By Suhaib Farooq Butt | Part 3 of a personal reflection series. This is a hypothetical interpretation, not a claim of scientific proof or a definitive explanation of Quranic verses.
Start here: Part 1: The Dimensional Passage Theory. This article develops one part of the theory further.
Why a people might visit another world and still return home
One of the questions people could ask about my theory is simple: if Yajuj and Majuj once crossed into our world, why would they not stay? I do not think entering a place and settling there are the same thing. We have astronauts who travel into space and return. We explore caves, oceans and deserts without turning every place into a home. Sometimes an environment is difficult to survive in for long periods; sometimes people simply do not want to leave their homeland.
Perhaps Yajuj and Majuj originally had a civilization with enough resources of its own. Their ancestors could have come through the gateway occasionally, attacked settlements, taken whatever they wanted or simply exercised power over communities they considered weaker. The local people would remember those attacks and want protection. The visitors, by contrast, might have remembered a route they could exploit. I cannot say that every aggressor behaves the same way, but in my mind those two groups could remember the same passage very differently.
What if circumstances changed across generations?
Imagine a place with sufficient water, food and living space. Then imagine the entrance to another world is closed with a physical barrier. Generations pass. The population grows or later begins to decline. The climate changes. Competition increases. Technology and leaders change. What once supported everyone might no longer be enough. This is one possibility behind my suggestion that their desire to cross the barrier could become much stronger over time.
I am not claiming that we know their world is uninhabitable or that they have no water today. I am trying to understand what could drive generations of people to attempt an escape. Human societies invest in the possibilities they know about. We look toward space and other planets partly because we understand that they exist and can study them. If people on the other side already know of a gate leading to a habitable place, perhaps they would invest their efforts there instead of searching the stars.
How could they remember the other world?
I imagine the barrier may be visible from their side even though we do not know its location on ours. That means they might not depend only on a legend. Their people may see the physical object every day. Families might tell children that their ancestors crossed it long ago. Leaders may change, beliefs may change, and methods of digging may change, but the location of the wall remains known to them. From our side, we have the Quranic account without the coordinates. In my hypothesis, each world possesses a different piece of the story.
This does not require a single ruler living for thousands of years. Think of large countries today: people have different beliefs, and leaders come and go. Likewise, a population on the other side could contain different communities, traditions and religions. Islamic tradition generally regards Yajuj and Majuj as descendants of Adam (peace be upon him), though the Quran does not describe their complete society. They might be human beings whose appearance and circumstances differ because of ancestry, environment and long histories of adaptation. Different human populations on Earth also vary, but all are equally human and none is more or less evolved than another.
Digging the barrier and saying InshaAllah
The report in Sunan Ibn Majah 4080 describes Yajuj and Majuj digging the barrier repeatedly and finding it restored, until their leader eventually says they will return the next day if Allah wills. The report has received differing scholarly gradings. I wonder whether people on the other side possess knowledge of Allah, perhaps inherited through generations. Saying InshaAllah raises that question for me, but the narration does not say the leader learned the words from an ancestor or establish the community's religious beliefs.
I also do not assume that digging means using a shovel. In ordinary speech we sometimes say people dug through rock with machinery or explosives. However, the hadith does not identify the tools they use, so their technological level remains unknown. Even if they possess sophisticated tools, the Quran places the opening of the barrier at Allah's appointed time. Technology alone is not given as the determining factor.
The enormous numbers and the water of Lake Tiberias
The hadith in Sahih Muslim 2937a describes an extraordinary event: earlier groups of Yajuj and Majuj drink from Lake Tiberias, and later groups arrive after its water is gone. I find that image difficult to comprehend. The report describes immense numbers and terrible effects, but it does not specify how many individuals there are, what the lake level will be, or how much each one drinks. We cannot calculate their precise population from it.
One possibility in my mind is that people emerging from a difficult environment are thirsty and do not have a supply system established on our side. Another is simply that their numbers are extraordinarily large. If a billion people all had access to plenty of water and food, they would behave differently from a billion people arriving with nothing. Yet I cannot turn that imagined resource crisis into something the Prophet ﷺ explicitly stated. The narration describes what they do, not their previous economic conditions.
Two civilizations, two sets of priorities
Here is the contrast that interests me most. We might live comfortably enough that we do not spend every day searching every mountain for a barrier from an ancient account. Their civilization, within my hypothesis, might know exactly where the wall is and increasingly depend on opening it. To us the gateway is a mystery. To them it might be a visible object, part of inherited history, and perhaps the strongest remaining hope for a new place to live.
I am not saying this proves another dimension, or that scarcity excuses violence. I am trying to explain how the same physical wall could have different meanings to different people across the centuries. Once it may have blocked occasional raiders. Later it could be the focus of an enormous population. Whether the true explanation is geographical, something beyond our understanding, or entirely different, the unseen details remain unknown.
References and further reading
Read the series: Part 2 · Part 4
Allah knows best.
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