Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

254 t CHAPTER TEN
the signs (ayat) that God in his mercy has strewn across the universe
to understand his uniqueness and generosity (30:20–25). But
for Muslims there is a special guidance: the Quran (2:185), with its
own clear ayat—a word that soon came to refer to the Quran’s
individual verses. The Book also characterizes itself as a furqan, a
“criterion.” This too is a difficult word, but its contexts suggest
that the entire range of its values is germane here: criterion, revelation,
salvation. The Quran is then, in its own words, both a guide
and the instrument of salvation, since, as we have just seen, the end
for humans is the generous endowment of prosperity, the successful
reaping of rewards in this life, and an entry into the Garden
that is God’s reward to the just in the Afterlife.
The End and What Follows
The corollary of “this world” (al-dunya) so despised by the ascetic
is “the next world” or, more properly, “the End” (al-akhira),
which the mystic attempts to anticipate. From the perspective of
the three monotheistic communities, this “end” is understood in
two related, and sometimes conflicting, senses. It refers in the first
instance to the end of the individual: what, if anything, occurs to a
person immediately after death. It is a starkly personal and individual
concern. But the three faiths are also, and perhaps even
more thoughtfully and fretfully, concerned with the End Time, the
absolute finale to God’s plan for the cosmos, and what might lie
beyond. There was, as it turned out, a great deal beyond. The End
will mark only the end of history; beyond “The Day” and “The
Hour” of the End Time stretches eternity, not the mere prolongation
of time but an entirely new dimension of being. Eternity is a
state or condition, and although theology undertook to explain in
what it consisted, “eternity” simply pronounces of itself that it has
no beginning or end. Humans will enter it in progress.
The End Time was and remains a complex affair for Jews, Christians,
and Muslims, with an elaborate and articulated scenario for
the series of acts that will constitute it. Its formal production design
began with the visionary apocalypses of post-Exilic Judaism