Balfour Declaration

In 1901, Theodor Herzl met again with the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who turned down his offer to consolidate the Ottoman debt in exchange for a charter allowing the Zionists access to Palestine. The Sultan said:

Please advise Dr. Herzl not to make any serious move in this matter. I cannot give up even one small patch of land in Palestine. It is not something that I own as a part of my personal estate. Palestine in fact belongs to the Muslim Nation as a whole. My people have fought with their blood and sweat to protect this land. Let the Jews keep their millions and once the Caliphate is torn apart one day, then they can take Palestine without a price. To have the scalpel cut my body is less painful than to witness Palestine being detached from the Caliphate state and this is not going to happen…

The British therefore sought to free Palestine from Ottoman control by instigating the Arab Revolt, achieved by pitting the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula against their Turkish brothers in Islam. However, as it is forbidden in Islam for Muslim to fight other Muslims, the British exploited their Masonic connections in the Muslim world—primarily Jamal ud Din al Afghani, one of H.P. Blavatsky’s “Ascended Masters,” from the so-called Brotherhood of Luxor, and also Hajji Sharif, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s source for the political doctrine of synarchism—to create the subservice sect of Salafism, who denounced their Ottoman brethren as “apostates,” and which subsequently became the primary source of “Islamic” terrorism in the twentieth century, all financed by the petrodollars produced by the Rockefeller family in Saudi Arabia. That relationship was facilitated by an occult philosophy known as “perrenialism,” advocated by Réne Guénon.

When Kaiser Wilhelm II asked Theodor Herzl what he wished him to ask of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Herzl answered “A Chartered Company–under German protection,” to be modelled on the African country of Rhodesia, established by his idol Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the Round Table.[1] When Theodor Herzl’s attempts to gain the support for a German protectorate in Palestine from Kaiser Wilhelm II failed, he turned to Great Britain in 1900, thereby creating the pro-British faction that was soon to be led by Chaim Weizmann, and result of the Balfour Declaration. In 1900, Herzl declared at the Fourth Zionist Congress, held in London, “England the mighty, England the free, will understand us and understand our aspirations. With England as starting point we could be certain that the Zionist idea will grow mightier and rise higher than ever before.”[2] On January 11, 1902, Herzl wrote to Rhodes:

You are being invited to help make history… it doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial… [Y]ou, Mr. Rhodes, are a visionary politician or a practical visionary… I want you to… put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan and to make the following declaration to a few people who swear by you: I, Rhodes have examined this plan and found it correct and practicable. It is a plan full of culture, excellent for the group of people for whom it is directly designed, and quite good for England, for Greater Britain…[3]

However, Herzl’s plan came to nought when it was rejected by the Sultan, the Round Table embarked on a plan to use British imperialisms during War World I to appropriate the Holy Land for Zionist settlement, collimating the Balfour Declaration of 1917, written by Lord Balfour, a member of the Round Table and past president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and addressed to Baron Walter Rothschild, son of Baron Nathan Rothschild, who founded the Round Table with Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner and W.T. Stead, who was friends with H.P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and part of the occult circle of Papus who were responsible for the forgery of the Protocols of Zion. Walter Rothschild was an active Zionist and close friend of Weizmann, who helped to draft the declaration, along with the assistance of Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and Rabbi Stephen Wise, all leading Zionists and known Sabbateans.[4]

One of the primary aims of World War One was for the destruction of the Ottoman Empire to free the land of Palestine for a return of the Jews, according to the long-standing messianic aspirations of Zionism. From the Manchester Guardian, in November 1915, members of the Round Table secret society asserted that “the whole future of the British Empire as a Sea Empire” depended upon Palestine becoming a buffer state inhabited “by an intensely patriotic race.” Britain had until the mid 1870s been traditionally pro-Ottoman because it saw in the Empire an important bulwark against Russia’s growing power. Additionally, Britain’s economic interests in Turkey were very significant. In 1875, Britain supplied one third of Turkey’s imports and much of Turkish banking was in British hands. However, Britain was about to see its preeminent role as Turkey’s ally challenged and eventually supplanted by Germany, as European powers tried to uphold the Ottoman Empire in the hopes of stemming the spread of Russian control of the Balkans.

Britain’s hegemony was being increasingly threatened by the Germans. Strategic moves to offset Germany’s growing power included the Entente Cordiale of April 1904, by which France recognized British control over Egypt, while Britain reciprocated with regards to France in Morocco. Britain and its former rival Russia also agreed to the Anglo-Russian Entente, which involved a partition of Iran in exchange for Afghanistan and the surrender of Tibet. Thus, remarked David Fromkin, in A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, ‘The Great Game had seemingly been brought to an end.”[5] Or so it seemed…

Britain was particularly concerned about preventing a possible alliance between Russia and Germany, following the prescriptions of Halford Mackinder (1861 – 1947). In 1904, Mackinder gave a paper on “The Geographical Pivot of History” at the Royal Geographical Society, in which he formulated the Heartland Theory. Developing on the politics of the Great Game, to Mackinder, domination of the world was dependent on control of Eurasia, which in turn was dependent on control of Central Asia, which Mackinder referred to as the “World Pivot.” Mackinder, therefore, warned British strategists about preventing Eurasian unification:

The oversetting of the balance of power in favor of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight. This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia. The threat of such an event should, therefore, throw France into alliance with the over-sea powers, and France, Italy, Egypt, India and Korea would become so many bridgeheads where the outside navies would support armies to compel the pivot allies to deploy land forces and prevent them from concentrating their whole strength on fleets.[6]

Therefore, Britain—often derided as “Perfidious Albion”­— deployed all her cunning, through backroom dealings, deceptions and sabotage, to bring about World War I, all the while putting forward the image of doing everything in its power to maintain peace. Germany in the 1880s became increasingly interested in the riches of the Middle East, particularly oil. Likewise, the importance of guaranteeing a supply of oil for Britain’s navy was central, as oil had not yet been discovered in its Arab possessions in the Gulf. As outlined in “The Rothschilds, Winston Churchill and the Final Solution,” by Clifford Shack, no issue would affect Britain’s foreign policy prior to World War I more than the crucial debate about whether or not the Royal Navy should be converted from coal propulsion to oil. Oil was not only superior to coal, but the French branch of the Rothschilds were, together with the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds’ agents in the US, and supreme rulers of the oil business, having entered into a world cartel with Standard Oil.

However, in order to provide the pretext to legitimize Britain’s increased spending for naval construction, the Rothschilds fabricated the threat of Germany’s naval build-up in the late nineteenth century.[7] Baron Nathan Rothschild, the founder of the Round Table, who became head of NM Rothschild & Sons after his father’s death in 1879, was a keen proponent of increases in the strength of the Royal Navy. Nathan’s brother, Leopold de Rothschild (1845 – 1917) administered Cecil Rhodes’ estate after his death in 1902 and helped to set up the Rhodes Scholarship scheme at Oxford University. Winston Churchill, became a close friend of Leopold’s son Lionel de Rothschild (1882 – 1942), who as the eldest son and heir took over NM Rothschild & Sons. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill vowed to do everything he could to ensure that the Royal Navy, the symbol of Britain’s imperial power, was ready to meet the German “challenge” on the high seas. According to Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power:

One of the most important and contentious questions he faced was seemingly technical in nature, but would in fact have vast implications for the twentieth century. The issue was whether to convert the British Navy to oil for its power source, in place of coal, which was the traditional fuel. Many thought that such a conversion was pure folly, for it meant that the Navy could no longer rely on safe, secure Welsh coal, but rather would have to depend on distant and insecure oil supplies from Persia, as Iran was then known.[8]

On June 17, 1914, Churchill introduced a bill proposing that the British government invest in an oil company, after which it acquired 51 percent of Standard Oil affiliate, Anglo-Persian, financed in part by the Rothschilds bank. The company grew rapidly, first into Anglo-Iranian, and then finally into British Petroleum, or BP. However, since Germany’s move eastward was restricted by Britain’s control of important sea lanes, it struck a deal with the Ottoman Empire to build a railway from Berlin to Baghdad. The Round Table was especially alarmed about the agreement, as it would provide direct German access to the Middle East oil, bypassing the Suez Canal controlled by the British. The last northern link of the railway was in Serbia.

