What Future Holds

There is a new World Order which demands a completetly different intervention - no intervention at all but a the greatest pristine revolutionarly narrative of brave men and women liberating themselves.

Since I came back to Egypt I sensed a change in the air, palpable change. It is with great pleasure I report on Egypt coming back from the dead, rising from ashes. First in national phsyche, putting behind it years of humiliation, defeat and corruption. People are happy and relived but concerned.

Hope it will lead to a better tomorrow, where it will lead to real changes in economics, soceity and politics. It must take a long time and will not be without set-backs but leader of the Arab world has now arrived. Egypt is a true star and along Turkey and Iran is the country which defines what Middle East will be like in next decades. As they said, future of the region is not decided in Tripoli or Tel-Aviv or Riyadh, it is being made in Cairo.

Democracy has been delayed in the Middle East for years due to several reasons but history should become normalized now - as Friedman puts it - the Arab world will return to history. I will not list these well known reasons, but just note how critical this change is.

"No leaders should think that they could rule forever" - this is another new idea, dawning on Muslim world for probably the first time.

All the while, western myths - and I for years argued and described them as such - about Middle East were put to dustbin of history. Europe now stands humiliated and confused, paralyzed by fear of the post-crisis future and incipient racism, United States also stands compromised and indecisive. Both of them will be unable to master a responce to the Arab spring, neither raising to the challenge nor able to fight the outcomes. And yet the values these regions represent to the world, others still hold dear - not western phenomena, really.

So who will lead the Arab spring from beginning into fruition. What is the journey to be undertaken, a journey which FOR THE FIRST TIME in 100 years will be wholly unique.


There are several key elements to how this can play out:

1. Democracy and advance of human social rights across region must push the policies of regional integration. It can not be that the potential of region is stifled, it can not be that they trade with Europe more than each other. Arab block was a sham, now it must become a region of common trade and visa-free travel.

2. Liberalization of economies of the region and free trade between countries in the region.

2. Flow of ideas and people across the region must be unhindered, this process must include translations of foreign books en masse, many educational projects and nurturing civil and religious activism into a force for good different in tone from western concepts, but related to them.

3. Infrastructure, education and science projects financed by rich Arab surplus money - this money has to be wrestled out of the useless Gulf monarchies.

2. Turkey, now banished from European Union. must play a key role in shaping the new middle East. Iran must not play this part, unless it stars playing constructively

3. And finally Israel must abandon its protector and attempt reconciliation and join regional integration in good faith. It must do so by abandoning its current protector and putting trust into her current enemies. No more unwinnable wars- just trust, or otherwise it will be left out of the region forever.

The unity which will reconcile such irreconcilable entities will be another bold step which I term New Eurabia. This will- with a leap of faith - involve integration of Europe and Muslim Middle East into a single entity.

How? We will talk about it in due time.

Egyptian Nation, We salute you..

The spirit of Egyptian revolution is making air in Cairo cleaner, and it is easier to breathe. The nation of Egypt has risen from ashes and while there is still lot more to do but I have no doubt that Arab nations are undergoing the profound change, which will not be easy and there are many tough years ahead. All possibilities for derailment exists, but we should also be admiring possibilities of change for the better.

Economic reforms can not come soon enough; if all Arab countries can start on the road for the unified economic zone with free movement of labour, ideas and goods, anti-corruption drive and real market, only then we can define revolution as success. HOW this will be achieved I do not know, for there will not be any helpers to Arab nation in this quest.

For those who are not here and want to understand the spirit please look at the video we have uploaded during the Revolution Festival last Friday...

Musavat Party Program

A quote from the program of Turkic Democratic-Federalist party Musavat. This declaration accepted on October 26, 1917 at the party's Baku Convention.

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful!

Human life is a constant war with Nature. Civilization is a reward men earn in this war. Humanity’s main purpose and desire reveals itself in sustaining our civilization and in fair distribution of its bounties. Human civilization in its entirety is a sum of cultural gains of individual nations.

To preserve the gains of our civilization and cultural achievements of Humanity, the existence of cultured nation state is vital. And since this fact is not in dispute – and furthermore, since the fact that a culture of all Humanity is a sum of individual national cultures is also not in dispute – we strongly believe that most rational and normal state must be a nation state.

