The Dajjal: the One-Eyed Deceiver

The Dajjal is the Islamic end's antagonist, and the hadith describe him with an unusual insistence on the ordinary. He is a man, born of human parents, one-eyed, his right eye is like a floating grape, and between his eyes is written the word kafir, unbeliever, which only believers can read. He comes at the end of time from the east, riding with his followers, and the hadith dwell on his powers with a kind of clinical dread: he brings with him his paradise and his fire, and the fire is the true paradise, a test inverted; he commands the sky and the earth, summoning rain and gold; he travels the world in forty days, leaving no city untrodden except Mecca and Medina, which the angels guard. He claims divinity, heals the sick, raises the dead, or so it appears, and the faithful flee him, and the deceived flock to him, and at the gate of Jerusalem, as he besieges the believers, he is met by Isa, who has descended to the white minaret east of the city. Isa pursues him to the gate of Ludd, kills him, and shows his corpse to the believers so the doubt is over. The trick is over. The world, after the deceiver's death, has no more great illusions to suffer through, and the end of days proceeds to the trumpet.

The Dajjal is the Antichrist tradition's most fully realized figure: he inherits the New Testament's man of lawlessness, the Christian legend's false Messiah, and the Zoroastrian final adversary, and the hadith give him a biography no other end-times villain has. His function is diagnostic. The hadith insist he will be tested by hunger and plenty, that he will command with miracles that are in fact illusions, because the end's final danger is not the war before it but the lie inside it. The Dajjal's word kafir on his own forehead, readable only by believers, makes the point: the deception is only deception to those who can read. To everyone else it is a savior, and the most dangerous figure in any apocalypse is not the destroyer but the convincer.

The figure who appears at the end is described under Saudi Arabia.

The hadith material gives him a biography. Born blind in one eye, he will emerge from the east and stay forty days, one of them like a year; he will carry paradise and hell reversed, feeding the fire to those who believe him and water to those who resist; and he will travel the earth at speed except that Mecca and Medina will refuse him entry, their angels standing guard. The traditions differ on details but agree on the mechanism: his power is the ability to make the false look true, which is why only faith, not force, answers him.

Muslim apocalyptic literature, David Cook's study documents, has revived the Dajjal in every era of crisis: against the Crusades, against the Mongols, against colonial powers, and in the twentieth century against technologies read into the letter K-F-R on his forehead, variously identified with unbelief itself or with specific modern systems. The figure's endurance lies in that adaptability; a deceiver who can be recognised only by believers is always recognisable, whatever the century. The form outlives every empire that thought it had him.

@figure[gog-magog-beatus]{note: "Gog and Magog as the end-times besiegers — a parallel end-times deceiver tradition in the Christian lineage."}