By Theodore Shoebat and Walid Shoebat (Shoebat Exclusive)
It has been argued that if an Antichrist is to be Muslim it would be impossible because Muslims, on account of their puritanical ideology, do not call any man god. But a new research by Shoebat.com using Islamic sources never before shared in the prophecy circles until now shows overwhelming evidence that not only Islam teaches that the Mahdi declares to be God, but that the prophecy in 2 Thessalonians 2:4 where Antichrist “he as God sits in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God” is etched in Islam.
Since the Antichrist is coming from Turkey where the main form of Islam is sufism a much more antichrist theology than Wahhabi or Shiite Islam since it explicitly teaches that a Muslim can become divine and literally declare to himself “I am god” just as the Scripture indicated which every sufi aspires to reach a spiritual state called “fana” (annihilation) the process in which the Muslim is absorbed into God so he becomes God, and his entire being is annihilated in him; he no longer is himself, he loses his whole identity, and becomes no longer as Islam demands to be in submission to Allah as a mere “servant of God”, but becomes God and he declares “I am god.”
This concept has never been researched by prophecy scholars nor did they ever connect these Islamic concepts to the Antichrist. Jalal al-Din Rumi, by far the most prestigious sufi in Islam’s entire history, explained this concept as such:
Remember the famous utterance of al-Hallaj, “I am God.” People think that to say “I am God” is a claim of great pretense and spiritual arrogance. It is actually a claim of extreme humility. “I am God” means “I do not exist.” He is all, everything is He, existence is God’s alone. I am without existence, pure non-existence. I am nothing.” “I am God” is not a claim of great pretension, it is a claim of extreme humility. There is more humility in this than any supposed claim to greatness, but people do not understand the inner meaning. When a man acknowledges his servitude to God, he is aware of his being a servant. He may see himself as a devoted servant of God, but he still sees himself and his own actions as apart from the one reality of God. He is not drowned in the Ocean of Divine Unity. Drowned is he in whom there is not separate motion or mobility. Drowned is he whose movement is the movement of the water. And so it is with the enlightenment ones, those who declares, “I am God.” Anyone who says “I am the servant of God” asserts the reality of two existences, one for himself and the other for God. But he who says “I am God” — and has realized the deepest levels of unity within his being — has seen through the illusion of his existence. He knows from the experience of unity that his own separate existence is nothing but an illusion. Knowing that, he casts its former selfhood upon the winds of oblivion. (Rumi, Hearts bear witness one to another, in The Complete Discourses of Jalal al-Din Rumi, discourse 11, p. 75, ed. Louis Rogers)
This and much more actually reconciles what baffled biblical scholars for generations that Daniel points to Antichrist as a servant of one god and in 2 Thessalonians he declares himself as deity, yet the seeming contradiction is resolved once we understand Rumi’s quote “I am the servant of God” and “I am God”. In Daniel 11:39, He (Antichrist) serves a “foreign god” which he shall “acknowledge” and via warfare he “advances its glory”, the glory of this single-war-god while he proclaims deity at the same time. Everything fits, including that he does not honor the “desire of women” (woman’s needs, rights) as we have seen Erdogan of Turkey do last week.
