Muhammad ﷺ made a bold prediction about the state of the land of the Arabs: “The Hour will not begin until the land of the Arabs once again becomes meadows and rivers”
Ref: Sahih Muslim 157
This narration anticipated the greening of Arabia’s extensive dry desert environment. As recently as 1986, there was little to no agricultural activity in the region. However, over the last few decades these deserts have been transformed to grow grains, fruits, and vegetables thanks to techniques such as centre pivot irrigation. This is a process that pumps water to the surface from deep underground reserves, some of which date back to the last ice age 20,000 years ago. This fossil water is distributed via large feeds and results in circles of green irrigated vegetation. The diameters of these irrigated crop circles range from a few hundred metres to as wide as 3 kilometres (1.9 miles).
Even without human intervention, the Arabian desert is forecast to become green in the future. Science writer Jason Daley explains: “In fact, the cyclical nature of Green Arabia means that sometime in the future the area will once again be lush and full of vegetation, though researchers aren’t sure exactly when that might happen, and whether climate change in general will put a damper on the greening”
Now put yourself in the position of a person living in seventh century Saudi Arabia. This region hosts some of the most extensive sand and gravel deserts in the world with rainfall that averages just ten to twenty centimetres per year. To put this into context, some parts of the United Kingdom average over four hundred centimetres per year. Could anyone inhabiting such a harsh environment ever rationally conceive of the possibility that one day there would be a plentiful supply of water and abundant crops? Muhammad ﷺ stood to gain nothing by making such an outrageous prediction, moreover it was no light matter, as it gave his enemies a reason to mock and undermine him as a Prophet. But this was important information that had to be conveyed, for it is a sign of the closeness of the End Times and therefore of immense benefit to the generations who would follow after him.
Muhammad ﷺ did not fear the mockery of men, for he was not speaking from his whims; he had no doubt that the prophecy would transpire as this was inspiration from the heavens. Today this prophecy is unfolding before our very eyes, and is only possible thanks to ancient reserves of water buried deep beneath the desert sands, as well as modern advancements in irrigation technology to mine that water. This is technology that could not have been
imagined by Muhammad ﷺ over 1,400 years ago.
This prophecy also makes a claim about the ancient past. Note the words of Muhammad ﷺ: “...the land of the Arabs once again becomes meadows and rivers” By saying “once again” he is implying that at one stage in their history, the deserts were lush with vegetation and life and that they will be returning to this former state. Geologists now know that the Arabian Peninsula was indeed once filled with meadows and rivers in ancient times. Modern archaeological discoveries have uncovered a number of fossils which confirm this. Michael Petraglia is Professor of Human Evolution and Prehistory, Senior Research Fellow and the Co-Director of the Centre for Asian Archaeology, Art & Culture, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. He was asked: “What has the team unearthed about the ancient environment of Saudi Arabia?” He replied: One of the first things that we did was remote sensing. We looked at satellite images for example, and found that there are literally thousands of ancient rivers that crisscrossed Saudi Arabia. We also now count 10,000 ancient lakes. The most amazing thing, to me, are the fossil finds. They say something about the kinds of animals that could migrate into Arabia. We have fossils of elephants; these were gigantic creatures, much larger than the African elephant. Amazingly, we also have hippos. These finds tell you something of how wet it really was. Because hippos cannot survive in very arid and dry situations, so the environment had to be green for them to survive. So, there were surely lots of lakes and rivers all across Arabia, and there was plenty of grass with vegetation for these animals to consume.
So not only did this prophecy correctly predict the greening of Arabia in the future, it also conforms to modern archaeological discoveries and conclusions about Arabia’s ancient, pre-Islamic past. There are so many ways that Muhammad ﷺ could have been wrong, for example he could have claimed that “God will bless Arabia with greenery and rivers for the first time”. Or, he could have made an easier claim that would have seemed more logical to people at the time such as “Arabia will always remain dry and barren”. His ancient prediction about the past and the future cannot be explained naturalistically as he did not have access to modern technology that helped discover the history and future of Arabia’s geology.
Copied From Book: Forbidden Prophecy
