The Dhul-Khalasa
Return Prophecy

A. The Destruction Hadiths

The hadith tradition preserves detailed accounts of the Prophet's campaign against Dhul-Khalasa. In Sahih al-Bukhari 3020, Jarir ibn Abdullah al-Bajali reports: "The Prophet said to me: 'Will you relieve me of Dhul-Khalasa?' I replied: 'Yes.' So I rode with 150 horsemen from Ahmas, and we destroyed it and killed those whom we found there." In Bukhari 4355, the same event is described with the Prophet's personal emotional response: he prayed for Jarir's success five times, and Jarir reports "the Prophet was very pleased with my work." Al-Bukhari further records in 3021 that the Prophet "invoked blessings on the horses of Ahmas and their men five times" in celebration of the destruction.

These are not peripheral reports. They appear in the chapter on military expeditions (kitab al-maghazi) and are among the most frequently cited examples of the Prophet's systematic eradication of pre-Islamic idols in Arabia. The prophetic intention was clearly permanent abolition, not temporary suppression pending eschatological restoration.

B. The Theological Contradiction

Classical Islamic theology holds that the Prophet's acts and statements form a coherent, divinely guided whole. If the Prophet genuinely believed Dhul-Khalasa would return and be worshipped again at the End of Days — as Bukhari 7116 claims — then his expressed relief at its destruction makes no theological sense. Why be "relieved" at completing a mission whose outcome is both temporary and cosmically predestined? Why invoke blessings five times on the men who destroyed something God has ordained will be restored? The emotional and spiritual logic of the destruction hadiths is only coherent if the Prophet expected the destruction to be permanent.

The contradiction is irresolvable through harmonisation. Apologists sometimes attempt to argue the Prophet was relieved about the short-term security gain while knowing the long-term eschatological return was inevitable — but this reading imports psychological complexity the text never suggests and strains credibility. The simpler explanation, consistent with ICMA findings, is that one tradition is authentic and one is fabricated: the destruction tradition is multiply attested across independent chains and shows no Common Link bottleneck; the "return prophecy" tradition flows entirely through al-Zuhri.

C. The Pattern Across the Hadith Corpus

The Dhul-Khalasa contradiction is not unique. The hadith corpus contains a broader class of what scholars call "anti-abolition prophecies" — traditions that predict the reversal of Prophetic achievements. The Prophet banned alcohol: a tradition predicts Muslims will drink it again. The Prophet prohibited visiting the graves of saints for intercession: traditions predict that practice will return. The Prophet destroyed major idols: traditions predict their return. In each case, the "return prophecy" is associated with later Common Links operating under political pressures that made such pessimistic eschatological warnings useful — not with the Prophet himself. This pattern strongly suggests that the "return of Dhul-Khalasa" tradition belongs to a distinct genre of post-Prophetic apocalyptic fabrication, not to the Prophet's genuine teaching.

A. Layer One: Abdullah ibn Amr's Biblical Warning (c. 650s–680s CE)

The earliest recoverable form of this tradition is a mawquf statement — meaning it is attributed to a Companion, not to the Prophet — preserved in Nu'aym ibn Hammad's Kitab al-Fitan. The Companion Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As (d. 63–65 AH) is recorded saying:

This is a geopolitical warning, not an eschatological prophecy. It reflects the political anxieties of the Arab-Byzantine Wars: the early Islamic conquests had seized Syria from the Eastern Roman Empire, and the fear of Byzantine reconquest remained acute throughout the Umayyad period. Abdullah ibn Amr was notorious for having acquired two camel-loads of Jewish and Christian books — the so-called "two loads" (al-hamlan) — and freely incorporating isra'iliyyat (Biblical material) into his teachings. His statement derives from the Biblical apocalyptic pattern in which idol worship signals divine abandonment and foreign conquest (Deuteronomy 28:64; Jeremiah 16:13): a nation that returns to idols has lost divine protection and will be conquered. The warning was addressed to early Muslims: apostasy enables Byzantine reconquest.

Critically, a parallel version preserved in al-Hakim's Mustadrak (no. 8653) makes the attribution explicit. When this saying was mentioned to Umar ibn al-Khattab, he responded: "Abdullah ibn Amr knows best what he is saying" — validating Abdullah's authority in Biblical-derived eschatological matters. This version also mentions Banu Amir rather than Daws as the tribe involved, demonstrating that the tribal specificity is not original but was introduced later and varies across versions.

