—namely the Tatars and others who share these very features—has been exhaustively documented and is universally known. The hadith about them is recorded in more than ten thousand copies of Muslim books, great and small, all of them written even before the later wars against those invaders who surged from the eastern horizon, men whose appearance is portrayed so precisely that, were an eyewitness today asked to describe them, he could hardly do better.

In the two Ṣaḥīḥs it is narrated from Abū Hurayrah that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said:

7203 “The Hour will not come until a fire issues forth from the land of the Ḥijāz that will illuminate the necks of the camels in Busra.”

That fire did indeed appear in the year 655 AH; people saw it with their own eyes and observed how the necks of their camels in Busra were lit by its glow. It would burn stone, yet it would not roast meat.

In the two Ṣaḥīḥs, it is narrated from Abū Saʿīd and Asmāʾ that the Messenger of Allah