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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 — 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?

[ by Charles Cameron — Timbuktu tombs, cultural preservation, WWII, miracle stories, della Robbia ]

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A report on Al Jazeera today is sub-headed:

Al-Qaeda-linked group in northern Mali attacks tombs of Sufi saints just days after sites put on UNESCO endangered list.

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My friend Michael Robinson just pointed me to this piece by Dr. Laurie Rush on “Cultural Property Protection as a Force Multiplier, from the March-April edition of Military Review:

Preservation of cultural property can be critical for social restoration in a devastated community. During World War II, the Germans systematically blew up every single structure in the small town of Pieve Santo Stefano, Italy. Incredibly, they failed to destroy the Andrea della Robbia altarpiece relief, Assumption of the Virgin, in the local church. The MFAA wanted to remove the piece for its own protection, but the prospect of its relocation was unthinkable to the citizens of the community. Instead, the MFAA worked with them to save the altarpiece as part of the town’s restoration. Cultural property that survives war, sometimes miraculously, offers hope when all else seems lost.

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Miracles and rumors of miracles…

Picking up where I left off last time: people with a non-miraculous worldview are apt to use the word “miraculous” to describe something like that altarpiece surviving, meaning roughly “fortunate” — while those whose worldview includes and welcomes miracles will use the same term in a very different sense, and with very different feeling.

These are differences that make a difference.

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Here, because I was curious, is another Andrea della Robbia Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece, this one from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection, London:

Miraculous? Me personally, I’d say so.

[by Charles Cameron — the difficulty of difference, plus a poem for M ]
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When you have a worldview, it all fits together pretty seamlessly. You see a map of record high temperatures such as the one above, swiped from emptywheel today, and it’s either global warming, and maybe:

this is getting to a point where the terror industry and the homeland security industry, generally, needs to come to grips with the fact that the biggest immediate threat to the “homeland” is not terrorism or drugs or even hackers, but climate change…

or it’s the hot face of an angry God:

And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.

— Revelation 16.8

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I read the Book of Revelation in much the same spirit in which I read William Blake or WB Yeats — as figurative, imaginative thinking rather than future history. Record high temperatures, rising sea levels, dazzling storms, wildfires and the like I tend to view as natural phenomena belonging to the realm of science as far as causation is concerned, and to first responders and FEMA in terms of crisis response.

But they’re still awesome, the poet in me still stirs…

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What concerns me here, though, is not to explain my own position nor to refute or approve either the prophetic or scientific explanations, but to emphasize that when you have a worldview, you have explanations ready-made in place for (almost) whatever happens.

And that goes for the Taliban, for Al Qaida, for the Brotherhood, for Christians of the Dominionist or Soon Coming or Episcopalian varieties, for Buddhists, for Scientists, and for many who are braiding their own, picking up different strands in different places as they go along.

If someone else’s worldview is not your worldview, it may very well be as different as the world in which God is blasting His displeasure at Washington DC is different from the world in which Washington DC needs to do something about global warming before nature re-balances our ecosystem in a manner we find decidedly inhospitable.

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In a shared worldview, you can talk face to face. Across worldviews, you can only talk worldview to worldview — and the “other” worldview may well be unable to make sense of what you say or do, or take a meaning from it that has serious negative consequences for you in your world.

Just yesterday, Gulliver tweeted:

I know this sounds crazy for a defense analyst, but sometimes I put myself in another country’s place and think about how it must see U.S.

— Gulliver (@InkSptsGulliver) June 29, 2012

Ha!

But it’s true, as Paul Van Riper said and I know, I’ve quoted him before, but this is good:

What we tend to do is look toward the enemy. We’re only looking one way: from us to them. But the good commanders take two other views. They mentally move forward and look back to themselves. They look from the enemy back to the friendly, and they try to imagine how the enemy might attack them. The third is to get a bird’s-eye view, a top-down view, where you take the whole scene in. The amateur looks one way; the professional looks at least three different ways.

The thing is: how do you get inside a magical head with a rational mind?

It’s not impossible, mind you — but it takes great strength of imagination.

That’s the point I’m trying to make here. Done. Finished.

