[editor-surveyor]

>> “While some believe this prophecy to have been fulfilled in the distant past” <<

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How can anyone believe that?

There is no record, Biblical or otherwise, that Damascus has ever been destroyed.

[muawiyah]

Two ways to deal with such questions ~ see if we have an allegorical prophecy ~ in which case the Moslem takeover of Damascus shortly after Mohammad's death would, in fact, fill the bill.

The Moslems are still there of course ~ so the place has become an intellectual and spiritual wasteland. Earlier, before that takeover, they sent missionaries into the whole world (as understood at that time).

The weakness of that particular argument would be that with the departure of the Umayyad Dynasty and its standards from the Eastern Mediterranean to Spain, Damascus become an even less noteworthy spiritual wasteland.

So, two destructions, or one, or we are waiting on Damascus to turn into a sterile radioactive ruin.