Al-Masih ad-Dajjal

The ship had been a month at sea, thrown from wave to wave, when it grounded on an island at sunset. Thirty men of Lakhm and Judham lowered the small boat and rowed ashore into failing light. The first thing that met them was an animal so thickly haired they could not tell its head from its hindquarters, and the animal spoke. It said its name was al-Jassasa, the Spy, and it told them to go up to the man in the monastery, who was very eager for news. They went quickly, afraid the thing was a devil. Inside they found the largest human being any of them had ever seen, his hands gathered up to his neck and iron running from his knees to his ankles.

He wanted to know about the date palms of Baysan, whether they still bore fruit. He wanted to know whether there was water in the lake of Tiberias and whether the spring of Zughar still watered its fields. Then he asked about the unlettered prophet, and what the Arabs had done about him. They told him the man had left Mecca for Yathrib and that those around him had submitted. He said that was better for them. Then he named himself. He was the Masih, he would soon be given leave to come out, and when he did he would walk into every town on earth within forty nights except two. Tamim al-Dari, a Christian merchant who later became a Muslim, brought that account to Medina. The Prophet gathered the people to the mosque to hear it, sat on the pulpit smiling, and when the story was done he struck the pulpit with the end of his staff and said: this is Taiba. He meant Medina.

He is never named in the Quran. Every detail of him arrives through hadith, and there the reports are dense, repetitive and not always in agreement with one another, which is itself a clue to how they were made. The word dajjal is usually traced to a Syriac term for a cheat or an impostor, though Arabic lexicographers preferred to find it at home, in a root that gives dajjala for covering something over, dajjala again for gilding a base thing so it passes for gold, dajal for defilement, and dujjala for the refuse of humankind. Hamid Algar, writing the entry for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, notes drily that the sheer number of these explanations rather undercuts them, while conceding that every one of them fits.

The oldest surviving description is short and physical. An-Nawwas ibn Sam’an heard the Prophet speak about him one morning, pitching his voice low and then high until the listeners felt the thing was already among the palm trees, and what he said was that the Dajjal is a young man with tight twisted hair and a blind eye, and that he looked like a particular Meccan named Abd al-Uzza ibn Qatan. Anas ibn Malik gives the other half of it: no prophet was ever sent who did not warn his people against the one-eyed liar, and mark this, he is one-eyed and your Lord is not, and between his eyes stands written the word kafir, unbeliever. Later collections crowd in more. The good eye burns like the morning star with a clot of blood across it. His big toes nearly touch while his heels stand wide apart. He has all the strength of a young man and cannot father a child. The only beast that will carry him is a white donkey with an impossible distance between its ears.

None of this began in the desert as ancient lore. The apocalyptic traditions took their shape during a bad century, through three civil wars in the Umayyad caliphate and the repeated failure to break Byzantium, and they gave Muslims fighting other Muslims a picture of a world that would eventually be set right. The Dajjal is what that century built to hold its fear.

What he does is worse than what he looks like. He carries water and fire with him, and Hudhayfa’s report reverses them flatly: his fire is cold water and his water is fire. He orders the sky and it rains, orders the earth and it puts up crops, so that the herds of the people who believe him come home in the evening with their humps high and their udders full. The people who turn him away wake up to drought with nothing left. He walks past ruined ground and tells it to give up its treasure and the treasure comes out after him like swarming bees. He calls over a young man in the prime of his strength, cuts him in two with a sword, throws the halves as far apart as an archer stands from his target, then calls him back, and the young man walks up laughing with his face shining. He crosses the earth like rain driven before the wind. He is given forty days, the first as long as a year, the second a month, the third a week, the rest ordinary. When his followers asked whether one prayer would do for a day that long, the answer was no. Work out the hours and pray them.

Seventy thousand Jews of Isfahan in Persian shawls are said to follow him, along with nomads, drunkards, singers and idlers. That line has done a great deal of damage. Algar points out that no tradition from the Prophet clearly makes the Dajjal himself a Jew, and Hugh Beattie traces how twentieth-century apocalyptic writing took the older material and gave it a heavily anti-Semitic colouring it did not originally carry, folding in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a good deal of borrowed Christian end-times fiction. What the early reports actually describe is a crowd of the credulous, drawn from every direction.