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And this is for Madhu, who encourages me to post my poems:

Storm words
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There are no words for the stride of thunder –

pounding stride of clouds across a drumhead of plains,
the traveling downpour, drenching
the dry gullies and passing, words cannot
see nor show what the eye sees, the great lights
thrown, the target trees scorched and left —

but for man who lives in the path of thunder,
wrestling a little grass for soup from the parched land,
feeling thrum of a god’s advance under bare feet,
seeing the lowering god with his bright arms striding,

sensing the god’s strong coming, longing
for the fresh grasses after the storm’s passing,
the calm that follows the god: fearing
the god’s blasting, scorching, man’s words are prayer.

[ by Charles Cameron — forecasting, relihttp://zenpundit.com/?p=10194&preview=truegious and otherwise ]
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As I write, there are fires still raging in the area of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

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Years ago (in October, 1982?) I lived in a little place called El Nido, the Nest, about half way up Corral Canyon in Malibu, California. My papers were there, a decade’s worth of my thinking and writing, all highly flammable. I was in Santa Monica as it happened, watching a wildfire that had jumped the many lanes of the Ventura Freeway — eucalyptus bark carries flame nicely in a high wind — and was pouring down the dry scrub hills towards the coast, and I heard a police spokesman say the fire had been diverted into two mostly uninhabited canyons — Corral and Latigo — to avoid any risk of the fire reaching the prestigious Malibu Colony a little ways down the road.

That fire burned to within fifteen feet of our house.

The Colorado Springs fires are in the immediate vicinity of the US Air Force Academy, in and around the city the Guardian calls “the ‘evangelical Vatican'” and NPR “a Mecca for Evangelical Christians”.

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When Hurricane Katrina flooded 80% of New Orleans in August 2005, Pastor John Hagee said:

All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. … I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

When Haiti was hit by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in 2010, killing 300,000 and rendering more than a million people homeless, one-time pastor Pat Robertson said:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about. … They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another…

Now it’s the turn of Colorado Springs, the Evangelical Vatican or Mecca.

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Here’s Joel Rosenberg blogging on the topic of the Colorado Springs fires:

Thousands of years ago, God told the Hebrew prophet Haggai to write down these words: “For thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘Once more in a little while, I am going to shake the heavens and the earth, the sea also and the dry land. I will shake all the nations. . . . I am going to shake the heavens and the earth. I will overthrow the thrones of kingdoms and destroy the power of the kingdoms of the nations’” (Haggai 2:6-7, 21-22). This is Bible prophecy. This is an intercept from the mind of the all-knowing, all-seeing God of the universe. It is a weather report from the future, if you will, a storm warning.

His headline?

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Juan Cole has a different set of resources, a different worldview:

Over the coming decades, the American Southwest will become drier and warmer as a result of all the carbon dioxide and soot that the US, China and other industrial societies are dumping into the atmosphere.

[ … ]

Professor Max A. Moritz at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues find the long-term probability of increase of forest fires in the American southwest is high.

Texas and Arizona are among those states at risk — further evidence that the Red States that engage in active climate change denial are committing suicide. I suspect most Coloradans know exactly what is happening to them and why, and my heart goes out to them.

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It appears that Boulder, too, may be under some degree of threat, and is preparing for possible evacuation.

Boulder, as very distinct from Colorado Springs, is where the Buddhists thrive — home of Naropa University and much more besides.

Best watch out, Boulder. Some Buddhists — as true to the Buddha’s teaching, perhaps, as Rev. Hagee is to those of Christ — hold views about Karma that seem remarkably similar to Rev. Hagee’s views about the wrath of God.

I’m thinking of Sharon Stone:

Stone, 50, who was speaking to reporters at the Cannes film festival, criticised the Chinese government’s actions in Tibet and directly linked them to the disaster: “I’ve been concerned about how should we deal with the Olympics, because they are not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine,” she said. “And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma – when you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”

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God, nature or karma — whatever it is, it appears to be an equal-opportunity creator and destroyer.

We’re human.

With our heads, we’d like to explain and blame. With our hearts we are terrified, concerned, meditate, pray, fear, love. And help.