Wednesday, April 19, 2023

2023: Gog - Golden

 


Gog and Magog
Gog and Magog (in Arabic, Yajuj wa-Majuj).  Two peoples who belong to Muslim eschatology.  They are mentioned in the Qur’an at Sura 18:90-95 and Sura 21:95-100.

Gog and Magog appear in the Book of Genesis, the Book of Ezekiel, and in the Book of Revelation and in the Qur'an. They are variously presented as men, supernatural beings (giants or demons), national groups, or lands. Gog and Magog occur widely in mythology and folklore.

 The Qur'an (early 7th century C.C.) gives information on Ya'jūj and Ma'jūj (Gog and Magog in Arabic). In sura Al-Kahf ("The Cave"), 18:83–98, a mysterious individual called Dhul-Qarnayn ("The Two-horned One") journeys to a distant land beyond the sunrise where he finds a people who are suffering from the mischief of Gog and Magog. Dhul-Qarnayn then makes an iron wall to keep Gog and Magog out, but warns that it will be removed in the Last Age. In Sura 21, Al-Anbiyā (The Prophets), the wall is mentioned again. There Allah tells his Prophet (Muhammad) that there is a prohibition upon the people of a city which Allah destroyed that they will not ever return until the dam of Gog and Magog has opened.  According to Islamic tradition (in Saḥīḥ al-Bukhāri), Gog and Magog are human beings, and the city mentioned in Sura 21 is Jerusalem.

The Qur'anic account of Dhul-Qarnayn follows very closely the "Gates of Alexander" story from the Alexander romance, a thoroughly embellished compilation of Alexander the Great's wars and adventures (see Alexander the Great in the Qur'an). Since the construction of a great iron gate to hold back a hostile northern people was attributed to Alexander many centuries before the time of Islamic Prophet Muhammad and the recording of the Qur'an, most historians consider Dhul-Qarnayn a reference to Alexander (see Alexander the Great in the Qur'an). However, some Muslim scholars reject this attribution, associating Dhul-Qarnayn with some other early ruler, usually Cyrus the Great, but also Darius the Great. Gog and Magog are also mentioned in some of the hadith, or sayings of Muhammad, specifically the Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, revered by Muslims.

Fourteenth century Muslim sojourner Ibn Battuta traveled to China on order of the Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq, and encountered a large community of Muslim merchants in the city of Zaitun. He comments in his travel log that "Between it [the city] and the rampart of Yajuj and Majuj is sixty days' travel." The translator of the travel log notes that Ibn Battuta confused the Great Wall of China with that supposedly built by Dhul-Qarnayn.

The Ahmadiyya Community present the view that Gog and Magog represent one or more of the European nations. They associate European imperialism after the Age of Discovery with the reference to Gog and Magog's rule at the "four corners of the world" in the Christian Book of Revelation. The Ahmadiyya founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad linked Gog and Magog to the European nations and Russia. His son and second successor, Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad further expounds the connection between Europe and the accounts of Gog and Magog in the Bible, the Qur'an, and the hadith in his work Tafseer-e-Kabeer. According to this interpretation of Mahmood Ahmad in his commentary on Surah Al-Kahf (Urdu), Gog and Magog were the descendants of Noah who populated eastern and western Europe long ago, the Scythians. According to Ahmadiyya teachings, the period of the Cold War between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet union (identified as Gog and Magog) or the influence of Communism and capitalism, the conflict and rivalry between the two and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union all occurred in accordance with the prophecies concerning Gog and Magog. Ahmadis also cite the folkloric British interpretation of Gog and Magog as giants as support for their view.

Ahmadis point out that the Arabic words for Gog and Magog i.e. Yajuj and Majuj derive from the root word Ajjij (to burn, blaze, hasten) which suggests that Gog and Magog will excel all nations in harnessing fire to their service and shall fight their battles with fire. In his commentary of Surah-Al-Masadd, Mirza Mahmood Ahmad, the Second Ahmadiyya leader has interpreted the two hands of Abu-lahab (the father of flame) as Gog and Magog, the nations opposed to Islam that will ultimately be destroyed by the 'fire' of their own making.

