This entry examines two authenticated narrations foretelling an increase of harj — killing — before the Hour, including the striking detail that the killer will not know why he kills and the victim will not know why he is killed. It weighs that detail against the impersonal violence of the twentieth century.
The source text
“(Religious) knowledge will be taken away (by the death of religious scholars), ignorance (in religion) and afflictions will appear; and Harj will increase. It was asked, 'What is Harj, O Allah's Messenger?' He replied by beckoning with his hand indicating 'killing.'”
Sahih al-Bukhari 85 · Grading: sahih (Bukhari-Muslim by definition)
“By Him in Whose Hand is my life, a time would come when the murderer would not know why he has committed the murder, and the victim would not know why he has been killed.”
Sahih Muslim 2908a · Grading: sahih (Bukhari-Muslim by definition)
What was understood in the seventh century
Both texts are sahih. In Sahih al-Bukhari (85) the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), asked what harj is, answers by gesturing with his hand to indicate killing, listing its increase alongside the loss of knowledge and the spread of afflictions. Sahih Muslim (2908a) adds the distinctive clause: a time would come when the murderer would not know why he has committed the murder, and the victim would not know why he has been killed. The gesture in place of a word gives the report an unusual vividness, and the questioners' need to ask what harj meant suggests the term pointed to something beyond familiar bloodshed.
Tribal Arabia knew raiding and blood feud, but killing was intensely personal: the parties knew one another, and vendetta logic supplied the 'why'. Warfare everywhere in the seventh century was face-to-face; the notion of anonymous killing in which neither side knows the reason had no contemporary analogue. Even the era's largest battles were assemblies of men who could see one another's faces, and tribal poetry preserved the names of killers and killed alike.
The fulfillment record
The twentieth century was the deadliest in absolute terms in recorded history: the Second World War alone killed on the order of 40 to 55 million people, with estimates varying. Industrialized methods — aerial bombardment, artillery at range, and later terrorism directed at random crowds — produced precisely the anonymity the Muslim narration describes, in which the individual killer and victim are strangers to each other and to the specific cause of the killing. A bomber crew and the city beneath it, or a device left in a market crowd, connect killer and victim by no knowledge whatsoever.
Commentators cite conscript armies and indiscriminate weapons as cases where 'the murderer does not know why he kills'. The correspondence should nevertheless be stated carefully: violence itself is perennial in every age, and what changed in the modern period is its scale and its impersonality, not its existence. The entry therefore rests its weight on the distinctive detail of mutual ignorance rather than on the bare statement that killing would increase, which is generic.
Considerations and counterpoints
Skeptics respond that predicting bloodshed is the safest of all prophecies. In the debate around Steven Pinker's work, some scholars argue that on a per-capita basis violence has declined over the long run, complicating the claim that killing 'increased'. The vivid detail about unknown motives can also be read as a moral description of fitna — civil strife among Muslims — which classical commentators applied to the civil wars of the first Islamic centuries rather than to any distant future. The reader must decide whether the narration describes modern anonymity or the fratricidal chaos its earliest commentators saw around them.
Credibility rating: Tier 2 · Interpretive — Authentic texts with a distinctive detail (mutual ignorance of motive) that matches modern impersonal warfare, but 'killing will increase' alone is generic, so the item rests on interpretation.