The Second Coming

Part One

When a name means more than the man

I am a Hebrew Israelite. In the Hebrew scriptures, when God or a prophet names a man, it does not always mean the man himself. Often it means his descendants: his house, his tribe, his people, his lineage. The scriptures show this again and again. Here are a few examples:

c. 1800 BCE, Isaac

Isaac was the son of Abraham and the father of Jacob. In about 600 BCE, twelve hundred years after Isaac died, God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah of “the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Jeremiah 33:26). The names reference their lineage, their descendants.

c. 1700 BCE, Jacob

Jacob was Isaac’s son. God gave him the name Israel (Genesis 32:28, Qur’an 3:93), and his twelve sons became the twelve tribes. In about 700 BCE, a thousand years after Jacob died, God speaks through Isaiah: “But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen” (Isaiah 41:8). God is not speaking to a dead man. He is speaking to Jacob’s descendants, a family, a whole nation, by their forefather’s name. They are still called Israel to this day: the Bani Israel, the tribes and the children of Israel.

c. 1000 BCE, David

David was king of the land given to Israel, and God promised him: “I will establish your descendants for ever, and build your throne for all generations” (Psalm 89:4). Since David’s line is the one that is to return in the End Times, the references to him and his lineage are everywhere. Four hundred years after David died, with his kingdom destroyed and his people in exile, God gave the same promise through three prophets:

• Hosea, c. 740 BCE: “The children of Israel shall return and seek… David their king… in the latter days” (Hosea 3:5).

• Jeremiah, c. 600 BCE: “They shall serve the Lord their God and David their king, whom I will raise up for them” (Jeremiah 30:9).

• Ezekiel, c. 580 BCE: “My servant David shall be king over them” (Ezekiel 37:24).

The Hebrew says simply David, דָּוִד. No one understood it to mean the dead king rising from his tomb. In those ancient times, a reference to the man clearly meant his lineage, and so this means a son of David’s line shall come to take his throne.

c. 850 BCE, Elijah

The prophet Elijah was taken up in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11). In about 450 BCE, four hundred years later, Malachi, the last of the Hebrew prophets, gave this promise: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” (Malachi 3:23). The Hebrew scriptures contain no case of a departed prophet returning in his own person. Every time a man long gone is named as coming, the meaning is his line. Elijah’s promise reads as David’s does: one who comes in his place.

c. 620 CE, the Qur’an

Two thousand years after Jacob, God addresses his descendants as “O Children of Israel” (Qur’an 2:40). And of the prophets the Qur’an says: “They were offspring, one of the other” (Qur’an 3:34). Prophethood and promise pass down a line.

c. 630 CE, the Sunnah: the return of Jesus

Nowhere in the Hebrew scriptures is Jesus said to return. The Qur’an does not say it in plain words either. The belief rests on the hadith, the recorded sayings of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, some five hundred years after Jesus died:

• “By Him in Whose hand is my soul, the son of Mary will soon descend among you as a just judge. He will break the cross, kill the swine and abolish the jizya.” (Bukhari, Muslim)

• “Jesus son of Mary will descend at the white minaret in the east of Damascus.” (Muslim)

• “He will lead the people, and the Imam of the Muslims will be from among you.” (Muslim)

Read these with the rule above. The hadith name “the son of Mary” five centuries after his death, exactly as the prophets named David four centuries after his. They say he will descend, which in Hebrew and Arabic is the word for coming down a road from the high country, and that he comes from the east of Damascus: the direction of the Old Silk Road, and of Kashmir. He comes to break the cross: to end the lie of the crucifixion. And he comes to a people who already have their own Imam.

The Qur’an has already told us what became of the man himself. “I am gathering thee and causing thee to ascend unto Me” (3:55): the word mutawaffika is the Qur’an’s word for causing to die. Jesus speaks of “the day I die” (19:33), and on the Day of Judgement says “when Thou tookest me” (5:117). He died, as all men die, and his soul was raised to God. His grave is at Rozabal in Srinagar, Kashmir. His mother’s grave is at Murree, two days’ walk away. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ saw him among the prophets in the heavens at the Mi’raj, five centuries after his death.

