In The New Republic, in "The Other Secret Jews," Adam Kirsch reviews The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks by Marc David Baer.
A number of years ago, a friend in Istanbul mentioned several times that many of his friends and acquaintances in classical music, cinephile, and other high culture circles in the Turkish capital were crypto-Jews. I had no idea what he was talking about until I did some research into the Donme (or Donmeh or other variant spellings), and discovered that they were the descendants of followers of the Jewish False Messiah of the 1660s, Sabbatai Zevi (spellings vary), who after Zevi's apostasy, had publicly converted to Islam but had continued to worship Zevi, and remained a small, relatively endogamous elite who played key roles in Turkish revolutions and subsequent life.
For example, the foreign minister in Turkey's most recent Kemalist party government, Ismail Cem, was a Donmeh. (Perhaps a certain amount of the former neocon ardor for Turkey as the Good Muslim Country, which was so rudely interrupted in early 2003 when the Turkish parliament voted to not allow the U.S. to use its big base in Turkey to invade Iraq, much to the surprise and dismay of Paul Wolfowitz, had to do with Americans and Israelis being used to dealing with Turkish diplomats with many of whom they felt culturally compatible.)
The Donme are fascinating in an Umberto Eco sort of way, so, back in 2006, I wrote four long blog posts about them. The Donmeh are representative of how in the realm of the old Byzantine Empire, things are lot more, well, byzantine than we poor dumb Americans assume. We think of Muslim lands as uniformly Islamic, but there are millions of people there who are only vaguely Muslim, like the tens of millions of Alevis in rural Turkey and the ruling Alawi minority in Syria, not to mention the 50,000 Gnostics in Southern Iraq who believe in "planetary archons," and the Lucifer-worshiping Yezidis in Kurdistan. Then there are the Samaritans of Israel and the Druze, who won't tell you what they believe. There are people in the Middle East who worship a sword stuck into the ground and others who worship a large black dog. If it sometimes seems as if the U.S. government doesn't have much of a clue what we are dealing with over there, well, one reason is that it doesn't.
Kirsch's review confirms the history of the Donmeh I reported, but when he gets to recent generations after Kemal's revolution, he more or less announces, "Nothing to see here, folks, just move along, nothing to see. This topic is much more boring than it sounds. It's purely of antiquarian interest."
A number of years ago, a friend in Istanbul mentioned several times that many of his friends and acquaintances in classical music, cinephile, and other high culture circles in the Turkish capital were crypto-Jews. I had no idea what he was talking about until I did some research into the Donme (or Donmeh or other variant spellings), and discovered that they were the descendants of followers of the Jewish False Messiah of the 1660s, Sabbatai Zevi (spellings vary), who after Zevi's apostasy, had publicly converted to Islam but had continued to worship Zevi, and remained a small, relatively endogamous elite who played key roles in Turkish revolutions and subsequent life.
For example, the foreign minister in Turkey's most recent Kemalist party government, Ismail Cem, was a Donmeh. (Perhaps a certain amount of the former neocon ardor for Turkey as the Good Muslim Country, which was so rudely interrupted in early 2003 when the Turkish parliament voted to not allow the U.S. to use its big base in Turkey to invade Iraq, much to the surprise and dismay of Paul Wolfowitz, had to do with Americans and Israelis being used to dealing with Turkish diplomats with many of whom they felt culturally compatible.)
The Donme are fascinating in an Umberto Eco sort of way, so, back in 2006, I wrote four long blog posts about them. The Donmeh are representative of how in the realm of the old Byzantine Empire, things are lot more, well, byzantine than we poor dumb Americans assume. We think of Muslim lands as uniformly Islamic, but there are millions of people there who are only vaguely Muslim, like the tens of millions of Alevis in rural Turkey and the ruling Alawi minority in Syria, not to mention the 50,000 Gnostics in Southern Iraq who believe in "planetary archons," and the Lucifer-worshiping Yezidis in Kurdistan. Then there are the Samaritans of Israel and the Druze, who won't tell you what they believe. There are people in the Middle East who worship a sword stuck into the ground and others who worship a large black dog. If it sometimes seems as if the U.S. government doesn't have much of a clue what we are dealing with over there, well, one reason is that it doesn't.
