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[ by Charles Cameron — flabberghasted by what new things he learns daily — comparative religion ]
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From the al-Qiyamah site:

Prophesied Sure Signs of Allah (SWT) will confirm Al-Qiyamah

Nafas al Rachman, breath of the Merciful, experienced daily by those taking part in Al-Qiyamah (The Resurrection) (Photo taken 1st August 2008 in Russia of the Nafas al Rachman which, though invisible to the naked eye, can be felt as Cool Breeze or Wind of the Resurrection flowing from hands, head and other parts of the body.)

Compare Acts 2. 1-4:

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

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If you follow Twitter, you’re familiar with the phrase “retweeting does not imply endorsement” — my equivalent here would be “juxtaposition does not imply eqivalence.”

[ by Charles Cameron — Ansar al-Din destruction of shrines in Timbuktu expands to include elimination of mosque door and haram eschatological belief ]
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@tweetsintheME This was the Door of al-Qiyama (aka “all hell will break loose if you open it door”). Guess it has. twitter.com/vatyma/status/…

— vatyma (@vatyma) July 2, 2012

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Various positions can be taken, with significantly different emphases, concerning the destruction of the shrines and mausoleums of Timbuctu.

There is the military assessment:

The international community fears the vast desert area will become a new haven for terrorist activity and the Islamists have threatened any country that joins a possible military intervention force in Mali.

The legal opinion:

International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on Sunday warned that the destruction could amount to a war crime. “My message to those involved in these criminal acts is clear: stop the destruction of the religious buildings now,” Bensouda told AFP in an interview in Dakar. “This is a war crime which my office has authority to fully investigate.”

The attacks come just days after UNESCO declared Timbuktu an endangered world heritage site, so there is the cultural preservation argument:

United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon deplored the destruction of tombs, with his spokesman Martin Nesirky quoting him as saying: “Such attacks against cultural heritage sites are totally unjustified.”

There is the condemnation from much of the Islamic world:

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation condemned the destruction, saying in a statement the sites were “part of the rich Islamic heritage of Mali and should not be allowed to be destroyed by … bigoted extremist elements.”

and:

Algeria condemned the destruction of tombs which “constitute a homage and a recognition by the local people to the saints and scholars who contributed to the flourishing of Islam in the region and to the spread of the values of tolerance and spirituality.”

And then there is the reason given by the Ansar al-Din themselves:

“God is unique. All of this is haram (forbidden in Islam). We are all Muslims. UNESCO is what?” spokesman Sanda Ould Boumama said on Saturday. He said the group was acting in the name of God and would “destroy every mausoleum in the city. All of them, without exception”.

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Here’s how the locals saw the destruction of one specific door into the Mosque of Sidi Yahia in Timbuktu:

Islamist militants in northern Mali on Monday destroyed the ‘sacred’ door of one of Timbuktu’s three ancient mosques after smashing seven tombs of muslim saints over the weekend, witnesses said. “The Islamists have just destroyed the door to the entrance of the Sidi Yahya mosque… they tore the sacred door off which we never open,” said a resident of the town. A former tour guide in the once-popular tourist destination said: “They came with pick-axes, they cried ‘Allah’ and broke the door. It is very serious. Some of the people watching began crying.”

Another man, a relative of a local imam (religious leader), said he had spoken to Islamist group Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith) who have gone on a rampage destroying cultural treasures after occupying the town for three months. “Some said that the day this door is opened it will be the end of the world and they wanted to show that it is not the end of the world.” The door on the south end of the mosque has been closed for centuries due to local beliefs that to open it will bring misfortune.

All quotes above from various versions of Serge Daniel’s AFP reporting, see eg: Islamists smash Timbuktu relics, plant mines in north Mali.

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Did you catch that?

Some said that the day this door is opened it will be the end of the world and they wanted to show that it is not the end of the world.

There’s irony for you: the Ansar destroyed the ancient door to demonstrate that it wouldn’t bring on the Yawm al-Qiyamah, the Day of Judgment and Resurrection — they’re demythologizing the legend that has it that it will open only on the Day — in the stilted translation offered by Google:

The Abu Turab; who is a member of Ansar al-Din, he emphasized that what happened is the kind of “Aspects of the elimination of superstition and heresy, and the excuse they may reach a trap,” adding: “We have heard our ears that there is a door in the courtyard of the Mosque of Sidi Yahia old if open The Resurrection, and verified what we learned from it that he canceled the door in the courtyard of the mosque is the door has been canceled accumulation Vtm filled soil on it.

