| Jorjani - The Return of Zarathustra, Part V | Front |
The Return of Zarathustra, Part VJason Reza JorjaniThe Aryan identity of Iran, which binds her destiny together with that of Europa, is not a historical curiosity. It is the basis of a cultural revolution triggered by the failed uprising against the Islamic Republic in 2009. The fifth and final part of this series examines the roots and implications of this Iranian Renaissance. The first part of the original article explaining the recent history of Iran is unsuitable for this blog and is not reproduced below. However you can read it here: Return of Zarathustra Part 5 - Original Meanwhile, it became clear to increasing numbers of young Iranians that the reform movement had not failed for incidental reasons. For the first time in centuries, Iranians took care to read scriptures such as the Quran, the Hadith, and Nahjul Balagha for themselves (in clear and comprehensible Persian translations). They began to tease apart Islam itself from what Iranians had made out of Islam in order to survive the Islamic conquest of Iran. For example, how the Zurkhaneh or “House of Strength” that is in nearly every Iranian town and hamlet preserved Mithraic chivalry in the form of a very superficially Islamized, mystical martial arts tradition. It became clear to young Iranians that Islam itself is at fault, and that this religion is not amenable to reform. Symbols of Iran’s Zoroastrian heritage began to appear everywhere, most of all in pendants around people’s necks. Ancient Persian holidays such as Tirgan (the Tyr festival), Mehrgan (the Mithras festival), or Yalda (in its original Yule Day form) that had faded into obscurity began to be boisterously celebrated again, and every Nowruz became an occasion for reaffirming the nation’s Aryan identity. Most people began naming their children after pre-Islamic Persian heroes and heroines, and some have even endeavored to minimize their use of Arabic loan words in written and spoken Persian. There are even projects being organized to reconstruct a purely Indo-European Persian language. Thousands began to gather spontaneously around the tomb of Cyrus the Great, growing by the numbers every year, on the day that commemorates his founding the Persian Empire when he marched into conquered Babylon. What they chant around the titanic tomb is even more significant: “We are Aryans, we do not worship Arabs!” ........ Since at least 2012 a grassroots movement has given birth to what the Pahlavi regime tried but failed to accomplish from the top down: a cultural revolution that restores and revitalizes the Pre-Islamic identity of Iran – an Iranian Renaissance. Dr. Shahin Nejad has defined the movement’s core principles as “the worship of wisdom” (Setayeshe Kherad), “justice” (the Zoroastrian concept of Daad), “charitableness” (Daheshmandi), “chivalric free-spiritedness” (Azadegi), and the “beautification, cultivation, and development of the living world” (Abadsazie Giti or Giti Arayi). All of these have their roots in the Gathas of Zarathustra and were preserved in the beloved national epic, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. The closest Western points of comparison to this epic are the works of Homer or the Norse sagas, with the very great difference that the Shahnameh was written a couple of centuries after the Arab conquest of Iran and with the explicit aim of preserving both the Persian language and the Aryan heritage of Iran. It was composed based on fragments of surviving pre-Islamic sagas and chronicles. The epic ends with the Islamic conquest, which is portrayed as such a cosmic tragedy that it breeds Luciferian contempt for the wheelwork of the heavens. Partisans of the Iranian Renaissance refer to themselves as the “children of Ferdowsi” (farzandane Ferdowsi). The term “Renaissance” calls to mind Medici Italy. It is more than an analogy. One thing that is clear to partisans of the Iranian Renaissance, and that Westerners are going to have to understand soon, is that the idea of “Arabic Science” or an “Islamic Golden Age” being a bridge between classical antiquity and the European Renaissance is grotesque nonsense. Repeating such absurdities adds insult to Islam’s injury of Iran. When the Caesar Justinian of the Christianized Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium closed the last of the great classical academies, the one at Athens, in 529 AD on the grounds of sacrilege, no less than seven of its Neo-Platonist masters resumed their careers at the Academy of Gondeshapur. One of three major universities in Sassanian Iran, like the Library of Alexandria, the Academy of Gondeshapur featured laboratories for practical research as well as a hospital that was the