The activities of the Round Table leading up to and during World War I, were propagandized by British newspaper magnate, Alfred Harmsworth (1865 – 1922), owner of the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and The Times. By 1914, Harmsworth controlled 40 per cent of the morning newspaper circulation in Britain, 45 per cent of the evening and 15 per cent of the Sunday circulation.[9] Harmsworth, who idolized Cecil Rhodes, was a passionate supporter of the British Empire.[10] Harmsworth intended to use his newspaper and the rest of his publications to “strum the Imperial harp.” According to Harry J. Greenwall, the author of Northcliffe: Napoleon of Fleet Street (1957), Harmsworth “with the Daily Mail unleashed a tremendous force of potential mass thought-control” as it became the “trumpet… of British Imperialism.”[11]

Harmsworth’s editorship of the Daily Mail in the years just preceding the World War I, when the newspaper displayed “a virulent anti-German sentiment,” caused The Star to declare, “Next to the Kaiser, Lord Northcliffe has done more than any living man to bring about the war.”[12] His newspapers’ reporting of the Shell Crisis of 1915 helped end the Liberal government of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and helped to bring about Round Tabler Lloyd George’s appointment as prime minister during 1916. Lloyd George offered Lord Northcliffe a job in his cabinet, but Northcliffe refused and was appointed director for propaganda.[13] Such was Northcliffe’s influence on anti-German propaganda during the First World War that a German warship was sent to shell his house, Elmwood, in Broadstairs, in an attempt to assassinate him.[14] In 1918, was named as Viscount Northcliffe, of St Peter’s in the County of Kent, for his service as the director of the British war mission in the United States.[15] Arthur Balfour, the leader of the party in the House of Commons, sent a private letter to Harmsworth. “Though it is impossible for me, for obvious reasons, to appear among the list of those who publish congratulatory comments in the columns of the Daily Mail perhaps you will allow me privately to express my appreciation of your new undertaking.”[16]

Lloyd George brought in a War Cabinet that included only four other members: Andrew Bonar Law and Arthur Henderson, and Garter knights George Curzon and Alfred Milner. Prior to founding the Round Table, Alfred Milner had been a member of the Coefficients, set up in 1902 by the Fabian Society founders Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Members included Halford Mackinder, Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells. The British military was represented by Leo Amery, an original member of Milner’s Kindergarten, who as a parliamentary under-secretary in Lloyd George’s national government. Amery, who was Hungarian Jewish descent, was also an active Freemason.[17] It was Amery, acting on behalf of Milner, who recruited Mackinder to conduct research into imperial matters.[18] Amery was also a member of the “X Committee,” a secret organization set up to keep Milner as the de facto member of the inner-circle of decision-makers, when he became Secretary of War during World War II. The committee, who met regularly to decide war policy, maintained contact with the British War Cabinet and included Lloyd George, Henry Wilson and Amery as secretary.[19]

Immediately following Britain’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, the War Cabinet began to consider the future of Palestine, then under the control of the Ottoman Empire. One month later, Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the President of the World Zionist Organization and later the first President of Israel, met with Herbert Samuel, Zionist member of British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith’s cabinet, and they discussed the settlement of Palestine and “that perhaps the Temple may be rebuilt, as a symbol of Jewish unity, of course, in a modernised form.”[20] In January 1915, Samuel circulated a memorandum, The Future of Palestine, to his cabinet colleagues, suggesting that Britain should conquer Palestine in order to protect the Suez Canal against foreign powers, and for Palestine to become a home for the Jewish people.[21]

Amery helped draft the Balfour Declaration, an idea proposed by Milner. Present at the first official meeting of the London Zionist Political Committee were Nathan Rothschild, James de Rothschild, the son of Edmund de Rothschild of Paris, former owner of Rothschild colonies in Palestine, and Mark Sykes. There, were discussed in detail the future mandates of Palestine, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Arabia, then still forming parts of the Ottoman Empire whose final collapse was soon expected. It was Sykes’ idea that the Zionists draft a declaration that would be sent to Lord Rothschild, who would then recommend it Balfour, who in turn would reply to Rothschild on behalf of the British Government.[22] The letter was written in 1917 by Chaim Weizmann, later President of the World Zionist Organization and first President of Israel, announcing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Milner was also a chief author of the declaration, although it was issued in the name of Arthur Balfour.[23]

Wahhabism

A little-known projects was the attempt to free territories from Ottoman control through the British creation of the first and foremost of the modern Revivalist sects of Islam, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, who continue to be the dominant interpretation of the religion in that country to this day. The purpose of the creation of the Wahhabi sect was to serve imperialist designs of the British, by undermining the Ottoman Empire from within. The plan was to rile the Arabs of the Hijaz, what came to be known as Saudi Arabia, against the tremendous empire of the Muslim Turks. The means of doing so was to create a “reform” movement that attacked the basic principles of Islam by calling for a re-opening of the Doors of Ijtihad. The precedent resorted to as the dubious approach to Ijtihad employed by Ibn Taymiyyah, a leading though controversial exponent of the Hanbali Madhhab, also adhered to by the Arabs of the Hijaz. As Joseph Schacht explained:

From the eighth/fourteenth century onwards the Hanbali school declined and seemed on the verge of extinction, when the puritanical movement of the Wahhabis of the twelfth/eighteenth century and especially the Wahhabi revival in the present century, gave it a new lease of life. The religious founder of this movement, Muhammad ibn Adb al Wahhab (d. 1201/1787), was influenced by the works of Ibn Taymiyyah. Whereas the Hanbali school had always been regarded by orthodox Islam as one of the legitimate schools of law, the intolerant attitude of the earlier Wahhabis towards their fellow Muslims caused them for a long time to be suspected as heretics, and they have come to be generally considered orthodox only since their political successes in the present generation.[24]

British collusion in Wahhab’s mission is detailed in a work that appeared in the 1970s entitled Memoirs of Mr. Hempher. The work has been dismissed by critics as a hoax, but already in 1888, Ayyub Sabri Pasha, a well-known Ottoman writer and Turkish naval admiral who served the Ottoman army in the Arabian Peninsula, recounted Abdul Wahhab’s association and plotting with a British spy named Hempher, who “inspired in him the tricks and lies that he had learned from the British Ministry of the Commonwealth.”[25] Whatever the case may be, the absurdity of Abdul Wahhab’s claims and the direction and ramifications of his pronouncements point to the fact that he was, in one way or another, in the service of British colonialism. Most importantly, despite their fervent disavowals, the mission of the Wahhabis only managed to survive against adversity from other Muslims through British support.

Eventually, as related in the Hempher Memoirs, the British Ministry managed to acquire for Wahhab the support of Mohammad Ibn Saud, the Amir of Diriyah. The U.S. Department of Defense released a translation of an Iraqi intelligence document in September 2002, titled “The Emergence of Wahhabism and its Historical Roots,” which indicates that Abdul Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, and his sponsor ibn Saud, who created the Saudi dynasty that now rules Saudi Arabia, were reported by several sources as being secretly of Jewish origin.[26] The Iraqi intelligence documents also resort to the Hempher Memoirs, and, citing numerous Arabic sources, connect Wahhab and Ibn Saud with the Dönmeh of Turkey. Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, wrote Dr. Mustafa Turan in The Dönmeh Jews, was a descendant of a family of Dönmeh.[27] Turan maintains that Abdul Wahhab’s grandfather, Sulayman was actually Shulman, having belonged to the Jewish community of Bursa in Turkey. From there he settled in Damascus where he feigned Islam but was apparently expelled for practicing sorcery. He then fled to Egypt, where he again faced condemnation and so made his way to the Hijaz, in the western portion of the Arabian Peninsula, where he got married and fathered Abdul Wahhab’s father. The same is claimed in The Dönmeh Jews and the Origin of the Saudi Wahabis, by Rifat Salim Kabar.[28]

The Aniza tribe—to which the Saudis as well as the ruling Sabah family of Kuwait belong—originally issued from Khaybar in Arabia, which was initially inhabited by Jews before Islam. A report of the Saudi family also being of Jewish ancestry was published by Mohammad Sakher, who, it is claimed, was ordered killed by the Saudi regime for his revelations. The Wahabi Movement/The Truth and Roots, by Abdul Wahhab Ibrahim al-Shammari, relates a similar account to Sakher’s according to which Ibn Saud is apparently descended from Mordechai bin Ibrahim bin Mushi, a Jewish merchant from Basra. Apparently, when this Mordechai was approached by members from the Arabian tribe of Aniza, he then claimed to be one of them and traveled with them to Najd where his name became Markhan bin Ibrahim bin Musa.[29]

The British thus sought to exacerbate the Ottoman Empire’s growing weaknesses. The typical strategy was that of Divide and Conquer. Much of the Ottoman Empire consisted of numerous ethnicities, united in their allegiance to Islam and to the Caliphate as its guardian. By dividing the Ottoman territories into numerous independent and competing states, separated mainly along ethnic lines, they could be more easily challenged. The goal of the British was to weaken the Ottoman Empire by pitting Muslim against Muslim, in this case, Arab against Turk.

However, in Islam, Muslims fighting Muslims is of course considered an enormity. Therefore, the only way to convince the Arab Muslims to fight their fellow Muslims was to suggest that they were not Muslims after all, that they had apostatized and become “unbelievers.” What makes Abdul Wahhab’s mission so suspicious, then, is that his teachings provided precisely this pretext. Instead of addressing where true reforms were needed in the Ottoman Empire, he instead chose to fixate on a far more trivial issue, where he found the means to propose the absurdity that the Ottoman Turks were not true Muslims. Ultimately, he chose to combat the Empire from without rather than assisting it from within. In particular, despite the more critical issues facing the Ottoman Empire, Wahhab chose to address certain Sufi practices which he characterized as Shirk, or polytheism, and therefore amounting to Kufr, or apostasy. His interpretation then suggested that any at fault should be fought and killed, contrary to the basic tenet of Islam, which prescribed Naseeha, or “sincere advice.”

Adbul Wahhab nevertheless declared “Jihad” against the Ummah, that is, against all except those who followed his prescriptions for “purifying” his version of monotheism (Tawhid). The unusual nature of Wahhab’s declaration is remarked upon by David Commins, in The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia:

Since early Islamic history, Muslims have differed on the essential point of what constitutes correct belief, but at most times, such differences did not result in military conflict or the adoption of coercive measures as in an inquisition.[30]

From then on, the Wahhabi movement was characterized by maliciousness towards the Muslims, despite the encroachments the “infidel” British were making in the region. Motivated by a concern for their Indian enterprise, in 1755 Britain made an initial but unsuccessful attempt to pry Kuwait from the Ottomans. Ten years later, Mohammed Ibn Saud died and his son Abul Aziz became ruler of Dariyah. During the following two decades, the Wahhabis extended their sphere of influence, paralleling infiltration by the British. Britain again moved against Kuwait in 1775, seeking protection for their mail service through the territory, and attempted unsuccessfully again to seize it, when they were defeated by the Ottomans.