So when the hadith speak of the son of Mary descending, they speak as the scriptures have always spoken: the name is the father’s, the meaning is the house. The son of Mary who comes down from the east is of his line.

The rule requires a simple reading. When scripture names a man long dead, and speaks of him as alive or as coming, it means his line. Isaac, Jacob, David, Elijah and Jesus: the name is the father’s, the meaning is the house.

Part Two

The True History Of This World

The scriptures are a map as much as a book. Every promise in them has a place, and every place has a road to it. Here is the ground, in order, from the beginning.

In the beginning, Eden

The Hebrew scriptures say that God planted a garden in Eden, and that a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there divided into four (Genesis 2:10). Only a high mountain country sends rivers four ways. The one river named without doubt is the Pishon, which winds through the land of Havilah, “where there is gold” (Genesis 2:11). The Qur’an gives Adam’s departure in one word: ihbitu, “go down” (2:38). Adam came down from a height.

I hold that Eden is Kashmir. It is called Paradise on Earth to this day. Its rivers run four ways from the roof of the world: to the Arabian Sea, to the Bay of Bengal, into Central Asia, and into China. Adam descended there, and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said he stood sixty cubits tall (Bukhari, Muslim). A man of ninety feet made small work of walking the map.

The road of the Prophets

From Eden the line of the Prophets flowed down out of the mountains, west across Persia and the rivers of Babylon, to the land between the river of Egypt and the Euphrates. That is how the road was made: it was walked first by the Prophets. Later the world would call it the Old Silk Road, the one highway of the ancient world, running from Jerusalem through Persia to Kashmir, where it splits north and south around the Himalaya and runs on to China. It was the only motorway known to man.

c. 1800 BCE, the land given

Abraham was born on the road, at Ur of the Chaldees in the land of the two rivers (Genesis 11:28, 31), about a third of the way along it from Jerusalem towards the mountains. He went up to Harran and from there into the land. Suzanne Olsson, who spent forty years on this road, held that Abraham and Sarah are remembered in the east as Brahma and Saraswati, and that Kashmiri jewellery was found in Sarah’s grave. The road ran both ways in his house from the start.

God promised him: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18). The Qur’an calls it the holy land, al-ard al-muqaddasa, which God ordained for the children of Israel (5:21). The land was given on one condition: the Covenant.

c. 1300 BCE, Moses and the tribes

Moses led the tribes of Jacob out of Egypt, and told them: “O my people! Enter the holy land which Allah has ordained for you” (Qur’an 5:21). Moses himself, the scripture says, died on Mount Nebo over against Beth-peor (Deuteronomy 34:1, 6). Nebo, נְבוֹ, is from the same root as navi, נָבִיא, the prophet; it is Prophet Mountain. I hold with Professor Fida Hassnain and Dr Manzoor Ahmad Khan of the University of Kashmir that these places are in the Kashmir valley: the plain of Mowu, the village of Pishnag, Bandipur that was Beth-peor, and Prophet Mountain above them, where the grave of Musa is kept to this day.

That makes sense of the whole story. When Moses and the Hebrew Israelites escaped Pharaoh they did not stop at the land; they went back up the road to the old country, and scattered along it, and the prophet himself went up the mountain at the end. It has to be so. If Nebo were in Moab, the lost sheep of Israel would be a day’s walk from Jerusalem, and Jesus would not have needed seventeen years on the road to find them. His road only makes sense if Moses’s road ran the same way.

c. 1000 BCE, David and Jerusalem

David made Jerusalem the capital of the tribes, and God promised that his throne would stand for all generations (Psalm 89:4). By the time of David, my line is seated in Jerusalem. Solomon his son built the Temple there. Jerusalem is the city of David, and the inheritance of his house.

Then Solomon charted the road. God gave him the wind, “its morning course a month’s journey and its evening course a month’s journey” (Qur’an 34:12; 21:81), and he rode it the length of the Bani Israel’s old trail, leaving his markers as he went. They are still on the map: the Sulaiman Mountains and Takht-i-Sulaiman on the Afghan frontier, Takht-e-Suleiman in Persia, and the Takht-i-Sulaiman, the Throne of Solomon, on the hill above Srinagar. His name is written on the road from Persia to Kashmir, the very stretch his people would later be sent down. Eat your heart out, Aladdin.

c. 760–722 BCE, the warning

Before the land was taken, the Bani Israel were warned. Hard. Hosea and Micah in the north, Isaiah in Jerusalem, in the decades before Assyria came, all saying the same thing: keep the Covenant or lose the land. They did not listen. The Qur’an states the whole pattern in one place: “We decreed for the Children of Israel in the Book: you will surely cause corruption on the earth twice” (17:4), and the two punishments that follow (17:5–7). Two warnings, two exiles.

