A trip to the dam of Gog and Magog.. What do you know about the adventure of Salam al-Turjuman a thousand years ago?

He (Dhul-Qarnayn) dug its foundation thirty cubits down, and built it with iron and copper until its leg to the face of the earth, then he raised two jambs (the jamb like a wall or the vertical lintel up) following the mountain from both sides of the gap.. Each jamb is twenty-five cubits (14 meters) wide. , in the thickness of fifty cubits (27 meters), and it is all built with bricks (like the shape of bricks or stones) of iron hidden (melted) in copper. Width) Four Fingers".

(Salam Al-Turjuman’s description of the Dhul-Qarnayn Dam)

The mention of the people of “Gog and Magog” goes back to the Noble Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet, and they have an inseparable connection in the history of the world, ancient and in the future, for it came about the dam of Gog and Magog in Surat Al-Kahf

.

Dhul-Qarnayn was able to build this dam or fill between the two great mountains through an engineering plan explained by the Noble Qur’an, as he melted over that fill a mixture of iron and copper, to be stronger and more compact, until God said in it

, i.e., they could not go up to the top due to its height and smoothness, and they were not able to dig it up to get out of it.

The Mother of the Believers, Mrs. Zainab bint Jahsh - may God be pleased with her - narrated that the Prophet - may God’s prayers and peace be upon him - entered her in terror, saying: “Woe to the Arabs from an evil that has approached, so today he opened from the backfills of Gog and Magog like this one. He circled his thumb with the thumb and the next.”

The hadith is narrated by the two Imams Al-Bukhari and Muslim in their Sahihs[1].

Moreover, one of the signs of the Great Resurrection is the emergence of Gog and Magog, so that humanity will not be able with all its might to repel and repel them.

Among these Qur’anic verses and prophetic hadiths, the interest in the people of Gog and Magog and the dam of Dhul-Qarnayn became a matter that had epistemological and cultural significance in the Islamic mind. The translator came to that dam to find out his experience after a terrifying vision he had seen in his dream.

How was the journey of Salam Al-Turgoman to the dam of Gog and Magog?

And how did he meet the horrors and difficulties on the road a thousand and two hundred years ago?

And what did he see in that dam?

Was Salam Al-Turgoman's journey preceded by other trips?

That's what we'll see in our next story.

Previous Attempts on a Peace Journey

The Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal said on his support from Abu Hurayrah, may Allah be pleased with him from the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: "Tear and migrations to dig the dam every day. What was, even if their debate was, and God wanted to send them to people, drilled, even if they see the sun beam, he said, who returned to them tomorrow, God willing. So they drain the waters, and the people fortified themselves in their fortresses, and they shoot their arrows into the sky, and they are slain:The people of the earth, and the people of heaven.

These are the entirety of the narrations of the Islamic origins from the Book and the Sunnah of the Prophet that showed us the people of Gog and Magog, but the following facts on the death of the Messenger of God - may God’s prayers and peace be upon him - made the story of Gog and Magog return to the surface of events from time to time, during the era of Caliph Omar Ibn Al-Khattab - may God be pleased with him May God be pleased with him - and during the Muslims’ conquest of Azerbaijan in the year 22 AH, the owner of Azerbaijan, Shahrbaraz, the Muslim conqueror, Abd al-Rahman bin Rabi’ah, told about the dam by saying:

He said: O Prince, do you know where this man came from? This man was sent years ago towards the dam to see what his condition and without him, and I provided him with great money, and I wrote to him to those who follow me, and I gave him, and I asked him to write to him to those behind him, and I gave him to every king A gift, so he did that with every king between him and him, until he reached him... So when we finished, there were two mountains between them with a dam blocked, until he rose over the two mountains after he had leveled them, and if below the dam there was a trench darker than the night for its distance.”[3]

The reason for the trip and departure

But in the era of the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Wathiq, who ruled the Islamic world between the years 227-232 AH, while he was sleeping on one of his nights, he saw in a dream that the Gog and Magog dam was open, so he was terrified by that, and ordered the preparation of a scientific expedition to investigate the truth of the matter!

The Caliph Al-Wathiq informed the commander of the Abbasid army, Ashnas Al-Turki, of the truth of his vision. He told him that a man working in the Abbasid administration in the translation department there named Salam Al-Turjuman knows thirty languages. Salam Al-Turjuman says about those moments: “Then Al-Wathiq called me, and said: I want you to go out to the dam until You see him and bring me his experience. He joined me with fifty strong young men, and he connected me (he gave me) five thousand dinars, and he gave me my diet (if I died on the way) ten thousand dirhams, and he commanded that every man be given one of the fifty thousand dirhams, and a livelihood (salary) for a year”[4] as he transmits Obaidullah bin Khordadbeh (d. 280 AH) in his book "The Paths and Kingdoms", and he heard the whole story from Salam Al-Turjuman, who is our main source for it.

The expedition convoy was equipped with vehicles, provisions and food, and they left the capital of the Abbasids at that time "Samarra" towards the north, and they went towards Armenia and it was part of the Abbasid Islamic State and its capital is Tbilisi (Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia today. The kings of the Caucasus and southern Russia, the most important of which was the Jewish Khazar kingdom.

