Yemen and the fabrication of a bogus-Arabic nation.
Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
April 22, 2007
Why does this happen?
The Ancient Yemenite epigraphic monuments have been deciphered by European explorers first; the leading excavations have been undertaken by European archeologists first; the analysis of literary documentation about Yemen in other languages has been carried out by European philologists, and yet the entire situation looks similar to what occurred in Greece. Why then the indifference and the ignorance?
One could suggest that this is due to the Muslim identity of the country, supposing that this leads to indifference for Pre-Islamic periods. Yet, this proved to be wrong in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere.
As there is a direct link between the average culture, the knowledge of the past, and the political – diplomatic direction of any country, Yemen was thought as proper victim of the post-WW I situations, and although the country avoided to be merged with Hedjaz, no characteristics of a really independent country were foreseen for the otherwise isolated (from the Western world) country. The colonial plan for Yemen involved cultural annihilation in the name of a false Arabic identity that had to be imposed, abnormally and tyrannically.
This critical issue is not presented in Western universities, but we know very well that we cannot find a Sublime Truth there, only true-looking analyses that promote at the same time the Western interests in the area in question. Who would suggest that we can disconnect the establishment of the modern Western sciences from the Western countries’ own socio-economic interests?
Yemen’s past, if correctly studied, interpreted, analyzed and diffused among modern Yemenites, would automatically imply a shift in Yemen’s foreign policy orientations. This is precisely what the colonial powers do not want to happen, as far as colonized countries are concerned.
In fact, if an administration strives to achieve real success in its natural expansion policies (I mean legitimate aspirations here, and this is all foreign policy is about), the administration of the country in question should base its aspirations on historical pillars that had been set and consolidated during some important moments of that country’s past. These pillars have been proven successful for long, as shaping the axes of the country’s natural expansion.
The weight of History
There is a way to categorize therefore the countries of the world, based on History; divided into just two categories, countries can be either historical and non-historical. Historical countries are Rome, Russia, Iceland, Mongolia, Japan, Peru, Ecuador, Tanzania, Senegal, and many other countries as well. Non-historical countries are modern states set up on soil where no significant cultures, civilizations, or states had been formed in the past. Non-historical countries are Canada, the USA, Brazil, Chile, Angola, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
Generally speaking there are few ‘really’ non-historical countries (we do not consider Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Caicos and other atoll-states as ‘real’ states however). There is not a single non-historical country on European or Asiatic soil, and the majority of the African states are definitely historical states, either they were the center of a historical cradle of civilization, i.e. Mali, or just a periphery to it, f.i. Nigeria. Sub-Saharan Southern / South-Western Africa is the non-historical part of Africa.
But the majority of the modern states in America and all the states of Oceania are non-historical. One can understand the entire world of today very differently, if one views present day realities through this viewpoint. And we have full proof that Colonial Empires keep doing so, preserving a secret, an invisible let’s say, kind of power for their benefit, and in the perspective of perpetuating the current status of affairs.
However, what we have been suggesting here for Yemen is not different than the way today’s France views and pursues its foreign policy, defending its own interests; it is not different than the way Russia makes its foreign policy decisions, and it does not differ from the way the Ottoman Empire shaped its foreign policy prescripts, and so on.
There is no difference between big and small countries in this regard; or to put it better there must not be. Qualitative difference in viewing own foreign policy interests jeopardizes the existence of a country, turning it to a position of dependence or subservience.
Viewing a country’s own through an authentic standpoint that enables full assessment of the basic historical pillars of cultural and national development in the past and complete understanding of the natural expansion axes that are diachronic is the basic method of genuine political success, at least for historical countries.
On this foundations, an administration may set a political - ideological system to make its foreign policy work even more efficiently (France in Algeria, USSR in Eastern Europe, China in Eastern Turkestan and Tibet, etc); however, the historical dimensions of cultural / political / economic expansion, if correctly assessed, consist in the basic level.