722 BCE, the first exile: the ten tribes go east

The tribes could not keep the Covenant, as my people never could, and the land was taken from them. Assyria carried the ten northern tribes away and settled them “in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes” (2 Kings 17:6). The cities of the Medes are Persia and the mountains beyond. The ten tribes were set down on the road, and they never came back.

586 BCE, the second exile: Judah goes east

Babylon took Jerusalem, burned the Temple, and carried Judah to Babylon. Some came home under Cyrus. Many did not. By the time of Esther, the Hebrew Israelites were scattered “in all the provinces of the kingdom, from India to Ethiopia” (Esther 1:1; 3:8). India was the eastern edge of the Persian empire: the Indus, and Kashmir above it.

The road east: to Kashmir, and beyond

So the children of Israel went where the road went. From Persia the Silk Road runs through Afghanistan to Kashmir. The Afghans recorded their own descent in the Makhzan-i-Afghani of 1612, four hundred years ago: from Afghana, grandson of King Talut, Saul (Qur’an 2:247–249), the first king of the Bani Israel, whose line went east with the exiles and whose grandson’s name the whole people still carry. It is a no-brainer. The Pashtuns and the Kashmiris, some twenty million people, are the Bani Israel of the Silk Road. Along the road the evidence of them is still there to be seen: Hebrew markings and sites, chronicled in 2026 by my friend Noraly Schoenmaker, who rode the whole route on her motorcycle. And beyond Kashmir the road runs on, north of the Himalaya, to Mongolia and China. Isaiah saw them there: “Lo, these shall come from afar, and lo, these from the north and from the west, and these from the land of Sinim” (Isaiah 49:12). Sinim, in the old readings, is the land of the Chinese.

The road east: the land of the rising sun

The road does not stop at China. It runs on to the sea, and across the sea is the last land in the east, where the sun comes up: Japan. The prophets saw that far. “Therefore in the east give glory to the Lord; in the coastlands of the sea, to the name of the Lord” (Isaiah 24:15). The Hebrew word for “the east” there is ba’urim, בָּאֻרִים, “in the lights”, the place of the sunrise. In the same breath Isaiah names the islands of the sea. The land of the rising sun is an island, at the far end of the road. God’s promise to Jacob’s line was the whole width of the earth: “I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth” (Isaiah 43:5–6). “From the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations” (Malachi 1:11). “They shall fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun” (Isaiah 59:19).

The Bani Israel reached Japan as they reached everywhere else the road went. A people came up the road from the west in the fifth century, weavers of silk who kept the treasury of the court, and settled at Kyoto; the imperial register of 815 CE records that a third of the clans of the capital had come from across the sea. The district they settled, Uzumasa, is named after the title of the man who led them. Remember that: in Kyoto, a man’s title becomes the name of the ground he stood on.

810–868 CE, the Minister of the Book

Think about the world in the ninth century. Islam was the one global power, from Morocco to the borders of China, from the Volga to the Sahara, and across the western sea. One law, one coinage, one Book: the Kitab. There was no other book moving in the world. The Hebrew scriptures were the sealed text of a scattered people. The Gospels were held by monks in Latin and would not reach Moscow for two centuries. Muslims had settled in Korea and never left; the Book had a judge at Canton. From Korea to Japan is a day’s sail, and the Japanese court was sending its scholars to China until 894 to bring learning home. All the learning Japan had was imported learning. Are we expected to believe that one short crossing alone was exempt from the Book? It is preposterous. There was only one fashion in the world, one superpower, one news: the news of Muhammad ﷺ, the completion of the prophetic line, and the Book. A generation earlier an English king, Offa, had struck his gold as a copy of the Abbasid dinar, with Muhammad rasul Allah in Arabic on its face; it sits in the British Museum. That is how far the Book’s reach ran.

