To Win over Terrorism, Eradicate Pan-Arabism and Tear Down the Arab League!

By: Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
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[ Posted On: 2007-04-04 ]

To start with a basic statement and truth, we should stress the point that among the member-states of the so-called Arab League there is not a single one inhabited by Arab population. In this regard, the simple and single historical truth is that there are no Arabs at all. There are only 'Arabic-speaking' peoples having striking dissimilarities one from another, and they all have different past, different cultural backgrounds, different social and behavioral systems, different orientations and archetypes. Only failure is guaranteed in any attempt to shape up a 'union' among these so disparate elements and peoples.

We have all attested numerous similar examples of disunion, mutual disparagement and unprecedented co-vilification so paradigmatically performed by the uneducated and uncultured 'leaders' of the 'Arab' League.

Our mistake was to view similar situations among these tyrants as 'fratricidal' situation, whereas it is not, since they are very disparate and divergent from one another. It is actually the paranoiac and contra-natural regrouping named 'Arab' League that, by creating the shock of bringing together elements that just cannot be together, generates the unpleasant atmosphere in which all these funny and clownish 'leaders' are engulfed, without knowing why 'this' happens to them!

If this situation concerned only these grotesque characters of the present day Middle Eastern Commedia dell' Arte, the problem would be limited, and no one would need to discuss and tackle it. But the West and the rest of the World is found involved in this situation one way or another, because of the interconnections existing since the Colonial times. The Middle East affects the entire world. And if this absolute and fundamental historical reality is not widely assessed and understood first, nothing good can come out of the Middle East, and its extremist frenzy.

If the Middle Eastern peoples are not Arabs, what are they?

The Real, True but hidden, Face of the Middle East

In reality, the Lebanese are Phoenicians, who got hellenized and aramaized in Late Antiquity.

Arabic speaking Syrians and Iraqis are Aramaeans.

So are the Palestinians and the Kuwaitis, as well as the Emiratis and the Qataris, who have certainly been intermixed with Persians.

Egyptians are Copts, native Egyptians, descendants of the people of Ancient Egypt – belonging to the Khammitic / Kushitic (not Semitic) linguistic group – in their amalgamations with the numerous foreigners, who passed by the valley of the Nile: Aramaeans, Phoenicians, Persians, Yemenites, Greeks, Meroitic Sudanese, Romans, Libyans, and others.

Sudanese are descendants of the ancient Meroites (Kushites) and the Nubians.

Libyans and the people of the Maghreb are descendants of the Khammitic / Kushitic peoples of the great Atlas, Berbers, in their genuine fusion with Carthaginians and Romans.

And finally Yemenites are Yemenites, descendants of the ancient states of Saba, Qataban, Himyar, Hadhramawt and other; they are closer to Abyssinians (mistakenly called Ethiopians) than to the Arabs of Hedjaz.

Islamization: the reason of the (linguistic but not racial) Arabization

All these peoples, by accepting Islam, sooner or later, started becoming arabized, but this happened at a linguistic, not at a racial/ethnic and cultural level. We know very well that the Arabs of the times of the Prophet were not numerous; in their entirety they did not outnumber the population of one big Persian, Roman, Aramaean or Egyptian city, like Ctesiphon, Antioch, Alexandria or Constantinople.

One generation later, when let us say Islamic armies reached Carthage in today's Tunisia, Central Asia, and the Indus valley, the Muslim fighters were speaking Arabic but among them Arabs were already a minority. Aramaeans from Damascus and Ctesiphon, Egyptians from Alexandria, Yemenites from Muza and Persians from Praaspa were already a majority among them! They had already learnt the language of Coran, but they did not and could not change their racial and ethnic origin; they were not 'Arabs'.

The Copts (Christians) of Egypt, and the Assyrians' and 'Chaldaeans' of Iraq and Iran (their proper national name is 'Aramaeans') are very good examples showing very precisely what happened: those who remained Christians preserved initially their language (Coptic), and lost it gradually in later dates. Aramaean Christians preserved their language in significant numbers.

Among the peoples who accepted Islam in the early period, only the Persians preserved their language. This is not strange, since the great cultural phenomenon of Ferdowsi testifies to an insightful understanding of that country's islamization.

If Copts and Aramaeans had not been christened, and if they had kept a national traditional historical record of their glorious past, they would have resulted into a different perception of Islam, preserving their original languages and developing epics similar to Shahnameh.