Evaluating situations at this fundamental level, we can assess that France acts after the model of the Roman Empire in Numidia and North-Western Africa, whereas the USSR acted as Moscow ”Third Rome’ (inheriting Rome and Constantinople) in Eastern Europe. In the same way, China acts in its Western provinces as the Han Empire!
French Colonial Ideology
The gravest distortion of History that has been diffused by the colonial authorities, and mostly due to the on purpose fabricated French Colonial ideology (British imitated the French, and ideologically speaking, they tried always to cope with the French, inventing truly very little in this direction), is the false Arabic identity, the theory that all the Arabic speaking peoples are Arabs, having much in common, and therefore reason to pursue Arabizing policies! The bogus dogma of Pan-Arabism was established and diffused among the (detached from their only normal and natural state) colonized masses to totally and irreversibly divert them from achieving (each one a different) historical self-knowledge and clear identity, involving appreciation and full assessment of their natural expansion axes.
Actually, Yemenites are NOT Arabs, and were never Arabs! They are Yemenites, who got partly Arabized (in the past), as result to their Islamization. Gradually (and not all of them), they accepted Arabic language, since that was the holy language of the religion that Hadhrat Ali, son-in law of Muhammad, when the Prophet was still alive, came to preach in Yemen (630). As the majority of the Yemenites had already gradually accepted Nestorian Christianity, Islam was ideologically very close, and all the Yemenites, even the Persian colonizing army and administrator, accepted.
The diffusion of Arabic was very slow, and never complete; in vast parts of the Hadhramawt, and in Sokotra, significant populations speak forms of ancient Yemenite languages that survived without hindrance since those dates only to meet the French vicious hatred of local languages that could help indigenous peoples recreate great moments of their past, therefore threatening the illegal and inhuman French Freemasonic and racist plans. Mahrani and Soqotri are today the really authentic means of communication among Yemenites, and they should become a matter of great concern for intellectuals and linguists, historians and sociologists because of the serious threat emanating from the lethal imposition of the French fabricated dogmas on the quasi-illiterate local elite at Sanaa.
US Blacks are English native speakers, but not Anglo-Saxon
The phenomenon of linguistic arabization did not make of the Yemenites ‘Arabs’; they are just Arabic speaking Yemenites, in the same way the third generation Blacks in the USA, who forgot completely their original African language and speak only English, did not become Anglo-Saxons, but just English speaking Blacks!
Can you imagine an American Black writing a pamphlet on Anglo-Saxon nationalism?
So, how can we afford to accept a Yemenite, an Algerian, a Bahraini, a Syrian, an Iraqi or a Sudanese ideologist diffuse ‘Pan-Arabism;! That all these people can diffuse Islam or Christianity is a completely different subject; one should not confuse religion and nation!
As a matter of fact, it is not only the Yemenites, who are not Arabs!
The Sudanese and the Somalis are not Arabs; the Egyptians and the Libyans are not Arabs; the Arabic speaking people of Maghreb are not Arabs; the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Iraqis, the Palestinians, the Jordanians, the Kuwaitis, the Bahrainis, the people of Qatar, the Emirates and Oman are not Arabs. None of them is Arab!
Sudanese are Meroites / Kushites, who got arabized because islamized.
Somali are Khammitic Africans, who did not even get arabized but slightly, after they got islamized.
Egyptians are Khammitic Africans, ‘Egyptians’, mixed with so many peoples already since the Antiquity, who got arabized because Islamized; even the Christian Egyptians (Copts) got gradually arabized because of the criminal involvement of France in Egypt that started with the gangster-like expedition of Napoleon. It is noteworthy that before 210 years ago there were still many Coptic native speakers, but they became the victims of the criminal and gangster-like imposed policies of fraudulent and dehumanizing arabization.
Libyans and NW African people are all Berbers (either they speak Berberic or not) and other Khammitic natives.
Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Kuwaitis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Arabic speaking people in SE Turkey and in SW Iran, and people at the Eastern coast of the peninsula (either in S. Arabia or in the Emirates and Qatar) are all Aramaeans, who gradually got arabized, because islamized. Yet, the Christian populations in SE Turkey, SW Iran, Iraq and Syria speak the latest form of Aramaic language, Syriac. Here one should add that from 2nd century CE Syriac cursive writing originated the Arabic writing.
