Al-Masih ad-Dajjal

← Encyclopedia

Al-Masih ad-Dajjal — “the false messiah, the deceiver” — is the great adversary of the end times in Islamic tradition: a figure who appears before the final days, claims to be God, and leads much of humanity astray through miracles and false abundance before his defeat. The name pairs al-Masih, the messiah, with ad-Dajjal, the liar or impostor, so that the title itself states the danger — a counterfeit of the very office of the true Messiah.

The Dajjal is not named in the Qur’an. He belongs instead to the hadith, the collected reports of the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds, where his coming is described in unusual physical detail. He is said to be blind or defective in one eye, with the word kafir — unbeliever — written between his eyes, legible to the faithful whether or not they can read. Reports hold that he will travel the earth with the speed of wind-driven rain, bringing what looks like a paradise and a hell that are in truth the reverse, and that his reign, variously numbered in days that stretch like years, will test belief to its limit. The two cities of Mecca and Medina, the tradition adds, he cannot enter; angels guard their approaches.

In the standard eschatological sequence, the Dajjal’s defeat does not come by human hand. Jesus — Isa, held in Islam to have been raised to God rather than crucified — descends again and kills him, in many reports near a gate of Lud (Ludd, in present-day Israel). The Mahdi, the rightly guided one who restores justice before the end, appears in the same cluster of events, though the relation of the two figures varies across the sources. Muslims across the centuries have understood these reports as genuine prophecy of events still to come, and the Dajjal as a real being yet to appear.

Historians of religion read the figure within a shared late-antique apocalyptic imagination. The structure — a deceiving pretender to the messianic role, unmasked and destroyed at the return of the true Messiah — closely parallels the Antichrist of Christian expectation, and the two traditions developed in conversation, drawing on overlapping Jewish, Christian, and Near Eastern sources. The resemblance is real and much studied. It is not identity: each tradition fixes the figure within its own account of the last things, and the Dajjal’s defeat by a returning Jesus is a distinctly Islamic arrangement of the older material.