Introduction
In the first part, we saw that the formative period of Islam was marked by apocalyptic beliefs, intensified at the beginning of the 7th century by the war between Persia and the Byzantine Empire. We also demonstrated that the Qur'anic discourse reflected the apocalyptic ideas of its time before diverging in a second phase, the writing of which can only be dated
after the death of Muhammad. The latter believed until his death that he would witness the events of the End. This is indeed what emerges from an examination of the oldest sources, which will be discussed in this second part.
Early Islam: an apocalyptic movement?
The Prophet of the End of the World
Many publications have shown that Muhammad first presented himself as a “warner” come to alert his people to the imminence of the end of the world
1. This hypothesis was formulated as early as the late 19th century by several German scholars. One of them, Frants Buhl, wrote that Muhammad had no intention of founding a new religion, but was simply trying to warn the Arabs of the impending Judgment
2. A French historian, Paul Casanova, adopted the thesis of his predecessors and developed it in a book titled
Mohamed and the End of the World: Critical Study of Primitive Islam, published in 1911.
Apart from the Qur'an, Islamic tradition has preserved many traces of the Prophet's doctrine concerning the end of the world. The hadith scholar Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 855) reported the following tradition in his
Musnad: “The Hour will come. My advent and the Hour, said Muhammad, are separated by such and such,” pointing to his index finger and middle finger, which are separated by the length of these two fingers
3. In a variant reported by Sahl ibn Sa'd, he declares: “My advent and the Hour are separated by such and such,” again using his index and middle finger
4. The failure of Prophet's preaching caused embarrassment among the scholars. The great exegete al-Tabari (d. 923) proposed a rather complex explanation: according to his calculations, the middle finger exceeds the index finger by a fourteenth, and the Earth's duration would be 7,000 years. He deduced that Muhammad's coming and the end of the world were separated by a fourteenth of these 7,000 years, that is, 500 years. In other words, the end of the world should have occurred 500 years after Muhammad
5. Although this interpretation is ingeniously elaborate, it has not stood the test of time. In another hadith cited by al-Maqrizi (d. 1442), we read: “My coming and that of the Hour are concurrent; even it nearly came before me”
6. Ibn Abi Shayba (d. 849) and his contemporary Ibn Hanbal report another prophetic tradition: “Those who see me or hear my sayings will see al-Dajjal [the Muslim Antichrist] alive”
7. Elsewhere, the Prophet states succinctly: “Within a century, there will be no man left on earth,” and, in another account, he points at a young man and says: “Before he reaches old age, the Hour will break out”
8. Consider another tradition, found in ancient sources but later obscured. It reports that during the construction of the first mosque in Medina, the Prophet told the men working not to bother covering the roof with thatch “because the dominion (
al-amr) [of Allah] will occur sooner than that”
9. As Meir Kister notes, “it is obvious that this tradition [...] was omitted by Muslim scholars. The Day of Judgment had not arrived at the time of the Prophet, and there was no reason to cite a tradition that clearly states that the Prophet believed the Hour would occur during his own lifetime”
10. Some ancient texts are even more explicit about the apocalyptic nature of Muhammad’s mission. Indeed, he is repeatedly called the “prophet of the end times” (
nabi akhir al-zaman) or the “prophet of the calamities of the end of the world” (
nabi al-malhama)
11.
The traditions we have just mentioned most likely originate from the historical figure of Muhammad, as they satisfy the criterion of embarrassment, a tool often used by historians to assess the authenticity of a tradition. The principle of the criterion of embarrassment is simple: if a statement or story attributed to the Prophet risks putting religious authorities in a delicate position, it is more likely to be authentic. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Muslims deliberately forged and attributed clearly false predictions to the Prophet, and recorded them in hadith collections that are among the most respected. Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi is therefore right to pose the following question: “Given that the coming of the Hour ultimately did not happen and the world did not end, which later Muslim scholars or currents had an interest in fabricating such texts by attributing them to Muḥammad, thereby causing him to lose all credibility and prophetic legitimacy?”
12 There is no satisfactory answer other than to consider these traditions as authentic. The fact that, despite their embarrassing nature, Muslim sources took care to preserve these prophetic traditions suggests that they were too well known at the time to be simply dismissed. It was better, for Muslim historiographers, to record them in writing and offer explanations, more or less convincing—one need not recall al-Tabari’s unsuccessful attempt at explanation.
A Messianic Movement?
The fact that Muhammad expected to see the end of the world in his lifetime is confirmed by the
Doctrina Jacobi, one of the oldest writings concerning the figure of the Prophet composed a few years after his death
13. In this text, a certain Abraham, a Jew from Cæsarea, addresses his brother Justus:
It was said that the prophet
[= Muhammad] appeared, coming with the Saracens
[= the Arabs], and proclaimed the coming of the Anointed Christ who was to come
14.
According to this testimony, Muhammad announced the return of Jesus to the earth. This idea closely resembles a hadith in which the Prophet states that “the descent of Jesus son of Mary is imminent”
15. It is, it seems, a unique case where a prophetic tradition is corroborated by a non-Muslim writing from the first century of Islam. The statement attributed to Muhammad, attested in multiple and
independent sources, can be considered authentic with a very high degree of probability.
