Prophet MUHAMMAD

Profit MUHAMMAD

many thanks to;
http://www.truthbeknown.com/islam.htm

Islamic Depictions of Mohammed with Face Hidden 

http://zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/islamic_mo_face_hidden/

The Origins of Islam

 by D.M. Murdock/Acharya S

The Harvard Pluralism Project

An April 2001 survey by CAIR found 69 percent of Muslims in America saying it is "absolutely fundamental" or "very important" to have Salafi (similar to radical Wahhabi Islamic ideology) teachings at their mosques (67 percent of respondents also expressed agreement with the statement "America is an immoral, corrupt society").

 Dr. Moorthy Muthuswamy

The Qur'an tells us: "not to make friendship with Jews and Christians" (5:51), "kill the disbelievers wherever we find them" (2:191), "murder them and treat them harshly" (9:123), "fight and slay the Pagans, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem" (9:5). The Qur'an demands that we fight the unbelievers, and promises "If there are twenty amongst you, you will vanquish two hundred: if a hundred, you will vanquish a thousand of them" (8:65).

 Women Oppression and Cultural Bigotry

This repression of the female is sadly ironic when one considers the roots of Islam, but it is not unexpected in a world that, for the past severalFour Muslim women in Kuwait City waiting for their (shared) husband. 'Kuwait law allows each Muslim husband up to four wives, who must be covered from head toe while in public and walk behind the man.' (Photo: SSgt. Derrick C. Goode, USAF) thousand years, has done everything within its power to subjugate women simply because of physical differences, a male-domination need shared with the apes and other "lesser beasts." While some may claim that this subjugation and enslavement of women is a cultural tradition, rather than a religious one, it matters not, for it comes hand-in-hand with religions which teach that there is some separate outerspace god who is exclusively male. In Islam, this god is interpreted through the minds of Muslims as being an Arab or Persian man, as opposed to the Jewish man of the Judeo-Christian ideology.

What are the origins of Islam? Well, the Muslim religion is obviously built upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it is also a reaction to said tradition, which excluded and vilified the various Arab cultures. Like their Jewish brothers and sisters, the Semitic Arabs trace their lineage to the biblical patriarch Abraham, who is depicted in the Bible as having mated with Hagar the Egyptian, producing the progenitor of the Arab race, Ishmael. While the Jewish contingent interprets this tale to justify its own ethnocentric ideology, Muslims interpret it to fit theirs, claiming that "God" would make of Ishmael's people a "great nation" (Gen 21:18). 

The Fictional Patriarch

Like numerous biblical characters, Abraham is evidently a mythological construct, not a "real person." As superb independent scholar Barbara G. Walker states in The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (5-6) concerning Abraham:

"This name meaning 'Father Brahm' seems to have been a Semitic version of India's patriarchal god Brahma; he was also the Islamic Abrama, founder of Mecca. But Islamic legends say Abraham was a late intruder into the shrine of the Kaaba. He bought it from priestesses of its original Goddess. Sarah, 'the Queen' was one of the Goddess's titles, which became a name of Abraham's biblical 'wife.' Old Testament writers pretended Sarah's alliances with Egyptian princes were only love-affairs arranged by Abraham for his own profit—which unfortunately presented him as a pimp (Genesis 12:16) as well as a would-be murderer of his son (Genesis 22:10).

Abraham sacrificing Isaac; Rembrandt, 1635"In the tale of Isaac's near-killing, Abraham assumed the role of sacrificial priest in the druidic style, to wash Jehovah's sacred trees with the Blood of the Son: an ancient custom, of which the sacrifice of Jesus was only a late variant. Jehovah first appeared to Abraham at the sacred oak of Shechem, where Abraham built his altar. Later Abraham build an altar to the oak god of Mamre at Hebron. Even in the 4th century A.D., Constantine said Abraham's home at the Oak of Mamre was still a shrine: 'It is reported that most damnable idols are set up beside it, and that an altar stands hard by, and that unclean sacrifices are constantly offered.'"