Colonial practice and diffusion of Pan-arabism

Because this did not happen, we attest nowadays the current situation, but this does not involve that these peoples are Arabs, or that a kind of union can be based on falsely perceived history, and tons of misinformation and disinformation due to colonial powers' diplomacy.

Mainly 19th century France and England became the centers of emanation of a falsely conceived and inaccurately studied 'pan-Arabism', since they focused their educational – academic – cultural – ideological policies on issues related to their strategic efforts to bring down the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Iran, after Mughal India had already collapsed. The term 'inaccurately studied' is employed because the falsehood of Pan-arabism created problems worse than those it was supposed to solve, even if we limit the discussion within the context of the Western world, as Islamic Terrorism is a later by-product of earlier ideological developments in the area of the Middle East.

It is from the Western European universities, political parties and demented ateliers of all sorts and societies that nationalism emanated. And as such, it caused serious problems to peoples of the East and the West, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and others. The confusion spread throughout the territories of the Ottoman Empire finds its equivalent in the disaster of the Irish, the Scots, the Corsicans and the Celts of Brittany. Actually, it leads to nowhere.

Earlier one understands this, sooner one escapes from the traps that led millions to wars and disaster.

Of course, the Colonial Scheme was not geared only against the Ottoman Empire. It did aim at creating an entire situation in which it would be sure that no powerful successive state form would ever rise in its stead! In this way, the colonial powers shaped the problematic Middle East of the 20s, the 30s, the 50s and the 60s that we all know; an area of total confusion, conflict, and impotence. This was considered as the area from which the Western powers would extract oil and various other resources in a most profitable way that – at the same time – would help them impose themselves as undisputable powers over the rest of the world.

Following the results of the WW I America joined the two colonial powers that achieved a multi-targeted 'miracle':

1. they destroyed the Ottoman Empire

2. they made sure that no other power rises in its stead in the Middle East and

3. they kept rivals like the defunct Austria –Hungary, as well as Germany and Russia far from that region

Impossibility of an 'Arab' nationalism

In the sense that never Indians will be able to express … Chinese nationalism (!), and never Spaniards will be able to express … Portuguese nationalism, never will:

a. the Copts of Egypt (all the population is Coptic, Egyptian properly speaking, not only the Christians, those who are called 'Copts') – call them just Egyptians if you want –

b. the Aramaeans of Iraq, Syria, Jordan (I mean again the entire population of these countries, not just the Christians), Iran (the so-called 'Arabs' of Khuzestan are just 'Aramaeans'), Turkey (Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic speaking populations of Antakya, Gaziantep, Kahraman Marash, Urfa/Edessa, Diyarbakir/Amida, Mardin/Margdis, Nusaybin, Hasankeyf, Siirt and Cizre), and Lebanon Lybia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania (again I do not mean the Kabylians in Algeria, who openly declare their Berberic/Khammitic identity, but the entire population of all these countries)

d. the Nubians (belonging to the so-called Nilo-Saharic group of languages and races) of Egypt and the Sudan (another terribly oppressed minority), who live between Luqsor in Egypt and Karima in Sudan

e. the Meroites of Sudan, who live either nubianized in the north of Karima or arabized between Karima and Malakal in Central Sudan, being the descendants of the ancient Khammitic population of the historical Sudanese states Kush (800 – 525), Meroe (450 BCE – 350 CE) and (Christian) Makkuria (450 – 1150)

f. the Yemenites and the Omanis, who are certainly Semites but closer to the Abyssinians than to Arabs (their extensively recorded on epigraphic monuments ancient languages gave birth to Gueze, the official and religious language of Axumite Abyssinia, and have been preserved until now in some parts of Hadhramawt and at the island of Sokotra)
and last but not the least

g. the Palestinians, the Kuwaitis, the Qataris, the Emiratis and the Bahrainis, who – all – are arabized Aramaeans,...be able to compose and express 'Arab' nationalism in the way Russians, Germans, Italians and Greeks established their respective nationalisms.

Survival was more successful and more significant in numbers in the case of the Nubians and the Berbers than for Aramaeans, Yemenites and Egyptians (Copts). Coptic fell in desuetude just 150 years ago. At the times of Champollion, Coptic was still mother tongue to a few thousands of Christian Egyptians. However, Coptic is the religious language in use for the Christians in Egypt, and many hundreds of thousands learn it in the religious schools.

