Иран 2026: поворот мировой истории под натиском варваров Запада - III
In
the present, third article of the series, I expand on the beneficial role
played by the formation and secession of the Iranianates, i.e. secular kingdoms
of Iranian culture, in the emergence of the Golden Era of Islam, in the
creation of the Islamic Sciences, Letters and Arts, in the subsequent
powerlessness of the Abbasid caliph, and in the marginalization of the
otherwise useless Islamic theology and Jurisprudence which was the devilish
trick of corrupt and ignorant fighters, who wanted to put an end to the Islamic
Spirituality. While presenting the topic, I keep highlighting the central role
of Iran in World History and rejecting fallacies, misconceptions, and
distortions made by Western Orientalists. With respect to the Contents as per
below, this unit corresponds to parts IV, C, 3 and 4.
Contents
I.
Iran: the Pivot of World History
II.
Falsehood Diffused, Heinous Acts Performed, and Intentional Destruction of
Mankind Undertaken by the Western Colonials
III.
Iran & Aniran or Center & Periphery or Truth & Lie: a 2600-year
Long History
A.
Achaemenid Zoroastrianism vs. Mithraism: Caesaropapism vs. Papo-Caesarism or
Monotheism vs. Polytheism
B.
Alexander the Great as Macedonian King, Egyptian Pharaoh and Iranian Emperor: a
Monotheist against Mithraism
C.
The Division of Iran among the Arsacid Parthians and the Diadochi
D.
The 'Imperium Romanum' and the Greco-Roman Civilization: a Barbarous
Pseudo-Empire and a Divisive, Worthless Legacy
E.
The Orientalization of the Roman Empire -and of the West in general
F.
Manichaeism and Mani, the Greatest Man of All Times
G.
Kartir, the Eradication of Manichaeism in Iran, and its Prevalence in the Roman
Empire
H.
Why the Roman Elite imposed the Composite -Memphitic Egyptian & Mithraic
Iranian- Dogma of 'Christianity' instead of Manichaeism
I.
Islam and the Mythologization of the so-called 'Arab Conquests'
J.
The Falsehood of the Western Orientalists about Islam, Christianity, and the
Use of Force in the Diffusion/Imposition of a Religion
K.
The Falsehood of the Western Orientalists about the Arrival of Islam in Iran
IV.
The Irrevocable, Overwhelming and Infinite Iranization of Islam in Asia and
Europe, and the Attempt of Unification of Christianity and Islam
A.
The Barmakids and Bayt al Hikmah: the incorporation of all scientific, academic
and intellectual schools and traditions into a unified, universal, original,
and exemplar house of sciences
B.
Modern Western Misrepresentation and Distortion of the Golden Age of Islam that
remains undisputed by today's Muslims
1.
There was no "Islamic Philosophy"; there was "Islamic
Wisdom".
2.
A certain "Greco-Arabic translation movement" in the Islamic World is
a factoid
3.
The destruction of Baghdad (1258) as supposedly ruinous for the Islamic world
C.
The inevitable return of Iran and Turan: the Iranianates and the
Iranian-Turanian 'Intermezzo'
1.
The instantaneous rise of secessionist states that preserved Iranian culture
2.
The revolutions that paved the way for the rise of the Iranianates
3.
Useless and fake, the Islamic Caliphate ultimately supplanted by the
Iranianates (wrongly named 'Persianates')
4.
Apex of the Material-Spiritual Sciences of the Truth: the Islamic Sciences were
entirely due to the formation of the Iranianates
5.
The greatest conceptualization of Man in the History of Mankind: Ferdowsi's
Shahnameh
D.
The Iranization of all Turanians, Slavs included, either heading to the South
(the So-called Indian Subcontinent) or to the West (the Bogus-continent of
Europe)
E.
The Unification of the Iranian and the Eastern Roman Worlds, and the First
Barbarous Onslaught against them: the Anti-Christian Crusades
V.
The Enduring, 5-century Long Western Assault on Iran
VI.
Iran as Lighthouse to Nations at the End of Times
Содержание
I.
Иран: ось мировой истории
II.
Распространение лжи, чудовищные деяния совершены и преднамеренное уничтожение
человечества западными колонизаторами
III.
Иран и Аниран, или Центр и Периферия, или Правда и ложь: 2600-летняя история
А.
Ахеменидский зороастризм против митраизма: цезаропапизм против папоцезаризма
или монотеизм против политеизма
Б.
Александр Великий как македонский царь, египетский фараон и иранский император:
монотеист против митраизма
В.
Разделение Ирана между парфянами Арсакидами и диадохами
Г.
«Римская империя» и греко-римская цивилизация: варварская псевдоимперия и
разделяющее, никчемное наследие
Д.
Ориентализация Римской империи и Запада в целом
Е.
Манихейство и Мани, величайший человек всех времен
Ё.
Картир, искоренение манихейства в Иране и его распространенность в Римской империи
Ж.
Почему римская элита навязала составную — мемфитско-египетскую и
митраистско-иранскую — догму «христианства» вместо манихейства
З.
Ислам и мифологизация так называемых «арабских завоеваний»
И. Ложь
западных ориенталистов об исламе, христианстве и применении силы при
распространении/навязывании религии
Й. Ложь
западных ориенталистов о появлении ислама в Иране
IV.
Необратимая, всепоглощающая и бесконечная иранизация ислама в Азии и Европе и
попытка объединения христианства и ислама
А.
Бармакиды и Байт аль-Хикма: объединение всех научных, академических и
интеллектуальных школ и традиций в единый, универсальный, оригинальный и
образцовый дом наук.
Б.
Современное западное искажение и неверное представление о Золотом веке ислама,
которое до сих пор не оспаривается мусульманами.
1. Не
существовало «исламской философии»; существовала «исламская мудрость».
2.
Некое «греко-арабское переводческое движение» в исламском мире — это не факт, а
фактоид.
3.
Разрушение Багдада (1258 г.) как якобы губительное для исламского мира
В.
Неизбежное возвращение Ирана и Турана: иранаты и ирано-туранское «интермеццо»
1.
Мгновенный подъем сепаратистских государств, сохранивших иранскую культуру.
2.
Революции, проложившие путь к возвышению иранатов.
3.
Бесполезный и фальшивый исламский халифат, в конечном итоге вытесненный
иранатами (ошибочно названными «персианатами»).
4.
Вершина материально-духовных наук истины: исламские науки возникли
исключительно благодаря формированию иранатов.
5.
Величайшее осмысление человека в истории человечества: «Шахнаме» Фирдоуси.
Г.
Иранизация всех туранцев, включая славян, которые направлялись на юг (так
называемый Индийский субконтинент) и запад (фиктивный континент Европы)
Д.
Объединение иранского и восточно-римского миров и первое варварское наступление
против них: антихристианские крестовые походы
V.
Непрекращающееся, пятивековое наступление Запада на Иран
VI. Иран как маяк
для народов в конце времен
-------
The first part of the article
(containing 3 out the 6 units) can be found here:
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2026/02/28/iran-2026-the-pivot-of-world-history-assaulted-by-the-barbarians-of-the-west-i/
https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_15672
https://archive.org/details/iran-2026-the-pivot-of-world-history-assaulted-by-the-barbarians-of-the-west-i
https://www.academia.edu/164892900/Iran_2026_the_Pivot_of_World_History_Assaulted_by_the_Barbarians_of_the_West_I
https://www.patreon.com/posts/iran-2026-pivot-152023843
The second part of the article
(containing subunits A, B 1, B 2, B 3, C 1 and C 2 of the 4th unit) can be
found here:
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2026/03/31/iran-2026-the-pivot-of-world-history-assaulted-by-the-barbarians-of-the-west-ii/
https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_15794
https://archive.org/details/iran-2026-the-pivot-of-world-history-assaulted-by-the-barbarians-of-the-west-ii
https://www.academia.edu/165713714/Iran_2026_the_Pivot_of_World_History_Assaulted_by_the_Barbarians_of_the_West_II
https://www.patreon.com/posts/155845420
---------
Miniature from a manuscript of Kitab al Hayawan by Al Jahiz (performed by a Syrian artist ca. 1335)
Содержание частей IV, В, 3 и 4
3.
Бесполезный и фальшивый исламский халифат, в конечном итоге вытесненный
иранатами (ошибочно названными «персианатами»).
i- Различия
между римским восприятием христианства и иранским восприятием ислама:
папо-цезаризм исторически неприемлем в Иране
ii- Иранаты: образцовые примеры цезаропапизма
4.
Вершина материально-духовных наук истины: исламские науки возникли
исключительно благодаря формированию иранатов.
i- Сасанидский
иранский университет и исследовательский центр Гундишапур ii- Ложное
образование сегодняшних мусульманских стран и невежество мусульман как
результат западных ориенталистских искажений.
iii-
Джафар аль-Садик и фабрикация лжи о мусульманах-суннитах и шиитах iv- Необоснованные и нестабильные основы исламской теологии.
v- Современное ошибочное представление исламских наук как преднамеренной попытки христианизации ислама.
vi- Ибн аль-Мукаффа
vii-
Якуб ибн Тарик, Мухаммад ибн Ибрагим аль-Фазари и природа исламских наук
viii-
Джабир ибн Хайян
ix.
Ложная дилемма и двойное неправильное название: для «шиитов» и «суннитов» VII
века, правильные названия - «мусульмане» и «лицемеры» соответственно.
x-
Истинный, но неизвестный мусульманам Ислам: науки Джабира аль-Хайяна. xi- Абу
Нувас и исламская поэзия: винная поэзия, эротическая поэзия, трансгендерная
поэзия и охотничья поэзия.
xii-
Аль-Джахиз и его восхваление черных над белыми людьми
xiii-
Хабаш аль-Хасиб и астрономы/астрологи Бейт аль-Хикма
xiv-
аль-Хорезми
xv- Абу
Машар аль-Балхи: учёный, который отказался от бесполезной науки хадисов, чтобы
сосредоточиться на математике, астрономии и астрологии.
xvi-
Абу Ханифа Динавари и Исламская сельскохозяйственная революция
xvii- Движение
Шуубия
xviii- Аль-Кинди и
мутазилиты
xix- Совершенно
ложные академические термины «древнегреческая философия», «неоплатоническая
философия», «неопифагорейская философия» и «эллинистический период».
xx- Аль Кинди,
его пример и его работы
xxi -
Аль Фаргани
xxii-
Аль-Махани, Хунейн ибн Исхак, Аль-Баттани, Бану Муса и Аль Халладж. xxiii- Аль
Табари
xxiv-
Ахмад ибн Фадлан и распространение ислама среди народов России
xxv-
Абу Камиль, Абу Зайд аль-Балхи, Ибн Абд Раббих, Абу Бакр ар-Рази и Ибн Умайл
xxvi-
Аль Фараби
viii- Jabir ibn Hayyan
One of the best and the earliest
examples of highly versatile intellect, comprehensive approach to science and
wisdom, and multifaceted erudition was Jabir ibn Hayyan (ca. 720-816), who covers the period from
the rise of the Abbasids to the emergence of the early Iranianates. Abu Musa Jabir
ibn Ḥayyan (أَبو
موسى جابِر بِن حَيّان) lies between the historical truth and the legend that his
superior wisdom, formidable spirituality, and spectacular dexterity created
among the people of his generation and posterior peers and scholars, who
systematically resorted to his texts, acumen and ingenuity.
More than 600 treatises have
been attributed to him by later Islamic scientists and scholars, whereas only
excerpts from ca. 200 texts have been preserved until today, as they were successively
quoted by others. He was certainly versed in Alchemy, Pharmacology, Medicine,
Botany, Linguistics, Astronomy & Astrology, Cosmology, Spiritual Sciences,
and other disciplines. To him is ascribed the oldest description of the (al)-chemical
method by which we can derive inorganic compound such as ammonium chloride from
plants or blood. Furthermore, he is the first scholar known to have established
a systematic
classification of chemical substances.
There is a
certain tendency among modern Western scholars to classify the hitherto
preserved Islamic scientific texts into the following ten modern scientific
disciplines: Astronomy and Cosmology, Geography and Cartography, Botany and Agronomy,
Alchemy and Chemistry, Pharmacology, Zoology, Medicine, Optics-Ophthalmology, Physics,
and Mathematics. Yet, it would be enough for any person of good intentions to
delve into the 'Jabirian' Corpus (the totality of the excerpts from his
treatises that have been quoted by posterior Islamic scholars and scientists)
in order to understand that
a) the
aforementioned ten branches are not all-inclusive, i.e. there are many other
disciplines in which Jabir ibn Hayyan
was very knowledgeable, either they 'exist' today as academic fields or not;
b) to him
this division was absolutely meaningless due to the irrevocable and undeniable
interconnectedness of all things spiritual and material; and
c) he
could never excel in any of them by separating the material universe from the
spiritual universe and by disregarding or (even worse) denying the existence of
the latter.
To state
the things as they are, Jabir ibn Hayyan,
as a concept of mystic, magician, savant and scientist, heralds the inevitable
death of the present, entirely fallacious corpus of sciences that the absurd
and paranoid Western European fraudsters of the Renaissance malignantly devised
and colonially imposed worldwide. The modern Western 'science' and the
associated perverse technology drive the entire world to extinction, but the
unmatched superiority of the Jabirian Corpus calls every really conscious person
to the path of the Truth far more vivaciously than the Quran and the Hadith.
Sometimes,
even a term used by a scholar and author of the Golden Age of Islam is enough
to lambast the modern pseudo-scientific construct and to demonstrate the
ineptitude of modern academics; according to several posterior scholars and scientists
who mentioned him and quoted excerpts from his works, Jabir ibn Ḥayyan
mentioned quite often a science (field of knowledge) that modern scholars
cannot either identify or even accept: the Science of Balance ('ilm al mizan; علم الميزان). This was not an abstract theory, as the
fraudulent, sectarian, and biased Western academics and the idiotic pseudo-Muslim
theologians of our time try to falsely interpret in order to get rid of the
topic and keep it hidden.
Quite
contrarily, it was a highly calibrated discipline invented -after an immense
effort and an all-encompassing comprehension of the fields of spiritual and
material knowledge- in order to capacitate the human being to achieve full mastership
over natural phenomena, thus establishing a system of balanced arrangements, as
well as quantitative and qualitative proportions, in the natural environment;
in other words, Jabir ibn Ḥayyan taught his students and novices how
they could affect and master natural phenomena, but the bureaucratic academics
and the perverse specialists of the modern bogus-sciences intentionally distort
the meaning of the term and the essence of this scientific discipline, because
they do not want to possibly admit that the human being, as soul, character,
and body, has these (criminally hidden by the masters of this world)
capacities.
ix- Fake
Dilemma and Double Misnomer: for 7th c. CE 'Shia' and 'Sunni', the correct
appellations are respectively 'Muslims' and 'hypocrites'
That's why
the biased Western academics shamelessly attribute to Jabir ibn Hayyan
'imamological' (sic!) theories and purposely formulated yet nonsensical conjectures,
labeling him also as "Shia Muslim" (as if a genuinely false term can
possibly have a derogatory meaning), because he was said to be a pupil of
Ja'far al-Sadiq. And this explains what is hidden behind the fabricated divide
"Sunni vs. Shia" that the forgers of the Western universities created
out of thin air; the term Shia was basically used during the period going from
Prophet Muhammad's movement (Hijrah) to Madinah (622 CE) to the Battle of Kerbala
(680 CE), when Hussein, rightful heir and second son of Ali, was killed by the
forces of Yazid I, son of the usurper Muawiyah, who left Madinah and made of
Damascus his capital.
The term
"Shia" meant the "party" of Ali, i.e. all those who sided
with Ali, Fatimah, and their sons; after the generation of Ali was gone (end of
7th c. CE), the term became obsolete. Similarly, the term "Sunni" is
a historically used term with totally different meaning from the sectarian
notion that the cruel colonial schemers and Orientalists attributed to it;
initially, it denoted all those who followed the "tradition" (Sunnah/
سنة; in the sense of "life example")
of Prophet Muhammad. However, as per this meaning, all Muslims are Sunnis,
because all those, who are now falsely called "Shia", follow too the
tradition of Prophet Muhammad.
There is no
doubt that there was fierce opposition between the supporters of descendants of
Prophet Muhammad (down to Ja'far al-Sadiq and later on) and the heretic and
pseudo-Muslim Umayyad dynasty. But this extreme polarization was -to put it in
real terms- due to the fact that the outright majority of all Muslims followed
the faithful Muslim leaders (and rightful heirs to Ali who was the only true
caliph as he was designated by the prophet) and rejected the Umayyads. While
most of the Muslims opposed and repeatedly fought against the ominous Umayyad
disbelievers, they utilized several docile and submissive people, who were avid
for governmental and social power, in order to produce ridiculous
justifications of their supposedly Islamic identity and attitude. Consequently
these two groups, which certainly had a historical continuity from generation
to generation, should be accurately described as "Muslims" (: the
religious forefathers of today's so-called "Shia") and the
"hypocrites" (: the doctrinal precursors of modern times' self-styled
"Sunnis").
All the
same, the above schematization, although historically appropriate, does not
fully clarify the matter; the outright majority of the Muslims, who followed
Prophet Muhammad's offspring, did not do so only because he had designated Ali ibn
Abi Taleb as his successor or solely due to their own disagreement with,
rejection of, and opposition to, the Umayyads, namely the opponents of Ahl
al-Bayt ('the People of the House', i.e. the descendants of the prophet) or merely
as a result of the Umayyad cruelty, lawlessness and total lack of Islamic
credentials. There were truly far more important issues at stake and they had
nothing to do with the prophet, but with God Himself.