Allah—Remake of the Moon Goddess

This description of Abraham's origins means that Judaism is built upon hoary myths, such that neither of its offshoot religions, Christianity and Islam, can truthfully claim to be of divine or "inspired" origin. As concerns the god of Islam, Allah, Walker (22) has this to say:

"Late Islamic masculinization of the Arabian Goddess, Al-Lat or Al-Ilat—the Allatu of the Babylonians—formerly worshipped at the Kaaba in Mecca. It has been shown that 'the Allah of Islam' was a male transformation of 'the primitive lunar deity of Arabia.' Her ancient symbol the crescent moon still appears on Islamic flags, even though modern Moslems no longer admit any feminine symbolism whatever connected with the wholly patriarchal Allah."

Indeed, the Koran verifies Allah's lunar or night-sky status: "Remember the name of our Lord morning and evening; in the night-time worship Him: praise Him all night long." (Q 76:23) And at Q 2:189: "They question you about the phases of the moon. Say: 'They are seasons fixed for mankind and for the pilgrimage.'"

In Pagan Rites in Judaism (97), Theodor Reik states, in a chapter called "The ancient Semitic moon-goddess":

"All Semites had once a cult of the moon as supreme power. When Mohammed overthrew the old religion of Arabia, he did not dare get rid of the moon cult in a radical manner. Only much later was he powerful enough to forbid prostration before the moon (Koran Sure 4:37). Before Islamic times the moon deity was the most prominent object of cults in ancient Arabia. Arab women still insist that the moon is the parent of mankind.

Horned goddess Ishtar"Sir G. Rawlinson traces the name Chaldeans back to the designation of the ancient capital Ur (Chur) to be translated as moon-worshipers. The Semitic moon-god was 'the special deity and protector of women.' The Babylonians worshiped the goddess Ishtar, who is identical with the great Arabian goddess and has the epithet Our Lady... She also has the title Queen of Heaven, which really means the Queen of the Stars. She was horned and was, as all lunar goddesses, represented by a heavenly cow.

"The Hebrew tribes, or rather their ancestors, were the latest wave of migrants from Arabia. The cult of their god was associated with Mount Sinai—the mountain of the moon. The experts assume that the name Sinai derived from Sin, the name of the Babylonian moon-god. In Exodus (3:1) Sinai is called the 'mountain of the Elohim. This suggests that it has long been sacred.'

"In the Old Testament, which is a collection of much earlier, often edited writings, the moon appears as a power of good (Deut. 33:4) or of evil (Ps. 12:16). Traces of ancient moon-worship were energetically removed from the text by later editors. A few remained, however, and can be recognized in the prohibitions of Deuteronomy. In 4:19 the Israelites are warned: 'And lest thou lift up thine eyes upon heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, and be led astray to worship them, and serve them,' and in 17:3 the punishment of stoning is prescribed for the person who 'hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven...' The Lord predicts (Jer. 8:2) that the bones of kings and princes of Judah will not be buried, but spread 'before the sun, and the moon, and all the hosts of heaven, whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and whom they have worshipped.'"

In The Origin of All Religious Worship (25-26), concerning Arab astrotheology, which was a continuation of this ancient Semitic lunar tradition, Charles Dupuis states:

"The Moon was the great divinity Presidential flag of Turkeyof the Arabs. The Sarazens gave her the epithet of Cabar or the Great; her Crescent adorns to this day the religious monuments of the Turks. Her elevation under the sign of the Bull, constituted one of the principal feasts of the Saracens and the sabean Arabs. Each Arab tribe was under the invocation of a constellation Each one worshipped one of the celestial bodies as its tutelar genius.

"The Caabah of the Arabs was before the time of Mahomet, a temple dedicated to the Moon. The black stone which the Musulmans kiss with so much devotion to this day, is, as it is pretended, an ancient statue of Saturnus. The walls of the great mosque of Kufah, built on the foundation of an ancient Pyrea or temple of the fire, are filled with figures of planets artistically engraved. The ancient worship of the Arabs was the Sabismus, a religion universally spread all over the Orient. Heaven and the Stars were the first objects thereof.

