ISLAM AND THE FUTURE. A brief relation of the future course of history as it apparead to early Muslims.

The future is not a topic treated in the Koran, but it is abundantly (and by no means consistently) treated in early islamic tradition, from which what follows is selected. The future is nasty, brutish and short. The Muslim communuity will break up into a mass of conflicting sects, just as the Children of Israel ha done before them. Sedition will follow sedition like strips of the darkest night, and the living will envy the dead. Eventually God will send a redeemer, a descendant of Muhammad. This redeemer, the Mahdi, will receive allegiance at the sanctuary in Mecca, whence his emigration (hijra) will be to Jerusalem; there he will reign in justice. Yet this interlude will last less than a decade. Thereafter Antichrist (the Dajjal) will appear from Iraq, reducing the Muslims to a remnant making their last stand on the peak of a mountain in Syria. In the hour of their need, Jesus will descend to earth in armor and lead them against Antichrist, slaying him at the gate of Lydda in Palestine; the Jesus will reign in justice and plenty, exterminating the pig and breaking the crosses of the Christians. Yet this too will pass, giving way to the final horrors of human history. At the last a wind takes up the souls of trhe believers, the sun rises in the west, and history gives way to the cataclysmic eschatology of the Koran.
Casalino Pierluigi, on June 1st 2014