Nationalism Explained

Some might refer to otherwise quite liberal me as a nationalist, which might have some truth to it, although i view things through a different prism.

While modern concept of nationalism is a European invention (or distortion), the old concept of family, clan, and blood loayalties and resulting sentiment of what one would call "soil nationalism" existed from the time immemorial and will always be with us. To deny your roots, your language and religion is a grave sin in the eyes of a nationalist.

What nationalism is remains a hotly contested subject on which there is little general consensus. The clearest example of opposition to nationalism is cosmopolitanism, with adherents as diverse as liberals, Marxists, and anarchists, who hold all people equal and strive to eliminate cultural and ethnic differences. On the other hand, main universal religions - Islam and Christianity, in particular - also to certain degree restrict modernist nationalism, while unwilling to restrict ethnic one.

Reliance on ethnicity to spread religion is a major boon. Nations that have fused religion into the sense of nationhood are almost unassailable - like Jews, Armenians or Iranians. They will have less internal conflict but will receive double reinforcement from the two powerful ideas: ideas of sanctity of blood and sanctity of Revelation. Nations where religious affiliations divide, generally fare worse - like Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland. So called post-religious Europe is in fact still very culturally Christian anywhere from a small hamlet to a big city (although maybe in denial of it).

In this sense true non-expansive and non-chauvinist nationalism is still a parochial force, for it does not strive for imposition of international values and is content to maintane values specific to a certain tribe or ethnicity. It carries no universal values and therefore does not clash with whatever other values a person can hold dear.

Recent non-western example of confusion between specific ethnic and religious sentiment is Pushtun problem hapless Americans now finding themselves in. The reason it may not be possible to fight Taliban in Pakistan or elsewhere it is because in a sense Taliban are Pathans, who are fighting for and within the bounds of Pushtunwali code and in this sense they are "freedom fighters", however barbaric they may be for Europeans. All should remember that Afghanistan is a gravesite for all of its invaders and occupants, irrespective of their might.

New system for 21 century

Todays monetary and commercial system – build on the foundation laid at Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 - and economic arrangements related to it are coming to an end – as a oncoming New Great Depression. There will be no imminent Fall of the West but continuing and inevitable shift of economic power away from the current power brockers. Some of the clearest indicators of that is the oncoming devaluation of the dollar – not yet evident but assured as printing machines will be working overtime.

There is a reason that Bretton Woods agreement worked so well for over 60 years. The U.S. dollar was the currency with the most purchasing power and it was the only currency that was backed by gold. Additionally, all European nations that had been involved in World War II were highly in debt and transferred large amounts of gold into the United States, a fact that contributed to the supremacy of the United States. Thus, the U.S. dollar was strongly appreciated and became the currency of choice for Bretton Woods system. The withdrawal of US away from the gold standard in 1971 left a peculiar sitation of dollar as a reserve currency – the situation continuing to this day. This situation will change now – maybe as soon as next decade.

What had happened at Bretton Woods Conference? To ensure economic stability and political peace, states agreed to cooperate to regulate the international economic system. The pillar of the U.S. vision of the postwar world was free trade. Free trade involved lowering tariffs and among other things a balance of trade favorable to the capitalist system – and at that time – to the only mass-manufacturing nation on the planet.

Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, the planners at Bretton Woods established the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These organizations became operational in 1945 after a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement. Will these agreements be slowly undone?

Versions of History

If only there was a world without Islam - a dream kingdom of Islamophobes - it may not look too different to a current world for Eastern Christianity would supplant and feed Anti-Western ideology - according to an article in Foreign Affairs. Middle East would be a pawn and a headache whatever the religion of its inhabitants may be.

Continuing in the vein of historical "ifs" for today is an anniversary of Crystal Night. If there were no Holocaust, there would be no Palestinian problem, for there would be no Jewish state. It is inconceivable that it may have appeared other than a result of a Post-War settlement. Iran and Palestinians should really be blaming Germany and Germans for disposing of Europe's Jewish population.

The History Lesson?

Some mistakenly assume that the stockmarket crash of 1929 was the catalyst of the Great Depression. The crash in America came near the beginning of the Great Depression, a most devastating period of economic decline in the industrialized world.

