Islam - notes on some of its eschatology and essence

  When it comes to understanding Islam, the principles laid out in some of my previous texts hold true in ways that have been for me increasingly stunning. The principles are, first, the separation in Islam between outward aspect (exoterism) and inward aspect (esoterism); second, the idea of an emphatic distinction between these two aspects despite their separation being relative [meaning a tension]. Analyzing Islam through this lense has been perhaps the most jaw-dropping philosophy of history challenge I was forced to examine.

The subject, no doubt, deserves a lot of attention, and is so dense as to be seemingly not allowing of straight-on outline. 

The first point to be noted is that, contrary to what seemingly most would assume, Muhammad is not the central figure in Islam when one examines coldly the tenets of Islam. Oddly enough, the true central figure does not figure explicitly in either the Koran or in the two most authoritative Hadith collections (Saheeh Al-Bukhari and Saheeh Muslim, respectively [these are collections of religious stories involving Muhammad]). This central figure I mentioned is the Mahdi, an apocalyptic character very popular among all Muslims. Further, according to Shia Muslims, who are an influential minority, this Mahdi has already come in the domain of history and will certainly return to bring about the fulfilment of history. This individual is Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī, one of the Twelve Imams descending from Muhammad and his son-in-law [and fourth Caliph] Ali Ibn Abi Talib; this Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī [who is the twelfth imam] is said to have lived and been in contact with his disciples at least semi-ordinarily up to more or less three hundred years after the death of Muhammad. Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī is the de facto central figure of Islam for Shia Muslims; and the coming mythical figure of the "mahdi" [ corresponding to Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī as Shia/non Sunni Muslims see it] is also very popular among the majority Sunni Muslims.

According to Shia Muslims, essentially anyway, what happened to Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī historically is comparable to what happened to Enoch and Elijah in the Old Testament. Just as the latter two were all of a sudden nowhere to be seen, and made occult by a supernatural power and design; so also the Shiite Muslim religion proposes Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī will return [as Elijah did return in the person of John the Baptist].  

Now, if one applies to this case the above-mentioned principle by which purportedly one should understand Islam, it is clear that calling as little attention as possible to this mahdi figure, while simultaneously highlighting him in the eyes of the Muslim faithful and those who study Islam, corresponds to playing, in an overlapping way, with the paradox of the exoteric and esoteric distinct but relative and simultaneous aspects of the Muslim religion. This is done by a subtle web of interplays between shias and sunnis, and their mutual influence and mutual conflict. 

A part of this exoteric and esoteric dynamic is symbolically indicated in things like the fact that the first Twelve Imams (usually father and son of the House of Ali/descendents of Muhammad's daughter Fatima, married to Ali) were all  killed or poisoned (with the exception of the last of the twelve, Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī, who purportedly became supernaturally occult like Elijah, instead of being killed). The historical humiliation and tragedy of the Twelve Imams is highlighted by the famous so-called Battle of Karbala, an event in which Muhammad's grandson, Husayn ibn Ali, was killed and his company massacred by an Umayyad Dinasty army. Some of the wives of the Imams are said to have poisoned them, at least one wife having been a relative or daughter of some Abbasid Caliphate ruler. It is this dynamic that made religion in Islam, over time, be crystallized as something that, albeit corroborated by secular power, has to do with an authority that is essentially deprived of any ordinary and easy access to secular stability. Matthew 8:20: "And Jesus saith to him: The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air nests: but the son of man hath not where to lay his head." Muslims see mahdi, their promised savior, as bringing about universal triumph of esotericism, the triumph of an authority laden with mystery, an authority which was, in the persons of the Imams (despite having been this authority corroborated in an equivocal way), trampled upon cruelly and chased away into the shadows of a dark occult waiting grotto. This persecution and humiliation endured by the imams is all the more serious to Muslims because to them the Twelve Imams are analogously equivalent to the Christians twelve apostles. 