Indeed, the photo in the tweet at the head of this post — which is subtitled The process of opening the door of the Holy Sepulchre in Tinbactu — actually downloads under the title “bab alqyama” — door of the Day of Resurrection.

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Belief in the Last Day, the Yawm al-Qiyamah, is mandatory of Muslims in accordance with the revelation of Qur’an 4.136:

O ye who believe! Believe in Allah and His Messenger, and the scripture which He hath sent to His Messenger and the scripture which He sent to those before (him). Any who denieth Allah, His angels, His Books, His Messengers, and the Day of Judgment, hath gone far, far astray.

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Here’s an image of one of the beautiful doors from the same mosque:

photo credit: Jean-Luc Dighaye, EurAstro visit to Mali

I am not clear whether this is a photo of the same door which was destroyed, however, and would appreciate any further info.

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You might like to drink a cool glass of water at this point, to cleanse your palate…

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Here’s my preferred quote on opening doors into sacred space:

When you have grown still on purpose while everything around you is asking for chaos, you will find the doors between every room of the interior castle thrown open, the path home to your true love unobstructed after all.

St. Teresa of Avila

h/t kathe izzo, who tweeted this today for reasons unconnected with Timbuctu as far as i can tell…

[ by Charles Cameron — Anabaptists, Amish, Mennonites and Robespierre, rock’n’roll, gaming ]
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I knew the Amish and Mennonites tended towards a pacifist interpretation of Christianity, but I had no idea until this evening that Robespierre had granted them special recognition on that account:

The matter was referred for a decision to the Committee of Public Safety. And on 19 August 1793 this body issued what was indeed not formally a decree, but simply a recommendation, in effect brief guidelines directed to local authorities, concerning the proper procedure to be adopted in dealing with drafted Mennonites. Among those signing, or confirming, this document we find the names of such prominent Jacobins as Robespierre, Carnot, Couthon, Hérault de Séchelles, and St Just. ‘We have observed the simple hearts of these people,’ states their arrêté, ‘and believing a good government ought to employ all kinds of virtue for the public good we ask you to treat the Anabaptists with a mildness that matches their character, to prevent them from being harrassed in any way, and finally to allow them to serve in such branches of the armed forces as they may agree to, like the pioneers or the teamsters, or even to allow them to pay money in lieu of serving personally.’

Peter Brock, Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War, University of Toronto Press, 2006, p. 76.

Amish Warfare, on the other hand, is either a rock band, or a playlist of YouTube videos “designed for various Call of Duty related topics”, or both.

Quite a name for a band.

Quite a stand to take, right at the start of the Reign of Terror.

[ by Charles Cameron — first in a series of three posts about celestial & terrestrial geographies ]
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Joel Rosenberg, again. This time it’s Damascus he’s on about, and he’s been discussing it with “a prominent Member of Congress”:

… the official asked, “What are your thoughts on Isaiah 17?” For much of the next hour, therefore, we discussed the coming judgment of Damascus according to Bible prophecy, and how this scenario could possibly unfold in the coming years in relation to other Bible prophecies and current geopolitical trends in the Middle East.

Should we file that under Foreign Policy background, Syria?

Rosenberg clearly thinks Damascus is Damascus — and it’s easy to see why, it’s almost a tautology, one might think:

These prophecies have not yet been fulfilled. Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth. It has been attacked, besieged, and conquered. But Damascus has never been completely destroyed and left uninhabited. Yet that is exactly what the Bible says will happen. The context of Isaiah 17 and Jeremiah 49 are a series of End Times prophecies dealing with God’s judgments on Israel’s neighbors and enemies leading up to — and through — the Tribulation.

How exactly will Damascus be destroyed? When will exactly it be destroyed? What will that look like, and what will be the implications for the rest of Syria, for Israel and for the region? The honest answer is that the Bible does not say. I’m currently writing a novel entitled, The Damascus Countdown, that envisions how these prophecies could come to pass.

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But wait — the idea that Damascus (the word) means Damascus (the place) may not be so obvious at all. Consider the possibility that the names of peoples and places are, well, somtimes a bit mixed up.