Kirsch's review confirms the history of the Donmeh I reported, but when he gets to recent generations after Kemal's revolution, he more or less announces, "Nothing to see here, folks, just move along, nothing to see. This topic is much more boring than it sounds. It's purely of antiquarian interest."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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50 comments:
Crypto-Jews discreetly running things, organizing revolutions, manipulating societies?!?!
That's absolute crazy talk, Steve!!
Are you some kind of conspiracy nut?!
You really need to see a psychiatrist, Steve. There's a diagnosis for this kind of thing. It's right under the Racism diagnosis.
The Donmeh are representative of how in the realm of the old Byzantine Empire, things are lot more, well, byzantine than we poor dumb Americans assume.
Most Americans' ancestors were only relatively recently "civilized," that is they were mostly rural and pastoral. They faced different selection pressures from those groups who have been living in cities for thousands of years. Groups that have evolved in cities throughout various multiracial civilizations for thousands of years have evolved quite a different "skill set" like politics, human husbandry, social manipulation, etc.
From the TNR article:
"That Spinoza and Montaigne, those skeptical modern minds, were both descendants of conversos, and that New Christians played a major role in the economy of the New World, is seen as evidence that these Jewish converts helped to invent the secular world we live in."
The crypto-Jews were heavily involved in the slave trade. Though this is for some reason or other always missed, or glossed over as "a major role in the economy of the New World" or some other such dissembling. It's always the Evil White Gentile Men and Slavery.
From the TNR article:
"Baer emphasizes that the CUP was not a Dönme party—any more than the Russian Bolsheviks, though they included many Jews, were a Jewish party"
Heh-priceless.
I guess it must have been a complete coincidence that the fierce persecutions these "Young Turks" executed once they came to power were targeted at Christian minorities that happened to be Dönme's main business competitors (Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians etc.)
Much like the coincidence of christian Ukrainian and Russian peasants being the target of the famine caused by forced collectivisation of land in the early USSR.
"Slave trade"
Right. Paul Johnson has a section in his "History of the Jews" praising the major ethnic Jewish role in developing the sugar industry in Brazil. I recall reading that and thinking, "Sugar industry in Brazil ... wait a minute, wasn't that a main engine of the slave trade because it killed off so many blacks?"
Brazil was a huge recipient of slaves. Largely because of the sugar industry. It received a little over a third of all slaves from Africa.
It's funny that considering all the Arabs, native Africans, Jews, et al that were involved in the slave trade, it's always the gentile North American Whites and Europeans that are tainted with the Sin of Slavery. Hell, even the European South Americans seem to get somewhat of a pass - I guess they can hide under the murky "Hispanic" label or something.
Bin Laden's mom was Alawite. Don't know what that means.
Except the reality is, that the Sultans use of various non-Muslim minorities: Dragoman Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Jews, Maronite Christians, etc. as elites who blocked ordinary Muslim advances led catastrophic ethnic/religious cleansing and Islamism.
The Young Turks who advocated reform got crushed by the Sultan's Islamists, who he unleashed on the Young Turks AND the Armenians, who had popular hatred for their favored position inside the Caliphate.
Ataturk was no Donme, Armenian, Jew, Maronite, or Greek. But he recognized the failure of the Islamist model at Meggido where his forces were wiped out by Allenby's combined arms of airplanes, artillery, and motorized infantry.
Ataturk's early death ended his push to de-Islamicize Turkey into something akin to the West. The current ruling party is throwing over the secularization, and using Islamic resentment of urbanized, rich elites by the rural poor to maintain power in economic collapse and European rejection.
Looking for "secret Jewish cabals" controlling the world is akin to putting on the tin-foil hat. Since the Diaspora, Jews have made various accomodations with Romans, Goths, Muslims, Carolingians, Czars, Hapsburgs, and others, all of which have proved temporary and ineffective (i.e. like most minorities in multi-ethnic/religous empires, they are subject to purging).
