My Foreword in the book ‘The One Eyed Imposter’ by Eschatology scholar Abu Bilaal Yakub
In the name of Allāh the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.
In Islām, religious experience or spiritual communion with Allāh Most
Glorified can be broadly divided into two. One is the personal religious
experience where the servant witnesses the ‘Hand of God’ unraveling their
lives. It could be through an accepted Duā, a true dream, a miraculous event or an unveiling or unmediated comprehension of an attribute of Allāh or a concept in the Qurān.
But there is another type of religious experience that the Qurān alludes to time and again. This is the universal or collective religious experience wherein the Ummah or groups within the Ummah can witness the ‘Hand of God’ in global events or the movement of history.
This is the domain of I’lm al Ākhir az-Zamān, the field of study pertaining
the end of human history.
What could be more fulfilling and revitalizing for a believing heart than to not only see how the world is transforming bit by it, second by second, event by event, into what was foretold by Allāh and His Messenger (n), but to equally comprehend the wisdom of its unfolding. We as a global community have an opportunity to witness the I’jāz (miraculousness) of our tradition through the field of Islamic Eschatology.
Abu Bilaal has achieved a fascinating feat at analyzing Islamic Eschatology
using the instruments of Philosophy, Epistemology, Logic, and deep
Linguistics.
For millennia philosophers have argued over the nature of reality.
Is it real? Is it illusory? Is it material? Is it spiritual? The Indian, Chinese, and Greek philosophical traditions have presented a plethora of opinions on this fundamental question.
There was always a fringe school of materialism that existed in all these philosophical traditions that considered the world to be nothing more than matter. But the dominant thought was ‘spiritualistic’ as the unseen realities like God and soul were given due importance. The enormity of the tribulation of the Dajjāl lies in the fact that for the first time in history we see the emergence of a civilization that is utterly materialistic.
What was considered an outcast fringe group in previous civilizations has
swept across the globe and created a profoundly decadent monoculture
making materialism the mainstream worldview despite its various inherent
contradictions.
Brother Abu Bilaal presents an enlightening exposition on the Dajjāl’s
attack on knowledge and spirituality. I congratulate him for writing one
of the first few books that deconstruct the ‘fitnah’ of Dajjāl in an analytic
manner.
The Prophet (n) said that if the Dajjāl were to have emerged in his
time, the children of Medina would drive him out with their sandals. The
question arises why is the Dajjālic tribulation so trivial for the first generation and why does it become almost undefeatable for the later generations? The answer lies in the ‘blind eye’ of the Dajjāl. Those who interpret it literally have a difficult task of having to explain how the ka-fa-ra on the forehead of the Dajjāl can only be seen by a believer regardless of being literate or illiterate.
The tribulation of Dajjāl thrives under facades and veneers of deception and illusion. This book tears the fascade down and presents it for what it really is — a spiritual and epistemological tribulation.
It is a covert global war on spirituality.
Mankind has two kinds of vision- the physical and the metaphysical,
and corresponding to these are the two kinds of knowledge- the physical or
empirical knowledge of the material world, and the other being metaphysical or spiritual knowledge that is revealed i.e the Qurān. The early Muslims were firmly rooted in this Epistemology, whereas the later Muslims have been subjected to centuries of secularization.
This didn’t happen overnight.
The Islamic Scientific Revolution heralded a scientific revolution in
Europe, but while the pursuit of science was largely used to serve religious
ends in the Muslim world, in Europe the proliferation of science eventually
undermined the religious worldview. Secularism emerged triumphant after
centuries of conflict between religion and science in Western Christendom
and it was swiftly imported to the Muslim world that lay shackled under a
colonial world order.
However, it was the secularization of knowledge that continues to pose
the biggest challenge to a religious way of life. If you can convince a Muslim that knowledge only comes from physical sources, and that knowledge from metaphysical sources such as revelation through the medium of a metaphysical agent like an angel is either inferior or wholly fictional, you have killed his/her faith.
As such, even if they continue to read the Qurān, it functions as no more than a good luck charm in their life or a way to quell their anxiety. And the Prophet (n) warned us that a person would be a believer in the morning and become a disbeliever by evening.
Lastly, you the reader will benefit greatly from the insightful analysis
of the mysterious subject of Time in this book.
Both the Qurān and the Sunnah present a relativistic conception of Time. Nowhere can we see this manifest than in this field of I’lm al Ākhir az-Zamān. Both the False as well as the True Messiah demonstrate the relativistic nature of Time in their being.
Dajjāl’s first few ‘days’ are like a year, month, and a week respectively, clearly demonstrating that he functions in a different dimension of Time in the early period of his mission, all the while, impacting our world. And the True Messiah will descend without aging even a moment, despite being raised up 2000 years ago. The Prophet (n) describes him as having beads of sweat falling from his forehead, as if to denote that he will descend in the exact same manner as he was raised up (one doesn’t sweat in the heavens) making 2000 years equal to a moment in his miraculous life.
I ask Allāh to accept this effort in His gracious presence and reward Sidi
Abu Bilaal immensely for his dedication in this field. May the reader find
infinite benefit through this work.
Ameen.
Safiyyah Sabreen Syeed
Muharram 1444/2022
B.E (Mechanical Engineering), M.A (Philosophy)
Researcher and Director KNOW and Second Golden Age.
Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/One-Eyed-Impostor-Book-Identifying/dp/1989450172