The
descendants of Prophet Muhammad practiced, instructed and introduced
spirituality to their supporters, pupils, and initiates; they made everyone
realize that the Divine is not merely a nominal value or an abstract theory or
a verbal debate for agnostics, but -quite contrarily- a highly sensed, comprehended,
and spiritually enacted transcendental reality without which every sort of
material existence is entirely worthless and utterly contemptible. For the
magnificently created human being, life has value only through permanent
synergy of the body and the soul.
The few
opponents of the true Muslims of the Umayyad times were
a- the
children of heinous tribal lords, who were unable to break the clannish
tradition as per which a younger man or a
low-ranking member of the tribe cannot have any precedence over older persons
or higher clan members (in spite of the fact that Prophet Muhammad's revelation
and the verses of the Quran strictly reprimand that mentality);
b-
brainless soldiers devoted to razzias, looting, and ruining others in order to gradually
establish their own wealth, increase their social status, assert their military
command, and materialize all the lawless desires that they had, irrespective of
the ascetic example of Prophet Muhammad, Ali ibn Abi Taleb, and their
descendants; and
c-
faithless imams who learned (through reading or hearsay) the Quran and the
Hadith only to find arguments in support of their masters (as per above), produce
justifications of all the impious, lawless, and sacrilegious acts of their
superiors, and reduce Islam to a social code of behavior and a series of futile
actions (fasting, hajj, prayer, zakat/almsgiving, etc.) perpetrated for the
benefit of the rulers, and not for the profit of every person's soul.
These were
the doctrinal precursors of modern times' self-styled "Sunnis"; they
did not fight in order to diffuse Islam, because if they wanted to do so, they
would have to abdicate in favor of the Ahl Al Bayt. They fought for their
material benefits and when the true Muslims decried them, they attempted to
massacre them; that's why there were as many rebellions against and secessions
from the Umayyad pseudo-caliphate as I described in the previous article of the
present series.
This
tragic and extreme polarization took an end with
a) the
Iranization of Islam during the Abbasid times,
b) the
emergence of the Iranianates,
c) the
advent of Bayt al Hikmah,
d) the
development of the Islamic sciences, and
e) the
expansion of Islamic spirituality and mysticism.
Most of
the early schools of jurisprudential authority (madhhab) were established by
scholars who believed that law, moral, science, wisdom, and spirituality are totally
inseparable from one another. But, as I already said, with the rise of the Iranianates,
the malignant and faithless imams, who learned (through reading or hearsay) the
Quran and the Hadith only to find arguments in support of their masters,
gathered around the impotent Abbasid caliphs in order to console them by means
of flatter and hypocrisy, and in the process, survive and obtain some importance.
Thus, they
distorted the true meaning of Islamic theology ('ilm al-kalam) and the original
concepts on which most of the early schools of jurisprudential authority had
been founded; they apparently produced tons of totally useless material. However,
these imams were rejected by the outright majority of the Muslims, by the
followers of all the other religions, and more importantly, by all the rulers
of the Iranianates that emerged. So, all the worthless fatwas were not executed
and their decisions were fully disregarded. Consequently, all the inhabitants
of the quasi-defunct caliphate were all -Iranians or not- liberated from the evil
indoctrination and the purely anti-Islamic pseudo-theological literature
produced by those villainous imams.
For this
reason, Islam expanded among the populations of the Iranianates more during the
period 820-1450 CE rather than in the course of the first two centuries after
Hijrah. It was not a matter of oppression but of attraction; it was not
enforced but preferred. In fact, after the first 50 years of Umayyad rule, at
the very beginning of the 8th c. CE, not even 15% of the total population
throughout the Islamic territory had accepted Islam as their faith.
World
History would have been very different had these faithless imams not survived
around the powerless Abbasid caliphs, transferred to Damascus after 1258, and
then made the Ottoman sultan's palace their home. That's why the destruction of
Baghdad by Hulagu was effectuated after the advice of a leading Muslim
scientist, scholar, and founder of the Maragheh Observatory (Nasir al din
al-Tusi; 1201-1274) and it was a really divine blessing for all Muslims.
Exactly for
this reason, it was said that Tigris River became black because of the ink of
the -therein thrown and destroyed, excessively voluminous but very perilous and
poisonous- material, namely all the manuscripts produced by the malignant pseudo-Muslim
imams, who wanted to eliminate spirituality, mysticism, sciences, and arts from
Islam in order to reduce the divine revelation of Prophet Muhammad and the blessed
preaching of Ali ibn Abi Taleb to a doctrinal idiocy, which justifies
villainous and mischievous rulers, turns the average people into filthy,
submissive, brainless and pathetic beings, and makes of every Islamic state a
truly repugnant entity that has to disappear.
That's why
Timur (Tamerlane) attempted to eradicate the Ottoman infamy and vanquished
Bayezid I near Ankara (1402), and immediately proceeded to the West, to
terminally destroy and uproot the Catholic missionary state (1344-1402) that
the Knights of the Hospitaller Order were calmly allowed by the idiotic Ottoman
sultans to set up around Smyrna (Izmir) in Western Anatolia.
And this
is how Islamic spirituality and sciences took an end with the expansion of the
Ottoman Empire (notably in 1453 and in 1517), because those faithless imams put
gradually under control the Sultanate, creating the purely anti-Islamic
officialdom of the sheikhulislam and forcing the insane sultans-caliphs to exterminate
every Islamic Spiritual Order (notably the Şahkulu, the Qizilbash, the
Bektashi, etc.) and every academic-scientific institution (like the Istanbul
Observatory).
x- The
true, but unknown to Muslims, Islam: the sciences of Jabir al Hayyan
But Jabir
al Hayyan is always there - as an exemplary Muslim, mystic and scientist. And
so is the Jabirian Corpus; for many unbiased researchers, it will take a
lifetime to a) delve into the mass of excerpts hitherto found, b) search for
further citations in other manuscripts that have not yet been studied, translated
and published, and c) reconstitute the true meaning of Jabir al Hayyan's words,
terms, concepts, sciences and descriptions. It will be an unprecedented project
able to put a dead end to the entire Western science.
We can
expect that the most suitable scholars able to undertake the task would be
Chinese Islamologists, Iranologists, and Semitic linguists, because they are
the only apt to establish parallels with Chinese Alchemy and the other historical
sciences developed in China, and in addition, they are void of the Western
Greco-centric bias. Except the aforementioned Jabirian Science of the Balance, it
is to be noted that Jabir al Hayyan mentioned and discussed topics pertaining
to other, today unidentified and impenetrable, sciences, which he defined as 'ilm
al-khawass ('science of specific properties')
and 'ilm al-ṭilasmat ('science of the talismans') that can be
translated as Magic (the use of the term at this point is totally unrelated to
the Mithraic Magi), although some scholars used the term 'theurgy' to describe
it. Personally, I believe that the latter term is rather advisable for
references to ancient civilizations, religions, and temples - only.
Among the
most famous works of Jabir ibn Hayyan, we find the "Ten Books of the
Rectifications" (المصححات العشرة),
the "Book of the King" (كتاب
الملك; describing
the effectiveness of the talismans), the "Book on Poisons and on the
Repelling of their Harmful Effects" (كتاب السموم والدفع مدارها), the "Books of the Seven Metals"
(الأحجار
السبعة; lit. 'the
seven stones' / in which he describes the properties and the use of the metals,
namely gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead and the 'Chinese metal' named
kharsini), "Our Books on the Transmigration of the Soul" (كتبنا في التناسخ),
the "Book of the Thirty Words" (كتاب الثالاثين كلمة), the "Subtle Book on Astronomical Tables" (کتاب الزاج اللطيف), the Books on Military Stratagems and
Tricks (الحيال
الحروبية والمكايد),
and many others. If I mention few titles of works either written by the great
mystic, scholar and scientist or attributed to him by posterior Muslim writers,
this is only indicative.
Only by
attentively observing the titles of his works, one understands to some extent
how Jabir ibn Hayyan perceived the two worlds, spiritual and material, and their
interconnectedness. Exactness is very significant, but only when it is needed
in calculation; if one text, which is considered as presentation of an entity,
fails to reproduce the entireness of a topic (and this involves its
interconnection with many others), the author has failed in his endeavor. If a
researcher does not manage to generate a balance of understanding out of his
study of a subject, he betrays his faith, because he misrepresents a basic law
of the universes, namely that of the perfect equilibrium.
There is
no invention and no discovery that can plausibly be achieved by anyone;
everything is known and everything has been known as possible to be eventually
produced. Research, study, observation, learning, exploration, calculation, and
description are not endeavors undertaken in order to create something new, but they
consist in personal training for the soul of the scholar. As a matter of fact,
there is no knowledge without Moral; and wisdom is the effective representation
of the spiritual and material reality, as well as the extraction of the proper
conclusion.
No human
needs any novelty or change, except for what the nature brings about - in and
by itself. Actually, nothing can be renovated or modified in the universes,
except by the Will of God. For a scientist, faithlessness is merely self-destruction,
whereas the transmutation executed by an alchemist has no utilitarian purposes.
The many tricks and secrets, which exist in the nature and can potentially be
unveiled and narrated by a scholar, constitute a moral examination for all
those who happen to learn them. The use they may make thereof can become a
blessing or a disaster for their soul; the only standard or measure for this
life is the Hereafter.
The Jabirian Corpus was published in two volumes (of 215
& 406 pages respectively) by Paul Kraus in 1942-1943 at the Institut
Français d'Archéologie Orientale du Caire (Jâbir ibn Hayyân: Contribution à
l'histoire des idées scientifiques dans l'Islam. I. Le corpus des écrits
jâbiriens. II. Jâbir et la science grecque; in the series: "Mémoires de
l'Institut d'Egypte, tomes 44 et 45). For
that period, the result delivered by the great scholar was excellent, but it
bears the stamp of the misperceptions, the preconceived ideas, and the assumptions
that most of the Orientalists had at the time. So, the prejudiced approach of the
Western Orientalists is present throughout this otherwise excellent opus and,
due to the fallacy of Hellenism, all Egyptian alchemists, scientists and
mystics, who are known through the Ancient Greek names that they adopted, are
portrayed as "Greeks" whereas in fact they are Egyptians reflecting
Ancient Egyptian traditions, sciences, knowledge, wisdom and spirituality.
The
present article does not consist in a presentation of the major scientists of
the Golden Age of Islam, but it offers a brief outlook of the seminal role
played by Iran in this development; even more particularly, since the rise of
the Islamic sciences, scholarship and wisdom coincided with and was due to the
emergence of the Iranianates and the disintegration of the Abbasid Caliphate.
xi- Abu
Nuwas and Islamic Poetry: Wine Poetry, Erotic Poetry, Transgender Poetry, and
Hunting Poetry
During
this period, Abu Nuwas (756-814) excelled in poetry, oratory, literary wisdom,
and criticism of religion. He became one of the most legendary figures of early
Abbasid Baghdad, up to the point of being mentioned several times in the
momentous epic One Thousand and One Nights. Due to his unconventional life, extravagant
lifestyle, and uncompromising verses, he was one of the most often selected
poets for literary anthologies, a social-intellectual practice that typified
the historical Islamic culture across the ages.
Having
earned the favor of Harun al Rashid, Abu Nuwas exemplified in his verses what
everyday life of the Abbasid elite was about; in his Diwan, he outstandingly
exalted the sumptuous banquets, the poetry recitation competition, the physical
comedy performances, the extensive oenophilia, the voluptuous desires, and the
homoerotic tendencies that created the overall ambiance. Being of mixed
-Persian and Arabic- origin, he was known throughout the Islamic ages for his
Khamriyyat (wine poetry), his Tardiyyat (hunting poetry), and his
Ghazaliyyat (erotic poetry).
One gets a
more comprehensive picture of Abbasid Baghdad's libertarian and self-indulgent
society by reading Abu Nuwas' Ghulamiyyat (poetry about girls dressed like
boys). Being three decades older than Harun al Rashid's son and successor, the
caliph al-Amin (Abu Musa Muhammad bin Harun al-Amin; 787-813),
who reigned for only four years, Abu Nuwas may well have been not only his
royal poet but also private lover, as it was well known that the young caliph
did not have interest in the opposite sex.
xii- Al
Jahiz and his Praise of the Black over the White people
Living at
the time of Harun al Rashid and benefitting from the establishment of Bayt al
Hikmah, Al Jahiz (historically known as Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Kinani
al-Basri; 776-869) was a leading scientist, an innovative littérateur, a wise researcher,
and a thought-provoking intellectual able to make groundbreaking approaches to
many earlier untackled topics, while integrating spiritual and universal
dimensions into the microcosm of his library. He was apparently eager to
contextualize his own activities astronomically/astrologically; able to describe
the wisdom of the nature in each and every of his texts and ready to identify
Divine Providence everywhere, Al Jahiz demonstrated his wisdom and
perspicacious view on life and nature in his famous Kitab al-Hayawan (كتاب الحيوان; Book of the Animals), a treatise in zoology (involving
descriptions of no less than 350 species) that encompasses observations on the
character of the animals, the balance of the nature, and the rules of survival.
As member
of the Mu'tazilite ('rationalist') school of thought, Al Jahiz wrote about the
techniques of eloquence in order to strengthen the abilities of orators in
public debates and help people speak formally and effectively. His Kitab
al-Bayan wa-al-Tabyin (كـتـاب
الـبـيـان و الـتـبـيـن;
'The Book of Eloquence and Demonstration') became the foundation of all
literary theories that were later developed within the Islamic world. As a
dedicated moralist, Al Jahiz was excellent in denouncing avarice and greedy
minds of every social layer in his (كتاب البخلاء; Kitab al Bukhala'/The Book of Misers).
In his Al-Radd
'ala al-Nasara
(الرد
على النصارى;
Rebuttal against the Christians), Al Jahiz proved that he never tolerated
dogmatic sectarianism (as per which modern idiotic Muslims 'learn' and
propagate the falsehood that 'Christianity is closer to Islam'); he fervently
supported that the Hebrew text of the Old Testament was a more reliable and
trustworthy source than the Christian Gospels. He also attributed the Christian
theological arguments (as per which Jesus was literally the son of God) to
erroneous Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible.
As his
grandfather was a Black cameleer or loader, Al-Jahiz was the best placed wise
scholar and intellectual to compose the World History's first comparative essay
about races of different color; he opposed and rejected the racist and pathetic
attitude that several Muslim theologians had toward the East African Zanj (:
Bantu) people and the Indus River Delta Zutt (maybe the ancestors of Roma) people,
who used to work as slaves in the central provinces of the Caliphate. It is not
a coincidence that, during and after his lifetime, overwhelming events like the
Zutt Rebellion (810-835) and the Zanj Rebellion (869-883) took place. The
absolutely unconventional, balanced and sagacious essay elaborated by Al Jahiz
under the title Fakhr al-Sudan ala al-Biḍan (فَخْر السُودان على البيضان; 'The Boast of blacks over the Whites') makes
state of the unmatched dexterity of the Black people in eloquence, oratory,
literature, poetry, music and dance.
Al Jahiz was
wise enough never to hold an official position in the Abbasid court; however,
he was in high demand by three successive caliphs, namely al-Ma'mun (813–833),
Al-Mu'tasim (833-842) and Al-Wathiq (842-847) whose reigns lasted no less than
three and half decades.
xiii-
Habash al-Hasib, and the astronomers/astrologers of Bayt al Hikmah
Better
known as Habash al-Hasib, Ahmad ibn 'Abdallah al-Marwazi (approx. 770-870) was
a leading mathematician and astronomer in the famous Al-Shammisiyyah
observatory in Baghdad, which was constructed around 823-825 CE as part of the
wider Bayt al Hikmah precinct. Built as per the orders of the caliph al Ma'mun,
it was one of the two scientific centers of astronomical-astrological research
in the world - along with the observatory at Mount Qasioun in Damascus, which
was erected few years later, in 830-831, according to the demand of the same
Abbasid caliph. It would take 150 years until another observatory was built in
Baghdad by the Buwayhi / Buyid 'Amir al Umara' ('emir of the emirs') Sharaf
al-Dawla (born Shirdil Abu'l Fawaris; reign: 983-989) in the garden of his
palace.
Habash
al-Hasib (حبش
الحاسب; lit.
'Abyssinian calculator') published his 10-year long observations in three zij
(astronomical) tables; one of them is still extant in two copies (preserved in
Istanbul and Berlin), but unfortunately not yet published. Around 150 years
later, al Biruni studied Habash al Hasib's work, mentioned him repeatedly in
his own treatises, and continued his astronomical tables. Iranian of origin but
called 'Abyssinian' because of his dark skin, Habash al-Hasib discovered the
tangent and the cotangent, the trigonometric ratios, and generated the first
known tables in this regard. His Book of Bodies and Distances (its remaining
parts were translated by the Israeli scholar Y. Tzvi Langermann) detailed his
researches and activities in several fields; in it, we find a report on a
geodetic expedition that he conducted with others in the Nineveh Plains in
order to calculate the length of one degree of the meridian.
Ḥabash al Hasib wrote extensively on
the fabrication of astronomical instruments; in addition, he composed a
separate treatise about the construction of a universal plate for timekeeping
by the stars; preserved in a single and incomplete copy (MS Oxford, Bodleian
Marsh 663, pp. 205-206 and 239-247) and published by François Charette &
Petra G. Schmidl (2001), the text remains quite obscure and difficult to
comprehend.