Nevertheless, the following year, Abdul Wahhab declared himself leader of the Muslims of the world, in direct opposition to the authority of the Sultan in Istanbul, reinforced by a Fatwa ordering “Jihad” against the Ottoman Empire. And, significantly, in 1788, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud was joined by British forces in occupying Kuwait. In 1792, Abdul Wahhab died, and Abdul Aziz assumed the leadership of the Wahhabi movement, and extended raids over the next three years into the city of Medina, and the regions of Syria and Iraq. In 1801, the Wahhabis attacked the Shiah holy city of Karbala, in Iraq, slaughtering thousands of its citizens. They ruined and looted the tomb of Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. As a result, it seems that Abdul Aziz was murdered in 1803, most likely by a Shiah avenger. His son Saud ibn Abdul Aziz then succeeded him. After sacking Karbala, the Wahhabis moved against Mecca. The Ottoman governor of Mecca failed to negotiate a peace, and retreated into the fortress in the city of Ta’if, where he was pursued by some 10,000 Wahhabis.

In the taking of Ta’if, the Wahhabis then set about destroying all the holy tombs and burial grounds, followed by the mosques and Islamic madrassas. It is even said that the leather and gilt bindings of the Islamic holy books they had destroyed were used by them to make sandals. Al Zahawi, an Islamic historian of the time, recounted:

They killed everyone in sight, slaughtering both child and adult, the ruler and the ruled, the lowly and the well-born. They began with a suckling child nursing at his mother’s breast and moved on to a group studying Koran, slaying them, down to the last man. And when they wiped out the people in the houses, they went out into the streets, the shops, and the mosques, killing whoever happened to be there. They killed even men bowed in prayer until they had exterminated every Muslim who dwelt in Ta’if and only a remnant, some twenty or more, remained.

These were holed up in Bait al Fitni with ammunition, inaccessible to the Wahhabis’ approach. There was another group at Bait al Far numbering 270, who fought them that day, then a second and third day, until the Wahhabis sent them a guarantee of clemency; only they tendered this proposal as a trick. For when the Wahhabis entered, they seized their weapons and slew them to a man. They induced others to surrender with a guarantee of mercy and took them to the valley of Waj where they abandoned them in the cold and snow, barefoot, naked and exposed in shame with their women, accustomed to the privacy afforded them by common decency and religious morality. They then plundered their possessions, wealth of any kind, household furnishings, and cash.

They cast books into the streets, alleys, and byways to be blown to and fro by the wind, among which could be found copies of Koran, volumes of Bukhari, Muslim, other canonical collections of Hadith and books of Islamic jurisprudence, all mounting to the thousands. These books remained there for several days, trampled upon by the Wahhabis. None among them made the slightest attempt to remove even one page of Koran from underfoot to preserve it from the ignominy of this display of disrespect. Then, they razed the houses, and made what was once a town a barren waste.[31]

Next, the Wahhabis entered the holy city of Mecca. Ghalib, the Sharif of the city, repelled them, but Wahhabi raids then turned against Medina. Saud ibn Abdul Aziz addressed the people saying, “there is no other way for you than to submit. I will make you cry out and vanish as I did the people of Ta’if.” In Medina, they looted the Prophet’s treasure, including books, works of art, and other priceless relics that had been collected over a thousand years. Finally, while in control of these two holy cities, they imposed their version of Islam, barred pilgrims from performing the Hajj, covered up the Kabbah with a rough black fabric, and set about the demolition of shrines and graveyards.

Neo-Caliphate

Afghani’s British handler was the poet and writer Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840 – 1922), a close friend of Lord Randolph Churchill and his son Winston. Blunt married Lady Anne, a grand-daughter of poet Lord Byron. Wilfred and Lady Anne’s daughter, Judith Blunt-Lytton, married Neville Bulwer-Lytton, grandson to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and son of the Earl of Lytton, a friend of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. Blunt married Lady Anne was also friends with Jane Digby and Sir Richard Burton (1821 – 1890), the famous British explorer, spy and fellow Freemason, who had been made consul in Damascus in 1869. Recent research by Marc Demarest indicates that he had been introduced to occult studies in England in the 1840s as a member of the so-called Orphic Brotherhood led by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Burton is best-known for traveling in disguise to Mecca, a translation of One Thousand and One Nights, bringing the Kama Sutra to publication in English, and journeying with John Hanning Speke as the first Europeans to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. Ouida reported in 1906 that “Men at the FO [Foreign Office] …used to hint dark horrors about Burton, and certainly justly or unjustly he was disliked, feared and suspected… not for what he had done, but for what he was believed capable of doing.”[32] In 1878, Burton joined the British Theosophical Society. Burton also referred to Blavatsky as a “dear friend.” The friendship would have begun either when both were in the Arab world in in the 1850s, or around 1890 when Burton was consul in Damascus.

Digby, or Lady Ellenborough (1807-1881), was an English aristocrat who lived a scandalous life of romantic adventures, having had four husbands and many lovers, including King Ludwig I of Bavaria, his son King Otto of Greece, statesman Felix Schwarzenberg, and an Albanian brigand general. She died in Damascus, Syria as the wife of Arab Sheikh Medjuel al Mezrab, who was twenty years younger than her, and who belonged to the Aniza tribe of Syria. Like Burton, Digby was also acquainted with Blavatsky, as well as with Lydia Pashkov, who along with her partner James Sanua, was friends with Jamal Afghani.[33] Blunt and Lady Anne in 1878-79 visited the Wahhabi stronghold in the Arab Peninsula, recorded in their book A Pilgrimage to Nejd, where they first met Digby and el Mezrab. Blunt had supposedly become a convert to Islam under the influence of Afghani, and shared his hopes of establishing an Arab Caliphate based in Mecca to replace the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul.

All of them were close with Abdul Qadir al Jazairi (1808 – 1883), an Algerian Islamic scholar, Sufi and military leader. Abdul Qadir led a struggle against the French invasion of Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century, for which he is seen by some Algerians as their national hero. The French government bestowed on him the Grand Cross of the Légion d’honneur, and he received the “magnificent star” from the Freemasons of France. He was also honored by Abraham Lincoln for this gesture with several guns that are now on display in the Algiers museum. The town of Elkaker in Iowa was named after him. In 1864, the Lodge “Henry IV” extended an invitation to him to join Freemasonry, which he accepted, being initiated at the Lodge of the Pyramids in Alexandria, Egypt.[34]

K. Paul Johnson in the Masters Revealed, lists Abdul Qadir as a likely influence on Blavatsky, who seems to have referred to him in a letter in which she wrote, “I have lived with the whirling Dervishes, with the Druses of Mt. Lebanon, with the Bedouin Arabs and the Marabouts of Damascus.”[35] Marabout is a North African term for a Sufi saint, and Abdul Qadir was regarded as the preeminent Sufi sheikh of Damascus, being the head of the Qadiriyyah Sufis. Blunt had supposedly become a convert to Islam under the influence of Afghani, and shared his hopes of establishing an Arab Caliphate based in Mecca to replace the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul.

When Blunt visited Abdul Qadir in 1881, he decided that he was the most promising candidate for “Caliphate,” an opinion shared by Afghani and his disciple, Mohammed Abduh (1849 – 1905).[36] As the chief Mason of his country, Abduh did much to spread interest in Freemasonry in the Arab World. 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.”[37] Tellingly, Afghani and Abduh would refer to themselves and their fellow Egyptian Masons as “ikhwan al saffa wa khullan al wafa,” in deliberate reference to the full name of original Brethren of Sincerity, who derived from Ismaili influences.[38]

Geoffrey Nash’s recent work From Empire to Orient explores the significance of Blunt’s associations with prominent Eastern political reformers such as Afghani and Abduh, whom Blunt introduced to his close friend Lord Randolph. By the 1880s, in the words of R.F. Foster in Lord Randolph Churchill, Blunt had become “the avatar for anti-imperial causes” and an active force for the “regeneration of Islam” by means of “agitation and negotiation as well as by poetry and horse breeding.”[39] The social connections of horse breeding community contact especially in Tory circles, including George Wyndham, the Lytton family, Lord Curzon and Arthur Balfour. Blunt first became connected with the Churchill family after befriending Lord Randolph in 1883, and their relationship would continue to grow during the early 1900s. On some occasions they dressed in Arab clothing. Randolph “was a man after Blunt’s heart: ferocious in public attack but frank and natural, even boyish, in private. He seemed ready to learn from Blunt, deferring charmingly to him as a writer and poet.”[40] In 1885, Blunt even brought one of the founders of an intellectual, anti-imperialist, Islamic movement, Afghani, who had been staying with Blunt in Britain, to see Randolph at the India Office so that “Lord Randolph… might be in closest possible touch with authentic Mohammedan opinion.”[41] Blunt recorded their conversation regarding India, Russia, and the role of Muslims in the Great Game. Wilfrid Blunt met Winston Churchill for the first time in 1903, and guided his writing of the biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), for which he borrowed some of Blunt’s papers and letters, and even solicited Blunt’s help as an editor.[42]

Al Azhar

As a result of the catastrophe of colonialism in general, education in traditional religious science in the Islamic world had already been severely weakened. And, the apparent ineffectiveness of Muslim institutions initially lent support to the notion that Islam needed to be replaced with Western-based models, which generated new elites of Western-educated secular professionals. Thus, many of the Shariah schools were closed down. The religious endowments that traditionally funded the Shariah schools were nationalized and became state-owned property. Those like Al Azhar in Egypt, which had been the most prestigious educational institution in Islam, and the oldest university in the world, became state-owned schools with state-appointed faculty. The curricula were redefined and limited in such a way that those trained in these schools no longer achieved the credentials of jurists in the traditional sense. The Ulema, in effect, became state functionaries, relegated to officiating at public rituals.

