Er... This article is called this because 'a friend' (as in, not a Mafia 'friend!' but an actual ordinary person who is a friend) will like the title. LOL
Anyway, it's not so much that someone the Arabic literature calls 'Salman' was a liar, more that well, he never even existed and was a lie.
Salman the Persian ('Salman Al Farsi') was theoretically a contemporary of Muhammad (supposedly 570 - 632) and both was older than Muhammad and outlived him by twenty years as well...
'Salman the Persian' was also a military commander who fought wars for the Sassanian Empire (since he was a Persian by birth), then for the Christian Byzantines, then for the Arab Muslims, against the Sassanians in the famous (though independently historically non-existent) Battle of Badr.
'Gate of Heaven' Persian silk rug. |
I mean you know, it's truly a wonderful kind of nonsense that people believe if you let them all.
There is absolutely not one single historical reference for any of this 'Salman the Persian.' 'Salman' is not a Persian name, and even the popular Islamic literature assigns him several other different names, depending on which fairy tale they want to tell at the given moment: he is variously 'Roozbeh, and 'Luqman' (an Ethiopian person yet somehow too, the same person!), and 'Salman.'
One reason there is a 'Salman' connection to the fictional figure, is because there really was a vast treasure (like the treasure of Kong Solomon) which was ultimately found in 1911, that belonged to the Iranian House of Karen.
The Battle of Badr is a famed incident in the Islamic narrative and is given as the key turning point of Muhammad's fortunes and Wikipedia has a long entry on the whole thing and when your read it you will realize there is not one single independent external historical reference given - and that is because there simply isn't one. The thing never happened.
What did happen was a Battle of al-Qadisiyyah - which took place in Iraq at Kufar in 636. And here, Arabic forces decisively overthrew the Sassanid Army and took control of Ctesiphon particularly, and sacked it, burning the Great House of Learning (where the Jews had their central religious legal 'highest court' located at the time) to the ground destroying almost every ancient book.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, so to speak, the Persians were feuding among themselves at the top, Kosrow II was executed by his own son and things just went downhill super fast from there.
Once the Great Library was destroyed, all that remained more or less, were learned people who could remember what was contained in those books and texts. And people who wanted to know something, would have to consult such 'memory specialists' and have them recite what they recalled.
In any event, much much earlier, the Great Library of Alexandria had been burned almost completely too, then after the Ctesiphon destruction (around 636), the second 'Great (or also 'Grand') Library of Baghdad' was once again completely burned in 1258, necessitating once more, people with the memory resources, to try and re-construct various important books.
So we have a bunch of significant things happening in Baghdad and at Ctesiphon 20 miles away (which was in fact the largest city in the world at the time, rather than 'Baghdad' itself)... ...and then suddenly, two hundred years later, everything gets shifted to a place that had never even featured in any ancient map at all, a thousand miles South and West, at a place now called 'Mecca...'
This fellow, Ibn Mujahid, starts to write down 'the history' and he has another guy 'Al-Tabari' (839 - 923) who writes commentaries on this, and it all gets placed as having happened in Mecca... ...where there is no actual historical record, no monuments made at the time, or any archaeology of any kind whatsoever, of any of these things.
'Persian buttercups' - are actually Ranunculus flowers. |
So. Suddenly, and without reference to the Great Libraries that have all burned down, some people develop this skill of learning from memory and reciting, something important about certain important things.
...Meanwhile, there is this lonely guy, out somewhere, virtually unknown, and he has a few of the remaining old partly-burned books, and he has some recollection of what was in those that had been completely burned. No one listens to him because he hasn't taken any swords with him and he cannot force his views on anyone.
Or maybe there are two or three 'lonely guys.'
