Part 5 The Crux of the Problem – and it’s Solution
Addendum: Can Jesus, the Mahdi and the dajjal surpass or even match The Avengers? How our ideas of Prophecy and the Future are Manipulated.
[Part 1: Past Ummahs and Our Delusions – Part 2:Contrasting Present and Past – Part 3:The Trap and Background Music – Part 4:Miracles in the Seemingly un-Miraculous – Part 5:Conclusion, Crux and Solution]
Peace upon those who seek peace,
We are now at the end of this journey. Let’s consider a few things together.
When The Mahdi does arrive, if he has not already arrived, realize that you may be unable to even recognize him for what he is because what you are expecting as miraculous is not congruent with reality, al-Haqq, itself. What you may be looking at and not perceiving is just be some guy, someone who seems like a total nobody to the entire world, with a small group of friends or small band of followers doing something or other out in the Middle East. Perhaps some minor rag-tag group or small faction, or just a small group of disparate individuals who blip in and out of the news you watch every single day. And perhaps only in the alternative and fringe news, and not even the mainstream press. While you skim the headlines you may see mention of this tiny group, derided as a group of no account, while you and the rest of the entire planet utterly fail to realize what was occurring.
Consider the difficulties in identifying one man by what you consider to be clear indications.
The Illogic of Expectations, Negative and Positive identifying
Why do we expect the future to be essentially different than our present? Why do we surmise that it should be any less mundane than today, that it should be different from the day to day reality that we already see constantly unfolding around us? Is the end cataclysmic? Without a doubt, but could it be that our understanding of the cataclysmic is warped?
You can’t really easily identify people by the things they do not do, for this is a negative identification and positive identification is far easier. We all tend to be able identify people by things that they do and which are apparent to our observation.
Consider deeply the matter of positive identifying. Would you be able to identify one of us if all that you knew is that we don’t east fresh tomatoes? How would you pick any of us out of a million people simply given the sign that we don’t eat tomatoes? This is a negative identifying, you wouldn’t be able to identify people by negative means, by the things they do not do, or the things they do not like. I challenge you to find one man by only three signs, he is not Chinese, he does not have red hair, and he does not pray tahhajud on Thursdays.
Logically we cannot easily identify people by the things the don’t do or are not; it is easier to identify people by the things they do or are. But for Prophets and Messengers the main way to identify them is simply that they are different from the masses. Such men do not do the petty and stupid things that most of us tend to do. Prophets and Messengers do not lie, or cheat in their transactions, or fornicate. In a sense they are basically like hermits, they do not go out there flaunting themselves and making spectacles. Apart from moral uprightness and honesty by in large they do not stand out very much, they dress simply and when they do go out and preach it tends to be things that the majority of humanity find rather boring, such as believe in one God, seek righteousness, do not lie and steal, do not fornicate with your neighbors wives and daughters. When they go to people’s doors the people who hear them probably respond along the lines of; “Okay, thank you very much old man, we have to got to bed and put our kids to sleep” and roll their eyes.
If such men showed up in a town square with a Mariachi Band, however, would the people forget them? Not by a long shot. Prophets do not have mariachi bands following them in their wake. Imagine yourself on any street corner today, in Paris, or New York, or Cairo, or Tunis, or London; imagine yourself standing there all day in simple clothes of the age, dressed like any clean but humble working man, telling people to desist from unrighteousness. They will just see you as a boring crazy guy on a street corner, but they will all run to see the Mariachi band that just set up a few blocks down the road and the charismatic lead singer with an eye-patch and sequins in his sombrero. This is the reason why the prophesied future may already be here and you don’t recognize it. Because it doesn’t have special effects or a musical soundtrack, and all of your life, whether you admit it or realize it, or not, this has been what you have been expecting.
Consider Today
For all you know The Mahdi could have given you a Khutbah once in your life, or you may have seen him having an argument outside of a Coffeehouse with a group of irate brothers, you may have witnessed him in ordinary clothes, talking to people who rejected him. In fact it is entirely possible he may have been somewhere being given a lecture and lesson by a group of people who actually thought they knew better. The Mahdi may have even been preached to by them, berated with fingers wagged at him by someone who thought he was qualified to teach, and we have a lot of those in the Ummah. Perhaps he and his entire small group may have been passed by, somewhere, and no one had a clue as to who they really were.
The Mahdi could not only be this small group but the Prophesies concerning his actually ruling and holding Amirate could be fulfilled while you are totally clueless to the reality of the situation beneath the appearances. Because, like Bani Isra’el 2000 years ago, you were expecting unreality, when reality was staring you in your very face. Jesus son of Mary, ‘Isa Ibn Mariam, could have come and gone for all you know, while you missed him. The False Messiah, al-Dajjal himself, could have come out, ‘ruled’ the entire world, passed from town to town and entered every place except Medina, been killed, and all the while you were eating a bowl of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes in your slippers, watching CNN and not having a clue as to what you were witnessing. Do you realize the enormity of this problem? This is what we are up against, that an entire Ummah of nearly 2 billion individuals may be none the wiser of the essential reality of what they have collectively expected for centuries.