During the
same period, many other significant scholars, multilingual translators, mathematicians,
scientists, engineers, astronomers and astrologers were actively engaged in the
works of the observatories and the associated research, notably Sanad ibn Ali (famous
for having introduced the decimal point notation to the Arabic numerals), Yahya
ibn Abi Mansur (also known through his Farsi name Bizist son of Firuzan and
originating from the then influential Banu al Munajjim Iranian family), al
Abbas ibn Said al-Jawhari (active in the observatories of Baghdad and
Damascus), Ali ibn Isa al-Asturlabi (nicknamed after his treatise on the
astrolabes), Khalid ibn Abd al-Malik al-Marwarrudhi (member of the 827 CE
academic expedition to the Nineveh Plains for the purpose of measuring the
length of a meridian arc), and Ahmad al Dharra. More important of them all
proved to be Al-Khwarizmi (780-850).
xiv-
al-Khwarizmi
According
to Tabari, the Islamic World's greatest historian, who was born 11 years before
al-Khwarizmi died, the complete name of the illustrious Northeastern Iranian scholar
and founder of Algebra was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
al-Majusi al-Quṭrubbulli (محمد بن موسى الخوارزميّ المجوسـيّ
القطربّـليّ).
Khwarizm (or Chorasmia) covers today the territories of Turkmenistan, Western
Uzbekistan, and Western Kazakhstan; the area spans across the eastern coastline
of the Caspian Sea. By adding the name 'al-Majusi', which is the Arabic
equivalent of the modern term 'Zoroastrian' (actually, the word originates from
the Old Achaemenid, Iranian, Imperial Aramaic, Parthian and Middle Persian term
for 'Magus', which is also mentioned in the Quran as 'al Majus'), Tabari
insinuates that al-Khwarizmi's ancestors were Zoroastrians and that he either was
surreptitiously follower of the pre-Islamic Iranian religion or regarded the
quintessence of both religions as identical. Qutrubbul (or Qatrabbul) was a
site west of Baghdad.
Al-Khwarizmi's
Al-Jabr {its complete title being 'the Concise Book of Calculation by
Restoration and Balancing' (الكتاب المختصر في حساب الجبر والمقابلة /al-Kitab
al-Mukhtaṣar fi Hisab
al-Jabr wal-Muqabalah)} proved to be apparently one of the most impactful and
the most indelible treatises in World History; al Jabr is the word from which
the term Algebra originates. The book consists in the first true algebra text
that exists; in it, the ingenious author presented the first systematic
solution of linear and quadratic equations, by introducing the 'reduction'
(al-jabr/الجبر, lit. 'forcing' or 'restoring') and the
'balancing' (Al-muqabala - المقابله)
as methods, namely the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of
an equation.
Other
major works by Al-Khwarizmi were the Zij as-Sindhind al Kabir (' Great Astronomical Tables of the
Sindhind'/ زيج السندهند الكبير), which was an astronomical manual consisting of 37 chapters
with no less than 116 related tables (completed in 820 CE) and his geographical
grand opus Kitab Ṣurat al-Arḍ ('Book of the description of the Earth'/ كتاب صورة الأرض ),
which is also known as 'Geography' (finished in 833). He reassessed the work of
Ptolemy, the Egyptian Geographer of the 1st-2nd c. CE, and came up with 2402
coordinates of cities, towns, villages and other geographical locations.
Several
of Al-Khwarizmi's works were not saved in the Arabic original text, but in
Medieval Latin translations, because his reputation reached Western Europe through
Andalusia; furthermore, he elaborated several other treatises on chronology and
calendars, Trigonometry and other branches of Mathematics, History (Annals) and
other topics. In general, he is considered as the beginning of the Golden Age
of Islamic Science.
xv- Abu Ma'shar al Balkhi: the scholar
who abandoned the worthless science of Hadith to focus on Mathematics,
Astronomy and Astrology
Abu Ma'shar al Balkhi (787-886) was
a Bactrian (Eastern Iranian) astronomer and astrologer, who became highly
influential in the Abbasid court and widely known in Andalusia and in Western
Europe, due to Latin translations of the 12th c.; known as Albumasar to Latin
readership, he was extensively quoted, copied, and discussed in either Muslim
or Christian lands. His successful divination and foretelling did not only
attract admiration and respect, but also caused him grave trouble, as the
puppet caliph al-Musta'in (836-866; reign after 862), who was imposed by the
Turkic military guards, was very displeased with him and punished him with
public lashing; such were the conditions of life during the period, which was
historically called 'Anarchy at Samarra' (fawda Samarra/فوضى سامراء; 861-870), because the capital was
transferred 130 km to the North; during those years, the violent succession of
four caliphs epitomized the disintegration of the Caliphate.
Most of Abu Ma'shar al Balkhi's
manuals and books are preserved through various summaries and anthologies made
by Muslim scholars (notably Ibn al-Nadim and Sijzi in the 10th c. and Abd
al-Hasan Isfahani in the 14th c.) or thanks to many Latin translators {such as Johannes
Hispaniensis (John of Seville), Herman of Carinthia, and Abelard of Bath in the
12th c.}.
As he has been chronicled by several
Muslim authors, we can safely claim that his centenarian life example is as
important as his treatises and opuses; Abu Ma'shar al Balkhi in his early years
was a theologian and a scholar of hadith; it is only at middle age that he
shifted his focus to mathematics, astrology, and astronomy. This was not merely
a personal affair, but it reflected and epitomized the reality of the Muslim
society, which valued science, exploration and intellectual investigation far more
than the boring work of archiving sayings, utterances, debates and discussions
made before 200 years in the faraway, marginal and mainly uneducated region of
Hejaz.
It simply meant that, in the 9th c.
CE, most of the Muslims -with few exceptions- were astute enough to realize
that what they could understand from the Quran and the -already known through
hearsay- hadith was quite sufficient for them to perceive the revelations made
by Prophet Muhammad and accept the moral values preached by Ali ibn Abi Taleb. And
who were the exceptions? Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), Muhammad al-Bukhari
(810-870), Muslim ibnl-Hajjaj (815-875) and few others, who wasted their lives
either in trivial affairs or in distorting the true essence of Islam, which was
exemplified by wise scholars and true scientists like Al Khwarizmi and Abu
Ma'shar al Balkhi.
What truly mattered for the 9th c.
CE Muslims was to study the nature, explore the universe, learn the truth of
other civilizations, and live their lives in plain truth and freedom – and not
in the hypocrisy of following orders issued by uneducated muftis who wanted to
make of religion a shameful bureaucratic officialdom and to thus secure for
them all the material goods that they could. It is therefore crucially vital for
today's Muslims to understand that they are disastrously wrong in the selection
of their readings, absolutely false in their religion, completely alien to
their cultural heritage, tragically confused in their priorities, and totally
ignorant of their historical past. Staying as they are now, Muslims cannot
claim any historicity, do not represent anything more than their willful
blindness and execrable misery, and are at the very antipodes of the true Islam.
xvi-
Abu Hanifa Dinawari and the Islamic Agricultural Revolution
Originating from the Zagros
Mountains (Western Iran), Abu Hanifa Dinawari (828-895; أبو حنيفة الدينوري) was another Iranian scientist, who
excelled in Agronomy, Botany, Alchemy, Metallurgy, History, Geography,
Astronomy, and Mathematics; his major work, the Book of Plants, has been
considered as the foundation of Islamic Botany, as it consists in an outstanding contribution to
the phenomenon of Islamic Agricultural Revolution, which represents only one
aspect of socio-environmental transformation brought about during the Golden
Age of Islam.
Great improvement in irrigation,
productivity, and animal husbandry, impressive increase in agronomic
literature, systematic diffusion of new plants to potentially accommodating
regions, and an evident effort to develop techniques able to support an advanced
urbanization and a sophisticated stratification of society constitute some of
the main changes occurred due to this phenomenon. Several Western Orientalists
gave it an absurd misnomer, namely 'Arab Agricultural Revolution', but of course
this appears pathetic and ludicrous in view of the aridity that prevails in
Hejaz and the minimal skills that the Arabs developed in agriculture - in
striking contrast to the Yemenites, the Aramaeans, the Iranians, the Turanians,
the Indians and the Egyptians.
Abu Hanifa Dinawari's 'General
History' (الأخبار
الطوال) marks a
major landmark as it is an early Islamic chronography that starts with the
Creation, the antediluvian times, and the Flood. Written by a devout Muslim and
a proud Iranian, the text places Iranshahr (the realm of Iran) at the epicenter
of World History; the book ends with the defeat of the Khurramite rebellion
(837) and the subsequent execution of Babak Khorramdin and the vassal prince of
Ushrusana (in parts of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan), Khaydhar ibn Kawus al-Afshin
(see previous unit of the present series of articles Iran 2026: the Pivot of
World History Assaulted by the Barbarians of the West – II, Part IV, C, 1, a,
i).
It would take few decades until
Tabari makes of historiography the revelation of all oral and written sources,
and around 150 years until Ferdowsi exalts Iranshahr as the epitome of Mankind.
xvii- The Shu'ubiyyah movement
In the late 8th and the early 9th c.
CE, we first attest the fundamental concepts and the main tenants of the
Shu'ubiyyah movement; this reflected the conclusions and the convictions of the
outright majority of the population of the Caliphate, namely all those who,
having accepted Islam, realized very clearly that the religion revealed by
Prophet Muhammad and preached by Ali ibn Abi Taleb was understood by the
non-Arab Muslims far better than by Arabs. In other words, they maintained that
the Yemenites, the Aramaeans, the Iranians, the Turanians, the Indians, the
Egyptians, the Berbers, and the Eastern Romans could perceive the spirituality
and the faith of Muhammad in a far more sound and noble manner than the tribal
society of Hejaz that had no cultural background, no historical past, no indigenous
spirituality, and no socio-behavioral environment suitable for the very
sophisticated revelation made by the Quran.
Uncultured, uneducated, ignorant and
barbarian, the Arabs should not therefore control the administrative positions
of the caliphate if the state had to be Islamic. Disastrously entrenched in
tribalism and barbarian traditions, the Arabs, who had already become a tiny
minority among the Muslim populations of the vast Islamic state 100 years after
the death of Prophet Muhammad, could not understand the universal-ecumenical
role of the Caliphate, and downgraded it to petty razzias, stupid invasions,
and miserable tribal rules, thus demonstrating that their false religion was a
sort of combined Abu-Bakrism (also known as Bakriyyah), Umarism (quite distinct
from Omarism, i.e. the literary legacy of Omar Khayyam), and Uthmanism
(historically described as shi'at Uthman or Uthmaniyya) rather than the true
Islam.
Although the Shu'ubiyyah movement
never had proper structure and organization, it constituted a mindset, a
worldview, an attitude and a behavior -attested in average people and the
academic-intellectual elite-, which could never tolerate any form of cultural sectarianism
and governmental Arabization. The movement represented indeed a certain number
of trends that finally prevailed; in terms of governance, it took the form of
the Iranianates that rose at the expense of the Abbasid caliphate. With regard
to spirituality, education, culture, and everyday life, the Golden Era of
Islamic Civilization sent all Arab elements back to the useless deserts from
where they had come. In the 9th and the 10th c., Arabic language became a
highly enriched medium of communication, able to incorporate many words of Aramaean,
Persian, Turkic, Egyptian, Indian, Berber and other origin, thus taking a
markedly different form from Quranic Arabic.
The complete prevalence of the
Shu'ubiyyah led to the de-Arabization of the early administrative nomenklatura.
In fact, the only Arab traits of the early Caliphate that remained were
a- the idiotic desire to produce
copious theological literature in support of every ignominy performed and of all
the debased caprices committed by lawless fighters who turned Islam into a
disgrace; this trait is at the origin of the so-called Sharia (the fake
religious law) and the Islamic jurisprudence (which is falsely associated with
Fiqh) that were later developed in several pseudo-Islamic states.
and
b- the
deeply anti-Islamic absurdity that a religion can be spread through invasions
and wars, which was what Prophet Muhammad before dying had sworn Ali ibn Abi
Taleb never to do; this vicious trait is the true reason for the many
unnecessary wars attempted and invasions undertaken by pseudo-Islamic states
run presumably by the various caliphs, emirs and sultans, but in reality
governed by despicable muftis and false theologians, who wanted to perpetuate
the Arab barbarism within their Papo-Caesarist bogus-Islam.
xviii- Al Kindi and the Mutazilites
Al Kindi (أبو يوسف يعقوب بن إسحاق الصبّاح الكندي/Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn 'Isḥaq as-Sabbaḥ al-Kindi; 801-873), born in Kufa and educated in
Baghdad, was truly a particular case of theoretician, scientist and
intellectual influenced by the Mutazilite school of theology that rose to
prominence in the period known as Mihna {833-851; محنة خلق القرآن/miḥna khalq al-Quran/'the tribulation (caused by the belief) that the
Quran was created', in the sense that, because the holy book of Islam was
literally 'the Word of God', it had to be thought of as eternally extant, just
like God}, when four successive Abbasid caliphs (i.e. al-Ma'mun, al-Mu'tasim,
al-Wathiq, and al-Mutawakkil for his first four years of reign) decided to
impose Mutazila (المعتزلة) as the only acceptable Islamic doctrine
allowed across the Caliphate, resulting in persecution and execution of
numerous opponents.
Initiated by Wasil al Ata (699-748),
the Mutazila School of Islamic theology revolved around four pillars, namely
Monotheism (Tawhid), Justice (al-'Adl), Freedom, and the Creation of the Quran;
promoting a rational approach to divine matters, all the Mutazilites rejected
the theological absurdity as per which the Quran was uncreated and as eternal
as God; they also reduced the 'good' and the 'evil' to merely rational
categories. Strictly religious, the Mutazilites opposed the rising secular
trend of their days, but by persistently debating on these topics, they significantly
contributed to the consolidation of the beliefs of their theological opponents.
Renowned scholar in the Bayt al
Hikmah, al Kindi was an Arab originating from Kindah, a tribe that is known to
have a) earlier served the Yemenite kingdom of Sheba (the Sabaeans), b) later
worked for the Himyarite Yemenite kingdom, and c) then migrated to the North
where they established their own tribal realm in the desert (4th to 6th c. CE).
Being a Mutazilite, Al Kindi tried to find theoretical tools, potential
arguments, and counter-examples useful to oppose all those who rejected the rational
argumentation and the Mutazila theology.
xix- The totally false academic
terms "Ancient Greek philosophy", "Neo-Platonic
philosophy", "Neo-Pythagorean philosophy", and "Hellenistic
period"
He therefore resorted to pre-Islamic
spiritual concepts, cosmological-soteriological systems, theoretical
backgrounds, and schools of esoteric mysticism that were known and well
documented for several centuries before the revelation of Islam. In this
regard, Western historians, Orientalists and Classicists have introduced distortive
representation of the facts and false terms, such as "Ancient Greek
philosophy", "Neo-Platonic philosophy" and "Neo-Pythagorean
philosophy". Working on this background, many Western scholars and experts
in Islam, utilizing these false terms, suggest that al Kindi was influenced by
Neo-Platonic philosophers. That's absurd and nonsensical.
The so-called "Ancient Greek
philosophers" are basically Ionians from Anatolia (and not the Balkans, so
unrelated to Europe), who travelled to Babylonia, Egypt and Iran to study in
the local temples-universities-research centers, because there was nothing
equivalent back at home where the tiny local temples were centers of limited
cult and dogmatic ignorance. Whatever idea was attributed to those
'philosophers' is subject to the real and original meaning of the created term:
feeling a sense of inferiority in front of the wisdom of the Ancient
Babylonian, Egyptian, Iranian or Phoenician priests, mystics, scribes,
translators, scientists and wise elders, they did not dare to call themselves
'wise', but 'friends of wisdom' ('philosophia' vs. 'sophia'/wisdom).
When speaking about the so-called
"Ancient Greek philosophers", it is absolutely crucial to bear in
mind that their texts were not properly, honestly and reliably saved and
preserved. There is no text written by any Ionian or (later) Attic philosopher
that dates back to 6th, 5th or 4th c. BCE. Most of their works are lost; of
several books attributed to them by later authors only some excerpts have been
saved as they were quoted by posterior writers; and the few texts, which are 'preserved'
down to our days, were recorded in the 9th, 10th or even 15th c. CE (so 1500 or
even 2000 years after these philosophers died). Even more importantly, it is
critical to point out that those manuscripts were written in geographically very
distant lands that were culturally different, among people who were ethnically-linguistically
dissimilar, by copyists who were spiritually and religiously opposed to all these
philosophers. How trustworthy can this deceitful operation possibly be in terms
of originality, accuracy and truth?
And, to ask the question in reverse
form, why on Earth should a 10th c. Frankish or Irish Catholic monk bother to
"copy a manuscript" of a text written by a pre-Christian Anatolian
thinker
- whose land was located 3000 km
away;
- whose faith had nothing in common
with the Biblical past that the Christians cherished;
- whose language and script were
totally unrelated to Latin or Frankish;
- whose culture and worldview
directly contradicted the Christian faith; and
- whose potential use (by other
monks, priests and few more people able to read) was none?
It makes no sense!
Even more so, since these monks and
scribes had plenty of material to translate and copy, notably the Hebrew Bible,
various Targumim (Aramaic translations of the Old Testament), diverse
translations of the New Testament, and -above all- treatises, speeches, and
other works elaborated by numerous Fathers of the Christian Church in Syriac, Greek,
Coptic, Armenian, Georgian and Ge'ez.
Even worse, the corpus of all these Ancient
Greek philosophical texts (and all the contents, concepts, theories, notions,
assumptions, and conclusions that happen to be therein stated, discussed or
mentioned) -if duly viewed in the light of the meanwhile deciphered, read,
understood, and amply studied Sumerian, Akkadian (Assyrian-Babylonian)
cuneiform, Hittite, Hurrian, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Canaanite Ugaritic,
Phoenician, Aramaean, and Iranian texts (which are all accurately dated as per
the archaeological excavation data)- plainly demonstrates that all the
so-called "Ancient Greek philosophers" either merely reproduced diverse
Ancient Oriental doctrines, worldviews, perceptions of the Divine, and moral
codes or misperceived them in different ways. So, we can conclusively assert
that what is by now senselessly called "Ancient Greek philosophy"
constitutes in fact Ancient Oriental wisdom variably comprehended, partly
understood, slightly misconstrued, totally misunderstood or even mistakenly
overlooked by the intellectuals of Western Anatolia and Southern Balkans.