It was this vacuum that was exploited by the Salafi movement founded by Aghani, the most important of the Revivalist movements. Leading the modernist trend, the Salafis suggested that the deteriorating condition of the Muslims was due to their inability to mirror the institutions or technology of the Europeans. The Revivalists suggested that Muslims needed to return to the “original sources,” meaning the Quran and Hadith, bypassing the accumulated scholarship of the Mujtahids through the centuries, in order that Islam could be reinterpreted anew to “adapt” to modern times. However, what was truly needed was not a reform of Islamic law as the Salafis deceptively suggested, but a return to the spirit of the law.

The deception was in how the Salafis defined “pure” Islam. Their prescriptions were largely in the service of British interests. Evidently, the claims of the Revivalists were just a devious ruse to open the door for the British plan of rewriting Islam, following upon the revival of the reputation of Ibn Taymiyyah initiated by eighteenth century Saudi reformer, Mohammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, founder of Wahhabism. The growth of the financial resources of the British allowed them to expand their colonial objectives beyond the Caribbean and the Americas.

Effectively, while Afghani pontificated against the perils of British colonialism, he was secretly an agent-provocateur in the employ of the British. Among its many uses, the Salafi movement also served in protecting the British’s growing interest in the Suez Canal, which would later become crucial to the shipment of their oil cargo to Europe and elsewhere. In 1854 and 1856, the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps had obtained concessions from Said Pasha, the viceroy of Egypt, who authorized 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 colonization of Africa. It became, as Bismarck called it, “the spinal column of the British Empire.”

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, then under Benjamin Disraeli, and financed by his friend, Lionel Rothschild, acquired nearly half the total shares in the Suez Canal Company, giving it a controlling interest. A commission of inquiry into the failing finances of Ismail in 1878, led by Lord Cromer and others, had compelled the viceroy into ceding his estates to the nation, to remain under British and French supervision, and accepting the position of a constitutional sovereign. Lord Cromer, Consul General of Egypt from 1883 to 1907 and an important member of England’s Baring banking family, who had grown rich off of the opium trade in India and China. 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. The agent-provocateur revolt was followed by a formal invasion and occupation that made Egypt a colony.

The two principle organizations behind the revolt were created by Jamal Afghani: a nationalist organization called Nationalist Liberal Party (al Hizb al Watani al Hurr), which was assisted by Scawen Blunt, and the Mazzini-inspired Young Egypt. Both were united in their membership in Afghani’s French Masonic lodges. According to Homa Pakdaman in DJamal-ed-din Assad Abadi dit Afghani:

Most of the leaders of the future revolution were part of the masonic lodges. [...] Thus the lodge became a place for the gathering of the Egyptian nationalists, and it is this grouping which was the origin of the first political movement in 1879, called the National Party with the motto: Egypt for the Egyptians, which culminated in the revolution of ‘Urabi.[43]

Evidently, the claims of the Salafis were just a devious ruse to open the door for the British plan of rewriting Islam. Sheikh al Buti describes, in his history of the attack on Ijthad:

According to Lord Cromer’s view, the Islamic Shariah was backward, stagnant, and not conclusive to development. He was looking for an easy way to make the Egyptian society break away from this chain. His crafty way was to promote the idea of Ijtihad among those who believed in the advancement of modern European society. Such people were assigned sensitive religious positions. Some were made Muftis, and others were assigned to the administration of Al Azhar. Those who had faith in European society, and its values, started encouraging the Shaykhs of Al Azhar and its scholars to exercise Ijtihad outside its allowed domains. This had reached the point to where Shaykh al Maragani removed the stipulation that a Mujtahid need to know Arabic.[44]

From 1888 until his death in 1905, Abduh would regularly visit the home and office of Lord Cromer. In 1892, Abduh was named to run the administrative Committee for the Al Azhar mosque and university. From that post, he reorganized 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, chief legal authority in Islam, as well as the Masonic Grand Master of the United Lodge of Egypt. One of Lord Cromer’s motives was to change the law forbidding interest banking. On his behalf, Abduh then offered a contrived interpretation of the Quran 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.” Cromer also concluded, however, referring to both Afghani and Abduh: “They were very much too tainted with heterodoxy to carry far along with the conservative Moslems. Nor were they sufficiently Europeanized to win the mimics of the Europeans ways. They were neither god enough Moslems, nor good enough Europeans.”[45]

Shadhili Sufi Order

To his many correspondents he clearly designated Sufism as a more accessible form of traditional initiation for Westerners eager to find an initiatory path that does not exist any more in the West. Guénon was the founder of the occult school known as Traditionalism, which advanced the notion that a mystic could pick any outward traditional religion, as they all shared the same esoteric source. Papus’ membership in the Theosophical Society was an important source of Martinist Order’s Perennialism, and therefore of Traditionalist Perennialism, which proclaimed “that truth is One, and that no school, no religion can claim it for itself alone… In every religion can be found manifestations of the single truth.”[46] Papus believed that the Perennial Philosophy had been transmitted by Hermes from Ancient Egyptian sources, and they saw in this transmission the source of initiation. To Guénon, the Perennial Philosophy was the basis of a single esoteric tradition, which was as the secret source of all major exoteric traditions. Guénon chose Islam, seeing in Sufism a reflection of the Perennial Philosophy.

Guénon’s particular approach—which would later influence Freemasonry—was reflected in the universalism of Ibn Arabi, an interest he shared with the Shadhilli Sufi order he joined, which included Abdul Qadir al Jazairi and the circle of Theosophical agents. Abdul Qadir’s Book of Stops reveals him to have been devoted to a universalist interpretation of religion and interested in altered states of consciousness as stages in a spiritual journey through different levels of being. Abdul Qadir was also known for his knowledge of the Muslim Neoplatonist, Ibn Arabi, from whom he derived his Gnostic and universalist principles. However, Islam doesn’t propose that all religions are valid. There is only one religion recognized as such: Islam. Nevertheless, Islam recognizes the right of other communities to adhere to different beliefs, and has safeguarded that right in the Shariah. Rather, Ibn Arabi’s universalism was profoundly heretical, opening the way for the suggestion of an original Gnostic truth underlying all religions. These ideas were adapted by Abdul Qadir to provide justification that Sufism represented such a tradition, and provided the basis for its relationship with Freemasonry.

Abdul Qadir’s friend Richard Burton made many enemies during his time in Damascus. He antagonized much of the Jewish population of the area because of a dispute concerning money lending. Burton was further involved in a scandal that implicated the Shadhili Sufi order, founded by Abul Hasan Ali ash-Shadhili in the thirteenth century, and which was introduced to Damascus by Abdu Qadir. For two years the inner circle of the Shadhili in Damascus met at Abdul Qadir’s residence to meditate and pray “for enlightenment before the throne of God.”[47] Finally, as related by Burton’s wife Isabel, they become conscious of a presence among them and used to hear and see things they did not understand. Finally, they received a vision that assured them it was the religion of Christianity which they were seeking. Richard and Isabel threw their support behind the Shadhili, and attempted to secure support for their conversion. But the British government, fearing the political consequences, removed Burton from his post in Damascus, and transferred him to Trieste, then part of Austria-Hungary. As Isabel noted, “It broke his career, it shattered his life, it embittered him towards religion.”[48]

Having denounced the lure of Theosophy and neo-occultism in the form of Spiritism, Guénon was initiated in 1912 in the Shadhili Sufi order. Guénon’s initiation was effected by Swedish convert to Islam Ivan Aguéli, who took the name of Abdul Hadi. Aguéli was interested in both Sufism and Jewish Kabbalah. Guénon’s initiation was performed under the authority of the friend of Abdul Qadir, Sheikh Abder Rahman Illaysh al Kabir, Freemason and head of the Maliki Madhhab at Al Azhar University. It was a Fatwa produced by al Kabir and his father Muhammad Illaysh, grand Mufti of the Malaki Madhhab in Egypt, which led to the Urabi revolt, and for which the two were subsequently imprisoned. Al Kabir was eventually exiled to the island of Rhodes before finally coming back to his role at Al Azhar. Sheikh Abder Rahman too would later become the head of the Maliki Madhhab at Al Azhar University. As a Freemason, al Kabir also aimed to demonstrate the relationship between the symbols of Freemasonry and Islam.[49]

When Abdul Qadir died in 1883, al Kabir officiated at his funeral, where he was buried near Ibn Arabi’s tomb. Al Kabir had introduced Aguéli to Ibn Arabi, whose teachings he came to regard as the essential doctrine of Islam. Aguéli founded the Al Akbariyya, as a secret Sufi society in Paris in 1911. It was named after Ibn Arabi’s nickname of Sheikh al Akbar, meaning “the greatest sheikh.” Its purpose was to promote the teachings of Ibn al-Arabi, through the practice of the Shadhili and Malamati Sufi paths, and Guénon was one of its first members.