Do not misunderstand us, we are not saying that this is happening today, but we are saying it could have happened, and you would be none the wise. We are saying that if you disregard this possibility you could very stupidly putting your entire Islam and Iman in grave danger, all the while feeling quite secure.
What This All Means
What does this all mean, in terms of actual consequences of our argument? What it means is that when you do read Prophesy, and when you do consider The Future, you must throw off any and all interpretations of the miraculous, and consider the whole matter with truly fresh eyes. When some interpretations offer you an easily detectable sign, ask yourself how easily detectable it really is. The very prophesies themselves all but say that the majority of people will not understand them and will not see what is going on. And further more that when the people finally do see things they will deny them. So where does this leave us? How are we going to recognize or tell the signs when they are staring us in the face? That truly is the dilemma; if such signs are actually not easily detectable or may not even generate a blip of attention in the mainstream news, then what chance do any of us have? If we try to be even hyper-aware so too others in the past were hyper-aware and yet still were deceived.
Some of you reading this are probably well steeped in Qur’an, Hadith, and Prophesies. You’ve probably studied it all in depth, and maybe even dedicated many years of your life to it. You may saying saying to yourself ‘this guy is an idiot!’ or worse ‘this guy is a mubtadi!’ Perhaps you are thinking, well we clearly know the signs by heart.
Well, do you?
You say that The Mahdi will appear in Makkah.. Reflect on this, have not dozens of men appeared in Makkah, over the centuries and a few still even had followers. Some were the children or grandchildren of Sahabah and there were Mahdist expectations of them (which in short negates the skepticism of some in the Ummah who blindly reject the concept in spite of multitudes of Sahih Hadiths explicitly on the Mahdi, the fact that in th first 3 generations people explicitly asked of him and expected him is sufficient proof for anyone with intellect or Iman) These men, when they appeared, were denied, most were even killed, and some were actually killed in the Kaaba itself, and indeed a few by the actual people of Makkah itself, let alone by distant authorities far away. Each man is a data blip on your screen. If this mere sign was so obvious thousands of people over a 1300 odd year period would not have been deluded.
Also reflect on the fact that many pretenders to thee Mahdi arouse outside of Makkah and were followed by just by rustic uneducated ‘Araab and Bedouins, but by learned scholars. These scholars knew such signs as well as you do, and may have had access to Ahadith that you do not given the extinction of many collections through the centuries. Yet they still were deluded.
Another clear sign you may offer up is that The Mahdi will be 40 years of age. Really? Are you not aware that some narrations and their interpretations offer a range of years, from 39, or 38, or 30, or 18, or even 52 and 51, or 62. So now; which Mahdi do you prefer?
Another clear sign that you may offer is that he will be white in face, bright. Some sources however say Asmar – أَسْمَرَ, what does this even mean, does it mean olive skin?
Another clear sign you may offer is that he is tall, beyond the simple subjective nature of height , know that others say short.
Is the Mahdi weighty, hefty and big? But some narrations say that he’s skinny.
So many clear signs that you have memorized, yet ask yourself, and then tell us; which of these Mahdis are you looking for?
The clear sign of name; you offer that the Mahdi is a Muhammad son of Abdullah. Or perhaps of Abdulrahamn, or a similar configuration of divine names. Realize some of the scholars have denied this and pointed out that this is actually an interpretation, a conclusion drawn from an interpretation of the hadith, in which the The Prophet, saaws, states that The Mahdi’s name ‘treads along equal footing’ with his name. The Arabic can be translated in other ways, but this is a legitimate and quite literal translation of the meaning of Arabic. Would you risk kufr to deny the possibility of a literal meaning of a Hadith? The impression that the name of the Mahdi is identical to the Prophet’s, saws, name lies in that his name treads equally with his name, some have interpreted this as meaning “equal” but of course this is not what it necessarily literally means. It is but one possibility.
What does all of this mean, would you remotely dream of saying that you can interpret this to a meaning that you would actually swear to it? No, not if you were wise.
You mention the clear sign of the sinking, well lets look at this matter. How many witnesses are there to the sinking? Is there one Bedouin ‘Araab shepherd? Some narrations that say two survivors of the army itself, one of whom goes to Sham (Syria) to report back to The Sufyani, while another one goes to Makkah and gives The Mahdi good tidings. However some narrations say it is but the one Bedouin shepherd who saw the Army camped, and then he latter returned and saw no signs of them except the top of a tree sticking out of the sand. From this he deduces that what he just witnessed was the army swallowed up, and then he goes to Makkah to tell The Mahdi. Contemplate this for a moment; the man didn’t see the sinking, this legally makes him a dubious witness, you have testimonies of one or two anonymous and by all accounts uneducated soldiers, who were paid to be in vile and detestable army of The Sufyani. Choose them, or choose some anonymous hick of a shepherd who comes to you with stories of an entire army being swallowed up in the sand. Now, pretend that you are in Makkah at that time, and you must make a choice of going to test your life on the testimony of an unknown redneck of an ‘Araab sheep herder, and that if you do many people will go and get killed for this sign?
