The chapter
"There is no trial between the creation of Adam and the rising of the Hour greater than the Dajjal." The Prophet ﷺ said it plainly, and added that every prophet warned his nation of the one-eyed liar, while he was given the details no prophet before him gave.
The description, assembled from Muslim's long narrations: a young man, ruddy, thick-set, his hair in tight curls; blind in his right eye, the eye "like a floating grape"; and written between his eyes ك ف ر, kafir: "which every believer will read, literate or not." Reading, at the end as at the beginning, belongs to faith, not to schooling. He is barred forever from two cities: Madinah and Makkah, angels stand at their passes; at his approach Madinah will shake three times and expel its hypocrites to him, the city sifting itself.
He emerges from the east, from Khurasan, by way of the gap between Sham and Iraq: "and works corruption right and left; O servants of Allah, hold fast!" His stay: "forty days, a day like a year, a day like a month, a day like a week, and the rest of his days like your days." The companions asked the question of a people who prayed: on the day like a year, will one day's prayers suffice? He said: "No, estimate for it its measure." The ummah that keeps its prayer schedule under a dilated sky cannot be deceived by a man who plays god.
For he will play god with props: he arrives with a paradise and a fire, rivers of water and mountains of bread; he commands the sky and it rains, the earth and it sprouts; he kills a young believer, splits him in two, walks between the halves, and revives him, and the young man laughs: "By Allah, I have never had more insight about you than today." The tradition names that youth the greatest martyr-witness of history. The rule he ﷺ gave: "His fire is a cool garden, and his garden is a fire", at the end of time, appearances invert; whoever judges by the eye is already his.
Seventy thousand of the Jews of Isfahan follow him in Persian shawls; the terrified flee to the mountains; and the siege closes on the believers in Sham, until, at dawn prayer in Damascus, the minaret whitens.
Before all of that, he is already chained. The stunning hadith of al-Jassasah, told to the Prophet ﷺ by the sea-traveler Tamim ad-Dari and retold by the Prophet from the minbar, has the crawling spy-beast of the island lead the sailors to a shackled colossus in a monastery, who interrogates them about the palm trees of Baysan, the lake of Tiberias, and "the prophet of the unlettered," and says: I am the Masih, and I am about to be released.
Protection is prescribed, not improvised, see the Shield box: the opening verses of al-Kahf, the fourfold refuge in every prayer, distance, and the knowledge that your Lord is not one-eyed and is not seen on earth before death.