Despite the unfulfilled prophecy, messianism persisted in subsequent Muslim texts, which emphasize the role of two redeemer figures at the end of times: the Christ and the
Mahdi—the latter sometimes identified with the former
16. Historians have noted that, paradoxically, the eschatological role attributed to Jesus in prophetic and post-prophetic literature is ignored in the Qur'an. Certainly, and this is precisely the crux of the matter, Jesus is called many times “the Messiah” in the Qur'an (see, for example, 3:45; 4:157; 5:17). But, on the other hand, the Quranic text attributes no eschatological role to Jesus, nor does it describe him as the Savior of the end times
17. Yet that is the quintessential function of the Messiah. It’s as if “the Messiah” was simply a nickname or an honorific title given to Jesus but devoid of the function traditionally associated with him. This perplexed Casanova, who wrote: “For the Antichrist and for the return of Jesus, the silence of the Qur'an seems to me an enigma [...] the messianic role of Jesus is nowhere mentioned in it.
18.
To resolve this “enigma,” some scholars propose the hypothesis that initially, the Qur'an did mention Jesus’ messianic role and his imminent return to earth, but that these passages were eliminated during subsequent recensions, when apocalyptic expectations had waned
19. Although this hypothesis is plausible, it cannot be fully demonstrated due to lack of material evidence, although some documents seem to suggest that the Qur'anic text was altered after the Prophet’s death
20. An alternative explanation was recently proposed by José Costa, a specialist in ancient Judaism. Costa demonstrates that certain Jewish currents had developed a conception in which the Messiah plays no role in the end times. This conception, later adopted by the Ebionites, a Judeo-Christian movement, appears to fit quite well with the Qur'anic Jesus. According to Costa, “rather than speaking of censorship, it would be simpler to consider the absence of an eschatological Messiah as an intentional choice by the authors of the passages about Jesus in the Qur'an”
21.
In any case, the question of messianism in early Islam has sparked numerous debates among historians since the publication in 1977 of
Hagarism by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook
. By exploiting the earliest sources, the two authors hypothesized that the movement initiated by Muhammad was the result of an alliance between Jews and Arabs who together undertook the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem to prepare for the Messiah’s return
22. Due to this alliance, ‘Umar was nicknamed by the Jews
al-faruq, “the redeemer”
23, a title still associated with the second caliph. Crone and Cook saw in this the proof that ‘Umar was considered by the Jews as a messianic figure, and that he portrayed himself as such. However, this hypothesis has been challenged by Fred Donner, who argues that the title “redeemer” given by the Jews to ‘Umar merely came from the fact that he “allowed them to settle again in Jerusalem and perform their devotions at the sacred site”
24.
In any case, the numerous sources mentioning an alliance between Jews and Arabs seem too numerous to deny any historical reality—whatever form it may have taken in practice. Thus, the author of the
Armenian Chronicle writes that the Jews “made an alliance with the Arabs for a certain period and devised a plan to rebuild Solomon’s Temple.” It seems, as Shoemaker notes, that “many of Muhammad’s earliest disciples saw in this gradual restoration of worship on the Temple Mount the beginning of the events of the end times.” The great merit of
Hagarism and the works following in its wake has been to highlight the centrality of Jerusalem in early Islam. It is now well established that it was Muhammad himself who secured the conquest of Palestine, an episode not remembered in Islamic sources but well attested in contemporary writings on the conquests
25. Several verses in the Qur'an also speak of the conquest of “the holy land” (5:21; 21:105-106). These passages seem to refer to the conquest of Jerusalem by the proto-Muslims
26, which would be another cue pointing to a late dating of the Qur'anic text. Also noteworthy is that prayer originally was oriented toward Jerusalem, and remained so for a few decades after the Prophet’s death, contrary to the later Islamic tradition which claims that the change of the
qibla occurred during Muhammad's conflict (supposedly) with the Jews of Medina
27. Finally, elsewhere, we have shown that the pilgrimage in the Qur'an seems better aligned with Jerusalem and its region than with the Meccan site
28. As shown, a convergence of evidence suggests that the axis of sacredness in early Islam was oriented toward Jerusalem and its surroundings. According to Jewish and Christian traditions, it is there that the events of the End were to occur. This explains the proto-Muslims’ interest in the city.
Conclusion
We have demonstrated that early Islam has its roots in apocalyptic beliefs spread towards the end of antiquity. An examination of the earliest sources has allowed us to determine that Muhammad himself presented as a warners whose role, it seems, was to announce the end of the world. The Prophet’s role then took on a military dimension: the goal was now to conquer Jerusalem to hasten the coming of the Messiah. Early Islam is thus described by Jan Van Reeth as a “sectarian community [...] waiting for the parousia [i.e., the second coming of Christ] in the near future”
29. Despite the efforts made by the Islamic tradition to construct an alternative history, the apocalyptic dimension of the Qur'anic community has never been completely erased. This is evidenced, in particular, by the numerous traditions within Islamic sources themselves, as well as the Qur'anic verses that can be linked to the earliest textual layer.
