Boreal

Adam, Eve and Noah; the Flood and the Ark

From La Vie de Mahomet, Virgil Gheorghiu, Robert Lafont, 1962

Adam and Eve

In Arab traditions, the story of Adam and Eve is not like that of other people's. They were tricked by the devil into eating the forbidden fruit and for that transgression were literally thrown out of Paradise. Eve landing in Arabia and Adam in [present day] India ...

Adam made his way to Mecca, dragging with him a stone from Paradise and built the first Ka'ba [in which he placed the stone] ...

Next to the Ka'ba is another stone, the  Maqām Ibrāhīm ("Abraham's place of standing") on which Abraham is alleged to have left his footprint.

Later in a pilgrimage to Mecca [from who knows where] Adam ran into Eve near mount Arafat. In one meaning of the Arabic ta'arafa, "they recognized each other". The miracle is not that they found each other, but that they recognized each other having been separated for over a hundred years ...

They fell in love again ... and began procreating.

p. 18

The Flood

After the murder of Abel, which is said to have occurred near present day Damascus, Adam became convinced that it was only a matter of time before God decided to punish mankind for its increasingly wicked ways by drowning everyone.

In anticipation of the Flood, he built a shelter for the "black stone" he brought from Paradise on mount Hira, the same mount on which the future Prophet Muhammad would receive the revelations.

The flood water came the day when the sins of man became of such magnitude that they could no longer be tolerated, as Adam had predicted.

A popular Arab tradition is that rain is the spit of angels. Rain being a rare occurrence where they lived, the Arabs, while being extremely imaginative, could not visualize the flood as real rain, simple angel spit that is.

The flood waters must have come from somewhere else, they did not fall from the sky.

The water that inundated the desert and the entire earth simultaneously gushed from the depths of the earth, from a hole dug in the earth's crust, like from a broken water main or a fire hydrant.

11:40 And when Our Command came, and the water gushed forth from the earth, We said: “Carry in it (the Ark) two of every kind, together with your family, except for those who have been doomed, and [take] those who believe.” However only a few believers besides him were there.

This hole-in-the-ground from which water flooded the entire earth is said to be at Kufa where the Great Mosque is located.

In Shia traditions the Ark was built at Kufa:

The Ark began it's voyage at Kufa in central Iraq and sailed to Mecca, circling the Ka'ba (sic) [seven times] before finally travelling to Mount Judi where it settled.

Ibn Haukal [died 978 A.D.]

... Before sailing off into the unknown, on the advice of the angel Gabriel who had earlier taken the sacred stone to the shelter built by Adam on month Hira, Noah did seven complete circles of the Ka`ba aboard the Ark*.

This circumambulation of the sacred sanctuary by Noah is called tawaf and is still done to this day by pilgrims as part of the Hajj and the Umbra.

Noah's wife, it is said, and one one of her sons were great sinners and were not allowed on the Ark.

In the Koran, the son did not make it onto the Ark because he thought he would be safe on higher ground [11:43]. There is no mention of Noah's wife not boarding the Ark, only that, along with the wife of Lot, she will burn in Hell for betraying her husband in some unspecified manner [66:10] as wives in the Koran often do.

In the Traditions, Noah is buried near Baalbek in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley. Adam in Mecca, his tomb at the center of the universe, Eve is buried at Jeddah.

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* If this is the case, then the ark would have first floated (remember this was a ship with no means of propulsion) south-west 1,710 km in direction of Mecca to perform this ritual, then approximately 2,500 km north to come to rest on mount Judi in present day Turkey.

Bernard Payeur