Islam and the End Times

Muslim eschatology is dominated by two prophesied figures. The Mahdi, or “rightly-guided one,” is similar to the Jewish understanding of the mashiach, a mortal man who plays a central role in defeating the enemies of Allah. The Dajjal is the Islamic Antichrist figure.

Western pundits, politicians, and preachers fail to understand the depth of Muslim belief that we are in the end times right now. Unlike American Christians, some 80 percent of whom do not anticipate the literal return of Jesus anytime soon, most Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia, upwards of three-quarters in some places, expect to see the Mahdi before they die.

Looking at specific countries, the highest percentage of the population expecting the Mahdi’s near-term appearance is found in Afghanistan (83 percent), followed by Iraq (72 percent), Turkey (68 percent) and Tunisia (67 percent). Sixty percent of Pakistanis, 51 percent of Moroccans, 46 percent of Palestinians and 40 percent of Egyptians are looking for the Mahdi in their lifetimes. The conventional wisdom in recent decades among many journalists, and not a few area “experts,” has been that Mahdism is an eccentric outlier belief held mainly by (Twelver) Shi`is and the uneducated on the fringes of the Sunni world. This Pew data, among other things, shows the intellectual vacuity of such biases. The average for the 23 countries Pew surveyed on this issue of Mahdism comes out to 42 percent, and extrapolating from that to the entire Muslim world means there are over 670 million Muslims who believe the Mahdi will return here in the first half of the twenty-first century.

What does this Pew information on Mahdism mean? First and foremost, Mahdism must be taken seriously as an intellectual, sociological and even political strain within the entire Islamic world—not dismissed as archaic, mystical nonsense.^[1]

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that data. What it means is this: The Islamic State and other Sunni “Mahdist” movements, of which there have been many over the years, haven’t hijacked Islam; they practice a purer formof Islam—one that believes it can jump-start the Apocalypse and bring the Mahdi to earth sooner rather than later.

While most Muslims do not support the methods and/or aims of ISIS, “Islamic history is rife with violent jihads led by self-styled Muslim messiahs and waged by their followers.”^[2] ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State is only the most recent iteration such a movement. If only 1 percent of the world’s Muslims who believe the Mahdi is due to return rally to a would-be Mahdi’s cause, he’ll have nearly seven million jihadists at his disposal.^[3]

Oddly enough, two of the starring characters of the Islamic end-times scenario aren’t even mentioned in the Quran.

In the seventh century AD, as the armies of Islam swarmed out of Arabia and overwhelmed the armies of the two greatest powers in the Near East, Persia and the Eastern Roman Empire, a pseudepigraphal text called the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius emerged, attributed to the fourth-century bishop Methodius of Olympus. The text was an effort by stunned Christians to make sense of the new world order, as Muslim conquerors captured nearly all the major centers of Christendom—Damascus, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria—by 642, just ten years of Muhammad’s death. In 674, the armies of the Umayyad caliph began a four-year siege of the Eastern Roman capital, Constantinople.

For traumatized Christians in the Middle East reeling before the Islamic onslaught, it must have felt like the end of the world. Without the military strength to fight back, Christians turned to the pen. Pseudo-Methodius depicted Roman emperors as agents of God’s will and prophesied that a final emperor would arise in the last days to deliver Christendom from the “sons of Ishmael.”

But it provoked an equal and opposite reaction from Islamic teachers—creation of the Mahdi. Yes, it appears the messianic savior of Islam was invented out of whole cloth after Muhammad’s death in response to the Final Roman Emperor, who was created in response to the Islamic invasion by an unnamed Christian cleric in northern Syria. In other words, the Mahdi is the product of an “anything you can do, we can do better” game of one-upmanship.

Isn’t it bizarre that seventh-century fiction has such an impact on the world today?

Unlike the Quran, which was compiled under the authority of early Islamic authorities in Medina, the hadithweren’t collected until the eighth and ninth centuries. The sayings attributed to Muhammad, based on stories passed down from people who’d known him, were never evaluated by a central authority. Islamic scholars in the centuries since have divided the hadith into sahih (authentic), hasan (strong), and da’if (weak). Here’s the thing: There is no universal agreement on which hadith are which. Sunni and Shia Muslims have different collections of hadith, and there is a small group of Quranists who reject the hadith altogether.

Since everything Muslims know about their two main players in the end times, the Mahdi and the Dajjal, come from the hadith, it’s nearly impossible to summarize an authoritative list of “What Muslims Believe about the End Times.” Sunnis and Shias have disagreed over Islamic doctrine for more than thirteen hundred years, often violently, and those differences naturally carry over into eschatology.

For example: Sunnis believe the Mahdi has yet to appear on eaarth while Shias believe he’s hidden now but will return. Those views are as different as Christian and Jewish views of the Messiah.

Two other figures play key roles in Islamic eschatology. Isa, the Muslim conception of Jesus, appears in the Last Hour to kill the Dajjal (or help the Mahdi do so), and the Sufyani, a Muslim tyrant or national hero depending on the sect, emerges in Damascus just before the Mahdi’s arrival.