Christian and Muslim writers sometimes associated the Khazars with Gog and Magog. In his 9th century work Expositio in Matthaeum Evangelistam, the Benedictine monk Christian of Stavelot refers to the Khazars as Hunnic descendants of Gog and Magog, and says they are "circumcized and observing all [the laws of] Judaism". The Khazars were a Central Asian people with a long association with Judaism. The 14th century Sunni scholar Ibn Kathir also identified Gog and Magog with the Khazars who lived between the Black and Caspian Seas in his work Al-Bidayah wa al-Nihayah (The Beginning and the End). A Georgian tradition, echoed in a chronicle, also identifies the Khazars with Gog and Magog, stating they are "wild men with hideous faces and the manners of wild beasts, eaters of blood". Another author who has identified this connection was the Arab traveller Ahmad ibn Fadlan. In his travelogue regarding his diplomatic mission to Elteber (vassal-king under the Khazars), he noted the beliefs about Gog and Magog being the ancestors of the Khazars.


Magog see Gog and Magog
Yajuj wa-Majuj see Gog and Magog
Majuj see Gog and Magog

Gokalp
Gokalp (Ziya Gokalp) (Mehmed Ziya’)  (Mehmet Ziya) (March 23, 1876, Diyarbakır—October 25, 1924, Constantinople). Turkish sociologist, writer, poet, and political activist. In 1908, after the Young Turk revolution, he adopted the pen name Gökalp ("sky hero"), which he retained for the rest of his life. As a sociologist, Ziya Gökalp was influential in the overhaul of religious perceptions and evolving of Turkish nationalism..  After the revolution of 1908, he became a member of the Union and Progress Committee and preached Pan-Turanism.  In 1921, he joined the movement led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.  He stressed the need for reforms in all aspects of life and after his death was recognized as the father of Turkish nationalism.

Mehmet Ziya was born in Diyarbakir to a family of mixed Turkish and Kurdish origins.  He attended the Imperial Veterinary School (1896) at Istanbul, where he joined the revolutionary Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).  He was dismissed from the school, arrested, and jailed when his affiliation with the CUP was discovered by the secret police in 1897.  After his release from prison, he returned to his native city and married his cousin Cevriye in 1898.  They had three daughters who survived him and a son who died at an early age.  Gokalp devoted his time in Diyarbakir mostly to ethnographic research among Kurdish and Turkoman tribes and to the study of Durkheimian sociology. 

Following the Young Turk revolution of July 1908, Mehmet Ziya founded a local branch

of the CUP.  He was a delegate to the important CUP Congress of Thessaloniki in 1909 where he was elected a member of the Central Committee, a position he held until the party dissolved in November 1918.  Gokalp’s brilliant career as a nationalist thinker started in Thessaloniki, with the nationalist literary journal Genc kalemler (1911), where he used the pseudonym “Gok Alp” for the first time.  When the Balkan War (1912-1913) broke out, he established himself in Istanbul, and continued to publish in various journals, notably Turk yurdu (1912-1914), Halka dogru (1913-1914), Islam mecmuasi (1914-1915), and Yeni mecmua (1917-1918).  In 1915, he became a professor of sociology at Istanbul University.  As a member of the Central Committee of the CUP, he was arrested and tried after World War I as a war criminal and deported to Malta by the British (1919).  After his release, he lived for a short period in Diyarbakir where he published the journal Kucuk mecmua (1922-1923).  Although he was elected deputy for Diyarbakir in 1923 on a Kemalist slate, he remained quite isolated in the capital city owing to his record as a notable CUP member and an admirer of Enver Pasha.  He soon moved to Istanbul because of poor health and died there on October 25, 1924.

As a thinker, sociologist, poet, and politician, Ziya Gokalp has been one of the most influential minds in twentieth-century Turkish political and intellectual history.  He is the theoretician par excellence of Turkish nationalism as a ground for synthesis of secularist westernization and Islamic reform movements.  He never published a major work to express methodically his idea of nationalism.  Even his Principles of Turkism (1923), which can be considered his final word on the subject, is a collection of essays on nationalism previously published in journals and newspapers.  However, despite the tentative character of some of his ideas and his occasional modification of them, a highly articulate understanding of nationalism emerged in the numerous essays he published over a period of fifteen years.