I had a Professor at Business School from Turkey. She was no Donme, but was part of the Urbanized, post-Islamic elite. Sure, she was easy to get along with, but no more represented Turkey than Ryan Seacrest represents most American men.
The story of Turkey is not the marginal Donme but the failure of Ataturk.
from Anon upstream:From the TNR article:
"Baer emphasizes that the CUP was not a Dönme party—any more than the Russian Bolsheviks, though they included many Jews, were a Jewish party"
Yeah, nothing new here. Once you've read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "200 Years Together", nothin suprises you anymore.
Paul Johnson's, "History of the Jews" was a good read.
"who after Zevi's apostasy, had publicly converted to Islam but had continued to worship Zevi, and remained a small, endogamous elite who played key roles in Turkish revolutions and subsequent life."
.....you couldn't put that in a novel, its too far-fetched to be fiction. Only something thats actually true could be so improbable. The fact (and its a fact dear readers, sorry) that so many leading Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were Jewish comes as an eye-opening suprise when one reads about that era. History gets "misty" in this area as historians afraid of being accused of improper attitudes don't bring it up. As always, the best policy is to just get the truth out there, even if its uncomfy for some, for people's consideration.
Looking for "secret Jewish cabals" controlling the world is akin to putting on the tin-foil hat.
Nothing Steve has said here involves "secret Jewish cabals" or "controlling the world." He doesn't make such expansive and extraordinary claims. It's a fairly narrow claim about a historically documented group of crypto-Jews in Turkey. Why do you deceive and misdirect people?
Since the Diaspora, Jews have made various accomodations with Romans, Goths, Muslims, Carolingians, Czars, Hapsburgs, and others, all of which have proved temporary and ineffective (i.e. like most minorities in multi-ethnic/religous empires, they are subject to purging).
Yes, they have been temporary, but that's the nature of the strategy, of the various hosts, and of, well, life and things in general. I wouldn't say it's been "ineffective" however. That's not to say that everything has been easy and rosy, of course. But they have managed to survive for 2,000 years in various environments following the destruction of their homeland, and they have recovered their old territory. Do you think the Iroquios (if there are any even left) will recover upstate New York 2,000 years from now?
Looking for "secret Jewish cabals" controlling the world is akin to putting on the tin-foil hat. Since the Diaspora, Jews have made various accomodations with Romans, Goths, Muslims, Carolingians, Czars, Hapsburgs, and others, all of which have proved temporary and ineffective (i.e. like most minorities in multi-ethnic/religous empires, they are subject to purging).
Ok. So Jews have made "various accomodations" with arguably the great powers of their time and place throughout history. What this means is that they used their political, social, and economic influence to work for their interests under various regimes throughout history. I mean, they weren't mercenaries or soldiers providing military services in return for the protection of the regime or something. They no doubt faced persecutions, but they were successful overall in using their influence for their survival and interests. After all, those groups you mentioned destroyed many peoples that, unlike the Jews, don't exist today.
Totally off topic, but your VDARE column on the Atlantic article by Don Peck was excellent.
"We think of Muslim lands as uniformly Islamic, but there are millions of people there who are only vaguely Muslim..."
Steve lectures us on this point (throwing in an insincere "we" for good measure) just before telling us how Paul Wolfowitz surely must have had a red phone to unnamed, vaguely Jewish diplomats in Turkey during 2003.
Longtime readers may remember that Steve used to peddle the theory that Paul Wolfowitz advocated invading Iraq in order to impress his Arab mistress. I wonder what happened to that idea.
Look, Jews are smart and bound to succeed as Jews or crypto-Jews. Indeed, if you were take a 1000 Ashkenazi Jewish babies and give them to Catholic parents to be raised as pure Catholics, they would still succeed more than non-Jews. It's due to high IQ and restless racial personality.
If Milton Friedman had been raised as a Baptist or Mormon(without knowing he's Jewish), he would reached to the top of any profession. But, if you took a baby of a dimwit redneck and gave him to a Jewish family, the kid would grow up dumb EVEN IF raised Jewish. It's about genetics.