There was also, in Medina, a real boy. Ibn Sayyad spoke unnaturally early, claimed prophecy for himself, said he could see a throne on the water, and once answered a test question with a single clipped syllable, al-dukh, which was taken as garbled inspiration. Umar ibn al-Khattab was certain enough to want him killed, and was told to leave him alone, because if this was the one he feared he would not be able to kill him anyway. The Prophet hid behind palm trunks to watch him and never settled the question. Most of these reports simply stop.

His end is the most fixed thing about him. Jesus, son of Mary, comes down at the white minaret on the eastern side of Damascus in two garments faintly dyed with saffron, his hands resting on the wings of two angels, and when he bends his head water runs from it, and when he lifts it beads scatter like pearls. He hunts the Dajjal down and catches him at the gate of Ludd in Palestine and kills him. Other reports say the killing happens in the valley of Afiq, or with a lance rather than a sword, and Shi’i tradition gives the deed to the twelfth imam instead. All of them agree on the manner of the dying. At the sight of Jesus the Dajjal starts to dissolve the way rock salt dissolves in water, and has to be run through before he can finish melting.

Against a being who can raise the dead, the defences look almost insultingly small. Mecca and Medina are closed to him, guarded at every pass, and an angel with a drawn sword turns him back at each gate. Whoever lives to see him should recite the opening verses of the chapter of the Cave. That is the whole armoury. It works because the trial is a trial of judgement, not of strength: the ground really does yield gold, the young man really does get up laughing, and none of it is true, which is the entire point. Later readers took the hint and went inward. Rumi read the single working eye as spiritual blindness. Sufi writers made the killing of the Dajjal an image of the spirit mastering the lower self. In the twentieth century Said Nursi proposed two of them, one universal and one specific to Islam, hinting at Bolshevism and at Ataturk, and Muhammad Asad read the one good eye as the one-sidedness of modern Western materialism. He has been almost every enemy anybody needed. That is the flaw built into a figure defined entirely by pretending to be something else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Dajjal in Islam?

The Dajjal, in full al-Masih ad-Dajjal, is the great impostor of Islamic tradition who appears near the end of time claiming divine status and leading people astray. He is not named anywhere in the Quran; everything known about him comes from hadith, above all the collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. His defeat is counted among the major signs of the Hour.

What does the Dajjal look like?

The earliest reports describe the Dajjal as a young, powerfully built man with tight, twisted, matted hair and one blind eye. The word kafir, meaning unbeliever, is written between his eyes, and the traditions insist any believer can read it whether or not they are literate. Later collections add that his working eye shines like the morning star, that his big toes almost touch while his heels stand wide apart, and that he rides a white donkey.

What powers does the Dajjal have?

He carries water and fire that are the reverse of what they appear to be, so his fire is cold water and his water is fire. He commands rain and crops for those who accept him and leaves drought behind for those who refuse, calls buried treasure up out of ruined ground, and appears to cut a young man in half and restore him alive. The traditions present all of it as deception rather than genuine power.

How is the Dajjal defeated?

Jesus, son of Mary, descends at the white minaret on the eastern side of Damascus, hunts the Dajjal down and kills him at the gate of Ludd in Palestine. At the sight of Jesus the Dajjal begins to dissolve like rock salt in water and has to be killed before he melts away. Some reports place the killing in the valley of Afiq, and Shi’i tradition assigns it to the twelfth imam rather than to Jesus.

How can someone be protected from the Dajjal?

The Prophet told his followers that whoever lives to see the Dajjal should recite the opening verses of the chapter of the Cave, Sura 18. The cities of Mecca and Medina are also closed to him, with angels guarding every road into them and turning him back with drawn swords. The protection is understood to work because the trial is one of judgement rather than of strength.

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Iblis, Shaitan, Qareen, Djinn, Dhul-Qarnayn, Al Rakim, Israfil, Azrael, Jannah, Iram of the Pillars, Buraq (Burak), Jesus, Antichrist, Gog, Satan