In the name of Allāh,
the Beneficent, the Merciful.
Peace and Blessings of Allāh on Mohammad.
DEDICATED TO
Allāh–the Glorious and the High,
Lord of the worlds
AND TO
Mohammad–who brought the world
to our feet and eternity to our arms.
*

ANTI-CHRIST & ISLAM

Who or what is the anti-Christ?
The Internet is awash with conjectures about the identity of the Anti-Christ. There is even the preposterous view that Allāh is one of the “beast” mentioned in the Bible and that the Anti-Christ will rise from the Islamic camp. It is also stated that the expected Imam Mahdi, after being successful in battle, will be defeated.

(It is to be noted that while Hadith literature speak of a Mahdi in Islam, the belief that the Mahdi is in “occultation” and will come through the lineage of the Twelve Imams is not a teaching of Islam, it is a Shi’ah belief. See Islam-Sunnis & Shi’ahs).

The effort expended to interpret the prophecies about these “beasts” of the Book of Revelation and Daniel, and to reveal the identity of the Anti-Christ is boggling.

If Allāh God, the Omnipotent, would send “beasts” from the earth and raise the Anti-Christ from Islam who is there that can prevent it?

That Allāh is one of these Biblical “beasts”: Allāh tells us in His Qur’an that He raised messengers among all people –and which act is conducive to a Just God in contrast to a God Who would give messengers to only one or some people. Thus, God is known by a name according to the language(s) of the people.

   “Allāh,” as Eli and Elah, is the name of God in the Semitic language –notably, Jesus called to “Eli” from the cross; he did not call to Jehovah, which is not a Scriptural name of God but a concoction of those who call themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses (Jehovah does not exist)–; as Prof. Abdul Ahad Dawud (the former Reverend David Benjamin Keldani, B.D., a Roman Catholic priest of the Uniate-Chaldean sect”) points out:

“If the Christian priests and theologians knew their Scriptures in the original Hebrew instead of in translations as the Muslims read their Qur-an in its Arabic text, they would clearly see that Allah is the same ancient Semitic name of the Supreme Being who revealed and spoke to Adam and all the prophets.”¹
Thus, to say that Allāh is a “beast” is to say that the God of the Bible is a “beast;” and as Christians claim that Jesus is God, then according to Christian belief Jesus is this “beast” that will be raised up from the earth.

Therefore, asGod is Lord of all the worlds, whether we call Him Ishwar, Eli, Allāh or Atnatu, God Who created man out of love, Whose mercy precedes His anger, Who implores us in loving compassionate terms to forgive our sins, and from Whom only good comes, as Islam teaches, could not be a “beast” from the earth that would wreak havoc to man.

Regarding the “beasts” having the various “horns” mentioned in Daniel 7:2-27, Professor Abdul Ahad Dawud –the former Reverend David Benjamin Keldani– explained:

“According to the interpretation by the Angel, each one of the four beasts represents an empire. The eagle-winged lion signifies the Chaldean Empire, which was rapid and mighty like an eagle to pounce upon the enemy. The bear represents the “Madai-Paris” or the Medo-Persian Empire, which extended its conquests as far as the Adriatic Sea and Ethiopia, thus holding with its teeth a rib from the body of each one of the three continents of the Eastern Hemisphere.  The third beast, from its tigrish nature of swift bounds and fierceness, typifies the triumphant marches of Alexander the Great, whose vast empire was, after his death, divided into four kingdoms….The (fourth) beast is practically a monster and a huge demon. This is the formidable Roman Empire. The ten horns are the ten Emperors of Rome who persecuted the early Christians. Turn the pages of   any Church history for the first three centuries down to the time of the so-called conversion of Constantine the Great, and you will read nothing but the horrors of the famous “Ten Persecutions.”
    …..all these wild beasts were the enemies of the “holy people of God,” as the old Israel and the early followers of the Gospels were called. For they alone had the true knowledge, the scriptures and the revelation of God.  These wild beasts persecuted and massacred the people of God. But the nature and the character of the Little Horn which sprang up on the head of the fourth monster was so different from that of the other animals, that God Himself had, as it were, to come down and establish His throne in the firmament, to judge and condemn to destruction the fourth animal; to summon His presence the Bar Nasha –“Son of Man”– and to make him the Sultan of men; for the words sholtana, yaqar, malkutha, which signify respectively the “empire, honour, kingdom” of all the peoples and nations, were granted to him (Daniel 7:14) and to the “people of the Saints of the  Most High (Dan. 7:27).

