Awf ibn Malik and Six Signs Before the Hour

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

❧Count six things before the Hour

ʿAwf ibn Mālik narrates, and the ḥadīth is in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, muttafaqun ʿalayh, of the highest grade of authenticity, that at Tabūk the Prophet ﷺ said: count six things before the Day of Judgment.

❧One: his own death

مَوْتِي. The coming and the passing of the final Prophet ﷺ is itself the first of the signs of the Hour.

❧Two: the conquest of Jerusalem

فَتْحُ بَيْتِ الْمَقْدِسِ. This came to pass less than two years after his death. It is striking that he says it at Tabūk, the northernmost point he ever reached, on the very road his army would soon travel.

❧Three: two plagues

He likened them to a disease they knew that strikes livestock: one animal takes it and the whole pen simply dies. Two such mortalities would sweep through them. In the time of ʿUmar there was a severe plague in which a great many died; commentators mention other events besides, and whether all of it has passed or some is yet to come, Allāh knows best.

❧Four: the multiplying of wealth

تَكْثِيرُ الْمَال, so much so that a man will be given a hundred dinars and be vexed that it is only a hundred. A hundred dinars was more than the annual income of most of the Companions, realistically something like ten thousand dollars to us. He foretold a time when they would be so rich they would not know what to do with it, and the shaykh believes we live in that time now.

❧Five: a fitnah in every household

A trial that leaves no house of the Arabs untouched, meaning no house of the Muslims, since the Muslims then were the Arabs. Some in our times say this is happening now, and a number of scholars point to the wars and civil strife touching nearly every household. But the shaykh repeats his rule: we do not equate a specific prediction with a specific event. We may hypothesize; we may not declare that what the Prophet ﷺ said is this. Hypothesis is not revelation.

❧Six: the truce with Banū al-Aṣfar, and the betrayal

Banū al-Aṣfar, "the sons of the yellow," is what the Arabs called the Romans, and so their descendants, the Europeans and Americans. Other narrations fill in the sequence: there will be an enemy common to you both, so that you must combine against it; then, once that enemy is beaten, they will betray you and break the treaty; and they will come against you under eighty banners, under every banner twelve thousand men, an army the like of which the world has not seen. This is the end of time; the Christians expect their Armageddon and we have our equivalent in our own tradition. These are not things we look forward to or provoke. We try our best to avoid them, even while believing that whatever the Prophet ﷺ said will come to pass.