I would like to present to you the best way I know how, the incredible and outstanding connection between Islam and the Qur'an today and the Ancient spiritual systems of km.t ("kemet", Ancient Egypt). In this blog, I would like to show you a different perspective of their Ancient religion based on some studying of the topic I've been doing that shows that while the popular view of modern scholarship is that the people of Kemet worshiped multiple deities, they actually practiced a spiritual and complex form of monotheism, a monotheism that parallels Islam. I am not an Islamic scholar nor a Egyptology expert, all of this is from research I've done independently. I only wish to share my interpretation of information I have learned in hopes that this knowledge can be passed onto someone else and they can learn something from it. Please feel free to leave any comments or questions you may have and I will try to answer them either in the same post, or more in-depth in a upcoming post.
The Kemetic/Islamic Connection
Islam, submission to God, is the Ancient, True Religion that has been in existence since the beginning of creation. All those who believed in and submitted to the One God in heaven were therefore Muslims. The Qur'an testifies to the fact that Allah sent messengers to all nations of mankind...
"And verily, We have sent among every Ummah (community, nation) a Messenger (proclaiming): Worship Allah (Alone) and avoid (or keep away from) Taaghoot (all false deities etc. do not worship Taaghoots besides Allah)." (An-Nahl, The Bee 16:36)
Therefore, while there were certainly disbelievers in all nations, we can still assume that the knowledge of the One True God existed among the people. So then we can also assume that Kemet was no different, they had their messengers and the knowledge of the One True God was amongst the people. With this knowledge amongst the people, there were believers who practiced a "way of life" submitting to the One God and in harmony with his laws and the universe, alas Islam.
So who did the people of Ancient Kemet worship?
Excerpt from the book "Egyptian Divinities: The All Who Are The ONE" by Moustafa Gadalla...
"The Ancient Egyptians believed in One God who was self-produced, self-existent, immortal, invisible, eternal, omniscient, almighty, etc. This One God was represented through the functions and attributes of "His" domain. These attributes were called the neteru (pronounced net-er-u; masculine singular: neter; feminine singular: netert). The terms gods and goddesses are a misrepresentation of the Egyptian term, neteru.
When we ask "Who is God?", we are really asking, "What is God?". The mere name or noun does not tell us anything. One can only define "God" through the multitude of "His" attributes/qualities/powers/actions. To "know" God is to know the numerous qualities of "God". The more we learn of these qualities (known as neteru), the closer we are getting to our divine origin.
Far from being a primitive, polytheistic form, this is the highest expression of monotheistic mysticism."
This is exactly the same in Islam. We believe Allah is self-produced, self-existent, eternal, almighty, etc. We also can only know and define Allah by his attributes, alas the 99 names i.e. Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim, Al-Aziz, etc. If one supplicates to Allah by saying "Al-Razzaq" and another supplicates to Allah saying "Ar-Rahim", they did not pray to two different divinities, they prayed to the same One God and addressed him based on their needs and His attributes. One was in need of something, so he addressed Allah by His attribute, "The Provider", while the other was in need of repentance, so addressed Allah by His attribute, "The Merciful".
This is how it also worked in Kemet. When one addressed Ausar (Osiris) and another addressed Tehuti (Thoth), they were not addressing two different gods or deities, they were addressing two functions/attributes of the One God, Ausar dealing with the One God's power of resurrection and Tehuti dealing with God's spoken Word being put into action.
