Tag Archives: Stolen Legacy

The Myth of “Arabized Islam” & Other Fallacies of Pseudo-Islam (Part 1)

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Whoever the Most High is a witness for Truth, he need not claim it. The claim is a sign of his veiling from Truth and Peace.

A quote from dhū al-nūn from al-Sha’rānī, ’Abd al-Wahhāb. Lawāqiḥ Al-Anwār al-Qudusīyya Fī Manāqib al-ʿUlamā Wa al-Ṣūfīyya. Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīnīyya, 2005, p. 129.

In recent years, the Moorish Science Temple (MST) has become one of the many groups on the conscious chit’lin circuit; some of them Hanifs, most of them Sabians. Unfortunately, the unscrupulous reader might mistake the Sabians among them for Muslims or, even worse, a factual representation of history. As a Muslim researcher with a specialization in the Arabic language and Islamic history, it is my responsibility to debunk the bogus claims propagated by such groups.

In one recent YouTube presentation on TITANS TV, a Moorish Science researcher and self-proclaimed Arabic teacher by the name of Kemetian Adept Hieruphant attempted to advocate for his Sabian-inspired MST doctrine using George G. M. James’ Stolen Legacy, orientalist mythology about the Egyptian Sufi, Dhū al-Nūn (more on this in another post), and a hodgepodge of information to confuse you. I beseech the reader not to confuse claims to knowledge for actual knowledge, as was the message of Dhū al-Nūn. In this post, I will focus on deconstructing Kemetian’s treatment of Stolen Legacy and the history of the Moors.  

While Kemetian uncritically accepts James’ thesis, he provides little to no detail to demonstrate the MST position. Kemetian throws a lot of images and texts at you, but his attempt to connect the so-called Moors to the ancient Egyptians is weak because it has no basis in the actual history of North Africa or the Islamic world. He, like many so-called conscious folk, suffers from debilitating confirmation bias; believing his point of view is the only way of seeing the information. Why does he perpetuate a bogus conspiracy theory about the death of James? (A past professor of mine researched and debunked this claim) Why does he think that by virtue of genetic lineage he has a rightful claim to the knowledge of ancient Kemet without actually studying it? And what is a mystery school today other than a university? Kemetian’s misinformation not only reduces his credibility but also the credibility of anyone who takes this topic seriously.

Kemetian Adept | Moors Custodians Of Kemet’s Wisdom Teachings

George GM James’ Misunderstood Stolen Legacy

Kemetian introduces his presentation with the passage from Stolen Legacy that opens Islam and the Ancient Mysteries Vol. 1. In my book, I put forth a better way to understand James’ thesis, which lies in answering three main questions:

  1. Who were the Moors discussed by James.
  2. What knowledge did the ancient Egyptians possess?
  3. How did the Moors acquire ancient Egyptian knowledge?

First, the Moors of history were not followers of Noble Drew Ali or members of an organization called the Moorish Science Temple. “Moor” was an epithet used by Europeans during the Middle Ages to refer to people with dark features and Muslims in general, and North African Muslims specifically. Whatever its original meaning, it was lost on European people by the Middle Ages. They were not calling North African Muslims “gods” or anything of that nature.

If we take the European usage of Moor at face value, it means someone who is dark (relative to the average European phenotype) and/or from North Africa and/or Muslim. This is a broad span of people, which can encompass SubSaharans, Berbers, Arabs, Persians, and Indians and often times it has referred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims living in Muslim-controlled lands.

Johannes Andreas Maurus, a Spanish convert from Islam to Christianity (original pen and ink drawing by Maurice Hines)

Secondly, we must have an understanding of what knowledge was attributed to the ancient Egyptians. While James touches on this, he is not completely clear as to what that knowledge was. On the one hand, James characterizes this ancient knowledge as a secret, exclusively for Egyptians, transmitted orally from teacher to student, and forbidden to be written down. On the other hand, he writes that this knowledge was kept in books at temples and libraries, which were eventually copied and plagiarized by the Greeks (particularly Aristotle), and then they became the domain of the Greeks, Freemasons, Theosophists, and occultists. How James deduces this can be challenged on the grounds that he retrofits the concepts of contemporary esoteric movements on to ancient Egyptian Mystery Schools. This is only James’ speculation, not concrete proof.