Read this, for instance, from Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Byzantium: Their ears were uncircumcised, in Harper’s, May 2102:

The Byzantines called themselves Greeks (because they were) and also Romans (because they had been). To the Muslims, who had been the Arabs (who had coveted Constantinople even before they were Muslims) but were later the Turks, the Byzantines were usually the Romans (Rum) and sometimes, though these Romans spoke Greek, the Latins (which to the Byzantines meant the barbarians of Western Europe), and sometimes the Children of the Yellow One, who was Esau. The Arabs called the Byzantine emperor (who signed his letters in purple ink EMPEROR AND AUTOCRAT OF THE ROMANS) the Dog of the Byzantines, and by the fifteenth century the sultan of the Ottoman Turks (whom the Muslims farther east called Romans and whom the Byzantines called Trojans) called himself sultan i-Rum in expectation that he soon would be and in recognition that he already, for most purposes, was.

You can see why GEN Boykin might think Dearborn is Damascus:

Dearborn, in fact, I’ve been there a couple of times recently, and if you walk down the streets, you would think you were in Beirut or Damascus.

Just kidding — Boykin sees a cultural similarity between them, that’s all.

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But Rum — that means Rome, remember? — figures prominently in Islamic apocalyptic, so we “need to know” what it actually refers to. Here’s Harun Yahya on the topic:

Another astonishing piece of revelation that the Quran gives about the future is to be found in the first verses of Surah Rum, which refers to the Byzantine Empire, the eastern part of the later Roman Empire. In these verses, it is stated that the Byzantine Empire had met with a great defeat, but that it would soon gain victory.

“Alif, Lam, Mim. The Romans have been defeated in the lowest land, but after their defeat they will themselves be victorious in a few years’ time. The affair is God’s from beginning to end.”(The Quran, 30:1-4)

Okay, Rome is Byzantium, got it. Constantinople. Istanbul.

Stamboul.

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Ibn Kathir, in The Signs Before Day of Judgement, offers this hadith from the collection Sahih Muslim:

Nafi’ ibn ‘Utbah said, “The Prophet said, ‘You will attack Arabia, and Allah will enable you to conquer it. Then you will attack Persia, and Allah will enable you to conquer it. Then you will attack Rome, and Allah will enable you to conquer it. Then you will attack the Dajjal, and Allah will enable you to conquer him.'”

Let’s get into a little more detail. Stephen Ulph quotes a writer in Al-Jama’a, a “periodical magazine on Algerian jihad affairs” in a 2004 piece in CTC’s Terrorism Monitor:

From Afghanistan comes the kernel of the Nation; it was the beginning…proud Iraq was not the end…for those infidels and the apostate agents in our lands there are not enough graves…it is high time that Rome had its Cross uprooted and the city decked out for the arrival of the new conquerors, passing through Al-Andalus and the Pavement of the Martyrs, and Vienna and Constantinople, to which we are yet drawn by a longing that grows in our breasts day by day. For our Prophet (who does not lie when he speaks, being the most truthful of speakers) did promise: “God hath set aside for me the world, and I beheld its east and western lands, and the dominion of my Nation shall reach unto that which was set aside for me.”

So Afghanistan is Afghanistan, Al-Andalus is Andalusia, Vienna is Vienna — and Rome is Rome along with the Vatican, eh?

Or is Al-Andalus Spain — or Afghanistan Khorasan for that matter?

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I was reminded by another sentence in Rafil Kroll-Zaidi’s piece in Harper’s —

Halfway between Heaven and earth were tollbooths where demons taxed the sins of the Byzantines.

— of the beautiful opening sentences of Charles Williams‘ lyrical “short history of the Holy Spirit in the Church”, The Descent of the Dove:

The beginning of Christendom, is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of the Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete. That measurement, the measurement of eternity in operation, of the bright cloud and the rushing wind, is, in effect, theology.

And the title essay of Guy Davenport‘s book The Geography of the Imagination should give us a clue that confusion as to what exactly is where is not solely the province of prophets and their interpreters. In a memorable sentence about the American artist Grant Wood, he writes:

If Van Gogh could ask, “Where is my Japan?” and be told by Toulouse-Lautrec that it was Provence, Wood asked himself the whereabouts of his Holland, and found it in Iowa.

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Photo credits:

Damascus: Roberta F under CC BY-SA 3.0
Vatican: Sébastien Bertrand under CC BY 2.0
Istanbul: Preference-events & elsewhere
Vienna: Canaletto, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien via Wikipedia
Cordoba: Timor Espallargas under CC BY-SA 2.5

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So. Where is Zion / Jerusalem?