the largest part of the
introduction and almost the entirety of the commentary which consisted in half
the book (p. 115-244). The other two specialists undertook the translation, wrote
parts of the introduction and the commentary, and established the
bibliographical section.
A book review can be
found here:
https://www.academia.edu/23546817/The_Book_of_the_Travels_Sefer_haMasaoth_of_Benjamin_of_Tudela_and_his_Search_for_the_Ten_Lost_Tribes_of_Israel_a_book_review_of_the_Greek_edition
The book can be
downloaded here:
https://www.academia.edu/50114362/Βενιαμίν_εκ_Τουδέλης_Το_Βιβλίο_των_Ταξειδίων_Benjamin_of_Tudela_The_Book_of_the_Travels
6-
The Six Stars of the Orient (Domos Publications, Athens, 1994; 240 p)
The book constituted a
really atypical itinerary linking historical moments, topics of History of
Religions, and the description of monuments and archeological places with
personal traveler experience, as well as with transcendental, spiritual contacts
that I had while traveling in, studying, and exploring the area of today's
South-Eastern Turkey in the middle and late 80s.
In fact, it is an
unusual and odd travel 'guide' book, which initiates the reader into the
History of the Oriental Genius; covering a distinct region per chapter, the
book features six cities and/or provinces, namely Urfa (Edessa of Osrhoene),
Commagene, Amida (Diyarbakir), Mardin (Margdis), Nisibis (Nusaybin), and
Thospitis (Van), at two levels: present time (middle to late 80s to be precise)
and Antiquity.
By so doing, I covered
the real, daily and physical, as well as the transcendental levels of
existence, describing -one after the other- efforts of understanding spiritual
fights and simple daily events, while also expanding on various sorts of human
achievement carried out in that area, from architecture to government to faith;
parts of the narrative describe activities and works of several Grand Masters
of Intuition and Initiation. Reference is also made to part of works and
activities that seem to have taken place under the surface of the Earth in
different historical moments.
A book review can be
found here:
https://www.academia.edu/23483287/The_Six_Stars_of_the_Orient_Έξι_Άστρα_της_Ανατολής_A_Cultural_and_Historical_Itinerary_in_South_Eastern_Turkey_by_Prof_Megalommatis
The book can be
downloaded here:
https://www.academia.edu/49479727/Έξι_Άστρα_της_Ανατολής_The_Six_Stars_of_the_Orient
All six chapters of the
book were turned to 6 videos and made available online by a good friend, Mr.
Nikos Bayraktaris; the videos involved significant excerpts from each chapter
and many pictures from the sites, cities and monuments mentioned in the book.
Amongst other portals, the 6 videos can be watched here:
Έδεσσα της Οσροηνής (Ούρφα, ΝΑ Τουρκία): από το Βιβλίο Έξι Άστρα της Ανατολής,
του Μ. Σ. Μεγαλομμάτη
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdJdOu19xP0
Κομμαγηνή: από το Βιβλίο Έξι Άστρα της Ανατολής, του Μουχάμαντ Σαμσαντίν
Μεγαλομμάτη
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqwzc5jkLQs
Ντιγιάρμπεκιρ – Άμιδα, ΝΑ Τουρκία: Έξι Άστρα της Ανατολής, του καθ.
Μουχάμαντ Σαμσαντίν Μεγαλομμάτη
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsAOiRLBlLg
Νίσιβη – Νουσαϋμπίν, ΝΑ Τουρκία: Έξι Άστρα της Ανατολής, του καθ. Μουχάμαντ
Σαμσαντίν Μεγαλομμάτη
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOeuGL7EScY
Μάργδις – Μάρντιν, ΝΑ Τουρκία: Έξι Άστρα της Ανατολής, του καθ. Μουχάμαντ
Σαμσαντίν Μεγαλομμάτη
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIe8Knxu1m4
Θωσπίτις - Βαν, ΝΑ Τουρκία: Έξι Άστρα της Ανατολής, του καθ. Μουχάμαντ
Σαμσαντίν Μεγαλομμάτη
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywBYOehPlLU&t=2s
7- Turkish
– Greek relations and the Balkans. A Historian's Evaluation of Today's Problems (Kıbrıs Vakfı - Cyprus Foundation,
Istanbul, 1994, 56 p)
The book comprised a
scholarly article (part I), which was independently published in an academic periodical,
and a speech (part II) that I gave in a conference (in Girne, Turkish Republic
of Northern Cyprus, in 1994) attended by the then head of state, President Rauf
Denktash. The two parts are:
Part I: The
Turkish-Greek Relations
Part II: The Political
Evolution in the Balkans, the Greek-Balkan Relations, and Turkey
A brief part of the
book can be downloaded here:
https://www.academia.edu/50067711/Turkish_Greek_relations_and_the_Balkans_A_Historian_s_Evaluation_of_Today_s_Problems
A book review can be
found here:
https://www.academia.edu/34468353/Turkish_Greek_relations_and_the_Balkans_A_Historians_Evaluation_of_Todays_Problems
A book review published
by Prof. Fahir Armaoğlu in Turkish can be also found here:
https://www.academia.edu/43189300/Kitap_Tanıtma_Turkish_Greek_relations_and_the_Balkans_A_Historians_Evaluation_of_Todays_Problems
8- Türk
Yunan İlişkileri Ve Balkanlar. Bir Tarihçi Gözü İle Bugünün Sorunları (Kıbrıs
Vakfı, Istanbul, 1994, 56 p)
This is the Turkish
translation of the previous book; it was also published by Cyprus Foundation (Kıbrıs
Vakfı) Istanbul, in 1994.
The book can be
downloaded here:
https://www.academia.edu/49309519/Türk_Yunan_İlişkileri_Ve_Balkanlar_Bir_Tarihçi_Gözü_İle_Bugünün_Sorunları
A book review can be
found here:
https://www.academia.edu/34463155/Türk_Yunan_İlişkileri_Ve_Balkanlar_Bir_Tarihçi_Gözü_İle_Bugünün_Sorunları
9- Mardheniet Turko – Greke dhe Ballkani. Nje Vleresim Historik i problemeve te sotme (Albanian Center in Istanbul,
1994, 44 p)
This is the Albanian
translation of the aforementioned book; it was published by the Albanian Center
in Istanbul, in 1994.
The book can be
downloaded here:
https://www.academia.edu/49311584/Mardheniet_Turko_Greke_dhe_Ballkani_Nje_Vleresim_Historik_i_problemeve_te_sotme
A book review can be
found here:
https://www.academia.edu/34468465/Mardheniet_Turko_Greke_dhe_Ballkani_Nje_Vleresim_Historik_i_problemeve_te_sotme
IV.
Scholarly publications, open lectures, participation in congresses-conferences,
courses offered in universities, and
various
articles
In parallel with the
aforementioned, during the period 1991-1998, I published extensively,
contributing in diverse academic periodicals, reviews and magazines,
participating in congresses and conferences, and offering public lectures and
speeches. Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus were my base for
most of the time; during the same period, I gave interviews to newspapers, I started
working for universities and foundations, and I encountered presidents,
premiers, ministers, ambassadors, and other statesmen. Why all these
developments did not impress or affect me personally is described in the next
unit.
1- Scholarly
publications
Among several other
contributions I herewith mention the following:
Eastern
Mediterranean at the end of the 13th century BCE and the Sea Peoples {in Greek with French summary, in:
JOAS, Athens, (6) 1994, 50 p}
The article can be read
here: https://oilaoitisthalassas.wordpress.com/
It can be downloaded
here:
https://www.academia.edu/26287366/Η_Ευρύτερη_Περιοχή_της_Ανατολικής_Μεσογείου_κατά_τον_13ο_και_τον_12ο_Αιώνα_και_οι_Λαοί_της_Θάλασσας_κείμενο_και_σημειώσεις_
The article is also
available as video:
https://vk.com/video429864789_456239080
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4jv198 and
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4jvdgt (in two
parts)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca9-Ug_WIjY
The
political developments in the Balkans, Greek – Balkan relations, and Turkey {(Speech given in the: Onuncu Uluslararası
Girne Konfereransı, 15-16/5/1994) in: Balkanlar, Kafkasya, ve Ortadoğu’da
Gelişmeler ve Türkiye, Kıbrıs Araştırmaları Vakfı, EDİTÖR: EROL MANİSALI,
Istanbul, 1994, p. 32 – 52}
The volume containing
the article can be purchased here:
https://www.nadirkitap.com/balkanlar-kafkasya-ve-ortadogu-da-gelismeler-ve-turkiye-editor-erol-manisali-kitap1092277.html
The article was
included into the aforementioned book no 7, and therefore translated into
Turkish and Albanian (see no 8 and no 9)
Greece
between Europe and the Third World {(in
French: La Grèce Entre L'Europe Et Le Tiers-Monde), in: Atatürk Araştırma
Merkezi Dergisi, X, 29, Temmuz 1994, p. 347 – 356}
The article is
available online:
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2017/08/31/la-grece-entre-leurope-et-le-tiers-monde/
https://megalommatis.wordpress.com/la-grece-entre-leurope-et-le-tiers-monde
https://www.academia.edu/34424375/La_Grèce_entre_l_Europe_et_le_Tiers_Monde_Prof_Dr_Mohamed_Chams_Ad_dın_MEGALOMMATİS
The
Canaanites and the Phoenicians in Western Mediterranean and North – Western
Africa {(in Greek,
with French summary); in: JOAS, Athens, (3) 1991, 24p.}
Post
WW I Women's Rights in Macedonia
(in Turkish: I. Dünya Savaşı'ndan Sonra Makedonya'da Kadın Hakları; speech
given in the: Kastamonu'da İlk Kadın Mitingi'nin 75. Yıldönümü Uluslararası
Sempozyumu, Yayınevi: Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi, Ankara 2000)
The volume containing
my speech can be purchased here:
https://zerobooksonline.com/urun/Kastamonuda-Ilk-Kadin-Mitinginin-75-Yildonumu-Uluslararasi-Sempozyumu-21226
Greece
is the Enemy of the Minorities
{(in Turkish: Yunanlı Profesör Megalommatis: Yunanistan Azınlık Düşmanı) Speech
given on the 29th January 1995 in Istanbul at a conference organized by Batı
Trakya Türkleri Dayanışma Derneği (Western Thrace Turks Solidarity Association);
published in: Batı Trakya'nın Sesi, Ocak 1995 - Yıl: 8 Sayı: 69}
The article is
available online:
https://megalommatis.wordpress.com/yunanli-profesor-megalommatis-yunanistan-azinlik-dusmani/
https://www.academia.edu/43180050/Yunanlı_Profesör_Megalommatis_Yunanistan_Azınlık_Düşmanı
Occident,
Orient and Turkey {in
Turkish: Batı, Doğu ve Türkiye; speech given on the 2nd November 1996 in: Doğudan-Batıdan
Konferanslar Dizisi II, İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi (From East - From West
Conference Series II, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality), Kültür İşleri Daire
Başkanlığı Yayını (Publication of the Department of Cultural Affairs), İstanbul
1997}
The volume containing
my speech can be purchased:
https://www.simurgkitabevi.com/dogudan-batidan-uluslararasi-konferanslar-dizisi-1-2-1996
https://www.nadirkitap.com/dogudan-batidan-2-uluslararasi-konferanslar-dizisi-ekim-96-nisan-97-kitap14930852.html
https://search.worldcat.org/title/47937592?oclcNum=47937592
https://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/9757580848
A presentation article published
in the Turkish Daily News on the 11th November 1996 can be found here:
https://megalommatis.wordpress.com/from-east-from-west-conference-series-opens/
2-
Courses offered in universities
In addition to the
aforementioned, working for the Doğu Akdeniz Üniversitesi (Eastern
Mediterranean University Cyprus) from 1994 to 1996, I gave a number of
semestrial courses as per below.