Instead there were multiple causes for the first downturn , including the structural weaknesses and specific events that turned it into a major depression and like massive bank failures and the stock market crash, while economists - ironically - point to Britain's decision to return to the Gold Standard at pre-World War I parities. In reality, no one knows exactly why the crash has occured.

Ironically - like today - debt was one of the major factors of spreading the disease and deflation, not inflation was the plague. in the 1920s, American consumers and businesses relied on cheap credit. This fueled strong short-term growth but created consumer and commercial debt[ People and businesses who were deeply in debt when price deflation occurred or demand for their product decreased often risked default.Many drastically cut current spending to keep up time payments, thus lowering demand for new products. Businesses began to fail as construction work and factory orders plunged. Massive layoffs occurred, resulting in US unemployment rates of over 25% by 1933.

Banks which had financed this debt began to fail as debtors defaulted on debt and depositors attempted to withdraw their deposits en masse, triggering multiple bank runs. Government guarantees and Federal Reserve banking regulations to prevent such panics were ineffective or not used. Bank failures led to the loss of billions of dollars in assets.Outstanding debts became heavier, because prices and incomes fell by 20–50% but the debts remained at the same dollar amount. After the panic of 1929, and during the first 10 months of 1930, 744 US banks failed. (In all, 9,000 banks failed during the 1930s). By 1933, depositors had lost $140 billion in deposits- enormous figures for the time. Economic activity in US declined by 45%!

This kind of spiralling may have turned a 1930 recession into a 1933 great depression. All hope was lost. Countries that suffered the most were the countries most integrated - USA, Britain and Germany depending on american post-war reconstruction loans managed by mostly Jewish bankers. Soon Germany was in turmoil (Hence, Hitler had an easy time: preaching to the choire). Britain was faltering, Latin America was in grip of revolutions. Communism of poor but rapidly industrializing Soviet Union suddenly became attractive for great variety of people in the West and in the future "Thirld World". This in turn increased fears of Communist revolution in the West, strengthening support for extreme anti-Communists, or other right-wing reactionary forces. The shaky liberal democracies were toppled in Central Europe one by one and the era of integralist dictators folloed.

THe crisis has eventually came to pass, however it had left indelible imprint on the political and economic models employed after it had passed. Among the conseuquences which was the abandonment of classic economic liberal approaches, which Roosevelt replaced in the United States with the New Deal. It was a main factor in the implementation of social democracy and planned economies in European countries after the war.

Ironically the massive rearmament policies of Nazi Germay and of other countriwa to counter the threat from Germany helped stimulate the economies of Europe in 1937-39. The preparation for total war provided a safe valve for the economies to stop their slide

By 1937, unemployment in Britain had fallen to 1.5 million. The
mobilization of manpower following the outbreak of war in 1939 finally ended unemployment.In the United States, the massive war spending doubled the GNP, either masking the effects of the Depression or essentially ending the Depression. People accepted rationing and price
controls for the first time as a way of expressing their support for the war effort. Cost-plus pricing in munitions contracts guaranteed businesses a profit no matter how many mediocre workers they employed or how inefficient the techniques they used. The demand was for a vast quantity of war supplies as soon as possible, regardless of cost. Businesses hired every person in sight, even driving sound trucks up and down city streets begging people to apply for jobs.

Kommunalka

As my Soviet life moves to a ever greater distance beyond the horizon, few things are worth remembering - or reminding myself about. Communal Aparments, while not personally experienced - as our family had managed to preserve a separate rump of a larger "capitalist" flat - were a great fixture of contemporary Soviet Life all the way into privatization of 1990s.

The communal apartment was the pièce de résistance in the chronicle of the miseries of Soviet everyday life. Contrary to the myth, they were not a product of collectivist ideology. Rather, they developed out of urban overcrowding and a Proletarian zealotry which made local authorities eager to punish the bourgeoisie, our family included, by forcing them to give up part of their apartments to the poor. A whole folklore exists about the humiliations, petty vindictiveness, fights and resentments associated with involuntary communal living. Michael Zochenko had developed a whole genre of satirical literature devoted to description of such a communal living.