"This religion was that of the ancient Chaldeans, and the Orientals pretend that their Ibrahim or Abraham was brought up in that doctrine. There is still to be seen at Hella, over the ruins of the ancient Babylon, a mosque called Mesched Eschams, or the mosque of the Sun. It was in this city, that the ancient temple of Bel, or the Sun, the great Divinity of the Babylonians, existed; it is the same God, to whom the Persians erected temples and consecrated images under the name of Mithras."

Astrotheology at Mecca

One of the sites for this Arab worship of the "hosts of heaven" was Mecca. Regarding the Kaaba of Mecca, that holiest of Muslim holies, Walker (487) writes:

Black Stone (al-Hajaru-l-Aswad) in the Kaaba at Mecca, encased in a yoni-shaped silver frame"Shrine of the sacred stone in Mecca, formerly dedicated to the pre-Islamic Triple Goddess Manat, Al-Lat (Allah), and Al-Uzza, the 'Old Woman' worshipped by Mohammed's tribesmen the Koreshites. The stone was also called Kubaba, Kuba or Kube, and has been linked with the name of Cybele (Kybela), the Great Mother of the Gods. The stone bore the emblem of theyoni, like the Black Stone worshipped by votaries of Artemis. Now it is regarded as the holy center of patriarchal Islam, and its feminine symbolism has been lost, though priests of the Kaaba are still known as Sons of the Old Woman."

And a translator of the Koran, N.J. Dawood (1), says:

"Long before Muhammad's call, Arabian paganism was showing signs of decay. At the Ka'bah the Meccans worshipped not only Allah, the supreme Semitic God, but also a number of female deities whom they regarded as daughters of Allah. Among these were Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat, who represented the Sun, Venus and Fortune respectively."

Arabian Matriarchy

Concerning the nation of Arabia, Walker asserts that, prior to the encroachment of Islam, it was a matriarchal culture for over 1,000 years:

"The Annals of Ashurbanipal said Arabia was governed by queens for as long as anyone could remember....

"Mohammed's legends clearly gave him a matriarchal family background. His parents' marriage was matrilocal. His mother remained with her own family and received her husband as an occasional visitor....

"Pre-Islamic Arabia was dominated by the female-centered clans. Marriages were matrilocal, inheritance matrilineal. Polyandry—several husbands to one wife—was common. Men lived in their wives' homes. Divorce was initiated by the wife. If she turned her tent to face east for three nights in a row, the husband was dismissed and forbidden to enter the tent again.

Mohammed watches women in hell being tortured by a demon; 15th cent., Persia; 'Miraj Nama,' Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris"Doctrines attributed to Mohammed simply re-versed the ancient system in favor of men. A Moslem husband could dismiss his wife by saying 'I divorce thee' three times. As in Europe, the change from matriarchate to patriarchate came about only gradually and with much strife.

"...However, the history of early-medieval Arabia is nearly all legend. Like Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and other founders of patriarchal religions, Mohammed lacks real verification. There is no reliable information about his life or teachings. Most stories about him are as apocryphal as the story that his coffin hangs forever in mid-air 'between heaven and earth,' like the bodies of ancient sacred kings.

"With or without Mohammed, Islam succeeded in becoming completely male-dominated, making no place for women except in slavery or in the seclusion of the harem. Islamic mosques still bear signs reading: 'Women and dogs and other impure animals are not permitted to enter.'

"Nevertheless, traces of the Goddess proved ineradicable. Like the virgin Mary, Arabia's Queen of Heaven received a mortal form and a subordinate position as Fatima, Mohammed's 'daughter.' But she was no real daughter. She was known as Mother of her Father, and Source of the Sun..."

Who Wrote the Koran?

