Apocalypse

During the first quarter of the seventh century, the Qur'an was revealed into this world of pre-Islamic Arabia, with its warrior caste's never-ending battles against tyrant time.

The Qur'an is an apocalyptic text. As revelation it is a divine irruption into the world of man and thus heralds the onset of the End Time. As the last in a long sequence of such revelatory irruptions over the course of human history, it signals the end of history, for it clarifies once and for all what is right and what is wrong. Thus revelation represents the first stage of the Last Judgement.

Human autonomy is the consequence of God's gift of choice to man. The decision whether to comply and acknowledge God's authority or violently recuse it represents the second stage of the Last Judgement. God has sent the Qur'an from heaven to earth because of the violence of human unbelief (kufr). Central to the Qur'anic notion of unbelief is the idea of ingratitude. Apostasy, idolatry, hypocrisy, obstinacy in rejecting God's message, com­placency, arrogance, irreverence, impiety, these are some of the major characteristics of unbelievers. At their heart lies a fundamental sense of a lack of gratitude to God for the gifts of His creation, for His clemency and solicitude for man, for His overwhelming benefaction. God has filled the world with the signs of His kindnesses, pre-eminent among which are the verses of His revelation. Acts of benefaction were thought to require expression of gratitude on behalf of those who received the benefit. Thus, rejection of God's signs and of the verses of the Qur'an was a failure adequately to express gratitude to the benefactor, God. Such ungrateful disobedience in rejecting God's message merited hell-fire (Qur'an 2:39).

The Qur'an abounds in punishment stories in which God sends past peoples a messenger. Invariably these peoples reject their messengers in acts of wanton violence. There ensues an apocalyptic cataclysm and the people are destroyed. In Qur'an 26 (al-Shu‘ara', The Poets) seven punishment stories are framed by verses (1-9) that condemn rejection of God's revelation and by verses (192-227) that establish the authority of the revelation as of divine and not human provenance. The story of Moses at the court of Pharaoh and the Exodus from Egypt (verses 10-68) is followed by Abraham's rejection of the idolatry of his people (69-104). Noah and the Flood (105-22) leads into the punishment of ‘Ad for their rejection of Hud (123-40) and then the Thamud are punished for their rejection of Salih (141­59). (‘Ad and Thamud were two ancient Arabian peoples.) The sequence culminates in the destruction of the People of the Grove (Midian) for their failure to hearken to Shu‘ayb (176-91). History is thus a foretelling of the Eschaton, a prediction of futurity.

Only God knows the time of the apocalypse, the third stage of the Last Judgement, the display of divine majesty and might in which the earth will be torn asunder by a massive earthquake, when the sun and the stars will be extinguished, the sky will pour down like molten metal, the seas will surge, and the mountains, the pre-eminent pre-Islamic symbols for eternity, will be teased and plucked like carded wool.

Qur'an 88 (al-Ghashiya, The Firewave) conjures the aftermath of the Last Judgement (verses 2-16) before evoking the End Time (17-20). It concludes with an intonation of the present-ness of future events (21-6). The Firewave is an apocalypse for a desert people. In a drought to end all droughts God withholds water and unleashes a cosmic firestorm. But however violent and traumatic these events appear to be, however much terror they instil in our hearts, their violence is as naught when compared with the violence of man's ingratitude to God, the ultimate catalyst of the End.

There is a profound intimacy between Qur’anic revelation and Qur’anic time: the act of revelation is itself conceived in apocalyptic terms (see Qur’an 101, al-Qari‘ah, The Salvo). Past events are limned as present advents of future inevitability, for man, in order piously to appreciate and prepare for the End Time, must view the future retrospectively, in terms of past cataclysms. What Sieburth calls ‘mantic hysteria’ and ‘messianic inevitability’ create in all who receive God’s revelation an ‘acute anticipatory angst’. Indeed, the very language of the Qur’an is transformative, its verses so fraught with such an ‘alarming surplus (or abyss) of meaning’ that its verse-signs are themselves the apocalypse.^[1122]