HIST 202. Ancient History of the Middle East (the
beginning of the civilization in Sumer and Elam, the early dynasties of Sumer,
the Empire of Akkad, its decline and fall)
HIST 202. Ancient History of the Middle East (the Guti and the Neo-Sumerian
periods in Mesopotamia)
HIST 202. Ancient History of the Middle East (the Ancient Assyrian and
Babylonian times)
HIST 206. World History
HIST 101. History of Mathematics in the Antiquity
(Numbers and numeration systems of all the major peoples of Oriental and
Classical Antiquity)
HIST 104. Modern History of Cyprus
PHIL 201. History of Religions and Mythology
(Ancient Sumerian, Elamite, Assyrian and Babylonian religions and myths: Enuma
Elish, Adapa, Gilgamesh, Etana, the Flood, Ishtar’s Descent to the Nether
World, etc.)
PHIL 201. History of Religions and Mythology (Ancient Egyptian religion: the
Heliopolitan, the Hermupolitan, Memphitic, and the Theban religious systems,
myths and ideologies, and the Amarna Monotheism // the religious – ideological
syncretism of the Egyptian Late Antiquity: Isidism, Osiris, Hathor, Horus,
Thot, and Anubis cults, Gnosticisms, Hermeticism, Diffusion of Egyptian cultic
– religious – philosophical systems throughout the Roman Empire)
PHIL 201. History of Religions and Mythology (Ancient Hittite religions and
myths: Ullikummi, Illuyanka, Telipinus; other Ancient Anatolian religious and
mythological systems: Hatti, Luwian, Urartu, Neo-Hittite, Phrygian, Lydian,
Carian, Lycian, Cappadocian)
PHIL 202. History of Religions and Mythology (the Evil in Ancient Oriental
Religions, Cults, Mythologies and Philosophies)
LIT 101. Ancient Literatures (Analytical study of the Ancient Egyptian
Hieroglyphic text Expedition to Punt by Queen Hatshepsut that narrates an
Egyptian expedition to the Red Sea and Horn of Africa coasts around 1475 BCE)
LIT 133. Travel Literature (Analytical study of A. the Egyptian Hieratic text
known as the Adventures of Wenamun that narrates an Egyptian priest’s trip to
Phoenicia / Lebanon by 1075 BCE and B. the Periplus of Hanno, King of the
Carthaginians, an Ancient Greek translation of the original Carthaginian – now
lost - text that narrates that king’s expedition to the Western coast of Africa
down to today’s Sierra Leone by 450 BCE)
LIT 102. Ancient Literatures (Analytical study of the Periplus of the Red Sea,
an Ancient Greek text of the 1st century CE, written by an unknown Egyptian
captain and merchant, that narrates details concerning the commerce, the
navigation, the geography and the political structures throughout a vast area
encompassing the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and Indochina)
GRE 01. Introduction to Greek language
GRE 01. Introduction to Greek language
3-
Various articles
Among numerous articles
for the general public that I published in monthly magazines, reviews and
newspapers during the period 1991-1998, I consider the following ten titles as
quite representative of the last period of publications for me in Greece; they
were all written in Greek and printed in the monthly Trito Mati (Third Eye). More
recently, they were scanned and made available online; I therefore add the
respective links to them.
The
Confusion and the Tower of Babel
https://www.academia.edu/49088280/Η_Σύγχυση_και_ο_Πύργος_της_Βαβέλ_The_Confusion_and_the_Tower_of_Babel_
Monotheism
and Idolatrous Polytheism
https://www.academia.edu/49091778/Μονοθεϊσμός_and_Εικονολατρικός_Πολυθεϊσμός_Monotheism_and_Iconolatrous_Polytheism
The
Flood and the Malediction of Nations
https://www.academia.edu/49091084/Ο_Κατακλυσμός_και_η_Κατάρα_των_Εθνών_The_Flood_and_the_Malediction_of_Nations
The
Temple of Isis at Philae
https://www.academia.edu/43010340/Ο_Ναός_της_Ίσιδας_στις_Φίλες_της_Αιγύπτου_The_Temple_of_Isis_at_Philae_Храм_Исиды_в_Филе
The
Temple of Horus at Edfu
https://www.academia.edu/49143283/Ο_Ναός_του_Ώρου_στο_Εντφού_Αποκάλυψη_του_Αρχετυπικού_Αιγυπτιακού_Μεσσία
The
Temple of Hathor at Denderah
https://www.academia.edu/49222339/Ο_Ναός_της_Χαθώρ_στην_Ντεντέρα_The_Temple_of_Hathor_at_Denderah
The
Formation of Christianity (in two parts)
https://www.academia.edu/49282705/Οι_Χριστιανισμοί_Το_Άγνωστο_Παρασκήνιο_της_Δημιουργίας_της_Νέας_Θρησκείας_1
and
https://www.academia.edu/49285956/Οι_Χριστιανισμοί_Το_Άγνωστο_Παρασκήνιο_της_Δημιουργίας_της_Νέας_Θρησκείας_2
The
Ancient Egyptian Temple-Book at Kom Ombo
https://www.academia.edu/49201637/Ο_Αρχαίος_Αιγυπτιακός_Ναός_Βιβλίο_στους_Όμβους_The_Ancient_Egyptian_Temple_Book_at_Omboi_Kom_Ombo_
The
Dark Years of Jesus' Life and his Travels in Persia, India and Kashmir
https://www.academia.edu/49291062/Τα_Σκοτεινά_Χρόνια_της_Ζωής_του_Ιησού_τα_Ταξίδια_του_σε_Περσία_Ινδία_και_Κασμίρ_
From
Judaea to Kashmir
https://www.academia.edu/49293803/Από_την_Ιουδαία_στο_Κασμίρ_From_Judaea_to_Kashmir
V.
Academic explorations, conceptualization of the World History, and adhesion to
Islam (at the age of 36, in 1992)
The period 1991-1994
proved to be the culmination of my earlier studies, researches and explorations,
and the transformative moment, which enabled me to pursue my personal path,
while continuing my investigation of the human advance -or rather trajectory- throughout
History, identifying genuine expressions of humanity that are being
progressively lost, and comprehending the nature of human life beyond the
destructive delimitations caused and/or imposed by conventional academic
schemes, professional biases, and numerous dilemmas of conformist, relativist,
rationalist, materialist or even consumerist nature.
This made it clear to
me first and to others second that my career of scholar, my activities of
author, and my endeavors of explorer were all appended -at least for me- to the
progress I would make in grasping the originality of human soul as attested in
numerous texts written, deciphered, published, translated, academically discussed,
and scientifically commented, but ultimately not understood.
1- The
Western scholarship in disarray
It was then that I
realized for the first time the fact that most of the specialists did not truly
read, let alone appreciate, the genuine meaning of the ancient historical
sources because, beyond the first, technical level of approach, they did not
assess the terms, conditions and connotations involved in the words used, but
merely projected their own ideas and concepts onto the ancient texts, assuming
that the ancient nations "were humans like us". Coming from their
part, that was assuming a lot; the failure of the 20th c. Western scholarship
could be easily described as it follows: they read what they wanted to
read and not what the original author intended to mean. If this occurs
only once or twice, this is surely a minor problem; but if this attitude does
indeed characterize our approach to all the ancient texts, then we simply
fabricate an enormous delusion the first victims of which cannot be other than
us.
Since the beginning of
my postgraduate studies, for most of the cases and with few exceptions, the
20th c. Western Orientalist scholarship has been, to my eyes, less perspicacious,
less inventive, and less groundbreaking than that of the 19th c. great pioneers.
In other words, what the 19th c. explorers managed to achieve in very remote
locations, often under very harsh conditions of movement, the timid and trepid
professors of the 20th c. failed to repeat in the serenity of their offices and
libraries; the former attained the limits of the Earth, but the latter did not
have the courage to reach the boundaries of Human Genius. Few scholars would
accept this approach of mine today, because the corrections, improvements, and adjustments
made by the latter are considered as indispensable part, if not the real
backbone, of today's scientific disciplines.
For me, this undeniable
fact is indeed of minor importance; progressively, the academic life turned out
to lamentably become a fully useless and absolutely incomprehensible
bureaucracy of Knowledge, a dogmatic body of -detached from real life-
'connoisseurs', and an otherwise worthless hierarchy of doctrinally austere
carcasses for whom only the elaborate books of the specialized libraries really
matter precisely because the outside world is alive but they are dead. That's
why what was for many long millennia considered as the 'next level' or as the
'superior stage' that humans can attain, after acquiring and possessing the necessary
knowledge, is now a never used, quasi-obsolete word: Wisdom.
2- Ethnography:
indispensable for History, Literature, History of Religions and Mythologies
So, I decided to
advance the type of research that I had already undertaken ever since I arrived
in the Orient in 1984, namely to make of the human factor a solid and indispensable
parameter of my investigations. A villager in the hills of Tur Abdin, a farmer
not far from where the Great Zab joins the Tigris, and a shepherd in a valley
of the Zagros Mountains are certainly closer to both, Gilgamesh and Enkidu,
than the best Assyriologist of the Western universities may ever manage to be.
But, of course, it takes time to remove the diverse veils thrown on the human
soul during all the later historical periods and the compact crust deposited by
modernity, until you access the antiquity and the originality of the
cultural-spiritual heritage of a rural person.
What the simple and
uneducated rural people are able to empower a historian to fathom is beyond the
capacities of most of the modern scholars to understand. This is called
'historical continuity', and quite unfortunately, the entire academic
discipline of History lies at its antipodes. The ignorant modern historians
deplorably divide History into periods and sub-periods; but the simple, yet
wise, rustic men preserve the unity of time in his heart and mind.
This, true and
inalienable, historical continuity has nothing in common with idiotic and
destructive modern dogmas composed by criminal elites in order to fool the
average people and utilize the masses for their own, lawless and evil,
interests. That's why anything that originates from the mind, within the modern
Western world, is inevitably venomous and destructive, whereas the heart and
its functions have been rendered invalid, inactive, and obsolete.
The delusional and
entirely fake world of the Western world and its appendices constitute spiritually
an exemplary instance of the Non-Being far from the heart, the nature, the
Being, and the Becoming. Idiotically believing that, by 'thinking' they exist,
Western scientists reached the level of delusional disorder, thus reducing themselves
to merely hypothetical conclusions and gravely sinful dogmas, which render them
effectively nonexistent; their physical disappearance is going to be the
consequence of only few movements (this is what they call 'time').
3- There
are no religions today; they have been substituted by ideologies.