As concerns the Koran, the Muslim holy book, Walker (513) says:

"Mohammedan scriptures, often erroneously thought to have been written by Mohammed. Moslems don't believe this. But many don't know the Koran was an enlarged revised version of the ancient Word of the Goddess Kore, revered by Mohammed's tribe, the Koreshites (Children of Kore), who guarded her shrine at Mecca.

"The original writing was done long before Mohammed's time by holy imams, a word related to Semitic Uma, 'mother.' Like the original mahatmas or 'great mothers' of India, the original imams were probably priestesses of the old Arabian matriarchate. It was said they took the scripture from a prototype that existed in heaven from the beginning of Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, 'considered the single most fundamental writing about alchemy and the occult.'eternity, 'Mother of the Book'—i.e., the Goddess herself, wearing the Book of Fate on her breast as Mother Tiamat wore the Tablets of Destiny. Sometimes the celestial Koran was called the Preserved Tablet. There was some resemblance between this and other legendary books of divine origin, such as the Ur-text, the Book of Thoth, and the Emerald Tablet of Hermes.

"As in the case of the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran was much rewritten to support new patriarchal laws and to obliterate the figures of the Goddess and her priestesses."

In The Great Religious Leaders, Charles Frances Potter says of Mohammed, "It is very doubtful that he read any of the Bible: indeed, it has not been proved that he ever read anything, or wrote anything. He called himself 'the illiterate prophet.'" Of course, much of the Koran is based on the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, combined with pre-Islamic Arab and other traditions.

Regarding the unoriginality of the Koran, Islam expert Dr. Daniel Pipes says (The Jerusalem Post, 5/12/00):

"The Koran is a not 'a product of Muhammad or even of Arabia,' but a collection of earlier Judeo-Christian liturgical materials stitched together to meet the needs of a later age."

Biblical scholar Dr. Robert M. Price likewise concurs as to the pre-Islamic nature of various koranic texts:

"The Koran was assembled from a variety of prior Hagarene texts (hence the contradictions re Jesus' death) in order to provide the Moses-like Muhammad with a Torah of his own...."

Islamic expert Dr. Gerd-R. Puin concludes:

"My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate...."

Thus, the Koran was not written by Mohammed.

The Yemeni Koran

Adding significantly to this important scholarship Koran hoard from Sana'a, Yemen; 7th-8th centurieswas the discovery in 1972 at Sana'a, Yemen, of thousands of parchment fragments from the Koran, consisting of possibly the oldest extant quranic manuscript ever found, dating to the 7th-8th centuries. Regarding these fragments, the professor who photographed them, Dr. Puin, remarks:

"So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God’s unaltered word. They like to quote the textual work that shows the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana’a fragments will help us do that."

Concerning the texts and Puin's conclusions, The Atlantic Monthly's Toby Lester states:

"...some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the stand Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.... What the Yemeni Korans seems to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D."

Others weighing in on the value of the Yemeni discovery have included Dr. Andrew Rippin, a professor of Islamic Studies:

Fragment of the Quran from Sana'a, Yemen"The impact of the Yemeni manuscripts is still to be felt. Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Koranic texts is much more of an open question than many have suspected: the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed."

In this same regard, Islamic history professor Dr. R. Stephen Humphreys summarizes the importance of the study of how the Koran was created and the Yemeni hoard in this quest:

"To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community. The Koran is the charter for the community, the document that called it into existence. And ideally though obviously not always in reality Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless."

The evidence reveals that the Koran was created over a period of decades, if not centuries, by a number of hands, rather than representing a single, divine "revelation" from the Almighty to Mohammed.

  

Who Was Mohammed?

Mohammed riding his magical steed; from 'The Apocalypse of Muhammad,' 1436, Herat, Afghanistan; Bibliotheque Nationale, ParisLike that of Buddha, Jesus, Moses, et al., Mohammed's historicity is questionable. He seems to be yet another religious figurehead invented to create a "state" religion. His "history" is full of fantastic legends, but even if we were to find a "historical person" there, it would not be one of very high or affable character. As Potter says:

"Of women, his taste ran to widows with a temper... For recreation he delighted in cobbling shoes. Perhaps his greatest joy was when he beheld the severed heads of his enemies.

