Tamim al-Dari and the Hadith of al-Jassasah

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The last delegation for today is a long one, and it raises theological questions that will be flagged at the end: the delegation of Tamīm al-Dārī, a Christian from one of the northern Christian tribes who came as his tribe's delegate and embraced Islam. The reason the whole affair belongs in the Sīrah at all is that Tamīm is a delegate, so the story falls in the ninth year, in the Year of Delegations.

❧As-salatu jami'ah

The account comes through Fāṭimah bint Qays, one of the Companions who made both emigrations, Abyssinia and Madinah, and is therefore called ṣāḥibat al-hijratayn. She was completing her ʿiddah in someone's house when she heard the call from the masjid: الصَّلَاةُ جَامِعَةٌ, which is how the Companions were summoned outside the times of prayer.

She came, and stood in the women's row nearest the men. When the Prophet ﷺ finished the prayer he went up on the minbar, his face beaming, and said: let everyone stay where he has prayed. Do you know why I have called you? They said, Allah and His Messenger know best. He said: by Allah, I have not called you for any exhortation, any khuṭbah, any lesson. I have called you to hear the story of Tamīm al-Dārī, a Christian who has become a Muslim, and who has told me something that agrees with what I have been telling you about the Dajjāl.

❧The island

Tamīm said that he sailed with thirty men of Lakhm and Judhām; the waves took them and they were lost for a month, until at sunset they came upon an island. They went ashore in the small boat and met a beast so covered in hair that they could not tell its front from its back. Terrified, they said: woe to you, what are you? It said: I am al-Jassāsah. They said, what is the Jassāsah? And it said: O people, come to the monastery, there is a man there waiting to meet you, I am only a messenger.

That frightened them more: what manner of man has such a creature for a messenger? They feared it might be another devil, but they had no choice. In the monastery they found the largest man they had ever seen, a giant, bound in chains, his hands shackled to his neck and his legs in irons from the knees to the ankles. Woe to you, who are you? He said: you will learn about me, tell me who you are. They told him: Arabs, driven off course for a month, come ashore for food and water, brought here by a beast that called itself al-Jassāsah. And they asked, are you a devil or a man?

He asked instead about the date palms of Baysān: are they bearing fruit? They said yes. He said: it is only a matter of time before they go dry. He asked about the lake of Ṭabariyyah, the Sea of Galilee: is there still water in it? They said, a great deal, it is a huge lake. He said: soon it will dry up. He asked about the spring of Zughar, in Shām: is there water, and do the people grow crops by it? They said yes, plenty. Then he asked about النَّبِيُّ الْأُمِّيُّ, the unlettered Prophet, what has he done? Tamīm answered: he has left Makkah and settled in Yathrib. Have the Arabs fought him? Yes. And what came of it? We are told that he has prevailed over the Arabs around him and they have all obeyed him. Has it truly reached that point? Yes.

He said: if so, it is better for them to obey him. Now I will tell you about myself. I am the Dajjāl. Soon I will be given leave to come out, and I will travel the earth and leave no town unvisited, staying forty nights in each, except Makkah and Ṭaybah. Both are forbidden to me. Every time I try to enter one of them I will be met by an angel with a drawn sword who will turn me back, and on every road into those cities there will be angels standing guard.

Fāṭimah says the Prophet ﷺ struck the pulpit with his staff and said: هَذِهِ طَيْبَةُ، هَذِهِ طَيْبَةُ، هَذِهِ طَيْبَةُ, this is Ṭaybah, one of the names of Madinah. Did I not tell you this before, about the Dajjāl, and that he will not enter Makkah or Madinah? They said yes. He said: this is why I like the story of Tamīm al-Dārī, because it confirmed for you what I have told you. But he, the Dajjāl, is in the Syrian sea or the Yemeni sea. Then he paused and said: no, rather he is in the East, he is in the East, he is in the East, pointing with his hand eastward. And Fāṭimah ends: I memorised this ḥadīth from the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.

❧Why the hadith is a problem

The narration is in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, and that is precisely why it has caused so much difficulty. It is unique in several respects: nothing else in the ḥadīth literature mentions the Jassāsah; nothing else says the Dajjāl is alive right now; nothing else has him chained on an island. Nobody has really reconciled it with the traditions that have the Dajjāl born at some future date. A very small number of scholars have therefore cast doubt on it despite its place in Muslim, among them Shaykh Rashīd Riḍā of Egypt, and in our time the shaykh's own teacher, Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-ʿUthaymīn raḥimahullāh, who used to say فِي الْقَلْبِ مِنْهُ شَيْءٌ, something in my heart is uneasy about it. One does not grade a ḥadīth by one's heart, of course, and Ibn ʿUthaymīn's argument was that it contradicts narrations stronger than itself.

For instance the ḥadīth of al-Bukhārī and Muslim in which the Prophet ﷺ told the people one night, looking at the stars, that not a single soul alive that day would still be alive in a hundred years, with no exception made. How then is the Dajjāl on an island somewhere? And there are more: the narrations describe the Dajjāl as short and stocky, where this one has a giant; they have him born to a couple who had been waiting for a child, where this one has him already alive; they make kāfir written between his eyes, legible to literate and illiterate alike, which Tamīm never mentions; and above all they make his single most obvious mark his eye, of which there is nothing here at all.

There is also the affair of Ibn Ṣayyād, a magician from one of the Jewish tribes of Madinah, whom the Prophet ﷺ himself at one point was unsure about, he went to test him, as Muslim also records, and whom ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb swore until his death was the Dajjāl. But if the ḥadīth of Fāṭimah is sound, why would anyone in Madinah be worried at all, when the Dajjāl is known to be chained on a distant island?

On this point the shaykh notes a distinction some scholars draw in answer: the Dajjāl is barred from Makkah and Madinah as the Dajjāl. Before he emerges as such, growing up unrecognised, no one will know him, and he could enter them then. And separately, that the Dajjāl will not enter the two cities is not in doubt in any case, it is narrated from at least six Companions by other routes than this one.

❧The verdict, and the principle

Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī stands a clear notch above Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, and while a ḥadīth's absence from al-Bukhārī does not make it weak, it does tell us that al-Bukhārī did not take this one to his standard. The shaykh adds that he came across a full research paper on this single ḥadīth by another student of Ibn ʿUthaymīn, the Kuwaiti scholar Dr. Ḥākim al-Muṭayrī, who went through every chain after hearing his teacher call it weak. The chain runs through Mujālid from al-Shaʿbī from Fāṭimah, and al-Shaʿbī, one of the Tābiʿūn, took a good deal from the storytellers; the suggestion is that this may have been a tale that was later mistaken for a ḥadīth. There is a genuine weakness in the isnād, not so plain that one can simply call it ḍaʿīf, and a matn so strange that, taken together, the shaykh sees no problem in saying the report does not sit with the rest of the Qurʾān and Sunnah.

The principle must be stated carefully. When we say a ḥadīth does not make sense, we must always mean in light of other Qurʾān and ḥadīth, never that it does not fit my intellect, my understanding or my culture. A ḥadīth is judged by other authentic evidence, not by my mind. The Qurʾān and Sunnah's account of the Dajjāl is clearly and consistently built, and this one report throws a spanner into all of it. If the Prophet ﷺ said it, we believe it, but the question is whether he said it, and there is a large question mark. Allah knows best.