B. Layer Two: Eschatological Reframing (c. 680s–710s CE)

In a second stage, unknown transmitters added the eschatological frame la taqumu al-sa'a hatta — "The Hour will not be established until..." — to Abdullah's geopolitical warning. This formula is a standard device in Islamic apocalyptic literature for signalling End Times portents, and its attachment to existing prophetic and Companion-level sayings is documented across dozens of hadith traditions. The addition transformed Abdullah's conditional warning ("if Dhul-Khalasa is worshipped, the Romans will dominate") into an absolute eschatological statement ("the Hour will not come until Dhul-Khalasa is worshipped again"). At this stage the saying may still have been attributed to Abdullah ibn Amr or left with vague attribution. The context was the ongoing political instability of the post-Ridda period and Umayyad consolidation: apocalyptic urgency served the purposes of centralising authority.

C. Layer Three: Al-Zuhri's Elevation to Prophetic Canon (c. 718–742 CE)

The decisive transformation was performed by Muhammad ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d. 124 AH / 742 CE), the official hadith compiler for the Umayyad caliphs Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik. Al-Zuhri serves as the Common Link (see §4) for all versions of this hadith that attribute it to the Prophet via Abu Hurairah. His contributions to the text are identifiable by the fact that they appear in no earlier version:

The political context is decisive. Al-Zuhri operated during a period (95–130 AH / 714–747 CE) of major Bedouin revolts in Yemen, the Hijaz, and Iraq. Kharijite rebellions and tribal autonomy movements posed repeated threats to Umayyad authority. The hadith, in its Zuhrian form, delivers a theologically forceful message: "Bedouin tribal independence leads to idolatry, which leads to the End of Days." It is Umayyad state propaganda encoded as Prophetic prophecy and laundered through the most authoritative hadith transmission network of the era.

A. The Common Link Methodology Applied

Isnad-cum-Matn Analysis (ICMA), developed by G.H.A. Juynboll and refined by scholars including Harald Motzki and Andreas Görke, uses the structural convergence of transmission chains to identify the true originator of a hadith. The principle is that a hadith's earliest recoverable source will appear as the convergence point — the "Common Link" — where all independent chains meet before branching outward to later collectors. As Juynboll states in his Muslim Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 206): "The common link is in most cases the originator of the tradition."

Applied to the Dhul-Khalasa prophecy, the finding is unambiguous: al-Bukhari 7116, al-Muslim 2906, and every parallel collection's version of the marfu' (Prophetic) form of this hadith traces back, without exception, to al-Zuhri. From al-Zuhri the tradition fans out to his well-documented students — Shu'ayb ibn Abi Hamza (source for Bukhari's version via Abu al-Yaman), Ma'mar ibn Rashid (source for Muslim's version via Abdur-Razzaq), Yunus ibn Yazid, and others. Each of these students received the same text from al-Zuhri, demonstrating that the text crystallised at al-Zuhri's level and was then distributed outward. There is no earlier Prophetic version that bypasses him.

B. Al-Zuhri: Umayyad Court Scholar and Serial Elevator

Muhammad ibn Shihab al-Zuhri is simultaneously one of the most important figures in hadith transmission history and one of the most controversial. He served as the official hadith collector for the Umayyad caliphs, working directly under the patronage of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and his son Hisham. Classical scholars were acutely aware of this relationship. Ibn Sa'd in his Tabaqat al-Kubra records that al-Zuhri "entered the courts of rulers and mixed with them" — a remark that in classical hadith criticism registers as a warning about potential bias. Imam Malik, who transmitted a great deal from al-Zuhri, nonetheless remarked that he had seen al-Zuhri distort accounts under court pressure.

More specifically, al-Zuhri is identified by modern hadith scholars as the Common Link or key elevator in numerous politically sensitive traditions that happen to serve Umayyad interests. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook in Hagarism (Cambridge, 1977), and later Robert Hoyland in his analysis of early Islamic historiography, document the pattern of Umayyad-era hadith production as a deliberate political enterprise. Al-Zuhri's Dhul-Khalasa hadith fits this pattern precisely: it targets tribal opponents of the Umayyad state by prophesying their return to paganism as a sign of the apocalypse.

C. The Companion-Level Versions Are Stronger by Classical Criteria

When the Prophetic version is compared against the Companion-level versions attributed to Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As, the classical criteria for hadith authenticity consistently favour the Companion versions. They are transmitted through multiple independent chains (Muhammad ibn Sirin, Qatada, Ibn Burayda, Rabi'a ibn Jawshan), none of which converge on a single Common Link bottleneck. They are explicitly marked as deriving from "the Book" (al-kitab), which accounts for their origin without requiring Prophetic authority. And they appear in the oldest surviving collection (Kitab al-Fitan of Nu'aym ibn Hammad) in their non-eschatological, non-Prophetic form.

The classical hadith critic Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi's principle applies here: when a tradition appears in both mawquf (Companion-attributed) and marfu' (Prophet-attributed) forms, the mawquf is presumed original unless there is specific evidence that the Prophet was the source. In this case, the evidence runs precisely in the opposite direction: all marfu' versions pass through a single Umayyad court scholar, while all independent non-marfu' versions cite a Biblical source. The mawquf form is original; al-Zuhri's elevation is the fabrication.