So, the success of Donmes in Turkey was about as predictable as the success of secular anti-religious Jews in the USSR.
As for Young Turk persection of Christian Armenians and Greeks, it almost certainly had nothing to do with Donmes being crypto-Jews.
Newly independent Greece waged wars on Turkey to take back Istanbul/Constantinople with the backing of Western powers. The Turks also feared that Armenians would side the Russians during WWII, and there was some justification for this fear. Turks did horrible things to Greeks, but there were horrible Greek massacres of Turks too. What happened to Armenians was truly tragic, but 'shit happens' during or following horrible wars.
What happened to the Armenians was similar to what happened to Germans in the East after WWII. The Allies decided to uproot 10-12 million Germans and push them westward. In the process, 1-2 million Germans died. The Allies--and Poles, Czechs, and Russians--took callously vengeance on the Ost-Germans though most of them had lived in Eastern lands for centuries.
During and after WWI, the Turks took vengeance on Armenians for the disasters that befell Turkey. If what the Turks--with or without Donme contribution--did to the Armenians was genocide, what the Allies did to Ost-Germans was genocide. There may have been no clear blue-print to kill millions of people, but the drastic actions were taken with full knowledge that millions might die. They just didn't care in the climate of anger and vengeance.
C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet has stuff reminiscent of the planetary archons, i.e. an angel in charge of each one, and each one bringing the gift the planet is supposedly known for -- Mercury the gift of gab (messenger of the Gods), Jupiter magnamity and so forth. Kind of weird stuff, kindof cool though , read with Holst's 'The Planets' blaring!
I've always felt Lewis's sci-fi gets less attention than it deserves.
@neodon
1) The Dönmeh are not Ashkenazi.
2) Persecutions of Armenians began in 1908, well before the World War was underway.
Longtime readers may remember that Steve used to peddle the theory that Paul Wolfowitz advocated invading Iraq in order to impress his Arab mistress. I wonder what happened to that idea.
Probably went the same way as Paul Wolfowitz. Quietly into obscurity.
Look, Jews are smart and bound to succeed as Jews or crypto-Jews.
Look, nobody doubts that Jews are smart and bound to "succeed." That's a prerequisite for being able to successfully use political, social, and economic influence to work for one's interests under various regimes throughout history. You have to be smart to survive for 2K years wandering around in foreign territory and end up recovering your homeland and being arguably one of the most powerful national groups. The dumb groups don't make it. And groups that don't care enough don't make it either; they say the hell with it to both explicitly being part of the group or through crypsis.
I have to say that my faith in Whiskey's Scots-Irishness is somewhat shaken.
It is a little known fact that 95% of the Africans taken to the Western Hemisphere as slaves went to someplace other than the United States (or the British colonies that became the USA).
Any guesses as to why this fact is so little known?
neodon sez:What happened to Armenians was truly tragic, but 'shit happens' during or following horrible wars.
Nice try at obfuscation. The Armenian genocide is being swept under the carpet by Turks, Israel and US elements in order to prevent any parallel with the holocaust and serve the current strategic interests of the neocons. But in fact the Armenian genocide was a precursor to the holocaust and even encouraged Hitler in his evil intent. So it should by extension be condemned as much. However that would not serve the interests of certain quarters...
Why pick Turkey as an example of this? Exoticism, I suppose. You could just go downtown. Or even the nearest mega-church.
A little off-topic, but over at AoSHQ, they're discussing what sounds like a real-life Ziva David operation.
Apparently somebody forged themselves some Irish passports...
Looking for "secret Jewish cabals" controlling the world is akin to putting on the tin-foil hat.
Whiskey, for a Scots-Irish evangelical [& mysoginistic bachelor], you sure do seem to have a staggering amount of insider's knowledge about the history of world Jewry [knowledge which you tend assert with a rather impressive amount of Alpha Male testosterone - at least for a Beta who can't seem to score with the Shiksas].
Hey, let me ask you this: Have you ever heard of a chick named Sibel Edmonds, and her accusation that the Mossad was running the Turkish desk through Mark Grossman and his successors?