Additionally, James reconstructs the ancient Egyptian curriculum using a mixture of Christian and pre-Christian Greek sources, whose works he sees to be untrustworthy since the pre-Christian Greeks allegedly stole knowledge from the Egyptian Mysteries and the Christians attempted to annihilate them. Nevertheless, the curriculum according to James was made up of the seven liberal arts, secret languages and mathematical symbolism, as well as magic. This included memorizing the books of Hermes that teach the hieroglyphs, cosmography, geography, astronomy, typography, how to slaughter animals, law, theology, medicine, among other subjects.

Many of these subjects where known and practiced all over the ancient world including ancient Babylon and India, as James alludes to, as well as in Europe and the Americas. There simply is no concrete proof that this curriculum originated in Egypt, no matter how much we want to believe it. In one aspect, it was a secret that died with the last Egyptian priest. Any other empirical knowledge they developed could also be reconstructed by other people with similar aims. Not only that, but both the Islamic civilization and later the current European civilization surpassed the ancient Egyptians in the empirical sciences (no matter what our criticisms of those civilizations are). It is also much more logical and backed by evidence to think that the world’s knowledge was an intergenerational, multi-ethnic collective effort rather than the work of one people.

Finally, how did ancient knowledge transfer to the the hands of the so-called Moors and then to Western Europe? I demonstrate this process in Islam and the Ancient Mysteries Vol. 1. I firmly demonstrate that Muslim civilization under the Hanif creed absorbed the knowledge of ancient Near East, serving as a bridge between the ancient and modern world. The following is a summary of this history.

Statue of Ibn Rushd in Córdoba, Spain

The True History of the Moors

What’s lost on Kemetian and the Moors are the key players in history that represented this passage of knowledge. If we were to question MST folk to name some of the Moors who conveyed knowledge from the ancient Mysteries, they would be hard pressed to name one. Yet, I have researched several of them for my book: the Ḥarrānian Thābit ibn Qurrah, the Persian family Āli Nawbakht, the Abbasid Translation Movement, and particular Muslim philosophers like Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Rushd and their respective philosophical positions. There are countless more that historians have researched.

A synopsis of this history starts with the decline of the Mysteries, prior to Christianity. In the Greco-Persian wars, Alexander massacred Iran and sought to extinguish the Persian-Babylonian Mysteries and the knowledge they acquired. He brought their manuscripts to current-day Egypt and had them translated into Greek and Coptic and destroyed the Persian originals. The Greeks were therefore consolidating the knowledge of ancient Egypt and Babylon. As of the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, this knowledge was most readily available in Greek and Coptic (an advanced form of the ancient Egyptian language).

Christianity was a Hanif system that challenged the Sabianism that proliferated among Judaism and the so-called Philosophers. The disciples spread the monotheistic message of Jesus, which eventually became mixed with the ideas of gnostics (i.e. Sabians), such as Simon Magus, Menander, and yes, Paul. The early scholars of Christianity were educated in the schools of the Greeks and were able to argue the Sabians in their own terms. Though the Christians opposed the Sabians, they ended up absorbing much of the ancient knowledge in the Eastern Church, which split from the Western Church relatively early in the history of Christiandom.

In the meanwhile, the Persians sought to reconstruct their mysteries by reviving the manuscripts found at the extremities of the Persian empire near India and China. They were open to various sects of Christianity such as the Nestorians. Many of those Christians preserved ancient knowledge they inherited from the Greeks in the Syriac language. By the time the Muslims conquered, these works began to be translated into Arabic. This proliferated during the Abbasid Caliphate that funded the Translation Movement; translating the works of the ancient mysteries primarily from Greek, Syriac, and Persian, because knowledge from the ancient world was largely consolidated in these languages.

