and they will take you as a qiblah (direction of prayer), and thereafter you will be called “the City of the Lord” (1).

(Sixteenth Proof) (2): He likewise said about Mecca: “Rise and quake, O barren woman who has never given birth! Break out in praise and rejoice, though you have not conceived, for your children will outnumber my children” (3).

By “my children” he means Jerusalem, and by “the barren woman” he means Mecca, for before Muhammad—God bless and grant him peace—she had never produced a prophet (4). It is therefore impossible to interpret the barren woman as Jerusalem, for Jerusalem is the home of the prophets and the wellspring of revelation, and indeed it has “borne many prophets” (5).

(Seventeenth Proof): Isaiah also said to Mecca—may God ennoble her—: “I shall grant the wilderness the honor of Lebanon and the splendor of Carmel” (6), meaning Syria and Jerusalem. In other words, I will transfer to the desert—through the appearance (7) of the prophets in the person of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, and through the pilgrimage—the dignity that revelation had bestowed on those lands.

He then said: “In the wilderness streams (8) shall burst forth and channels of water will cut through the barren ground; in the wastelands and thirsty places there will be springs and waters. A causeway will arise there—a road to the Sanctuary—no unclean nation shall traverse it, and the ignorant will not reach (9) it, nor—"