What’s odd about Isa’s return is that it’s prophesied in the Quran. However, Muslims believe Isa/Jesus did not die on the cross but was taken up into heaven before death like Enoch and Elijah. Despite his miraculous birth (Muslims do believe Mary was a virgin) and rescue from the cross, Isa will die like any other mortal man some years after his return.

The Sufyani, like the Mahdi and the Dajjal, is an apocryphal figure mentioned only in the hadith. The differences in how he’s perceived in the Muslim world illustrates the depth of the hostility between Sunnis and Shias. His name stems from his ancestor, one Abu Sufyan, the leader of Muhammad’s tribe who persecuted the self-proclaimed prophet and his followers at first. Although he and his family eventually converted to the faith, Abu Sufyan’s son, Yazid, fought Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali, for control of the new Islamic empire and eventually became the caliph.

Ali’s supporters, the Shi`at Ali (“partisans of Ali,” and later just “Shi`a”), formed their own sect that persists to this day. After the death of Ali’s son, Husayn, in AD 680, the Umayyads had firm control of Islam. Shia imams, perhaps drawing inspiration from Pseudo-Methodius, began teaching that the Mahdi would return someday to defeat the champion of the Sunnis, the Sufyani. Many Shias today believe the Sufyani’s emergence is imminent—a bad thing for them because he’s the enemy of the Mahdi.

Conversely, some Sunnis see the Sufyani as a sort of national hero, especially in Syria, the historic homeland of the Sufyani’s ancestors. (More evidence that the tribe of Muhammad and the original Ka’ba were not from Arabia.) And unlike Shia prophecies that portray Syria in a bad light because it will be the birthplace of the Sufyani, it holds a place of honor for Sunnis as the site of the prophesied future victory over the forces of Rome.

Think about that. Some 670 million Muslims, including an overwhelming majority in the Middle East and western Asia, expect to see the Mahdi in their lifetimes—sometime during the first half of the twenty-first century. But Sunnis and Shias, like Jews and (most) Christians, are looking for different men to fulfill their prophecies.

Now, the typical Muslim is probably no better informed about his or her faith than the typical Christian. So, while large majorities in nations like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan expect the Mahdi’s return in the near future, their expectations, which are already built on sometimes contradictory hadith of questionable authority, may be shaped to fit current events by charismatic and persuasive imams or political leaders.

So, in broad strokes, here is what Muslims generally believe about the end times:

1. The “Last Hour” will be preceded by corruption, widespread unbelief, oppression of Muslims, declining standards of living, wars and anarchy, sexual immorality, the emergence of false prophets, and an increase in technology.
2. The armies of Rome will land at al-A’maq, a valley near Antakya (Antioch) in southern Turkey, or Dabiq, a rural village in Syria between Aleppo and the border with Turkey. Muslims triumph over the “Romans” and go on to conquer Constantinople (Istanbul). This belief is at the center of the apocalyptic theology of the Islamic State, and it’s why the official news agency of ISIS is called Amaq and its now-defunct official magazine was titled Dabiq. (Not surprisingly, when Syrian rebels, Turkish troops, and U.S. Special Forces overran Dabiq in October 2016 with virtually no resistance, the Islamic State just told the faithful that the relevant hadith refers to a future battle at Dabiq, not the one they’d just lost.)
3. The Dajjal emerges from the east, possibly from Khorasan, the traditional name of a region in eastern Iran and western Afghanistan, and remains on earth deceiving and oppressing people for forty days, forty months, or forty years.
4. Isa (Jesus) descends from heaven at Damascus and either helps the Mahdi kill the Dajjal or kills the Dajjal himself.
5. The Sufyani fields an army to fight the Mahdi, but the earth swallows the Sufyani and his followers before they reach him.
6. When the fighting is over, Isa and the Mahdi will lead prayers at Jerusalem. Al-Mahdi will try to defer to Isa, but Isa will insist on remaining subordinate to the Mahdi. The two will rule over the earth for 40 years before dying of old age.

Obviously, there is far more to Islamic eschatology, but since a lot of it isn’t believed by most Muslims or deals with supernatural events after the defeat of al-Dajjal, it doesn’t concern us here.

Then there are multiple variations on the main theme that are unique to either Sunnis or Shias. Some Sunnis believe the Dajjal will come from Iran; some Shias believe the civil war in Syria is a sign that the end times are upon us.

This is a key point: Both Sunnis and Shias firmly believe the other sect will mistake the Dajjal for the Mahdi. Young Muslim men willing to travel from Iran, Chechnya, Dagestan, the United Kingdom, and America for the privilege of fighting each other in the Syrian civil war convey the sense that Sunnis and Shias are enthusiastically slaughtering each other for the privilege of going to war with the Dajjal—the Islamic form of the Antichrist.

But with Sunnis and Shias identifying different characters–possibly the other side’s Mahdi–as the Dajjal, we must ask: Who will that character really be?

^[1] Dr. Timothy R. Furnish, “Mahdism (and Sectarianism and Superstition) Rises in the Islamic World.” History News Network, August 13, 2012 (http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/147714), retrieved 1/23/19.

^[2] Furnish, 2012.

^[3] Dr. Timothy R. Furnish, Ten Years’ Captivation with the Mahdi’s Camps: Essays on Muslim Eschatology, 2005–2015 (Kindle Edition, 2016), 6.