People have speculated that instead of trying to cover up his role in the 9-11 fiasco, Sandy Berger was actually trying to destroy the evidence which implicated his involvement in the Turkish mess.
BTW, if you look at the history of the Turkish desk, then it seems to have had more than it's fair share of Chosen People [going back well before the foundation of Israel in 1947/48]:
Oscar S. Straus (1887-1889)
Solomon Hirsch (1889-1892)
Oscar S. Straus (1898-1899)
John G. A. Leishman (1899-1901)
John G. A. Leishman (1901-1909)
Oscar S. Straus (1909-1910)
Henry Morgenthau, Sr. (1913-1916)
Abram I. Elkus (1916-1917)
Joseph Grew (1927-1932)
Robert P. Skinner (1933-1936)
Laurence A. Steinhardt (1941-1945)
Robert Komer (1968-1969)
Ronald I. Spiers (1977-1980)
James W. Spain (1980-1981)
Robert Strausz-Hupe (1981-1989)
Morton I. Abramowitz (1989-1991)
Marc Grossman (1994-1997)
Eric S. Edelman (2003-2005)
What is most interesting to me about Turkey isn't the fate of various minorities, be they Christian or Jewish.
The interesting part is the impact of dysgenic fertility. My understanding is that the low IQ rural people have been outbreeding the high IQ urban people for a long time now.
The result is that each successive government is more and more beholden to the low IQ rural people who happen to be more islamic. There is no hope for non Islamic people in Turkey. They are best off moving somewhere else.
I am not a greek and I am not a Turk so I have an outsider's perspective on the battle between Greeks and Turks. But it seems to me that the separation of the two groups, through population exchange, was immensely successful. I mean, if Greeks and Turks still lived intermixed with each other there would be constant fighting and the GNP of both countries would be consumed in warfare.
Good fences make good neighbors as far as I am concerned.
In general, I think that if ethnic groups can't get along with each other, they should find an orderly and humane way to sell their businesses and houses and move to different countries.
For example, if you are a person of Japanese ancestry living in the USA, and you are concerned that your children will pick up values and habits that you don't like, you can move back to Japan where you will be welcomed with open arms. Your children will grow up in a racially pure place, and marry other Japanese.
Similarly, if you want to live in a place that is all white that practices traditional Catholicism, Poland is the place to go. If you raise your kids in Poland they are certain to marry whites and certain to grow up with a level of respect for Catholic doctrine that you just can't find in the USA.
History shows that in the USA, just about all groups bleed in to one. The fact that pretty much all kids born here speak English and all go to public schools with kids of other ethnicities means that it is hard to maintain any sort of tradition here over the course of a few generations.
In the USA of 1910, just about everyone wanted their children and grandchildren to marry within the same narrowly defined ethnic group. I mean, Chinese people in the USA wanted ethnically pure Chinese great grandchildren to be living in 2010. Armenians, with a fresh experience of genocide certainly wanted to preserve the Armenian nature of their great grandchildren here in the USA. Irish people wanted ethnically pure Irish great grand children to be living in 2010. But it just doesn't play out that way here in the USA.
It seems to me that the only way to preserve your ethnic group is to live within an enclave that is closed to the outside world (ie live like the Amish) or instead move to an ethnically pure country (like Poland or Japan)
Anything else, and you are doomed to having great grandchildren that are different than what you want
Ataturk was indeed a Donme born, not in Turkey, but in Salonika, Greece. The Young Turks (called the Ittihad in Turkey) were a nationalist (not Islamic) party who were instrumental in the Turkish entry into WW I and the concurrent massacre of the Armenians. Ataturk continued the secular and nationalist cause after WW I with the massacre and expulsion of Greeks from western Turkey. Both the Ittihad and Ataturk's followers included numerous Donme.
Turkey strikes me as one of the great diplomatic / political success stories of the last 85 years. If you look at a globe, the single most strategic location is probably Turkey -- it's the opposite of Sweden, which is on the road to nowhere. Turkey, even more so than Lebanon, Iraq, and the Holy Land, is hub of the Old World.