Therefore, this sufi belief makes the Muslim Antichrist, coming from the sufi nation of Turkey, declaring “I am god,” entirely plausible when the Turkish Muslim Mahdi reaches the state of “fana” and that he is God. Self-deification is not something that hasn’t been done by Sufis. The famous Sufi mystic, Mansur al-Hallaj, had a vision in which Allah identified himself with him. As al-Hallaj recounted:
I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart I asked, ‘Who are You?’ He replied, ‘You’
Rumi praised al-Hallaj’s self-identification with Allah and at the same time being a servant of Allah just as Scripture demands for evidence, writing:
When Mansur’s friendship with God reached its absolute goal he became an enemy to himself. He annihilated himself. He said “I am God.” That is extreme humility and the utmost limit of servanthood. It means “He only exists.” It is pretentious and arrogant for one to say, “You are the Lord, and I am Your servant,” for by saying this you will have affirmed your own separate existence. The necessary result is dualism. If you say, “He is God,” that is duality, for until “I” exists “He” is impossible. It was God who said, “I am God,” since anyone other than He was non-existent. Mansur had passed away, those were the words of God. (Rumi, Belief and disbelief are all causes of duality, ibid, discourse 52)
In another place Rumi explains that there are three spiritual stages: the first is when a man doesn’t care about Allah nor anything about religion; the second is when a man worships Allah as a devout Muslim; and the third is when one does not serve Allah, but annihilates himself through meditation (zikr) and becomes divine:
Man has three spiritual states. In the first state he does not focus on God at all. He worships, serves and pays tribute to everything else: man and woman, wealth and children, stones and land. But God he does not worship. Then, when he acquires a little knowledge and awareness he serves nothing but God. And finally, when he progresses further in this state he becomes silent. He does not say, “I do not serve God,” and neither does he say, “I serve God.” He has transcended both states, and no sound comes into the world from him. (Rumi, Man has three spiritual states, ibid, discourse 53)
This final stage is fana, and it is when the sufi says, “I am god,” for as Rumi says in another discourse, to reach the state where one declares “I am god” springs from the ultimate knowledge of the sufi master:
To know what “I am god” means is the knowledge of bodies, but becoming “I am god” is the knowledge of religion. (Rumi, Knowledge acquired after death, ibid, discourse 64)
This belief in self-deification through annihilation, can be traced to the divine nature that Sufi Muslims attribute to Muhammad, and they go so far as to give him Christ-like titles, saying that the world was created for him, with him, and through him, and that one can only reach God through Muhammad. As Rumi says,
Muhammad is the guide. Until a man comes to Muhammad he cannot reach God. (Rumi, Lovers have headaches which no medicine can cure, ibid, disco use 63, p. 375)
Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6) And now these Muslim antichrist heretics want to replace Christ with Muhammad. St. Paul writes of Christ that “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever.” (Romans 11:36) And in another epistle the holy Apostle says of the Christ, “And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” (Colossians 1:17)
The Sufi take these attributes of our Lord and applies them to their false prophet Muhammad in a perfect match to Antichrist in which he is anti (against) Christ and at the same time wanting to become Christ. For example, Hisham Kabbani, one of the most influential sufis of our own time, deifies Muhammad and says that he was the essence of heaven itself, and created before the existence of paradise came to pass:
…Muhammad was the essence of the heavens itself; the fabric of creation itself; the fabric of creation itself in its entirety. The evidence of this is the famous hadith of Jabir, where it is related that Jabir ibn Abd Allah said to the Prophet, “O messenger of God, may my father and mother be sacrificed for you, tell me of the first thing God created before all things.” He [Muhammad] said:
“O Jabir, the first thing God created was the light of your Prophet from His [Allah’s] light, and that light remained in the midst of His Power for as long as He wished, and there was not, at that time, a Tablet or a Pen or a Paradise or a Fire or an angel or a heaven or an earth. And when God wished to create creation, he divided that Light into four parts and from the first made the Pen, from the second the Tablet, from the third the Throne, then He divided the fourth into four parts [and from them created everything else.” (Kabbani The Naqshbandi Sufi Tradition Guidebook, intro, p. 16)
Kabbani goes on to quote a declaration attributed by sufis to God himself, “If not for you [O Muhammad] I would not have created the cosmos.” (Ibid) Kabbani affirms that God told Muhammad, “from you all creation emerged.”
Rumi went so far as to say that to praise Allah is to praise Muhammad:
Someone asked the question, “Why do they not praise God alone from the minaret? Why do they also mention Muhammad?” He was answered, “Praising Muhammad is praising God. It is like a man who says, “May God give long life to the king, to him who showed me the way to the king, and to him who told me of the king’s name and of his attributes!” Praising the man is praising the king. ((Rumi, Hearts bear witness one to another, in The Complete Discourses of Jalal al-Din Rumi, discourse 63, p. 377, ed. Louis Rogers)
From this it can be said that sufis are hijacking the nature of Christ and applying them to Muhammad and by extension to the Mahdi since the Mahdi is the essence of Muhammad wanting to mimic Christ and desires to have a second coming.
