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Jamal Ud Din al Afghani
The emergencee of the Salafi movement was the result of the deliberate spread of Scottish Rite Freemasonry to the Middle East. This strategy was spearheaded by what has been referred to as the Oxford Movement, established in the 1820s, with a group of missionaries appointed by a combined grouping of Oxford University, the Anglican Church, and King’s College of London University.78
The leading promoters of the Oxford Movement were Pike’s fellow member of the Palladian Rite, Lord Palmerston, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and Edward Bullwer-Lytton, the leader of a branch of the English Rosicrucians, a branch of Rosicrucianism developed from the Asiatic Brethren.
The Oxford movement was further supported by the Jesuits. Also involved were the British royal family itself. The kings and queens of England head a circle of individuals who represent the pinnacle of centuries of intermarrying among the aristocracy of Europe and Armenia, and more recently, of the family of Frederick II the Great of Prussia, and the descendants of Karl of Hessen-Kassel, the Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren, Catherine the Great, and Queen Victoria.
The reigning British monarch is the Holy Grail, as it were, the vessel which carries the “holy blood,” the culmination of centuries of intermarriage of Kabbalistic bloodlines, believed to derive in several directions from King David. According to L.G. Pine, Editor of the prestigious Burke’s Peerage, Jews “have made themselves so closely connected with the British peerage that the two classes are unlikely to suffer loss which is not mutual. So closely linked are the Jews and the lords that a blow against the Jews in this country would not be possible without injuring the aristocracy also.”79
The British monarch is not only the Grand Patron of Freemasonry, but heads the Order of the Garter. The Order of the Garter is the parent organisation over Freemasonry, worldwide. When a Mason reaches the 33rd degree, he swears allegiance to that organisation and thereby to the British Crown. According to researcher Dr. John Coleman, who interviewed a Grand Master at Oxford, the Knights of the Garter are the inner-sanctum, the elite of the elite of Her Majesty’s Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta. The Knights of the Order of the Garter are the leaders of the Illuminati hierarchy, and the reigning monarch’s most trusted “Privy Council”. 80
Benjamin Disraeli was Grand Master of Freemasonry, as well as knight of the Order of the Garter. It was in Coningsby, that he confessed, through a character named Sidonia, modelled on his friend Lionel de Rothschild, that, “the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Of the influence of the secret societies, Disraeli also remarked, in Parliamentary debate:
It is useless to deny. . . a great part of Europe – the whole of Italy and France, and a great portion of Germany, to say nothing of other countries – are covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superficies of the earth is now being covered with railroads. And what are their objects? They do not attempt to conceal them. They do not want constitutional government. They do not want ameliorated institutions; they do not want provincial councils nor the recording of votes; they want. . . an end to ecclesiastical establishments…
Bulwer-Lytton, who served as the head of Britain’s Colonial Office and India Office, was the Grand Patron of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), founded in 1865 by Robert Wentworth Little, and based on the Asiatic Brethren. Many members of the Asiatic Brethren, or Fratres Lucis, had become members of a German Masonic lodge called L'Aurore Naissante, or “the Nascent Dawn”, founded in Frankfurt-on-Main in 1807. It was at this lodge where Lord Bulwer Lytton was initiated. 81
Their primary agent for the spread of Scottish Rite Fremasonry to the Middle East was a notorious impostor by the name of Jamal ud Din al Afghani, regarded as the Salafi’s founder.82 Initially, the creation of the Salafi reform movement would serve as an early example of the methods in which Islamic terrorists were used in the future, in helping to provide a pretext for invasion. Essentially, the Salafi were employed in the protection of Britain’s growing interest in the Suez Canal, as it would later become crucial to the shipment of their oil cargo to Europe and elsewhere.
In 1854 and 1856, Ferdinand de Lesseps had obtained concessions from Said Pasha, the viceroy of Egypt, who authorised the creation of a company for the purpose of constructing a maritime canal open to ships of all nations. The canal had a dramatic impact on world trade, playing an important role in increasing European penetration and colonisation of Africa.
In 1875, the mounting debts of Said Pasha’s successor, Ismail Pasha, forced him to sell Egypt’s share in the canal to the British. Thus, the British government, under Benjamin Disraeli, financed by his friend Lionel Rothschild, acquired nearly half the total shares in the Suez Canal Company, and though not a majority interest, it was for practical purposes a controlling interest. A commission of inquiry into the failing finances of Ismail in 1878, led by Evelyn Baring, First Earl of Cromer, and others had compelled the viceroy into ceding his estates to the nation, to remain under British and French supervision, and to accept the position of a constitutional sovereign. The angered Egyptians united around Ahmed Urabi, a revolt that ultimately provided a pretext for the British to move in and “protect” the Suez Canal, followed by a formal invasion and occupation which made Egypt a colony.