And yet, Turkey has managed to get through the last 85 years with mostly only some regrettable Kurd-stomping and a few coups. Most Turks have lived out their lives in peace.
Good fences make good neighbors as far as I am concerned.
The great and the good are all agreed that the current partition of Cyprus. Turks in the north east, Greeks in the south west, is A Very Bad Thing which must be ended as soon as possible. Yet for thirty years people on the island havent been killing each other.
It looks like a solution to me.
Repartition of Ireland/Northern Ireland the same way, that little matter would be solved.
Then there is Sri Lanka, the Cypriot solution screams out its obviousness.
85 years is an interesting cut off steve, since 90 years ago they had ethnic cleansing in proportion to the numbers - far worse than anything in WWII - they have been stable because they ethnically cleansed.. so why are we trying to do the opposite?
Cypress should be returned to Greece, as should Constantinople.
"Repartition of Ireland/Northern Ireland the same way, that little matter would be solved."
That was already done. The Catholics should move to the Republic if they don't want to be British.
"And yet, Turkey has managed to get through the last 85 years with mostly only some regrettable Kurd-stomping and a few coups. Most Turks have lived out their lives in peace."
Right, and there is a reason for that: the practically unchallenged power of the military. After all, this was Ataturk's legacy, the army as ...guarantor of 'secular democracy'.
A little off-topic, but over at AoSHQ, they're discussing what sounds like a real-life Ziva David operation.
Apparently somebody forged themselves some Irish passports...
Perhaps they forged themselves some Scotch-Irish passports.
Perhaps they forged themselves some Scotch-Irish passports.
LOL.
"Armenians . . . wanted to preserve the Armenian nature of their great grandchildren here in the USA."
The Kardashian great grandparents must really be spinning in their Los Angeles graves.
"The interesting part is the impact of dysgenic fertility. My understanding is that the low IQ rural people have been outbreeding the high IQ urban people for a long time now."
You're talking about Turkey, right? Or...every other civilized society in history? I can't tell.
If dumb hicks having more kids than city slickers is "dysgenic" then we hit rock bottom a long, long time ago. A little more won't hurt.
So Huffington Post stateside and the mainstream news outlets in Europe have published the smiling mug shots of the eleven person Mossad assassination team caught working in Dubai.
Dubai Hamas assassination: 'Israeli hit-squad' used fake British passports
...but 'conservative' Matt Drudge and the rest of the big 'liberal' news services in the USA mostly took a pass.
What is this sneaky group of international criminals to be called -- Moshe's Eleven? Blogs are chattering anew about that Spielbergian Mossad vengeance movie from a few years back. Rent it today! And you too can begin piecing the Dubai mystery together along with Scotland Yard!
I wonder what sort of Hollywood office suite shouting matches took place during the production of that Spielberg film. I will guess that the sticky wicket was 'just how much of our Israel business do we really want to show them (the audience)?' I bet there were some conversations this week where deep regrets were voiced about the wisdom of doing that movie.
Hmmmmmm. Anyway, Steve, our friends in internet land seem to disagree on just what is the news and what is thought crime. Kudos to Ms Huffington for refusing to allow Mossad to have editorial control of her website.
The Catholics should move to the Republic if they don't want to be British.
Or the British could just go back to Britian.
Apropos of the "50,000 Gnostics in Southern Iraq who believe in planetary archons," it is worth pointing out that much of the so-called golden age of Islamic learning was due to the ancestors of these people - followers of late antique Neoplatonism who preserved the knowledge of Greek and translated many ancient Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic. Thebit ben Corath, one of the principal mediaeval Arabic authorities on algebra, was one of these people. They were allowed to survive as dhimmis, because they had a sacred scripture (the Corpus Hermeticum) and believed in a creator - thus qualifying as one of the "peoples of the book" along with Jews and Christians.
and don't forget the fascinating Mandeans - a religious group found in Iraq and Iran
their origins are obscure but it seems to me that the best guess is they're the descendants of Gnostics from 1st century Israel
of course, as David said, you can find exotic religious beliefs downtown in the US. but they simply don't have the history and class of their Middle Eastern counterparts
Felix M
I meant that if you want to find crypto-Jews, you can find them downtown in Anywhere USA. You can even find them running the megachurch.