That is Islam's story, the story of a purported inner truth whose fight for public display was almost completely and continually thwarted in some meaningful and dramatic way. The phenomenology of this drama and disadvantage was seemingly what the second Koranic Surah, al-Baqarah ("The Cow"), tried to suggest. This Surah, in effect, seems to be about the Nicolaitan heresy, a heresy which is explained at length, in the context of explaining Islam, by the way, in the book Commentary on the Secret of Fatima. The significant thwarting of Islam's purported inner truth in the public arena being a trait of Islam is symbolized by Ali's [Muhammad's apparent successor of choice/intended successor] never-disclosed esoteric books that were meant only for him and his imam successors, the books are Jafr and Jami'a. These books are said to contain secret knowledge and prophetic predictions. Ali's wife [and Muhammad's daughter], Fatima, is said to also have a book of her own similarly never to be disclosed outside the circle of the authoritative imams, purportedly dictated by an angel/Gabriel; with future predictions.

The Encyclopaedia Iranica, furthermore, has in the heading about Islamic eschatology a few canonical quotations from traditions concerning the mahdi. Some of it says that he will show up in the context of two cries of [among others] warning. The second/subsequent cry would the associable to earth, apparently as opposed to heaven/the circle of the justified. This corresponds to the three final trumpets of Revelation 8 to 13, precisely them chapters the timeline of which Sister Lucia associated with the Third Secret of Fatima; inasmuch as the first of the three last woes trumpet sounding/cry is associable to heaven, the second to earth insofar as it is associable to the "four" number, a number which in traditional symbolism means the palpable world, the manifested cosmos.

The mahdi has the epithet "al-qāʾem" (he who will rise, he who will raise, or the “resurrector”); and the archangel trumpet sounding parallelism of 1 Thessalonians chapters 4 and 5  with Revelation chapters 8 to 11 (Third Secret) sufficiently indicates this resurrection theme; this resurrection being the waking up people from a widespread spiritual slumber/darkness/night. The fact Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser interprets Revelation chapters 8 to 13 (more or less encompassing their timeline description in any case) as corresponding to the intervention of the by-many-prophesied Catholic Monarch (long story short also extraordinary pontiff-to-be [see the book "Commentary on the Three Days of Darkness"]); shows that what the Muslim traditions understand as "mahdi" is also a commonplace Catholic notion, albeit in an analogous way. The two traditions somehow are attempting to discuss the same individual. Furthermore, this may have been painfully clear to René Guénon, French metaphysician, when he discussed the Catholic Great Monarch in the book The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times; and the fact Guénon [a Muslim] preferred to casually and not explicitly or emphatically associate the Great Monarch with the mahdi (if I remember correctly) seems to reinforce the Muslim typical overlap play with exoterism and esoterism, the interplay between the hidden and the outward. 

The mahdi is said to be destined to bring all the holy books of the past out from the cavern where they are hidden (meaning from the obscurity of their true sense accidentally lost) and will apply their precepts among their respective followers. This is essentially what, according to Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser, the Revelation chapters 8 to 13 timeline is partly about, namely, a religious leader's gathering familiarity with "all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues" [Revelation 7:9]. Revelation 10:11: "Thou must prophesy again to many nations and peoples and tongues and kings."

However, despite the unusual quality of these considerations being formidable, the plot thickens further in that the second of the three final trumpets specifically mentions four angels bound in the great river Euphrates. The River Euphrates is notable for its proximity with Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī's last-public-seen place, the place where he was seen last/before his purported "occultation", namely, the city of Samarra, present day Iraq.

Further, the first turn of the key bible interpretation [from the book Commentary on the Three Days of Darkness] explains that the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus is paralleled with the previous cure of the woman with the twelve-years issue of blood. The parallelism is demonstrated in the above-mentioned book in great detail, among the details the equal number of years concerning the issue of blood and the age of the maiden/daughter of Jairus. Each cure corresponds symbolically, it seems, to each trumpet sounding of the first two trumpets. Jairus' daughter corresponds to the first trumpet, and the woman with the issue of blood (who is Mary Magdalen, long story short) corresponds to the second trumpet.