Entirely faithless,
thinking that they are Christians (and therefore believers), today's nominal
Christians generate endless forms of Anti-Christianity that they, as fully consummate
Manichaeans, perceive as merely an 'antithesis' leading to a 'synthesis', whereas
they are the deliberate consequence of their endless acts of disbelief, which they
shamelessly praise.
Spiritually defective
Muslims, overwhelmingly impacted by the colonial conditions of this situation,
take ideology for religion, silly theological doctrines as spiritually
effective practices, and cult as an ostensibly shameful act of automatons. They
subsequently turn out to be hypocritical fraudsters, damned in the eternal
fire, as their prayers, before reaching Allah, are rejected by angels and
thrown on their heads.
Failing to perpetually
re-examine tradition and occasionally identify deviations, most of today's Jews
evoke a past, which is not theirs anymore, be it Biblical Hebrew or Judeo-Rabbinical
(Talmudic), and a heritage that cannot coexist with the modern Western
ideologies that they may/might embrace. The heartless ritual next to the
Western Wall is a deeply anti-Biblical idolatry and an anti-Talmudic attitude apparently
caused because of the irreversible loss of all major Qabbalah keys.
The aforementioned evidences
made a person like me, born Christian Orthodox, distanced from official
Christianity, turned to irreligious, and then associated with Bar Mitzvah
ceremony, finally accept Islam in late 1992. My spiritual, religious, academic,
intellectual and identitarian quest was an indivisible and multifaceted process
that lasted several years, as it had started in 1986.
4- Historical
continuity of Monotheism as the natural and honest perception of the Divine
Theoretically, it was
the consolidation of my perception of prophet Muhammad's preaching as
repetition of the sermon delivered by prophet Jonah to the Men of Nineveh, as
reiteration of the monotheistic faith of Akhenaten, and as reinstatement of the
early Sumerian monotheism that marks the beginning of Human Faith.
In reality, it had much
to do with the conceptualization of two, radically opposed to one another,
forms of perception of the Divine: one, natural and honest, which ended up with
monotheistic narratives, and another, abnormal and dishonest, which plunged the
targeted believers with endless stories of polytheistic semiotics that
destroyed the original perception and turned the divinely created Man into an
abhorrent beast. These two perceptions of the Divine were later contextualized
in World History as concretized priesthoods, but this is of secondary
importance.
Many Muslim friends,
having heard in detail the story of my adhesion to Islam, constantly tell me
that I accepted this religion through extensive studies, researches, and deep
investigations of numerous historical Islamic texts, not via conversation (with
an imam, preacher or layman), seminar attendance, ideological enthusiasm or
simply routine daily practice. That is true; I was not affected by preconceived
ideas, false biases, grave misinterpretations, historical forgeries, and
enormous distortions caused over the past two centuries due to
theological-political needs.
Certainly, I did not
consider the 'official' representatives of this religion as truly original, but
it was very clear to me that the same situation characterized all the so-called
religions of our time. To limit the discussion within the circumference of
Islam, offering an example, I would say that Al Biruni or Ibn Hazm represent
Islam authoritatively, not the mufti of Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem or Al Azhar.
5- Islam
as the riparian lands of the perception of the Divine
When I accepted Islam,
I truly knew its correct place in World History far better than most of the
other Muslims (be they a professor, a theologian, a mufti or an ayatollah),
precisely because although Islam starts with Adam (which is a true, common
belief among Muslims), no Muslim has ever tried to establish the still missing
link between Modern Orientalism and Islamic historiography.
But this is an
inevitable task, since we don't live anymore in the 1st or the 10th century of
the Islamic era, but in a period in which abundant pre-Islamic, pre-Christian,
and pre-Biblical sources have been excavated, deciphered, translated and made
available thus entirely changing the environment in which we find ourselves. No
one can disassociate cuneiform and hieroglyphic textual evidence from the
Quran; it is impermissible and evil to study them separately. Enuma Elish is as
important as the Quran as holy revelation.
In this regard, without
identifying the Muslims and the hypocrites (or if you prefer, the monotheists
and the polytheists) in Early Sumer, not a single Muslim of our time can grasp
the slightest idea of what diachronic Islam truly is, and even worse, not one
Muslim scholar can possibly refute the fallacious historiography of the Western
Orientalists - which is a prerequisite for the refutation of the entire Western
anti-Islamic literature, and of the Catholic-Protestant misrepresentation of
Islam.
All the same, my quest
was mainly personal, i.e. identitarian, as I already said. That's why I never
experienced the enthusiasm (or fanaticism) of the ideological newcomer; faith
is strictly personal-spiritual. It has nothing to do with worthless mental and
intellectual processes or silly thoughts about mending the world. Accepting a
religion means correcting yourself – only!
Forget the 'others',
the 'society', the 'material world', and every worthless material concern! I
never wrote an article under the stupid title "Why I accepted Islam".
This strictly personal affair does not concern any other person in the world
than myself; divulging details on this topic, one simply becomes a hypocrite
and an evil puppet of forces that you cannot even fathom. To describe how this
personal development affected a scholar's explorations and authorship is quite
meaningful if not necessary (after the years pass and one has a perspective on
it); but the reasons and the motives of a person's spiritual choice are not
matters of public interest.
6- There
is no religion without culture
In any case, one person
must be very superficial and totally disconnected from any spiritual process,
if he narrates stories and news according to which the day after his
'conversion' in another religion was entirely different from the previous.
These are the people who accept another faith for purely psychological reasons,
being foolish enough to believe that, by merely performing different rituals,
one can correct the problem of his faithlessness and his inability to establish
full synergy between the soul, the character, and the body. This type of
nonsensical 'confessions' demonstrate that the person in question remains
attached to the very low, verbal level of religious belief, which is exactly
what makes me specify that today's so-called religions are merely ideologies
void of spirituality.
It goes without saying
that, in most of the cases, a religion is an emanation that comes out of a
context, namely a culture; it subsequently transforms the context, producing a
new one. But there is never a new religion without a previous and an ensuing culture,
except for the case of early civilizations, notably Sumer, Elam, and Egypt, where
the early faith and spirituality of the humans created the first cultures.
Then, without a deep
knowledge, understanding and perception of the ensuing culture, no one can
truly know and accurately believe in the religion that instituted the new,
sequential culture. Taking into consideration the fact that everything in human
affairs has a beginning, a duration, and an end, we easily realize that the
disintegration of a civilization and the decay of a culture bring about the
fall and the desuetude of a religion.
In fact, today,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam do not exist as religions, i.e. as fully
functional, active and creative, organizational systems; this is an undeniable
reality, which if you don't accept, you live in the sphere of the unreal and the
delusional. This does not mean that you cannot accept any of them (and many
other religions), but you have to be conscious of the truth that religion is
your personal affair.
The worthless, defunct
and putrefied systems that naïve and ignorant people still today call
'religions' are merely defunct entities that have been substituted by theological-ideological
systems, which have been colonially invented and only 'recently' (over the past
200-250 years) projected onto various nations in order to facilitate the
purpose of the Modern Western world to systematically promote faithlessness.
7- The
remote locations where true religions can be found today
For this reason, the
last remnants of true, culturally experienced religion, the few remaining
shreds of socially lived and respected religion, and the very last centers of
practicing historical faiths in exactly the same manner as historical believers
did before 7 or 10 centuries can only be attested in remote locations that are clean
of modern technology, free of the useless thoughts and the sick ideas produced
by the otherwise corrupt Western mindset, and void of all the dehumanizing
–isms that the Western contamination cannot stop generating.
Proceeding in this
manner, one can certainly understand why I was able to dissociate the truly
faithful people in the mountainous villages of Iran from the sinful, perverse, and
ideologically fanatic, pseudo-Muslims in Tehran. Several years before becoming
Muslim, I already knew very well that
a- the Jews of Shiraz
were truer than those of Jerusalem;
b- the Aramaeans of
Urmia and the Armenians of Jolfa-Isfahan were more genuine Christians than
those of Western Europe and North America; and
c- the Muslims of Takab,
Salmas, Kaleybar, Hasanlu, Sahneh and Dezful were far more authentic in their
faith (Islam) than those of Tehran, Karachi, Cairo, Istanbul, etc.
But it took me years to
reach North Sudan, an extraordinary and marvelous land where I first arrived
only in 1992; there I really sensed that the people of Abri, Delqo, Kerma and
Dongola were the best Muslims I had encountered. That is why in this region I
concluded the following: since I already believed that there is no other god
except God and Muhammad ibn Abdullah was a prophet, I was in fact already a
Muslim.
8- Technology,
modernity and politics kill religion
Furthermore, my
personal conviction was corroborated by the superior manner of daily life that
prevailed among them and which I was able to discern. If you wish me to
enumerate the most distinct constituent elements of their daily life, which
indeed persuaded me as regards their originality, I will only mention a few
external traits; so, there will be no chance for personal subjectivity to be
detected in my response. Here they are:
a- there were no electricity
and no electrical appliances at all;
b- people slept at 8:30
pm and woke up at 3:30 am;
c- they shared with you
all they had, from a room in their home to a bread loaf in their plate, because
you were to them a brother or simply a human being – not a coreligionist viewed
through sectarian lenses and viciously 'preferred' to others;
d- their religion, cult
and practice had nothing to do with orders, musts or social conventions, being
a joyful expression of faith totally unrelated to mindsets and thoughts;
e- their faith was
reflected in their discourse and conversation in which there was no place for
'states', 'governments', 'politics', 'administrations', 'bureaucracies' and
other useless 'hierarchies' of material order;
f- their behavior was
characterized by
- total absence of
sectarianism, hatred of the other, and activism, and
- a permanent, strong propensity
to spontaneity;
and (to add a case of
personal experience)
g- when I described to
them the then newly invented technology of computer-generated simulation, which
is called 'virtual reality', they did not believe me at all, thinking that I
wanted only to impress them and considering my narrative as a pure lie and its
contents as a hypothetical, illusory, yet disastrous deviation of the entire
mankind.
9- Islam
before Islam, and the need for an Oriental-Islamic Orientalism
So, the only statement,
which would accurately describe the spiritual, cultural, religious,
intellectual, and academic context of my adhesion to Islam, is to be found in
the following three paragraphs:
In a world with
no religion, but with governments set up by criminal gangsters and fraudsters,
who -working as silly puppets for their evil masters- present their useless ideology
as 'religion' and drive all Muslims to extinction, I decided to openly and
officially become a Muslim, after I identified prophet Muhammad's preaching as
identical with all previous sermons and declarations of monotheism.
I then gave
myself the tasks to discover all points of falsehood diffused by the West over
the past 5-6 centuries, comprehend the subsequently concealed and hitherto
totally unknown World History, and identify the originality of Man, as
described in numerous pre-Christian and pre-Islamic treatises, which are best understood
in the light of a great number of Islamic texts.
This intention definitely
impacted my authorship because in many cases, if properly studied and
comprehended, numerous historical Islamic texts, treatises and opuses effectively
illuminate Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian, Iranian and other texts
written two millennia before prophet Muhammad. Respectively, the earlier epics,
sacred texts, myths, and other narratives help us indeed understand better several
posterior sources, be they Biblical Hebrew, Christian, Islamic or other.