Now, in addition to the
aforementioned, the fallacious misconstructions "Neo-Platonic
philosophy" and "Neo-Pythagorean philosophy" were generated in
order to supposedly narrate the otherwise nonexistent continuity of the
so-called "Ancient Greek philosophy". As per the respective
assumptions of biased Western scholars, the figurative descendants of Plato and
Pythagoras were the intellectual progeny of Platonism and Pythagoreanism; this
-if true- would simply mean a new stage of reassessment and reevaluation of
Ancient Oriental wisdom, spirituality and science among Greek-reading audience
during the Roman imperial times. But this would certainly be misplaced, because
the tenants of those 'schools' were Oriental mystics, scholars and
intellectuals, who wrote in Ancient Greek in order to diffuse their own
Oriental reinterpretation or reconstitution of the Ancient Oriental
spirituality, moral and wisdom that had largely decayed and been lost.
Look now at the leading figures of
the so-called Neo-Platonists, who are better known due to existing sources!
They are the following:
i- Ammonius Saccas (175-243 CE), an
Egyptian mystic who was by name dedicated to Amun, an Egyptian god;
ii- Plotinus (diminutive of
'Plautus'; 204-270), an Egyptian from Zꜣwtj (Zauti; in Coptic: Sayawt; in
Ancient Greek: Lycopolis; in Arabic: Asyut), 390 km south of Cairo; his most
famous work, the 'Enneads', is a direct allusion to the Ancient Egyptian Iwnw
(: Heliopolitan) religion, spirituality, world conception, system of cosmogony
which were known to the Ancient Macedonians, Ionians and others as 'Ennead'.
iii- Porphyry of Tyre (233-309),
Plotinus' best pupil, loyal follower, and editor of the 'Enneads' was, as
already his conventional appellation suggests, a Phoenician (or Aramaean) from
Tyre (today in Lebanon) whose original name Malchus was typically Semitic.
iv- Iamblichus (245-325), who was
also a pupil of Plotinus, originated from Qinnasrin, near Haleb (Aleppo) in NW
Syria, and represented Aramaean culture and mysticism.
v- Last but not least, Proclus Lycius
(412-485) was a Lycian Anatolian scholar who grew in Xanthus (SW Anatolia) and
later traveled, lived, studied, and taught in many cities, notably Alexandria,
Constantinople and Athens; but he was not 'Greek' and he cannot be called as
'Proclus of Athens', contrarily to what many vicious Western bogus-scholars and
forgers pretend.
There was nothing 'Greek' in all of
them; they were Oriental mystics, scientists, and erudite scholars who wrote in
Greek in order to diffuse Oriental concepts, notions, worldviews, cults,
spiritual sciences, and wisdom among the elites of the Roman Empire.
Considering them as 'Greeks' is as erroneous and as absurd as describing
African American intellectuals as "Anglo-Saxon philosophers".
Similarly erroneous term is the
construct "Hellenistic philosophy", which relates to the so-called
"Hellenistic period", another racist fallacy fabricated by the criminal
colonial academics out of thin air; the term is extremely biased because it
supposedly refers to monuments built and material record -excavated in Western
Asia and Egypt- with Ionian or Attic inscriptions and traces of Ionian,
Macedonian or Attic Art. This was due to the formation of new cities where several
soldiers of Alexander the Great, and of the Epigones, dwelled. This is true
indeed, but the development did not Hellenize the local populations; but quite
contrarily to this development, an unprecedented flood of Oriental cults,
mysticisms, myths, and diverse systems of spirituality prevailed in the
kingdoms of the Seleucids, Ptolemies, Attalids, etc.; in addition, a great
number of Oriental religions, worldviews, cosmologies and eschatologies, behavioral
systems and lifestyles were later diffused throughout the Roman Empire,
removing the old Roman, Macedonian, Ionian and Dorian traditions and
transforming all the European populations into culturally Orientalized nations.
The correct term would therefore be "Orientalistic period" and
"Orientalistic philosophy".
xx- Al Kindi, his example, and his
works
Al Kindi found it necessary to study
many treatises and other opuses of those pre-Islamic Oriental wise men and
erudite writers in order to find ways to effectively refute the anti-Mutazila
arguments of several Muslim theologians. And in doing so, he was very smart; at
the same time, he offered the same possibility to many other Muslim scholars,
scientists, mystics and wise savants who wanted to oppose the ignorance, the
obdurate persistence, and the strict literalism of the traditionalist theologians.
But the typical description that Al Kindi and many others (Avicenna, Ibn Rushd,
etc.) made of the Late Antiquity Oriental mystics and savants was "the philosophy
of the ancients".
Al Kindi covered many scientific
fields, being inventive, innovative, perspicacious and comprehensive in his
consideration of all things spiritual and material. Although he was not the
first Muslim scholar to write about cryptography and al-Khalil (718-791;
Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi), the famous grammarian and linguist from Basra,
was the first to have written about the topic (كتاب المُعَمَّى /Kitab
al-Muamma/
the book of cryptographic messages),
Al Kindi established a method according to which a variation in the procession
of letters, if duly observed, could help break ciphers (which in modern
cryptanalysis is called 'frequency analysis'). In his essay (Risāla fī
Istikhrāj al-Kutub al-Mu'ammāh/ رسالة في استخراج الكتب المعماة /How
to extract the meaning of obscured texts), he explains how to proceed
analytically in the matter.
In his astronomical-astrological
treatises, Al Kindi reveals his conviction that the spiritual and material
universes are inherently intertwined; they therefore interact, and that's why
the celestial bodies influence the humans. Most of his astrological books are
lost, whereas other treatises are saved as fragments or translated in Latin.
Known as Alkindus among Western Europeans, he maintained that the stars are
rational beings, which willingly act as instruments for the worship of God. He
made many predictions, foresaw the collapse of the Caliphate, established
concordances between astronomical signs and Medicine, associated meteorological
conditions to sidereal developments, calculated solar returns (i.e. 'natal
revolutions'), and asserted that every luminous body emits rectilinear rays which
spread everywhere thus filling the universe. He was also versed in Optics, and
his essay on vision was rendered in Latin as 'De Aspectibus'; according to him,
the visual power of the eye transforms the air, which is the medium that stands
between the eye and the object, and it is this 'transformed medium' that allows
the object to be perceived by the eye.
In his
medical treatise that was saved in its Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona
(a 12th c. Italian translator of Arabic books in the libraries of Toledo, which
became part of the Castilian kingdom in 1085) under title 'De Gradibus' (also
known as 'Quia Primos' / the Arabic title being: رسالة في قدر منفعة صناعة الطب/risalatu fi qadr manfaeati sinaeatul
tibi/A treatise on the usefulness of the medical profession), Al Kindi tries to
apply mathematics to Medicine by quantifying the strength of drugs. By assuming
that every simple drug, in which the two opposing qualities -i.e. hot and cold-
are moderate, is thought to possess one part of warmth and one part of coldness,
he quantified the degrees of potential effect that the drugs may have, by
defining the arithmetic progression of the degrees (1nd, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) as actually
hinging on the geometric progression of the number of parts (2, 4, 8 parts of
warmth or coldness, etc.) that is administered for each degree.
Al Kindi's Medical Formulary
(Aqrabadhin), which is not included in Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist, is a collection
of many recipes that may have been attributed to the illustrious scholar
because of his reputation; most of them originate from botanical sources,
whereas few ingredients are taken from animals or derived from minerals. Although
Al Kindi was quite knowledgeable in Alchemy, wrote essays on Chemistry and
Distillation, and also produced a great number of recipes for different perfumes,
he did not believe in the transmutation of metals, which was thought to be the
highest level of this science. In addition, he is credited with having actively
contributed to the diffusion of the Indian system of numeration among Muslims.
He even wrote several groundbreaking treatises on the topic, notably 'A book on
the use of Indian numerals' (كتاب في استعمال الأعداد
الهندية/Kitab fi
Isti'mal al-a'dād al-hindiyyah). Last, he developed a purely mathematical
approach to Spiritual Ontology (which is falsely called 'Metaphysics' today) by
attempting to 'prove' that infinity in actuality is logically and
mathematically absurd, and by pointing out that infinity exists only in
potentiality.
Al Kindi's treatises on music, its
relationship with the universal order, its impact on humans (as form of healing),
and the 'knowledge on the composition of melodies' testify to a
spiritual-material perception of the phenomenon of the sound, the need for
sonar equilibrium, and the reflection of the universe within the human soul.
The same approach to scientific research can also be found in his treatises
about climate and the meteorological phenomena. However, to most Islamic scholars,
scientists and intellectuals, as well as to Medieval Jewish philosophers and
Western thinkers, al Kindi remained as the first savant of the Golden Age of
Islam who tried to prove that divine revelation and human reasoning or
philosophy are two different paths that lead to the Truth.
xxi- Al Farghani
Originating
from the Central Asiatic valley of Ferghana (which belongs today partly to Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) and being of Iranian ancestry, Al-Ferghani (أبو العبّاس أحمد بن محمد
بن كثير الفرغاني
/Abu al-'Abbas Aḥmad
ibn Muḥammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani;
800-870) was an astronomer at the Abbasid court and a distinguished engineer
supervising projects in Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt. His grand opus 'Compendium
of the Science of the Stars' (كتاب في جوامع علم النجوم /Kitab fi Jawami' 'Ilm
al-Nujum/also
known as 'Elements of Astronomy on the celestial motions') included a summary
of the Almagest (a major treatise composed by the Ancient Egyptian astronomer
and geographer Ptolemy in the 2nd c. CE), corrections, modifications, and
improvements made by earlier Muslim astronomers, as well as his own personal
calculations.
Al
Farghani made notable amendments concerning the circumference of the Earth, the
Earth's axial tilt (or obliquity), and the apsides (apogee and perigee) of the
Sun and the Moon. His masterpiece of Islamic Astronomy was translated into
Latin by John of Seville (around 1135) and later by Gerard of Cremona (ca.
1170). Between 1231 and 1235, it was also translated into Hebrew by Jacob
Anatoli, who was invited by Friedrich (Frederick) II to Naples where under the
high patronage he translated from Arabic into Latin and also taught Arabic.
Last, Al Farghani composed several essays on various astronomical instruments,
notably astrolabes, providing at the same time the mathematical basis for the
construction of tools able to function in different meridians, as well as
tables with the necessary data. More than 150 years after the death of the
great astronomer, an even greater, Al Biruni, commented and discussed his
contributions in a lost treatise under the title 'Editing the chapters of Al
Farghani' (تذهيب
فصول الفرغاني/Tahdhib
fuṣul al‐farghani).
xxii-
Al-Mahani, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Al-Battani, the Banu Musa, and Al-Hallaj
Abu-Abdullah
Muhammad ibn Isa Mahani (ابوعبدالله محمد بن عیسی ماهانی; died ca. 880)
was an Iranian astronomer and mathematician, born in Mahan (near Kerman) and
active in Bayt al Hikmah and the Baghdad Observatory around the middle and the
2nd half of the 9th c. He worked on several mathematical problems, wrote
commentaries, and introduced several new terms, thus enriching and updating the
scientific vocabulary of Muslim scholars. Writing
on irrational numbers, he considered integers and fractions as rational
magnitudes and held square and cubic roots as irrational magnitudes. After
defining square roots as plane irrationalities and cubic roots as solid
irrationalities, he determined the sums or differences of these roots as also irrational
magnitudes. Although most of his astronomical treatises are lost, Al-Mahani's
achievements were mentioned by several posterior astronomers; his methods of
calculating the azimuth were used by many other savants of the Golden Age of
Islam and his observations of eclipses and conjunctions were mentioned in zij
(astronomical tables) established by later scientists. He was also credited
with using a solar clock in order to estimate the ascendant.
Hunayn
ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi (known in Arabic as أبو زيد حنين بن إسحاق العبادي /Abu
Zayd Ḥunayn ibn 'Isḥaq al-'Ibadi; 808-873) was a Christian Nestorian
Aramaean scholar, physician, ophthalmologist, and most acclaimed translator,
who became the personal doctor of Caliph al-Mutawakkil; however, this high
distinction did not prove good enough to help him avoid a one-year
imprisonment, because he refused to formulate a lethal poison for the caliph's
enemy. He excelled in the study of vision and the description of the anatomy of
the eye; in his 'Book of the Ten Treatises of the Eye' (kitab al-ashar maqalat
fil-ayn/ كتاب
العشر مقالات في للعين),
he elucidates the function of all parts enabling a human being to have sight
and makes state of the interconnection between the spiritual and the material
parts of every person in this regard. At the very center of the eye, a crystalline
lens links the eye to the brain; the vital part of the soul, which is based in
the heart, rises to the brain, and thence it is adjusted in order to condition
the sight. In other words, for Hunayn it is absolutely impossible for a body to
see without interacting with the soul; it is only due to a) the spiritual
vitality, which is sent from the brain to the eye, and b) the light, which acts
in concordance with the soul, that humans can see what they see.
Hunayn was the student of another
great Christian Nestorian Aramaean scholar, Yuhanna ibn Masawaih (777-857; يوحنا بن ماسويه ), who was the son of a physician and
alchemist active in the illustrious Sassanid University Gundeshapur, before
moving to Baghdad. Fluent in Syriac and many other languages, he translated
extensively. Widely translated into Latin, Yuhanna ibn Masawaih became known in
Western Europe as Janus Damascenus. Hunayn inherited his mentor's love for
translation. He therefore systematized the translation process, establishing
different teams working for specific tasks and prioritizing the accurate
reproduction of the original meaning and the natural phrasing over
word-for-word accuracy. As he was described as the 'master of all translators',
it is not strange that his son, Ishaq ibn Hunayn (830-910), became a fully
accredited translator at the Bayt al Hikmah too.
It goes without saying that Hunayn,
his mentor, and his son, as well as many other Christian Monophysitic or
Nestorian Aramaeans, who actively contributed to the rise of what is
conventionally called 'Islamic Sciences' and Golden Age of Islam, fully and
totally disperse the racist fallacies set up by many American and European
Protestant, Evangelical, and other pseudo-Christians and the historical
forgeries diffused by the paranoid Zionist Christians, who -by means of extreme
distortion- represent the numerous Christian populations of the Islamic realm
as supposedly oppressed or persecuted during the period between the 7th and the
11th c. CE.
That's a devilish lie and a vicious
odium; the Monophysites and the Nestorians made the quasi-totality of the
Christians who lived in the lands governed by Muslim rulers either in Asia or
in Africa. We have therefore to conclude that the highly disastrous conditions,
which prevailed across Eastern Mediterranean because of the barbarian, heinous,
pseudo-Christian, Frankish Crusaders, and their absolutely negative
consequences, which lasted long and were attested within the Ottoman Empire,
cannot be arbitrarily projected onto the Islamic past (before the end of the
11th c. CE) and intentionally generalized, because this consists in foremost
distortion and falsification.
Abu Abd Allah Muḥammad ibn Jabir ibn Sinan al-Raqqi al-Ḥarrani al-Ṣabi'
al-Battani (basically known as Al-Battani;
858-929) was a Sabian Aramaean from Harran, not far from modern Urfa in SE
Turkey (i.e. the great Aramaean capital Urhoy, which was also known as Edessa
of Osrhoene). Extinct only in the 19th c., the Sabians were one Aramaean nation
with totally distinct religion the sacred center of which was located in Eski
Sumatar, SE of Urfa.
Astro-symbolists, monotheists, and forgetful
of their appearance, the Sabians continued the
Assyrian-Babylonian tradition, belief and worldview, which identified the
material world as a reflection of the spiritual universe. Their religious
center encompassed seven circular buildings dedicated to the stars, being
available for both celestial and chthonian types of cults, either around them
or in the caves constructed underneath the architectural structures. Quite bizarrely
for Muslim historiographers of the Golden Age of Islam but very meaningfully
for both, Prophet Muhammad and Ali ibn Abi Taleb, the Sabians were respectfully
labeled as 'People of the Book'; they were thought to have their own holy
scriptures of which no remain has been saved until now. Quite reasonably, the
Sabians were believed to be the best observers of the luminaries and the wisest
connoisseurs of the meaning of their particularities and trajectories. It was
not therefore strange that Al-Battani found easily his position among Baghdad's
leading astronomers and astrologers.
Working mainly in Raqqa, in today's
NE Syria, where he established an observatory, Al-Battani continued the
pre-Islamic Aramaean scholarly tradition, even more so since his father was a
technician who produced astronomical instruments; this must have been the
reason of his rather nominal adhesion to Islam, because it is evident that for
people of such caliber, silly theological prescriptions and absurd descriptions
are only worthless distortions of the truth. Quoted by later Muslim astronomers
and widely translated by Western Europeans, he was a leading mathematician who
introduced the use of sines and tangents in geometrical calculations,
discovered trigonometric formulas, solved equations, defined relationships, and
developed equations enabling the calculation and the establishment of tables of
tangents and cotangents. He also produced an equation for finding the qiblah
(the direction that Muslims take when praying), which was however superseded by
a more accurate calculation invented by Al Biruni one century later.
Excellent astronomer following the
geocentric model of the universe, Al-Battani employed his father's dexterity in
creating correct astronomical instruments, made groundbreaking observations,
improved Ptolemy's measurements, obtained a value for the precession of the
equinoxes (1 degree every 66 years), and understood that this occurrence
altered the annual motion of the Sun through the zodiacs.
