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Muḥammad spoke often of the coming day of judgment but did not predict when it would arrive. The Quran gives no date for the “hour of doom” but does describe it in vivid and terrible images. It will devastate the earth and reverse all the natural processes that were established by Allah:

When the sun shall be darkened, When the stars shall be

thrown down,

When the mountains shall be set moving, When the pregnant

camels shall be neglected,

When the savage beasts shall be mustered, When the seas shall

be set boiling,

When the souls shall be coupled, When the buried infant shall

be asked for what sin she was slain,

When the scrolls shall be unrolled, When heavens shall be

stripped off,

When hell shall be set blazing, When paradise shall be

brought nigh,

Then shall a soul know what it has produced. (Q 81:1-14)

The imagery itself is deeply involved in polemic and parenesis, showing Muḥammad’s attention to the social evils of his day. The reference to the exposed baby girl reflects a practice which Muḥammad sought to end, explicitly building the inquiry for these secret sins into the vision of the end and thus to end all such practices. Paradise approaches and hell will be ignited. Judgment is at the end of time. Other, later descriptions go into great detail about hellfire and brimstone. This only makes more obvious that Islam was, from its inception, a religion of conversion. The images of the fate awaiting the damned is an argument to change one’s life and join the early Islamic movement. Muḥammad was a preacher who challenged his hearers to convert because the soul will stand in judgment.

Indeed, it is arguable that the word “Islam” itself functionally means conversion (literally: “submission”), as well as becoming the proper name of the religion. That very well may make Islam the first great Western religion to develop its own name for itself, the others adapting names first used by others.7 In any event, the close connection between the vision of the horrors awaiting sinners at the day of judgment and the necessity of conversion is at the base of Islam, and it is designed to convince its hearers to submit to the precepts of Islam, which is the only way for a pagan to avoid the coming eschatological disaster.

Neither Jews nor Christians would have found this message outlandish. They may have disagreed with it or with Muḥammad’s sense of the coming end, but they would have agreed with the exhortation to a moral life and the revelation of the “Day of Judgment.” The hostility to this part of the message came from the pagans around whom he lived. Muḥammad records in his revelations the hostile attitude of the Arabs to his message of a resurrection on the Day of Judgment. “They swear by God to the very limit of their oaths that God will not raise him who dies …” (Q 16:38) and “They say, ‘Are we to be returned to our former state when we have become decayed bones?’ They say, ‘That would be a detrimental return!’” (Q 79:10-12). It is no surprise, then, that when Muḥammad reveals the doctrine of resurrection, it is in the context of missionizing an often quite hostile audience.

Here is the complete context, as revealed by the Quran:

O You people: If you are in doubt concerning the resurrection, know that We created you from dust, then from a sperm-drop, then from a blood-clot, then from an embryo partly formed and partly unformed, in order to make clear to you. We establish in the wombs whatever We wish for an appointed time, then We bring you out as an infant, then [sustain you] until you reach maturity. And among you are those who die and those who return to the infirmity of old age so that, after having been knowledgeable, they now have little understanding. You saw the earth lifeless, and then We poured down upon it water and it quivers and grows and sprouts forth all kinds of beautiful pairs. That is because God is the ultimately real [al-ḥaqq]. He is Who gives life to what is dead; He it is Who has power over all things. Truly the