These attributes, the neteru, were NEVER believed by the people of Kemet to be gods or any actual beings and were never worshiped as such. This would then eliminate any theories of the so called "gods and goddess" being aliens and/or jinn. The One God was NEVER drawn, depicted, or personified (in line with the laws of Moses and Islam), only his many functions/attributes. The purpose of the personification of these attributes were to put them in a narrative story form, which is the best way to express both physical and metaphysical concepts. In this way, an individual could understand and apply these concepts to himself and the universe, and by applying them the individual brings themselves in harmony with creation. The neteru were attributes and functions of God that applied to everything in the universe; in the ancient Egyptian language the word neteru is written without the vowels ntr. This word NeTeRu is where the word NaTuRe originates. The "laws of Nature" are really the laws/functions God has created for creation to exist the way it does. "Nature", everything from what goes on in the cosmos, the Earth cycles, to the plants and trees, to the many animals and insects, and to the microscopic world, is in constant harmony with each other and in constant submission to the Creator, alas in Islam. So when man, who Allah has blessed with free will, follows the laws established by his Creator, he is in harmony with all of creation.
Many (including the man in the videos below) believe Akhenaten was the one who tried to bring monotheism into Kemet with his worship of Aten. However, this is not true. Akhenaten developed a system where he was to be worshiped by the people and only he was to be in communication with Aten, whereas the people before were free to worship and be in communication with the Neteru (the many functions/attributes of the One God). Thus in this way, Akhenaten set himself up as a partner to God and made himself an idol to be worshiped. Akhenaten's system was eventually destroyed after his death and his reign was taken out of Egyptian records, and the old spiritual system was restored. This is like those who the Qur'an tells us about that throughout history set themselves up in worship with God and were destroyed for doing so.
As this is only an introduction, this is only touching the surface. I will start go in-depth about specific topics like the role of Pharaoh, the extreme similarities of the Creation story, the Day of Judgement, the names, purpose and meanings of specific Neteru, and many other things that link Ancient Kemet with Islam. In the meantime, look at these other sources that touch on the connection Kemet has to Islam.
Note: The man in this video mentions an uprising of the priest of Amun for power. This video is dated and newer studies suggest that this imbalance of power may have never happened. He made a connection between the Pharaoh in the Qur'an arguing with an Atenist (Monotheist) and linked that to Moses, Joseph, etc. Actually, a better connection is made with the Qur'an that the Atenist was the Pharaoh, perhaps even Akhenaten himself....
"Fir'aun (Pharaoh) said: "O chiefs! I know not that you have an ilah (a god) other than me." (Qur'an 28:38)
Here you see that when challenging Moses, Pharaoh did not refer to Ra, Ausar, or any other Neteru (which are the aspects of the One God, the Creator which Moses being Egyptian would have been preaching about), he referred to himself. Akhenaten is the only Pharaoh that place himself as the mediator between the people and the Divine and set himself up to be worshiped as a god on earth, while trying to destroy the spiritual system of the Neteru. This is literally inviting idolatry into Kemet, where Akhenaten is the idol. "A living god" was not the attitude of the Pharaohs of Kemet, their role was closer to a Caliph's role in Islam. More on that to come...
The Egyptian Source of the Arabic Language
Tracing the history of the Arabic language will lead us to Ancient Egypt. Ibn Hazm, the medieval Arabic scholar of Córdoba (died 1064), recognized that Aramaic/Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic were kindred dialects, derived from the Mudar, the dialect in which the Koran had been disclosed.
The original home of Arabic—the Arabic of the Koran came from the northwestern region of the Arabian Peninsula. These three kindred dialects (Aramaic/Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic) originated from the Moab region. Diodorus, Book I, [28, 1-4], tells of an Egyptian colony at present-day Moab.
. . . that the nation of the Colchi in Pontus and that of the Jews, which lies between Arabia and Syria, were founded as colonies by certain emigrants from their country [Egypt]; and this is the reason why it is a long-established institution among these two peoples to circumcise their male children, the custom having been brought over from Egypt.
It is therefore a logical step to consider the role of the Ancient Egypt language, as it relates to the later formulated Arabic language.
To decipher the Ancient Egyptian language and its grammar and syntax, modern-day Egyptologists studied the Arabic language. They assumed that Arabic, being an offshoot of the Ancient Egyptian language, would share much of the same grammar/syntax and vocabulary. It was generally the right assumption and thus Egyptologists were able to address the subject of the Ancient Egyptian grammar and syntax.