Not to worry, today, we have Wikipedia, and this will tell us the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
...At the mythical 'Battle of Badr' a few hundred soldiers overcame thousands of heavily-armed Quraysh soldiers, following which 'Muhammad' established his over all conquest and his mission and so on. However, the mythology says that a ''heavenly army of angels dressed in green' and there are so many 'recorded conversations' between soldiers and participants and even angels, that the whole thing is like Henry V by Shakespeare, Olivier's version.
Persian 'mist of love' or Nigella plant aka Persian Jewels flowers; half of the dye source for Persian green dye. |
Chapter 8, verse 12 of the Quran explicitly says thousands of angels strengthened the ranks of Muslims.
Today, two billion, nay four billion plus if you add Xtians as well, and then even more if you throw in the Jews - want to get back in through 'the Gates of Heaven' and Muslims say they know where this is, some Rabbis says they know, and half of California says it knows and the 'green haze' associated with the pathway there has simply nothing whatsoever to do with Snoop Dogg's legalized marijuana shops.
Meanwhile, there is is this lonely guy out on a hill somewhere, or perhaps in a plain, or at the coast - hell I don't know - but he has this other account, right...
Like Salman the Persian/Christian/Muslim/Ethiopian, who lived twice as long as Muhammad, this old guy is also fifty times older than you and no one can say where he came from or how he got there or when he might consider dying and leaving you alone - but he says this:
Nigella (Lawson) was named not simply because it is the female form of her dad (Nigel)'s name, but because it means the plant from Persia from which comes both the 'Persian Jewel' (which is a flower, not a gemstone) and half of the dye needed to make the green velvet and silk clothes and covering for the armor of the knights of Karen, a strange mobile group of people who possessed not just amazing knowledge of battle strategy but also practical skills of fighting, as well as a treasure box of real material wealth.
Lawson |
And the angels, whole 'armies' of them, well these you may easily locate on mountainsides where the Persian buttercups grow, and where the Persian Jewels - also known as 'love in a mist' - flower in Spring, since, even angels require actual authentic raw materials to make their dye, that is, if they want to dye something green.
You see, authentic 'istabraq' (unique green-colored Persian silk), which features in Jannat al-Firdaus (the highest part of Heaven), has to be made from authentic ingredients; it's not all just 'made up' in the sky there!
But see, this is the bit you don't believe. Because you choose, voluntarily, to believe those people who have never been inside the Gates of Heaven, who don't know or care anything about what was really lost by the vandals burning down the great libraries of knowledge, and who haven't got the first clue about any angelic things but who know all about swords and killing and those things and pushing you around.
Sidrat ul-Muntaha. The farthest tree of all... At the furthest boundary... Even the angel Jibreel stopped there and went no further.
Like I said though, you believe certain stuff easily, and certain other stuff not at all. Okay maybe, some of you don't believe anything. You want scientific proof and evidence.
Sci-i-i-i-i-i-ence.
That thing.
Joe Rogan the other day was marveling about how HG Wells 'predicted' some amazing things about the future (well it was the future when he was writing it down). Lucky no one burned his books though because then Joe would have nothing to 'marvel' about now. Mohammed Hijab, this Islamic apologist was clamoring on about how come Rogan was so stunned about HG Wells when he could have been just as stunned by the prophecies of Muhammad... ...and this is broadly speaking, true enough to an extent; because there are some futuristic things that come out of the Islamic literature, though those things are looked down upon by mainstream Islamic scholars since they verge onto the occult.
Illustration from 'Ferdinand the Bull.' Illustration by Robert Lawson. |
Same with many of you - you look down upon the occult, and even seek to manufacture a scientific rationale for it by suggesting it all probably has to do with drugs, or altered states and so on.
'Occult' just means 'hidden.' It means unless someone has shown you how to remove the covering, you ain't gonna 'see' it. And then, worse yet, because of the sustained culture of ignorance into which you have been born and in which you are raised, even when you 'see' it, you will deny its reality, and make up other ideas about what it means so long as this is not what it actually means. Because what it actually does mean disturbs your sense of reality.