Encountering the Shadow

Al-Masih ad-Dajjal, the ‘false Messiah’ in Islamic eschatology, corresponding to the ‘Anti-Christ’ in Christianity, is a false Prophet and impostor who, according to tradition, will seek to impersonate Jesus shortly before he returns to earth in the ‘last days’ at the end of time. In his Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam, Cyril Glassé states that according to a hadith, al-Masih ad-Dajjal will be the last and greatest of a number of dajjals in history. Glassé also points out that some traditional commentators changed the word masih (‘Messiah’) to masikh, meaning ‘deformed’, giving the term ad-Dajjal al-Masikh (‘the deformed deceiver’). ‘This play on words is done by the addition of a single dot over the last Arabic letter, ha’, changing it to kha’, to symbolise how easy it is to deform truth into falsehood. The nature of the dajjal is precisely the deformation of truth into its exact opposite, and a complete inversion, or parody, of spirituality.’ 

The primary meaning of the root word djl, according to E.W. Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, is ‘to cover or conceal the truth with falsehood’, to beguile, enchant, gild, varnish, adorn with false lustre, or, in very graphic, concrete terms, ‘to smear a mangy or scabby camel with tar’ so as to make it more attractive to a prospective buyer. Lane explains that the root also has the connotation of adulterating the truth through mixing things up and confusing or confounding them. Lane’s analysis of the characteristics of ad-Dajjal might be summarised as follows: he will tell lies, he will arrogate to himself godship, he will traverse most of the regions of the earth, he will cover the earth with the multitude of his forces, he will manifest the contrary of what he conceives or conceals, treasures will follow him wherever he goes, he will defile the ground, and he will have one eye. The depiction of the Dajjal with ‘one eye’ is striking, given the Greek myth of the Cyclops, a one-eyed, man-eating giant, defeated by the hero Odysseus who blinds him by driving a stake into his eye, but the ‘one eye’ has greater significance as a symbol of evil in the disembodied flaming eye of Sauron in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Sauron, the chief lieutenant of the Dark Lord Morgoth, and compared by some commentators to Balor of the Evil Eye in Irish mythology, rules the land of Mordor and has the ambition of ruling the whole of Middle Earth. He is also identified as the ‘Necromancer’ in Tolkien’s earlier novel The Hobbit. Sauron’s deceit is only too evident in his claim that he was acting not out of a lust for power but out of a sincere desire for peace, and that he longed to heal Middle Earth from the wounds it had suffered during the long, bitter war against Morgoth. While Tolkien denied that absolute evil could exist, he stated that Sauron came as near as possible to a wholly evil will. 

It is worth noting that various commentators maintain that the characteristics of the Dajjal can be discerned in current world events, and to adherents of the anti-globalisation movement they could be identified as sounding uncannily like the forces of globalisation ‘traversing most of the regions of the earth.’ They might interpret his single eye as monocultural imposition, the homogenisation of diversity and pluralism, the misappropriation of Divine Unity, as well as the exponential proliferation of CCTV and satellite surveillance with the prospect of unlimited expansion through artificial intelligence (AI) applications. ‘Arrogating to himself godship’ might be associated with two of the self-aggrandising slogans adopted by the US after 9/11 in its ‘war on terror’, namely, ‘infinite justice’ and ‘full spectrum dominance’ (‘covering the earth with the multitude of his forces’), enforced by the economic power of unregulated corporations (‘treasures will follow him wherever he goes’). 

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