While the likes of Thābit ibn Qurrah, the Nawbakht family, and Ibn Muqaffaʿ played key roles in this Translation Movement, the effort cannot be attributed to one tribe, ethnic group, race, or religion. Thābit’s ethnicity cannot be ascertained although he was a native Syriac speaker and also spoke Greek and Arabic. The Nawbakht family were from a lineage of Persian Magians who specialized in astrology. Likewise, Ibn Muqaffaʿ was a Persian litterateur responsible for translating numerous books from the Persian and Indian literary heritage. Muslim and Arabic-speaking scholars of other faiths engaged these works for nearly a millennium, including the questionable works on astrology and magic. Yet, the most controversial issues centered on the philosophical concepts of the creation of the universe, pantheism, and the like, which I covered in the post Is God the Universe?  

Social media scholars from the MST and other so-called conscious groups cannot accurately describe how or why this passed from Muslim lands to Western Europe. The Christian Crusades against Muslims began in the 11th century, at the height of the Translation Movement. One should also observe that during this time, many Europeans were “orientalists,” meaning that they admired Arabic language, culture, and knowledge; see (Burnett, 2008, p. 22). Many in Western Europe, who have long since been cut off from the ancient Greeks, rediscovered the knowledge compiled in Greek through Arabic. As political enmity grew between Western European Christiandom and Islamdom, the intellectual affinity grew. One might notice that some of the most erudite scholars from Andalus, migrated to Egypt during the Inquisitions such as al-Qurṭubī and Abū Ḥayyān al-Andalusī, etc. Khaled El-Rouayheb performed an excellent study on the influence of Maghribī scholars on theology and logic in Ottoman-controlled Egypt and prior. Many of whom were from the Ṣanhajah Berber ethnic group.

No narrative about the Moors’ passage of knowledge to Europe would be complete without mentioning the 12th century CE polymath Ibn Rushd (the grandson). In addition to being from a scholarly lineage based in Córdoba, he was a jurist, physician, and Aristotelian philosopher. In fact, he was known as the chief commentator on the works attributed to Aristotle. The untrained reader must remember that Aristotelian philosophy was at the core of Sabian doctrine, which was a proponent of the eternity of the universe. Ibn Rushd wrote a vehement defense of philosophy and Aristotelian concepts in his Faṣl al-Maqāl and Tahāfut al-Tahāfut against Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-Filāsifah. Although Ibn Rushd’s positions were rejected by most Muslim scholars, many European orientalists were enamored with his works. This even prompted the Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas to write a response opposing the eternity of the universe.

Conclusion

The perspectives propagated by the Sabian factions of the MST amounts to nothing short of pseudoscience and a creative re-telling of history. Only simpletons are impressed. History does not begin with the interpretations of pseudo-scholars, but the collective evidence established by a body of researchers. Unfortunately, the MST lacks members who have advanced through the degrees of scholarship: sufficient tertiary education, specializations, peer-reviewed publications, academic integrity and humility, etc. Furthermore, there is nothing novel about their teachings. Their teachings are simply Sabian-Noir doctrines; the same doctrines that have confused our people for generations. In another post, I will unravel some of their doctrines and their erroneous characterizations of Sufism.

Islam and the Ancient Mysteries (Part 1)

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Is there a relationship between Islam and the mystery schools of the ancient world? This sounds like a strange comparison for someone who is only familiar with Freemasonry or for someone only familiar with the teachings of Islam. Yet, a close, open-minded reading of Freemasonic texts combined with a strong background in Islamic teachings and history will reveal a number of similarities between what is called the “Ancient Mysteries” and Islam as we know it.

