by Iftikhar uz Zaman

Islamic eschatology — the teaching on the end of time — is one of the most vivid and technically demanding fields in the tradition. The Quran gestures toward the final hour; the hadiths fill in the narrative in extraordinary detail. But the genre of apocalyptic hadith was also, as Iftikhar uz Zaman notes, a favorite vehicle for forgery: politically motivated fabrications are mixed with genuinely ancient transmissions, and the chronology of events is uncertain even among the most careful scholars.

This post — written in May 1991 by Iftikhar uz Zaman of the University of Chicago, a scholar who appears throughout the soc.religion.islam archive as one of its most reliable guides — offers a model of how to hold the eschatological literature honestly. He names the caveats openly: the isnads require checking, the metaphorical reading can justify anything, and the chronology is not established. Then, having set those guardrails, he gives the narrative anyway — organized into five "frames" covering Dajjal's career, the plight of the Muslims, the jihads in Hind, the descent of the Messiah, and the final confrontation — followed by the world-ending arrival of Gog and Magog and the long peace before the final dissolution.

What makes it remarkable is its tone: neither credulous nor dismissive, but genuinely curious. The man writing this loves the subject. He has spent years with these hadiths. The caveats are not hedges against belief — they are the marks of someone who takes the material seriously enough to read it carefully. "May Allah look with favor upon us all on that day."

This has always been a favorite topic of mine — though for the last half a dozen years I haven't had much time to continue my study of it. So most of what I write is from memory; however, if you are interested enough in pursuing it, please email me and I would be quite happy to brush up my memory by looking up anything that needs elaboration.

There is much parallelism (and difference, of course) between the Bible (Book of Revelations, I think?) and the Islamic beliefs on the various signs of the approach of the Apocalypse (alaamaat al-sa'ah). And this is to be expected: after all both Books are originally from the same Source!

The Quran, as with many other things, contains only reference to some of these things — many of these references are even incomprehensible unless one adds to them information from the hadiths ("reports of things the Prophet said").

There is a lot more detail in hadiths about these "signs"; on the other hand, except for various major events predicted, the chronology is not clearly established. In secondary works which try to sort out these hadiths, often the author relies on his own interpretation and understanding both to establish the chronology, and (often) to try to interpret these hadiths by tying them in to "current events." The only treatment in English which I have seen on this subject is called Israel and the Prophecies of the Holy Quran. As you can guess from the title, the author is quite interested in tying in these hadiths to current events. On the other hand, he does provide the texts of the original hadiths, so one is free to agree or disagree with his interpretations. The aspect of his imposing his interpretation which is a little more veiled is the manner in which he establishes a chronology for the hadiths — it can escape one's notice that he establishes a very clear chronology, where the hadiths themselves contain little or no evidence for much of his interpretation. Just a word of caution.

Basically, the thing here is that much of the interpretation and understanding of these hadiths is done in a metaphorical way: for example, it is said that Dajjal (antichrist) will have an ass which has thirty-foot-long ears and which will travel from one end of the earth to the other in seconds. The temptation to interpret this as a description of an aeroplane is practically irresistible! On the other hand, this is clearly a metaphorical understanding. And, those who are familiar with Nostradamus would agree, I think, that metaphorical understanding can allow one to read anything as anything.

Another aspect one has to watch out for is that this genre of hadith — "predictions of the coming of the apocalypse" — was a favorite genre within which one could cast one's political tastes in the early period. Thus, there are many fabricated hadiths; so, if you disapproved of a certain act of the government etc., and you didn't have compunctions about fabricating hadiths, it was easy to say "when x happens, know that the end of time is at hand." This was a very powerful and attractive genre of hadith to forge: (1) it established a miracle for the Prophet ("he knew of this many years ago"), so if someone tried to deny it you could really corner him, by accusing him of denying a miracle of the Prophet! (2) it was tempting to "pious but foolish" people to forge a hadith with good intentions, for example with a text that near the end of time such and such a sin will flourish — such individuals could forge a hadith, attribute it to the Prophet and still feel good about what they were doing.