To go back in time for a while, one has to underscore that at an earlier stage Babylonians, Phoenicians, Philistines / Palestinians, and Jews had got aramaized, and this is the reason of the existence of various Aramaic languages, dialects and idioms.
Very small number of Arabs intermingled with indigenous peoples
What is usually responded to the previous paragraphs is that people intermingled with one another at the early Islamic times, as they usually have done throughout the History of the Mankind. But in this case the counter-argumentation collapses automatically. Intermixed populations have a definite impact at the racial / ethnic level only when they occur in significant proportions.
The aramaization of Babylonia was a long procedure that did not occur at the linguistic only but also at the racial level; great masses of Aramaeans were living among Babylonians in the area of today’s Central and Southern Iraq for many centuries. This situation was not reproduced at the times of the early expansion of Islam!
As far as Yemen is concerned, the only Arabs who came to Yemen to diffuse Islam, were not even a small army of invaders! It was just a small group, Hadhrat Ali, the Prophet’s son-in law, and his limited company of men, who all returned with Ali back to Mecca! After the Yemenite adhesion to Islam, there was no need for Arabs to invade Yemen, and protect local Muslims and/or diffuse Islam! Of course, there were a few Arab merchants passing by Yemen, but the trade route to Petra, Syria and the Roman Empire was rather an area where rather the Yemenites were actively moving, not the Arabs. And useless to say it, all the epigraphic evidence excavated in Yemen and deciphered with the help of Gueze (Ancient Abyssinian) proves that all the Ancient Yemenite languages (Sabaean, Himyarite, Qatabani, Hadhramawti, etc) were linguistically different than the Arabic dialects, and they were much closer to Gueze. In addition, the Arabic pre-Islamic writing (originating from Syriac) was very different from the Yemenite syllabogrammatic scripture.
The Process of Linguistic (only) arabization
Although the case of Yemen’s islamization was different than that of Mesopotamia and Syria, many intend to discuss it within the context of the diffusion of Islam in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia (636 to 641). Well, we know very well that the first perception of Islam by people living in what we call now Mashreq (Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait) was that of one more Christological heresy, rather a latter Nestorian ideology.
This is, as we said, one of the reasons Islam was so easily accepted in Yemen, where Nestorianism had already taken deep roots, as a rejection of either the Monophysitic, Axumite (Abyssinian) Christianity or the Constantinopolitan and Roman Orthodoxy.
The Aramaean populations of these large provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Sassanid Empire of Iran were ethnically/linguistically different than the central populations of both empires (Greek and Persian); they were versed into religiously and culturally different systems than those prevailing in both capitals, and they were terribly exploited by the taxation within either empires. Furthermore, the Aramaeans faced continuous oppression and experienced very heavy damages, due to continuous wars between the two empires that took place in their own - Aramaean - land, where no Greeks and no Persians lived.
The Aramaeans were in majority Nestorian Christians, who did not call Jesus’ mother ‘Theotokos’ (Mother of God) but ‘Christotokos’ (Mother of the Messiah). It would be very easy for them to join the little Islamic armies in a fight against the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran in order to get rid of the ominous oppression exercised over them by the two imperial administrations. But – and this is deliberately hidden thanks to the colonial bogus-historians’ deeds - those early Islamic armies were including already some Yemenite converted Muslims! They were not exclusively ‘Arab’!
So, indicatively speaking, at those days the entire Arab population (that was limited in Hedjaz) did not exceed the population of just one big Aramaean, Egyptian, Persian, or Greek city, f.i. Antioch, Damascus, Palmyra, Edessa of Osrhoene, Alexandria, Tesifoun (Ctesiphon), Istakhr, Jond-e Shapur, Constantinople, Ephesus, and so on.
What happened a few years later is meaningful. Converted Aramaean populations joined the Islamic armies in the fight against the center of the Sassanid Iran, against Egypt, a Roman province, and then moved far to Northwestern Africa.