Kitchens and bathrooms were the sites of epic battles over property (saucepans, washbasins) and use of space that could end up with a brawl or a bloodbath. Women, stay-at-home housewifes had it the worst, fighting it out with the neighbours all their lives. There are a few kommunalka memoirs that mention mutual support among neighbours and a feeling that one was part of an extended family where different classes, genders, nationalities and religions were all huddled together. Much more common was the sense that the family’s room, not the kommunalka as a whole, was home.

There wasn’t much room for possessions in the kommunalka, or even in the small separate apartments. This was just as well, as goods of all kinds, even basic necessities like food, shoes and clothing, were in short supply throughout the Soviet period. Yet shortages did not mean that Soviet citizens were indifferent to consumption. On the contrary, getting hold of scarce goods via connections and various under-the-counter arrangements became a Soviet pastime. Marxist ideology may have emphasised production, but in the Soviet Union it was hierarchies of consumption (based on preferential access to goods) that mattered.

While the Soviet regime may be said to have discouraged consumerism by keeping goods scarce, it was not ideologically on the side of asceticism, it promised us the Paradise on Earth. the meagre supply of goods in the present was only a harbinger of the abundance to come. I remember how potent was the symbol of Cornucopia with goods falling out from the sky - this was to be the future of the Soviet consumer, who had to persevere just a little longer to enter to paradise later.

Western consumer goods that were now known to exist but remined out of reach.
In the Soviet Union,the Western goods were veru coveted, and their arrival en masse with the collapse of the regime at first seemed like a miracle. The bitter pill that these consumers would have swallow as a price of free access to goods, and the coming of anarchy was neither predicted nor waited for.

Eid Mubarak

Blessed Ramadan to all! All the Glories of the World I wish to my friends and brothers, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, for indeed in the "eyes" of God (Allah forgive me for assigning attributes to You) shall we be judged according to our thoughts not our words and actions.

Not to be too offensive to modern sensibilities i have found a more acceptable veiled image of the Prophet (saw)

This sixteen-century Persian painting depicts the Night Journey and shows Muhammad seated on Buraq horse, flying from Mecca to Jerusalem with the Angel Gabriel, a mythical event which bounded forever Jerusalem to a Muslim imagination. From the Haram in Jerusalem, Muhammed, according to hadith tradition is said to have ascended the heaven, a perfect act of surrender to God, which became a paradigm for a Islamic spiritual journey

Confession

I imagine myself a part of a great army of Tung Yabgu – khagan of Turks – ready to lay siege to a great Sassanian town of Derbent, sword in my hand and murmuring my prayers to Tengri – a great God of Blue Sky and Ruler of all Spirits. I am a Son of Grey Wolf, from the Valley of the Wolves. I am a mighty Turkut.

How can any of these smelly brown people understand the sounds of my beautiful language, how can they cherish blooming valleys of Orhon where streams come to form the mighty Ulugh-Khem which flows north into the Unknown Northern Ocean.
How can I not be a Turk then, and not marry one?

I imagine myself as a warrior of the Great army of Islam during the first siege of Constantinople, just few decades after Prophet’s death. I am serving Ayyub– the flag-bearer of the Prophet, and I am to be the one to take the Green Banner from his hand and to hear his last words about the walls of Constaninople to scaled by a Conquering Turk.
How can I not be a Muslim and not marry one?

But then my thoughts sadden and darken and I imagine myself as a part of small band of hangers on with Imam Huseyn (a.s) on the field of Karbala. I am bloodied and wounded and hiding in a tent. After the battle, when Yazeed's army is looting the tents, they fnd me and place my head on a spear. Umar ibn Sa'ad sends Imam Husayn's head to ibn Ziyad on Ashura afternoon and orders to sever heads of his comrades to send them to Kufa. I am one of them. How can I not be a Shia and not marry one?

And then my thoughts sadden yet again and I see myself on the bridge over Ganja river in May 1920, commanding a small band of survivors from Azerbaijani Army. Russian Bolshevik horde and its Armenian backers are coming to take the bridge and I am – like in Ali and Nino book – waiting for my martyrdom, knowing that there is no way back into the beautiful but short-lived dream of our nation. I will be dead for seventy years.
How can I not be an Azeri and not marry one?

