This entry examines narrations foretelling, before the Hour, the spread of trade and of the pen — writing — together with women assisting their husbands in business. It sets the wordings against modern literacy and trade data, and discloses that one of the two source texts could not be independently verified.
The source text
“One of the portents of the Hour will be that wealth becomes widespread and abundant, and trade will become widespread, but knowledge will disappear. A man will try to sell something and will say: 'No, not until I consult the merchant of Banu so-and-so'; and people will look throughout a vast area for a scribe and will not find one.”
Sunan an-Nasa'i 4456 · Grading: sahih (Darussalam)
بَيْنَ يَدَيِ السَّاعَةِ تَسْلِيمُ الْخَاصَّةِ وَفُشُوُّ التِّجَارَةِ حَتَّى تُعِينَ الْمَرْأَةُ زَوْجَهَا عَلَى التِّجَارَةِ وَقَطْعُ الأَرْحَامِ وَفُشُوُّ الْقَلَمِ وَظُهُورُ الشَّهَادَةِ بِالزُّورِ وَكِتْمَانُ شَهَادَةِ الْحَقِّ
“Just before the Hour, the greeting of peace will only be given to specific people, trade will proliferate to the point that a woman will help her husband in his business, family ties will be severed, the pen will spread, false testimony will prevail and truthful testimony will be concealed.”
Musnad Ahmad 3870 · Grading: sahih (Shu'ayb al-Arna'ut (Musnad edition); a parallel wording in al-Adab al-Mufrad is graded sahih by al-Albani)
What was understood in the seventh century
The primary, fully verified source is Sunan an-Nasa'i 4456, graded sahih by Darussalam: wealth and trade become widespread while knowledge disappears, and people search a vast area for a scribe without finding one. A second, fuller wording attributed to Ibn Mas'ud in Musnad Ahmad — the greeting given only to acquaintances, trade proliferating until a woman helps her husband in business, family ties severed, the pen spreading, false testimony prevailing — is graded sahih by Shu'ayb al-Arna'ut, but its citation number could not be verified on the standard reference site, a limitation noted again below.
Literacy in seventh-century Arabia was rare enough that the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is described as needing designated scribes. Writing was a specialist craft, commerce was caravan-scale, and women's participation in trade — attested in Khadijah's business — was not a mass phenomenon; scribes were few enough to be individually remembered by name in the tradition. Foretelling a world saturated with writing and commerce inverted these conditions: the prophecy compounds three separate improbabilities — writing universal, trade global, women present throughout commerce — from the standpoint of its first audience.
The fulfillment record
The Ahmad wording — the spread of the pen (fushu al-qalam) and the proliferation of trade until a woman assists her husband in business — is frequently cited against modern data: world literacy rose from roughly 12 percent of adults around 1820 to about 87 percent by the 2020s (Our World in Data); global merchandise trade grew by orders of magnitude after 1945 (Our World in Data); and women's mass entry into commerce is a defining twentieth-century shift. Each of these series is documented in the references below, and none is disputed; on the numbers alone, no century before the twentieth could have claimed the correspondence at anything like this scale.
The verified an-Nasa'i version foregrounds trade's spread and knowledge's disappearance, with scribes paradoxically scarce. Commentators reconcile the two wordings as ubiquitous writing alongside scarce trustworthy scholarship. Either way, the correspondence is a broad secular trend rather than a datable event, and the entry weights its conclusions on the verified text. The tension between the two wordings is treated here as a datum rather than an embarrassment, since the considerations below turn on it.
Considerations and counterpoints
Skeptics argue that commerce and record-keeping had been expanding across the Near East for millennia, so extrapolating their growth required no foreknowledge. They note that the 'pen will spread' clause comes from a Musnad wording whose number could not be independently verified on the standard reference site, and that the an-Nasa'i version actually predicts scribes becoming scarce — which cuts against the literacy-explosion reading and, they contend, shows how flexible the interpretive matching is. The entry accordingly rests its tier on the verified an-Nasa'i text alone and treats the Musnad wording as supporting material.
Credibility rating: Tier 2 · Interpretive — The an-Nasa'i narration is verified and graded sahih and the macro-trends (literacy, trade, women in commerce) are indisputable, but the correspondence is a broad secular trend that any era of growth could partially claim.