Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT t 255
when privileged individuals were permitted to espy the future. The
subsequent reports of these journeys into the Beyond, Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim, were filled with circumstantial details of
events and their sequences, of topography, of personalities, and
even of dialogue. It was left to later and more generally sober theologians
and jurists to put some order into these visionary recitals,
to filter out elements that proved useless or unacceptable, and to
try to incorporate other and older details that had somehow been
overlooked. By their own Middle Ages, all three monotheistic
communities had a relatively coherent idea of what would occur at
the End Time, a schema or scenario for the more literal-minded, a
vivid picture for those who took their instruction from preachers,
poets, or the walls of churches.
End Time Scenarios
The End, that is, the term of historical time, the Judgment rendered
by God on his creation either individually or collectively,
and the Requital meted out in consequence are the three main acts
of most eschatological scenarios, each enlarged with illustrative,
instructive, or even entertaining detail. The End is extended backward
to embrace a prelude that might be called Signs: how do we
know when the End will come? “No man knows the day or the
hour,” as the Quran (33:63; 79:42–44) and the other Scriptures
warn, but a great many believers have spent a great deal of time
calculating it nonetheless. There will be perturbations of nature
and perturbations of the spirit, and to the latter belong the false
messiahs, false Christs, and the Muslims’ “Deceiver.” Loose ends
are to be tied up: Enoch and Elijah must return to suffer death, to
whom the Muslims would add Jesus, who only “seemed” to die on
the cross (4:157). For the Christians, Israel must be converted, in
history, before Act 2 can begin. The climax comes with the defeat
of God’s enemies—here the Messiah and Mahdi figures are in evidence—followed
by the destruction of the world, the great conflagration
in which the material cosmos perishes.
Before the Judgment proper can begin, the resurrection of the