The Holy Qur’an calls the Messiah a sign of “the Hour”. Why has the Hour not come?

“The Hour” here does not mean the destruction of the world but a great spiritual revolution. The Holy Qur’an already uses the word at the first coming of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw), and the world did not end then either.

The question assumes that “the Hour” means the end of the world. But then another question would have to be answered first. The Holy Qur’an already uses the same word at the first coming of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw). The first verse above links the nearness of the Hour with the splitting of the moon, a sign from his time.

If the Hour there meant the destruction of the world, it should have come some fourteen hundred years ago. And if everything had perished then, why would a second Hour be needed later? So the Hour did come the first time, only not in the way some people imagine it.

The Arabic word for the Hour does not only refer to the end of the world. Muslim scholars also understand it as great upheavals in the world, and above all as a spiritual and religious revolution. That is exactly what happened with the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw). A world that was spiritually almost dead was given new life.

The same is true of the Messiah. With his coming the second part of this revolution was to begin, in which the message of Islam spreads across the whole world. Whoever looks only for an outward event that destroys the earth will miss this. God does not send prophets to destroy the world. He sends them to give it new life.