D. Abu Hurairah: The Ideal Fabrication Vehicle

Al-Zuhri's choice of Abu Hurairah as the Companion anchor for this hadith was not arbitrary. Abu Hurairah (d. 57–59 AH) was from the Daws tribe — the tribe the hadith condemns. This creates what might be called a "self-condemnation" dynamic: the prophecy gains apparent authenticity from the fact that a member of the condemned tribe is its transmitter. Abu Hurairah was also the most prolific hadith narrator in the entire corpus, with thousands of attributed traditions, making him the easiest figure to attach additional traditions to without arousing suspicion. He was Umayyad-aligned in his political sympathies during his lifetime. And critically, he had been dead for 60–80 years by al-Zuhri's time, making him unable to dispute or deny the attribution. These factors — tribal insider, prolific narrator, political ally, deceased — make Abu Hurairah the near-perfect vehicle for a fabricated prophetic tradition.

A. The Two-Version Comparison

Placing the Companion-level version and al-Zuhri's Prophetic version side by side makes the fabrication structurally visible:

Every element al-Zuhri's version adds — the eschatological frame, the graphic imagery, the tribal specificity — and every element it removes — the Roman reconquest warning, the explicit Biblical citation — follows the logic of Umayyad political propaganda: replace a geopolitical warning about external enemies with an internal warning about tribal apostasy, strip out the Biblical provenance that would undermine its claim to Prophetic origin, and add sexually humiliating language to stigmatise the targeted tribal group.

B. Al-Hakim 8653: The Slip-Up Text

Al-Hakim's Mustadrak (no. 8653) preserves a version that explicitly attributes the saying to Abdullah ibn Amr and records Umar ibn al-Khattab's validation of Abdullah's eschatological authority. This version also mentions Banu Amir as the tribe rather than Daws. This is decisive for two reasons. First, it confirms that the original form of the tradition was Companion-level and that Umar himself understood it to derive from Abdullah's Biblical scholarship, not from the Prophet. Second, the variation between Banu Amir and Daws demonstrates that the tribal name was not fixed in the original tradition and was selected later — specifically by al-Zuhri — for rhetorical purposes. As the researcher Elon Harvey has noted in his analysis of transmission evolution patterns, tribal substitution of this kind is a standard marker of fabricated hadith adjustments, where the forger tailors a generic statement to a specific political target.

C. The "Wobbly Buttocks" Addition as Tribal Mockery

The phrase tadtaribu alyatu nisa' Daws — the shaking or wobbling of the women of Daws's buttocks — appears in zero versions of this tradition prior to al-Zuhri. It is entirely absent from the Abdullah ibn Amr versions, from the Banu Amir versions, and from any early transmission. Its insertion into the Prophetic form is a fingerprint of Umayyad-era political rhetoric, which routinely deployed sexually degrading imagery against tribal opponents as a form of literary humiliation (hija'). The technique was standard in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabic poetry, where the sexuality of a group's women was weaponised to stigmatise the group as morally degenerate. Al-Zuhri, operating in the Umayyad court literary culture, transposed this political poetic convention into an apparently Prophetic hadith — transforming what was once tribal satire into canonical eschatology.

The theological incongruity reinforces the case. The Quran consistently employs sober, dignified language when describing eschatological signs. The hadith corpus's most authentic eschatological traditions describe cosmic events — the smoke (dukhan), the beast (dabbah), the rising of the sun from the west — in language appropriate to divine revelation. A prophetic statement focused on the wobbling buttocks of women during pagan circumambulation is not consistent with the Quranic register for End Times signs. It is consistent with Umayyad satirical poetry targeting tribal enemies.

D. Abdullah ibn Amr's Biblical Template

Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As was the most prolific absorber of Biblical material among the Prophet's Companions. He possessed, by the widely attested account, "two loads" (hamlan) of Jewish and Christian texts, and his eschatological statements consistently show the structural fingerprints of Biblical apocalyptic literature. The specific pattern underlying the Dhul-Khalasa warning — apostasy and idol worship as the trigger for divine abandonment and foreign conquest — appears throughout the Hebrew prophetic books. Deuteronomy 28:64 threatens: "There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone." Jeremiah 16:13 warns: "I will hurl you out of this land into a land neither you nor your ancestors have known, and there you will serve other gods day and night." This is precisely Abdullah's pattern: if the Muslims return to idolatry (worshipping Dhul-Khalasa), God withdraws his protection, and the Romans reconquer Syria. Abdullah synthesised these Biblical warnings into an Arabic-language pastoral caution for his contemporaries — and al-Zuhri then stripped the Biblical provenance and re-attributed the content to the Prophet.