printed and published. Then after the electronic media came
into vogue, a whole new world came into existence — radio, TV
and the internet. Such great quantities of information of all kinds
are being fed into the internet that more than 5000 pages of
information are added to it every 5 minutes. There has been a
similar exponential increase in printed books.
A tradition has been recorded in different collections of
Hadith about a prediction made by the Prophet to the effect
that a time would come when the deception (
fitna)
of words,
whether written or spoken, would be more dangerous than the
sword. This age of the deception of words has already set in in
our times. Today, it is the abundance of beautiful words that is
the greatest source of misguidance.
How will it be possible to save oneself from this dark
deception of words? The answer is to be found in a hadith. The
Prophet of Islam observed, “Realization of God is the shield
against this
fitna.
” This means that there is only one way to shake
off the spell of beautifully deceptive words and that is for man
to be possessed with the realization of God. Nothing else can
save man from this
fitna.
Mahdi
is, in fact, a realized person. A soul of this kind, by
God’s special grace, will be able to penetrate the fallacy of words.
He will be one who is able to understand the difference between
beautifully deceptive words and valid arguments; who will have
the ability to analyze misleading statements in order to see
through them to the realities beyond and who will have the gift
of precise description of the truth. Because of his great degree
of realization, he will save himself from the (
fitna)
deception of
words and will help others to save themselves from this
deception. It was due to the importance of this role of
Mahdi
that the Prophet of Islam observed: “When
Mahdi
or the believer
appears, it is the duty of every believer to support him and to
welcome his call.” (Sunan Abi Dawood,
Kitab al-Mahdi
).
This Hadith further tell us that there is nothing mysterious
about the appearance of the
Mahdi
, or the believer. Had he been
possessed of a miraculous personality, it would be irrelevant to
38
The alarm of Doomsday