Truth is, Muslims deify Muhammad and Mahdi giving them titles that only belong to god: Al-Maqam-Al-Mahmud (The Glorious One), Awal-Khalq-illah (The first of Creation), Muhammad (The Praised One), Al-Insan Al-Kamel (The Perfect Man), Rahmatan-lil-A’alameen (Mercy to All Mankind), Al-rasul Al-A’tham (The Greatest of All sent by God), Shafi (Healer), Munji (Savior), Mahdi (The Guided One/Deliverer), Al-Mustafa Al-Mukhtar (The Chosen One), Amir (The Prince), Khatimun-Nabiyeen (The Seal of Prophets), Al-Hadi (The Guide), Awal (First), Akher (Last), Sayyid Walad Adam (The Leader of The Sons of Adam) and Al-Siraj Al-Muneer (The Luminous One, The Glowing Lamp). (1)
Moreover, this divine nature attributed to Muhammad can, within sufi thought, be obtained by man. Not only is this concluded from the passages quoted already, but also from the sufi idea that man can become, like Muhammad, the light of God. Rumi recounts a story in which a sufi sheikh named Mawlana Baha’ al-Haqq wa’l-Din, becomes the light of God and “the soul of the Kiblah” (the Ka’ba’s Black Stone in Mecca) to which Muslim pray. Rumi relates:
The Shaikh had lost all ego-consciousness and had long since passed away from the sense of personal identity. Having been consumed in the Light of God, his self no longer remained. This is the meaning of the prophetic saying, “Die before you die.” The Shaikh had become the Light of God. And whoever turns his back on the Light of God to face the wall of the prayer niche has assuredly turned his back on Mecca, since God’s Light is the soul of the Kiblah [the Ka’bah] (Rumi, Service done for God is proof of divine favor, in The Complete Discourses of Jalal al-Din Rumi, discourse 3, p. 17, ed. Louis Rogers)
This is quite telling; what its saying is that the sheikh became the Kiblah, or the person to whom Muslims would pray toward. Therefore, an Antichrist Muslim leader in Turkey, who is a practicing sufi, can declare that he is the light of God, and Muslims from all over the world will pray towards him; he will become the new Kiblah, with the multitudes of Muslims praying to his direction.
This revelation explains much of the amazing prophetic puzzle, that, when Mecca is destroyed by Elam (Iran, see Isaiah 21 “the burden against Arabia”), Muslims will no longer need it because their new Kiblah (direction) will be toward the Mahdi, the light of Allah in which Muhammad predicted that the Black Stone will transform to life.
THE BLACK STONE AS SATAN’S STAR AND IMAGE
But what is this whole thing about venerating an asteroid? What is this whole image about? Does the Bible warn us of this? The Bible is so clear in exposing this issue. God simply wants us to dig deeper. Lucifer’s image is depicted in Revelation 8 and 9 showing Satan wanting to be worshipped. He is a star that fell from heaven and at this point he enters Antichrist (Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28):
“And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.” (Revelation 9:1)
This “him” cannot be an object, but rather Satan himself, a living being (him) cast out of heaven as described in Isaiah 14 and Revelation 8:10.
And then we have the key to tie Islam into all this from the most important verse in the Qur’an that describes Allah is perfectly mirrored in Isaiah 14. In Isaiah 14, it is Satan or Lucifer that is described as the bearer of light, and in the Qur’an it is Allah that is depicted as a lamp (light, torch). In the chapter of the Star, we read:
“Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth; a likeness of His light is as a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp is in a glass, (and) the glass is as it were a brightly shining star.” (Qur’an 24:35-36)
Compare this with Revelation 8:10:
“And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters.”