Then I smile again and think about all the good things people had said to me and done to me, the people who knew and cared nothing about sanctity of blood, far away from my land and people, and were inherently good or even better than some of my compatriots.
How can I not be a human and not marry one?

In defence of Autocracy

Autocrats of the World, while still ruling with iron fist in many a country, always seem to be on retreat and do not posesss a narrative and ideology to counter the critique from West and associated with it liberal ideology of humans rights. They are forced to stage elections and and play fake democracy to play along in the game of convenience.

Of course the reason that this is the case is that most of the autocracies run by thugs devoid of any ideology and even a practical wit to create an ideology suited for their affairs. They are run as family or clan enterprise. A failure to create such an ideology lead those autocracies to lose a battle for hearts and minds of the people and eventually fall. However there are many other types of autocratic governments that work well

Absolute monarchies can be authoritarian, Gulf monarchies being a great example. The absolute monarchs are generally benign rulers in the current world climate. Succession in the monarchiest is the easiest problem

• Individual dictators also be authoritarian, though there have been many cases of benevolent dictators. My favourite and best-loved example is Ataturk
• Fascist nations are always authoritarian.
• Military autocracies countries run by high-ranking military officers, are almost always authoritarian. Note that militarchy does not necessarily mean a dictatorship or a junta, but a generally thoroughly militarized state.
• Theocracies are almost always authoritarian. Iran seems to be a partial exeption
• Consentual dictatorships seems to proliferate in the South Eastern Asia.
  In the late 20th Century political elites in East and Southeast Asia argued that countries with authoritarian regimes were more likely to be economically successful than democratic countries. Examples given to support this argument were South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan all of which were authoritarian and experiencing a period of rapid growth. China is now a great example of flourishing authoritarian state.

As Promised - about Parthians

I don't know I want to write about Parthians. Perhabs because they were rulers of the long forgotten Empire. A country which history is still eclipsed by other ancient empires, like those of Sassanids after them. Parthians were great multiculturalists of their day, integrating Hellenistic and Central Asian culture into one unique culture. Most of all I write about Parthian Empire because i had visited its capital Nisa, whose ruins are located in Turkmenistan desert.

At the height of its power, the Parthian Empire covered all of Iran proper, as well as regions of the modern countries of Armenia, Iraq, Georgia, eastern Turkey, eastern Syria, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, the coast of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and the UAE[3]. The Parthian empire was led by the Arsacid dynasty, which reunited and ruled over the Iranian plateau, after defeating and disposing the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, beginning in the late 3rd century BC, and intermittently controlled Mesopotamia between 150 BC and 224 AD. It was the third native dynasty of ancient Iran (after the Median and the Achaemenid dynasties). Parthia had many wars with the Roman Empire.

Western domination over the East is over 2000 years old

Great - all of us are after all descendants of the highly esteemed Western Greek Civilization, not some of accursed Eastern barbarians. I always suspected that.

Read on:The Indo-Scythian Taxila copper plate uses the Macedonian month of "Panemos" for calendrical purposes (British Museum).[172]From the 1st century AD, the Greek communities of central Asia and northwestern India lived under the control of the Kushan branch of the Yuezhi, apart from a short-lived invasion of the Indo-Parthian Kingdom.[173] The Kushans founded the Kushan Empire, which was to prosper for several centuries. In the south, the Greeks were under the rule of the Western Kshatrapas.It is unclear how much longer the Greeks managed to maintain a distinct presence in the Indian sub-continent. The legacy of the Indo-Greeks was felt however for several centuries, from the usage of the Greek language and calendrical methods,[174] to the influences on the numismatics of the Indian subcontinent, tracable down to the period of the Gupta Empire in the 4th century.[175]
The Indo-Greeks may also have had some influence on the religious plan as well, especially in relation to the developing Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism has been described as "the form of Buddhism which (regardless of how Hinduized its later forms became) seems to have originated in the Greco-Buddhist communities of India, through a conflation of the Greek Democritean-Sophistic-Skeptical tradition with the rudimentary and unformalized empirical and skeptical elements already present in early Buddhism".[176]

My next post will be about Nisa and the Parthians

The flag once raised will never fall!

Today is 90th anniversary of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.