He wrote several treatises in
Mathematics and in Astronomy, as well as discourses, essays, and commentaries, but
his Zij (Book of Sabian Astronomical Tables/Kitab az-Zij as-Sabi/ كتاب الزيج الصابئ), composed around 900 CE, consists in a
masterpiece of Islamic Astronomy; it comprised of numerous astronomical tables,
which were established on the basis of earlier Sassanid Iranian, Indian, and
Egyptian (Ptolemy the Geographer) material, at times rectified, and of
Al-Battani's own observations. The appended texts contained instructions as to
how to use the tables. According to Ibn Nadim, the Sabian master released two
editions of Zij, and the second was the best. The book was translated into
Latin in the 12th century and in Spanish in the 13th century; the author's name
was Latinized as Albategnius.
The Banu Musa ('the sons of Musa') is
a conventional term used collectively for three Iranian brothers, who were all
employed in the Bayt al Hikmah and the court of the caliph in Baghdad as
leading scholars in Mathematics, Astronomy, and Engineering; named after their
father, Musa ibn Shakir (who was the personal astrologer of Caliph al Ma'mun),
Muhammad ibn Musa, Ahmad ibn Musa, and Al-Hasan ibn Musa (in order of
seniority) lived during the 9th c., were prolific writers, and invented a great
number of fascinating devices. Only three of their twenty (20) books are
preserved; however, the titles, the contents, and commentaries about them are
abundant in texts written by posterior Muslim scholars.
Not only did they form a large group
of worldwide leading scientists and erudite scholars -along with Hunayn ibn
Ishaq, Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ibn Maṭar (a famous translator), Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, al-Khwarizmi,
and al-Kindi- but they also traveled across the Caliphate in order to
effectuate different projects, being also dispatched to Constantinople in order
to acquire manuscripts that were necessary for their research. They produced
armillary spheres and other astronomic instruments; they carried out extensive
astronomical observations in various part of the vast state, also effectuating
concurrent stargazing from faraway locations.
Some of the titles of their
treatises are quite indicative: the 'Kitab bayyana fihi bi-ṭariq ta'limi wa-madhhab handasi annahu laysa fi kharij kurat al-kawakib al-thabitah kurah tasi'ah'
(كتاب
بيّن فيه بطريق تعليمي ومذهب هندسي أنه ليس في خارج قرة الكواكب الثابتة قرة تاسعة /Book
on the mathematical proof by geometry that there is not a ninth sphere outside
the sphere of the fixed stars), which is by now lost, constitutes a stark and
full refutation of Ptolemy's assumption that there might be a ninth celestial sphere,
which would be (as per the Egyptian astronomer's assumptions) responsible for
the motion of the heavens. The author of the treatise, Ahmed Ibn Musa,
contended that all the stars moved, as independent spiritual and material
beings, of their own free will.
The Banu Musa became principally
known in Western Europe thanks to their 'Book on the measurement of plane and
spherical figures' (Kitab ma'rifat masaḥat al-ashkal al-basiṭah
wa-al-kuriyah / كتاب
معرفة مساحة الأشكال البسيطة والكريّة)
that was translated into Latin in the 12th c. by Gerard of Cremona, who knew
their biographical details and he therefore selected the descriptive title
"Liber trium fratrum", i. e. 'the book of three brothers'); this book
was extensively commented by Nasir al din al Tusi in the 13th c., and
quoted-discussed by plenty of Muslim and Western European scholars. The three
great savants translated astronomical and mathematical treatises from Chinese
into Arabic in an effort to encompass all the previous major scientific schools
and traditions, namely Egyptian, Babylonian-Aramaean, Iranian-Turanian, Indian
and Sinic, and to integrate them in a unified framework, as a universal
patchwork of human knowledge, research, exploration, and wisdom.
For modern readership, the most
spectacular treatise of the Banu Musa is certainly the 'Book of ingenious
devices' (Kitab al hiyal/ كتاب الحيل; in Farsi: كتاب ترفندها
/Kitab tarfand-ha, lit. 'Book of the tricks'); this constitutes an impressive
collection of about 100 diverse innovative devices and engineering inventions.
Modern scholars believe that only
one fourth of them can have a practical use, but at the same time, they fail to
realize that all these concepts, engineering ideas, various automata, inventive
designs, mechanisms, and textual descriptions were viewed at the time as
"tricks"; in other words, the Persian title of the book was
meaningful. This already suggests a visibly negative reception of all these items
by the faithful and the spiritually sound people of those days. This is so
because they believed and knew that the human being since the Creation was fully
capacitated to achieve far more impressive and astounding acts than these petty
tricks and trivial schemes that the Banu Musa materialized and presented.
Actually, during the Golden Age of
Islam, it was not quite well known why they undertook this effort and what
their real target was; utilitarianism is attributed to their inventions only by
modern scholars, who exist only to endlessly and uselessly praise the modern
Western science in a most unilateral, intentional, and sectarian manner. But
there is no textual evidence of scholarly admiration from those days. It would
therefore pertinent to deduce that the grand opus was mainly the result of
- eventual lengthy discussions and
interpolations among them,
- their meticulous examination of
the material feasibility of such projects,
- their desire to captivate the
caliph and his guests, and
- their exuberant scholarly pride.
Two critical realities are certain
in this regard:
a- whereas there were many ingenious
Muslim scholars, who lived, searched, wrote, taught and delivered
groundbreaking results over the next 600 years (down to the middle of the 15th
c., notably in Timurid Samarqand), few among them showed an interest in
expanding the advance made, and in engaging in the path opened, by the Banu
Musa; for example, it is quite interesting why Al Biruni, 150 years later, did
not bother to continue in the footsteps of the three brothers. But the foolish
and pathetic Western scholars did not bother to examine the issues closely,
because they want to always pretend that modern science is by definition
beneficial -which is an absurdity.
and
b- soon there would appear an
epic-literary and mystical 'response' to those unwise engineering marvels
invented by the three brothers. In Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, a most intriguing character,
the outlandish Iranian Kayanian King Kay Kavus, would devise a magnificent
flying throne and undertake a fabulous flight to China, only to face a
disastrous fall and be saved at the very last moment by Rustam, the ultimate
personification of the Divine Grace.
As I cannot further expand on this
point, I want to make clear that such inventions, either in the case of the
Banu Musa or with respect to Ismail al-Jazari 300 years later, must be dealt
with skepticism and not enthusiasm. Saved in several copies among which the
best preserved are at the Vatican Library, the Berlin State Library, and the
Topkapi Sarayi (Palace) in Istanbul, the 'Book of ingenious devices' comprises plans,
designs and descriptions for non-manual (automatic) cranks, automatic one-way
and two-way valves, mechanical fountains, pouring vessels, grabbing tools,
funnels with bent end, double-concentric siphons, mechanical musical
instruments, delay systems, timing devices, water dispensers for hot and cold
water with both outlets alternating, a form of gas mask for underground use, devices
capable of responding to feedback, self-trimming and self-feeding lamps, mechanical
memories, hurricane lamps, and diverse combinations of pneumatics and
aerostatics.
Mansour al-Hallaj (ابو المغيث الحسين بن منصور
الحلاج /Abu 'l-Mughith
al-Husayn ibn Manṣur al-Hallaj; 858-922) was a leading mystic,
poet, and spiritual master far more important than the theologians, the hadith
collectors, and the muftis who gathered around the impotent caliph of Baghdad
during the late 9th and the early 10th c. CE in order to flatter him and
acquire higher social status in the process. Best known for defining himself
with the words 'I am the Truth' ('Ana 'l-Ḥaqq), Al-Hallaj was one of the
Islamic world's most controversial champions. This is so because many heinous religious
scoundrels accused him for laying claim to divinity, whereas contrarily to
them, the true Muslims realized that the audacious and portentous visionary,
when stating this, only described his personal achievement of fully
annihilating his ego (or character or person) – which is «condicio sine qua non»
for every human willing to fathom the Truth.
Al Hallaj is a historical person to
whom the historical reality, the mystification, and the mythologization
converged so forcefully that it is almost impossible for impartial observers to
extract an exact and accurate understanding of what happened to him, his
followers, his admirers, and his enemies.
Describing him as a Sunni Muslim is
preposterous and misleading. He was not a Mutazilite by all means; that's for
sure. For the miracles he was able to perform and for the wording of his
sentences, we can comprehend that Mu'tazila rationalism was sheer absurdity to
him.
There were no 'Sunni' and no 'Shia'
at those days; as I already explained this is a modern construct. There were
people, who viewed Islam as divine revelation, but it would be wrong to label
them 'Shia', because the term is valid only for the times of Ali ibn Abi Taleb.
More importantly, they did not designate themselves in this manner.
And there were people afraid for
their petty lives up to the point of distorting and rationalizing the divinely
sent book (Al Qur'an), as well as the speeches of Prophet Muhammad and the
narratives about him (Hadith). By so doing, they reduced their religion to mere
theology and they diminished the eternal, moral prescriptions to silly, strict
rules formulated in a way that pleased villainous rulers and execrable
usurpers. Accepting the material order above the divine calling is the exact
opposite of Islam.
Among the people who wholeheartedly
accepted Islam as divine revelation, one can distinguish, starting at the end
of the 8th c. CE, two different categories of faithful Muslims:
a- those who identified salvation
within an eschatological context and specified the forthcoming Savior as a descendent
of Prophet Muhammad and Ali ibn Abi Taleb (those are mistakenly called 'Shia'
by Western colonialists and by their foolish puppets, i.e. the outright majority
of today's demented Muslims);
and
b- those who viewed salvation as
result of mystical efforts within esoteric or personal context, involving
abstinence and celibacy, explorations, spiritual exercises, and eventually (but
not obligatorily) a mystic as spiritual guide. This particular approach to
spiritual-material life is called Tasawwuf; the term was distorted in modern
times as "Sufism", which can be all things to all people (like so
many other ludicrous -isms) and must therefore be rejected. Consequently, the
term "Sufi" is a totally fallacious construct that must not be used.
As true believers, all those, who
identified salvation within eschatological context, practiced spiritual
exercises as well and they lived experiencing mystical revelations of personal
order. That's why the Western Orientalist forgers generated false terms, such
as "Sunni Sufi" and "Shia Sufi" in order to deliberately
produce common ground among those, who maintained no eschatological
expectations, and to thus portray the so-called Sunnis as Muslims. The term
"Sunni Sufi" is an oxymoron. Spirituality, as transcendental life, is
the opposite of theology, which constitutes -within Islam- real death and
faithlessness.
Al-Hallaj was an Iranian originating
from a sacerdotal family of SE Mesopotamia; as a Muslim child, he memorized the
Quran at 12, becoming thus a 'hafiz'; he studied spirituality and religion with
several mystics, notably Junayd of Baghdad, performed hajj, and decided to
abandon his tariqa (mystical order or esoteric group), because he did not agree
with his master. He then traveled extensively to Khorasan (today's NE Iran and
the southern parts of Central Asia); he practiced asceticism, which he fully
identified with 'Jihad' (holy war against one's own sins, passions, desires,
thoughts, and personal feelings), and he consciously erected Islamic
monasteries for ascetic fighters willing to practice spiritual exercises and
reconnect with their souls. It was a novelty for the entire Muslim world, but
the dreadful end of his life cancelled the perspective. Celibacy and asceticism
existed throughout the Islamic Ages, but never in organized form (like the
Eastern Roman monasteries); all the same, many Muslim saints were hermits for
several years of their lives.
It is certain that, after acquiring
some spiritual potency, he was able to perform miracles – a faculty that would
not be appreciated by many different segments of the multiethnic, multilingual,
and multicultural society that was the then Abbasid realm.
The miracles performed by Al-Hallaj
could not possibly be acceptable by
a- the ruling family, the social
elite, and the military officers,
b- the scientists, erudite savants,
translators and researchers, who -contrarily to him- did not have a direct
contact with the popular masses,
c- the Muslim theologians, who had
reduced religion into a bogus-educational system geared to ensure social status
stability to them and spiritual death to their followers,
d- those who identified salvation
within eschatological context and specified the forthcoming Savior as
descendent of Prophet Muhammad and Ali ibn Abi Taleb,
f- the followers of all the other
religions, notably Zoroastrianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitic/Miaphysitic
Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc., and
g- many people who wanted to calmly
live their lives, disregarding the spiritual world.
Embarrassed because of the great
number of his followers, many accused him of sorcery, pacts with demons and
other spiritual beings, subordination to Evil, etc. His second hajj was
apparently an opportunity for him to clash with a great number of people,
notably all those who -irrespective of their religious, intellectual, and
social background- desired to continue living in the way they did. We therefore
understand that immorality for Al-Hallaj had become tantamount to voluntary or
thoughtless disconnection from one's soul. Consequently, we can safely deduce
that his Central Asiatic asceticism was impregnated with concepts related to a)
criticism of the social order and b) rejection of the urban life. He then
undertook his life's major quest and travel, which apparently was a spiritually
inquisitive expedition throughout India and Turkestan.
After his return to Mecca (third
hajj) and Baghdad, his life's last two decades were a period of extreme
turmoil, incessant persecution, and constant confinement. Al Hallaj must be the
only person in the History of Islam, who performed hajj with a Hindu loincloth
and a patched garment. His ambivalent and inscrutable utterances, which are
often mentioned as reason for his arrest and his brutal execution, date from
that period. We cannot be sure about the correct and genuine reproduction of
his words, because in such cases one word more or less changes entirely the
meaning. It appears that he so much reviled urban life and human congregation
in urban agglomerations that he may have believed that, in and by itself, civic
life, community engagement, and social order constituted the real «mater omnium
peccatorum» (the mother of all sins).
This conclusion is what interprets
best the utterances which insinuate that he preferred to be killed by the
senseless people of his community. However, if this is true, Al Hallaj
constituted a unique and unprecedented threat (not for the Islamic world but)
for all human communities of all time. The fact that he never called for a
rebellion or an upsurge of any sort shows that he had clearly understood that
no society can be potentially rectified, because the real problem is the human
society itself. In other words, his atypical anachoretism may have helped him
realize that the terminal end of all eschatologies cannot be other than the
return to the Paradise before the Fall; but there is no -and there cannot be
any- 'society'.
Al Hallaj was disastrous for all
those, who identified salvation within eschatological context and specified the
forthcoming Savior as descendent of Prophet Muhammad and Ali ibn Abi Taleb;
although these people were fully correct in their demands, struggle, and faith,
the real problem of human life after the Fall was far beyond all issues related
to the time of Prophet Muhammad.
The truth is that these people had
also been divided among themselves; after the death of Ja'far as-Sadiq, his
followers were split into those, who accepted Musa al Kadhim (745-799 CE) as
the seventh Imam, and those, who accepted Isma'il ibn Ja'far (722-775 CE; an
elder half-brother of Musa al Kadhim) as the seventh Imam (and by so doing,
they identified him as the Savior/Al Mahdi); however, the followers of Musa al
Kadhim did not identify him as the Mahdi, therefore expecting one of his
descendants to be the long awaited Savior.
The above brief description gives
only a very modest idea about the eschatological divisions that characterized
those Muslims. There were others, who -although they accepted Isma'il ibn
Ja'far- viewed him as the sixth Imam, because they did not count Hasan ibn Ali
as the second imam, considering him only as 'temporary' (mustawda/ المستودع); furthermore, there were people, who
viewed Isma'il ibn Ja'far as the sixth Imam, because they considered Ali ibn
Abi Taleb as Asas (الأساس; Foundation of the New Era) and Prophet
Muhammad as the Natiq (الناطِق; Proclaimer of the New Era). This means that
the divisions were not due to personal differences, but involved key conceptual
divergences and distinct interpretations of the phenomenon of Islam.
There were also many who
-considering Isma'il ibn Ja'far as the sixth Imam- accepted his son, Muhammad
ibn Isma'il (740-813 CE), as the Savior/Al Mahdi. The latter group became known
as Qarmatians; they were so dynamic and so strong that they set up a distinct
religious state of purely eschatological vocation. By identifying the Zanj
Rebellion (869-893 CE) in Basra as an excellent opportunity, the Qarmatians
seceded from the already collapsed caliphate and, originally based in Bahrain
and Qatar, invaded al-Hasa (NE Saudi Arabia) in 899 CE. There they formed a
rebellious religious society of eschatological aspirations, because they were impatiently
expecting Muhammad ibn Isma'il to come out of hiding and save the world; the
Qarmatian state lasted for almost two centuries (from 899 until 1077).
This was the fragmented situation in
which the Islamic realm lived when Al Hallaj had realized that the problem lay
elsewhere. It was easy therefore for those, who accepted Musa al Kadhim
(745-799 CE) as the seventh Imam, to accuse an outlandish and otherworldly mystic
known for his eccentric utterances as Qarmatian. The fact that Al Hallaj had
performed hajj three times, whereas the Qarmatians prohibited the hajj as a
useless ritual and repeatedly ambushed hajj caravans, did not and could not
possibly matter under those circumstances.
Al Hallaj was condemned to death in
922 CE only because in one of his utterances, he stated the following: «one
true believer circumambulates seven times the Kaaba of his heart». It sounds
quite ironical, but only five years after his excruciating death (in 927 CE),
the Qarmatian army invaded Iraq and they were about to capture Baghdad, whereas
three years later (in 930 CE), during the sack of Mecca and Medina, they tore
down the Kaaba, desecrated the Zamzam well with killed corpses, and carried the
Black Stone off for ransom that the otherwise useless Abbasid caliph paid an
enormous amount of money to get it back two decades later.
Al Hallaj was 16 years old when the
Eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari (844-874) died; his son, Abu al Qassim Muhammad
ibn al-Askari, the Twelfth Imam (identified as the Mahdi), was only six (6)
years old (being born in 868 CE) and until then totally unknown to the public. His
existence was announced for the first time by Uthman ibn Sa'id al-Asadi (the
first of the four successive representatives through whom the Twelfth Imam was
said to have communicated with the faithful Muslim community) immediately after
the death of Hasan al-Askari. According to several traditions, the only time
Muhammad ibn al-Askari appeared in public was the funeral of his father where
he led the funeral prayer. His life until 941 CE was therefore defined as Minor
Occultation (al-Ghayba al-Ṣughra/ الغيبة الصغرى) because from the age of 6 until he reached 73, he lived among
people, being though unidentified and unknown, and guided the faithful and
their affairs only though his deputies.