Guénon’s The Symbolism of the Cross (1931) is dedicated to “the venerated memory of Esh-Sheikh Abder-Rahman Elish al Kabir.” The goal of the book, according to Guénon, “is to explain a symbol that is common to almost all traditions, a fact that would seem to indicate its direct attachment to the great primordial tradition.” By “cross,” Guénon meant the occult symbol of the swastika, employed by the Nazis as a symbol of their “Aryan” heritage. Guénon regarded the swastika as “a truly universal symbol.” The Germans did not use the Sanskrit word swastika, however, but called it instead Hakenkreuz. But Guénon insisted that it was in no way related to “the artificial and even anti-traditional use of the swastika by the German ‘racialists’ who have given it the title of Hakenkreuz, or ‘hooked cross,’ and quite arbitrarily made it a symbol of anti-Semitism.”[50] Nevertheless, Guénon apparently spied for the Nazis as well as the English during the 1940’s in Cairo, and had started “to accept increasingly considerable sums for the services which he rendered to the Third Reich.”[51]

Young Turks

Afghani also had been part of the creation of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)—a Masonic political party, also known as the Young Turks—created in the 1880s, when he became involved with its members in Europe. Young Turks were largely comprised of the Dönmeh—the crypto-Sabbateans of the community of secret Jews descended from the followers of Sabbatai Zevi who converted to Islam. In The Dönmeh: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries and Secular Turks, Professor Marc David Baer wrote that many Dönmeh advanced to exalted positions in the Bektashi and Mevlevi Sufi orders.[52] Writing in 1906, H.N. Brailsford said of the Bektashi, “their place in Islam is perhaps most nearly analogous to that of Freemasonry in Christianity and noted that “Bektashis themselves like to imagine that the Freemasons are kindred spirits.”[53] Richard Davey, author of The Sultan and His Subject, published in 1897, wrote “[The Bektashi] are even said to be affiliated to some of the French Masonic Lodges. One thing is certain; the order now consists almost exclusively of gentlemen of education, belonging to the Liberal, or Young Turk party.”[54]

Through the influence of the Bektashi Sufis, the Young Turks adopted an ideology of Pan-Turkism, which aspired towards reviving shamanism as the true religion of the Turkish heritage. Pan-Turkism was developed by Hungarian Zionist Arminius Vambery, a friend of Theodor Herzl and a source for Golden Dawn member Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In 2005, the National Archives at Kew, Surrey, made files accessible to the public and it was revealed that Hungarian Zionist named Arminius—who consulted Golden Dawn author of Dracula Bram Stoker on his knowledge of vampirism—was an agent of the Great Game, secretly working for Lord Palmerston.[55] Vambery was well known at the British court, corresponding regularly with the Prime Minister. His reputation in England as an expert on Muslims began with his publication of Arminius Vambery: His Life and Adventures, about his travels throughout the Middle East and Central Asia disguised as a dervish between 1862-64. Although he was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vambery believed Britain was the most advanced European power, and therefore the best to protect Muslim countries from Russian expansion. Britain’s strategy was to combat Russian attempts at gaining ground in Central Asia and threatening British possessions, especially India. In 1900-1901, Vambery failed in a promise to Theodor Herzl to arrange a meeting for him with Sultan Abdul Hamid II, his real goal being only to obtain money from Herzl.

Vambery was inspired by Alexander Csoma de Körös, who was an important source for Blavatsky, and the first in the West to mention Shambhala, which he regarded as the source of the Turkish people, and which he situated in the Altai Mountains and Xinjiang. In Turkish nationalist mythology, Ergenekon, which is related to the synarchist myth of Agartha, is the name of an inaccessible valley in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, where the remnants of a number of Turkic-speaking tribes regrouped following a series of military defeats at the hands of the Chinese and other non-Turkic peoples, where they were trapped for four centuries. Under the leadership of Bumin Khan (died c. 552), they expanded and founded what has come to be known as the Göktürk Empire. According to legend, they were able to leave Ergenekon when a blacksmith created a passage by melting rock, allowing the grey wolf named Asena to lead them out.[56]

The Young Turks regarded themselves the heirs of the secret organization known as the Young Ottomans, formed in 1865, which drew its inspiration from the Carbonari societies founded by Mazzini, like Young Europe, Italy, Spain and Poland. The Young Turks regarded themselves the heirs of the secret organization known as the Young Ottomans, formed in 1865, which drew their inspiration from the Carbonari societies founded by Mazzini, like Young Europe, Italy, Spain and Poland. Influenced by Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, they advocated a constitutional, parliamentary government. The organization was forbidden and its members exiled in 1867. In 1876, the Young Ottomans briefly seized power, temporarily installing Sultan Murad V, who had also been a Freemason. They ended a debt moratorium, paid off the British, declared free trade, and brought in European bankers. But they were soon overthrown. Murad V was dethroned three months later, and replaced by Abul Hamid II.

The failure of the Young Ottoman policies in reversing the decline of the Ottoman Empire led groups of intellectuals to search for other means. One of these groups was the Young Turks. The Young Turks were created in the 1890s by a prominent Sephardic Jewish family in Ottoman Salonika (modern Thessaloniki, Greece) and an official of the Italian B’nai B’rith, named Emmanuel Carasso. Carasso was also the grand master of an Italian masonic lodge there called “Macedonia Resurrected.” The lodge was the headquarters of the Young Turks, and all the top Young Turk leadership were members. The Italian masonic lodges in the Ottoman Empire had been set up by a follower of Mazzini named Emmanuel Veneziano, who was also a leader of the European affiliate of the B’nai B’rith, as well as the Alliance Israëlite Universelle.[57]

The Zionist leadership, hoped that revolutionary forces in the Turkish government would demonstrate greater sympathy for Zionist aspirations in Palestine. Influenced by Zeev Jabotinsky (1880 – 1940), a network of newspapers was founded in Turkey, among them the popular newspaper Jeune Turc (“Young Turk). While in power, the Young Turks ran several newspapers including The Young Turk, of which Zeev Jabotinsky was the editor. Jabotinsky was the founder of Revisionist Zionism, on which the policy of the Zionist terrorist faction the Irgun was based, and helped form the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I. He was educated as a young man in Italy, and later described Mazzini’s ideas as the basis for the Zionist movement. Jabotinsky arrived in Turkey shortly after the Young Turks seized power, to take over the paper. The paper was owned by a member of the Turkish cabinet, but it was funded by the World Zionist Organization (WZO).[58]

In 1908, the Young Turks carried out a military coup against the crumbling regime of Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman Sultan, who was overthrown, and the Young Turks ultimately seized power over the Ottoman Empire. All the founding members, but one, of the Ottoman Freedom Society in Salonika, which became the headquarters of the CUP, were Freemasons or became Freemasons. Freemasons declared themselves “the main force” behind the 1908 revolution, supported the CUP in power, and thrived after Abdul Hamid II was deposed. Theories persist that the Dönmeh, were responsible for the Armenian Genocide when they planned and implemented the 1915 Deportation resulting in the mass slaughter and death of most of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian population. Since many of the leaders of the ruling CUP were Dönmeh origin, including Talat Pasha and Nazım Bey, they proposed such a plan to the committee as a way of eliminating their Armenian competitors.[59] Talaat was the interior minister and dictator of the regime during World War I. He had been a member of Carasso’s Italian masonic lodge in Salonika. One year prior to the 1908 coup, Talaat became the grand master of the Scottish Rite Masons in the Ottoman Empire.[60]

Afghani founded Young Egypt which was mainly composed of members of the Young Turks. Sultan Abdul Hamid II mentioned in his diary: “Both associations [Young Egypt and Young Turks] worked in the same path to impose constitutions and laws instead of the Shariah and to abrogate the Islamic Khalifate. In this matter Jamaluddin al-Afghani said that the salvation of the government is the Parliamentary regime in the European style.”[61] According to Mohammed Abduh’s disciple, Rashid Rida, “Jamaluddin al-Afghani created this association in Alexandria called Young Egypt. It did not have amongst its members a single Egyptian and their great majority were young Jews.”[62]

By 1906, Turkish nationalism based on the pseudoscientific race theories of Europe had become the guiding ideology of the Young Turks.[63] Sir Gerard Lowther, British ambassador to Constantinople from 1909 to 1913, called the ruling CUP ‘‘the Jew Committee of Union and Progress.’’[64] Minister of finance Mehmet Cavid Bey was a ‘‘secret Jew, an official manifestation of the occult power of the Committee, one of the only members of the Cabinet who really count, and the apex of Freemasonry in the empire,’’ Lowther claimed.[65]

According to Baer, the Young Turks, “wholeheartedly embraced theories of race, although they rearranged the hierarchies to place Turks on top. By 1906, Turkish nationalism based on the pseudoscientific race theories of Europe had become the guiding ideology of the CUP.”[66] Historian and Round Tabler Arnold Toynbee, in a report written for British naval intelligence in 1917, noted the “anti-Islamic tendencies” in the Pan-Turkish movement, including the employment as a symbol of CUP’s youth movement, and a Turkish army order directing troops to include the Grey Wolf in their prayers. Toynbee quoted from a circular produced by Turkish Hearth, a Pan-Turkist group, which condemns the “monstrous figment of the imagination, which is known as the community of Islam, and which has for long past stood in the way of present progress generally, and of the realization of the principles of Turanian unity in particular.”[67]

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks expanded on the ambitions of Pan-Turkism and tried to replace the lost legacy with a new Turkish commonwealth. The legend of Ergenekon was therefore promulgated by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who sought to create a sense of nationalism to replace the religion of Islam as the primary identity of the new Turkish secular regime.[68] In Salonika, Greece, the heartland of the Dönmeh community, Turkish Freemasonry and the Young Turk movement, many Jews claimed that Ataturk was a Dönmeh.[69] The 1973 book, The Secret Jews, by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, maintains that Ataturk and his finance minister, Djavid Bey, were both committed Dönmeh and that “too many of the Young Turks in the newly formed revolutionary Cabinet prayed to Allah, but had their real prophet [Sabbatai Zevi].”[70] When Greece achieved sovereignty over Salonika, many Dönmeh, unsuccessful at being re-classified Jewish, moved to Istanbul. Others moved to Izmir, Bursa, and Ataturk’s newly-proclaimed capital, Ankara. Some texts suggest that the Dönmeh numbered only 150,000, and were mainly found in the army, government, and business. However, other experts suggest that the Dönmeh numbered as many as 1.5 million, and that their influence extended to every facet of Turkish life. One influential Dönmeh, Tevfik Rustu Arak, was a close friend and adviser to Ataturk and served as Turkey’s Foreign Minister from 1925 to 1938.[71]

Lawrence of Arabia

From without, the final dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate was accomplished by exploiting the treachery of the Arab Muslims of the Hijaz, who rose up in a large-scale insurrection, known as the Arab Revolt. Instigating the revolt was the ruler of the Hijaz at the time, Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who belonged to the Hashemite clan that claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed, and who had ruled on behalf of the Ottoman Empire in the region. On a visit to Damascus in 1914, Hussein’s son Faisal had been given the Damascus Protocol by the Arab secret societies al Fatat and al Ahd. The Damascus Protocol declared that they would support Hussein’s Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, if the demands in it were submitted to the British.