No! Today, you cannot
'learn' the vast, complex, multifaceted, and uniquely valuable cultural-spiritual-intellectual-scientific-artistic
phenomenon of Islam by means of only the Quran and the Hadith. Those, who
villainously reduce Islam to just a holy book and a collection of oral
traditions, are either ignorant, uneducated, silly and pathetic pseudo-Muslims
or the worst enemies of Islam, who happen exactly to be the vicious promoters
of the Islamic terrorist version of History of Islam, which is a filthy
forgery.
Understanding the
basics of Islam due only to the Quran and the Hadith was still a possible method
only before the disintegration of the Islamic civilization and the decay of the
Muslim cultures, which brought about the fall and the desuetude of Islam as
religion. The meaning of words, the connotation of terms, and the principles of
faith are by now entirely altered within the new context in which Muslims find
themselves today. This truly unprecedented event makes of the so-called
believers only nominally Muslim, but the reality of their political clowns'
ruthlessness, their presidents' brainlessness, their states' and governments' uselessness,
and their bogus-religious leaders' faithlessness is evident to all.
That is why the only potential
betterment is personal, and this is the sole struggle in which a Muslim today
can engage. No guns, no arms, no attacks! It is not the task of a true believer
to mend the world; an evil world can only be a short-lived experience and a test
for a faithful person, but it is only up to God to terminate it.
VI.
The encounter with university colleagues and students, and the conclusions drawn
about the academic life in the 1990s and its total uselessness
My academic employment
would affect my authorship in many dimensions; the simplest step in this regard
would be the progressive elaboration of manuals and concise textbooks about the
courses and the seminars that I conducted. By turning my notes and the
printouts distributed in class into manuals, I could easily generate the next
5-7 books; my students would be so happy. However, this was not a priority for
me, because when I find myself in a new environment, I first explore it as best
as I can. I therefore willingly edited at no cost the English and the French
texts of several colleagues in view of forthcoming publications, instead of
merely composing my own books.
Because it was the first
time for me to be an academic staff member of a university, I had plenty of
extra topics to study; my colleagues, my students, and their social milieus
were those to start with. Due to the fact that I was a quite unconventional
academic at 38, many had the vivid interest to meet and examine me from
closely. As it is described below, my attitude, behavior and curriculum were
quite divergent from that of most of my colleagues, and this added to the
curiosity, which was created in this regard.
My studies in Western
Europe and my explorations in parts of the Orient (usually but very erroneously
called 'Middle East'), my Greek citizenship and my staunch pro-Turkish Kemalist
stance, my Christian Orthodox background and my adhesion to Islam, my field of
specialization (Ancient Mesopotamia, Canaan, Anatolia, Egypt, Cush and Iran)
and my extensive readings in Islamic wisdom, spirituality, art and mysticism,
my personal attire, which was purely Western, and my long narratives about
Islamic heritage, almost every constituent element of my personality appeared
as contrasting with another, markedly different component; I therefore appeared
to most of the people around me as quite intriguing. After all, I was the sole
Greek to recognize, live, work, and teach in the Turkish Republic of Northern
Cyprus.
1-
Socializing (daily meetings) with students originating from different countries
All this looked very
good to others, but at the end, I garnered only ambivalent impressions.
Breaking all norms and contravening all social conventions, I soon turned the
salon of my apartment into a meeting point for my students and their friends.
From the sunset to around midnight, every day many students passed by to greet,
discuss, ask questions, exchange ideas with others, meet classmates, comment,
encounter new persons, eat, drink, and above all -and thanks to my guidance of
the discussions-, learn about the past, the archaeological sites, and the
monuments of the lands and the countries of other fellow students.
These daily meetings
were quite instructive for me too! I was at the same time a professor and a
student or if you prefer an instructor and learner. As a matter of fact, and
despite my great effort to conceal it, it was a very painful experience for me
to realize that
- my Azeri students did
not know and had never heard about Mardin, Tur Abdin, Urfa/Urhoy-Edessa of
Osrhoene, Nemrut Dagh (Mountain), and many other Turkish sites of foremost
importance;
- my Egyptian students had
no idea that in Sudan there are more pyramids, albeit smaller, steeper and
chronologically later, than in Egypt;
- my Sudanese students,
who had crossed Egypt several times, never visited Ancient Egyptian temples,
Christian monasteries, and Islamic mosques there, and were never told about
them;
- my Palestinian
students were totally unaware of their ancestors, namely the Peleset (known as
Pelasgians in the South Balkans and as Philistines in Southern Canaan), a major
component of the Sea Peoples, who attacked the Hittite Empire, Ugarit and the
other coastal Canaanite kingdoms, Amurru (Syria), and Egypt where -only after three
successive battles- Ramesses III managed to defeat and disperse them in the
beginning of the 12th c. BCE;
- my Jordanian
Palestinian students never explored Rekem / Petra, the capital of the Aramaean
Nabataean kingdom, and failed to hear that there were antiquities in Jerash / Gerasa;
- my Lebanese students
only vaguely sensed their Phoenician identity and never learned about Sanchuniathon
(Sakun Yatan), the great mystic, spiritual master, scholar, and author whose
authoritative opuses were exalted by so many pre-Christian and Christian
historians, philosophers, and writers;
- my Turkish students
did not have a clue about the Nestorians, the Monophysites, the Manichaeans,
the Christian Icon-fighters, the Paulicians, and several other crucial elements
of Anatolian heritage that determined the historical evolution for many
centuries;
- my Pakistani students
were very proud to hear me extensively describing to all the others the
archaeological site details of Takshasila (Taxila) and the importance of the Gandharan
Art (during the last centuries of the 1st millennium BCE and the first
centuries of the 1st millennium CE), but they had never visited the famous site;
- my Afghani students
were very enthusiastic to listen to me speaking to other students and
highlighting the historical importance of Khyber Pass, which is also a most
fascinating landscape, but they could not narrate anything about the great significance
of Bactra/Balkh in either pre-Islamic or Islamic times;
- my Albanian students
could hardly make a sentence about Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeu (mainly known as
Skanderbeg in Western European languages), an outstanding historical figure and
a legendary hero for all Albanians; and
- my Turkish Cypriot
students, who had to care very much about the Semitic / Canaanite-Phoenician (so,
definitely not Greek) origin and identity of their island, heard from me for
the first time that the earliest name of Cyprus was Alashiya, and that the
first indigenous ruler -known by an entirely Semitic name- was none other than
Queen Hatiba, who was mentioned in the Ancient Egyptian text of Wenamun.
(Cyprus:
https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/150012/Zwickel_457.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
As it can be surmised,
the down-to-earth reality that I experienced was not pleasant but grievous; I
had studied the history of many ancient nations, their religions and
literatures, and I had explored several great civilizations which flourished in
the proximity of one another. But all of sudden, I discovered that the
'recently' imposed (but historically irrelevant and meaningless) colonial
borders had deeply separated the people, who inhabited all these lands, from
their neighbors, disconnecting them quasi-totally from many parts, phases, and
moments of their irrevocably common and undeniably illustrious historical
heritage.
For several millennia
of pre-Christian, pre-Islamic, and Islamic times, the History of today's
Pakistan cannot be dissociated from that of Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Persian Gulf states,
Turkey, Syria-Palestine, and the Arabian Peninsula. But 'now', all these
students of mine, i.e. the undeniable heirs of the world's greatest
civilizations and unsurpassed human genius, did not know anything about the
split segments of this vast region which was home to all of them, being
irrevocably identified as the undeniable Center of the World.
It was an extremely
embarrassing conclusion that I had to draw; most of my students thought that
their common denominator was Islam but apparently this name (which, as I
already said, is that of a modern political ideology substituted to the
historical religion without the believers even understanding the change) was a
prime divisor. More they spoke about issues pertaining to Islam today, more
they were divided across sectarian and sub-sectarian lines; this was the truth.
This situation was ostensibly
too bad, but it only corroborated my conclusion, namely that today there are no
religions anymore but theological-political ideologies, which damage all those
who accept them, thinking that they are religions. The fact that my Muslim
students could not even imagine that their common historical heritage was the
only force able to unite them and that what they used to call 'their religion' (but
was indeed 'their ideology') disunited them only added to my frustration.
All the same, this
development was overall positive after all, because it helped me comprehend the
true, invisible reality of today's world, which remained totally unknown to the
idiotic students of Islamic studies and to the scores of useless and
catastrophic sheikhs, imams, ayatollahs, muftis, not to mention the fully burlesque
statesmen of the so-called Muslim countries, i.e. the likes of Saddam Hussein,
the Saudi monkeys, the Gulf countries' humanoid emirs, Muammar Gaddafi,
Mubarak, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and many others down to today.
2-
Socializing with Turkish and Turkish Cypriot colleagues
My encounter with my
colleagues was similarly, quite frustrating and extremely useful (as a harsh
landing in the reality). Due to the diverse ethnic origin and the citizenship
of my colleagues, I have to tackle this issue in different parts, speaking
separately about a) Turkish and Turkish Cypriot colleagues, b) those
originating from the countries of the former USSR, and c) Western European and
Anglo-Saxon (US, UK) coworkers.
My Turkish and Turkish
Cypriot colleagues were Kemalists in their utmost majority; every objective
observer would admit this reality. However, this would be only a superficial
record of the situation. Next to Kemalism (Kemalizm or Kamâlizm), in Modern
Turkish, there is another term, namely Atatürkçülük (Ataturk-ism); the two nouns,
'Kemalist' and ' Atatürkçü',
alternate. However, it is not at all a matter of terminology, but of
connotation and semantics.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Atatürkçülük
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Atatürkçü
My Kemalist colleagues
had a totally fossilized perception of the thoughts, the actions, the
reactions, and the practices of Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk; if possible, they
would be happy to break Ataturk's genius down to pieces, turn them to brief
prescriptions -or recipes, if you prefer-, and obediently implement them to the
end of their lives. All the same, this docile attitude to life, depriving the
individual from any initiative, is at the very antipodes of Kemal Ataturk's dynamic
perception of life as an ongoing, interminable challenge. In other words, they
wanted to live their lives quite calmly and without concerns, bothers, and
confrontations, whereas the founder of Turkey spent his entire life, seeking after
challenges.
So, Ataturk's thought
was taught to students as a motionless system of doctrinal instructions, which
would be an anathema for him, because the essence of his system of thinking was
proactive, flexible, and perpetually adaptable to any new situation that would eventually
arise. It was easy to understand that, by incessantly and excessively lauding
Kemal Ataturk, a group of people ruled in his name only to govern Turkey in
visibly different manner from his. At times, their governmental practice was
not just different from but opposite to Ataturk's deeds and concepts.
The well-known example
of the omnipresent busts and the ubiquitous portraits of Kemal Ataturk in
Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is merely an indication:
they were totally absent during his life. But while the great man was alive,
there was only one party in Turkey; there was no politics at all. The governance
was collective, popular, and participatory. Religion, as an ideology, was
thrown to the dustbin of History. Why? In fact, it had to be re-invented; not
as such, but the path to it, namely our perception of the true connotations of
the words used within a different context.
But to me, the worst
problem was neither the posthumous omnipresence of a head of state by means of publicly
erected statues, busts and frames nor the perverse and catastrophic differentiation
in the system of governance and the administration of the country, but the grave
pedagogical, educational, academic and intellectual confusion generated around
Ataturk's legacy.