Despite all this, I think there are sufficient very strong hadiths which indicate that the Prophet did indeed make such prophecies about the end of time — one has to be careful with them, check the isnads (or if one does not have the ability to check for oneself, one relies on judgements of the scholars regarding these hadiths), but that does not mean that one must "throw the baby out with the bathwater." For an example of a work in which all sorts of material, clearly forged to probably authentic, is mixed together, see the Kitab al-fitan of Nu'aym ibn Hammad. Some of the weakest hadiths are mixed in with very reliable ones in that book.

One of the signs of the end of time is that Jesus will descend from the heavens to fight and kill the Antichrist (Dajjal). In India, in the first decades of this century, there was an individual by the name of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who claimed himself to be Jesus. A marginal benefit of his claim was that a number of scholars chose to refute him by collecting various hadiths about the second coming of Jesus and other general "signs of the end of time." One of the best collections we have on the issue, then, grew out of this controversy. This is the book — the name slips my mind, but I believe it is by Anwar Shah Kashmiri, and Abdul Fattah Abu Ghudda has an excellent marginal commentary on it which analyzes all the hadiths mentioned in the text along with providing great bibliographic references to the other literature on the subject. I think that should be enough to locate the book in a good library.

In any case. So much for caveats and bibliography.

The "signs" are usually divided into two kinds: the "smaller" signs (al-alamaat al-sughra) and the "larger" signs (al-alamaat al-kubra). The things that are supposed to happen before the actual appearance of Dajjal (antichrist) are the smaller ones, and those that occur after his appearance are the larger ones.

As I have already stressed: the chronology is not entirely reliable. But what I gather from various authors is that the smaller signs are all various evidences of moral decline which would precede the actual appearance of Dajjal. Promiscuity, strange hitherto unheard-of diseases, excessive wealth are among the things mentioned. That music would become widespread is also mentioned — this is particularly interesting since, if you think about it, until this century, music was something rather elaborate: you had to have the physical presence of musicians to hear music. Women who would be "dressed but undressed" (al-aariyat al-kaasiyat) have been mentioned: again, perhaps this could be understood as a reference to the very fine types of fabrics that are available today — the term "dressed but undressed" must have been puzzling at that time, and, to some degree, remains puzzling. Baraka will be removed from things: i.e. it will take more materials (time, money, food etc.) to perform tasks for which less had previously been adequate. There's a long list, but I'll leave it at that.

These were "general" things. Some of the more specific things are a hadith which mentions that "black gold" (!) will be found in a direction to which the Prophet pointed (I believe the hadith states something to the effect — "and the Prophet pointed towards Yaman") — and that none of you should touch any of it. (Again, one would want to look at the chains of narration of this hadith.)

Let me just present a composite "picture" of things mentioned in various hadiths — again, the chronology is uncertain, and the specifics do need to be studied carefully. This is just a quick run-down of various hadiths which I have come across (I do believe most of these are reliable, but I definitely would want to check before I made any specific claims). There seems to be some evidence for the chronological sequencing of each of the following "frames" within themselves, but there is a rough overlap between the various frames; i.e. the hadith doesn't provide a clear indication of the order of events in one frame relative to the next.

Frame One: Dajjal's Career

Dajjal will appear. His "right eye" will be blind (perhaps a metaphor? Side note: guess what went through the minds of Muslims when Moshe Dayan was still alive!). He will have "unbeliever" written on his forehead — any true believer will be able to see it, but others won't be able to. He will have heaven in one hand and hell in the other. He will offer nations his heaven and if they accept it will be as if they are in heaven — their needs will be fulfilled. Those that refuse him will fall into his "hell" and they will indeed appear to be in great suffering — but the true believer will know the difference!

The world will be made subservient to him. Until finally he will approach Mecca and Medina. He will actually conquer Mecca and overturn the Ka'ba — but when he approaches Medina he will find twelve doors to it all guarded by angels, so he will lay siege to it. (Before the siege of Medina, there will be three earthquakes — ninety thousand hypocrites will leave Medina; then this "cleaned" Medina will be besieged.)

The siege will last for a long time but will finally be broken by a "man of God" (not specified who — though some speculate about it). Dajjal will have been given all sorts of power: he will command the earth to spit forth its wealth and it will; he will command the clouds to rain and they will; he will make the claim to power over life and death and he will be given this power. Thus, he will kill a person and bring him back to life.

