Yawm al-Qiyāmah

Yawm al-Qiyāmah, “the Day of Resurrection” or “the Day of Standing,” is the Last Day, on which God shall raise the dead, gather all creatures, and judge them according to their deeds, consigning them thereafter to the Garden (al-Jannah) or to the Fire. It is among the gravest and most frequent themes of the Qurʼān and of the ḥadīth of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, and belief in it—faith in the Last Day—is one of the pillars of īmān, the articles of belief. The proclamation of the Day of Resurrection, with its reckoning and its requital, stood at the very center of the message preached throughout the sīrah, from the earliest revelations at Makkah.

The Day is named in the Qurʼān by many names, each marking an aspect of it: Yawm al-Qiyāmah, the Day of Standing; Yawm al-Dīn, the Day of Judgment; al-Sāʻah, the Hour; Yawm al-Ḥashr, the Day of Gathering; Yawm al-Ḥisāb, the Day of Reckoning; Yawm al-Faṣl, the Day of Decision; al-Qāriʻah, the Calamity; al-Ṭāmmah and al-Ṣākhkhah; and Yawm al-Taghābun, the Day of Mutual Loss and Gain. The multitude of its names in the revelation answers to the awfulness of the Day and the many faces of its terror and its justice, and the Makkan sūrahs return again and again to its description, summoning the hearer to prepare for it.

The coming of the Hour is preceded, in the teaching of the Prophet ﷺ, by signs (ashrāṭ al-sāʻah), lesser and greater, by which its nearness is known; but its precise time is hidden, known to God alone, and the Prophet ﷺ, when the angel Jibrīl asked him of the Hour, answered that the one questioned knew no more of it than the questioner. The Day itself begins with the blast of the trumpet (al-ṣūr) blown by the angel Isrāfīl, at which all in the heavens and the earth swoon away and die; then a second blast is blown, and they rise, restored to life, and come forth from their graves to the Gathering, barefoot, naked, and uncircumcised, as the Prophet ﷺ described them, every man too absorbed in his own case to regard another.

Upon the Day of Resurrection the creatures are gathered to the place of Standing, where they remain in a long and grievous waiting under a sun drawn near, in a distress from which they seek relief through the intercession of the prophets, until they come at last to the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, to whom is given the station of the great intercession (al-shafāʻah al-ʻuẓmá), al-Maqām al-Maḥmūd, that the reckoning may begin. Then the deeds are brought forth, the books of men’s works given into the right hand or the left, the scales (al-mīzān) set up in which the deeds are weighed, and the reckoning (al-ḥisāb) taken, every soul requited for what it wrought, none wronged in the least, and the hidden things made manifest.

The Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ adds to the Qurʼānic portrayal many particulars of the Day: the Basin (al-ḥawḍ) of the Prophet ﷺ, from which his community shall drink and never thirst again; the Bridge (al-ṣirāṭ) stretched over the Fire, which men cross according to their deeds, some as the lightning and some cast down; the questioning concerning the prayer first of all the deeds; and the first matter to be judged among men, the cases of blood. The Prophet ﷺ taught that his community would come on that Day with bright faces and limbs from the traces of their ablution, and that he would know them and they would be called to him at the Basin; and he spoke of the feet of the servant that shall not move until he is asked of his life and his knowledge and his wealth and his body.

The proclamation of Yawm al-Qiyāmah was central to the preaching of the sīrah, and many of its episodes turn upon it. The early Makkan revelations, with their vivid scenes of the Hour—the splitting of the sky, the scattering of the stars, the moving of the mountains, the rolling up of the sun—were among the first means by which the Prophet ﷺ called the people to faith; and the denial of the Resurrection was the chief point of the unbelievers’ rejection, who asked in mockery how they should be raised when they had become dust and bones. To this the Qurʼān answered with the proofs of God’s power, that He who created the first creation is able to restore it, and that the giving of life to the dead earth is a sign of the giving of life to the dead.

In the sīrah tradition, Yawm al-Qiyāmah is remembered as the Day of Resurrection and Judgment that the Prophet ﷺ proclaimed from the first of his mission: the Hour whose time is hidden but whose coming is sure, when the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall rise, the creatures be gathered and their deeds weighed, and each be requited in the Garden or the Fire. Grounded in the Qurʼān and detailed in the sunnah, with the Basin and the Bridge and the great intercession of the Prophet ﷺ, faith in the Last Day stands among the foundations of belief, and the warning and the promise of it framed the message that the Prophet ﷺ delivered to his community throughout the sīrah.

## References

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