Barefooted Herdsmen Building Towers

And then, the next sign after the one about the mistress is that you will see the barefooted, naked, destitute herdsmen competing in constructing lofty buildings.

At one level this is seen by many people in the modern time: the idea of the Bedouin people now in the Arabian Peninsula building all these things, who were literally destitute people forty or fifty years ago. There is the account of a majlis in the United Arab Emirates, the majlis of Shaykh Sultan al-Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah. These are very pomp-type, pompous majlises; there is a lot of protocol and such things. But there was a man who came in literally in almost rags, dirty and barefoot, walking in quite arrogantly, who went up to the ruler, shook his hand, and then sat down. When the person sitting next to him was asked who that was, he said: it is his cousin. He is still like a Bedouin, living out in a tent — but his cousin had become the ruler of the country. So that is really interesting, this idea of these poor people.

And then the building. A very interesting phenomenon in Arabia is the building of buildings, and then another shaykh getting upset because so-and-so built a taller building than him; he will actually tear down his building and build one taller than the second one. And this is also in our own culture: in New York the Empire State Building was the tallest, and then the Chicago building went one up on them, and then the World Trade Centre. And then now, in Malaysia, interestingly enough, the Malaysians are very proud that they now have the tallest building in the world. Somebody had it on the cover of a Muslim magazine and asked what to make of it. It is really interesting that the Muslims are proud of being part of fulfilling the signs of the end of time — because it is seen as a very negative thing, not a positive thing.

And then there is another way to look at this, of building tall buildings by these kinds of wretched people: and that is the idea of building lofty ideas, and building ideological structures — because the Qurʾān talks about the building of taqwā, bunyān al-taqwā, the building of God-consciousness and awareness. So there is also the idea of wretched people creating lofty ideologies that many people will follow and think that they are the truth, and things like that. So this is just a very quick overview of it.