According to Islam, this concept represents a time, near to Doomsday, when Qur’anic morality will come to prevail over all the world. The Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, has described it in considerable detail in the hadeeths, that is, his sayings. After the Prophet, a number of great Islamic scholars have given further accounts of the subject. All of these reveal that the end times will contain a number of consecutive events.
In the first stage of the end times, the world will become degenerate because of a number of philosophical systems that deny God. Mankind will move away from the purpose behind its creation, leading to a terrible spiritual emptiness and moral collapse. In the wake of great disasters, wars and suffering, mankind will seek the answer to just one question ‘Where does salvation lie?’
At that very moment of despair, God will charge a “spiritual entity” to call mankind out of the chaos and onto the true path; The Mahdi. The word means “he who leads people to the truth.” According to the Prophet’s sayings, the Mahdi will first wage a struggle in the Islamic world and return those Muslims who have broken away from the essence of Islam back to true belief and morality. He will have three basic tasks at this point:
1. The overthrow of philosophical systems that deny God and support atheism,
2. Putting an end to practices that are not part of the religion but that are portrayed as being so, and the revealing and implementation of true Islamic morality based on the Qur’an,
3. Starting with his own nation and moving on to strengthen the entire Islamic world in political and social terms, establishing peace, well-being and security, and resolving social problems.
The progression in the end times was described in some detail by the Prophet Mohammed in the hadeeths 1,400 years ago, and in the works of various Islamic scholars.
In addition, in our time the portents of the end times are actually coming about, one after the other. Since these signs you are about to witness may have happened separately at one time or another, they may appear to be quite ordinary events on the surface. Yet the occurrence of so many portents one after the other in a very short space of time, cannot be regarded as a coincidence. This succession of all the events described hundreds of years ago, in just the way that they were described, foretells the coming of the Mahdi in no uncertain terms ...