Instead of learning the
fundamental principles defended by the founder of Turkey throughout his life
and being trained as to how to proactively implement them in the new context in
which people found themselves in the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s, the
students were compacted with a fossilized and sterilized version of Kemalism.
This totally prevented them from accessing the true genius of Kemal Ataturk and
from identifying the basic principles of his world conceptualization which
fully consolidate a secular state and make all the ideologies, theologies and
pseudo-religions totally useless and unnecessary.
So, I was met with
total disappointment as regards my Turkish and Turkish Cypriot colleagues, who
were naïve enough to imagine that, since Kemal Ataturk adopted scrupulously selected
elements (not all of them) of the Western system of governance in the 1920s, it
was 'normal' for them to accept in the 1990s every worthless, debased and
calamitous detail of the, meanwhile degraded, Western states without any effort
of critical thinking.
This situation did not
bode well with the future of Turkey, because even one centimeter far from the
values and the virtues of the founder of the Turkish state, the country is
predestined to doom and disappear. Only idiots and pathetic lackeys of the
colonial states of France, England and America thought that they could
'Islamize' Turkey. By so doing, they would only bring a total destruction on
their stupid heads and on those of all the cretinous Turks who voted them.
3-
Socializing with colleagues
originating from the countries of the former USSR
My encounter with
colleagues originating from the countries of the former USSR was also disenchanting.
Someone must have plunged them into a series of calamitous myths, wrong
evaluations, and nonsensical dreams, thus totally destroying their mindsets and
personalities. Without any reason, any argument, and any proof, those very
skillful and highly qualified scholars, although very strong in their
respective academic fields, used to accept a number of otherwise
incomprehensible aberrations and unsubstantiated assumptions, such as the
following:
- the Soviet Union was
an entirely useless and bad socioeconomic system;
- the Western
capitalist system is good, if not the only suitable for human societies;
- the modern Western
technological civilization is superior to all previous ones;
- Turkey's real value is
the fact that it constitutes a part of the Western world;
- 'Freedom' (as per the
modern Western connotation of the word) is above all;
- in the USSR, the
absence of 'Freedom' made the economic collapse inevitable;
- there is absolutely
nothing wrong with, no problem and no injustice in, the West;
- only money and financial
success determine a person's life accomplishments;
- their earlier lives
had to be concealed and forgotten (despite their academic career);
and
- their real lives
started after they left their country, which had split from the USSR.
I could herewith add
many dozens of similar statements, self-deprecatory comments, false
conclusions, and wrong evaluations that I heard from colleagues originating
from the countries of the former USSR, but I guess the aforementioned samples are
quite enough for anyone to understand. It was very clear to me, although I was
not a communist, that an unprecedented, and until then unidentified by me,
mechanism had functioned so intensely, so rapidly, so perversely, and so
catastrophically that all these colleagues in few years had been contaminated
and intoxicated by a great number of sly biases, derogatory propaganda, and
pernicious falsehood.
As it was a pity for
people, let alone fully accredited scholars, to persistently attempt to delete
their past, land of origin, heritage, and identity, I repeatedly resisted all
these comments. However, after a certain point, I decided to abstain from the
effort, because the responses and the reactions that I received from those
colleagues were truly repetitive and identical to one another, as if they were
not humans but mere automatons. In fact, the Soviet Union was indeed a very advantageous
and beneficial state, in spite of several drawbacks, unpractical circumstances,
ineffectual practices, and absurd decisions; the main mistake of the Soviet
leadership was their dedication to ideology and not to life and nature. Even
when nature proved their ideology wrong, they persisted in implementing their
indisputably accepted ideological prescriptions.
The disillusionment was
again in this case very distressful, because it made me realize that many
disastrous situations would prevail worldwide because of an advanced level of
propaganda techniques able to spread misinformation, confusion, and total
disorder worldwide. If scholars were affected to that extent, simple people
would be certainly misled far worse.
On this occasion, the
'hard landing' was better perceived in the light of various discussions that I
had with several Turkish colleagues about the consequences of the intentions
hidden behind the very controversial article published in 1993 (in Foreign
Affairs) by the famous fraudster, the bogus historian Prof. Samuel Huntington,
about the so-called Clash of Civilizations. At this point, I note that his book
'The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order' appeared only in
1996. But already the intensely propagated article was highly noteworthy - as
critically dangerous for the entire mankind. To several experienced scholars it
was then clear that this threat was real. What was it about?
By duly utilizing the
silly Muslim theologians, the ignorant pseudo-academics of the so-called
Islamic universities, the uneducated elites of Muslim countries, the parasitic
and pathetic Muslim businessmen, and the ruling clowns of worthless
pseudo-states, i.e. the likes of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya,
etc.,
and
by fabricating -thanks
to their secret services- several groups of expendable terrorists and brainless
jihadists, idiotic enough to
- first, believe that
the shameful and dreadful Ottoman caliphate that was irrevocably abolished in
1924 will be resurrected from the dead, and
- second, fight personally
for this entirely anti-Islamic madness, ….
…… the leading Western
colonial countries intended to replace the, bygone yet real, bipolar structure
of the world affairs with a totally fake one.
So, instead of the
'Communism vs. Capitalism' scheme, a tragi-comical final act 'Western World vs.
Islam' would be staged in order to exterminate, as per the new stratagem, all
the Muslim countries and their populations.
The threat was real
indeed, and I immediately felt the need to extensively ruminate on the topic. My
approach to this vast and most troublesome issue has been recorded in numerous
publications and more recent online articles of mine; however, it was basically
formed back at those days.
4-
Socializing with Western European
and Anglo-Saxon (US, UK) coworkers
My encounter with this
group of colleagues was indeed an eye-opening experience. Among those I
contacted and met more often, there were German, French, English, Sri Lankan,
and American colleagues. My discussions with them covered diverse subjects from
History to Politics to Religion, fully confirming my pertinent decision (taken
already in the middle 1980s) never to study, work or live in America or other
Anglo-Saxon countries. Gradually, I was feeling that I needed to take distance
from the West, even from countries that marked my formation, such as France,
Germany and Italy.
Thanks to our frequent
conversations, my good French-Turkish colleague made me realize that the mind,
the mindset, and the mentality of the socialists, and in general of all the
people who belonged in the Left, were progressively and irreparably being
fossilized. It was a most unfortunate development. My German colleague was well
cultured and very knowledgeable; quite unfortunately, she thought that a travel
to Senegal is identical to few days of vacations in Split or Dubrovnik, which
is very wrong, and that's why she caught malaria in the West African coast and
died too early. This was a clear indication for me that the tradition of the
great and famous German explorers, like Alexander von Humboldt, was being lost
for today's misled Teutons.
An otherwise friendly
Sri-Lankan - American colleague proved to be the best proof I needed at the
time to corroborate my conclusion that the average everyday life in America
greatly damages one foreign newcomer's own national identity, cultural
integrity, moral individuality, and personal idiosyncrasy. Cultural
assimilation can of course happen to psychologically, religiously, and
intellectually weak people in Paris, London, and elsewhere; but apparently, in
the US, the process is facilitated due to the total absence of past, the
prevailing indifference and disregard for it, and the unbearable carelessness
or foolishness, which is subtly but dictatorially imposed as social condition
of life in order to render all the people harmless for the criminal gangsters
who rule that country.
Every contact with my
Anglo-Saxon colleagues constituted a matter of discomfort and that's why I
tried to avoid them; the English looked reticent, secretive and quite
unsociable, as if someone had told them to beware of me. To be honest, they
behaved as if someone had notified them that I intended to stab them in the
back. It was very pathetic and ludicrous, but this was not the main reason for
which they looked so repugnant. Their conventional behavior, their attitude of
being always content with the status quo, their conformist docility, and their
persistence in the acceptance of all convenient lies that would not turn the
situation upside down were for me incessant revelations of their servility, pusillanimity,
and hypocrisy.
The Americans were
different in the sense that they were quite worse; of course, I don't
generalize. There were and there are many Americans far better than those
leftist, arrogant, ignorant, and confident instructors who were truly boastful
in their absurd description of the world affairs. I was often invited to the
homes of various colleagues where really animated conversations took place. I
am truly thankful to my destiny for having -in a mystical way- arranged for me to
be present in a party in the Department Head's home! It was there that an
unprecedented and really fascinating ideological-political polarization, or
debate if you prefer, occurred, lasting for at least 2-3 hours.
An instructor, who was
evidently a member of the US Democratic Party, and I were the two adversaries;
however, the opposition was not at all personal, but academic, political,
ideological and cultural: a total clash of values and a conflict on many
fronts. The juxtaposition of arguments drew all the attendants from continent
to continent, from era to era, from civilization to civilization, and from
ruler to ruler. All the same, the real benefit for me was something totally
unexpected: from retort to counterargument and from riposte to rebuttal, my
interlocutor presented to me (in 1994) -without even willing to do so but
pulled by the dynamics of the interpolation- all the plans, the schemes, and
the projects that the American radical Left revealed in the daylight over the
next 30 years down to today. As one can guess, the frustrated guy used cynically
ritualized and absurdly sacralized words such as 'freedom', 'rights', 'justice',
etc. for an incredible number of times, also deploying the bulk of the
politically correct (and intellectually sick) vocabulary.
I could expand
enormously on that great party, which ended up being a most frenetic debate, but
I would digress. However, the impact of the event on my authorship was enormous,
because it made me understand how far the madness of the -then new- ruling world
class could reach. I realized that it would take decades for the ominous
contamination to subside; this evildoing was one of the political tools created
by the Jesuit-Zionist alliance, which was then heralded by the former President
George H. W. Bush and the Israeli statesman Ariel Sharon, who -quite notably-
was the Israeli prime minister on the 11th September 2001.
Certainly, the ugliest
aspect of my conversational partner's mood was his 'surety' about the
irreversibility of the Western world's victory over the Soviet Union, but of
course his bad luck was my good knowledge of World History, because my
recollection of similar incidents and events proved easily to all that on many
occasions people thought that a victory was final, but the victorious kingdom
simply disappeared just 40 years after it was mistakenly believed to be
everlasting and omnipotent. That's why in
many circumstances, back in the 2000s and the 2010s, I proceeded
retrospectively and recalled the instructive meeting, which repeatedly weighed
in my decision-making and influenced the way I was seeing events and
developments.
VII.
The choice made between scholarly truth and academic employment
Without the previously
described academic experience, my activity as an author would have certainly taken
a totally different form; but when you don't want to waste your time with the colleagues
and you realize that the students have nothing in common with you in terms of
life values, interests and expectations, you certainly don't stay further in
that boring and obnoxious environment of commercialized knowledge, academic
programs aligned with workforce needs, and studies leading to employment.
When you manage to understand
very clearly that the so-called universities and the other associated
establishments, foundations, institutes and centers merely adjust Knowledge to
business needs, thus making its most important parts practically inaccessible
to young students and potential explorers, you just leave the place. Due to my
aforementioned encounter with academic life, I was fast disillusioned and, in
quite young age, I concluded that academic research, scientific exploration,
and scholarly truth are totally independent from, and unrelated to, employment.