Salam says: "So we stayed with the king of the Khazars for a day and a night until he brought with us five guides. We traveled from him [to the east from the north of the Caspian Sea] for twenty-six days, and we ended up in a black land with a foul smell... We traveled there for ten days, then we arrived at cities. It was ruined, so we explored it for twenty days, then we asked about the state of those cities, and we were told that they were the cities that Gog and Magog used to drive through, and they destroyed them.”[5]

The Russian orientalist and scholar Ignatius Krachkovsky says in his book “The History of Arab Geographical Literature” that Salam al-Turjuman actually reached Lake Balkash, a lake located today in Kazakhstan, and even managed to reach the region of Hungary in China today, and that he may have seen the Great Wall of China[6 ].

History of Arab Geographical Literature by Ignatius Krachkovsky

Peace in front of the dam!

Salam al-Torjuman confirms that his mission was able to reach a city called “Aikha… with farms… it was the one Dhul-Qarnayn used to set up in his army, between it and the dam a three-day journey… until it reached the dam on the third day, and it is a round mountain.” They mentioned that Gog and Magog are of two types. ... And the dam built by Dhul-Qarnayn is a gorge (passage) between two mountains, two hundred cubits wide (about 120 meters), and it is the road from which they exit and disperse in the ground”[7].

What is striking is that Salam was able to describe this dam accurately because he saw it with his own eyes, and despite the doubts of some orientalists and European and Russian historians about the origin and reality of this journey, others confirmed its validity;

Because it was narrated from him orally, and Ibn Khordadaba, the geographer and one of the senior officials in the Abbasid Court, narrated it from him.

Many European researchers have praised this journey and the important and accurate notes mentioned by Salam, who says about the dam: “He dug (Dhul-Qarnayn) its foundation thirty cubits down, and built it with iron and copper until its leg to the face of the earth, then he raised two jambs (the jamb like a wall or a vertical sill). Up) follows the mountain from both sides of the open.. Each jamb is twenty-five cubits (14 meters) wide, fifty cubits (27 metres) thick, and it is all built with mud (like the shape of bricks or stones) of iron hidden (melted) in copper, the brick being ( The brick) is a cubit and a half by a cubit and a half (the length of the stone or brick is about a meter and a half) and the thickness (width) of four fingers”[8].

Salam confirms that Dhul-Qarnayn was able to build the backfill exactly like the door, filling the top with stones made of iron and copper, then on top of that iron and molten copper so that “no wind does not enter through the door or from the mountain as if he created his creation,” as he describes;

That is, as if this rubble, which resembles a door, has become like the two mountains that lie between them, and the viewer thinks that it is a mountain exactly like them.

Rather, Salam al-Turjuman confirms that this door or the filling/dam, which is 120 cubits high, i.e. approximately 55 meters, had a lock 25 cubits high, i.e. 11 and a half meters. Already on the building that resembles a door, or is it more tightness and support for the body of the dam or the backfill from the outside.

And Salam asks the inhabitants of that region whose king had appointed keepers of three men with a hammer, who knocked three ways every day on this great building: “Then the lock strikes at the beginning of the day, and he hears them (i.e. from behind the embankment or the dam) clamoring (loud voices) like The hornets swarm, then they subside, so if at noon he hits him another blow and he listens with his ear to the door, so their shout (their shout) in the second is louder than the first, then they subside, and if it is the time of the afternoon hit another blow, they are like that, then he sits until sunset, then he goes away. Knock on the lock to hear from behind the door, so they know that there are hafidhs, and these people know that those did not create anything in the door (the dam)” [9].

Salam al-Turjuman, the leader of the expedition, asked these guards, which security men are guarding the dam and monitoring the daily developments in it, asking them about any defects they noticed in this dam, “They said there is nothing in it except this fissure. And the fissure was wide like a fine thread. They said: No... So I approached and took out a knife from my hide and scratched the place of the incision and took out half a dirham from it (of the iron that had fallen from it), and tightened it in a handkerchief to show him the trustworthy in God [10].

Salam al-Turjuman finished inspecting the body of the Dhul-Qarnayn Dam, and completed his mission to the fullest, and they decided to return from Central Asia, apparently from what he described, towards Iraq, but the way back this time was not the same as the way to go, so they headed towards Khurasan (Turkmenistan and the far east of Iran) until They passed the city of Samarkand, then Bukhara, then to Tirmidh, then Nishapur. Twenty-two of the men who were with us died, and those who fell ill on going, twenty-two of them died, they were buried in their clothes, and those who fell ill were left sick in some villages. And he died in the reference (return) Fourteen men" [11].

Salam states that the period of going to the dam was "sixteen months, and we returned (to Iraq) in twelve months and days", meaning that the duration of the expedition lasted two years and four months to go, explore and return, and when Salam arrived at the temporary capital of the Abbasids at the time, "Samarra." He says: “So I entered Al-Wathiq and told him the story, and showed him the iron that I had scraped from the door, so he praised God (that the dam had not been excavated or demolished), and he ordered alms to be given in charity, and he gave the men a thousand dinars.”[12]

This is the journey of Salam al-Turjuman to the dam of Gog and Magog in the period between 227 AH to 232 AH. The ancient Muslim geographers such as Ibn Rustah, Ibn al-Faqih and Yaqut al-Hamawi differed about its authenticity, and the Russian historians and orientalists who cared about it differed because this mission passed through the lands of the Russians starting from the Caucasus Then with a route from the north of the Caspian Sea towards central Asia and China, and whatever description of this journey, it is considered a unique scientific and geographical achievement that the Muslims preceded a thousand and two hundred years ago.

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