The Ancient Egyptian-controlled Moabi region is regarded as the home of the Mudar language, the forerunner of Arabic. The name Mudar is an abbreviated form of the Ancient Egyptian term, Medu-Neter, meaning the words/language of angels/gods. It is no accident that Moslems say that Arabic is the “language of angels”, in imitation of the Ancient Egyptian Medu Neter. The people of this Ancient Egyptian colony (Moabi) spoke and wrote the Egyptian language. Scripts found in the Moabi region look exactly like the Ancient Egyptian demotic style of writing.
The Egyptians were the only people in the Moabi region who had an available writing surface (papyri), and its associated writing tools of pens and inks. When Ancient Egypt lost power in Asia, there was no one to maintain a literate Mudar language, and as a result no more than a handful of written texts were found, because writing was/is not part of the nomadic life—a fact that was also affirmed by Ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah [chapter 5, sections 20-22].
The rise and unexpected sweeping success of the Islamic forces, in the 7th century CE, prompted the need to write the Koran. The new Moslem Arabs came up with a haphazard system of writing, which is very cumbersome. It took a few centuries to keep on fixing its flaws, and in the process, made it even more difficult. It took a couple of centuries after Mohammed’s disclosure of the Koran for an “Arabic script” to have some form. The end result was an Arabic script—that looks basically like the Ancient Egyptian non-pictorial style of writing, some variation in sound of vocabulary (because of the phenomena of sound shift), as well as the incorporation of some local Arabic vocabulary.
The Ancient Egyptian demotic writing, such as depicted on the Rosetta stone, resembles very much the Mudar—the forerunner of present-day Arabic writing. The Arabic script survived and continues to survive only because it is the only permitted language of the Koran and prayers for the Moslems. The fate of Arabic is connected to the fate of Islam.
The (Koranic) Arabic language tried to look different from its Ancient Egyptian (Semitic) source, by re-arranging the order of the abgd alphabet to a, b, t, th, …etc, which caused them more problems. Other Semitic languages like Hebrew maintained the same order of abgd alphabet.
Despite the Islamization of Egypt and making Arabic its official and only language, the spoken Ancient Egyptian language didn’t die. The so-called “colloquial Arabic” in Egypt is practically the Ancient Egyptian language with some intrusive (Koranic) Arabic dialect vocabulary. The spoken language in Egypt has its own peculiar ancient vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. To call the spoken Egyptian language “colloquial” or “vulgar” Arabic is a misrepresentation of the history and content of the languages of the region where Egypt was a prominent literate country that has fallen prey to the illiterate nomadic Islamic Arabs since 639 CE.
Moustafa Gadalla
http://www.egypt-tehuti.org/articles/arabic-language.html
I received this comment from a member of the
Wake Up Project Forums:
"Very nice find here, interesting stuff. So in a nutshell, are you saying that All of acient Egypt were worhsipping Allah or that only some groups were? Because there is quite a lot of stuff out there that suggests that Egyptians believed Jinn interceded with Allah, and all the symbology, people believeing Horus to be the antichrist and all that."
My response:
"I am suggesting that Kemet (Ancient Egypt) as a civilization for the most part were Muslims (worshipers of the One God). Though it seems the popular idea is that they worshiped jinn (based on The Arrivals and TADS), there is no evidence to support the suggestion that the people ever believed the Neteru to be actual beings.
Quoted from Plutarch's Moaralia, Vol. V:
"The Egyptians simply give the name of Ausar (Osiris) to the whole source and faculty creative of moisture, believing this to be the cause of generation and the substance of life-producing seed; and the name of Set they give to all that is dry, fiery, and arid, in general, and antagonistic to moisture. As the Egyptians regard the Nile as the effusion of Ausar, so they hold and believe the earth to be the body of Auset (Isis), not all of it, but so much of it as the Nile covers, fertilizing it and uniting with it. From this union they make Heru (Horus) to be born. The all-conserving and fostering Hora, that is the seasonable tempering of the surrounding air, is Heru (Horus). The insidious scheming and usurpation of Set then is the power of drought, which gains control and dissipates the moisture which is the source of the Nile and of its rising."
