Predictions of the Future: Conquests, the Navy, and a Lifespan to the Year

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The sixth category, really a branch of the unseen, but set apart for its scope, is predictions of the future, of which there are well over 150 (some count 350). Every sign of the Hour (أَشْرَاط السَّاعَة) is itself such a prediction.

❧The conquests

In Mecca he foretold the conquest of the whole Arabian Peninsula. In Medina, while they were still fighting for their lives at Badr, Uḥud, and the Khandaq, he named lands by name: Yemen, Buṣrā near Damascus, Shām (Syria), Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem), and سَتَفْتَحُونَ مِصْر, "you will conquer Egypt, so be good to its people, for you have a bond with them" (for Hājar, his forefather Ismāʿīl's mother, was Egyptian). He foretold the fall of Persia, and Surāqah ibn Mālik indeed came to wear the bracelets of the Persian emperor, and the conquest of Constantinople, which came a thousand years later in 1453. He even foretold the conquest of Hind (India): نِعْمَ الْجَيْش, "what an excellent army is the army that conquers Hind." Every one of these lands was taken as he ﷺ said.

❧The navy in the middle of the desert

He foretold a naval force within the Companions' own lifetimes, this to a people who knew nothing of building ships. He had slept in the house of Umm Ḥarām bint Milḥān (aunt of Anas ibn Mālik) and woke smiling: "I saw people of my Ummah riding the sea in jihād as kings ride their thrones." She begged, "Yā RasūlAllāh, pray I be among them," and he said, "You are among them." Generations later, in the time of Muʿāwiyah, who acquired the Byzantine fleet and launched the first Muslim naval expeditions, she sailed to Cyprus, and disembarking there she fell from her mount and died. Her masjid and grave remain in Cyprus to this day. Look at the map: where is Medina, and where is Cyprus?

❧A lifespan to the year

The Companion ʿAbdullāh ibn Busr, among the last of the Ṣaḥābah to die, was foretold to reach a full century. In old age in Damascus he told his students that ninety-five years had passed and he awaited only five more before meeting his Lord. His student later reckoned, on the news of his death, that it had been exactly five years since, a full hundred, as the Prophet ﷺ had said. Fittingly, he died in the very act of performing wuḍūʾ.