"His dislikes were just as varied. He detested silk-lined clothes, interest charges, dogs, others' lies, Jews and Christians. He hated poets, and said, 'Every painter will be in hell.'

"He was inordinately vain. A clever woman poet satirized him. She was slain when asleep with her child at her breast, and the vengeful Muhammad praised her murderer. Once he tortured a Jew to find the location of hidden treasure and then had him killed and added the widow to his harem. Strange indeed was the character of the prophet. How could such a person inspire such reverence and devotion? It is one of the puzzles of history.

"It was not that he developed a great theology, either, for what little theology Islam has, worthy of the name, was built up after Muhammad had long been dead."

According to the hadiths or hadees—records of the purported sayings and acts of Mohammed and his companions—the Prophet was indeed of a character that would repulse any decent human being. One after another of the hadiths discuss Mohammed's insatiable sexual appetite, which included having sex with his "wife" 'Aisha, who was 9 years old and had not even reached puberty. Various Islamic authorities have also claimed that Mohammed began "thighing" 'Aisha when he married her at the age of six.

Mohammed with his followers enjoying a beheading; Turkish text 'Siyer-i Nebi,' 1338As to how such a character could inspire such reverence and devotion, we would submit that it was because Mohammed and Islam were created by yet another faction of "the brotherhood" for purposes of competition with Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and other religions. As N.A Morozov says:

"...until the Crusades Islam was indistinguishable from Judaism and...only then did it receive its independent character, while Muhammad and the first Caliphs are mythical figures."

Behind the creation of such ideologies are usually those who benefit the most, particularly "third-party" weapons manufacturers, since these divisive creeds are forever setting one culture against another.

'Let My People Go!'

Despite the unconvincing attempts by well-meaning individuals to assert the pacificism of Islam, the fact is that it is a desert warrior's religion and was not spread by peaceful means. As Gerald Berry says, in Religions of the World (62):

"Partly because he needed funds and partly because his followers were not skilled in agriculture as were the natives of Yathrib, [Mohammed] organized fighting bands to raid caravans. Having no ties with the older religions, he sent them out even in the peace months. This started Arabia's Holy War. Mohammed's whole movement took on the character of religious militarism. He made the Moslem fanatic fighters by teaching that admission to Paradise was assured for all those who died fighting in the cause of Allah."

In the end, Islam, which means "submission," is built upon older myths and traditions and was designed to usurp the power of all others and women. 

 Mohammed, on a blue donkey, with the Archangel Gabriel; 'Siyer-i Nebi,' 1595; Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul, Turkey

many thanks to;
http://www.truthbeknown.com/islam.htm

http://zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/islamic_mo_face_hidden/

Sources & Further Reading

Berry, Gerald. Religions of the Word. Barnes & Noble, 1955.

Dawood, N.J. The Koran. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

Dupuis, Charles. The Origins of All Religious Worship.

Glazov, Jamie. "The Yemeni Koran." FrontpageMag.com

Potter, Charles Francis. The Great Religious Leaders. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958.

Reik, Theodor. Pagan Rites in Judaism. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1964.

Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. HarperSanFrancisco, 1983.

ALBANIA and ILLYRISM

Europeans?

ALBANIANS

Albanians are originaly Berbers that came to Europe under Turkish comand
during Ottoman Empire.

Sqhips, Skiptari, Skiti, Scythians is a name Skenderbeg called all intruders on Helm (Balkan) which means a wanderer or a rambler in Slavic language.

First records on them come from Ragussa as criminal record or theft - 16th century. There are registers on their coming to Mediterranean as ARBERS.

Their language in spite of all their claims have NO WORDS FOR FLORA AND FAUNA OF THE SEAS NOR CURRENTS NOR BOATS NOR PARTS FOR BOATS! 