And Yemenite, Aramaean, Egyptian, African, and Persian converted Muslims participated in the attack against the center of the Eastern Roman Empire (Muwawiyah’s attack against Constantinople at 677). Arabs were a tiny minority among that army, and the Eastern Roman Chronicle writers, like the anonymous author of Paschalion Chronikon and Theophanes, called these armies not Arab, but Saracene, a recapitulative term rather meaning ‘Middle Easterner converted to Islam’.
To end up this point, one should add that only people originating from Hedjaz could logically claim to be ‘Arabs’; however, we also know that many Muslims from Persia, Egypt, Africa, Central Asia, India and Turkey moved there and settled permanently in Madina and in Mecca up to the point that they, due to their overwhelming numbers, turned the Arabs of Hedjaz into an Afro-Asiatic racial mixture of all ingredients and backgrounds! Long before the modern times already, there were no Arabs anymore, just Arabic-speaking populations.
The paranoiac effort to make of all these populations a ‘nation’, and the inconsistent theoretical composition of the Pan-Arabic nationalism, are taboo subjects for the European and American universities, whereby no one is accepted to study topics related to these issues!
Pan-Arabism was the device by which France and England destroyed the Ottoman Empire, since besotted and subservient, lewd and mean, miserable people were selected for ‘leaders’ by the European colonials and they were gullible enough to give credit to the words of the invaders and believe they would rule their countries; in reality all these comical bogus-kings starting with the Macedonian Muhammad Ali of Egypt were execrable puppets, and to be so they betrayed their own country, the Ottoman Empire, becoming simply renegades.
In a later phase, pan-Arabism helped the besotted populations of these large areas to remain permanently engulfed in eternal analphabetism, under-development and unprecedented misery. The reason is simple: a theory that misleads people as regards their true identity and integrity can never bring about development. Even in case of rich natural resources, the way of spoiling them shows that unfounded wealth is the worst advisor, and helps in nothing good to a nation!
Why the ‘wealthy’ Emirates, with 2.4 million inhabitants producing 129.4 billion US $ (49700 US $ per capita GDP), and larger national surface than Israel, devoid of fighting, terrorist attacks and the like, are not able to possess half the military power, half the nuclear power, half the academic / scientific power and half the political/diplomatic power of 4.8 million Israelis producing 166.3 billion US $ (26200 US $ per capita GDP)?
The answer is simple: before the establishment of the bogus-state called ‘UAE’, the local population had been so opaquely besotted by means of Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism (which is a form of degenerated materialism, and as such it consists in an additional tool in the hands of Colonial powers – not a religion or theology) that they were convinced that the best they can expect is wealth due to Oil resources’ exploitation. In one of the world’s worst expressions of apism, the administrators of that bogus-state do their best to please their Western masters. Their attitude will never change, unless the victims of the besotting and dehumanizing ideology of Pan-Arabism wake up one day out of miracle, and then they reject it properly and irreversibly.
Yemen’s future lies with Eastern Africa, not Arabs or Gulf states
Yemen's future should rather be viewed as close to that of the Eastern Africans. The fact that perhaps today’s Yemenites do not all feel it like that may be relevant to the erroneous colonial model of History that has been projected over Yemen. Not only the Yemenites are closer to the Somalis and the Tanzanians than to Iraqis and Lebanese, but this reality reflects in addition the diachronic axes of Yemenite expansion and naval – commercial rule over a vast part of the Indian Ocean.