In other words, you can
surely undertake a research and publish the results without being employed by a
university, research center, museum, library or any other similar institution;
even more so, if you disagree with the low norms, the silly prescriptions, the
bureaucratic standards, the pathetic ideologization of numerous subjects, the
vicious tyranny of the 'politically correct' paranoia, the hypocritical
outlook, the pretentious yet unproductive academic staff members, the uselessness
of their scarce contributions, their sophisticated nothingness, and their professional
falsehood, which has been institutionalized as conventional wisdom. Apparently,
terms like deadpan and deadwood have not been in use without reason.
There are several more
reasons for which I realized at the time that in today's so degraded
universities, employment is tantamount to embarrassment. First, if you insist
on being a productive academic, coming up with new books, articles, speeches in
conferences, and open lectures, certainly your colleagues, being unproductive
if not counterproductive, will envy you and react negatively; then their
endless and silly gossip will cause a real war against you.
Second, if you are a
publicly active and well-known scholar, publishing articles in highly esteemed
magazines, giving interviews to the country's leading newspapers, and appearing
quite often in the top news outlets, the shy and inferior co-workers, who are
not known to almost anyone, will hate you and attempt to discredit and defame
you, thus opening another war front against you.
Third, if most of the
students respect and love you, visit you in your apartment, being eager to further
learn from you and to interact with their classmates, every maladroit, inept,
and unsociable person, who happens to fatally work for the same institution as
you do, will certainly pour out an enormous quantity of venom against you. You
definitely don't deserve this worthlessness!
Perhaps what disturbed
me most, during my academic life, was the total absence of pioneering efforts
or, if you prefer, the absence of positively-minded explorers, who would take
the scientific research to the next stage, advancing not in remote lands like
the adventurous Orientalists of the 19th c. but in several hitherto unexplored
fields of semantics and semiotics.
Contrarily to my
-mainly 70 or 80 years old- professors, academics of younger generation acted pathetically
as if already too much had been discovered and as if there was supposedly a mystical
need to conceal (instead of further exploring and interpreting) a sizeable part
of the vast documentation that had been gathered lest contradictions and
modifications cause the collapse of the edifice of modern science. So, these
evil-minded people hated the truth and they would be ferocious enemies with whom
I did not share anything. I would never accept to be in a place that they
contaminated with their systematic and unconditional rejection of the truth.
Consequently, between
the scholarly truth and the academic employment, I had to choose and I finally
opted for the former. I would be free and totally unrestrained in my quest for
the truth, being employed by diverse companies in different countries and paid
by employers who would never know my true identity, past and activities.
VIII.
The determination to popularize academically known but publicly concealed
knowledge
- Which would then be
the first task of an academic, who does not work anymore for a university or a
similar institution?
The response to this
question is very easy indeed to answer:
- To make widely known
what was intentionally kept unknown or partly concealed!
I must however admit
that this statement may be effortless for a knowledgeable scholar to make but
strenuous to assess, at least in the entirety of its meaning. In fact, the
dissociation of the Knowledge from the average people of a society caused always
any type of disaster from weakness to wickedness, ultimately leading the
country (or the countries) where this happened to decay, disintegration and
disappearance.
Knowledge was initially
shared by every single human, because the perception of the world(s) was the
same and common to all. Later, the mythical description of the perception of
the two universes, spiritual and material, enabled all the people to share exactly
the same reality in different levels or manners of comprehension. Subsequently,
the destructive force of the polytheistic priesthoods led people to darkness,
ignorance, and total dependence on otherwise unnecessary clerics. The ensuing
mistrust among the differently guided segments of the society led the ancient
world to decomposition. Distinct societies reacted in the most divergent manner,
as several empires and kingdoms made of a theological dogma the sole foundation
of their integrity whereas other monarchies and realms introduced time-honored
legends and mythical perceptions of World History into their traditional
religion that had been preached or purified by a prophet, like Zoroaster.
In Islamic times, the
mythical conceptualization and the theological interpretation of sacred texts
coexisted (Ferdowsi's Shahnameh was described as the 'Second Quran'), while
explorers, scientists, connoisseurs and erudite scholars widely propagated
their discoveries, expertise, knowledge, and wisdom. When -in the late Medieval
Western Europe- scholasticism, rationalism, and nominalism removed from the
Western societies the foundations of the traditional historical sciences, the
path to Wisdom was banned, and the dissemination of Knowledge became
unnecessary, Spirituality and Faith were targeted with extinction, and an
absurd, fallacious science was tyrannically imposed as quasi-religious dogma,
which was quite normal due to the exclusively theological, Benedictine-Jesuit,
origin of this counterfeit science.
While the Western
Europeans expanded colonially and diffused the Western European inhumanity,
anomaly and darkness worldwide, several attempts to diffuse Knowledge were
undertaken within the Western world in order to help people
a) learn (at least some
of) the true realities of the material world,
b) resist (albeit
partly) the theological fallacy of the modern societies, and
c) emancipate from the
Jesuit delusion, which threatens mankind with extinction.
The French
Enlightenment and the scholars of the Encyclopédie (18th c.), the laic or
secular state in France (19th c.), the rise of Lenin's Soviet Union, Kemal
Ataturk's Turkey, and Mao's China (20th c.) constitute examples of
establishments which intentionally promoted practices that facilitated the
popularization of scientific discoveries. All the same, in most of these cases,
the effort hinged strongly on ideological convictions; this limited the scope
of the endeavor or program.
As a matter of fact,
back in the middle of the 1990s, it was quite clear to me that the world
circumstances were so different that any post-Soviet,
academic-intellectual-educational form of Knowledge popularization would have
to be entirely distinct. So, I concluded that what I had in mind would never be
described as Neo-Sovietism or post-Sovietism, because in popularizing Knowledge
there were many aspects either unknown to Soviet academics or incompatible with
their ideological rigidity.
It took me years to
identify paths or dimensions that the effort would have to take, even more so because
it would have to be undertaken for all audiences. Otherwise, by limiting Knowledge
popularization among Western publics, one would become quasi-automatically a
colonial gangster.
IX.
Diverse online activities: participation in fora and publication of articles in
portals
It was therefore only
normal for me to need the space of some years until I decide how to detach
myself from the existing, complex system of publications, which was an inherent
element of the unrepresentative and totalitarian regime of governance and,
therefore, it was intentionally incepted in a way to permanently block every
eventual attempt to refute parts of it or its entirety, either the attempt was
directed against the very beginning of the system or targeted a later or only a
recent stage of it. If the present statement of mine seems to be bizarre to
some, I have to persist; due to the structure of the system itself, every
reaction was always effectively diverted, scrupulously channeled, fully
absorbed, and ultimately put under control.
I subsequently crossed
a period with many drafts, many notes, and more efforts for reconsideration; in
fact, I re-examined the totality of my academically acquired knowledge and its
structure. That's why I did not publish any text in the year 1999 and 2000, and
only relatively few texts in the years 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. In the
meantime, a new possibility appeared worldwide; it brought in a fresh dimension
of endeavor-, activity- and effort-deployment that could bring significant
modification to personal and professional life across the Earth: the internet.
Not all the people
realized soon how it would change human life. When the World Wide Web was
launched, few insiders knew the intentions behind it; and there were even
fewer, extremely powerful people, who did not accept it at all, and wanted (and
still want) to put a definite end to it (or, to be truly accurate, to the
present form of technology utilization). As a matter of fact, there had already
been (since the 1980s) another form of internet in few leading countries, such
as France (Minitel); all the same, the early concept behind this technology revolved
around the facilitation of the governmental activities and did not involve the extension
of communication (email, etc.) possibility to all the people across the Earth.
More importantly, the use was fully restricted within the administration; only
through specific points, the various citizens as users would connect with the
government. At this point, I have to underscore that the invention of a new
technology is always a totally different issue from its utilization, let alone
commercialization.
In the years 2001, 2002
and 2003, I continued publishing articles in newspapers, reviews, and
magazines, mostly in Egypt and Yemen; in 2003, I expanded my activities in an another
field of authorship, namely technical writing and editing, as I started working
in the Marketing Dept. of Egyptian companies in the wider Telecom, Cabling, and
Interconnect sector. Although I had an email account as early as 2001, it is
only in 2002 that I discovered the first interesting sites and several fora
that were launched then. Of course, for the countries and the regions, which
were parts of my academic specialization and axes of my interest, the related
fora were mostly due to the effort of few expatriates, who were far closer to
the commercialization of the World Wide Web than their fellow countrymen back
in Yemen, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea and Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) where
Internet penetration was absolutely minimal at the time.
I was quite early in understanding
some of the various possibilities offered by the new technology and its diverse
and multiple applications, although I never felt any particular consideration
for it; that's why my first thought (as early as 2002) was how to use the
Internet in order to make more widely known worldwide my printed books, which
were less widespread in only few countries. It was then very clear to me that the
new forces, which controlled (as it is now known) the world from 1989 until
2024, intended to implement a very different model of society. I therefore used
the suitable nickname 'Horapollo', opened an account in Bookcrossing, and
briefly featured my books there. Today, 23 years later, my first online
appearance is still available: https://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Horapollo/
As I was quite
unfamiliar with Internet norms, I ended up with 4 different spellings of my
names as an author, which automatically generated four separate author pages!
Here you have them:
https://www.bookcrossing.com/author/105318/
https://www.bookcrossing.com/author/145516/
https://www.bookcrossing.com/author/453542/
https://www.bookcrossing.com/author/411806/
In any case, one can
find more updated book reviews, as regards both, the therein included books and
the more recently published titles, here:
https://independent.academia.edu/ShamsaddinMegalommatis/Book%20Reviews
Writing in fora became
soon a real passion for me, because it put me in contact with many people from
countries the history, the languages, the cultures and the religions of which I
had studied and from lands that I had visited and often lived in. There I
discovered that, although all these persons loved their lands and were well
versed in their respective cultures, they had indeed a very flawed, inadequate,
and distorted knowledge of their History, and even worse, a most diminished
understanding of the colossal impact that their ancient civilizations exercised
on other nations, later cultures, and in general, World History.
It was as if an
invisible hand had removed from the manuals of History in their high schools
significant pieces of info, critical data, and crucial conclusions drawn by
various Western scholars specialized in the past of those nations. What could
be easily found in Western libraries about the past of their countries was
unknown to them. Initially, I found it quite bizarre. Yet, I knew already quite
well that, among the students of these Orientalist professors, there were
several persons originating from the land(s) that their instructors had
studied. My first feelings were perplexed; when you study, learn and explore
the past of a country, you normally expect the native inhabitants to know at
least the landmarks of their past.
As I started communicating
regularly with many earlier unknown persons from different countries,
backgrounds and walks of life, I identified -soon afterwards- another problem
or if you prefer lacuna in their knowledge of the past; they had no idea about
the past of neighboring lands and peoples with whom they had cultural
affinities and common past. My discussions, emails, and exchange of messages
with numerous online friends from Asia and Africa made me soon realize the
extent of historical distortion sold by European colonial academics to
indigenous populations and the disastrous dissociation of formerly colonized
nations from one another. The heirs of people, who knew each other very well
before 8 or 9 centuries, did not have a clue about the 'other' in the beginning
of the 21st c. Modern times were therefore an era of darkness.