A picture says a thousand words. Just look at him!
And here's smail Cem, the recent foreign minister.
The level of conspiracy theories among Turks is quite extraordinary, but you can't really blame them. The more you learn the more you get sucked into the idea of machinations within machinations, worlds within worlds...
I wonder how things would have played out if the Turks had sat out WWI like they sat out WWII. If Mussolini been like more like Ataturk, Italy might have been spared too.
"it is worth pointing out that much of the so-called golden age of Islamic learning was due to the ancestors of these people - followers of late antique Neoplatonism who preserved the knowledge of Greek and translated many ancient Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic."
Yes but also most of the leading figures of that golden age were Persians or "central asian aryans" ie intellectuals from Bactria, Transoxiana, Sogdia, etc. who converted to Islam and spoke Arabic but whose cultural legacy was Persian, not Arabic. It wasn't just Greek learning that supported the Islamic Golden Age, but Persian and even Indian learning (from whence we got our "Arabic" numerals, for instance), translated into Arabic.
"of course, as David said, you can find exotic religious beliefs downtown in the US. but they simply don't have the history and class of their Middle Eastern counterparts"
Not being persecuted they don't have to hide and dissimulate, so that makes them appear less exotic. But also, Western culture simply doesn't have the same affinity for metaphysical speculation or the same mania for preserving ancient folkways and superstitions.
In the USA, the Mormons or the snake-handlers or the Scientologists or the Seventh Day Adventists are minor irritants, at best; they aren't normal. In the middle east they would be normal. That is to say, even as oppressed minorities, their tendency to form inbred sectarian communities is the norm in the middle east; it is not the norm in the West.
Anon of 2/18 - of course it is true that the Persians and Indians also contributed greatly to the so-called golden age of Islamic learning.
The point to be made here is that Islam conquered areas previously inhabited by two of the world's great ancient civilizations - the Greco-Roman (Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, Palestine) and the Persian. Almost nothing in its so-called golden age was originally Islamic. The glories of Abbasid Baghdad or Ottoman Turkey were essentially the result of living off cultural capital that had been earned long before the rise of Islam. Islam deserves no credit for the result.
When the jihadis invaded Alexandria, they burned the manuscripts of its ancient library to heat their bath water. This seems to me to be entirely typical Muslim behavior.
Christendom, on the other hand, inherited the Italian peninsula and a handful of Rome's less wealthy and less developed imperial possessions in Gaul, Britain, and Iberia. To them it added parts of northern Europe that the Romans never conquered, and with these seemingly unpromising raw materials created western civilisation.
"In one of the toughest actions against the powerful Turkish military in the history of modern Turkey, the police detained three of the country’s highest-ranking former generals on Monday as part of a vast and lengthy investigation into a shadowy ultranationalist movement accused of planning to overthrow the Islamist-inspired government."
"...The case, which has riveted Turks, revolves around a suspected conspiracy by secular ultranationalists accused of developing several plots to attack civilian targets, like a mosque in central Istanbul, and to provoke a crisis with neighboring Greece, with a goal of paving the way for a coup."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/world/europe/23turkey.html
"In one of the toughest actions against the powerful Turkish military in the history of modern Turkey, the police detained three of the country’s highest-ranking former generals on Monday as part of a vast and lengthy investigation into a shadowy ultranationalist movement accused of planning to overthrow the Islamist-inspired government."
Once again, Steve is ahead of the news.
hmm......"secular ultranationalists" that are against an "Islamic-inspired" government......perhaps the "secular ultranationalists" are the "scotch-irish" of turkey....
well i am an alevi and i do really think we are hellenized and then islamized pan jewish nation because lots of common esoteric relations, rituals and symbols we have been sharing with current jews.there is no difference between levite and alevite just a mask of islam thats all.
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