To this - necessarily summarized presentation - there can be only a counter-argument:

Several scholars have indeed pretended that Arabs, going outside the Arabic peninsula at the very dawn of the Islamic Era, finally settled and definitely intermingled with local populations from Iran and Oman to Morocco, in a way that we could admit a certain arabization at the racial, not only the linguistic, level.

The Aramaization of the Middle East during the Late Antiquity: a real racial intermingling.

This would be an entire aberration. Of course, any '– ization' can eventually take place at the level of race, not only language, culture or religion! The case of the Aramaization of Babylonia and Elam (a long procedure that took place from the 6th century BCE to the 1st century BCE) is quite indicative! But there were numerous Aramaic populations transported by the Assyrian emperors of the 8th and the 7th centuries in Southern Mesopotamia, or settled because of their own choice. Elamites were exterminated by Assurbanipal at 640 BCE, and the decimated Babylonians started being outnumbered by the continuously arriving in the Mesopotamian South Aramaeans!

Nothing similar happened during the early Islamic times! As we already said, at the times of the Prophet, all the Arabs of Hedjaz (the western part of the Arabian peninsula between Yemen and the area of today's Jordan) did not outnumber the population of just one big Aramaic, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, or Roman city! So, there cannot be discussion about numbers, the few Arabs who settled outside the peninsula were totally amalgamated among the multitude of the early Muslims, already before the year 30 of Hegira!

What most of the modern Western (mostly Colonial) historians failed to notice, focus and understand is that already during the lifetime of the Prophet Yemenites accepted Ali's preaching in Yemen at 630 CE in great numbers! Since Yemen belonged to the Sassanid Empire of Iran, along with the Yemenites, numerous Persian soldiers and colons in Yemen accepted the preached religion, without any Arab soldier entering Yemen!

Islamic, not 'Arab' invasions

So, to repeat what we earlier stated, when the first Islamic armies fought at Yarmouk (636) and reached Jerusalem and Damascus (638), there was already a sizeable non-Arabic part among these fighters! In addition, it is well known that these armies were not numerous whatsoever! When, a few years later, Islamic armies reached Nihavent (641) and Alexandria (642), already more than half of them were not Arabs!

To describe the Islamic army that invaded Alexandria on an ethnic / linguistic basis, one should specify that the soldiers were Aramaeans, Persians, Armenians, Yemenites, Arabs, plus a handful of Greek and Roman inhabitants of Eastern Mediterranean cities and Kushitic / Semitic inhabitants of the Red Sea coastal cities, who had accepted Islam in different moments between 622 and 642.

In the same way, when Islamic armies attacked Constantinople (677) and reached Gibraltar, Arabs were already an insignificant portion among them.

Early Islam was not 'culturally' Arabic: on the contrary, Islam de-arabized the then Arabs of Hedjaz.

The aforementioned is the historical reality that shaped the world, and it was widely accepted as such among Muslims during all historical periods before Colonialism. It was not limited at the racial level whatsoever! It was accepted as encompassing all levels:

cultural, literary, philosophical, religious, scientific, artistic. The great movement of Shu'ubiyeh precisely stressed the point that the contribution of the Arabs was just... nothing!

And the Shu'ubiyeh were correct! Not only they knew more than the modern XIXth century Western scholars but they did not have back mind schemes and hidden plans! Not a single aspect of the Islamic civilization is Arabic, except the language! Art, philosophy, sciences, literature, knowledge, wisdom, technology, administration, army, navy, religion, and theology: nothing in early Islam is Arabic.

Perhaps this is the most correct summary of the case: by accepting the prophet Muhammad, 7th century Arabs were totally des-arabized once and forever! Except those who, by not getting des-arabized, were driven to expression of retrograde obscurantism and barbarism, like Hanbal, Ibn Taimiya and Abdel Wahhab, plus their followers, the present day uncultured and ignorant extremists.

The des-arabization of the Arabs is precisely the phenomenon of Prophet Muhammad's fight to uproot pre-Islamic Arab traditions and beliefs, behavioural systems and Weltanschauung. All that was genuinely Arabic before Muhammad with his preaching took a definite end!

Different type of Islamization: the Persians preserved Persian, but other peoples got linguistically arabized. An effort of analysis.

The different approaches to the phenomenon of the adhesion to Islam consist in a vast, subject. Although our historical sources are rich in this regard, until now Western scholars did not use them in order to set up a comparative, eventually interdisciplinary, approach.

Turks accepted Islam late, in Central Asia, and through the Persians.