Like almost all his contemporaries, Gokalp was obsessed with the predicament of the Ottoman state, and his initial quest for a solution to keep that polity viable can be considered an expression of Social Darwinism.  What made him move away from his predecessors and contemporaries, however, was his conversion to French sociological thought through the works of Emile Durkheim and his subsequent reflection on the structure of Europe.  This led him to make a distinction between culture, which remained national, and civilization, which was shared internationally.  European society was divided into nation states despite centuries of identification with the same religion and a few multi-ethnic polities.  Since that history could not obliterate the differences of language and customs, nationality was the most essential characteristic of human societies.  Hence, Gokalp believed that Western civilization represented the sum total of Western nation states who shared a material and political civilization.  According to Gokalp, this civilization cannot be related to Christianity for two reasons.  First, despite the fact that religions are shared internationally, they exercise their appeal on individuals through a national language and a series of rituals that differ from one nation to another and are thus “nationalized.”  Second, Western civilization was based on a suprareligious political organization and had already incorporated non-Christians such as Jews and Japanese.  Gokalp contends that not only would the reorganization of the Ottoman Turkish polity along nationalistic lines invigorate that polity, but it would also pave the way for the Ottoman Turks to join Western civilization.  In other words, unearthing the national genius was synonymous with westernization.  In accordance with this thought, he vehemently insisted that Turkish nationalism would be a source of strength for the Ottoman Empire and contended, somewhat later, that the empire should be reorganized as a confederation of Turks and Arabs. 

To join Western civilization meant for Gokalp both political action and social engineering.  Political action consisted of secularization (muasirlasmak) of all aspects of social life, to the point of confining religion to the strictest individual sphere.  As an influential member both of the Central Committee of the CUP and of the parliamentary commission that drafted the Turkish constitution, he was the mastermind in the secularization process at two important turning points, in 1917 and in 1923-1924.  His insistence on placing the evkaf (awqaf, in Arabic) schools under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education and the seriat (shari‘a) courts under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice in 1917 can be considered as the first steps, respectively, toward the Law on the Unification of Education passed in 1924 and the Civil Code adopted in 1926.  In perfect harmony with positivistic determinism, yet another fashion of his age, Gokalp thought that social engineering too was necessary, for Turkish society had developed structural shortcomings for historical reasons.  Composed almost exclusively of bureaucrats and agriculturalists, this society lacked the entrepreneurial class that had the most crucial role in the social division of labor in modern nation-states.  Thus, Gokalp was also the initiator of the mobilization for “national(ist) economy” (milli iktisat), which consisted of a propaganda campaign aimed at developing the moneymaking instinct of the Turks and a series of legal measures, the most significant of which was protectionism.

Ziya Gokalp’s name has been associated with Pan-Turanism and proto-fascistic solidarism.  During the period between 1912 and the end of World War I, Gokalp leaned toward Pan-Turanism under the influence of Russian émigrés and particularly of the Azeri publicist Huseyinzade Ali, active in Istanbul.  This leaning also partly explains his sympathy for Enver Pasha, the champion of Pan-Turanism among the CUP leadership, to whom he dedicated his collected poems, Kizil elma, published shortly after the Ottoman Empire entered World War I.  This romantic weakness of Gokalp survives also in his Principles of Turkism, though in the form of a mild utopianism.  In the final analysis, his Pan-Turanism can be considered as a symptom of an age when the boundaries of a self-contained nation-state still appeared too modest to Turkish imperial hangover.  His solidarism is less evident.  There are sections in his Principles of Turkism that contradict each other, some thoroughly liberal and other solidaristic professions of faith.  This is a result of the effect of the World War and the Bolshevik Revolution on Gokalp.  The scramble for mandates in the Middle East and the social upheavals in Europe in the aftermath of the war were rationalized by Gokalp as the outcome of capitalistic greed.  In 1923, he still thought of the entrepreneurial class as essential in the social division of labor, but he also advocated that the individual ventures be monitored by the state for the general good of the society.

Obsessed as he was with the nation-state, Gokalp neglected the study of the Ottoman Empire, a polity he discarded as a cosmopolitan, hybrid oddity.  It is this weakness in historical outlook that led him to equate secularization exclusively with modernization.  He ignored, for instance, the secular kanun tradition that constituted one of the pillars of the Ottoman Empire.  This is yet another characteristic typical of the generation who founded the Turkish Republic, for which Ziya Gokalp was undoubtedly a spiritual father. 
Ziya Gokalp see Gokalp
Mehmed Ziya’ see Gokalp
Ziya', Mehmed see Gokalp
“Gok Alp” see Gokalp
"sky hero" see Gokalp
Mehmet Ziya see Gokalp