It will be noticed that the son of Man is nobler than, and superior to, the beasts, so the religion which he professed and established is infinitely holier than that of the Little Horn.
Now let us examine and see who the Little Horn is.  Having once definitely ascertained the identity of this eleventh king, the identity of the Bar Nasha (Son of   Man) will be settled per se. The Little Horn springs up after the Ten Persecutions under the reigns of the emperors of the Roman power. The empire was writhing under four rivals, Constantine being one of them. They were all struggling for the purple; the other three died or fell in battle; and Constantine was left alone as the supreme sovereign of the vast empire.

The early Christian commentators have in vain laboured to identify this ugly Little Horn with the Anti-Christ, with the Pope of Rome by Protestants, and with the Founder of Islam. (God forbid!) But the later Biblical critics are at a loss to solve the problem of the fourth beast, which they wish to identify with the Greek Empire and the Little Horn with Antiochus. Some of the critics e.g. Carpenter, consider the Medo-Persian as two separate kingdoms. But this empire was not more two than the late Austro-Hungarian Empire was. The explorations carried on by the Scientific Mission of the French savant, M. Morgan in Shushan (Susa) and elsewhere leave no doubt on this point. The fourth beast can, therefore, be no other than the old Roman world.
To show that the Little Horn is no other than Constantine the Great, the following arguments can  safely be advanced:–

                    (a) He overcame Maximian and the other two rivals and assumed the purple, and put an end to the persecution of Christianity. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is, I think, the best history that can instruct us about those times. You can never invent four rivals after the Ten Persecutions of the Church, other than Constantine and his enemies who fell before him like the three horns that fell before the little one.

                   (b) All the four beasts are represented in the vision (of Daniel) as irrational brutes; but the Little Horn possessed a human mouth and eyes which is, in other words, the description of a hideous monster endowed with reason and speech.  He proclaimed Christianity as the true religion, left Rome to the Pope and made Byzantium, which was named Constantinople, the seat of the empire. He pretended to profess Christianity but was never baptized till a little before his death, and even this is a disputed question. The legend that his conversion was due to the vision of the Cross in the sky has long since –like the account about Jesus inserted in the Antiquities of Josephus– been exploded as another piece of forgery.  

    The enmity of the beasts to the believers in God was brutal and savage, but that of the rational Horn was diabolical and malignant. This enmity was most noxious and harmful to the religion, because it was directed to pervert the truth and the faith. All the previous attacks of the four empires were pagan; they persecuted and oppressed the believers but could not pervert the truth and the faith. It was this Constantine who entered in the fold of Jesus in the shape of a believer and in the clothes of a sheep, but inwardly he was not a true believer at all.  How poisonous and pernicious this enmity was will be seen from the following:–  

                    (c) The Horn-Emperor speaks “big things” or  “great words” (rorbhan in the Chaldean language) against the Most High. To speak blasphemous words about God, to associate with Him other creatures, and to ascribe to Him foolish names and attributes, such as the “begetter” and “begotten,” “birth” and “procession” (of the second and the third person), “unity in the trinity” and “incarnation,” is to deny His unity.

    Ever since the day when God revealed Himself to Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees until the Creed and the Acts of the Council of Nicea were proclaimed and enforced by an imperial edict of Constantine amidst the horror and protests of three-fourths of the true believing members in A.D. 325, never has the unity of God so officially and openly been profaned by those who pretended to be His people as Constantine and his gang of the unbelieving ecclesiast! In the first article of this series I have shown the error of the Churches concerning God and His attributes. I need not enter into this unpleasant subject again; for it gives me great pain and grief when I see a holy prophet and a holy spirit, both God’s noble creatures, associated with Him by those who ought to know better.