Claiming Illyrian ancestry must be proven at least linguisticly bt they can't cause they forgot who they are or thay are ashamed of their true ancestry and handfull of their original words describes MOUNTAIN FLORA AND FAUNA!

Idea on Albanian ancestry of Iliyria is coming from Masonic nest namely it was Albert Pike who entartained this idea, late 1800's.

True Illyrians are Slavonic populace of former Yugoslavia who were 

always refered to as Illyrians, through millenias even!

Illyrians were ginger and blond and very tall which is typical for Slavics.
Linguisticaly Illyrian is Slavonic tongue too.

Albanians came from Lorestan, typical white hats
and language is practicly the same.
Where they come from before they ended up in Lorestan is possible Horn of Africa according to DNA analisys.

Lord Byron was one of the Masons that pushed further intentional "Balkanisation" of Helm (rela name of the Helm Peninsula. Balkanisation is long term plan of highjack of Old Europe turning it into muslim area. Plan is made by US and Brittish Masonry and executed trough Western aliances such as Nato and UN. Falsely created countries at Helm are Turkey, Greece as British Colony, Albania, Kosovo, Sandzak and Bosniak -muslim pockets created on Helm to further destroy genuine population and stability of Europe.

A huge campaign have been organised since to present Albanians as genuine European, dressing them into Slavic traditional clothes such as Fustanela (vesta - origin of the word have remained Dalmatian, it means a dress)

Population in Albania have been renamed and since 60's children got Illyrian names.

Toponims of Slavic origin are also changed to some extend.
What they have white amongst them is Slavic.

video;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4pYiStgH24&feature=youtu.be

but their DNA says their ancestry originates down at the Horn of Africa!

 Few old photos of Albanians

Austrian Scholars Leave Albania Lost for Words

Viennese researchers upset traditionally minded Albanians by pouring cold water on the theory that the Albanian language has its roots in Ancient Illyria.

Besar Likmeta Tirana and Vienna

Matzinger and Schumacher

Joachim Matzinger and Stefan Schumacher | Photo by : Besar Likmeta

Deep in the bowels of Vienna University, two Austrian academics are poring over the ancient texts of a far-away people in the Balkans. 

Like a couple of detectives searching for clues, Stefan Schumacher and Joachim Matzinger are out to reconstruct the origins of Albanian - a language whose history and development has received remarkably little attention outside the world of Albanian scholars.

“The way that languages change can be traced,” Schumacher declares, with certainty.  

Although the two men are simply studying 17th and 18th-century Albanian texts in order to compile a lexicon of verbs, their innocent-sounding work has stirred hot debate among Albanian linguists. 

The root of the controversy is their hypothesis that Albanian does not originate from the language of the Ancient Illyrians, the people or peoples who inhabited the Balkans in the Greek and Roman era. 

According to Classical writers, the Illyrians were a collection of tribes who lived in much of today’s Western Balkans, roughly corresponding to part of former Yugoslavia and modern Albania. 

Although Albanian and Illyrian have little or nothing in common, judging from the handful of Illyrian words that archeologists have retrieved, the Albanian link has long been cherished by Albanian nationalists. 

The theory is still taught to all Albanians, from primary school through to university.     

It is popular because it suggests that Albanians descend from an ancient people who populated the Balkans long before the Slavs and whose territory was unfairly stolen by these later incomers.

“You’ll find the doctrine about the Illyrian origin of Albanians everywhere,” Matzinger muses, “from popular to scientific literature and schoolbooks. “There is no discussion about this, it’s a fact. They say, ‘We are Illyrians’ and that’s that,” he adds.

What’s in a name? 

The names of many Albanians bear witness to the historic drive to prove the Illyrian link.

But not Pandeli Pani. When he was born in Tirana in 1966, midway through the long dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, his father told the local registry office that he wished to name him after his grandfather.  

Pani recalls his father’s hard-fought battle not to have to give his son an Illyrian name. 

