BRIDGE OUT OF BABYLON
We did a quick recap on polygamy and its permissibility but how many fail to make it work?
I didn't mention an important piece of the puzzle that's missing is that Muslim leaders in the community don't assist people in meeting each other. This leads to problems where people are “catching on sherbet” and then “making the haram affair halal”...
In the time of the Prophet SWS men practiced polygamy with their peers being the formal match-makers but weren't exactly “picking up random chicks from the local pub” if you know what I mean. There are many ignorant men today going around with their gaze unguarded and just approaching various women directly without their parent's approval or consent.
Would you offer your daughter to an older man who's married when there are plenty of young single and suitable bachelors who have yet to fulfil half their deen?
My kids have watched ‘Free Qu’ran Education’ on YouTube, one clip is with Mufti Menk chastising men about talking to other women instead of complimenting their wives. So when I asked my 8-year-old how she would feel about her husband taking another wife, her immediate response was “But he's not supposed to look at another woman!”
So then we looked at someone who wasn't inclined to flirt his way into a relationship but had two wives… so then we looked at the story as to how he got his two wives in the first place.
We discussed the historical consistency of Egypt having a king and not a pharaoh.
Then when his wife Sarah prayed for protection causing his hand to go lame until eventually he gave her Hajjar. As an interesting twist, her husband would end up with Hajjar later to produce an heir and thus a nation of believers.
But to go further back into their story we looked at the ‘Fertile Crescent’ which comprises the Rivers Tigris to Euphrates and Canaan by the sea. The green land on the map represents the fertile land from the waters running through it.
The Babylonian Empire stretched across this region and the people were culturally and linguistically related which led us to discuss their collective ties to Sumerian history.
Lut AS was in Canaan with his cousin when he got the calling to go north to what was then Sodom. Before this, they were expelled from Babylon when they tried to incinerate Ibrahim AS with some aspects of the wicker effect. But according to scholars it was a big fire that would have still been insulated and they couldn't get near it.
We know the reason why. He smashed the idols and confronted his father who said that they were continuing with what they inherited from their forefathers. Here’s where the plot thickens…
Babylonians were related to the Assyrians who were related to the Hittites (the people of Asiyah AS and it was their polytheism that contributed to Hatti being the “Land of 1000 Gods”) - all of these people were related to or descendent to the Sumerians. The Sumerians left us thousands of Cuneiform tablets that tell us a lot about who they were and how they influenced those who came after them. These don't follow the chain of letters like in Arabic or Roman alphabets. But similar to Chinese characters each symbol represents a word except that it can also represent a sound. Their history goes back to the Ubaids who were obsessed with reptile or snake humans leading to a lot of alien conspiracy theories.
Semitic Amorites from Canaan mixed and became the Sumerians who came to occupy that space and they were a combination of Semitic Amorites and Canaanites.
Their civilization started in what is today’s Armenia where the earliest signs of astronomy and metallurgy have been discovered. They were discovered going into outposts including the Indus Valley and coming down into modern-day Iraq due to the river going from North to South.
Egypt’s Nile went up from the Nubian South towards the Mediterranean hence the early Nubian influences.
By 1800 BCE they had reached the peak in religion, politics, and architecture. Their buildings and structures were adorned in Lapis lazuli, copper, and hard stones from trade. Metal was carved and rolled on clay to make highly detailed pictures.
Mudbrick was used to build walls a meter thick. That's why you can still see them in Iraq - subhanallah. It was an epic landscape of a city with massive Ziggurats that may or may not have inspired other pyramids with giant statues that visually captured their myths of strange animals and heavenly beings. They were so advanced that they even had batteries and were able to carve into hard stone that they imported. They used these to carve their “gods” from these stones and each town had its own “god” which was like a type of mascot they carried onto the battlefield.
Yet Ibrahim AS built a simple cube in Makkah which has survived to this day while not much is left of the hanging gardens with water pushed upwards through sophisticated irrigation systems.
This was a theatrical world that once overwhelmed the senses of Bani Israel and still does to some of them in the form of Zionist Hollywood… The Babylonians later tolerated the monotheist Bani Israel but left their mark or marks on them as well.
But this was the original background of their ancestors: Sarah RA, her husband, and his cousin - Peace be upon them.
We can appreciate in this context that their faith and focus on God would have to be through the roof (or should we say "through the heavens) to withstand an environment like this.
The Sumerian King's list before ‘The Great Flood’ shows a list of kings each ruling for about 1000 years. According to the cuneiform tablets, it seems that after the flood the years of rule were reduced to decades. Consider the lifespan of Nuh AS and that it has been discovered that the earth had about 50% more oxygen than today which causes an increase in size and longevity - so could it be that there was just a lot of longevity preflood?
They used the radius of the earth to calculate other bodies until they ended up with a star list similar to what we had in quantity during the 1700s. They were collecting tablets so they could predict the bodies then it became Astrology. This happened as politics motivated the interpretation of the stars. This Astrology became idolatry with these celestial characters coming to life in their imaginations then carved out of hard imported rock. Many tablets showed the sun, moon, and celestial bodies.
Despite all their advancement and refined measurements their insistence on dragging their idols onto battlefields would have clashed with a critical-thinking youth like Ibrahiem AS
He astronomically looked at the sun, the moon, and celestial bodies. He observed as astronomers do that all heavenly bodies ascend and descend with the myths of the “gods” usually rising and falling in various sagas. This is also reflected in Egyptian myth who may have received the Zodiac from the Sumerians as their trade and influences flowed around the Fertile Crescent into Egypt.
They responded that they found their forefathers doing this from so much content and information from the ancients prior. They had thousands of cuneiform tablets with instructions so specific even songs and music can and have been reproduced by people to this day.
Atheists argue that Judaism and thus other branching or responding monotheist faiths came from them with the themes of giants, floods, winged beings, longevity, and ancient reptiles. They argue that like many cults that competed before we are left with the remnants of a surviving cult from their civilization.
The people of Ibrahim AS were very eager to pass on their knowledge to future generations.
But despite their impressive attempts to preserve their civilizaticentrelah SWT was not in the centre of it, so it fell…
But the little Kaaba that their rejected son built still stands and we all face it every day to this day…
How did this legacy of The Great Patriarch influence the backdrop of Makkah and the world of the third woman on our list of the best of women: Khadijah bint Khuwaylid AS
To be continued - in sha Allah…
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