The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR; Azerbaijani: Azərbaycan Xalq Cümhuriyyəti) was the first democratic and secular republic in the Muslim world (pre-dating the Republic of Turkey). The ADR was founded on May 28, 1918 after the collapse of the Russian Empire that began with the Russian Revolution of 1917 by Azerbaijani National Council in Tiflis[1].

90 years of existence - despite the 70-year period of Soviet occupation created us, and as the founding fathers had said - the blue-red-green flag once raised would never fall.

Blue is for our Turkishness and Modernity we are on the road to. Red is for martyrs who died for the Nation and for our freedom. Green is for Islam and tradition we will be faithful to . That flag is us in a nutshell. Salute those created this flag!

Can you really help

Revisiting the theme of White Man's Burden, I am showing this picture from 1923 newspaper, which shows characteristic relationship towards developing world of the era. This particular cartoon depicts an Ameircan solider (notice US on the flask) dragging a Phillipino savage towards a place of learning - a school. Nice.

The West has now recognized that direct submission of other civilizations is beyond its capabilities. There are no benefits whasoever for ruling over foreign peoples or teaching those other foreign peoples what they need to be doing. This second point has not yet been understood by today's Samaritans. The countries and people in them are better left to their own devices as world practice has shown time and time again. But the charitable never learn.

Only when a country really wants to learn, asks for advice and sends her children forth to study, because this advice is beneficial to her; only then there will be some good that can come out of the initiatives like foreign aid and democracy building. Certain degree of fatalism is a pre-requisite for a donor program by a rich country to a poor one – this fatalism has to recognize that results of this program will lead to nothing but continuation of poverty. The aid has to be given to poor because of charity and not because of the result. It seems to me that any other goal is either dangerous idealism or thinly veiled racism.

Islam - for example - recognizes that there will always be wretched and poor people amongst ourselves and it is impossible to get rid of them, in which case unconditional charity is a mechanism to alleviate a social tension.

My Answer to Rudyard Kipling

From Rudyard Kipling

Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Do not take up again this burden

Do not set forth your sons anymore

The World was the captive of the White Race once

But today we are free and chaotic - free like before

Your medicines may save our children-

But to you we are primitive beasts, half cooked, half raw

No desire we have to serve at your table

And dress in Western way, to cover our otherness more

Our otherness is in our souls - and not in ways we speak

Which you do not seem to comprehend, nor want to

So damn you with all your care and charity

And made up compassion for our suffering in peace and war

White Man - burden yourself with other problems

Of which you have plenty. Let us be ourselves, let us be ourselves.

Spring Hath Come

What can be more primeval than the rebirth of Nature. In the Region where the Letter, the Agriculture and Religion were born, Man even before those had celebrated the budding festival of spring, for it was the to cultivate crops, tend animals ready to mate and collect berries and flowers

Thus I claim that Novruz is the oldest celebration known to Humanity. It is for all of us who live in the Middle East and Central Asia - the region where Spring is the best season of all.

Everyone claims with equal validity that Nowruz is theirs to cherish: Zoroastrians, Muslims, Bahais and Alawites. In reality it is as close to the Men's Natural Religion as the day could be. It is just the First Day of Spring, a day when not a single vice and wretchedness is celebrated, but Ours and Nature's Maker is worshipped - The One who made it all possible for us - to breathe, to sing and to make merry.

Nowrūz (Persian: نوروز, various local pronunciations and spellings) is the traditional Iranian new year holiday celebrated by Iranian, Turkic and many other peoples in West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Northwestern China, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and the Balkans.
Nowruz marks the first day of spring and the beginning of the Iranian year. It is celebrated on the day of the astronomical vernal equinox (start of spring in northern hemisphere), which usually occurs on March 21 or the previous/following day depending on where it is observed. As well as being a Zoroastrian holiday, it is also a holy day for adherents of Sufism and the Bahá'í Faith.[1] In Iran it is also referred to as an Eid festival, although it is not an Islamic feast. Alawites and Nizari Ismailis also celebrate Nowruz.[2] The term Nowruz first appeared in Persian records in the second century AD, but it was also an important day during the time of the Achaemenids (c. 648-330 BC), where kings from different nations under the Persian empire used to bring gifts to the emperor (Shahanshah) of Persia on Nowruz.[3]

The Age of Reason

It is always pleasant to learn something new in any area, but especially pleasant if it concerns Islamic history, onto which many in the West, so arrogantly pronounce judgements by assuming to know everything. Recently I have made an unexpected discovery while searching for the sources of Islamic Fundamentalism.