Staff at the civil registry office apparently said that naming the future linguistics professor after his grandfather was not a good idea, as he was dead. They suggested an approved Illyrian name instead. 

“But the Illyrians aren’t alive either,” Pani recalls his father as quipping.

Many members of Pani’s generation born in the Sixties did not have such stubborn fathers. Their parents subscribed to the government policy of naming children after names drawn from ancient tombs. 

In the eyes of the world, they aimed to cement the linkage between modern Albania and its supposedly ancient past. 

“While I was named after my grandfather, keeping up a family tradition, other parents gave their children Illyrian names that I doubt they knew the meaning of,” says Pani, who today teaches at Jena university in Germany. 

“But I doubt many parents today would want to name their children ‘Bledar’ or ‘Agron,’ when the first means ‘dead’ and the second ‘arcadian,” he adds. 

Pani says that despite the Hoxha regime’s efforts to burn the doctrine of the Albanians’ Illyrian origins into the nation’s consciousness, the theory has become increasingly anachronistic.

“The political pressure in which Albania’s scientific community worked after the communist took over, made it difficult to deal with flaws with the doctrine of the Illyrian origin,” he said. 

But while the Illyrian theory no longer commands universal support, it hasn’t lost all its supporters in Albanian academia. 

Mimoza Kore, linguistics professor at the University of Tirana. 

Speaking during a conference in November organised by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, where Pani presented Schumacher’s and Matzinger’s findings, she defended the linkage of Albanian and Illyrian, saying it was not based only on linguistic theory.

“Scholars base this hypothesis also on archeology,” Kore said. Renowned scholars who did not “subscribe blindly to the ideology of the [Hoxha] regime” still supported the idea, she insisted.

One of the key problems in working out the linguistic descendants of the Illyrians is a chronic shortage of sources. 

The Illyrians appears to have been unlettered, so information on their language and culture is highly fragmentary and mostly derived from external sources, Greek or Roman.

Matzinger points put that when the few surviving fragments of Illyrian and Albanian are compared, they have almost nothing in common. 

“The two are opposites and cannot fit together,” he says. “Albanian is not as the same as Illyrian from a linguistic point of view.”

Schumacher and Matzinger believe Albanian came into existence separately from Illyrian, orginating from the Indo-European family tree during the second millennium BC, somewhere in the northern Balkans. 

The language’s broad shape resembles Greek. It appears to have developed lineally until the 15th century, when the first extant text comes to light. 

“One thing we know for sure is that a language which, with some justification, we can call Albanian has been around for at least 3,000 years,” Schumacher says. “Even though it was not written down for millennia, Albanian existed as a separate entity,” he added. 

Bastard tongues:

Linguists say different languages spoken in the same geographical area often reveal similarities, despite a lack of evidence of a common origin. 

This phenomenon of linguistic “areas” is also evident in the Balkans, where such different languages as Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian all share words and structures.

First written words in Albanian

The first written record of Albanian is a baptismal formula written in 1462 by the Archbishop of Durres, Pal Engjelli. The first book in Albanian, a missal, was written in 1554 by Gjon Buzuku, a Catholic priest from the Shkodra region.

Pjeter Budi, Archbishop of Sape, also translated and adapted several Italian texts to Albanian in the same period.

Schumacher and Matzinger are concentrating their scholarship mostly on the work of Pjeter Bogdani, Archbishop of Prizren, who wrote half-a-century later. He is considered the most interesting Albanian early writer and the “father” of Albanian prose.

Bogdani’s most famous work, The Story of Adam and Eve, his account of the first part of the Bible, is written in both Albanian and Italian. Matzinger says that when Bogdani published the book he was under some pressure from the Inquisition. As the Inquisition did not know Albanian, and were not sure what he wrote, they forced him to make an Italian translation, which is published in the left column of the book.

“That is most useful because it means that no sentence in the book [in Albanian] is incomprehensible,” Matzinger says.

