The Last Things very often accompany the concept of the Mahdi figure, and one will do well to consider them, their nature and features as such as well as their actual relationship to the appearance and role of al-Mahdi. Considering, then, the former aspects of the Last Things, the central position in the Koran of the theme of the Day of Judgement is first of all worth mentioning. The angel Israfil will blow his trumpet, and everybody will die, then to be resurrected. During this excitement, through which fear, trembling and complete confusion will arise, God will come down with His angels, and all mankind will be gathered in front of Him and His angels to be judged. And as a result, they will be assigned to either Paradise or Hell, depending on whether their deeds have been mainly good or bad. Following the general trend of literary expansion by means of hadiths and tafsirs, this theme of the Last Things soon became the object of commentaries and enlargements, attracting the attention of both the conventional theologian and the popular preacher. And so immense was this production that a whole literature more or less mythological in character developed, composed not only around the traditional questions of death, resurrection and doomsday, but also around the appearance of the various signs which would occur during the period immediately preceding the actual Day of Judgement. As indicated above, these signs are largely thought of as being expressed in terms of moral degeneracy and social and political disorder. Yet this literary genre did not confine itself to the foretelling of such signs. Rather these were only considered to be a prelude to other far more ominous signs of physical abnormality.
Mahdi the Reviver of Muhammad's Primordial Islamic Religion
