In the first half of 7th c., Muslim Arabs invaded the territories of the two superpowers in the Late Age of Antiquity, the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) and Sasanian Persian Empire…

...searching the text of the Koran, one finds reference to Arabs, Israel, Egypt, the Egyptian Pharaohs who lived some 1000 years before Islam, and the Roman Empire… the Koran even refers to itself as the Koran...yet, the Koran makes no reference to Iran, Iranians, Persia, Persians, Sasanian Persian kings, Zoroaster, Zoroastrianism even though majority of those living in Iranian territories at the time were Zoroastrian and many Arabs were under the control of Sasanian Persian Empire… Isn’t that odd?

…maybe someone with expertise in the field of Islam can direct me to where I may find reference to the omitted subjects…

[pic wufak: for educational purposes only]

 

Perhaps as Americans abandon reading the bible, the less they know about Iran (Persia)…

“The Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties” edited by Paul Finkelman (2006) tells us that in 1950, 36 states either required or permitted Bible reading in schools given American culture was partially based on Protestant Christianity.  The most popular version was the King James Bible.  They read passages without commentary to avoid promoting a religion, but rather to teach general morality.  In 1963, the Supreme Court found that reading the Bible in public schools was unconstitutional (Abington School District v. Schempp)…

[As a side note, apparently Schempp was 16 when he protested bible-reading in school… according to bios online, he noticed his Jewish friends were upset with such readings and in protest he brought a copy of the KORAN to read in school…not sure why he chose the Koran that would have surely been alien to 1950s Americans rather than the Torah or the Talmud, not to mention the historical Islamo-Judaic conflicts such as Mohammad’s extermination of Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza or launching battle of Khaybar… odd indeed…in his lawsuit against the school system that led to the 1963 Supreme Court decision, Schempp and his family were assisted by the ACLU… today the 77 yr old Schempp is an atheist …]

Sorry for the digression but the Schempp situation was of particular interest especially since today there are countless complaints about American public schools teaching Islamic indoctrination and passages from the Koran…one may wonder what Schempp or the ACLU might think about all that…

Now back to the connection between bible reading and interest in Iran (Persia)…

Until 1950s, the King James Bible (1611) was it… THE bible!!!... It is considered the most important Western literary work of modern era…we can see the influence of the bible in Western arts, literature, philosophy, politics, etc…

Surveys taken in 2016 indicate that more than 50% of Americans have read little or none of the bible… perhaps this is why when many of my students are exposed to the opening lines of Robert Frost’s 1913 poem addressed to Ezra Pound, they do not know to what it is referring…

“I am a Mede and Persian

In my acceptance of harsh laws laid down for me

When you said I could not read

When you said I looked old

When you said I was slow of wit

I knew that you only meant

That you could read

That you looked young

That you were nimble of wit

But I took your words at their face value

I accepted your words like an encyclical letter…”

 

As noted in my recent study, according to P. Vasunia in “Persian Responses: Political And Cultural Interaction with(in) the Achaemenid Empire” (2007), disciples of Pythagoras and Plato invoked Zoroaster in their works. There was strong receptivity to Iranian influences in Greece, the Aegean, and Anatolia…“Iranian influence on classical Greek and Roman culture is not just plausible but likely”…

[pic Highline College:  In 1976, an American anthropologist Edward T. Hall proposed the Iceberg Theory Model to understand culture…that is, the visible aspects of culture are “the tip of the iceberg”… it’s the lower hidden part that contain the most powerful forces… for educational purposes only]

According to M. J. Olbrycht in a 2010 publication entitled “A companion to ancient Macedonia”:

Alexander the Great’s father Philip II “built his power and created many institutions to imitate those known from the Achaemenid [Persian] Empire,” because “the most immediate model of a great monarchy was Persia.” Although Alexander later conquered the Achaemenid Persian Empire, he and his court went through Iranization making “Iranians the mainstay of his army.” Alexander’s Indian War (327-325 BCE) “should be seen as a Macedonian-Iranian victory” given Alexander’s army were mostly Iranian.

[pic Columbia University: for educational purposes only]

Often in the news media (exposed mostly as a mouthpiece for rogue intelligence), social media (people either awakening or insisting upon not awakening), and elsewhere, one runs across the notion that Iranians are different than “white” people…

As noted in my doctorate dissertation, “the omission or marginalization of the positioning of Iran and Iranians with respect to Indo-European history might be attributing to public misconceptions about categorization of white people.” In a 2017 article published by Independent, Lucy Pasha-Robinson wrote “students at SOAS University of London were calling for removal of white philosophers from curriculum to address diversity” in more accurately focusing on Asia and Africa…this is a stunning revelation as to our current demise and where we are headed!!! … the problem of “colonization” in educational materials is not based on the fact that white notables in various fields are reviewed, but that students are not taught that many peoples of Asia and Europe are part of the “white” group…

The ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder claimed the name of the “Caucasus” Mountains comes from the Iranian Scythian word “Graucasus” meaning white with snow…so the word associated with "white people" may very well be Iranian in origin...

Iranians are Aryans of the Indo-European family and have populated Asia and Europe since antiquity… Iranians as well as many others are white…although race refers to variation among humans, there is no such thing as “Middle East” let alone “Middle Eastern race”…

[pic: "Trace Evidence: Hair Forensic Science” Copyright © Texas Education Agency, 2011…for educational purposes only]