with God’s creation of the universe, and all expect
an end to human history to come at a time of
God’s choosing. The end, according to the qUran,
will arrive suddenly but will be accompanied by
dramatic signs. At that time, the dead will be
raised physically, and all will be judged according
to their Faith and deeds. All Muslims believe that
there is life after death.
The Quran has a good deal to say about
the coming end. That humans will be called to
account for their good and bad deeds on that
day is affirmed repeatedly. The last day will be
accompanied by a great trumpet blast, when “the
mountains are lifted up and crushed with a single
blow” (Q 69:14). Humans will be reunited with
their bodies and will await judgment in great fear.
The day of reckoning is usually presented as a
matter of receiving a book with one’s accumulated
deeds. Those to whom the book is given in the
right hand will enter paradise (generally called the
garden), while the others will enter the fires of
hell (often simply the Fire). Both the rewards and
the punishments are rather graphically depicted
in the Quran and are given substantial elaboration
in hadith and other traditional materials.
Before the day of reckoning, however, Mus-
lims expect that several events not mentioned in
the Quran will occur. Many traditions speak of a
time of inversions to precede the end, in which
“normal” social relations will be turned on their
head: sons will not obey their fathers, slave girls
will give birth to their own masters, and the poor
and the weak will become leaders. While there
is no unanimity on this point, the general thrust
of popular Sunni eschatological belief is that the
end times will see the rise of a deceptive leader, or
antichrist (Dajjal), who will be fought and van-
quished by either the mahdi or JesUs, ushering in a
millennial period before the JUdgment day. Being
extra-Quranic, however, this popularly accepted
narrative is highly contested by Muslim scholars.
ibn khaldUn (d. 1406), for instance, rejected the
entire luxuriant set of traditions that purport to
prophecy the coming of the Mahdi, which would
also raise doubts as to his belief in the rise of the
Dajjal and the reappearance of Jesus.
For the Twelve-Imam Shia, a belief in the
Mahdi comes to be an article of faith and is thus
much more central than it is for Sunnis. Accord-
ing to Shii histories, the 12th imam, or descendant
of Ali through his son Husayn, disappeared from
view after 874 but is still present in the world
and will return at the end of time to fill the earth
with justice as it is filled now with corruption and
injustice. To be a true believer, one must have this
belief in the presence and eventual reemergence
of the imam Mahdi. In this sense, Shii theology
indicates that humanity is always on the threshold
of the millennial age.
See also aFterliFe; creation; Faith; ismaili shi-
ism; tWelve-imam shiism.John IskanderFurther reading: David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apoca-
lyptic (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 2002); Muhammad
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, The Remembrance of Death and
the Afterlife, Kitab dhikr al-mawt wa-ma badahu, Book XL
of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, Ihya ulum al-Din.
Translated by T. J. Winter (Cambridge: Islamic Texts
Society, 1995); F. E. Peters, Judaism, Christianity and
Islam: The Classical Texts and Their Interpretation, vol. 3,
The Works of the Spirit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1990); Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Y. Had-
dad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981).ethics and morality
Ethics and morality are concerned with how
humans should live their lives in accordance with
what they know to be right and wrong. The two
terms are often used interchangeably. However,
when scholars distinguish them, they understand
ethics to mean philosophical reflection upon
moral conduct, while morality pertains to specific
norms or codes of behavior. Questions of ethics,
therefore, involve such subjects as human natureK 214 ethics and morality