The Qur'an announces the Hour

The Quran was revealed to Muhammad across the first three decades of the 7th century, and from the start it returns to one theme with unusual insistence: the certainty of the Hour (as-sa'a) and the gathering of all humanity for judgment. Where the earlier scriptures treat the end in stretches of vision, the Quran makes it a constant, near presence, a moral spur repeated in prayer and law.

The end it describes is cosmic and sudden. The Hour is known only to God; those who ask "when" are told it is near and unforeseen. Its signs are cosmological and moral alike: the sun wrapped up, the stars fallen, the seas set boiling, the mountains moved, and people's deeds laid open. At the blowing of the Trumpet the dead are raised, and every soul is reckoned at a Scale and a Bridge (as-Sirat) stretched fine as a hair over the fire of Jahannam. The righteous enter paradise; the wicked fall to the flame.

The shape is the shared linear, goal-directed structure of Judaism and Christianity, with the Zoroastrian emphasis on a final renovation feeding in through Judaism. What Islam adds is the tight coupling of eschatology to daily life and a detailed vocabulary of signs, later expanded in the hadith into the cinematic sequence of the Dajjal, the return of Isa, Gog and Magog, and the Mahdi. The deceiver at the sequence's centre is treated under the Dajjal. The result is an end-of-the-world belief that is at once firmly future and constantly present, a lens held up to every age.

The Hour described is treated under Islamic Eschatology.

The Quran's treatment is strikingly varied in register: in some suras the Hour is a distant certainty argued against scoffers, in others, traditionally counted among the Meccan suras, it is described as near, with the shattering trumpet rendered in imagery readers would have recognised from contemporary Christian and Jewish apocalyptic. The nearness passages generated the first Islamic eschatological movement, the expectation surrounding the Prophet's generation, whose disappointment was absorbed into the doctrine that God alone knows the hour.

The hadith collections of the following two centuries supplied what the Quran declined to fix: an ordered sequence of minor and major signs, the false messiah, the descending of Isa, Gog and Magog behind their wall, and the Mahdi, much of it elaborated in dialogue with the Christian and Jewish materials already circulating in the conquered provinces. The canonically closest verse remains 7:187, where the Prophet is told to say that knowledge of the Hour belongs to his Lord alone.