Yet, one has to remember that at the times of the author of the Periplus of the Red Sea the Yemenites were accredited with colonial control over Azania, the Eastern African coast from the Horn of Africa (Cape Guardafui) down to Dar es Salam! Through the lines of many texts, and thanks to archeological explorations we have reconstituted a 500 years long (1 st millennium BCE) thalassocracy of the Islamic Yemenite mariners throughout the Indian Ocean from India and Indonesia to East Africa and the Red Sea. Ancient Qatabanite Yemenites seem to have unveiled the secrets of the navigation during the monsoons, and thus they were the first to sail straight form the Horn of Africa to the southernmost coasts of India! Yemenite sailors found first the Macassar ebony wood, and despite the Roman attack I the early years of Octavian, the Yemenites kept playing a determinant role in the political and socio-economic, cultural and religious developments in the Eastern African coast, during the Sassanid Iranian and the Eastern Roman times. Despite the precarious rule of the Axumite Kaleb in Yemen, the Persians and the Yemenites continued controlling the navigation throughout the Indian Ocean, and the phenomenon during many long centuries after the rise of Islam. The literary background of the famous Sindbad is due to Yemenite sailors in the Indian Ocean and further on in the China Sea and the Pacific. When Islamic times’ Chinese texts refer to Arabs, they mean Yemenites!
The reign of the famous Muslim Yemenite Queen Arwa reign proves by itself how closer t Khammitic Africa the Yemenites have always been!
Historical Geography for Tomorrow
Central Asia and China are far from Yemen. India is not far, but India is so huge that it would easily absorb Yemen economically! Furthermore, as India becomes a global hub for Services, and in the same way China becomes a global hub for Manufacturing and Industry, Yemen would be viewed as an unworthy Lilliputian.
Contrarily to these options, Yemen could create a multi-cultural, progressive community of 250 million people, within which Yemen could eventually become the locomotive, not in terms of financial advancement (the level is the same for all ten Horn of Africa countries) but through intelligence, volunteering commitment, thirst for development and progress, and last but not least through better cultural radiation and communication among the ten (10) suggested countries.
At the moment, what is missing in Yemen is democracy, accountability, and the rule of law. As there are many African peoples in search of a free, independent, modern, multicultural society, the Yemenites may again feel closer to them than to their uncultured and uneducated, barbaric northern neighbors.
Yemen in a Search for Identity and New Horizons
What is the best way for Self-Knowledge, Self-Understanding, and correct Cultural and Political Representation of one’s Identity?
Well, the question, I think, has been answered 500 years ago with the Renaissance. There are few chances for a country to obtain real development and real power while avoiding to follow the path of Western Europe. Of course, not the ‘same’ but the ‘similar’ the ‘corresponding’ ones!
a. Ancient Yemenite in Schools
A greater part of interest for the Ancient Yemenite world must be expressed at all levels, education, mass media, average culture, art and literature, social life and politics. Arabic translation of Ancient Yemenite epigraphic documentation will certainly popularize the subjects.
A Corpus of Ancient Greek and Roman texts relating to the pre-Islamic Yemen must be established within a National Research Center working close with a university. It will be complemented by an equivalent Corpus of the rich Ancient Yemenite epigraphic evidence translated in Arabic.
Primary and Secondary Education manuals must be re-written with extensive focus not only on the pre-Islamic history of Yemen itself, but also on the interactions and the interconnections of Ancient Yemen with the Horn of Africa, India, Iran, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Greco-Roman world. The importance of the Ancient Yemenite contributions to the World History must be stressed analytically.
Studying Ancient Yemenite in Yemen is not of philological but of national interest. Pending a considerable increase in the number of European tourists, a new generation of Yemenite guides must be formed that will be fluent in and able to read Ancient Yemenite inscriptions in the same way today a Greek guide in Greece and an Italian guide in Italy are able to read epigraphic documentation in Ancient Greek and Latin.
Within a perspective of 5 (five) years, Ancient Yemenite literature must be introduced – in the form of text, translation, and commentary – to the Secondary Education’s three last years’ courses for all the Yemenites. It must be done in the same way Latin is present within the modern Italian educational system.
b. Language / Literature / Folklore Academies for Suqutri in Qalansiya, and for Mehri in Qishn
Delving into the past means at times better understanding the present. Large projects must be undertaken for the preservation, writing, cultivation, and propagation of the Mehri, Suqutri, and Hobyot languages, but also of the neighboring Oman’s Jibbali, Harsusi and Bathari that are survival forms of Ancient Yemenite languages. A special National Committee must be formed in this regard, and an entire plan must be made in order to save traditions, songs, and all the expressions of folklore within these most valuable linguistic entities of Yemen.