One can therefore maintain that
either Al Hallaj lived at the time of the Minor Occultation of the Twelfth Imam
or that Abu al Qassim Muhammad ibn al-Askari lived at the time of Al Hallaj; no
less than 19 years after the latter died, the former started his Major
Occultation (الغيبة
الكبرى
/ al-Ghayba al-Kubra), namely a very
long period of mystical existence during which he does not communicate with the
faithful through deputies. Having disappeared from the cellar of his family
home in Samarra (Central Iraq), which contains the well of the Occultation
(currently accommodated within a mosque constructed in that location), the
Twelfth Imam set in motion the clock of the End Times which start with his
reappearance.
However, back at those days, Al
Hallaj experienced already what all the people will finally learn when Muhammad
ibn al-Askari appears finally in public; but in the tumultuous ordeal of their
days, the two extraordinary men undoubtedly constituted the only poles of
serenity in a tormented world: the former due to his interminable and eccentric
utterances and the latter because of his absolute and concentric silence. All
the same, we now understand that the great mystic knew very well that every
sound corresponds to a line and, by pronouncing the words and the letters that
he did, he generated Truth-emitting signs that exist until all things end.
xxiii- Al Tabari
Abu Ja'far
Muḥammad ibn Jarir ibn Yazid al-Ṭabari or (as in modern bibliography) simply Tabari
(839-923 CE; أبو
جعفر محمد بن جرير بن يزيد الطبري)
is the foremost historian of the Islamic World, and his Tarikh (History) is the
standard multi-voluminous text that covers best the first three centuries of
Islam (the grand opus was completed in 915 CE); furthermore, he was a leading
hermeneutic theologian (a 'mufassir'; مفسّر) and author of the first and the most important Tafsir (تفسير; i.e. 'interpretation', often called 'Commentary' in modern
languages) of the Qur'an. In addition, he was the founder of the most important
madhhab (school of systematic Islamic jurisprudence), which however did not survive
down to modern times.
Born in Amol, i.e. the part of the
southern seashore of the Caspian Sea that is called Tabaristan, Tabari was an
Iranian Muslim who studied at home, then in Ray (Rhages, east of Tehran) and
later in Baghdad (at the age of 17), Basra, and Kufah. He focused on History,
Islamic Theology, Hermeneutics, and Law, meticulously investigating the various
differences among the then already established Shafi'i, Maliki and Zahiri madhhab;
at this point, it has to be noticed that his formation was effectuated within the
Hanafi madhhab. Extinct after the 15th c., the Zahiri School of jurisprudence
was founded by the Iranian scholar Dawud al Zahiri (815-883), but prospered
mostly in Andalusia thanks to a prominent scholar, Ibn Hazm (994-1064), who was
one of its most important adherents and champions.
Tabari was a leading critical mind,
an adamant moralist, an avid explorer, and an investigative researcher who
always loved passionately the object of his study and endeavor; he became a
tutor at 19 and, despite his connections with very influential administrators
like Ubayd Allah ibn Yahya ibn Khaqan, he always managed to keep himself
distant from the state authorities. He traveled extensively to India, Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt, also effectuating a brief passage from Hejaz.
Tabari elaborated his monumental
Tafsir in his thirties and early forties; result of his mature age, the
fundamental opus that needed 30 volumes (plus an extra volume as index) to be
published in the Cairo edition (1902-1903 - in Arabic; reprinted in 1984) was
completed in 883. As he also relied on the hadith (for his interpretation of
the Quran), he also included the chains of narrations (isnad; اِسْناد) for each hadith, i.e. the names of
persons who transmitted the hadith through the generations that followed one
another since the days of Prophet Muhammad. As an impartial scholar and a shrewd
historian, Tabari included many Isra'iliyat in his Tafsir. This term (إسرائیلیات;
'Israelisms') denotes the use of non-Islamic sources, made by a Muslim scholar.
This is quite pertinent, but modern pseudo-Muslim Saudi and other theologians
viciously oppose the practice because of their barbarism, heinous heart, and
evil mind.
It is essential to understand the
central role that the Isra'iliyat occupy in the History of Islamic hermeneutics
(Tafsir) and historiography (Tarikh); I do insist on this point, because after
the Crusades and due to the negative impression that they generated among
various Muslims, a reaction against the Isra'iliyat started being expressed as
an absurd line of self-defense, gradually gaining momentum as a form of Islamic
isolationism, and therefore sectarianism, radicalism and terrorism.
As it is well known, Islam emerged
in a region filled with numerous Jewish and Christian denominations, Gnostic
faiths, and many other religions. All the stories about pre-Muhammadan prophets
mentioned in either the Qur'an or the Hadith were more extensively narrated in
the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Talmud and other opuses of Rabbinic
Judaism (Midrash, Mishnah, etc.), the Fathers of the Christian Church, Christian
Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, as well as the numerous texts of Gnostic
literature. All these stories were already known to the Arabs of Hejaz to some
extent; the cousin of Khadija, prophet Muhammad's first wife, was a
Monophysitic Christian able to read Syriac Aramaic, and apparently he had some
lectionaries at home. It was therefore quite normal for all early Muslims to
resort to similar stories that they had heard from the aforementioned sources,
when a verse of the Quran or a speech of prophet Muhammad concerned anything
related to those reports.
This fact generated an early circle
of Islamic theological literature, which is called Qisas al-Anbiya (قصص الانبياء; stories of prophets); not much of all
these popular and simple stories survived, except for the names of narrators
(qussas), who used to be paid for the purpose of storytelling in mosques and
elsewhere. Several names of qussas are saved because they were mentioned by many
Islamic historians, like Tabari and many others before and after him: Abdullah ibn Salam, Ka'b
al-Aḥbar, Wahb ibn Munabbih, and others
who lived in the 7th c. CE.
Tabari's Tafsir was posthumously
translated from Arabic to Farsi at the time of the Samanid Shahanshah Mansur I,
who ruled from 961 to 976; the translation was effectuated at the same time
with the translation of Tabari's History by Bal'ami, which was also sponsored
by the Iranian revivalist ruler of the Samanid Iranianate.
Tabari's History of the Prophets and
Kings (تاريخ
الرسل والملوك;
Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk) is not only a monumental work that took 40 volumes
and an international team of academics to be translated into English (progressively
between 1985 and 1999, with the Index added in 2007; by the State University of
New York/SUNY) but it also constitutes a revolutionary attempt in the History
of Historiography.
By using the typical method of
publishing hadith, i. e. by naming every isnad (chain of names of persons who
transmitted the information through the generations that followed one another
since the days of Prophet Muhammad) in support of one or another account of an event,
Tabari definitely eliminated the personal character from the narrative, thus
making the overall presentation objective, neutral, impersonal and unbiased. By
definition, History is not what pleases the fancy of a prejudiced forger;
History is not untrustworthy hearsay; and History is not the obscure gossip or
the unverified rumors that fallacious authors mention without however stating
their sources.
By
presenting his material in the form of Annals (i.e. in chronological order, one
year after the other), Tabari followed the millennia long Assyrian-Babylonian,
Egyptian, Hittite, and Iranian imperial practice of Annals (or Chronicles) of
which we find a reminiscence in the Old Testament Books of Kings and Chronicles,
and in the rather failed efforts of the Macedonians and the Romans (Res Gestae
Divi Augusti, Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis, Res gestae by Ammianus
Marcellinus, etc.).
Tabari's
History is reminiscent of Eastern Roman Chronographies, notably that of
Theophanes the Confessor (759-817 CE) or the even earlier Chronicon Paschale
(that ends with the 17th year of the reign of Heraclius) in the sense that it
constituted a Universal History starting with the Creation of the World. All
the same, the above description is incomplete.
As a
matter of fact, being a wise savant and a leading mystic, who went through
thousands if not dozens of thousands of material sources while also preserving
an accurate sense and a comprehensive perception of the spiritual universe,
Tabari starts his grand opus -immediately after the invocation of God and the
introduction- with the following questions (as per the aforementioned English
translation) that he poses to himself, before giving the answers and expanding
on the topics. I include them here because they speak for themselves:
«- What is
time?
- How long
is its total extent?
- Its
first beginning and final end
- Whether
before God's creation of (time) there was anything else
- Whether
it will suffer annihilation and whether after its annihilation there will be
something other than the face (wajh) of the Highly praised, the Exalted Creator
- What was
it that was before God's creation of time and what will be after its final
annihilation?
- How did
God's creation of it begin and how will its annihilation take place?
- Proof
that there is nothing eternal except God unique and powerful, to Whom belongs
the kingdom of the heavens and the earth and what is between them and what is
underneath the soil».
A conventional
academic would easily make of Tabari a philosopher of History but this would be
misplaced; Iranian wisdom has nothing to do with the verbosity of Western
philosophers. And Tabari's 'proofs for the origination of momentary and extended
time' fully demonstrate, as living survival of Zurvanism, that doctrine, cult
and wisdom were inextricably intertwined in all the pre-Islamic and
pre-Christian Oriental religions,
The
Universal History of Tabari may well be the greatest historical masterpiece of
the Islamic world, but essentially it is an Iranian History for which Iran is
the center of the world. This concerns the pre-Islamic and the Islamic times
that the majestic opus was written to narrate; historical developments are
viewed from a standpoint that makes of Mesopotamia and Iran the region around
which revolves the surface of the Earth. Central Asia, the Caucasus region,
Eastern Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, Egypt, Arabia, Yemen, and India constitute
the nearest periphery of Tabari's narratives. Beyond those regions, Tabari's
Tarikh offers little space to China, the Bilad as-Sudan ('Land of the Black';
i.e. Africa), the Maghreb, the Eastern Roman Empire, Macedonia, Rome, and
Islamic Andalusia. This approach was quite regular; several other Muslim
historians of the same period presented their treatises in a similar manner:
Ibn Habib, Al Ya'qubi, al Baladhuri, Ibn A'tham al-Kufi, etc.
The fact
that, although of Hanafi formation, Tabari felt obliged to launch his own
madhhab, which became known as the Jariri school of Fiqh (after Tabari's
patronym), shows the futility of the Islamic jurisprudence and the negative
role that it was left to play in the History of the Islamic societies and
states. Tabari rejected the qiyas (قياس), the shameful process of 'legal analogy' that became the
reason of many injustices and more absurdities in the Islamic world. As an
uncompromising moralist, Tabari gave priority to integrity in judgment and
ijtihad (اجتهاد), i.e. mental acumen and reasoning.
It was
therefore only normal that a great scholar and exemplary jurist (mujtahid) like
Tabari came to direct confrontation with the rascals, who followed the silly
ideas of the ignorant collector of hadith Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855 CE). It is
clear that for Tabari that individual was incapable of understanding Fiqh and
unable to set up a madhhab. It became then very clear how the detrimental lack
of education leads to exponential fanaticism and active terrorism. The idiotic
followers of the impostor Ahmad ibn Hanbal were enraged with Tabari because of
his moral, academic, and spiritual superiority and, being conscious of their
abysmal inferiority, attacked and stoned his home, forcing the police to
intervene, restore the public order, and extend permanent protection to Tabari.
The opportunity of public debate was offered and Tabari accepted it, but the
barbarian Hanbali terrorists did not dare to take the challenge.
The early 10th c. story of the few
Hanbali terrorists is quite instructive; it shows that if the evil is not
uprooted timely, it spreads and destroys everything. How many were these
inhuman monsters whose distorted idea of Islam was tantamount to odium of all
those who rightfully rejected them? A few thousands, at the most! It would be
far better for the Islamic Caliphate to exterminate them all than to allow them
survive. The problem was that the state did not function anymore outside
Baghdad and Central Iraq because, practically speaking, almost all the
provinces had seceded with the progressive emergence of the Iranianates and
other realms.
The Fatimids in Northwestern Africa,
the Tulunids in Egypt, the Ziyadids, the Yu'firids, and the first Zaydi imamate
in Yemen, the Qarmatians in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, the
Samanids in NE Iran and Central Asia, the Saffarids in Central and Eastern Iran,
the Alavids in Tabaristan, the Sajids and the Sallarids in the Caucasus region
had already diminished the authority of the caliph, put sizeable swaths of land
under control, and revived Iranian traditions and faiths. Among them no one would
possibly care about the few mad dogs that Ahmad ibn Hanbal had left behind. But
this is how the inhuman, monstrous, and impermissible state of Saudi Arabia
exists nowadays and how it infested the Muslim world with its idiotic
bogus-Muslims and repugnant terrorists.
xxiv- Ahmad ibn
Fadhlan and the diffusion of Islam among the peoples of Russia
Ahmad ibn Fadlan (أحمد بن فضلان بن العباس بن
راشد بن حماد البغدادي/
Ahmad ibn Fadlan ibn al-Abbas ibn Rashid ibn Hammad al-Baghdadi; end of 9th c.–middle
of 10th c. CE) was a theologian and an Islamic jurist in the Abbasid court at
Baghdad at least at the time of Caliph al-Muqtadir (reign: 908-932 CE);
apparently, he would never write any text (other than eventual essays of minor
importance) and he would never be historically known, if the elteber (Turanian
title used to designate a vassal ruler of a realm) Almış of Volga Bulgaria did
not sent an envoy to Baghdad, soliciting the assistance of the caliph for the
conversion of his people in Islam, the introduction of pertinent Islamic
education in his country, and the construction of a mosque in his capital Bolghar
(Болгар; بلغار). The caliph responded positively and, two
years before Tabari's death, i.e. in 921, a diplomatic delegation left Baghdad
with Ahmad ibn Fadhlan as one of its members.
Due to the investigative
mentality, the inquisitive culture, and the passion for exploration that
prevailed across the Muslim world at the time of the Golden Age of Islam, while
traveling from Baghdad to Bolghar, during his stay in the capital of Almış, and
in the course of the return trip, Ahmad ibn Fadlan observed, became familiar with,
and took notes about the everyday life, the faiths, and the traditions of the
different nations that lived in all those northern lands where Islam had never
been diffused; he also gathered plenty of information about the relations among
all those realms; and he finally wrote an absolutely fascinating account
(risalah/ رسالة) due to which he was immortalized. It is
essential to understand the nature of the contents of Ahmad ibn Fadlan's
report; he did not write in order to boast for having diffused Islam, for
fighting for his faith or for performing "jihad" in order to murder
infidels. His understanding of Islam, which was true, genuine and correct, was
at the antipodes of today's fake Islam of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Egypt,
Turkey and all the other ignorant, infidel and useless societies of hatred,
hypocrisy, and bias.
The complete title of
the report reads as per below:
«A letter from Ahmed
bin Fadlan bin Al-Abbas bin Rashid bin Hammad: Describing the journey to the
lands of the Turks, Khazars, Russians, and Saqlabis»
(«رسالة أحمد بن فضلان بن
العبَّاس بن راشد بن حمَّاد: في وصف الرحلة إلى بلاد الترك والخزر والروس
والصقالبة»).
The fascinating report
describes the path of the entire travel, which was completely different from
what modern travelers would imagine or make between Baghdad in Iraq and Bolghar
(ca. 970 km east of Moscow and about 180 km south of Kazan) in Russia. Instead
of crossing Eastern Anatolia (in today's Turkey), Caucasus, and the plains of
Russia, the diplomatic delegation moved eastwards/northeastwards; they crossed
the Zagros Mountains and, through Hamadan (Ecbatana), Ray (Rhagae), Neyshapur,
and Merv, they reached Bukhara; there they changed direction and, proceeding
northwards/northwestwards alongside the Amu Darya (Oxus) River, they traversed
the lands between the Aral Lake and the Caspian Sea. Advancing in the same
direction in-between the lands of the Pechenegs (to the west) and the area of
the Bashkirs (to the east), they reached Bolghar.
The report of Ahmad ibn
Fadlan was extensively quoted by Yaqut, an Eastern Roman captive who later became
a major Muslim traveler, explorer, geographer, historian, and ethnographer (1179-1229;
Yaqut Shihab al-Dīn ibn-Abdullah
al-Rumi al-Ḥamawi).
However, the great Bashkir revolutionary, scholar, liberation movement leader,
and author Zeki Velidi Togan (1890-1970), when in Mashhad (NE Iran) in 1923,
found -in the local Astane Quds Museum- a 13th c. manuscript (Razawi Library MS
5229) that has an almost complete version of the "Risalah".
Irrespective of the
delegation dispatched to Bolghar, thanks to which Volga Bulgaria became Islamic
66 years before Kievan Rus became Christian (when Prince Vladimir was baptized;
988 CE), the report elaborated by Ahmad ibn Fadlan is only one of the early
Islamic sources about the peoples of Northern Asia or NE Europe. Geographers
like Ibn Khordadbeh (825-913; ابوالقاسم عبیدالله ابن خردادبه /Abu
'l-Qasim Ubaydallah ibn Abdallah ibn Khordadbeh) and Ahmad ibn Rustah Isfahani
(احمد
ابن رسته اصفهانی),
who also lived in the 10th c. CE, left impressive treatises and reports of
their long voyages, astounding encounters, conscientious investigations, and accumulated
geographical knowledge.
Ibn Khordadbeh's 'Book
of Roads and Kingdoms' (كتاب المسالك والممالك /Kitab
al-Masalik wa-l-Mamalik) presents the quasi-totality of Asia with unprecedented
clarity and fastidious geographical knowledge concerning not only India and
China, but also Malaysia, Indonesia, Andaman Islands, other parts of SE Asia,
Korea and Japan. More analytical coverage is offered to Central Asia and
Northern Asia with detailed descriptions of many Turanian peoples; the same is
valid when it comes to Volga Bulgaria, the Saqaliba (Slavs), the Russians
(Rus), the Varangians, the Scandinavians and other peoples.