Into this setting walks the above-mentioned "man of God." He will challenge Dajjal. Dajjal will threaten him with death and demand that he acknowledge him as God. The man will refuse. Dajjal will kill him, saw his body in two and walk between the severed parts and then bring him back to life. Then he will ask: "NOW do you believe I am God?" And the man will refuse and say: "Now I am even more certain that you are not God! Our Prophet told us about your coming — you are Dajjal." At this point Dajjal will try to kill him but God will take this power away from him. This will be the beginning of the end for Dajjal, the turning point in his career.

Frame Two: The Plight of the Muslims

Probably a little before the siege of Medina, the Mahdi ("the rightly guided one") will be recognized by people as he circumambulates the Ka'ba. (The Mahdi is not the same as Jesus the Messiah — he is definitely a different character.) Again, many hadiths provide various descriptive hints about the Mahdi, and already many people in Islamic history have claimed to be the Mahdi. He will be circumambulating the Ka'ba when a group of Muslims will approach him. He will deny that he is the Mahdi but they will insist and finally convince him. The Muslims will take an oath of allegiance to him.

Frame Three: The Jihads in Hind

Somewhere along the line there will be three jihads in "Hind." The Muslims will lose in the first two; in the third they will win but there will be no joy in victory: there will be a funeral in every house. In addition, it is said that the army in this third jihad will be exceedingly sinful, but God will forgive them their sins. This victorious army will then go towards Damascus where they will join the army of Jesus to fight the final battle against Dajjal.

Frame Four: The Descent of the Messiah

The Messiah will descend directly from the sky to a minaret (the east minaret, I believe) on the mosque of Jerusalem. From there he will ask for a ladder — interpreted as indicating that he will have left the realm of the supernatural and now will have to follow normal "mortal" rules — and descend. The Mahdi will be leading the prayers and will step aside for him; but the Messiah will say: "No, this time I come not as a Prophet but as one of the umma of the Final Prophet."

Frame Five: The Confrontation

The Jews, the Christians, and hypocritical Muslims will have joined behind Dajjal. The final confrontation is seemingly in Syria. The Messiah will join battle and the enemy will fall away from him. He will be the only one able to confront the antichrist, who will melt in front of him as salt melts in water. The place of Dajjal's death is identified — I am told there is an airport there these days.

Jesus dies somewhere along here, after the final battle. I believe the way it goes from here is that the Mahdi will barely have had time to recover from the battle when he will be informed that a menace is about to come upon them which they will simply not be able to face: Gog and Magog (Yajuj wa Majuj). Thus, they will be commanded to take refuge in the mountains (Jabal al-Tur is specified — Mount Sinai?).

Gog and Magog are actually mentioned in the Quran. Hadiths describe them as short, with flat faces. This has led many to suggest that these are the Russians or the Chinese. The Quranic verse min kulla hadabin yansilun ("they will 'roll forth' from high places") has led some to suggest Chinese. In addition they are mentioned as being numerous beyond count — they will drink up whole lakes.

In any case, they will ravage the earth and no one will be able to oppose them. After forty years their arrogance will come to the point that they will "fire an arrow" skywards with the intention of "killing God" and God will send the arrow back to them bloodied — thus they will think they have succeeded.

Meanwhile, in the mountains the Muslims will be having a terrible time with famine and hunger. Finally, the Mahdi will pray to God for relief. So God will send down a terrible disease which will kill them all, their bodies lying there rotting with no one even to pick them up. The stench will be so bad that even then, no one will be able to descend from the mountain. So the Mahdi will pray again and God will send rain down to clean the earth, and the Mahdi will come down with his people.

Then there will be a period of incredible peace in which "children will play with snakes." Then a slow decline will begin until finally only very few will remain who are obedient to God. God will send a breeze which will leave the believers with something like a cold — they will sneeze and die. This will leave only the disobedient.

Then the sur (conch shell) will be blown. The first person to hear it will be tying his horse, and whoever hears it will die. As they die this conch shell will be blown again and the people will be raised from the dead and gathered towards the Plain of Judgement.

May Allah look with favor upon us all on that day. Wa lahu al-hamd wa al-kibraya.

Author: Iftikhar uz Zaman, University of Chicago.
Source: soc.religion.islam, posted May 20, 1991.
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Archived: 2026-03-22.

🌲