An Academy of Suqutri in Qalansiya, and an Academy of Mehri in Qishn must be the basic tools that will help up to the point of creating university courses in Soqotri and Mehri (in a perspective of 10 to 15 years). This will classify Yemen among the leading countries of the world in preserving Languages under Threat of disappearance, therefore bearing testimony to the multicultural and multilingual commitment of a democratic administration.
c. Cooperation for the establishment of an Italian Red Sea University at Al Mokha
Taking into consideration basic trends in the global world of academic establishments, Yemen must anticipate things expected to happen within the next 10 to 15 years. The reaction of Francophonie to English, which is the prevailing language in the Internet (but also at the level of academic establishments) is going to have consequences. Sooner or later, Spaniards, Germans, Chinese, Brazilians and Russians will imitate. There will be two ways to counterweight the English medium universities, but until now only one has been implemented, namely another foreign linguistic medium university. We have got French universities in several countries where the citizens are not French native speakers, namely Turkey, Egypt, etc. We also have got a German
University outside the limits of Mitteleuropa.
Evaluating the traditional interest of Italy in the area of the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, Eastern Somalia, Abyssinia, and more particularly Eritrea, the Italian involvement in the decipherment of Ancient Yemenite, as well as in Egyptology, Meroitic Studies, and Gueze Studies, one can introduce the concept of an Italian Mare Rosso (Red Sea) University at al Mokha, where Eritreans, Sudanese, Abyssinians, Somalis, Omanis as well as Mozambicans, Malagasies, Tanzanians and Kenyans will be studying along with the Yemenite students in an effort to promote peace, cooperation, and the regional development of human resources that will be needed over the next 50 years. Italy will certainly find the project as an excellent way of propagating Italian language, education, culture, as well as of expanding economic and political interests in an area that was long considered by the Italian establishment as falling within their ‘domain’. The project will have an impact of the first steps of regional interconnection (trade, navigation), as well as on Tourism in Yemen.
d. The Future of the Global Academia is in Bilingual Universities
It has not started yet, as a means of opposition to the preponderance of English, but it will soon. The concept has it that one of the two linguistic media of the university is already native language to all the students. A first year of intensive learning of the other language is offered. Then, the main 4-year Bachelor syllabus is offered in both languages, every year some courses in one and some courses in the other language. All papers are issued in two languages, and the academic staff itself is asked to learn the unknown language (if it is so) within the span of three years, and to be able to teach in this language as well within the span of five years.
1. Arabic / Chinese University
Nothing could help China penetrate the Arabic speaking world better than a bilingual Arabic / Chinese University established in Yemen. This would be the high place of Chinese students learning Arabic, since the Chinese attribute great importance to direct talks in negotiations; it would offer them a cheap way to form their Arabic speaking part of establishment. At the same time, it would make of Yemen the converging place for rich and poor Arabic speaking countries’ students wishing to find job opportunities in numerous Chinese companies that appear in the Middle East, in the rising incoming Chinese tourism, or in various other fields.
2. Russian/Arabic, and Turkish/Arabic universities
The eventuality of bilingual Russian/Arabic, and Turkish/Arabic universities may also be found worthy of financing among many financial, political and academic circles in Russia, in Turkey, and in several Central Asiatic countries (Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kirghizia and Kazakhstan) where both Russian and Turkish are a kind of international or second native language.
3. Portuguese/Arabic university
Working closely with regional and global partners in this regard, Yemen can envisage a university that would be located half on Yemenite soil, and half on Mozambican soil. Brazil, Portugal (and therefore the European Union), as well as Angola would also be concerned in this regard. It would consist in a cheap way for Portuguese to prepare their own Arabic speaking class of establishment that would help this southern European country in penetrating the North-Western African market. More than anything else such a tool would be useful for Brazil, a rising international pole of power, in setting foot in Africa and in the Arabic speaking area that both consist in ideal market opportunity for the fast expanding Latin American gigantic country.
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