Ahmad ibn Rustah
Isfahani's 'Book of Precious Records' (كتاب الأعلاق النفيسة /Kitab
al-A'laq al-Nafīsa) contains an impressive record of the encounters that he effectuated
and of the observations that he made, during his travel to Novgorod; the text
offers astounding descriptions of the Khazars, the Bulgars, the Slavs, and
other Turanian peoples.
xxv- Abu Kamil, Abu
Zayd al-Balkhi, Ibn Abd Rabbih, Abu Bakr al-Razi, and Ibn Umayl
Known as 'Al Hasib al
Misri' (الحاسب
المصري/'the
Egyptian Calculator'), Abu Kamil Shuja' ibn Aslam ibn Muḥammad Ibn Shuja' (أبو كامل شجاع بن أسلم بن محمد بن شجاع) was an Egyptian mathematician whose reputation
reached Western Europe and works were extensively commented by posterior Muslim
scholars and widely translated into Latin and Hebrew. Latinized as Auoquamel,
he is referred to as Abu Kamil in the modern bibliography. Considered as second
only to Al-Khwarizmi, he was born in the middle of the 9th c. and he died
around 930 CE. A comprehensive list of his works was made available by Ibn
Nadim in his Fihrist, whereas Ibn Khaldun did express his admiration for Abu
Kamil almost 500 years after the Egyptian scholar had died. Acknowledged for
his contributions in algebra and geometry, Abu Kamil was an elitist scholar
writing exclusively for his colleagues; fascinated with the discovery of all
the extant solutions of a problem, he presented a set of rules for the
calculation of the volume and the surface of solids.
Abu Zayd Ahmed ibn Sahl
Balkhi (ابو
زید احمد بن سهل بلخی;
850-934 CE) was an Eastern Iranian born near Balkh (Bactra) in today's
Afghanistan; he studied in Baghdad and then his life was shared between his
homeland and the Abbasid capital. He was a multitalented scholar versed in
geography, cartography, ethnography, mathematics, medicine, psychology,
astrology, and astronomy, also having a strong background in spirituality. In
his book on the sustenance for bodies and souls, he apparently tried to show
how to establish a balanced character able to ensure a highly beneficial
synergy between the body and the soul. While he expanded on how to eliminate
emotional weaknesses in order to solidify the personal character, he was also credited
with establishing the Balkhi School of cartography and mapping in Baghdad.
Al Balkhi was
personally acquainted with the Iranian aristocrat Ahmad ibn Sahl, who was
slightly older than him, held him in great esteem, and offered him two
positions in his administration. Originating from a family of Sassanid
magistrates, the influential magnate served first the Saffarids and later the
Samanids, i.e. Iranian dynasties that founded two of the most sizeable an
impactful Iranianates; he thus illustrates the processes through which these
realms emerged and the force that stood behind them. That's why, several
decades later, Ferdowsi mentioned Ahmed ibn Sahl's family deferentially. All
the same, al Balkhi preferred the simple position of a scribe in the regional
administration to that of a minister in Samanid Bukhara.
Ibn Abd Rabbih (ابن عبد ربه; 860-940) was a Visigoth or Hispano-Roman author,
poet, official panegyrist at the Umayyad Court in Cordoba, and the initiator of
the eloquent literary style in what is called 'Arabic Literature' of the Golden
Age of Islam. The odd occurrence has to do with the cultural-imperial
atmosphere that non-Arab natives produced in a totally different form of
stylistics, usage, and vocabulary, which do not reflect in anything the
cultural environment attested in Hejaz and the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula.
As the descendant of a slave, who received manumission, Ibn Abd Rabbih
perfected his linguistic skills, studied theology and fiqh (as per the Maliki
madhhab), and feeling attracted to literary narrative, refined his manners
after the Andalusian milieu in which he found himself. At this point, I have to
highlight the fact that the existing Arabic word for 'literature' ('adab'/ الأدب) means basically good manners, decency, and discipline; by
extension it came to denote also courtesy, etiquette, belles-lettres and
-finally- literature.
As he became friend
with several members of the ruling family, Ibn Abd Rabbih made an effort to
compose imaginative poems and fascinating descriptions to recite; in this he
excelled, and several of his compositions were included in an anthology that
became very popular throughout the Islamic world – not only in Andalusia. His
life's best period coincided with the reigns of Emir Abdallah III of Cordoba
(888-912) and his son, Emir Abd al-Rahman III (912-961), who transformed the
Emirate into a Caliphate, in 929, in order to challenge the newly founded (by
Abd Allah al-Mahdi Billah) Fatimid Caliphate in Mahdia (Tunisia).
Ibn Abd Rabbih's famous
anthology Al-'Iqd al Farid (العقد الفريد /the
Unique Necklace) reflects his perfection as belletrist; arranged in 25
sections, the text involves many metaphors, as every section's title symbolizes
the topic therein presented by means of a different jewel. Then, these jewels
(sections) make the 'necklace' mentioned in the general title of the anthology.
Example: in the fifth section, the poet discusses (always in rhyme and meter)
the 'etiquette of addressing kings'; the section's title reads: "the Book
of the Coral". A modern edition (English translation by the excellent
Palestinian scholar Issa Boullata) needed three volumes (2006, 2009, and 2011)
of ca. 350 pages each to accommodate the literary masterpiece. The stupendous composition
was one of the most copied manuscripts during the Islamic ages; more than 100
manuscripts have been preserved until now. This type of literature was
particular to Islamic Andalusia, but it was not highly esteemed in Asia.
With Abu Bakr al-Razi
(865-935 CE; أبو
بکر محمد بن زکریاء الرازي/Abu
Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi) we reach the most advanced level
of conceptualization of the Human History, and of the human being as the
integration of two universes in one. Judging on the basis of existing sources, we
deduce that he was the first Muslim to define religions as constricted systems,
which depend on the lands where they are developed and believed, being rather
unnecessary in one person's spiritual quest of the universes and the Divine. Having
such an approach, it would be inevitable for Al Razi to conclude that
prophethood (from Adam to Jesus to Muhammad) was quite redundant.
It is very easy to
misunderstand what Al Razi truly meant; his unprecedentedly audacious texts
were easy to distort and misinterpret -during the Islamic ages- by those who
knew the truths that he revealed, but disagreed with him on other topics. As a
matter of fact, Al Biruni had a correspondence with Ibn Sina (Avicenna) about
Al Razi, who had died 50 years before the two great scholars were born; it
becomes then clear that what truly embarrassed the great scholar were Al Razi's
apparent inclination toward Manichaean concepts, several of his texts that were
reminiscent of various Gnostic systems, his conscious separation of physics from
mathematics, and his minimal consideration for mathematics. It is on this background
that Al Biruni added his criticism of Al Razi's position as regards religion
and prophethood. On the other hand, Ibn Sina combined mathematics and wisdom
('philosophy'), and it was therefore normal for him to be acrimonious and
excessive when speaking about the outstandingly unrestrained mystic and savant
that Al Razi had been.
In his book 'Bibliography
of Al Razi' (رسالة في فهرست كتب الرازي; Risala fi Fihrist Kutub al-Razi), Al Biruni mentions two controversial
books that the great scholar of Ray (or Rey; Rhagae) had written, namely 'On
the Prophesies' (Fi al-Nubuwwat) and 'On the Tricks of False Prophets' (Fi Ḥiyal al-Mutanabbin). Only excerpts from these treatises
have been preserved. All the same, under the rubric "Divine
Sciences", he includes also other titles (of texts elaborated by Al Razi,
such as 'Obligation to propagate the teachings of the prophet against those who
denied prophecies' and 'That Man has a Wise and Perfect Creator'. If I expand
at this point, it is due to the fact that quite clearly these titles speak for
themselves; Al Razi was neither an agnostic nor an atheist; he was a mystic
with excellent perception of, and exposure to, the spiritual universe.
Modern Western scholars
tried desperately to find in Al Razi potential elements to justify their
wretched ignorance and pathetic minds. In the useless trash "Cambridge
Dictionary of Philosophy", the authors -in an extreme form of absurdity-
attempt to portray the great Muslim mystic and savant as impacted by
"Epicureanism" and other so-called Greco-Roman sources. That's why
they preposterously conclude that the grand master of Ray viewed prophecy as
imposture and reason as 'divine gift'. All these ludicrous assumptions are
totally false.
Consummate mystic and
uncompromising moralist, Al Razi knew very well that God created Adam incomparably
superior to the man of the fall; in other words, Adam was not like a fallen and
quasi-worthless human being of our days. However, the great mystic was also
convinced -based on his own life experience- that, due to spiritual exercises,
personal discipline, and moral integrity, as well as celibacy, man can recover most
of the lost spiritual potency, reestablishing himself on the correct path. Only
in the light of this perspective, prophets were unnecessary according to Al
Razi. This is the true representation of his concepts.
Now, his views on religions
as constricted systems have much to do with Al Razi' spiritual and scholarly
background in alchemy, medicine, geography and linguistics. As he had many
students from all over the world, he had apparently understood that there is no
religion without culture, there is no culture without geography, and there is
no geography without climate. Thus, different lands with diverse meteorological
conditions impact humans in strikingly contrasting ways; the religions
developed in China could not be formed in the Maghreb and the religions
generated in India could not be accepted in Mesopotamia. We can conjecture
after all that for Al Razi there were geographical limits for either Islam or
Christianity and that there cannot be a 'universal religion', because this
would constitute the absolute falsehood as disregard of the different identity
that humans develop when living in different lands with contrasted
meteorological conditions.
Al Razi must have also
comprehended in depth the variances between spirituality, religion and theology,
and the catastrophic role of the latter on human society. Vicious Western
scholars deliberately distort the presentation of his teachings, positions, and
stark admonitions in order not to embarrass today's worthless and pathetic
muftis, cadis, imams and ayatollahs whose existence is impermissible in Islam.
Consequently, in order to please the ignorant Wahhabi monkeys of Saudi Arabia
and the idiotic apes of Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Pakistan
and other useless states, Western specialists intentionally conceal the
importance and distort the meaning of Al Razi's rejection of 'taqlid', which is
the cornerstone of the Islamic jurisprudence, as it involves the necessary
conformity of a student to the teaching, the tutoring, and the guidance of his
instructor. In fact, by so doing, Al Razi blows up theology. It is crucial to
understand this approach, when comprehending the contributions of Al Razi to
the Muslim world and to the humanity in general.
Spirituality is
tantamount to one person's reconnection and synergy with its soul; it brings
forth the complete understanding of the spiritual universe. This has nothing to
do with 'reason', 'reasoning', 'philosophy', and oral discussions or
explanations; in most of its dimensions it cannot be communicated in written or
oral form. It can be sensed by people, who are prepared for the task; this
preparation can be independent and personal or communal and esoteric, i.e.
organized for groups of people, like the Islamic tariqas/orders. But
spirituality does not need a religion; usually, because of the religious
background of a community, the sacred book(s) and aspects of the cult play a
secondary role only for the facilitation of some spiritual processes. However,
with the correct spiritual exercises, every human can recover the lost sense of
his soul and spiritual identity.
Religion started as a
commonly accepted monotheistic faith of a community openly organized in order
to practice spiritual rites and techniques, but because of the moral deviance
of several depraved priests, it was gradually degenerated into communities of
monotheists and polytheists in permanent conflict and war. At that point,
Divine Providence sent prophets to save the mankind from itself; they had to
fight hard against the false narratives fabricated by the polytheistic
priesthoods (defined as 'hypocrites' in the Qur'an), the ensuing self-destructive
cognitive biases, the subsequent unrestrained greed developed among humans, and
all types of sectarianism and tribalism.
Al Razi apparently
observed that after the death of every prophet, his society or people went
astray again in spite of the revelation of a new sacred book and the preaching
that he offered them. This must have formed a major stumbling block in his
potential acceptance of the need for religion and of the effectiveness of the
prophets.
Even worse, every
religion was monstrously transformed into absurd theological systems that tried
to 'rationalize' what can never be expressed by means of reason. In spite of
his eventually good intentions, every theologian inevitably damages and
destroys the religion that he pretends to explain. Theology is good only for
priests, because when religion is reduced to theology, the search for
spirituality disappears.
Then, the followers are
irreparably disconnected from their souls and start being exploited by the evil
priests who do not represent their supposed religion anymore, as they merely
play their game in order to ensure social-material benefits for them and
perpetuation of their shame. No founder of religion would ever like to see his
faith distorted by theologians. In addition, priests are impermissible in
Islam. This was indeed Al Razi's overall conceptualization of historical facts pertaining
to the human identity and faith; however, various other scholars also observed
and noticed these facts, but failed to denounce them in order to remain in the
circle of power or avoid potential attacks against themselves.
As mystic and spiritual
master, Al Razi was quite inventive and innovative; drawing from the
fundamental spiritual definition with respect to the five elements, which may
vary to some extent from priesthood to priesthood and from mystic to mystic, he
established a new spiritual concept, namely that of the "Five
Eternals", i.e. God, soul, matter, place, and time. As only few excerpts
from his texts and chapter titles of his alchemical works have been preserved,
we cannot evaluate the reason for this concept, but we can conjecture that this
suited his other categorizations; to offer an example, I cite his 'Secret of
Secrets' (سر
الاسرار; Sirr al
Asrar - one of the many books written under the same title during the Golden
Age of Islam) in which Al Razi comes up with categorizations of knowledge,
matter, methods, and apparatuses, as well as with a classification of minerals
into six types.
His great reputation as
medical doctor was not due to his position as head of the bimaristan (hospital)
of Ray or to the invitations extended to him by two caliphs to found new
hospitals in Baghdad or to his numerous treatises and papers of medical
contents, but to his strong background in alchemy that he was able to
proactively use to the benefit of patients and students. Acknowledged for his
medical ethics, Al Razi was able to treat different grave illnesses; he
achieved outstanding breakthroughs in pharmacology; and he wrote numerous
medical monographs, essays, and other texts also publishing a monumental
encyclopedia of medicine under the title 'Kitab al-Hawi fi al-Tibb' (كتاب المنصورى فى الطب; 'the Comprehensive Book on Medicine) in
the year 900 CE; this compendium of medical practices, methods and
prescriptions was translated into Latin as per the order of the king of Sicily
Charles d'Anjou in the 2nd half of the 13th c.; the author's name was Latinized as Rhazes. Many of his
medical works were copied and reproduced systematically in the Islamic world.
Original in his
approach and unreserved in his criticism, Al Razi wrote a medical guide for
people unable to find or consult a physician; the title was 'For one who has no
physician to attend him' (من لا يحضره الطبيب;
'man la yahduruhu al-tabib). He also composed a very severe criticism of Galen
under the title 'Doubts about Galen' (al-Shukuk 'ala Jalinus; الشكوك على جالينوس). A recent (2019) French edition (by Pauline Koetschet) took
almost 300 pages for the Arabic text and the French translation.
Ibn
Umayl (محمد
بن أميل التميمي;
Muhammad ibn Umayl al-Tamimi/900-960
CE) was an Egyptian alchemist, astrologer, mystic, symbolist, and dream
interpreter; he spent most of his life in Egypt, but he traveled and lived also
in Iraq, NW Africa, and Andalusia. However, several scholars today believe that
he was an Andalusian. He was widely translated into Latin, and in Western
Europe he became known as 'Senior Zadith'. He represented the Ancient Egyptian
spirituality and scientific legacy within the Islamic world; it is established
that he explored Ancient Egyptian temples and monuments; in addition, he
continued the tradition of alchemical symbolism as a means for initiates to
comprehend the analogies between the body and the soul. His books were
extensively copied, translated, commented, quoted, discussed, and included in
several compendiums; he was mentioned by many posterior mystics and alchemists,
notably the 14th c. CE Iranian scholar Izz al-Din al Jildaki, who traveled
extensively before emigrating to Egypt. Highly considered were his book on the
"Silvery Water" and his poem "Letter of the Sun to the Crescent
Moon"; at this point, it has to be specified that the letters of the
Arabic alphabet are classified as "sun letters" and "moon
letters", which shows a great mystical background to his work.
xxvi-
Al Farabi
Abu Nasr Muhammad
al-Farabi (870-951; أبو نصر محمد الفارابي) was an Iranian-Turanian scholar whose exact place of birth
cannot be known because several locations have the same (Farab) or similar
(Faryab) name. In today's Central Asia, there are several villages that can be
identified as his place of origin, notably in Kazakhstan (Otrar), Turkmenistan
(Türkmenabat), etc.; his family background may have been Turanian or Eastern
Iranian, and the ambiguity is due to divergence in historical biographies of
the great savant.
He studied in Baghdad
alchemy, medicine, logic, philosophy, and sociology, being tutored by the
Aramaean Nestorian Christian Yuhanna ibn Haylan, a widely known scholar.
However, based on what Al Farabi himself wrote in his essay 'Appearance of
Philosophy' (في
ظهور الفلسفة;
Fi Zuhur al Falsafa), we understand that, in his master's teachings, there were
plenty of inaccuracies, such as the story that philosophy as an academic topic
was studied first in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic times and later under the
Romans until the rise of Christianity, before being examined by a college of
Christian bishops who specified which parts of philosophy would be allowed for
teaching and which would be prohibited.