Do you yet perceive the magnitude of the problem here? What sign is this even? Utterly unreliable witnesses reporting weird things, in response to which the man who will be the Mahdi has to make life or death choices.
In understanding Prophesies people are expecting truly weird and spectacular things without the imagination to put themselves in the picture, all the while actually not expecting what they should be expecting. The narrations of the the sinking is only but one of the many things that alerted us to this problem. Any event must be judged by the quality of the witnesses and reporters to determine the quality of the event. This event was witnessed by the very lowest grade of witness. In the sharia you couldn’t even execute a chicken on the basis of such witnesses, much less than make Khuruj and go to war against the Entire World, and do not be deceived in this – this is what all of this affair amounts to, a band of 313 men, plus one Amie, who are going to war against the entire planet, which includes most of the Ummah itself who have been blinded by the Dajjal’s lies.
And this gives us another clear sign to look at, the 313. Allah truly knows best about this number, where did it come from? Some of these narrations concerning it only rise to the level of the companions. We do not dismiss them, unlike deluded and whacked out Kharijites who risk denying the worlds of the Prophet, SAWS, but it is a problem when the narrations require much more research. Is this an exact number? The Mahdi’s army may end up eventually with thousands in it. What if this body is 200, or 500, then what are you going to do when you witness them? Deny them because there is not an exact numerical amount of 313? Maybe some are taking baths or in the privy when you come across them, or asleep. Maybe some are en route but considered among this number. Is the number supposed to be exact or is it just an estimate? Is there, perhaps, an important meaning to the number that is part of the transmitted narrations that you are not understanding? If you encounter 100 men en route searching for The Mahdi, or 400, then what do you do? Is the exact number itself critical to the point that you would deny a group or man because you don’t see exactly 313 mustered up, what if some later join up, or others joined earlier but are now gone. At what exact point are they 313? They start off at 7, then 12, then 300 or so, perhaps they end up as 317, or 5000, or 50,000. Any group whatsoever that will have any success will eventually pass the point of having at least 313 followers.
Let’s examine a clear sign; you may say that The Mahdi will conquer the whole middle east. Well will he be in one spot, at one time? If not then who are other spots, ordinary men like what you see all around you in the Middle East today. Now of these men who you see here and there, running things around you, would you trust any of them with your goat? Would you trust us with your goat? Well our own fathers wouldn’t, and we are not too certain that we would trust you with out goats either.
Would you like to consider the clear sign of a voice from the sky? Assembled before you all of the hadith, there are perhaps seventy thereabouts, read all 70 or so narrations transmissions and variants. Perhaps you will notice that the “voice” described may not be something that anyone actually even hears. Which implies that the nature of the voice may be different than what you expect. If in some narrations the voice is heard, somehow the manage to not understand it, and somehow many people are deceived in spite of this “voice”. Do you know what it may be? Could it be some sort of boom in space or the upper atmosphere, or some other sort of atmospheric event? Perhaps it will be a sound that is perfectly scientifically explainable and very normal and not the one most people are looking for, while a small number, of very few people, “get it” And maybe even then, they don’t
Do you really expect a Monty Python like voice from clouds in heaven to be broadcast on that day, with visible angels with bugles?
For every one of these signs, when looked at closely, we have seen there were many realistic and seemingly mundane ways of looking at them, that were not only mundane but perfectly linguistically valid in meaning. And each of these, in reality, are deep miracles if you but understood.
You need to look at all of these expected signs, and if you are able to take the time out to do so analyze them not in light of what you expect and are looking for, but in light of all of the possible quite ordinary meanings.
There has been a major manipulation of our expectations, hopes and dreams. This manipulation is consciously performed, by a knowing and conscious agent, and it manifests at the emotional level of our coveted expectations and desires. At the level of hope and desire it is quite easy to deceive oneself and others. If we are to have any hope of unraveling things we must accept this and attack it, before it destroys us.
Here we conclude, please consider these ideas as you read further.
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Series Addendum – Can Jesus, the Mahdi and the dajjal surpass or even match The Avengers?How our ideas of Prophecy and the Future are Manipulated.
[1: Past Ummahs and Our Delusions – 2:Contrasting Present and Past – 3:The Trap and Background Music – 4:Miracles in the Seemingly un-Miraculous – 5:Conclusion, Crux and Solution]
