Al‑Masih ad‑Dajjal

Accounts situate the Dajjal within the corpus of hadith and later apocalyptic writings rather than the Qur'an. Sources characterize his emergence as an end‑time sign shortly before the Day of Judgment, often saying he will come from “the East.” The tradition is internally varied: Sunni hadith commonly treat him as an individual man whose period of manifest activity lasts forty days, while other narrational strands and later exegetical summaries identify him as a devil in human form. Scholarly summaries note that some motifs (e.g., being chained in the West) reflect adaptation from Christian apocalyptic imagery and Syriac vocabulary, and that aspects of his depiction (including certain polemical elements) developed in post‑Quranic apocalyptic discourse.

Canonical descriptions in the hadith tradition emphasize a distinctive ocular deformity: he is usually said to be blind in his right eye while the left eye is described as green; true believers are reported to be able to read the word kāfir (كافر, “disbeliever”) inscribed on his forehead. These physical markers are presented both as literal identifying traits in many narrations and as symbolically charged (the one eye interpreted as signifying spiritual blindness). Variants and elaborations exist across the literature, but the right‑eye blindness, green left eye, and the kāfir inscription are the recurrent features in the supplied sources.

The Dajjal is described as a great deceiver who will pretend to be the promised Messiah and even claim divinity. He performs counterfeit miracles that imitate those attributed to ʿĪsā — healing the sick and raising the dead — often said to be aided by devils (shayāṭīn). Some accounts attribute to him capacity to affect natural and economic conditions (causing vegetation to appear, causing livestock to prosper or die, attempts to affect celestial phenomena), though these details vary between narrations. Sunni hadith material commonly gives the duration of his public activity as forty days (with the first day like a year, the second like a month, the third like a week, and the rest like ordinary days). He attracts many followers by deception and widespread spectacle, precipitating a major eschatological trial until his final defeat by ʿĪsā.