      If Brahma and Osiris, or if Jupiter and Vesta were associated with God, we would simply consider this to be a pagan belief; but when we see Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth and one of the millions of the holy spirits in the service of the Eternal raised equal to the dignity of God, we cannot find a name for those who so believe other than what the Muslims have always been obliged to use –the epithet “Gawun.”

       Now, since the hideous Horn speaking great words, uttering blasphemies against God, is a king –as the Angel reveals it to Daniel, and since the king was the eleventh of the Caesars who reigned in Rome and persecuted the people of God, he cannot be other than Constantine, because it was his edict that proclaimed the belief in the Trinity of persons in the Deity, a creed which the Old Testament is a living document to condemn as blasphemy, and which both the Jews and Muslims abhor. If it be other than Constantine, then the   question arises, who is he? He ahs already come and gone, and not an impostor or the Anti-Christ hereafter to appear, that we may be unable to know and identify. If we do not admit that the Horn in question has come already, then how are we to interpret the four beasts, the first of which is certainly the Chaldean Empire, the second the Medo-Persian, and so forth? If the fourth beast does not represent the Roman Empire, how can we    interpret the third, with its four heads, as the Empire of Alexander, split into four kingdoms after his death? Is there any other Power succeeding the Greek Empire before the Roman Empire with its ten potentates   persecuting the believers in God? Sophistry and illusion  are of no use. The “Little Horn” is decidedly Constantine, even if we may deny the prophecy of Daniel. It is immaterial whether a prophet, priests or a sorcerer wrote the seventh chapter of the Book of Daniel. One thing is certain, that its predictions and descriptions of the events, some twenty-four centuries ago, are found to be exact, true, and have been fulfilled in the person of Constantine the Great, whom the Church of Rome has always very wisely abstained from beatifying as a Saint, as the Greek Church has done.

                       (d) Not only does the “Little Horn,” grew into something of a more “formidable vision” than the rest, speak impious words against the Most High, but also it wages war against the “Saints of the Most High, and vanquishes them” (Daniel 7:25). In the eyes of a Hebrew Prophet the people who believed in one God was a separate and holy people. Now it is indisputably true that Constantine persecuted those Christians who, like the Jews, believed in the absolute Unity of God and courageously declared the Trinity to be a false and erroneous conception of the Deity. More than a thousand ecclesiastics were summoned to the general Council at Nicea (the modern Izmid), of whom only three hundred and eighteen persons subscribed to the decisions of the Council, and these too formed three opposite factions with their respective ambiguous and unholy expressions of “homusion” or “homoousion,” “consubstantial,” and other terms utterly and wholly strangers to the Prophets of Israel, but only worthy of the “Speaking Horn.”

    The Christians who suffered persecutions and martyrdoms under the pagan emperors of Rome because they believed in One God and in His servant Jesus were now doomed by the imperial edict of the “Christian” Constantine to even severer tortures because they refused to adore the servant Jesus as consubstantial and coeval with his Lord and Creator! The Elders and Ministers of the Adrain Creed, i.e. Qashishi and Mshamshani –as they were called by the early Jewish Christians – were deposed or banished, their religious books suppressed, and their churches seized and handed over to the Trinitarian bishops and priests. Any historical work on the early Christian Church will give us ample information about the service rendered by Constantine to the cause of the Trinitarian Creed, and tyranny to those who opposed it. The merciless legions in every province were placed at the disposal of the ecclesiastical authorities. Constantine personifies a regime of terror and fierce war against the Unitarians, which lasted in the East for three centuries and a half, when the Muslims established the religion of Allāh and assumed the power and dominion over the lands trodden and devastated by the four beasts.

