Is Dajjal on Astola Island?

Fatima bint Qays heard the call to prayer one day in Madinah. After the prayer the Prophet ﷺ sat on the pulpit, smiling, and told everyone to stay in their places. He had gathered them, he said, neither for good news nor for a warning, but because Tamim al-Dari, a Christian who had come and accepted Islam, had told him something that matched what he himself used to tell them about the Dajjal.

Tamim had sailed with thirty men of the Lakhm and Judham tribes. A storm tossed them for a month until, at sunset, they reached an island. On it they met a creature so covered in hair that they could not tell its front from its back. It called itself al-Jassasa and sent them to a man waiting in a building, a dayr. Inside was the largest man they had ever seen, bound tight: hands tied to his neck, iron fetters from his knees to his ankles.

The bound man asked about the date palms of Baysan, the water of Lake Tiberias, the spring of Zughar and the Prophet ﷺ. Then he said: "I am the Messiah", meaning the Dajjal, and that he would soon be let out to travel the earth, entering every town except Makkah and Madinah. The Prophet ﷺ struck the pulpit with his stick: "This is Tayba, this is Tayba", meaning Madinah. Then he said: "He is in the sea of Sham, or the sea of Yemen. No, rather from the direction of the east he is", and he pointed toward the east.

Anyone who wants to find this island has only what the hadith gives. Read it slowly and six clues stand out.

Start where the Prophet ﷺ stood: the pulpit in Madinah, 24.47° N, 39.61° E. Draw a line due east and it crosses the Najd, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, then runs along the coast of Balochistan. Al-Qadi 'Iyad, quoted by al-Nawawi, read the words as "in the directions of the east", a region rather than a line. So we shade a broad band either side of due east (the 45° width is ours, for illustration).

Next, the voyage. Al-Tirmidhi's version says the sailors were "people of Palestine". From Palestine the only sea road east begins at Ayla (today's Aqaba) on the Red Sea, runs down to Bab al-Mandab, around southern Arabia, and up into the Arabian Sea. To Astola that is about 4,870 km by sea. A ship driven by a storm drifts at perhaps 1 to 3 knots: 1,300 to 4,000 km in thirty days.

Last, the one building the hadith names: a dayr. Tamim was a Christian before Islam, and he called it a monastery. Here archaeology has something to say. In 1992 excavators on Sir Bani Yas, an island off Abu Dhabi, found a Christian monastery and church dated from about 600 CE and used until about 750 CE, in Tamim's own lifetime. On Kharg Island, off Iran, lies a larger monastery complex, dated by different scholars between the 7th and 9th centuries.

In 325 BCE the fleet of Nearchus, Alexander's admiral, sailed along this coast. The Greek historian Arrian records that the sailors were frightened by strange tales of an uninhabited island called Nosala. Historians identify Nosala with Astola. Writing in 1906, A. V. Williams Jackson's History of India adds that it "is to this day as much an object of dread to the Med fisherman as it was long ago to the Greek sailors".

And on the island stand the ruins of a Hindu temple of the goddess Kali.

This is the case the online theory makes, in its own terms. It is not AlFitan's view. Videos on YouTube and Facebook, mostly in Bangla and Urdu, set the Jassasa beside the way Hindu art depicts Kali, and count the similarities.