Islamic Reformism was a significant movement occupying minds of almost all ruling and clerical classes who clearly saw muslim countries lose superiority, economies and finally independence itself to the West. All leading voices of the 19 century argued for reform. The challenge of 19 century was crucial – how to compete with the West and yet stay independent, but the stakes went higher. It was obvious that Europeans would invade and rule directly, if urgent solutions were not found. While Ottoman Empire survived and staved off defeat, its Egyptian vassals under heirs of moderniser Muhammad Ali did not. After it had build the Suez canal, Egypt found itself – after heavy and indiscriminate borrowing – directly in depth to French and British banks and became insolvent. A military coup instigated by officers of newly modern Egyptian army was also the first attempt at nationalization to save Egypt from foreign creditors. It had failed and in 1882 British occupied Egypt under pretext of protection of Suez.

Basically it was becoming clear that despite its lip service to liberty for all, the West had no intentions to give liberty to other races and was on the road to enslaving them all. In these conditions there had to be two solutions: either to fight a losing battle of the sword or reform internally to be able to compete later. At the time answer was the latter, and beyond local battles with the West, there was no “jihad”-inspired backlash. Terror as the method of war was not yet born.

Two figures loomed large on the Sunni Islamic Reformism side in Middle East, and at the time quite known in Europe – like Tariq Ramadans of their day– Jalal-ad-Din Afghani and Muhammad Abduh.

Reformers like them said that Muslim societies had fallen behind the west because they had strayed from the core strength of Islam which celebrated science and reason and abhorred superstition. They had become antagonistic to change ossified and did not innovate with the result of the West racing ahead. There was generally little resistance to the idea that things had to change among all ruling classes and progressive clergy.

Abduh – who after being exiled and arrested by British eventually returned to become a Grand Mufti of Egypt – was also a consistent believer in the triumph of reason and berated a rigid ideology based on uncritical interpretations of hadiths, and went even further indicating importance of scrutiny and free speech to question many tenets. Both men strongly opposed irrational tendencies in Islam and opposed mystical Sufism which they saw as not scientific and full of ossified rituals. They have probably despised the folk religion with its cult of saints and holy places and thought of ways to challenge it through modernized education.

Now you might thing that the Islamic Reform movement was not opposed to the West, but it was not so. It was Sharia bound traditionalist headed by mainstream ulema, who in their stupor were ready to not only oppose but support foreign rule, provided their traditions were respected. Reformists invariably sided with nationalist cause. It was true in Russia (including my native Azerbaijan, whose Muslim democrat leaders eventually formed a republic in 1918), India and Egypt. Reformism in India created Iqbal and Ali Jinna and Turkish one Young Turks and their heir – Ataturk.

Reformists ultimate goal was the Islamic renaissance akin to the Arabic Golden age where spirit of scientific inquiry flourished; their future did not have not skimpily dressed women and binge drinking - they still saw the West as flawed in many respects. Afghani was also called a father of Pan-Islamism, which was a pro-Caliphate movement that can be constructed as a early version of Islamic “Fundamentalism” and Hizb-ut-Tahrir party. He toured many Muslim and European countries and served as an advisor to Ottoman Sultan and king of Afghanistan in their reforms.

Because some Reformists used to advocate a return to pious practices of Salafis – the early followers of the Prophet who, the Reformists believed, were guilded by Reason – these Reformists called themselves Salafis too, just like today’s West adversaries.

So in a twist of fate modernizers of 19 century became heirs to puritanical Salafis of today. Of course, on any Jihadi website the Reformists of 19 century are criticized as Jewish sell-outs – in one, Afghani is called a Judeo-Mason for example - but links between later Muslim Brotherhood and early Islamic Reform movement are obvious. Both were born out of desire to understand reasons for failure and derived their strength from critical and untraditional interpretation of the scriptures. However, the answers they have provided were different. There was the reason for the change of emphasis – it was because 20 century was a disaster and disappointment for Muslims, especially its second half, where it became clear that reforms had not worked and the West firmly and unconditionally established itself as the ruler of the World. Slowly but surely those who supported the modernism and innovation were tainted by association with the oppressors. This was the beginning of a new and more difficult chapter.