                     (e) The “Talking Horn” is accused of having contemplated to change “the Law and the times.” This is  a very serious charge against the Horn. Its blasphemies or “great words against the Most High” may or may not affect other people, but to change the Law of God and the established holy days or festivals would naturally subvert the religion altogether. The first two commandments of the Law of Moses, concerning the absolute Oneness of God –“Thou shalt have no other gods besides Me”– and the strict prohibition of making images and statues for worship were directly violated and abrogated by the edict of Constantine. To proclaim three personal beings in the Deity and to confess that the Eternal Almighty was conceived and born of the Virgin  Mary is the greatest insult to the Law of God and the grossest idolatry. To make a golden or wooden image for worship is abominable enough, but to make a mortal an object of worship, declare him God (!), and even adore the bread and the wine of the Eucharist as “the body and blood of God” is an impious blasphemy.              

    Then to every righteous Jew and to a Prophet like Daniel, who from his youth was a most devoted observer of the Mosaic Law, what could be more repugnant than the substitution of the Easter for the Paschal Lamb of the great feast of the Passover and the sacrifice of the “Lamb of God” of God upon the cross, and upon thousands of altars every day? The abrogation of the Sabbath day was a direct violation of the fourth command of the Decalogue, and the institution of Sunday instead was as arbitrary as it is inimical. True, the Qur’an abrogated the Sabbath day, not because the Friday was a holier day, but simply because the Jews made an abuse of it by declaring that God, after the labour of six days, reposed on the seventh day, as if He were man and was fatigued.   Muhammad would have destroyed any day or object, however holy or sacred, if it were made an object of worship intending to deal a blow or injury to God’s greatness and glory. But the abrogation of the Sabbath by the decree of Constantine was for the institution of the Sunday on which Jesus is alleged to have risen from the sepulchre. Jesus was himself a strict observer of the Sabbath day, and reprimanded the Jewish leaders for their objection to his doing the deeds of charity on it.

                        (f) The “Horn” was allowed to make war against the Saints of the Most High for a period of some three centuries and a half; it only “weakened” them, made “them languid” –but could not extinguish and entirely root them out. The Arians, who believed in one God alone, sometimes, e.g. under the reign of Constantius (the son of Constantine), of Julian and others who were more tolerant, strongly defended themselves and fought for the cause of their faith.

    The next important point in this wonderful vision is to identify the “Bar Nasha,” or the Son of Man, who destroyed the Horn; and we shall undertake to do this in the next article.” (pp. 61-69. Professor Dawud shows that this “Bar Nasha” is the Prophet Mohammad. See Jesus-son of man (Barnasha).

Regarding Gog and Magog–(Qur’an 18:94 and 21:96; Genesis 10:2; 1 Chronicles 1:5; Ezekiel 38:2, 9; 38:15, 16; 39:18-19, Revelation 20:7-10) Muhammad Ali shows in his commentaries 1523-1524 that “the ancestors of the present Teutonic and Slav races are the Gog and Magog spoken of in the Holy Qur’an. The effigies of Gog and Magog in London and the names of Tobal and Moskoa, occurring in the Bible, are clear indications of this fact;” and that “in the world-domination of Gog and Magog is thus clearly hinted the domination of the European nations over the whole world, and the prophecy has thus found fulfillment in our days.” (M. Ali’s translation of the Qur’an can be viewed online: www.muslim.org).

That the Mahdi will be defeated: Allāh decreed Islam to prevail over all religions–(Qur’an 9:33; 48:28; 61:9). As no man can defeat or thwart the purpose of Allāh, then no king or any other can defeat the Mahdi if the coming of the Mahdi is a Divine truth. (And as the Mahdi and Jesus would both be from Allāh, one would not be battling against the other).    

Jesus’ alleged return: Allāh sent Jesus wholly and solely to preach to the Jews; and he fulfilled his mission, as he himself declared–(See Jesus-only for Jews). That the Jews did not accept Jesus does not mean that Jesus did not complete his mission –can any man thwart the purpose of God? To say that Jesus was a failure would be to say that the Jews are greater than Allah–; the mission of prophets of God are to deliver the message, not to enforce it; this is why, because of their free will, the rejecters will be hurled into Hell.