It was then that I concluded
that the worst aspects of colonialism were not observed in the military,
political and economic sectors, but at the academic, educational, intellectual,
scientific, and cultural levels. There was therefore much work for me to do in
shedding light on these issues and in making available to people from Asia and
Africa numerous historical truths that had been malignantly kept hidden from
them. I would also have to enrich the knowledge and widen the horizons of my audience,
by showing to them that their painful colonial experience was not different
from other monstrous colonial deeds perpetrated against other nations.
These fora were also
fields of ferocious clashes among participants, who happened to be either
supporters of the two ruling nations of Abyssinia (namely Fake Ethiopia) or representatives
of the numerous subjugated and oppressed nations of Africa's most
anachronistic, obsolete, tyrannical, and racist state of Africa. In a World
Wide Web that was mainly accessed through Internet cafés, the confrontations
and the insults, the attacks and the denigration efforts, the denunciations and
the refutations were incessant among the Oromos, the Ogadenis, the Sidamas and the
Afars (representing the bulk of the monstrous, colonial, and dictatorial
state's persecuted nations) from one side and from the other side, the Tigray
and the Amhara, the ruling tribes of non-African origin, which originate from
Ancient Yemen.
As I stated the plain historical
truth, rejected historical falsifications undertaken by the criminal
bogus-Ethiopian regime of Meles Zenawi (and his colonial supporters from
England, France and America), and denounced the colonial practices of the
criminal Abyssinian state, I became immediately the direct target of all the
Amhara and Tigray forum participants. It was a bizarre moment for the Internet
indeed. No one knew Wikipedia, Wikisource, or Internet Archive; there was no
YouTube, and most of the blogs were political. The quasi-totality of the
world's academics had not yet decided to transfer the bulk of their work and
activities online, and if someone used a search engine to find mentions of
ancient harbors in the Red Sea, he would certainly find references to my
comments at the very top of the search page. Some of my comments or answers
back at those days were the size of a real article, but that early stage of my
internet contributions and interpolations went lost.
When I opened an
account in the portal Buzzle (2004), my first articles were earlier texts that
had first been published in Somali, Yemeni, Ethiopian, Sudanese, Iraqi,
Iranian, and Egyptian fora; they were partly edited or rewritten and in some of
their parts significantly extended. I also republished the aforementioned book
reviews from Bookcrossing. In 2006, I opened an account in far more influential
portal, the American Chronicle; my friends and interlocutors from the fora
followed me there. Few months later (in early 2007), I was invited to also post
in AfroArticles, which I did; it then became a practice for me to publish the
same title in all three portals.
As far as my
productivity is concerned, I published
11 articles in 2004,
84 articles in 2005,
38 articles in 2006,
289 articles in 2007,
553 articles in 2008,
304 articles in 2009,
465 articles in 2010,
39 articles in 2011,
11 articles in 2012,
and
9 articles in 2013 (so
a total of more than 1800 articles until end 2013)
Many
of these articles were republished, quoted, and mentioned in other sites and
blogs, included in the bibliography of printed books and articles, and also
discussed in online fora.
I have however to point
out that, from the last months of 2008 to the middle of 2010, I republished a) several
reports issued by Amnesty International and HRW with focus on countries of
direct personal interest, and b) numerous Ecoterra press releases (also known
as 'The Somalia Chronicle') with focus on the Somali piracy, which was instigated
during that period. At times, I added an introductory note to them, at times
not; on some occasions, the introduction was long.
However, by 2016, all
three fora (Buzzle, American Chronicle, and AfroArticles) were hacked, shut
down or taken over by a black knight; that's why I then opened an account in
the portal Academia (dot edu) and, along with a) scanned (digitized) copies of my
printed scholarly articles, entries to encyclopedias, articles and books, and
b) many new articles and/or books, I tried to re-upload a great number of my
earlier publications. Until now, more than 450 articles (i. e. 25% of the
total) have been republished: https://independent.academia.edu/ShamsaddinMegalommatis
A
smaller number of these articles are also re-uploaded in several other sites of
mine; and an unidentified, yet significant, number of articles can be read in
the different sites and blogs where they were republished; a relatively small
number of articles were transformed (by friends) into slides of PowerPoint docs
and, with the addition of pictures and selected music, uploaded as videos
(MP4).
The real benefits that
I extracted from my online publications of the period 2001-2011 were multiple:
- my encounter with a
great number of persons belonging to numerous oppressed and tyrannized nations
of Asia and Africa,
- my familiarization
with conditions of life in remote regions, provinces off the beaten track,
villages and settlements about which even the respective country's mass media
do not report anything,
- my acquaintance with
the personal difficulties of the activists, the persecuted fighters, and the
leaders of diverse national liberation fronts and associations,
- the formation of
strong bonds of friendship and cooperation with a significant number of African
migrants, who voluntarily became my informers about many issues pertaining to their
subjugated nations and the difficulties of the migrant's life,
- my conversance with
numerous portals, sites and blogs launched by migrants who belonged to divided
nations or colonially occupied lands; and
- my study of several
languages that happened to be the mother tongues of my
friends-informers-instructors.
Most of the
aforementioned is reflected in the publication of numerous articles, which are
genuine reports presented to me by correspondents who had personal experience
in matters of persecution, imprisonment, violation of Human Rights, and interminable
forms of oppression, injustice, racism and hatred; as a matter of fact, it is
my honor that I offered space to, and published very informative interviews with,
leaders and/or representatives of cultural associations and national liberation
fronts.
If I make the
distinction into two separate periods of online authorship (2001-2013 and
2014-today), this is due to two factors, namely
a- my conclusions as
regards several circles of topics, about which I had previously garnered an
enormous documentation without however reaching a conclusively formed
comprehension and an overall view; these conclusions were mostly shaped in 2013
and 2014; and
b- the development of
the internet, which already in 2014-2015 was very different from what it had
been in 2005-2007; by this I mean the availability of numerous sources and
ancient texts, bibliography and publications, comments and discussions that
offered every internet user, and more particularly my friends and readers, who
were scattered across all continents, an enormous number of references, as well
as the opportunity to crosscheck, find related bibliography, fully comprehend,
and therefore unreservedly accept most of my claims, argumentations, interpretations,
approaches, and conclusions.
In other words, my
Asiatic and African readers, who did not have the chance to get access to the Orientalist
libraries of major European, American, and Middle Eastern (in this case, mainly
foreign, i.e. colonial) academic institutions, could find online Tatian, Cosmas
Indicopleustes, the Coptic Chronicle of Nikiu, the Syriac Chronicle of Arbela,
the Achaemenid inscription of Darius I about the re-opening of the (Ancient) Suez
Canal, the Annals of the Assyrian Emperors, the Descent of Ishtar in the Nether
World, Enuma Elish, Pharaoh Hatshepsut's Expedition to Punt, the Celestial
Ascent of Kartir, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, and a multitude of ancient Oriental
texts that constitute the true and unmatched foundations of Human History.
The direct consequence
of these developments was the fact that my articles started becoming larger and
at times reached the size of a small book of ca. 100-150 pages. In addition,
the number of links/references therein included increased dramatically, because
I personally consider each and every article of mine as a stimulus for all my readers
to undertake their own research and find more in the direction I guided them
to. As my articles became larger, they also became fewer.
Another consequence of
my gradual change is the fact that I ceased to further publish in the portals I
used to contribute to (Buzzle, American Chronicle, and AfroArticles), which in
any case were shut down by 2016; I consequently shifted my activities to academic
portals (academia dot edu) and diverse blogs (i.e. wordpress, blogspot, archive
dot org, livejournal, vk, and slideshare dot net; and more recently ok dot ru,
substack, patreon, dzen, medium, tumblr, deviantart, etc.).
As far as my productivity
is concerned, I published
27 articles in 2014
(no articles published
in 2015)
5 articles in 2016
25 articles in 2017
7 articles in 2018
(no articles published
in 2019)
19 articles in 2020
22 articles in 2021 (until end May)
This makes a total of
125 articles for the said period. For more recent dates, I did not have the
time until now to establish a complete inventory of my online publications; all
the same, without making a promise, I state at this point that it is my
intention to publish the missing document, re-organizing my entire Curriculum,
during the next year and before my 70th anniversary.
Furthermore, I have
also to underscore the fact that the aforementioned catalogue does not include
- either the
republication of earlier uploaded online articles (of the period 2004-2014)
- or the digitization
of printed articles, entries to encyclopedias, scholarly articles, and books of
mine, which led to the online publication of many hundreds of titles (of the
pre-internet period).
In addition, during the
latest period of my authorship, I uploaded scanned chapters of my books as
videos (adding the appropriate music), whereas friends turned around 100 articles
or chapters of books of mine (from all three previous periods) into colorful slides
of PowerPoint docs and, by adding an enormous number of pictures and
well-selected music, transformed them into MP4s (videos). These resources can
be reached here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/megalommatis/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/profmegalommatis/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/megalommatisbooks/videos
https://www.dailymotion.com/Megalommatis
https://vk.com/video/@megalommatis
https://ok.ru/video/c1494616
https://www.youtube.com/user/marcoscassiotis/videos
https://vk.com/video/@orientalgreeks
https://ok.ru/orientalgreeks/video
Few copies have also
been uploaded here:
https://www.bitchute.com/search?query=Megalommatis
https://www.brighteon.com/channels/megalommatis/home
As it also happened in
earlier periods of my life, my residence in, study of, and familiarization with
several countries, nations and cultures determined, improved and adjusted my
worldview and my comprehension of the outer and inner world. In some cases,
they also helped me reject part of my earlier self, which at times consists in
a conditio sine qua non for higher, deeper, wider and better understanding.
So, I have to admit
that I would never be able to write what I published in the last ten (10) years
without living in Somalia and diverse parts of Africa and Asia; that's why I
truly owe to those lands the most significant part of my formation, which is in
turn a complete proof that you don't need books, manuscripts, libraries,
computers, ancient and modern tablets to truly learn the truth; you need
nature, lands, and humans. This is what I will briefly describe in the
following last units of this already very lengthy article that closes the
series.
X.
Academic experience in Somalia and the ultimate conceptualization of the
African problem
Prior to my first
travel to and sojourn in Somalia, I had met many Somalis and notably Ogadenis;
but you never understand a people, a culture, a situation, and the evolution of
the always changing trends among them, except when truly living the average
daily life of the local people. You have certainly to find the most genuine
segments of a society, namely those who do not speak foreign languages, did not
travel abroad, and have minimal connection with modern technology and with the
colonially imposed Western lifestyle. This has always been my method and my
approach, and they proved to be highly rewarding everywhere: avoid the useless
ideology (which is always imported and therefore colonial and Western) and
search for the original culture!
When I lived in Somalia
back in 2012-2014, I realized quite soon that Somalis, who had returned from
the Somali Diaspora back to their beleaguered country, brought with them an
extraordinary number of Western propaganda myths and instituted lies that they
believed in and, even worse, intended to stupidly prove as "valid' and
'correct' whereas all this falsehood constitutes nonsensical trash. I repeatedly,
vividly and extensively quarreled with my rector, a young Somali who had the
bad luck to have spent some years in the UK and absorbed all the falsehood and
the anti-Somali fallacy of the English political, military, diplomatic,
academic and journalistic circles.