Although numerous texts by Bogdani, Budi and some others survive, the variety of authors, mainly Catholic clerics, is small.  “It would be interesting if we had a bigger variety of authors, though we’re grateful enough for what we do have,” Schumacher says.

According to Schumacher, from the Middle Ages onwards, languages throughout the Balkans tended to become more similar to one another, suggesting a high level of linguistic “exchange” between populations in the region.  

“A lot of people used a number of languages every day, and this is one way in which languages influence each other,” Schumacher says. “The difficult thing is that this runs counter to nationalist theories,” he adds. 

Drawing on genetic terminology, linguists term this process of language exchange language “bastardization”.  

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the phenomenon of language bastardization has taken a new twist, moving in the opposite direction, as each newly formed state acts to shore up its own unique linguistic identity. 

Before the common state collapsed, four of the six constituent republics, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, shared a common language known as Serbo-Croat.

But since declaring independence in 1991, Croatia has consciously highlighted the distinct character of its language, now called “Croatian”. 

Bosnian Muslims have made similar efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, promoting official use of a codified “Bosniak” language.

Montenegro, which remained in a loose state union with Serbia until 2006, then appeared content not to have its own separate language. But after independence, a new constitution adopted on October 2007 named the official language as Montenegrin. 

Similar calls to foster a separate national language have been heard in Kosovo, drawing on the northern Albanian “Gegh” dialect, though none of these initiatives has received official encouragement. 

Out of language, an identity: 

The study of Balkan languages came of age in the later 19th century as the Ottoman Empire began disintegrating and as intellectuals tasked with creating new nations out of its rubble turned to language to help forge national identities.

According Schumacher, each country in the Balkans forged its own national myth, just as Germany or the US had done earlier, with a view to creating foundations for a shared identity. 

“In the late 19th century, language was the only element that everyone could identify with,” says Schumacher.  

He described the use of linguistics in national mythology as understandable, considering the context and the time when these countries gained independence.

“It’s not easy to create an identity for Albanians if you just say that they descend from mountains tribes about whom the historians of antiquity wrote nothing,” he notes. 

The friction between ideological myth and reality, when it comes to forging national identity, and laying claim to territory, is not unique to Albania. 

Schumacher points out that Romanian history books teach that Romanians descend from the Roman legionnaires who guarded the Roman province of Dacia – a questionable theory to which few non-Romanians lend much credence, but which shores up Romania’s claim to Transylvania, a land to which Hungarians historically also lay claim.  

“The Romanian language developed somewhere south of the Danube, but Romanians don’t want to admit that because the Hungarians can claim that they have been there before,” notes Schumacher.

“None of them is older or younger,” says Schumacher. “Languages are like a bacterium that splits up in two and than splits up in two again and when you have 32 bacteria in the end, they are all the same,” he added. 

The two Austrian linguists say that within European academia, Albanian is one of the most neglected languages, which provides an opportunity to conduct pioneering work.  

Although the extant texts have been known for a long time, “they hardly ever been looked at properly”, Schumacher says. “They were mostly read by scholars of Albanian in order to find, whatever they wanted to find,” he adds. 

This article was produced as part of a journalistic exchange programme between BIRN and Austrian daily Der Standard.

original link; http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/austrian-scholars-leave-albania-lost-for-words/

Some of the things Albanians do (beside yellow house)

This is sad story about how  Elfeta Veseli (Albanian muslim extremist) tortured and killed 12 year old Serbian boy who looked for his dog in the woods, they found him without front teeth, ears, with his chest ripped open in shape of a cross and bullet in his temple that ended his life.

https://www.espreso.rs/amp/436561/s-bogom-tajo-vise-nista-me-ne-boli-pesma-o-decaku-kog-je-albanka-zverski-ubila-je-pretuzna?fbclid=IwAR2jSA89Bl1rqB3axYILfIooraAh2gC8Af4gKM_ZhCkqBWy3LfSOolO8p6k

Albanians are so popular on the internet that there is even a term named after them, "Shqiping!"

more Shqiping