most renowned medical facility in the world. Its name means “Great Shapur” since it was founded by Shapur I, the Persian Emperor whose vision of Zoroastrianism was so broadmindedly true to the “progressive mentality” of the Gathas that he invited Mani to his coronation ceremony to sermonize about how Zarathustra’s esoteric teaching is one with that of Buddha and the Gnostic Christ. This is one of a number of examples of Persian Emperors aspiring to form an alliance with the leading visionary thinkers of their epoch, so that the two together could govern in the sagacious manner that Zarathustra and Goshtasp once did. As I suggested earlier in this article series, this was the model for Plato’s philosophical Guardians of the state. Indeed, when the last of Europe’s classical academicians took refuge in Iran they dubbed Khosrow I (Anushiruwan) the ideal Platonic philosopher king. The Sassanian interest in Neo-Platonism was such that extensive translations of Greek texts into Syriac, an administrative language of the Western parts of the Persian Empire, were already under way at the Persian ruled city of Nisibis (in present-day Syria). Once the academicians arrived in the Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon and were set up at Gondeshapur, these translation efforts were stepped up and these inspired original scientific treatises in Pahlavi (middle Persian) written by Bozorgmehr (Borzuya) and others. Such scientific efforts were not only taking place under Greek inspiration, but were also catalyzed by extensive translations of Sanskrit Indian texts into Pahlavi. In other words, about a century before the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran began, there was an enlightenment underway that promised what (somewhat anachronistically) we might see as a Zoroastrian fusion of Western science with Eastern spirituality. When the Arabs invaded in 651 AD they spent the first hundred years of their conquest setting fire to libraries and ransacking universities, including the Academy of Gondeshapur. What the Islamic State recently did in Mosul, where it burned every book in every library that was other than a canonical Islamic text, was just taking a page out of the playbook of the original Mohammedan armies that conquered Zoroastrian Iran. Only by 765 did the Caliphate begin to recognize that one cannot govern an empire this way. They pieced together what fragments survived their wonton destruction, aggregating the remaining texts at the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmat) in Baghdad. The library of the new school was placed in the charge of a Persian, Abu Sahl al-Nawbakhti, who oversaw the project of further translating the Syriac and Pahlavi translations of Greek originals into Arabic, and in rarer cases translating Greek directly into Arabic. By this means the whole Aristotelian corpus and most of Plato were preserved in Arabic translations as they met their demise at the hands of zealous Christians in Europe. The vast majority of the scholars of the so-called “Islamic Golden Age” were Persians, especially when mere translation gave way to commentaries and original texts inspired by Greek rationalism and science – which I have argued (in Part II) were probably catalyzed by the Zoroastrian colonization of Greece in the first place. These Persian geniuses of the medieval period were nearly all from that part of eastern Iran known as Khorasan (extending into present-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), which remained demographically white or ethnically Aryan for centuries after the Arab conquest (and before the Mongol invasion). In other words, these people were like ethnic Germans (as in German Science) whose own fathers and grandfathers were still practicing Zoroastrianism and resisting the country’s forcible conversion. Some of them were even referred to as “majusi” by Arab rulers of the time, an epithet for ‘pagans’ that derives from magus (a Zoroastrian priest). Together with the rebel stronghold of Azerbaijan and the Caspian coast (discussed in Part III), Khorasan was the site of the largest number of revolts against the Caliphate on the part of Persian fiefdoms trying to carve out some degree of autonomy. These Persians are the ones who crafted a philosophical and scientifically adequate Arabic vocabulary, radically transforming the language of the desert tribesmen in order to translate complex Greek and Persian terminology. It is a historical travesty of the first order to credit Islam with the brilliance of Razi (Rhazes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Khwarazmi (Algorithmi), Farabi (Alfarabius), Al Biruni, and Omar Khayyam. Every single one of these physicists, physicians, chemists, mathematicians, and