Golconda
Golconda.  Refers to the Qutb Shahs of the Indian (actually Turkoman) dynasty in the Deccan (peninsular India) (r.1512-1687).  Their main capitals were Muhammadnagar (Golconda) and, from 1590, Hyderabad.  The dynasty was founded by a nephew of the last ruler of the Qara Qoyunlu, who fled to India when their empire collapsed in 1478.  His son, Sultan Quli (1512-1543), governor for the Bahmanids in Telingana from 1493, broke free following the fall of the Bahmanid empires in 1512 and established the Qutb-Shah state, which secured great independence under the stable government of his successors.  The governments of Muhammad Quli (1581-1612) and Abd Allah (1626-1672) marked the cultural zenith.  The last ruler, Abu’l-Hasan (1672-1687), is remembered primarily as a poet.  In 1687, the Qutb Shah state was conquered by the Mughal ruler Aurangzib, who proceeded to annex the enitre Deccan to the Mughal empire. 


Golden Horde
Golden Horde (Ulus of Jochi) (Ulus of Juchi) (Khanate of the Qipchaq) (Kipchaq Khanate).  Refers to the group of Islamized Mongols having a Turkic ethnic majority.  The Golden Horde controlled Russia from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.  The name the Golden Horde was the name given by the Russians to the western division of the Mongol Empire, which ruled from 1227 to 1502.  It was created by Batu ibn Juci on the lower Volga, with its center at Old (later New) Saray.  In eastern literature, the country is usually referred to as the Qipcaq (Kipchak) Steppe.  Batu’s brother Berke was the first Mongol prince to become a Sunni Muslim and, thereby, began the incorporation of the Tatars into Islam.  Berke's death did not altogether put an end to Islamic influence, although his immediate successors were again Shamanists.  Ozbeg Khan (r. 1313-1341), a Muslim himself, definitely strengthened the position of Islam.  The Golden Horde became more and more at the mercy of Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy.  After 1419, the formation of independent khanates in Qazan, Astrakhan and in the Crimea started the disintegration of the Golden Horde.  In 1502, the Golden Horde was vanquished by the Crimea and Muscovy.  

The term Golden Horde is a Russian designation for the Ulus Juchi, the western part of the Mongol Empire, which flourished from the mid-13th century to the end of the 14th century. The people of the Golden Horde were a mixture of Turks and Mongols, with the latter generally constituting the aristocracy.

The ill-defined western portion of the empire of Genghis Khan formed the territorial endowment of his oldest son, Juchi. Juchi predeceased his father in 1227, but his son Batu expanded their domain in a series of brilliant campaigns that included the sacking and burning of the city of Kiev in 1240. At its peak the Golden Horde’s territory included most of European Russia from the Urals to the Carpathian Mountains, extending east deep into Siberia. On the south the Horde’s lands bordered on the Black Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, and the Iranian territories of the Mongol dynasty known as the Il-Khans.

Batu founded his capital, Sarai Batu, on the lower stretch of the Volga River. The capital was later moved upstream to Sarai Berke, which at its peak held perhaps 600,000 inhabitants. The Horde was gradually Turkified and Islāmized, especially under their greatest khan, Öz Beg (1313–41). The Turkic tribes concentrated on animal husbandry in the steppes, while their subject peoples, Russians, Mordvinians, Greeks, Georgians, and Armenians, contributed tribute. The Russian princes, particularly those of Muscovy, soon obtained responsibility for collecting the Russian tribute. The Horde carried on an extensive trade with Mediterranean peoples, particularly their allies in Mamelūke Egypt and the Genoese.

The Black Death, which struck in 1346–47, and the murder of Öz Beg’s successor marked the beginning of the Golden Horde’s decline and disintegration. The Russian princes won a signal victory over the Horde general Mamai at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. Mamai’s successor and rival, Tokhtamysh, sacked and burned Moscow in retaliation in 1382 and re-established the Horde’s dominion over the Russians. Tokhtamysh had his own power broken, however, by his former ally Timur, who invaded the Horde’s territory in 1395, destroyed Sarai Berke, and deported most of the region’s skilled craftsmen to Central Asia, thus depriving the Horde of its technological edge over resurgent Muscovy.

In the 15th century, the Horde disintegrated into several smaller khanates, the most important being those of the Crimea, Astrakhan, and Kazan. The last surviving remnant of the Golden Horde was destroyed by the Crimean Khan in 1502.

Ulus of Jochi see Golden Horde
Ulus of Juchi see Golden Horde
Khanate of the Qipchaq see Golden Horde
Kipchaq Khanate see Golden Horde

No comments:

Post a Comment