I could offer dozens of
examples, but this is not the purpose of the present article; the most
interesting one would perhaps be his absurd effort to 'protect' me from some
invisible enemies (!! ?? !!) and to insist on that I do not walk alone in the
streets by followed by guards assigned to me by the university. Of course, I
repeatedly turned down his demand, and this caused constant arguments, which
proved to be quite instructive for me later, notably as regards my plain
perception of the essence of the problem that hit Somalia.
Due to my then recently
published hundreds of articles in favor of Somalia, Ogaden, Oromia, Sidama
Land, and other subjugated Eastern African nations and against the criminal,
colonial and genocidal state of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia), I was indeed a
well-known person among the computer-literate and internet-savvy Somalis; it
was therefore quite true that I had a significant degree of recognizability,
when walking in the streets of Down Town Mogadishu, taking into consideration
that the only other non-Black people were few Turkish merchants and diplomats.
Consequently, the only
potential enemies that I could have in Somalia would be just the few dozens of
Somali traitors and bribed collaborators of the secret services' agents of the
racist state of Abyssinia (i.e. Fake Ethiopia). Because I had published much
about Somalia's pre-Islamic past ('Punt', 'Other Berberia', and 'Azania' as per
the Ancient Egyptian and Greek historical sources), contributing to the
education and the national pride of young Somalis, and in addition, I supported
methodically, comprehensively, and passionately Somalia's pacification,
reunification, reinstitution and rehabilitation for long and in significant
American portals, my contributions from 2006 to 2012 were a serious
embarrassment for all services of the dictatorial and inhuman, which occupies
the lands of many subjugated African nations. A former candidate to Somali
presidential elections actually told me at the time that one of my articles
constituted the best SWOT analysis in favor of Somalia and against Ethiopia.
This is the said article:
https://www.academia.edu/42952570/Why_the_US_must_opt_for_Somalia_not_Ethiopia_2007
https://maakhir.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/why-the-us-must-opt-for-somalia-not-%E2%80%98ethiopia%E2%80%99/
https://www.somaliaonline.com/community/topic/40693-why-the-us-must-opt-for-somalia-not-%E2%80%98ethiopia%E2%80%99/
However, except for the
aforementioned issue, there was nothing else to fear, even more so because the
average Somalis are true gentlemen, highly civilized and noble people, as well
as decent and respectful ladies; when your Af Somali is weak, it is enough that
you speak few Arabic words and a translator will come next to you voluntarily.
As soon as you are able to speak a few Somali words, you soon realize what you
missed before you came to Somalia.
The few images and
videos of Somali radicals screaming like mad people in the streets of Western
European and American cities are not representative at all, because they only
reveal
- the evilness of the
Western colonial and the absurd Soviet favoritism of, and support for, the impermissible
state of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia);
- the sickness of the
villainous plan known as the 'Great Replacement', which involves the
-deliberately incited and criminally promoted by Western services, public
administrations, and Mafia-like private institutions- movement of
pseudo-migrants, who are all systematically and insidiously deceived by their corrupt
and bribed pseudo-Muslim imams and fake sheikhs; and
- the subsequent,
intentionally detrimental, ghettoization of the radical Islamists, who have
been gathered in Western countries only because of the interminable but fake
promises of wealth (in fact, robbery) that were given to them by the Satanic
religious authorities of today's fake Islam, although the latter know quite
well that they send all these migrants to be inevitably but uselessly killed. But
back in their country, Somalis are not radical at all, being of nationalist
rather than of jihadist mindset, mentality and attitude. But my rector,
although a Somali national, and in spite of living again in Somalia, did not
want to realize this fact.
The narration of my
daily quarrels with the rector on this topic (namely about me moving alone in
the streets) would certainly fill an entire volume; we had great consideration
for one another and we agreed on many issues about Somalia and the future of
the embattled, yet great and noble, nation. But, quite unfortunately, he
unconsciously carried with him all the incredibly insidious myths of the
Western propaganda, which make any effort for local amelioration and nation
reassertion impossible and inapplicable. It would perhaps be excessive for me
to enumerate few samples of those worthless myths and viciously fictional lies
that could be imagined and stated in public (by any Somali victim of the pernicious
Western anti-Somali propaganda) as regards my safety in the streets of
Mogadishu, but I will do it to feed the curiosity of some readers who happen to
be unfamiliar with the topic. In fact, I state beforehand that there was no
danger at all for me walking alone in the streets.
So, according to those
myths, while I was walking alone in the streets of Mogadishu, I could be shot
dead; as per another myth, I could be abducted and the evildoers would ask
ransom from my family! In accordance with the most dreadful myth, I would be caught
in an explosion, thus losing my physical integrity and becoming an invalid. I
knew of course that for a Westerner, worrying for such eventualities is regular
and frequent; but for a Muslim or for a truly faithful person, such dilemmas
simply do not exist. So, it was a pleasure and an amusement to respond to those
horrible but absolutely false and mythical scenarios; however, the later study
of all those cases of enriching experience that I got in Somalia helped me open
my eyes and easily identify where the problem lies for the Somali Diaspora
persons who happen to return home and play a significant role there.
My answers must have
been anything from disappointing to perturbing for the young rector of the
university where I was hired. First, if I were to be shot dead, this would mean
simply that this was my fate and there was nothing to complain about; I would
be very happy to die in a country I so much loved. In any case, any human
anytime anywhere and under any circumstances whatsoever must be ready to die
just the next moment; the present life is a test for the eternal life which is
the only to truly matter. Would it be more glorious a death, if I died in a car
accident in Cairo or because a brick fell on my head when I was walking in
Ankara or when Iraqi aircraft shelled Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War?
Hearing this, the
rector was flabbergasted and the colleagues, who were present, were befuddled,
as they had the inclination to see me merely as a Westerner who accepted Islam;
my persistence made them feel in company of someone, who had lived like them,
even more so because I was repeatedly exposed to major dangers. Le coup de
grâce (the final blow) for the rector was my question:
- If no fear for my
life existed in me, when I was 30 and my father was alive, what makes you think
that it appeared as a feeling now that I am 56, my father died, I have no
family, and I gained a so enriching life experience in the meantime?
I went on asking him
whether he needed me to write to him a letter and send it as email, stating
that, if I happened to be shot dead while walking free in the streets of
Mogadishu, the only responsibility would lie with my Fate, not Somalia, not any
Somali, not even my eventual killer, and that I would be happy with it. Almost
all my colleagues were able to understand what I meant; but this would be a
shock for a Westerner and for any Somali unlucky enough to be based and live in
any Western country.
Speaking about the
potentiality of me being abducted, I retorted that this would be for me an
excellent opportunity to perfection my Af Somali, and that the first thing I
would say to my theoretical, imaginary or fictional abductors would be that not
one relative of mine would possibly be ready to pay a single penny as ransom,
because they all reviled me first for becoming Muslim and second for working in
Turkey and in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
So, I added, if that
paradoxical attempt had taken place, I would have pleasantly stayed for many long
years in an undisclosed remote location somewhere in the Somali provinces, the
university would have saved the amount of money for my salaries, and after getting
out of that place, I would have certainly become the undisputed no 1 specialist
worldwide in Somali Language, Literature, Linguistics, and Ethnography. I would
have also added the circumstance ("held hostage") in my Curriculum, because
my 'tenure' in the Somali provinces would have certainly been far more
rewarding and far more honorable than a position in Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard,
etc. where they fabricate all the sick lies of the Western world as well as the
spiritual-mental-intellectual-cultural contamination that they deceitfully
diffuse and dictatorially impose across the Earth, shamelessly labeling it
'science'. My response was an electric shock; the only reaction that was left
to the rector was a quite typical Western exclamation "you must be mad".
But there is nothing mad in the way a genuine exploration can undergo.
The answer to the last
myth, namely the one relating to any form of physical disability due to a bomb
explosion, was also easy for me to utter; for a faithful person, this most
undesired experience of life is merely the test that God sends to people to
examine the depth and the solidity of their faith. It cannot therefore be a
matter of discussion; if we want to be humans, we accept everything that God
sends us in life.
If I expanded on these
topics, it is because the reaction of the rector (as a former Somali
expatriate) to all these potential situations and eventualities of life was
entirely westernized and as such fully incompatible with the Somali traditions,
values, virtues, worldviews, and faith. To be consistent with the facts, I have
to admit that the guy behaved as an English colonial appointed as rector in a
university in Mogadishu, Somalia.
His Somali identity,
linear ancestry, nationality, family, language, culture and faith had gone; in
real terms, he was a non-Somali who appeared as Somali. But if this disaster
occurred at the simple level of some personal and professional issues with an
academic staff member, the trouble with all other major national and
international choices of the country would be of so disproportionate dimensions
that it could become the main impediment in Somalia's return to national
normalcy. And if we extend this person's serious problem of national dimensions
to all the other Somali expatriates, who think that they were 'saved' in
Canada, Australia, US, England and other cursed countries but in reality they
committed spiritual, mental, intellectual and behavioral suicide, we get the
complete explanation of the present trouble and ordeal of Somalia – which is
very different from what exploded in 1991, when all the Somalis were true Somalis.
This is actually the
evil plan behind the staged managed imposition of the criminal Islamist regimes
in Afghanistan (1989; following the Soviet withdrawal), Somalia (1991; after
the fall of Siyaad Barre administration), and so many other wars, regime changes,
and other orchestrated events: the deliberate formation of an enormous flood of
migrants, who absurdly posture as 'refugees' (which is a ridiculous term) and
gradually proceed to Western countries where they all -inevitably- fall victims
of the following evil, mostly undetected, but highly sophisticated dilemma:
a- they get
ideologically and emotionally radicalized
{which is wrongly
perceived by them as a personal religious re-awakening (whereas it is not) and
leads them to unnecessary social ghettoization, hatred of and hostility toward
the native inhabitants of the land of their final resettlement – something that
functions against them as a trap set by those who want to utilize and
instrumentalize all these naïve fools}
and
b- they get educationally,
academically, culturally, behaviorally, intellectually westernized
(which is undetected by
them, but constitutes the end of their Somali identity and integrity,
functioning indeed as factor of total dehumanization and heralding a) their
utilization as cannon fodder in the ferocious battlefields that have been
prepared in the meantime without them knowing and b) their subsequent, certain,
and tragic annihilation).
So much do I owe to
that rector! The fact that he hired me was eclipsed by the life example of a
Somali expatriate that he offered me: that of a terminal victim of
Westernization. Thanks to him, my sojourn in Somalia was more that of a student
and an explorer than that of a professor and instructor.
Consequently,
non-Westerners resettling in the West constitute the third, supreme stage of
colonization:
1- Early colonization:
with Western colonials being physically present in occupied lands in order to
ensure military-political control and detach the local lands from their
identity, integrity, nature and traditions;
2- Fake decolonization:
with educational-academic-intellectual control effectuated due to selected
idiots who "study" in the criminal Western propaganda institutions
that are called "universities" before returning home to implement
meticulous and pedagogical Westernization at all levels; and
3- Covert
re-colonization: with fake refugees resettling in the West to be radicalized,
ghettoized, westernized and utilized for the defamation of Islam as brainless
idiots who do not understand what they are being used for.
============================
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https://www.academia.edu/145271104/12_April_2025_40_Years_of_Authorship_Oral_Written_Printed_Online_Publications_III
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