The Last Caliph

On the blog which linked to Riri's I have found a damning injuctions against the destruction of Khilafah.

On the 28th of Rajab 1342AH, corresponding to 3 March 1924CE, the Khilafah was destroyed at the hands of the colonial powers with the assistance of collaborators such as Mustafa Kemal. Allah (swt) has obligated us to rule by His Law and ordered us to shield the Ummah with the Khilafah state.

I have an amblivalent attitude to the Califate as it has been destroyed by Ataturk, but I do want to come to his aid. He has done the unthinkable and in order to save the heartland of Ottoman Empire from the Western Domination stood against the alliance of Sultan and Allies to preserve independence of the Turkish State in the time of peril. The alternative was a foreign domination under a Western protectorate with monarchies of the type created or propped-up in Iraq, Jordan and Egypt.

The Turkish national movement, as the details explained in Turkish War of Independence forms a Turkish Grand National Assembly, secured formal recognition of the nation’s independence and new borders on July 23, 1923 through the Treaty of Lausanne. The National Assembly declared Turkey a republic on October 29 and proclaimed Ankara its new capital. After nearly 700 years, the Ottoman Empire had officially ceased to exist. However, under Allied direction and diktat, the Sultan pledged to suppress such movements and secured an official fatwa from the Sheikh ul-Islam declaring them to be un-Islamic. But the nationalists steadily gained momentum and began to enjoy widespread support. Many sensed that the nation was ripe for revolution. In an effort to neutralize this threat, the Sultan agreed to hold elections, with the hope of placating and co-opting the nationalists. To his dismay, nationalist groups swept the polls, prompting him to again dissolve parliament in April 1923. The National Assembly abolished the Caliphate on March 3, 1924. Abdul Mejid was sent into exile to France along with the remaining members of the Ottoman House, marking the official end of the "Ottoman Caliphate".

It is interesting to note that the last "Caliph" Abdulmejid II was an urbane and an intellectual.
He served as Chairman of the Ottoman Artist's Society. He is considered as one of most important painters of last period Ottoman art. His paintings of the Harem, showing a modern musical gathering, and of a woman reading Goethe's Faust were displayed at an exhibition of Ottoman paintings in Vienna in 1918. His personal self-portrait can be seen at Istanbul Modern.

For Turkey Ataturk did a right thing, destroying a poweless institution which had become an instrument in the hands of would-be colonizers. The effects of what this decision for a long time for other Sunni Muslims were minimal; this was until now when people living in a historical warp want to return to a political equation which did not exist for many centuries. Some Sunnis feel that re-creation the Caliphate will give Muslims a purpose the so lacked in the past.

In search of the seven cities of gold

I watched National Treasure with Nicholas Cage searching for yet another mystery as a treasure hunter. This is how the legend of Cibola originated, which goes to show that every tale has a grain of truth in it:

• 
  Upon hearing the castaways' tales of cities with limitless riches to the North of New Spain, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza organized an expedition headed by the Franciscan monk Marcos de Niza, who took as his guide Estevanico. During the voyage, in a place called Vacapa (probably located somewhere around the state of Sonora) the monk sent Estevanico to scout ahead. A short while later, Estevanico met a monk who had heard stories from the natives about cities overflowing with riches.When Marcos de Niza heard of this man, he supposed that the stories pertained to the "Seven Cities of Cíbola y Quivira."Estevanico did not wait for the friar, but instead continued travelling until he reached Háwikuh, now in New Mexico, where, at the hands of Native Americans, he supposedly met his death, and his companions were forced to flee.Marcos de Niza returned to Mexico City and said that the expedition moved on even after the reported death of Estevanico. He claimed that they had seen a city very far away and greater than the great Tenochtitlan; in this city, the people used dishes of gold and silver, decorated their houses with turquoise, and had gigantic pearls, emeralds, and other beautiful gems.It is now believed by many historians that the mica-inflected clay of the adobe pueblos may have created an optical illusion when inflamed by the setting sun. Thus fueling the tale of the "Seven Cities of Cíbola y Quivira."