Destruction of Great Cities
 

Great cities will be ruined and it will be as if they had not existed the day before. (Al-Muttaqi al-Hindi, Al-Burhan fi Alamat al-Mahdi Akhir al-Zaman, p. 38)

  

 

When developed places are ruined, then doomsday is no further away than the distance between your two fingers. (Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Rasul Barzanji, Al-Isha'ah li-ashrat al-sa'ah, p. 143)

 

 

There will be ruins all around the world. Ultimately, Egypt will also be ruined, but until Basra is destructed, Egypt will remain secure. The ruin of Basra will be because of Iraq’s destruction. Meanwhile, the downfall of Egypt will come with the drying of the Nile... (Mukhtasar Tazkirah Qurtubi, p. 530)

  

The ruin of great cities spoken of in this hadith brings to mind the destruction that now arises from war and various natural disasters. In addition to these, recently developed nuclear weapons, aircraft, bombs, missiles, and other weapons, have also caused untold destruction. These weapons with high destruction power have brought about a degree of destruction never before seen. Indeed, the great cities targeted are most affected by this destruction.

The incomparable destruction of the Second World War is an example of this. With the use of the atom bomb in world's greatest war, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely destroyed. As a result of heavy bombing, European capitals and other important cities suffered a great amount of damage. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes the damage caused to European cities by World War II:

The resulting devastation had turned much of Europe into a Moonscape: cities laid waste or consumed by fire storms, the countryside charred and blackened, roads pitted with shell holes or bomb craters, railways out of action, bridges destroyed or truncated, harbors filled with sunken, listing ships. "Berlin," said General Lucius D. Clay, the deputy military governor in the U.S. zone of postwar Germany, "was like a city of the dead. " *

In short, the unprecedented destruction caused by the Second World War conforms entirely to that described in the hadith of the Prophet (may God bless him and grant him peace).


Approximately 100.000 people died in Hiroshima at the moment the atom bomb was dropped and during the months following it. 3 days after the Hiroshima disaster, another bomb dropped to Nagasaki killed another 40.000 people. While bombs caused the death of people, they also wiped out a great area of settlement. Those who lived suffered for generations from genetic and physiological decompositions due to radiation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

*. Britannica Encyclopedia 2000, "The blast of World War II"