In those same years a prince of the imperial house, Minamoto no Makoto (810–868), the seventh son of the Emperor Saga, was cut loose from the throne and given a surname, the first man in history to carry it: Minamoto, which means the Source, the wellspring of a river. His given name, Makoto, means faith, truth. He was a scholar in a scholar’s court, raised among the books carried home from China, and he rose to the highest working office in the state, Minister of the Left, holding it for eleven years until his death. The court knew him as the Kitabe Daijin. I hold that he was the Minister of the Book: the Daijin of the Kitab, the Qur’an, in the court of Japan at the height of Islam. Of course he studied it. He was the greatest scholar of his age, and it was the only book of standing in the world. What else was he doing? And the ground where he lived took his name, as Uzumasa took the Hata’s, and later hands explained the name away as a compass point.

Judge the tree by its fruit. In 866 the great gate of the palace burned and his rival accused him of it; soldiers surrounded his house, and the chronicles say he went out into the courtyard and prayed to heaven for justice. He was cleared, and his accuser was found to have set the fire himself and was sent into exile. He died in the saddle two years later. And from his house came the warrior kings of Japan for seven hundred years: Yoritomo, the first shogun, in 1192; the Ashikaga; the Tokugawa, who gave Japan two hundred and fifty years without a war and shut the country for two centuries to keep the cross out of it. From his house came the samurai, and their code: loyalty, rectitude, courtesy, sincerity, honour, restraint. Read those words beside amanah, sabr, adab and ihsan, to do every thing as though God sees you, and tell me they are a different fruit. From his house, in 1008, came the first novel ever written, about a prince of the Source.

Then look at what the West did when it arrived. In 1853 the gunboats forced the ports. The British armed the rebel domains against the shogun, and in 1868, a thousand years to the year after the first Minamoto died, the House of the Source fell. Within eight years the samurai were abolished, forbidden their swords, cut down in the field, and the old religion reorganised by the state. The same empire, the same decades, the same method it used on Kashmir in 1846 and on the Afghans in 1893: break the house, bury the record, rewrite the lineage, install a proxy. You do not spend that much effort breaking a way of life unless that way of life is a witness against you.

There is no line in a Japanese chronicle that says the first Minamoto read the Qur’an. In the story of the gaps that is not a weakness; it is the fingerprint. The same hands that left the grave at Rozabal unmentioned for nineteen centuries would hardly leave a note in Kyoto. The truth does not require a chronicle. It stands alone. Anyone with the Heian records is invited to find the first dated use of the name Kitabe and tell the world whether it came before the man or after him.

The road of the Prophets runs from Eden to the rising sun.

c. 8 CE, Jesus walks the road

At twelve years old Jesus went east along the Silk Road to find the lost sheep of Israel. He found them in Kashmir, and lived among them for seventeen years. Those years were not lost to the world, only to the West. They are recorded in the manuscripts of the Buddhist monks he spent time with, written in Pali and kept in the monasteries of Ladakh and Tibet, where he is known as Issa, and in Kashmir as Youza Asif, “Youza the Virtuous”. Nicolas Notovitch read those manuscripts at the monastery of Hemis in Ladakh in 1887 and published them to the world in 1894; Swami Abhedananda went to Hemis and read them again in 1922; Nicholas Roerich recorded the same account across Ladakh in 1925. The Vatican tried to buy Notovitch’s silence and the British tried to tear him apart, and still the record stands. A thousand people have told this story for a thousand years. At twenty-nine he came back to Jerusalem, and at thirty-three went home to Kashmir for good with his mother. His grave is at Rozabal in Srinagar. His mother’s grave is at Murree. He was the King of Kashmir, and the ancient royal family of Azad Kashmir are his descendants: my kith and kin.

