Daniel

Daniel - Daniel After Death

Yunus Ibn Bakeer reported that Muhammad Ibn Ishaaq reported that Abu Khalid Ibn Dinar reported that Abul Aalia said: "When Tastar was invaded, we found, in the treasure house of Al-Harmazan, a bed on which lay a dead man, with a holy script at his bedside. We took the scripture to Umar Ibn Al-Khattab. He called Ka'b and he translated it into Arabic, and I was the first Arab to read it. I read it as I read the Quran." Here, I (i.e. Khalid Ibn Dinar) said to Abul Aalia: "What was in it?" He said: "Life history, annals, songs, speech, and what is to come." I asked: "And what did you do with the man?" He said: "We dug in the river bank thirteen separate graves. At nightfall we buried him and leveled all the graves in order to mislead people for they would tamper with him." I asked: "And what did they want from him?" He said: "When the sky was cloudless for them, they went out with his bed, and it rained." I asked: "Who did you think the man was?" He said: "A man called Daniel." I asked: "And for how long had he been dead when you found him?" He said: 'Three hundred years." I asked: "Did not anything change on him?" He said: "No, except for the hairs of his face (beard and mustache); the skin of the prophets is not harmed by the earth, nor devoured by hyenas."

The chain of citation from Abul 'Aa'lia is good, but if the date of the dead man's death was really three hundred years, then he was not a prophet but a saintly man, because there was no prophet between Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad , according to the hadith in Bukhari. The span between them (i.e. the dead man and Muhammad ) was variously reported as four hundred, six hundred, and six hundred twenty years. It could be that he had died eight hundred years earlier, which would be near to Daniel's time, if his being Daniel is correct. However, he could still have been somebody else, either a prophet or a saint. Yet the truth is more likely that he was Daniel, because he had been taken by the King of Persia and remained imprisoned, as already mentioned.

It was narrated with a correct citation that his nose was one span (nine inches)long. Anas Ibn Malik, with good citation, said that his nose was an arm's stretch long (two feet), on which basis he is thought to be an ancient prophet from before this period. Almighty Allah knows best.