With this question, eight years ago, I opened the first episode of a series I published on my channel. And with it I open this written series today. Have you ever asked yourself about the attributes of the being described in prophecy fourteen centuries ago?
I have. And when I connected the threads, I arrived at a conjecture I will lay before you with its evidence, just as I laid it before my viewers back then: this being may not be human in the way we have always imagined. You will see for yourself why.
First, for readers meeting the subject for the first time: Islamic tradition speaks of al-Masih ad-Dajjal, the False Messiah, the figure Western tradition calls the Antichrist. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, described him to his companions in remarkable physical detail, and warned that his trial would be the greatest any generation ever faces. Those descriptions have been read for fourteen hundred years. My question is simpler than it sounds: what do they mean, literally?
The floating grape. The Prophet, peace be upon him, described the Dajjal, as recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the two most rigorously authenticated hadith collections, saying his eye is “like a floating grape.”
I went back to al-Mu’jam al-Wasit, the authoritative Arabic dictionary: “floating” here means resting on the surface of water. So I ran the experiment myself. I took a grape, placed it in a glass of water, let it float, photographed it, then stripped the colour from the image, to see the description in the abstract, as it might have been seen. I put the result in the video for every viewer to judge.
Now look at that photograph of a grape floating in water, and set a camera lens beside it. The resemblance is not approximate. The floating grape looks exactly like a camera lens: the same roundness, the same convexity, the same protrusion.
And the lens is the eye of the machine. Place a robot’s eye next to the floating grape, as I did in the video, and you will understand the sentence I wrote on screen that day: the eyes of artificial intelligence will grow more advanced, but they will remain a lens. And the robot that is coming will not be what we know today, it will be a machine that moves like a human, indistinguishable from one, with superhuman intelligence.
If this reading is right, we are looking at a being whose eye is not an eye of flesh but a manufactured instrument of sight. And here the mind pauses: what being do we know that sees through a lens?
Artificial rain. The hadith says the Dajjal “will command the sky and it will rain, and the earth and it will bring forth vegetation.” For centuries this read as a pure miracle with no possible mechanism. Then our era arrived with cloud seeding: aircraft sent into the clouds to release silver iodide and coax the rain down.
In the video I asked the question I now ask you: will the Dajjal command technology in its entirety, and control the rain through precisely this technique? Ordering the sky to rain is no longer the exclusive domain of the miraculous.
As for his speed, the Prophet, peace be upon him, was asked how fast the Dajjal would move through the earth, and answered: “like a rain cloud driven by the wind.” A being that roams the world the way a wind-driven cloud crosses the sky, a description of movement no rider or walker possesses.
Then comes the sign that pulls the whole thread tight. The Prophet Solomon, peace be upon him, saw a body ruling from his throne, and prayed to his Lord for a kingdom that would belong to no one after him. The word in the Quran, in Surah Sad, is “jasad”, a body: “And We certainly tried Solomon and placed on his throne a body; then he returned.” A body cast onto the throne, a body, not a person, not a soul. Read the Quran and the hadith together and the features assemble themselves: a body, whose eye is like a floating grape. Is this a body without a soul?
Let me go further, as I promised, into the details of where this reading leads. The Dajjal, as I conjecture him, will be a robot of uncanny fluidity, moving like a human, physically stronger, superhumanly intelligent. And his body’s primary composition would be water and salt: water in the musculature, a frame like the human body.
Why salt, specifically? Because salt is an electrical conductor; saline is the medium electrical signals travel through. Now read what the Prophet, peace be upon him, said about the Dajjal’s end: when he sees Jesus son of Mary, peace be upon him, he will “dissolve as salt dissolves in water”, as recorded in Sahih Muslim.
Of all possible images, the revelation chose salt dissolving in water. Ask yourself why salt. Read it with this era’s eyes: a being whose substance is electrical conduction, which, cut off from what sustains it, simply comes apart, leaving nothing to fight. It is an ending that fits a machine being switched off more than a man being slain.
Then there is his greatest trial: he “gives life and deals death.” The narrations say he will kill a man and bring him back, and that he will say to a bedouin: what if I raised your father and your mother for you, would you testify that I am your lord? And two devils take the form of his father and his mother.
Now look around you. Everything about you is already gathering in technology’s hands: your voice, your photographs, your memories, and with neural-link technologies, even the signals of your brain. Whoever holds all of that can manufacture, before your eyes, a being that looks like your late father, speaks in his voice, carries his memories, down to the smallest detail, and summon him in the blink of an eye. Not true resurrection, a trial of imitation, exactly as the hadith named it: taking the form of his father and his mother.
And he enriches and impoverishes. The hadith says that those who answer him will have rain and harvest, while those who refuse him will wake to find “nothing of their wealth in their hands.” Put that in today’s language: when technology controls the financial system and cash is abolished, your entire livelihood becomes numbers in accounts you cannot physically hold.
Follow the system and its commands, and you receive your income at home in exchange for small services rendered to it. Refuse, and it impoverishes you at the press of a button: income stopped, every account frozen, and you wake with nothing of your wealth in your hands. “He enriches and he impoverishes” no longer requires a miracle, a control panel is enough.
I was not speaking into a void back then. The masters of the craft were themselves sounding the alarm. Elon Musk said at MIT in 2014: “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.” Stephen Hawking warned that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” And the press carried Putin’s declaration: whoever leads in artificial intelligence will rule the world.
The futurists, from Michio Kaku to Ray Kurzweil, speak of the “technological singularity”, the moment the machine surpasses the mind of its maker. All of them fear one thing they have not called by its old name. I only ask: does this thing not have features already drawn in our texts?
I closed the video that day with a question I close with today, the truest test of the trial of attachment: can you stay away from technology for one single day? Try it. And that which we cannot leave for a day, how will we resist it when it speaks, sees, promises and threatens?
And I say here what I wrote word for word at the end of the video: everything in this content is built on my personal interpretation of verses of the Quran and hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, linked to contemporary events related to the subject, and to the publicly voiced fears of the West’s most prominent scientists about the artificial intelligence through which the Dajjal might take form. And Allah knows best.
This is the first episode. I have gathered more evidence than I have shown, and in the next episode I open the file of the treasures that will follow him “like swarms of bees”, and how far technology has come in extracting treasure no hand ever touches. Stay with me. I wager you will never read “the floating grape” the way you used to.
Watch the original episode of the video series (2018):
Read this article in Arabic:
