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However he has not elaborated on this issue. It was in the late 50's or early 60's that I read this book and from then onwards, the more I thought about it, the clearer it has become to me that his idea is indeed correct. For the Messenger of Allah to give the mostly illiterate Arabs of fourteen hundred years ago a correct and comprehensive picture of a civilization based on today's technological advancement was next to impossible. Therefore, he did so through a series of allegorical references which exactly match the description of the western civilization of our time.
Everything we know about the Dajjal is derived from the Messenger's 'Hadis' or tradition i.e. words or actions of the Messenger himself, also action of others, he approved or disapproved of. As we all know, Hadis are classified into several groups, among which three are prominent, namely the 'sahih' or correct; 'hassan' which are also true but not as accurately related as the former and thirdly 'daif' or weak, poor Hadis, some of which are nevertheless accepted when corroborated. Besides these, there are also 'gharib', 'munkar', 'maruf' etc. divisions. During the rigorous process of collecting and verifying true Hadis, many false statements earlier deemed as correct Hadis have been rejected, while some of the true ones have also been omitted due to the fact that they could not be unbrokenly traced back to the Messenger of Allah himself. In order to get a complete and comprehensive idea about any subject broached in the Hadis, it is necessary to study all Hadis regarding it, notwithstanding the fact whether they are accepted without any doubt or rejected outright. Similar has been my method in collecting all relevant data about the Dajjal; however the ones quoted here are almost all Sahih or correct Hadis and those remained the basic platform of this research.
I have categorized all Hadis regarding the Dajjal into two groups. One part containing predictions related to its importance and gravity, the other concerning its identification. From the first group of the Hadis we are able to derive why the emergence of Dajjal occupies a more important stance than the deluge of Nooh's (a.s.) (Noah) time and why it is graver than the world wars or the battle of Kurukshetra which took the lives of about 1.5 crore human beings. In the second group of Hadis the Messenger of Allahhas related to us some definite signs through which we should be able to correctly identify the Dajjal as what it is and thus resist and reject the influence of the Dajjal. The almost complete lack of education and the total absence of technology could have prevented the people of the then Arabia in understanding the concept of the Dajjal, however, today, when almost every one of the allegories used to describe the Dajjal by the Messenger have been reflected in the mirror of the western society, how close are we in correctly interpreting and identifying it as the self-same "Masih-al-kazzab," the Dajjal? Unfortunately far from resisting or rejecting it, we, the so- called Muslims of this world, have it in front of our very eyes and yet are not only unable to recognize it for its true self, but have accepted it as our lord, master and have submitted to it. Let us start with the name, with which the Messenger has introduced us to it, the Dajjal- which is not actually a name, in the sense that it is more of a descriptive objective description than a proper name; like that of Emam Mahdi (a.s) who will have a separate personal name but is known to us as Al-Mahdi or 'the rightly guided one' - who will appear in the later times to guide mankind back to true Guidance, the right path. Similarly, the Dajjal is not a name in the proper sense as an adjective. The literal meaning of the word " Dajjal" is that of an attractive impostor, beautiful outside but dark and ugly inside, a cheat a deceiver and a liar. Is not this statement true of the technologically advanced western civilization which dazzles the beholder with fantastic achievements on the one hand yet due to its absolute detachment from God in their collective lives, society is rife with injustices, crimes and sins of every kind? This 'civilization' has been responsible for the deaths of 140 million human lives in course of the two world wars and another 20 million people in different wars and skirmishes ever since. The number of people disabled from these would be at least double of the dead; countless more have been displaced and rendered homeless. Since the beginning of this century, this ‘civilization’ has taken the lives of more than 10 million people in the war inIraq alone. It does not end there- injustices and cruelty on a personal and collective level, murders, thefts, rapes, kidnappings go on unabated and it is for these that the western civilization is the dazzling, attractive impostor.
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