The Arab Revolt represented a renewed attempt on the part of the British, to pit Arabs against Turks, after their first unsuccessful attempt with the Wahhabis in the eighteenth century. The ostensible aim of the Arab Revolt was autonomy for the Arab peoples of the Ottoman Empire, creating a single unified Arab state from Syria to Yemen, under a puppet Caliphate, where Hussein would be proclaimed “King of all the Arabs.” The promise was contained in a letter dated October 24, 1915, from Sir Henry McMahon (1862 – 1949), in what later became known as the McMahon–Hussein correspondence. McMahon was appointed British High Commissioner in Cairo, to replace Lord Kitchener, who had become War Secretary in London. A Freemason, Kitchener was a close friend of Nathan Rothschild’s brother, Alfred de Rothschild, and a leading member of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), which was connected to the Jack the Ripper murders. Kitchener was also purportedly a member of Lanz von Liebenfels Order of New Templars (ONT).[72] McMahon began the correspondence with Hussein with the approval of Kitchener, who had already promised Hussein that, if he would come out against Turkey, Britain would guarantee his retention of the title of Grand Sharif and defend him against external aggression.

It was a plan devised by London’s Middle East team, which included foreign secretary Lord Curzon, Robert Cecil and his cousin Arthur Balfour, and also Mark Sykes and David George Hogarth, the chief of the Arab Bureau. They were joined by Winston Churchill and Arnold Toynbee. Outlining the policy was T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” (1888 – 1935):

If the Sultan of Turkey were to disappear, then the Caliphate by common consent of Islam would fall to the family of the prophet, the present representative of which is Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca. Hussein’s activities seem beneficial to us, because it marches with our immediate aims, the breakup of the Islamic bloc and the disruption of the Ottoman Empire, and because the states the would set up would be as harmless to ourselves as Turkey was. If properly handled the Arab States would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and yet always ready to combine against an outside force.[73]

Assisted by Lawrence in 1916, in the midst of the War, Faisal and the British army coordinated the Arab Revolt, which finally succeeded in wresting Middle Eastern territories from the Ottoman Empire, and helping to end the Caliphate. Faisal seized Damascus in 1918. Five days later, an armistice with the Ottoman Empire came into effect. The Ottoman government effectively collapsed, and the empire was divided amongst the victorious powers. The Turkish people refused to accept this arrangement, however, and under Ataturk, the remnants of the Young Turk movement formed a government in Ankara, and created an army that forced the Greeks and Italians out of Anatolia, while the British and French refused to intervene.

However, contrary to their promises to Faisal, in characteristic duplicity, the British had secretly ratified the contradictory Sykes-Picot agreement. It instead allotted the former holdings of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East to themselves and their allies, and most importantly, Palestine was offered as Jewish homeland, as stated in the Balfour Declaration:

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The Balfour Declaration embarrassed both the pro-German Zionists and the German government. Weizmann later declared:

The German government, on the other hand, was deeply distressed that the British government should get the better of it. It called our representatives in Germany together and tried to explain to them that the German government would have eventually done the same thing, but that it could not because of its alliance with Turkey, which compelled it to move slowly in the matter.[74]

With the end of Turkish rule in Syria in October 1918, supporters of the Arab Revolt in Damascus declared a government loyal to the Sharif of Mecca in Arab-controlled Greater Syria. Faisal had been declared “King of the Arabs” by a handful of religious leaders and other notables in Mecca. In 1919 Faisal led the Arab delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and, with the support of the knowledgeable and influential Gertrude Bell, of the British Military Intelligence Department, argued for the establishment of independent Arab emirates for the area previously covered by the Ottoman Empire. In January 1919, Faisal and Dr. Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement for Arab-Jewish cooperation, in which Faisal conditionally accepted the Balfour Declaration, dependent on the fulfillment of the British’s promises:

We Arabs... look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through; we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home... I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of the civilized peoples of the world.

The British promises were not immediately fulfilled however, or in some cases not until after the establishment of the Jewish state. In 1920, Faisal had proclaimed himself “King of Syria.” His claim was resisted by the French who defeated him militarily and expelled him from Syria. Though the British held a mandate in Iraq, given the unrest in the colony, in 1921, at the Cairo Conference, they decided to step back from direct administration and created a monarchy, installing Faisal as King of Iraq. Though he was not popular there, a lack of organized opposition allowed him to remain ruler and establish power. In Jordan, the British created a protectorate for his brother Abdullah, while their father Hussein declared himself “King of the Hijaz,” and also “King of all Arabs.” In 1923, when the Republic of Turkey was founded, it was Kemal Ataturk who was elected the republic’s first president. In 1924, Ataturk shocked Muslims of the world by abolishing the Caliphate, with the Turkey now following a secular and nationalist ideology of “Kemalism” instead of Islam. Two days later, Hussein declared himself Caliph, but the claim to the title had a mixed reception among Muslims.

However, in an additional act of treachery, the British also intended to remove Hussein and have the Hijaz ruled instead by their long-standing Wahhabi ally Ibn Saud, who had no interest in the Caliphate. While the Hashemites, Hussein, Faisal and Abdullah, were backed by the Arab Bureau, their enemy Ibn Saud was also receiving British backing. The first formal treaty between Ibn Saud and the British had been signed in 1915. Assigned to assist him was Harry St. John “Jack” Philby, a protégé of E.G. Browne. Philby, who made a feigned conversion to Islam, taking on the name “Abdullah,” was responsible for conveying to Ibn Saud his monthly retainer of £5,000. Philby also escorted Ibn Saud’s teenage son, the future King Faisal, on a tour of London, including a visit to E.G. Bowne and Scawen Blunt.[75]

Then, assisted with British support, Ibn Saud defeated Hussein in 1924. The conquest of Arabia by the Wahhabis, however, came at the cost of 400,000 killed and wounded. Cities such as Taif, Burayda, and al Hufa suffered all-out massacres carried out by the Ikhwan, Ibn Saud’s notorious Wahhabi henchmen. The governors of the various provinces appointed by Ibn Saud are said to have carried out 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations. Ibn Saud’s cousin, Abdullah ibn Musallim ibn Jilawi, the most brutal among the family, set about subjugating the Shiah population, by executing thousands.

Muslim Brotherhood

Afghani and Abduh had long supported the plan of the British to create an Arab Caliphate to replace the Ottoman one. Rashid Rida, another Freemason who after the death of Afghani in 1897, and Abduh in 1905, assumed the leadership of the movement, had also supported the plot. Therefore, after a visit to the newly conquered Arabian Peninsula, Rida did his part to legitimize Ibn Saud’s criminal usurpation of power in the eyes of the world’s Muslims, by publishing a work praising Ibn Saud as the “savior” of the Holy sites, a practitioner of “authentic” Islamic rule and two years later produced an anthology of Wahhabi treatises. This, it was through Rida that the Salafis and the Wahhabis became aligned from that point forward. Rida also became seriously involved in the editing and publication of the works of Ibn Taymiyyah, and achieved far-reaching influence in the Muslim world through his monthly periodical, al Manar (“The Lighthouse”), which was first published in 1898 and continued until his death in 1935.

The organization primarily responsible for the perpetration of most acts of terrorism in the name of Islam in the twentieth century, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan al Muslimeen, was created in 1928 by Hassan al Banna (1906 – 1949), a student of Abduh’s pupil, Rashid Rida, in reaction to the 1924 abolition of the caliphate. As discovered by John Loftus, former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer, when he was allowed to peruse CIA archives, al Banna had been recruited in the 1930s by Hitler to establish an arm of German intelligence in Egypt.[76] In effect, the Brotherhood would form an international financial network, closely tied to Western intelligence agencies, through which to finance acts terrorism falsely characterized as “Jihad,” perpetrated by agent-provocateurs, to serve as false-flag operations and to provide pretexts for expanded colonization of subject territories. As Robert Dreyfuss explained, the Muslim Brotherhood was a creation of the Oxford Movement and the Round Table:

The Muslim Brotherhood could not exist today were it not for the fact that the more backward elements of Muslim culture were observed, taken note of, and then carefully cultivated by Orientalists of the British Oxford and Cambridge universities. The Ikhwan is the result of the patient organizing of London’s agents in the Islamic world, men such as the famous T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”), Wilfred Scawen Blunt, E. G. Browne, Harry St. J. B. Philby, Arnold Toynbee, and Bertrand Russell.[77]

Though ostensibly founded for the defense of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood inherited the Salafi tradition of Jamal Afghani through Rashid Rida. Representing the growing alliance between Salafism and Saudi Arabia, which Rida had established, Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan al Muslimeen, were patterned on the violent Wahhabi henchmen of Ibn Saud, the Ikhwan. Banna’s Brotherhood was also established with a grant from England’s Suez Canal Company in 1928, and over the following quarter century would be at the disposal of British diplomats and MI6 as a tool of British policy.[78] To get the Brotherhood started, the Suez Canal Company helped Banna build a mosque in Ismaillia, that would serve as its headquarters and base of operations, according to Richard Mitchell’s The Society of the Muslim Brothers. The Suez Canal was pivotal to the British as the route to its prized colony, India, and in 1928 Ismailia also housed not only the company’s offices but a major British military base built during WWI.