Take note of the fact that the death of one-third of the earth’s population occurs during the rise of the eighth empire, which will be an Islamic alliance with Turkey as the head. Satan, who is the fallen star, and the destroyer who is unleashed, will precede the “mountain” (empire) that will cause one-third of mankind to die. The Black Stone of Mecca owes its reputation to the tradition that it fell from the “heavens.” Like the Black Stone of Aphrodite, the Black Stone of Mecca is also clearly an “image” of Satan. Yet this Satanic image that is created by the Beast in Revelation 13:15 which can speak and cause all who do not worship it to be killed, is mentioned as a holy thing by Muhammad and is now explained since in Islam the Mahdi becomes the essence of the Black Stone. In an Islamic tradition authenticated by At-Tirmidhi, Al-Abani notes:
“Allah will raise up the stone [the Black Stone] on the Day of Judgment, and it will have two-eyes with which it will see and a tongue which it talks with, and it will give witness in favor of everyone who touched it in truth.”
And by the destruction of the Ka’ba, it is plausible that Mahdi will claim to be this fulfillment.
According to Muslim traditions, the Black Stone is even the redeemer of Muslims. Al-Tirmidhi notes that many years ago, the Black Stone was, “whiter than milk; it was only later that it became black as it absorbed the sins of those who touched it.”
So in essence the Black Stone is deified as well as the Mahdi.
The blasphemy doesn’t stop here. The Black Rock, the image of Satan, the fallen star, which attempts to take the place of Christ the Great Redeemer is called by Muhammad, the son of perdition Yameen Allah. This means that it is “the right hand of Allah” with which “he touches his servants.” It is the visible right hand of the invisible Allah. It is even the Shekina Glory, which dwells in all believers. Venerating it and rotating seven times around it will cleanse of Muslim of all prior sins.
The veneration of Satan through this act of rotating around an idol image is even alluded to in the Bible and rarely understood by western analysts. Ezekiel 31:3 declares:
“Behold, the Assyrian (The Antichrist, Satan in the Flesh) was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches, and with a shadowing shroud, and of a high stature; and his top was among the thick boughs. The waters made him great, the deep set him up on high with her rivers running round about his plants, and sent out her little rivers unto all the trees of the field.”
This would mean: “Behold, Satan, a beautiful angel clothed in beautiful covering, an angel with high status. Peoples and multitudes from every nation made him great, and the underworld set him up high with the multitudes running round about his idol and sent out all the people to all the idols that were set for him.” This is exactly what we see in the Muslim Hajj, which Muslims do yearly to have their sins forgiven by the right hand of Allah. They come from all over the world to the Ka’ba and roam round about it. In addition, Jeremiah 51:44 tells us: “I will punish Bel in Babylon, And I will bring out of his mouth what he has swallowed; And the nations shall not stream to him anymore.” The nations will not flock to Babylon and Bel, the Moon-god, will be ashamed in her. No longer will the nations flock to Mecca to worship Satan. This punishment is not a historic one; it refers to Jerusalem and the invasion of the Temple Mount: “strangers have come into the sanctuaries of the Lord’s house.” (Jeremiah 51:51) In the Last-Days, there will be two opposing houses, one dedicated to Jehovah and the other to Satan. The “shadowing shroud” in Ezekiel 31:3 could be the black cloth that covers the prostitute Ka’ba in Mecca and the streams perhaps refers to the hordes of people from all over the globe who come to worship Satan by running around his idol and bowing to it by the millions.
So, from this, we can conclude that the Muslim Antichrist can call himself God, and also replace the Black Stone, and become the object worship of all Muslims, thus concluding what John and St. Paul wrote on.
REFERENCES
(1) Muslim scholar, Dr. G. F. Haddad, in an article with a blasphemous title, The Best of Creation states: “[There is no] other Prophet [other than Muhammad] or angel-brought-near with whom Allah Most High shared as many of His own Names in the Qur’an as He did with the Prophet. With respect to his foremost name– Muhammad–peace be upon him, consider the poetic verse of Hassan ibn Thabit (RA): ‘And He drew out for him [a name] from His own Name so as to dignify him greatly: The Owner of the Throne is the Glorious [Mahmûd], and this is the Praiseworthy [Muhammad]!’” 127 In other words, the name Muhammad is not a mere name for a man, according to the Qur’an, Allah, whose name is Mahmud, or the Glorious or the Praised One, named Muhammad after Himself. This is quite the claim. This is a further exaltation than the name Yeshua, which in English means Jehovah is our Salvation. Muhammad literally means The Praised One—The Most Praised.