I became aware of this relationship in my high school years when I read a book entitled, Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy, by George G. M. James, originally published in 1954. It stands as one of the pivotal works of African-centered studies of history. The author does not use the word Islam at all throughout the whole book, but he alludes to it in a section entitled, “How the African Continent gave its culture to the Western World,” where he states:

During the Persian, Greek and Roman invasions, large numbers of Egyptians fled not only to the desert and mountain regions, but also to adjacent lands in Africa, Arabia and Asia Minor, where they lived, and secretly developed the teachings which belonged to their mystery system. In the 8th century A.D. the Moors, i.e., natives of Mauritania in North Africa, invaded Spain and took with them, the Egyptian culture which they had preserved. Knowledge in the ancient days was centralized i.e., it belonged to a common parent and system, i.e., the Wisdom Teaching or Mysteries of Egypt, which the Greeks used to call Sophia. (p. 32)

This passage prompted me to study Islam more seriously and to look at it from this historical perspective. Over the years, I would make mental notes of information I came across in the Islamic canon alluding to the idea of the Ancient Mysteries. However, before I can discuss the Islamic sources and my interpretation of them, I must clarify exactly what the Ancient Mysteries are…

What were the Ancient Mysteries?

Also known as the Ancient Mystery Schools, this name is used by Freemasons, esotericists, and privy Afrocentrics to describe the catholic (i.e. universal) religion of the ancient world. More specifically, it refers to the initiatic organization that taught and preserved religious teachings, the physical sciences, legislation, and the liberal arts among other things. James gives a concise description of the Ancient Mystery Schools:

The ancient Egyptians had developed a very complex religious system, called the Mysteries, which was also the first system of salvation. As such, it regarded the human body as a prison house of the soul, which could be liberated from its bodily impediments, through the disciplines of the Arts and Sciences, and advanced from the level of a mortal to that of a God. This was the notion of the summum bonum or greatest good, to which all men must aspire, and it also became the basis of all ethical concepts. The Egyptian Mystery System was also a Secret Order, and membership was gained by initiation and a pledge to secrecy. The teaching was graded and delivered orally to the Neophyte; and under these circumstances of secrecy, the Egyptians developed secret systems of writing and teaching, and forbade their Initiates from writing what they had learnt. (p. 7)

Given my description and James’ statement above you might ask…

How can a universal religion be secret?

First, it should be remembered that these schools were called “mysteries” because the primordial religion of mankind had no name by which it was referred. True adherents to the religion recognized it in others by their moral rectitude, erudition in the arts and sciences, as well as their keen knowledge of the narratives and symbols that were shared between all the religious orders of that time.

Secondly, the notion of mystery and secrecy was used strategically. According to Albert Pike in his book, Morals and Dogma, secrecy was used to excite curiosity and to stir the emotions of those who might witness the passion plays of initiation. Likewise, they saw the spirit of mystery as coming from God Himself, Who reveals Himself to the human heart in a manner that is unspoken (p. 255).

Furthermore, the true interpretations of the symbols, myths, and allegories were maintained by a scholarly/priest class who were not at liberty to share them with people who were not prepared to receive them. This took spiritual purity, which was only gained through the long and painful process of initiation. Only through this process, could other scholars and priests know that an initiate was prepared, strong, and trustworthy enough to uphold the doctrine, teach it accurately, and shield it and himself from corruption.

Exclusivity in the scholarly/priest class maintained the chains of authorities within these schools and thus maintained the purity and accuracy of its doctrines and practices. As James alludes to later in his book, it was the Greeks who learned from the Egyptians who broke this oath and consequently posited incomplete knowledge, which led to inaccuracies and misunderstandings of the original doctrines and practices.

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In future posts, I will demonstrate how Islam is tied to the Ancient Mysteries, historically and doctrinally. I will discuss some of the characteristics of the Mysteries, their decline in the ancient world, and their remnants in Arabia prior to Islam. Then I will take a brief look at early Islamic history to ask some important questions that might link the burgeoning Islamic civilization to the Ancient Mysteries as hinted to by James.