From that quote one can see that the understanding of the people of Kemet towards the Neteru weren't beings that were to be worshiped, but they were aspects/functions/attributes of God and how they were reflected in nature. Again NeTeRu = NaTuRe = NTR.
As for the symbols of masonry, the Illuminati, etc....all these symbols come from Kemet, I understand. My personal theory on that is this: When foreigners and invaders came into Egypt, they didn't completely understand the people of Kemet's complex sciences and systems. Europeans for example i.e. the Greeks, before coming into Egypt they already were polytheist. They believed in Zeus and Hercules and many gods and goddess. When they came into Africa, they saw the depiction of the Neteru and didn't understand the concepts and therefore went on to believe the people of Kemet worshiped the Neteru as multiple gods/goddesses, the same way they did. That's when the Greeks started to link certain Neteru to their own gods. Kemet was resistant to foreign customs for a long time but eventually the nation started to fall under foreign influence and that's where things changed. Foreigners started to learn the Ancient secrets of Kemet and then started using these secrets for their own evils. That's how you get the rise of freemasonry and the Illuminati, them using the sacred symbols, knowledge, and sciences that was stolen from Kemet.
Think about it like this, every nation that truly was pagan and idol worshipers was made to ruin, with very little documentation about that civilization. Ancient Kemet however is greatly preserved and documented and as a civilization, the people of Kemet were highly advanced in technology, science, and spirituality. There is so much knowledge, science and wisdom that comes from Kemet that's not even acknowledged many times. Do you think a civilization could be as successful as Kemet was without the help and guidance of Allah? When Kemet was resistant to change and maintained their spiritual and social system, they flourished. It was when they came under foreign influence and started deviating away from their "way of life" is when their civilization started to decline.
I even have a small theory that the prophet of Ancient Kemet could have been Enoch, considering that he was supposedly an Ethiopian (the people of Kemet in their own records say they descended from Ethiopia) and Enoch was the first to learn the secrets of creation (which the people of Kemet seemed to understand very well)."
Another comment from the same forum:
"Bro that sounds a lot like Hinduism too. for example Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva aren't individual 'gods' but are 3 attributes/functions of the manifest Brahman known as Ishvara which is the same as the concept of the manifest Allah (as opposed to the essence of Allah which is unmanifest just like Brahman).
However, Hinduism allowed for worship of individual entities who were representatives/incarnations/avatars of Vishnu for example. That's a bit like someone worshipping Prophet Mohammad as an Avatar of Al-Rahim because he was Rahim (merciful).
Idols became acceptable because they were viewed as stepping stones, for visualisation of an individual entity which would allow them to attain devotion and spiritual progress.
If you look at the pagans at the time of Prophet Mohammad and even long before that, it proves why this methadology is wrong. It results in further disunity whereas Islam is about obtaining total unity within a dual reality.
All the same, good thread."
My response:
"Correct, it is very close and similar to Hinduism. There's even studies that show the origins of Hinduism come from this concept in Ancient Kemet. I haven't really explored this part of the research yet, but I plan to do so Insha'Allah. It's important to keep in mind though that in Kemet there was no record of a physical entity being worshiped by the people (except Akhenaten) nor any record of the Neteru being physical beings that were worshiped.
One thing that has to be remembered is that for the people of Kemet, pictures were their written language. So with that in mind, you can draw a conclusion that the Neteru were pictures depicting concepts, not beings or gods to be revered. Pictures were the only way for the people of Kemet to explain concepts in a written language, hence "a picture tells a thousand words". "