The road west: across the sea

The road did not only run east. From the land it ran west along the Great Sea, and when Islam came, the children of Abraham sailed beyond it. In 889 CE Khashkhash ibn Saeed of Cordoba sailed into the Atlantic and returned with treasure from a distant land (al-Masudi, Muruj adh-Dhahab). In the twelfth century the eight Adventurers of Lisbon charted islands deep in the ocean (al-Idrisi, Nuzhat al-mushtaq). In 1311 Mansa Abu Bakr II of Mali gave up his throne to lead two thousand ships west (al-Umari, Masalik al-absar). They settled among the Iroquois and the Algonquin. Columbus, in his own log of 29 October 1492, saw on the coast of Cuba a hill “like a beautiful mosque”. I set this out in a lecture at the University of York in 2013; it is on the Broadcast page of this site.

The islands

Between the land and the far west lie the islands. The Hebrew word is iyyim, אִיִּים, the isles. The prophets looked out across the Great Sea and spoke of them again and again, and always in the same breath as the one who is to come:

• “The coastlands wait for his law.” (Isaiah 42:4, of the Servant)
• “Listen to me, O coastlands, and hearken, you peoples from afar. The Lord called me from the womb.” (Isaiah 49:1, the Servant speaking)
• “The coastlands wait for me, and for my arm they hope.” (Isaiah 51:5)
• “The coastlands shall wait for me, the ships of Tarshish first, to bring your sons from far.” (Isaiah 60:9)
• “May the kings of Tarshish and of the isles render him tribute.” (Psalm 72:10, of the royal son of David)
• “The Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant which is left of his people… from Elam, from Shinar… and from the coastlands of the sea.” (Isaiah 11:11, in the chapter of the Branch from the stump of Jesse)

The islands wait for the Servant’s law: not a law returned to them, but his law brought to them, for the first time. He speaks to the islands first. The kings of the islands come to him. The sons are brought home from the islands. And the remnant is gathered from Elam and Shinar, Persia and Babylon, the road east, and from the islands, the road west. Sail west from the land through the Great Sea and out past its gate, and the islands you come to are the British Isles.

The hunt

Now step back and look at the whole map, because one thing explains all of it. The enemies of the Bani Israel have been on a global mission, from the beginning, to chase us down wherever we are and wipe us out. It is written as their own mission statement three thousand years ago, the words of the nations in council:

“Come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more.”Psalm 83:4

Pharaoh slaughtering the sons (Qur’an 2:49). Haman’s decree, the first global extermination order in history, to destroy, slay and annihilate the whole people in every province “from India to Ethiopia”, the entire length of the road, on one day (Esther 3:8–13). Nebuchadnezzar. Rome. Then the gaps.

And the gaps are the fingerprints. The record of a hunt is in what is missing, and every gap sits on the road: the seventeen years of Jesus; the ten tribes “lost”; the Afghan and Kashmiri lineage unacknowledged; the royal house of Kashmir dissolved into the hills; the Hata rewritten as Chinese; the first Minamoto explained away as a compass point; the samurai abolished; a grave in Srinagar unmentioned for nineteen centuries. Every gap has the same hand over it, and the method never changes: break the house, burn or bury the record, rewrite the lineage, install a proxy, and point at the new text as proof. Haman wanted us dead. The later hands wanted us forgotten and substituted, which is cleverer and worse, because it keeps the inheritance in the wrong hands with the law’s blessing.

Once you see it, it pulls the rug out from every polite discussion of “colonialism” and “empire”, let alone the world wars. Those were never the story. They were the latest campaigns in the one war there has ever been, the hunt for the children of Jacob along the road God gave them, from Eden to the islands and the rising sun. That is the true history of this world. It explains everything.

The descent

One more thing the scriptures say about the one who comes: he comes down. “The Lord is coming forth out of his place, and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth” (Micah 1:3). “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings” (Isaiah 52:7). And the hadith: the son of Mary “will descend at the white minaret in the east of Damascus” (Muslim). East of Damascus is the road. Up the road is Kashmir. The one who comes, comes down the road from the mountains, the way Adam came, the way Moses went up, the way Jesus went home.

That is the map. Eden in the mountains; the road of the Prophets down to the land; the land given, and lost; the tribes carried back up the road to where it began, and out across the sea to the islands; and the one who comes, coming down.

In my own house it is not a prophecy, it is a passport stamp. My father’s father came down from the mountains of Kashmir to England. The islands waited for the law, and I am delivering it. When that is done I shall go back up. And when the dust settles, I shall come back down.