A Critical Analysis on David Cook’s Histography of the Apocalyptic Narrations about Ibn Sayyad

A group of Islamic apocalyptic narrations have mentioned a person named "Ibn Sayyad". Narrators and scholars have debated whether Ibn Sayyid would be the Antichrist or not from the past to the present. David Cook, one of the apocalyptic Islamic scholars, has considered the narrations about Ibn Sayyad as a sub-cycle of the narrations of the Antichrist and by the method of dating based on being found in the hadith collections has concluded that the history of these narrations should be in the second half of the third century AH. Using all methods of Orientalist historiography, including dating based on the oldest source, document and text-document, this study analyzes and criticizes Cook's historiography on these narrations and examines Cook's view on Ibn Sayyid being the antichrist by examining historical and narrative reports. As a result, Cook's method of historiography is not effective for the most frequent narrations about Ibn Sayyid, and in the study of history and narration, it was determined that Ibn Assyad is not the Antichrist, assuming his historical existence.