Al Banna defined his movement as “a Salafiyya message, a Sunni way and a Sufi truth.”[79] Inheriting the esoteric tradition of Jamal Afghani, the Muslim Brotherhood therefore secretly represented the occult tradition of Ismailism. The Muslim Brotherhood would follow a similar practice of progressive indoctrination as devised by the Ismaili leader, Abdullah ibn Maymun, where he would successfully transform a devout Muslim through progressive stages towards ultimately accepting occult doctrines, and rejecting all religion as a sham. Nevertheless, they would hold to the belief in the need to adhere outwardly to their chosen religion, in order to deceive others into carrying out their subversive objectives. This is how the Muslim Brotherhood, while at its lower levels is presumed by its followers to be a truly Islamic organization, at its higher echelons is in league with the Western powers though a shared devotion to the ancient occult tradition, which is believed to be the true doctrine of all exoteric faiths. As Robert Dreyfuss described:

The Muslim Brotherhood is a London creation, forged as the standard-bearer of an ancient, antireligious (pagan) heresy that has plagued Islam since the establishment of the Islamic community (umma) by the Prophet Mohammed in the seventh century.

…The real story of the Muslim Brotherhood is more fantastic than the mere imagination of the authors of espionage novels could create. It functions as a conspiracy; its members exchange coded greetings and secret passwords; although no formal membership list exists, its members are organized into hierarchical cells or “lodges” like the European freemason societies and orders. The Muslim Brotherhood does not respect national frontiers; it spans the entire Islamic world. Some of its members are government officials, diplomats, and military men; others are street gangsters and fanatics. While the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are at home in plush-carpeted paneled board rooms of top financial institutions, at the lower levels the Muslim Brotherhood is a paramilitary army of thugs and assassins.

At its highest level, the Muslim Brotherhood is not Muslim. Nor is it Christian, Jewish, or part of any religion. In the innermost council are men who change their religion as easily as other men might change their shirts.

Taken together, the generic Muslim Brotherhood does not belong to Islam, but to the pre-Islamic barbarian cults of mother-goddess worship that prevailed in ancient Arabia. As much as the peddlers of mythology might want us to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood and Ayatollah Khomeini represent a legitimate expression of a deeply rooted “sociological phenomenon,” it is not the case.[80]

Though the Wahhabis vehemently oppose it, the Muslim Brotherhood embraces Sufism. From early on, al Banna was a member of the Hasafiyya Brothers, a sub-branch of the Shadhiliyya, founded by Hassanayn al-Hasafi, a scholar of al Azhar.[81] Many of the head lecturers of al Azhar University in Cairo have also been followers of the Shadhili. Prominent among them was Abdel Halim Mahmoud became an important source of inspiration for members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who eventually served as Grand Imam of Al Azhar, and who became an important source of inspiration for members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his articles were published in their magazines. First educated at Al Azhar, Mahmoud had also received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in France. Mahmood was known for his modernizing approach to teaching at Al Azhar, preaching moderation and embracing modern science as a religious duty. During his tenure as Grand Imam, Al Azhar witnessed unprecedented reform and revival, including the introduction of new faculties, teaching methods and management style.

In 1930, Guénon moved to Egypt permanently, choosing Islam as his outward religion and joined the Hamidiya Shadhili Sufi order. While in Egypt, other than al Kabir, Guénon had little contact with actual Muslim scholars, with the exception of Abdel Halim Mahmoud. Mahmoud met Guénon in 1940 and wrote, much later described him as “He who knows through God.”[82] Mahmoud taught Guénon’s work at al-Azhar University and attended his funeral ceremony in 1951. Having also been a disciple of the Shadhili, and a devotee of Ibn Arabi, Mahmoud is remembered for reviving Sufism through his prolific writings and lectures on the subject. Mahmoud is referred to by an honorific title of “al-Ghazali, in 14th Century AH,” accorded to him because of his purported attempt, mirroring the teachings of Guénon, to integrate the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of Islam.[83]

Standard Oil

In 1932, through British support, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded, making it the only country in the world named after a private family. The following year, the first Rockefeller oil wells in the country were drilled, which would provide the wealth to finance the Muslim Brotherhood in its proxy terrorism on behalf of American imperialism. The federal Commissioner of Corporations studied Standard Oil’s operations from the period of 1904 to 1906 and concluded that “beyond question… the dominant position of the Standard Oil Company in the refining industry was due to unfair practices – to abuse of the control of pipe-lines, to railroad discriminations, and to unfair methods of competition in the sale of the refined petroleum products.”[84] Finally, by 1911, public outcry reached a climax and the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Standard Oil was to be dissolved under the Sherman Antitrust Act and split into 34 companies. As Standard’s president, however, since he owned a quarter of the shares of the resultant companies, and those share values mostly doubled, John D. Rockefeller emerged from the dissolution as the richest man in the world.[85]

The first formal treaty between Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, a descendent of Muhammad ibn Saud, and the founder of the Kingdom, and the British had been signed in 1915. Assigned to assist him was Harry St. John “Jack” Philby, a protégé of E.G. Browne. Philby, who made a feigned conversion to Islam, taking on the name “Abdullah,” was responsible for conveying to Ibn Saud his monthly retainer of £5,000. Philby also escorted Ibn Saud’s teenage son, the future King Faisal, on a tour of London, including a visit to E.G. Bowne and Scawen Blunt.[86]

According to Colonel Harold Richard Patrick Dickson, in response to the reprimands from a British officer during their meeting at al-Aqeer conference—which began on November 21, 1922, and in which the borders between the Sultanate of Najd, the Kingdom of Iraq, and the Sheikhdom of Kuwait were drawn—Sultan Abdul Aziz al Saud bowed his head before the British High Commissioner Percy Cox and said:

Your grace are my father and you are my mother. I can never forget the debt I owe you. You made me and you held my hand, you elevated me and lifted me. I am prepared, at your beckoning, to give up for you now half of my kingdom… no, by Allah, I will give up all of my kingdom, if your grace commands me![87]

In 1933, Ibn Saud negotiated a sixty-year contract that allowed California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), an affiliate of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of California (SOCAL), to have exclusive rights to explore and extract oil.[88] The deal was negotiated with the assistance of  Allen Dulles, while at Sullivan & Cromwell, and Jack Philby.[89] According to John Loftus and Mark Aarons, Dulles and Philby, together with Ibn Saud, “were the secret source of oil, wealth, and international influence that worked behind the scenes to put Hitler onto the world stage.”[90] Dulles had met Philby while he served in the Division of Near Eastern Affairs. A large part of the concerns of the division was competition among the great powers over unexplored oil reserves. Already in Constantinople, Dulles met regularly with visiting managers of Standard Oil, Shell, or Socony, where he was able to discuss various political realities. As Peter Grose also noted, “Next to missionaries, Allen discovered, there were no better sources of international gossip than the oil men.”[91] Therefore, in 1924, Dulles had spelled out in an official State Department communication his interest in making use of oil exploration as a cover for intelligence gathering.

In 1936, Socal and Texaco created a partnership which would later be named the Arabian-American Oil Company, or Aramco. To Socal and Texaco were later added Exxon and Mobil. Together, with the remaining partners of the Seven Sisters, this cartel controlled the price of oil, along with the Saudi royal family, who managed the world’s largest source of petroleum. Being a country that is said to “belong” to the royal family and is named for them, the lines between state assets and the personal wealth of senior princes are often blurred.

Despite the initial breakup of the parent company, former Standard Oil companies would go on to dominate what came to be known as the Seven Sisters—the seven oil companies that controlled the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. They consisted of British Petroleum (BP), Gulf Oil, Texaco, Royal Dutch Shell, and three “baby Standards”: Standard Oil of California (Socal), later known as Chevron; Standard Oil of New Jersey, which eventually became Exxon; and Standard Oil Company of New York, or Socony, which eventually became Mobil. The last two companies in particular grew significantly over the next few decades.

The extent of the influence of the American petroleum industry and their relationship with Saudi Arabia was enshrined in 1943, when President Roosevelt proclaimed, “I hereby find that the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.”[92] In 1945, Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in Egypt to forge an important US-Saudi economic alliance. Roosevelt had acted on the advice of Harold Ickes, then Petroleum Coordinator for National Defense, and a State Department which in December 1942 had noted, “It is our strong belief that the development of Saudi Arabian petroleum resources should be viewed in the light of the broad national interest.”[93]

[1] Dan Cohn-Sherbok. Introduction to Zionism and Israel: From Ideology to History (A&C Black, 2011).

[2] Cited in Josef Cohn. England und Palastina (Berlin, 1931), p. 69.

[3] Eitan Bar-Yosef. “A Villa in the Jungle: Herzl, Zionist Culture, and the Great African Adventure.” In Theodor Herzl: From Europe to Zion, edited by Mark H. Gelber, Vivian Liska (Walter de Gruyter, 2012), p. 101.

[4] Burton A. Boxerman. The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia. Anne Cipriano Venzon (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 800.

[5] David Fromkin. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (Macmillan, 2012) p. 31.

[6] Andreas Dorpalen. The World of General Haushofer. Geopolitics in Action (New York: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1942)

[7] Clifford Shack. “The Rothchilds, Winston Churchill and the Final Solution.”

[8] cited in Clifford Shack.