The main issue focalizes therefore on the difference between

a. the Persians – on one side – and

b. the Aramaeans (the many Aramaic speaking peoples that consisted in the outright majority of the areas belonging to today's SE Turkey, SW Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Emirates, Bahrain, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and N – NE – E Arabia) and the Egyptians – on the other side.

The main distinction between the two groups at the beginning of the Islamization procedure was the fact that

- all the Egyptians and the outright majority of the Aramaeans belonged to various Christian denominations, with the minority of the Aramaeans practicing Manichaeism and other Late Antiquity forms of Gnosticisms (from which originate both the Mandaean and the Yazidi Kurdish minorities of present day Iraq), but

- the outright majority of the Iranians were following various religious systems that almost all were derivatives of Zoroaterianism (namely Mithraism, Mazdakism, Zervanism, Gayomardism) turning around the Imperial Court adopted derivative form of Zoroasterianism, i.e. Mazdaism that was deeply involved in shaping a national – nationalistic political ideology. This political - ideological could not find its counterpart among any christened peoples and/or states.

Whereas Mazdaism's approaches to the diachronic role of Iran were shared by Iranian Mithraists, Mazdakists, Zervanists, Gayomardists, and eventually Iranians following other religious systems (Manicheism, Nestorian Christianity, Buddhism), Christianized populations of the Roman Empire, namely Aramaeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Armenians, Romans and others, were involved in terrible Christological divisions, debates, confrontations, and polarizations. They all had rejected political ideologies related to their pre-Christian religions, cults, ideologies, and philosophies, adopting the Christian Roman ideology of 'Urbi et Orbi', a kind of early 'internationalism' bringing nations together to the trinity – god.

The case of the Egyptians was particularly hard, since terrible hatred against the Pharaonic past of the country was diffused among the darkened minds of the fanatic, christened masses, leading therefore to total disrespect of their own identity, culture and past.

Briefly, the ideological issues that prevailed among the Aramaeans at those days were a) the division between Nestorians (who rejected Jesus' divine nature) and Monophysites (who rejected Jesus' human nature separate expression), and b) the common rejection of Constantinople Christianity (that was refuting both, Nestorianism and Monophysitism, accepting Jesus' double nature).

The top ideological issues among the Egyptians were a) the fights between the outright Coptic – Monophysitic majority and the sizable Greek minority that followed Constantinople Christianity, as well as the anti-Jewish stand of the Christians that generated serious incidents whenever the Jews formed an ostensible and sizable minority.

Similarly to the Aramaean and Coptic attitude of forgetting the mother language due to adhesion to Islam, in later periods, Greeks, who accepted Islam, underwent linguistic turcization. As much as Islamized Aramaeans and Egyptians disregarded Aramaic and Coptic, Islamized Greeks did not find any apparent reason to preserve Greek, in the way Persian was preserved among Iranians.

As far as the Yemenites are concerned, it seems that Monophysitic or pro-Constantinople Christianity (supported by and collaborating with Axumite Abyssinian King Kaleb, who invaded Yemen to help the Eastern Roman Empire in its fight against the Sassanid Empire of Iran) was so insignificant (whereas the majority was versed either in older forms of Yemenite religion, or in Nestorianism and Judaism) that the overwhelming acceptance of Islam came as a natural result to earlier developments.

Peace depends only on the extinction of the falsehood "Pan-Arabism".

The present article includes just some introductory thoughts regarding the perplex phenomenon of Islamization, as the subject is vast and mostly unstudied. However, this event's implications in present day politics are so deep that never peace in the Middle East will be achieved, before the earlier understanding and the final outmaneuvering of the aforementioned situation.

Arabic nationalism must be extinguished, the Arab League must be dissolved, Syriac Aramaic, Berberic, Nubian, Yemenite and Coptic must be imposed and taught in the schools, primary and secondary, in parallel with Arabic and other languages! Not only minorities, but the entire population of the Middle East must be taught their real languages in the primary and secondary education. This is the only way for Peace in the Middle East. The cultural implications of the various jargons of Arabic formed in different places are all related to and interconnected with obscurantist, retrograde and extremist ideological backgrounds. To them linked is a social behavioral system of absolute barbarism that supports the perpetuation of misery, which naturally leads to one exit: Islamic Terror.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis - is Orientalist, Assyriologist, Egyptologist, Iranologist, Islamologist, Historian and Political Scientist. Dr. Megalommatis, 49, is the author of 12 books, dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of encyclopedia entries, and thousands of articles. He speaks, reads and writes more than 15, modern and ancient, languages.

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