According to this
narrative, which must be certainly attributed to the descriptions of Al
Farabi's Nestorian master, the prohibited parts of philosophy continued being taught
clandestinely until the arrival of Islam, and then the schooling institution
was relocated to Antioch. The transmission of the tradition risked going
extinct, because only one maven was left, but he was able to find two good
disciples who continued his tradition one in Harran (in SE Turkey) and one in
Merv (in Turkmenistan); the latter scholar's disciple was Yuhanna ibn Haylan
himself. The overall story contains apparently many inaccuracies and
obscurities, but allows to some extent for an approximate reconstruction of the
overall process; at the same time, it helps us understand how and why the
arrival of Islam was a highly positive event for many clandestine mystics,
scholars, and masters of esoteric traditions, who opposed official Roman
Christianity.
Al Farabi lived in
Baghdad until 942 CE; he then traveled to Damascus, Haleb (Aleppo), and Egypt;
he lived and taught in these cities, but returned to Damascus in 949 because of
his excellent relations with the Hamdanid ruler Sayf al Dawla (reign: 945-967
CE), the founder of the Emirate of Aleppo (one more kingdom that seceded from
the Caliphate); one year later he died. As it happens in numerous other cases
of great Muslim scholars, mystics, scientists and authors, Western academics
have great difficulty in identifying Al Farabi as Shia or Sunni; the very
simple reason for this apparently odd but quite reasonable fact is due to what
I extensively discussed in the present unit, namely the historical reality that
this division is a modern construct and it did not exist in the past.
Al Farabi wrote
extensively on alchemy, music, mathematics, logic, philosophy, education, human
life, natural life, and social organization. He is one of the most
misinterpreted Muslim scholars, and this is due to the absurd effort of many
Western academics to make him look like an admirer and humble follower of
'Ancient Greek philosophers'–which is sheer nonsense. In fact, above all, Al
Farabi was an alchemist. His Letter concerning the Necessity of Alchemy (رسالة في وُجُوب صِنآعة
الكيمياء;
Risala fi wujub ṣina'at al-kimiya') leaves no doubt
about his attachment to the foundation of all sciences – which is exactly what did
not exist in the so-called 'Ancient Greece' and what nowadays Western academics
persistently reject.
To Al Farabi, music was
something totally different from what it is to Western academics; it has
nothing to do with abstract theories, but it is relevant to accurate and
correct identification of what the sounds are. In this sense, it comes close to
the sonar science of the Ancient Egyptian and Assyrian-Babylonian priesthoods
or to the real essence of the Jewish Qabbalah. In his 'Great Book on Music' (كتاب الموسيقى الكبير; Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir), Al Farabi presents
a mystic's viewpoint on music, first explaining what a sound is for the
spiritual and the material universes and then implementing his conclusions at
the material level, i.e. the musical instruments, the sounds that they produce,
the necessary musical intervals, the ensuing consonance, and the effects that
melody has on people. I merely add that the Arabic edition by Ghattas Abd
al-Malek Khashaba and Dr. Mahmoud Ahmed el Hefny (Cairo 1967) needed no less
than 1210 pages to accommodate the monumental opus and the diagrams involved.
Al Farabi generated a
distinct circle of spirituality, wisdom and science that Western scholars
distort by calling it 'school of philosophy' or -even worse- Alfarabism. Few
are however able to realize that, instead of wasting his time in discussions
about the spiritual universe (what is called 'Metaphysics' in Western
philosophy), the great Iranian-Turanian scholar appended the discussion to known
mystical practices and spiritual exercises.
Shifting his interest
from wisdom to science, Al Farabi wrote an essay 'On the Void' in order to
explain that the notion of perfect vacuum is misplaced. Having published Al
Farabi's essay with a Turkish and an English translations, the great Turkish
historian of science and personal friend of Kemal Ataturk, Aydın Sayılı
(1913-1993), in his article 'Al Farabi's Article on Vacuum' (1951), states the
following:
«Al Farabi rejects the
idea of the repulsion of the outside air, as well as the attraction of vacuum,
and substitutes for it the hypothesis that water and air preserve their contact
with each other and follow each other in their movements. Both this hypothesis
and his previously mentioned assertion that air possesses the quality of
pervading all the space made available to it by bodies neighboring on it
involve the tacit assumption that the behavior of both air and water are such
that they prevent a solution of continuity in nature, i. e., they forestall the
formation of vacuum in nature. The action of air is to fill all spaces which
are being emptied by other bodies, but such an air is in an unnatural state,
and if there is water neighboring upon it, the air will return to its normal
volume and water will occupy the space emptied by the contracting air».
In one of his most
characteristic treatises, Al Farabi examines how the perfect combination
between balanced human characters and rightful social structures will generate
a moral, virtuous, and joyful community of people. Al Farabi had carefully
observed the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate and the secession of Iranianates
and other states; he comprehended that the flaws and the drawbacks at the
origin of the disintegration of societies and states are both personal and social.
The fascinating
treatise has been preserved in different manuscripts under slightly divergent
titles; to make things more difficult, some of the words used can have varied
translations.
a- 'The Views of the
People of the Joyful City' (آراءُ اَهْلِ الْمَدینَةِ الْفاضِلَة; Ara' ahl al-madina al-faḍila)
b- 'Principles of the Views
of the People of the Joyful City'
(مبادئ آراءُ اَهْلِ الْمَدینَةِ الْفاضِلَة; Mabadi' ara'
ahl al-madina al-faḍila)
c- 'The Views of the
People of the Joyful City and their Opposing Views'
(آراءُ اَهْلِ الْمَدینَةِ الْفاضِلَة والمضاداتها; Ara' ahl
al-madana al-faḍila wa-lʼmuḍaddatiha)
The adjective 'fadila' (الْفاضِلَة) can be translated as 'excellent', 'perfect',
'virtuous', 'ideal' or even -according to the context of Al Farabi's treatise- 'joyful'/'happy'.
The noun 'madinah' (الْمَدینَةِ) can be translated as 'city' or 'state' or
'autonomous jurisdiction', 'city-state' or 'self-ruled agglomeration'.
Western academics
deliberately distort and misinterpret this masterpiece of Islamic literature,
by attempting to adjust it to their preconceived schemes, ideas, notions and
assumptions. There is not a shred of 'democracy' or 'republic' in Al Farabi's
ingenious treatise; similarly, there is no rejection of the basic Islamic
concepts of prophethood and Imamate. The author's main interest was to
demonstrate that the lack of moral characters among the people of a community
brings disintegration and collapse. The Joyful City of Al Farabi does not need
'philosophers' or 'kings'; and it has nothing to do with any sick Western
utopia. It is a stateless community of spiritually conscious and proactive
people, who stick to the inherent code of the Creation, which is what true
religions define as 'Moral'.
xxvii- Al Mas'udi
Al Mas'udi (أبو الحسن علي بن الحسين بن
علي المسعودي;
Abu al-Ḥasan 'Ali ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn 'Alī al-Mas'udi/896-956 CE) was an Arab scholar,
traveler, and explorer, who wrote many treatises and monographs on a wide range
of topics going from geography to natural science to theology. He was born in
Baghdad, being the descendant of a well-known companion of prophet Muhammad,
i.e. Abdullah ibn Mas'ud (593-653 CE). It is noteworthy that Al Mas'udi's
ancestor Ibn Mas'ud played a critical role in the early days of Islam and, after
the death of the prophet, he accused the scribes of Uthman for distorting the
text the Holy Book, adding three extra suras (chapters), changing subtly many
parts of the text, and thus fabricating a 'deceit'. He actually cursed all
those involved in the shameful process of producing the fake Quran that quite unfortunately
most of today's Muslims believe as original whereas it is not.
Al
Mas'udi was a very particular type of scholar, who first studied in the highly
beneficial environment of Baghdad where a 150-year long period of advanced
scientific and intellectual achievements had already created a worldwide unique
heritage and then continued his formation while traveling and living in other
lands. One has to also take into consideration the fact that Baghdad was still
at the time the then known world's foremost capital. One could encounter there
people originating from almost all lands and nations; apparently, this natural,
cultural, and scholarly wealth generated in the young student Al Mas'udi an inexorable
interest in the 'other'. He thus became a traveling writer or a writing
traveler.
Western scholars like
to express exaggerated admiration for Al Mas'udi, his travels, works, and
narratives; they also praise very hypocritically the abundant information that
his texts provide us with as regards many topics. However, they intentionally
and persistently avoid highlighting the true character, the real attitude, the
natural mentality, the fundamental concept, and the evident approach to the
world that Al Mas'udi's masterpieces and example of life reveal to all of us.
Still, the most
important benefits that we get from the great traveler and even greater scholar
are what we read in-between the lines of his texts, namely his universality,
humanism, and love for the 'other'. He so much loved the faraway lands that he visited,
people that he encountered, cultures that he admired, languages that he
learned, and religions that he comprehended, that he selected as title for his
grand opus the following: "Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems".
In Al Mas'udi, there is
no absurd desire for the further diffusion of Islam; there is no interest in
preaching Islam in China, Sri Lanka or Africa. The great scholar, although a
distinct Muslim, found it perfect to encounter diverse religions, different
cultures, and various peoples and to write down all the details that he learned
about them; this, as an intellectual and scholarly endeavor, was for him a far more
challenging task as ibadah (عبادة;
worship) than just collecting -in old manuscripts- various hadiths about
prophet Muhammad who had lived before 300 years. This however does not mean at
all that Al Mas'udi undervalued or disdained the collection of hadith; quite on
the contrary. But it is clear that for him the focus of a scholar or
intellectual should not be left on this topic. More important a task for the
Muslims of his time was to learn about China, Indonesia, Volga Bulgaria, Russia,
and France than to read once more petty stories about the heinous acts and the
destructive words of Aisha, which had ruined the early Muslim society.
Using therefore Al
Mas'udi as a standard and as a measure, we can understand how astray the modern
Muslim societies and fake states have gone. Instead of engaging in the path of
Islamic sciences, arts, wisdom, spirituality, and scholarly heritage, the erratic
religious authorities of today's Muslim states lead all Muslim populations to
calamitous confrontations, disastrous wars, abysmal odium, and interminable killings,
thus ruining all Muslim states one after the other in the process. At their
antipodes, Al Mas'udi demonstrates very well what the education of all Muslim
countries has to be nowadays.
His
example has to be imposed -one way or another- on all Muslim states today; Islamic
universities and religious schools must close down; Islamic theology and Fiqh
have to be replaced by Islamic sciences, literature, arts, wisdom and
spirituality; last but not least, the false dilemma 'Islam or the West' must be
outmaneuvered. And the interest for the 'other' must be reinstated among
Muslims everywhere, starting from the earliest stages of education. The
educational, academic, and intellectual establishment of all Muslim countries
must be entirely Islamic (not Western), but after the example of the Golden Age
of Islam. The present situation must come to an end.
Mas'udi traveled to the
Caucasus region, and visited the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, various parts of
NE Europe and Central Asia; he explored every province of Iran, and surveyed
many parts of India, before proceeding ti Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and China. He
repeatedly moved to Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt. Furthermore, he was
very knowledgeable about many lands that he did not visit, like the Eastern
Roman Empire, NW Africa, NW Europe, England, and Northern Asia. In this regard,
his informants were various people, who originated from those lands and
happened to encounter the traveling scholar; through the lines of his texts we
understand that he was able to listen carefully and he showed more importance
to simple people than to elites. It was only normal for a person like him, who
was so open to the world, to be impossible to identify with one or another
group of mystics or schools of theology and Fiqh; that's why during the Islamic
times many later authors expressed divergent opinions about him, whereas modern
academics cannot agree on the topic.
His masterpiece was the
famous and voluminous opus 'Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems' (مروج الذهب ومعادن الجوهر; Muruj aḏ-Ḏahab wa-Ma'adin al-Jawhar), which was finally completed
in 947 CE, only a few years before his death at the age of 60; it was rather
early written, repeatedly edited, and subsequently enlarged over a long period
of time. As per all criteria of Western scientific classification, this book is
impossible to categorize; of course, many will rush to describe it as a History
from the Creation down to the time of the Abbasids, but this is misplaced. Resourceful
in his approach and compassionate in his style, Al Mas'udi wrote an enormous
composition at the very antipodes of that of Tabari.
Instead of presenting
chains of informants to document his narrative like Tabari, Al Mas'udi presents
everything in a more personal manner, drawing on his experience, travels, encounters,
discussions, hearsay, and documents that he found in different lands. It is
truly impressive to observe two, so divergent, writing styles attested in two
historians who lived almost at the same time in the same place. Of course,
being 57 years younger, Al Mas'udi had the age of Tabari's grandchildren; he
must have attended the great old man's lectures and read the manuscripts
established by his disciples. It is perhaps then that he developed, in contrast
with the writing style of the illustrious historian, mufassir and faqih, his
own youthful, innovative and quite audacious approach to the topic of history
writing; and may be this is the reason of his multiple travels to faraway
lands.
It is truly fascinating
to observe what 'History' was for Al Mas'udi and his uniquely written
masterpiece: an interminable interaction of people and lands, creative forces
and traditions, secret faiths and vivacious snapshots, joyful moments and
inevitable punishments, propulsive exchanges and impulsive encounters, a
contrast between wisdom and foolishness, the increasingly rising desire and the
perennially staying remorse, the amalgamation of all varied concepts and the
separation of all uniform beliefs, the futility of all actions and the effectiveness
of every inaction. Striving to present World History as the result of the
passions of people across all the lands of the Earth, Al Mas'udi delivered the
most complete picture of mankind one could ever expect – a duly, definitely,
and irrevocably Irano-centric History as Life orders.
It is a pity that until
now only one complete international edition and translation of this masterpiece
of World History and World Literature has been published; even worse for the
worthless academics of our time, this grandiose enterprise was carried out in
the 2nd half of the 19th c. (between 1861 and 1877) by Barbier de Meynard and
Pavet de Courteille of the Société Asiatique de Paris. To give an idea of the
bilingual (Arabic and French) edition's approximate size, I merely state that
it covers nine (9) volumes of ca. 500 pages each. Charles Pellat's revised French
edition (between 1966 and 1974; by the Université Libanaise in Beirut) is made
up of 5 volumes. All other versions (Russian, English, etc.) are either partly
or abridged.
Only 9 years before Al
Mas'udi died, Ahmad ibn Buya conquered Iraq and made Baghdad his capital (in
945 CE). He selected the honorific name (laqab) Mu'izz al-Dawla ('fortifier of
the state'), locked the impotent Abbasid caliph in his otherwise worthless
palace, and terminated the ridiculous tradition that started after the death of
Prophet Muhammad. The Buwayhi (Buyid) states were the strongest Iranianates and
formed parallel realms, as the two elder brothers of Ahmad ibn Buya had already
invaded other parts of the wretched caliphate and set up their own emirates
there.
First, Ali ibn Buya, a
fisherman from the southern coastland of the Caspian Sea, after having served
the Samanids and acquired military and royal experience, conquered Fars in 934
and made of Shiraz his capital. To posture as a Muslim ruler, he took the
honorific name (laqab) Imad al-Dawla ('pillar of the state').
Few years later (in
943), after having conquered the region of Jibal (i.e. the Zagros Mountains), Hasan
ibn Buya (his younger brother) invaded Ray. He made of the historic Northern
Iranian city his capital, and he took the honorific name (laqab) Rukn al-Dawla
('the cornerstone of the state').
The
youngest of the three brothers, Ahmad ibn Buya, marked an even greater success
as we already saw; all three Buwayhi (Buyid) rulers established an Iranian
triumvirate, which was continued by their respective successors, namely the
Buyid rulers of Fars, Ray, and Baghdad. Furthermore, other Buyids set up
smaller and short-lived secessionist Iranianates in Hamadan (Ecbatana), Basra,
Ahwaz, and Kerman. It was the absolute Iranian revival in terms of royal power,
architecture, identity, art, and culture, but not religion.
Following
the early Iranian resistance against the 7th c. CE Muslim invaders, the subsequent
explosion of rebellions, the emergence of the first Iranianates, the upward
progress of the scientific-literary community, and the formation of a
socio-educational, cultural, spiritual and scientific environment that
marginalized Islamic theology, Islam -as a system of governance- was totally
Iranized. The principles of the revelation pronounced by Prophet Muhammad and of
the preaching made by Ali ibn Abi Taleb were however preserved; in fact, they
were almost identical to those heralded by Zardosht (Zoroaster) 1300 years
earlier.
The
apex of the material-spiritual sciences of the truth absolutely coincided with
the marginalization of the Abbasid caliphate, and of all the worthless notions of
Islamic state that the fanatic fighters of Hejaz and Yemen brought with them,
having fully disrespected the order that Prophet Muhammad gave to Ali ibn Abi
Taleb, namely never to undertake wars for the diffusion of his faith. As
imperial-universal entity, Iran was solemnly re-established, irrevocably re-affirmed,
and proactively transformed into the worldwide center of science, wisdom, and
spirituality.
It was about the time when the greatest conceptualization of Man in the History of Mankind would be manifested and Ferdowsi's Shahnameh would be written. The problem -for today's Iranians and their diverse but, unconscious of their heritage and therefore unrepresentative, rulers and the opponents to them- is that they will never truly command, reassert, and reinstate their nation before completely reassessing and effectively radiating their own universal heritage and destination.
====================
Download the article in PDF:
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2026/04/30/iran-2026-the-pivot-of-world-history-assaulted-by-the-barbarians-of-the-west-iii/
https://vk.ru/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_16240
https://www.academia.edu/170450584/Iran_2026_the_Pivot_of_World_History_Assaulted_by_the_Barbarians_of_the_West_III
https://www.4shared.com/web/preview/pdf/BxVl3sEafa?
https://online.fliphtml5.com/qynhg/fnwi/
https://anyflip.com/fdfzl/pogo
https://pubhtml5.com/jxyro/pbsz/
https://archive.org/details/iran-2026-the-pivot-of-world-history-assaulted-by-the-barbarians-of-the-west-iii
https://www.patreon.com/u82600919/posts/iran-2026-pivot-164486368
No comments:
Post a Comment