The agent provocateur revolt against Ismail was organised by the movement of Jamal Afghani. Throughout his forty-year career as a British intelligence agent, Jamal ud al Afghani was guided by two British Islamic and cult specialists, Wilfred Scawen Blunt and Edward G. Browne. 83 E. G. Browne was Britain’s’ leading Orientalist of the nineteenth century, and numbered among his protégés at Cambridge University’s Orientalist department Harry “Abdullah” St. John B. Philby, a British intelligence specialist behind the Wahhabi movement. Wilfred S. Blunt, another member of the British Orientalist school, was given the responsibility by the Scottish Rite Masons to organise the Persian and the Middle East lodges. 84
Very little is known of Jamal Afghani’s origins. Despite the appellation “Afghani”, there are some reports that he was a Jew. On the other hand, some scholars believe that he was not an Afghan but an Iranian Shiah. And despite posing as a reformer of orthodox Islam, al Afghani also acted as proselytiser of the Bahai faith, which Robert Dreyfuss characterised as “the first recorded project of nineteenth-century British aristocracy… in Persia.”85
Al Afghani is thought to be from Asadabad, a town in Persia, near Hamadan, an area of Ismaili settlement. Like the Ismailis before him, Afghani believed in the need of religion for the masses, while reserving the subtler truth of atheism for the elite. According to Nikki R. Keddie, in her study of Afghani, “much as esoteric Ismaili doctrines had in earlier centuries provided different levels of interpretation of the same texts, binding masses and elite in a common program, so Jamal ud Din’s practice of different levels of teaching could weld the rationalist elite and the more religious masses into a common political movement.”86
Several of those who witnessed Afghani’s teachings confirm his deviation from orthodoxy. Among them was Lutfi Juma, who recounted, “his beliefs were not true Islam although he used to present they were, and I cannot judge about the beliefs of his followers.” And again, Dr. Shibli Shumayyil, a Syrian admirer of his, writes that, when he heard that Afghani had written a treatise against the “materialists”, he commented, “I was amazed, because I knew that he was not a religious man. It is difficult for me after my personal experience of the man to pass definite judgment regarding what I heard about him afterwards, but I am far more inclined to think that he was not a believer.”87
In addition, Afghani had acquired considerable knowledge of Islamic philosophy, particularly of the Persians, including Avicenna, Nasir ud Din Tusi, and others, and of Sufism. Evidence also proves that he possessed such works, but also that he showed interest in occult subjects, such as mystical alphabets, numerical combinations, alchemy and other Kabbalistic subjects. Also demonstrating Afghani’s interest in mysticism, of a Neoplatonic type, is a twelve-page treatise on Gnosticism copied in his handwriting.
There is much controversy as to Afghani’s activities during the period of 1858-1865. However, according to one biographer, Salim al Anhuri, a Syrian writer who later knew him in Egypt, Afghani’s first travels outside of Iran were to India. It was there, he maintains, that Afghani acquired his heretical bent. His studies in religion, relates Anhuri, led into atheism and pantheism. Essentially, Afghani believed in a philosophy akin to Lurianic Kabbalah, of a natural evolution of the universe, of which the intellectual progress of man was a part. As Anhuri described, Afghani believed: Man began by saying that he would pass on after his death to an eternal life, and that the wood or the stone were what would lead him to his highest place if he showed reverence to it and showered devotion upon it, and there arose from this worship liberation from the bitterness of thought about a death with no life after it. Then it occurred to him that fire was more powerful and greater in benefit and harm, so he turned to it. Then he saw that the clouds were better than fire and stronger, so he adhered to and depended on them. The links of this chain, wrought by the two tools of delusion and desire together with the instinct and nature of man, continued to increase until man culminated at the highest state. The result of natural laws was a reaction leading to the conviction that all the above is idle talk which originates in desires, and that it has no truth and no definition.88
In 1866, Afghani appeared in Qandahar, Afghanistan, less than two decades after the unsuccessful attempts of the British, in league with the Aga Khan. And, according to a report, from a man who must have been an Afghan with the local government, Afghani was “...well versed in geography and history, speaks Arabic and Turkish fluently, talks Persian like an Irani. Apparently, follows no particular religion. His style of living resembles more that of a European than of a Muslim.” 89
Afghani then appeared in Istanbul in 1870, brought there by Ali Pasha, himself a Freemason, and Grand Vizier five times during the reign of Sultan Abdul Majid and Sultan Abdul Aziz. Afghani was severely disliked by the clergy for his heretical views, however. Hasan Fahmi, a leading scholar of his time, and the Shaikh al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire, pronounced a Fatwa declaring Afghani a disbeliever, and he was expelled.