   And as Jesus was sent to minister to Jews and as he completed his mission there is no need for him to return. Given the pagan foundation of Christianity –with sons of God dying for their people and would return to redeem mankind– and with the human tailoring of the Gospels to fit Jesus into this mold, it would seem that the narrative relating to Jesus’ alleged return is a fake just like his crucifixion. Or, if there is any truth to those narrations, Jesus’ return would be figurative just as Elias returned as John the Baptist–(Luke 1:17; Matt. 11:11-14; 17:10-13. See Jesus birth in Bible & Qur’an, APPENDIX III, DAJJAL).

That the Anti-Christ will rise from Islam: A Muslim cannot be Anti-Christ; this is a contradiction!

   Islam/Muslims believe in Jesus and teach the same doctrines that Jesus taught –Unity of God, worship of God and obedience to the law of God, and that he was a prophet sent to minister to the Children of Israel.

In fact, Islam/Mohammad repudiated the Jewish calumnies against Jesus and his mother, Mary -that Mary was an “adulteress” and Jesus of “illegitimate” birth- and have, at present, secured for them the unflagging allegiance of some one and one half billion Muslims.

Who or what is the Anti-Christ? Anti-Christ is that which teaches doctrines under the name of Christ that Christ did not teach.
Allāh revealed in His Qur’an: “Praise be to Allāh! Who revealed the Book to His servant, and allowed not therein any crookedness”–(Qur’an 18:1). To which Muhammad Ali states:

“In connection with this chapter, the Holy Prophet is reported to have said: He who remembers the first ten verses of the chapter entitled the “Cave” is protected from the tribulation of Dajjal (Antichrist) (Ms. 6:42). Shi‘bah mentions the last ten verses of The Cave instead of the first ten (AD. 36:12).
Now in the first and the last sections of this chapter the Christian doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is condemned. In the first section a warning is given to those who say Allah has taken to Himself a son (v. 4), in the last two to those who take My servants to be friends besides Me (v. 102), and this doctrine, the doctrine of sonship and of the divinity of a servant of God, is the basic doctrine of the Christian religion. Moreover, in the concluding ten verses, a true description of the occupation of Christian nations is given in the words whose effort goes astray in this world’s life (v. 104). The Holy Qur’an does not speak of the appearance of Dajjal, or Antichrist, anywhere, but the Prophet’s saying quoted above plainly shows that the Dajjal of the Hadith is the same as the upholders of the erroneous Christian doctrine of the sonship and divinity of Jesus Christ. Christianity, in its present form, being opposed to the true teachings of Christ, is thus the only Antichrist known to the Qur’an. It may be added that Dajjal signifies one who conceals the truth with falsehood, or a liar or a great deceiver (LL –Arabic English Lexicon by Edward William lane).”

The Christian Church with its Anti-Christ doctrines –Trinity, inherited sin, and vicarious atonement– which Christ did not teach, is the Anti-Christ! Factually, Christianity does not exist!

(Careful study of Hadith literature will show that the Dajjal/Anti-Christ is not an individual but a system. According to the Traditions of the Prophet Dajjal would be “one-eyed;” “will have two flowing streams with him, one seemingly white and the other seemingly bursting with flames;” between his eyes will be written the word “kafir” (disbeliever); he will travel over the land “like the rain shower which is being swept forth by a blowing gale behind it;” and most important, Dajjal cannot be “killed,” in the literal sense of the word.  A person –a being– cannot have two   streams with him. Dajjal is an unjust (one-eyed) system, unGodly (disbeliever), having the power to dominate, and to control (travel through the land like the rain), its allies are rewarded with “riches and prosperity” (the white stream) and its “opponents” are visited with death and destruction (the stream of flames). While the   Church teaches Anti-Christ doctrines under the name of Christ and is the Anti-Christ, an unjust system that supports Church doctrines is also Anti-Christ. Since Dajjal is a system and not an individual he cannot be killed by physical methods; but he can be killed. A system can only be killed by another system. Allāh God, through the Prophet Mohammad, has given us this system –Islam. We combat Dajjal with abstinence from intoxicants; immorality; injustice; deception; and by following and propagating Divine Truth. (See  Jesus birth in Bible & Qur’an, APPENDIX III, DAJJAL).

*

NOTES

1. Muhammad In The Bible, pp. 12-13.
2. Yusuf, Ali, Qur’anic comm; # 663.