[9] Thompson, J. Lee. “Fleet Street Colossus: The Rise and Fall of Northcliffe, 1896-1922.” Parliamentary History, 25.1 (2006) p. 115.

[10] Reginald Pound & Geoffrey Harmsworth. Northcliffe (1953), p. 208.

[11] Harry J. Greenwall. Northcliffe: Napoleon of Fleet Street (1957), pp. 56-57.

[12] Adrian Bingham. “Monitoring the popular press: an historical perspective.” History & Policy (May 2005). Retrieved from http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-27.html

[13] D. George Boyce. “Harmsworth, Alfred Charles William, Viscount Northcliffe (1865–1922).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).

[14] “Kent Today & Yesterday.” January 1, 2010. Retrieved from http://kenttodayandyesterday.blogspot.com/2010/01/viscount-northcliffe-1865-1922-pioneer.html

[15] “No. 30533.” The London Gazette (February 19, 1918), p. 2212.

[16] Arthur Balfour, letter to Alfred Harmsworth (May 7, 1896).

[17] “Famous Freemasons.” Blackpool Group of Lodges and Chapters. (December 10, 2015). Retrieved from http://blackpool.westlancsfreemasons.org.uk/about-freemasonry/famous-masons/

[18] Walter Nimocks. Milner’s young men: the “kindergarten” in Edwardian Imperial affairs (Durham: Duke University, 1968), p. 145.

[19] John Grigg. Lloyd George: War Leader, 1916-1918 (Faber & Faber, 2013).

[20] Chaim Weizmann. The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann: August 1898 – July 1931 (Transaction Publishers, 1983), p. 122–124.

[21] C.D. Smith. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict, 4th ed. (2001), pp. 60, 112.

[22] Michael D. Berdine. Redrawing the Middle East: Sir Mark Sykes, Imperialism and the Sykes-Picot Agreement (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), p. 173.

[23] Leonard Stein. The Balfour Declaration (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), pp. 310–311.

[24] An Introduction to Islamic Law, p. 66.

[25] Ayyub Sabri Pasha. Part Two: The Beginnings and Spread of Wahhabism.

[26] Federation of American Scientists [http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/iraqi/wahhabi.pdf]

[27] Correspondence, dated 24 Sep 2002, within the Genera lMilitary Intelligence directorate (GMID), regarding a research study titled, “The Emergence of AI-Wahhabiyyah Movement and its Historical Roots.” Defense Intelligence Agency. Document #: ISGQ-2003-00046659.

[28] Ibid.

[29] “The Saudi Dynasty: From where is it? And who is the real ancestor of this family?” Retrieved from http://www.fortunecity.com/boozers/bridge/632/history.html

[30] p. 26.

[31] Cited in Stephen Schwartz. The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2003), p. 86.

[32] Ouida, “Richard Burton,” Fortnightly Review, (June 1906).

[33] K. Paul Johnson, The Masters Revealed, p. 66.

[34] Colonel Churchill. Life of Abdel Kader (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867), p. 328, retrieved from http://www.archive.org/stream/lifeofabdelkader00churrich#page/328/mode/2up; Robert Morris, Freemasonry in the Holy Land. New York: Masonic Publishing Company, 1872. p. 577. Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/stream/freemasonryinho01morrgoog#page/n586/mode/2up

[35] Johnson. The Masters Revealed, p. 67.

[36] K. Paul Johnson. Initiates of Theosophical Masters, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 81.

[37] Samir Raafat. “Freemasonry in Egypt: Is it still around?” Insight Magazine, (March 1, 1999). Retrieved from http://surrenderingislam.com/essential-reading/freemasonry-egypt-it-still-around

[38] Ibid.

[39] R.F. Foster. Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 111, 120. 

[40] Longford Elizabeth. A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfred Scawen Blunt [sic] (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), p. 194. 

[41] Longford. A Pilgrimage of Passion, p. 219. 

[42] Warren Dockter. “The Influence of a Poet: Wilfrid S. Blunt and the Churchills,’” Journal of Historical Biography, 10 (Autumn 2011), p. 76-79.

[43] Homa Pakdaman. DJamal-ed-din Assad Abadi dit Afghani, (Paris, 1969), p. 57-8.

[44] Shaykh al Buti. Al la Madhhabiyya, p. 120.

[45] Robert Dreyfuss. Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005) p. 14.

[46] The words are those of Georges Descormiers, a follower of Encausse, quoted in Philippe Encausse, Papus, le “Balzac de l’occultisme”: vingt-cinq annees d’occultisme occidental (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1979), p. 31.

[47] Edward Rice. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography (Da Capo Pres, 1990), p. 527.

[48] Thomas Wright. The Life of Sir Richard Burton, (The Echo Library, 2010), p. 130.

[49] “Abder-Rahman Elîsh El-Kebîr,” Wikipedia, French edition, Retrieved from http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abder-Rahman_El%C3%AEsh_El-Keb%C3%AEr

[50] The symbolism of the Cross, chapter 10, n. 2.

[51] “The Spiritual Fascism of Réne Guénon and His Followers” Retrieved from http://www.naturesrights.com/knowledge power book/Guénon.asp

[52] Marc Baer. The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), Kindle Location 373

[53] H. Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future (Methuen & Co., London, 1906) p. 244 Retrieved from http://www.promacedonia.org/en/hb/hb_8_4.html#Bektashis

[54] Richard Davey. The Sultan and His Subjects [1897] (Gorgias Press LLC, 2001), p. 65.

[55] Joseph Brewda, “Palmerston launches Young Turks to permanently control Middle East,” Schiller Institute/ICLC Conference, February 1994. Retrieved from http://www.schillerinstitute.org/conf-iclc/1990s/conf_feb_1994_brewda.html

[56] Ibid.

[57] Joseph Brewda. “Palmerston launches Young Turks to permanently control Middle East.”

[58] Joseph B. Schechtman. The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky: Rebel and statesman (SP Books, 1986), p. 150.

[59] Rifat Bali. A Scapegoat for All Seasons: The Döonmes or Crypto-Jews of Turkey (Georgias Press, 2010).

[60] Marc David Baer. The Dönme: Jewish converts, Muslim revolutionaries, and secular Turks (Stanford Univeristy Press, 2010, p. 94.

[61] Mustapha Fawzi ibn ‘Abdulatif Gazal, Da’watu Jamaluddin al-Afghani fi mizan al- Islam, (The Da’wa of Jamaluddin al-Afghani in the Balance of Islam), (Riyadh 1983), p. 99.

[62] Rashid Reda. Tarikh al-Ustadh al Imam, Vol. I, p. 75.

[63] David Baer. The Dönme.

[64] Marc David Baer. “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Fall 2013) 523–555 p. 530.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Ibid.

[67] David Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism (Potomac Books, Inc., 2012).

[68] Gareth Jenkins. “Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey’s Ergenekon Investigation” (Silk Road Studies, August 2009).

[69] Marc David Baer (2013). “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic.” Jewish Quarterly Review. 103 (4): 523–555.

[70] Wayne Madsen. “The Dönmeh: The Middle East’s Most Whispered Secret (Part I).”

[71] Ibid.

[72] Howard. Secret Societies; Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 113.

[73] Dreyfuss. Devil’s Game, p. 43.

[74] Kl Chaim Weizmann. Reden und Aufsdtze (Berlin, 1937).

[75] Ibid., p. 41.

[76] “Islamic Terrorism’s Links To Nazi Fascism.” AINA, July 5, 2007. Retrieved from http://www.aina.org/news/2007070595517.htm

[77] Hostage to Khomeini, p. 101.

[78] Dreyfuss. Devil’s Game, p. 49 and 51.

[79] Richard P. Mitchell. The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London 1969), p. 14.

[80] Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini, p. 101.

[81] Hassan al-Banna. Mudhakkarat al-Da‘wa wa-l-Da‘iya (Cairo 1951), p. 20.

[82] Paolo Urizzi. Présence du soufisme dans l'œuvre de René Guénon, p. 410.

[83] Paper originally prepared by Hatsuki Aishima for an international conference “Sufism, Culture, Music” held from 12 to 15th November 2005 in Tlemcen, Algeria, Retrieved from http://islam-field.hp.infoseek.co.jp/aishima.htm

[84] Eliot Jones. The Trust Problem in the United States (1922). Chapter 5. pp. 65–66.

[85] Daniel Yergin. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p.113.

[86] Dreyfuss. Devil’s Game, p. 41.

[87] Minutes of meeting contained in official documents drafted by the British political officer in Bahrain at the time Colonel Harold Richard Patrick Dickson (H.R.P. Dickson), which he dispatched to the British Foreign Office in London on October 26, 1922; cited in Jafar al-Bakli. “Servant of the British Empire: On the founding of Ibn Saud’s kingdom.” Al Akhbar English (October 29, 2014).

[88] John Loftus & Mark Aarons. The secret war against the Jews: how western espionage betrayed the Jewish people (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994). p. 38.

[89] Ibid.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Grose. Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, p. 87.

[92] William Engdahl. A Century of War. Chapter 7, “Oil and the New World Order of Bretton Woods.”

[93] Geoffrey Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History (London & New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 122.

Volume Three

1. Synarchy

2. Ariosophy

3. Zionism

4. Eugenics & Sexology

5. The Round Table

6. The League of Nations

7. avant-Garde

8. Black Gold

9. Secrets of Fatima

10. Polaires Brotherhood

11. Operation Trust

12. Aryan Christ

13. Aufbau

14. Brotherhood of Death

15. The Cliveden Set

16. Conservative Revolution

17. Eranos Conferences

18. Frankfurt School

19. Vichy Regime

20. Shangri-La

21. The Final Solution

22. Cold War

23. European Union