In 1871, Afghani went to Cairo, sponsored by Prime Minister Mustafa Riad Pasha, who had met him in Istanbul, and who then placed him on a generous salary and had him appointed to the prestigious Muslim university of Al Azhar. Initially, Afghani remained strictly orthodox, but in 1878, he moved into the Jewish quarter of Cairo, where he began open political organising. Afghani then announced the formation of the Arab Masonic Society. And, despite their public profession of orthodox Islam, the members of Afghanis inner-circle evinced their adherence to the Gnosticism of the Ismailis. Afghani would refer to his Masonic brethren as ikhwan al saffa wa khullan al wafa, in deliberate reference to the tenth century Ismaili brotherhood by the same name.90
Footnotes:
78 Dreyfuss, Robert. Hostage to Khomeini, New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1980. p. 101. 79 Tales of the British Aristocracy. 1957, p.219. 80 Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300. 81 Ruggiu, Jean-Pascal. “Rosicrucian Alchemy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” 82 Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini. p. 118. 83 Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini. p. 118. 84 Ibid. p. 123 and 121. 85 Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini. p. 115. 86 Ibid., p. 87. 87 Ibid , p. 91 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid, p. 45 90 Raafat, Samir. “Freemasonry in Egypt: Is it still around?” Insight Magazine, March 1, 1999. |
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Mohammed Abduh and Rashid Rida
After Afghani’s departure from Egypt, his pupil, Mohammed Abduh, was inexplicably named the chief editor of the official British-controlled publication of the Egyptian government, the Journal Officiel. Working under him was fellow-Freemason, Saad Zaghul, later to be founder of the Wafd nationalist party. In 1883, Abduh joined Afghani in Paris, and then went to London.
In Paris and London, Abduh assisted Afghani in administering a journal in Paris, called Al Urwah al Wuthkah, or the “Indissoluble Bond”, also the name of a secret organisation he founded in 1883. Among the members of Afghani’s circle in Paris were Egyptians, Indians, Turks, Syrians, North Africans, as well as many Christians and Jews, and Bahais expelled from the Middle East.
Like his teacher, Abduh was associated with the Bahai movement, which had made deliberate efforts to spread the faith to Egypt, establishing themselves in Alexandria and Cairo beginning in the late 1860s. Abduh had met Abdul Baha, who became leader of the Bahai’s after his father’s death, and agreed with his one-world-religion philosophy. Remarking on Abdul Baha’s excellence in religious science and diplomacy, Abduh said of him that, “[he] is more than that. Indeed, he is a great man; he is the man who deserves to have the epithet applied to him.”96
Abduh was known for his “reformist” views about Islam. But in How We Defended Orabi, A.M. Broadbent declared that, “Sheikh Abdu was no dangerous fanatic or religious enthusiast, for he belonged to the broadest school of Moslem thought, held a political creed akin to pure republicanism, and was a zealous Master of a Masonic Lodge.”97
Like the Ismailis before him, he would advance his students progressively into deeper levels of heresy. To the higher initiates, he would reveal the doctrines of the Scottish Rite and the philosophy of one-world government. However, those Abduh deemed were much more disposed, he would introduce to an officer of British intelligence from London.
From 1888, until his death in 1905, Abduh regularly visited the home and office of Lord Cromer. In 1892, he was named to run the administrative Committee for the Al Azhar mosque and university, the most prestigious educational institution in Islam, and the second oldest university in the world. From that post, he reorganised the entire Muslim system in Egypt, and because of Al Azhar’s reputation, much of the Islamic world as well.
In 1899, Lord Cromer made Abduh the Grand Mufti of Egypt. He was now the chief legal authority in Islam, as well as the Masonic Grand Master of the United Lodge of Egypt. Lord Cromer was an important member of England’s Baring banking family which had grown rich of the opium trade in India and China. His motive in making Abduh the most powerful figure in all of Islam was to change the law forbidding interest banking. Abduh then offered a contrived interpretation of the Qur’an to create the requisite loophole, giving British banks free reign in Egypt. Of Abduh, Lord Cromer related, “I suspect my friend Abduh was in reality an agnostic,” and he said of Abduh’s Salafi reform movement that, “They are the natural allies of the European reformer.”98
The Salafi movement then became allied with the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia through another Freemason, Mohammed Rashid Rida, who, after the death of Afghani in 1897 and Abduh in 1905, assumed the leadership of the Salafis. Rida had become a member of the Indissoluble Bond at a young age. He was promoted through Afghani’s Masonic society through his reading of Al-Urwah al Wuthkah, which he later confessed was the greatest influence in his life. Rida had never met Afghani, but in 1897 he had gone to Egypt to study with Mohammed Abduh. Though Rida did not share his master’s opinions about the Bahai movement, it was through his influence that the Salafi movement became firmly aligned with the State of Saudi Arabia.
Footnotes:
96 Cole, Juan R. I. “Rashid Rida on the Bahai Faith: A Utilitarian Theory of the Spread of Religions”, Arab Studies Quarterly 5, 3 (Summer 1983): 278.
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