101 Reasons Why We Left Islam – Chapter 5: Failed Prophecies– Reason 59
When it comes to signs of ‘end of the world’ or the ‘final hour’, there are many signs Islamic Dawah and religious authorities will mention, but not these two. They would probably wish they were erased from the Hadith. See if you can spot why:
- Anas reported Allah’s Messenger ﷺ as saying: I and the Last Hour have been sent like this and (he while doing it) joined the forefinger with the middle finger.
Found repeated three times in the Authentic Hadith:
It will help to visualise what this really looked like, so there is no confusion as to what the Prophet said:
As you can see, for the observers at the time—the people who heard the Hadith narrated so many times—there would not have been a shred of confusion as to what the Prophet was saying. The Prophecy states that the end of time is very much with the arrival of the Prophet. But that is not all.
Just to enforce this, we have another Hadith:
- Anas reported that a person asked Allah’s Messenger ﷺ as to when the Last Hour would come. He had in his presence a young boy of the Ansar who was called Mabammad. Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: If this young boy lives. he may not grow very old till (he would see) the Last Hour coming to you.
Again, this is repeated multiple times in the Hadith, and it is authentic:
Here, we have the clearest indication of what the Prophet was saying. The end of time is coming in HIS generation, or at least in the generation of that child.
Naturally, Islamic scholars had to come up with some explanation for these, and here they are:
First one: Yes, the indication of having two fingers together does mean that the end is near, but what is close is relative. For Allah, who is eternal, it could be around 2000 or 7000 years.
Second one: The prediction is not for humanity but for the men who came to the Prophet. That is why he says, ‘…The Last Hour is coming to you, meaning to the men in the audience. Naturally, as the young man grew, his elders died, and therefore, the Prophecy has been fulfilled.
The more you read them, the more you realise these are not explanations but excuses. For the first one, the Hadith gave the impression that the end of time is very near, coming with the arrival of God’s ‘final messenger’. And this makes sense that the creator of the universe would send a messenger just before the end of time. And if this is not what the Prophet wanted to say, then he should have said or gestured differently. What is more, in Arabic culture, having two fingers close together as a communication means “together” and no space between them. For example, if someone asks how close this mother is to her children, and the person responds with the two joining the forefinger with the middle finger, this means “very close”. And linking this to Allah’s lifetime does not make sense. This is the Prophet talking, not Allah! For purpose of comparison, the gap between The Prophet Esa and The Prophet Muhammad is 600 years. If two fingers together are ‘near’ and can be interpreted as being 2000 years, then on Allah’s scale, Prophets Esa and Muhammad came at the same time.
The second one is much easier to refute. The question put to the Prophet is ‘when is the Last Hour coming’ – not “our hour”, but specifically “The Hour”. And even though those old people may have died before the child got old, the Last Hour has not arrived. Where is it? The Last Hour does not start when people die. In Islamic traditions, when we die, we are in a waiting status for that day when the horn is blown and people wake up to be judged. In the meantime, people are in their graves getting the grave punishment (which we will come back to later in chapter 6), waiting for the call for The Last Hour. So, no, The Last Hour did not arrive before the young boy got old. The Last hour has not come for some 1400 years. This excuse does not work.
When cornered badly by these Hadiths, some people will be ready to question the whole of the Hadiths, even if it is authentic. They will claim that if it is not in the Quran, then they don’t care. Well, time to move to the next reason – when the Quran makes similar promises! Are you ready for it?