Now, Mary Magdalen was a type of the Virgin Mary or was a as it were mirror image. Both had the heart filled with the ark religious knowledge concerning "all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues". The difference is Mary Magdalen had this knowledge in a degenerate Nicolaitan sense (and in this she had a Muslim-like inner inconciliation profane outlook). That is why Mary Magdalen, who is the John 4 Samaritan woman, didn't have water to give Jesus (this water means the conciliation between inner and outward aspects of religious gratification). But Jesus restores her to health and makes living water come out of her, which is essentially what the cure of the woman with the issue of blood means. As explained in the above-mentioned book, the point of the story is that Mary Magdalen's degeneration serves a greater purpose (in the last shall be first Gospel motif sense) of giving a means of succoring Jairus daughter, in a parallel way to how Islam is given to Christianity by Providence in the sense of Islam being cured of its heresy by means of Islam's potential spirituality; and with the riches purchased thereby Islam helps raise the Catholic church (corresponding to Jairus's daughter). The riches with an ambiguous quality, from Islam, are signified by the somehow well-known art motif of Mary Magdalene being depicted with an exuberant beauty and body. Exuberance and beauty in traditional symbolism, and etymologically, correspond to wealth, a spiritual one in particular. 

This understanding is all the more feasible since the traditionalist movement is, as of 2022, all but completely dried-up; and suffocated by its own conventions and prejudices. Truth ceased to have any ultimate say in how anything is judged, even among the Dimond monks themselves [perhaps especially among them]. It is all reduced to what the conventional language is, if you stick to it you're on the clear, nothing else matters. Of course, this is the Nicolaitan heresy, which is not strange to Islam but rather characterizes it [as is explained in great detail in the book Commentary on the Secret of Fatima]. The three turns resurrection story lines, beginning with the first turn about the resurrection of Jairus' daughter, correspond to the three resurrecting final trumpets of Revelation 8 to 11. So the resurrection of the faithful has a correspondence with the resurrection or at least the bringing to life of Islam into the Catholic fold. The specific difference between the woman with the issue of blood (corresponding to Islam) and Jairus' daughter (corresponding to the ordinary/to be resurrected Catholic Church) is that Islam's esoteric and extensive familiarity and contact [albeit a degenerate one] with "all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues" [Revelation 7:9], gives Islam a potential to simultaneously convert itself to Catholicism and support Catholicism that the Catholic Church understood ordinarily does not have.  

This is perfectly in line with information Malachi Martin either gave or suggested on the Third Secret of Fatima. In one of his Bernard Janzen's interviews Martin essentially said that the Secret predicts salvation and restoration coming from the East, which would in the Revelation 8 to 13 timeline [correspondingly belonging in the Secret according to Sister Lucia] be relative to the mention of the Euphrates River, for this river is said to be located in Western Asia. This is by all likely accounts the East all right. This makes the Apparition of Fatima's name [relative to "Fatima", a notable Muslim/Arab name] all the more interesting. In the same interviews series Martin, while discussing Muslims, observed it seemed to him certain traits of the Muslim religion, such as its Virgin Mary veneration motif, indicated Islam was in a special way prepared by providence to a conversion in due time. He mentioned no particular reason to believing so, which contextually suggests this is somehow related to the Third Secret. The predictable uninformed and silly objection likely coming from Dimond brothers supporter to relying on Malachi Martin can be answered by pointing out many things about the Third Secret Martin referred or corroborated do not need him/do not need trust in him at all to be built rhetorically. The conversion of Islam is one such instance, for it is corroborated by reputable faithful such as Saint Louis de Monfort and Venerable Mary of Agreda [specifically in the context of a miraculous widespread restoration] etc. But the fact the Dimond brothers or their supporters would from anecdotal evidence stick to dismissing this whole point as null and void, they fixated in the distrust of Martin and/or the fact this whole outlook is strange to them, speaks volumes to their degenerate heretical Nicolaitan current state of mind.