Harun al-Raschid

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Harun al-Raschid receives the delegation of Charlemagne (Julius Köckert 1864)

Harun al-Rashid Arabic هارون الرشيد DMG Hārūn ar-Rašīd; * c. 763 in Ray ; † 809 in Tus in Persia, buried in Mashhad), a son of Caliph al-Mahdi of the Abbasid dynasty, grew up in the city of Balkh in the north of present-day Afghanistan in the care of the powerful Barmakid dynasty. In 778, al-Mahdi entrusted Yahya ibn Chalid with Harun's education. After the death of his brother al-Hadi, Harun al Raschid ruled as caliph from 786 to 809 and led the Abbasid caliphate to its economic, political and cultural flowering.

A major contribution was made by Yahya ibn Khalid, who was appointed vizier by Harun (786-803) and sought a balanced relationship between the Arab and Persian groups. Through his influence, Harun brought Christians and Zoroastrians to the court and had many Greek philosophical and scientific writings translated. He also invited many scholars and masters from India, especially Buddhists. Ibn an-Nadīm's Kitab al-Fihrist, a catalogue of Muslim and non-Muslim texts, contained a number of Buddhist works. Among them was an Arabic version of the account of Buddha's previous lives (Kitab al-Budd). In 803, the Barmakids were suddenly deprived of their power, their property confiscated and Yaha imprisoned together with his son Fadl, which also entered into the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, through which Harun al Raschid became very well known in the Western world.

At the time of Harun al Raschid, man's self-thinking developed after the cosmic intelligence Michael had descended and arrived in the earth region (Lit.:GA 240, p. 184). Shortly after his accession to power, he received Charlemagne's legation in 786 and presented the Frankish ruler with an Indian elephant named Abul Abbas as well as an elaborate water clock with an hour strike and automatic movement. Harun and Charlemagne never met in person, but maintained good diplomatic relations.

According to Rudolf Steiner, Harun al-Raschid was reborn as Francis Bacon and his wise advisor as Jan Amos Comenius. It is reasonable to assume that this "wise advisor" was Yahya ibn Khalid.

„A brilliant place for this Arabism was in Asia over at the court of Harun al Raschid, so in the age in which Charlemagne ruled in Europe. But while Charlemagne was barely beyond being able to write and read, to unfold the most primitive beginnings of culture, a most magnificent culture lived in the court of Harun al Raschid. Harun may not have been an entirely good mind, but he was a comprehensive mind, a penetrating, brilliant mind, a universal mind in the best sense of the word. He gathered together at court all the wise men who were the bearers of what could be known at that time: Poets, philosophers, physicians, theologians, architects, all these lived at the court of Harun al-Raschid, guided by his great spirit.

Now, at this court of Harun al Raschid lived a very eminent, significant spirit, a spirit who - not at that time in the incarnation at the court of Harun al Raschid, but in an earlier incarnation - had been a real initiate. You may ask: does not an initiate, going through the incarnations, remain an initiate? One can have been a profound initiate in an earlier epoch, and one must use that body in a new epoch, one must undergo that education which can come out of that epoch [...].

Thus the personality of whom tradition says that he made great arrangements for all the sciences at the court of Harun al Raschid was at that time only one of the greatest sages of his time, with a talent for organisation so outstanding in spirit that much of what worked at the court of Harun al Raschid emanated from this spirit.

Now Arabism spread through the centuries. We know about the wars that Europe waged to put Arabism in its place. This was not the end of it: the souls who had worked in Arabism pass through the gate of death, develop further through the spiritual world and remain in a certain way at their work. So it is with the two individualities of Harun al Raschid and his wise counsellor who lived at his court.

Let us first follow Harun al Raschid. He passes through the gate of death, evolves through the spiritual world. The outer form of Arabism is being pushed back; Christianity is implanting its exoteric character, which it has gradually assumed, in Central and Western Europe. But as little as it is possible to continue to work in the old form of Mohammedanism, of Arabism in Europe, so much is it possible that the souls of those who once lived at the court of Harun al Raschid in this brilliant civilisation and received the impulse to continue to work in it, just continue to work.

Thus we see that Harun al Raschid himself is reincarnated in the much-mentioned personality of Baco of Verulam, that English leading spirit from whom the whole modern scientific way of thinking and thus much of what now lives in man is influenced. Harun al Raschid could not spread from London, from England, a culture and civilisation formed in the strict sense of Arabism; this soul had to use the form that was possible in the Western Occident. But the whole basic trait, the basic characteristic of that which Baco of Verulam poured over the European way of thinking, that is the old Arabism in the new form. And so it is precisely in that which is the scientific way of thinking today that Arabism lives, because Baco of Verulam was the re-embodied Harun al Raschid.

The wise man who lived at his court, he too passed through the gate of death; but he went a different way. He could not submerge himself in such a materialistically minded spiritual current as Baco could submerge himself in, he had to remain with a more spiritual spiritual current. And so it happened that in the same age in which Baco of Verulam was active, another spirit was active - but now in Central Europe - which in a certain sense met in soul with that which emanated from the soul of the reborn Harun al Raschid. We see, as it were, the Baco current pouring from England towards Central Europe, from West to East. The fact that the soul, I would say, brought back this view of Arabism from Spain and France, makes it clear that it had a different content from that soul which passes through the gate of death and, while passing through the spiritual world, directed its gaze to that which was in Eastern and Central Europe, and was reborn in Central Europe as Amos Comenius. He renewed what he had lived out at the court of Harun al Raschid out of oriental wisdom, in that in the 17th century he was the personality who quite energetically advocated the idea: A spiritual, a structured spiritual goes through the development of humanity. - It is often trivially said that Comenius believed in the "Millennial Kingdom". That is trivially speaking. In reality, it means that Comenius believed in epochs in the development of humanity, that he assumed a spiritual development of world history structured from the spiritual world. He wants to show that a spiritual substance runs through and weaves through the whole of nature: he writes a "Pansophia", an all-wisdom. There is actually a deep spiritual trait in what Arnos Comenius did. At the same time, he was an innovator of education. This is well known: he strove for clarity; but for a different clarity than materialism, for a thoroughly spiritual clarity. I cannot go into this in detail, I can only point out how Arabism in Western form, Arabism in Oriental form, flowed out from what arose, emerged in Central Europe from the confluence of these two spiritual impulses.“ (Lit.:GA 240, p. 45ff)

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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