astronomers was a Persian forced to write in a language other than his own because Iran was under Arab occupation. Fortunately, Khayyam managed to rattle off some poems in his native Persian towards the very end of his life, verses that are brimming over with the contempt for Islam that many of his scientific colleagues probably shared but had to muzzle before the Caliph. It is ironic that a man who was likely the greatest scientific mind on Earth during his own lifetime remains most well known, both in Iran and the West, for such drunken verses: If I am drunk on the wine of the Magi, so be it! The glory of Mughul India (including present-day Pakistan) must also be attributed to Iranian civilization and not to Islam. Akbar the Great and his successor, Dara Shokouh, were Persianate rulers who tried to move beyond the conflict between Islam and Hinduism on the basis of ideas from the school of Persian mysticism with the most direct connection to the Zoroastrian tradition, the Ishraqi or “Orientalist” school of Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi – a martyred medieval Iranian apostate. The Mughul culture of Northern India was in, nearly every significant respect, an Iranian culture. Its administrative and literary language was Persian, and its art and architecture were also predominately influenced by Iranian models. For example, a Persian, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, was the architect responsible for the Taj Mahal (a name meaning “Crown District” in Persian). Akbar and his short-lived successor instituted a project of translating all of the major works of Indian literature into Persian. These fifty or so books included the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Vishnu Purana, and the Bhagavata Purana. Until well into the period of British colonial rule, centuries after Akbar’s time, the Bhagavad Gita was more widely read in Persian in Northern India than in Sanskrit. It was said that this most revered of all Indian spiritual texts resounded better in Dara Shokouh’s Persian translation, under the title Abe Zendegi or “The Water of Life.” The truth is that the “Indo” of the Indo-European world has always referred, not to Dravidian India at large, but to the southeastern border of at least six Iranian or Persianate kingdoms that extended to the Indus river for most of history. With its northwestern border in the Scythian realm from the Black Sea to the Caucasus, and its southwestern border at the Indus, Greater Iran was the Indo-European civilization. Greater Iran is clearly a core concept of the Iranian Renaissance, as reflected by a popular motto that is oft-repeated by media personality Omid Dana, Iran-e-Bozorg arman-e-bozorg mikhahad or “Greater Iran needs greater ideals!” Iran has at least 3,000 years of continuous history that is an expression of an unbroken sense of national identity reaching back to Zarathustra, and even earlier heroic figures memorialized by the Shahnameh. By comparison the 10 or 12 nations that surround Iran by land and sea in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East are artificial constructions of modern European colonialists. The oldest of them does not predate the early 19th century. For example, from 1850 to 1900, Iran lost no less than half of its territory to the Russian Czars who carved it up into the “stans” (estan means “province” in Persian) that have, since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, become nominally independent states. The only exception to this rule is the Turkish border with Iran, which was a long disputed territorial boundary between the Ottoman Caliphate and the Persian Empires of the Safavid, Afshar, Zand, and Qajar dynasties. Two things are important to remember in this regard. Firstly, the Asiatic Turks did not arrive in ‘Turkey’ until the 14th century. Initially blood-lusting savages who genocided and forcibly miscegenated the Iranian population of the Caucasus region on their way to Anatolia, they adopted Persian as their administrative and literary language as soon as they settled down to the business of running an Empire. Both the Seljuk and Ottoman Empires were Persianate cultures, even if the latter was officially at war with Iran. Secondly, the population of eastern ‘Turkey’ remains mostly Kurdish. Referred to by the Greeks as the Medes, the Kurds are ethnically and linguistically an Iranian tribe who, together with the Persians, have always formed the backbone of Iranian civilization. The mother of Cyrus the Great was a queen of the Median Kingdom that was Iran’s first world-class state, preceding the Persian Empire. .......... Extract from: www.righton.net/2016/08/03/the-return-of-zarathustra-part-v/ |