world will hear. He will travel the world in forty days and have a wondrous ass.”27

God knows best, on condition such narrations are completely sound, they miraculously predict that in the time of the Dajjal, the means of communication and travel will have so advanced that an event will be heard by all the world in a day. It will be shouted out by the radio and will be heard in east and west, and will be read about in all the newspapers. One man will travel the whole world in forty days and see the seven continents and seventy countries. These narrations thus miraculously foretold the telegraph, telephone, radio, railway, and aeroplane ten centuries before they appeared.

Moreover, the Dajjal will be heard not in his capacity as the Dajjal, but as a despotic king. And his travelling everywhere will not be to occupy those places, but to create dissension and to seduce people away from the right path. His mount or ass is either a railway train, one ear and head of which is an infernal firebox, and the other ear of which is a false paradise gorgeously adorned and furnished. He sends his enemies to its fiery head, and his friends to its feasting head. Or else his mount is an awesome motor car, or a plane, or... (silence!)

EIGHTEENTH MATTER

There is a narration which says: “If my community advances on the straight path, it will have one day.”28 That is, in accordance with the meaning of the verse,

On a day the space whereof will be [as] a thousand years of your reckoning,29

it will have rule and splendour for a thousand years. If it does not proceed on the straight path, it will have a day of five hundred years, and will be dominant and victorious for only five hundred years.

God knows best, this narration is not giving news of the end of the world, but of Islam’s victorious rule and the sovereignty of the Caliphate, for miraculously, that is exactly how it turned out. For because towards the end of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate its politicians lost