The chapter
The Prophet ﷺ raised two fingers, the index and the middle, and said: "I and the Hour have been sent like these two." The first sign of the end of the world was the arrival of its final Prophet. Everything after him is epilogue, an epilogue that has now run fourteen centuries, because the mercy of Allah stretches the interval while the signs quietly accumulate.
He ﷺ told Hudhayfah everything: "The Prophet stood among us and did not leave anything that would happen until the Hour except that he mentioned it, those who memorized it, memorized it." The Codex gathers here the minor signs (al-alamat as-sughra) with their sources, the ones fulfilled, the ones unfolding, and the ones waiting.
Fulfilled and witnessed: his own death: "count six things before the Hour: the first, my death"; the conquest of Jerusalem under Umar; the plague of Amwas; wealth so abundant a man wanders with his sadaqah finding no taker; the fitan that fell on the community like patches of dark night, beginning with the murder of Uthman; false prophets: "there will be thirty dajjals, each claiming to be a messenger of Allah," a line running from Musaylimah to every modern claimant.
Unfolding before every generation's eyes: the slave-girl gives birth to her mistress; the barefoot, naked shepherds of goats compete in raising tall buildings, the hadith of Jibril, delivered in the towers' own century as if addressed to it; knowledge is lifted by the death of scholars and ignorance settles; zina and riba spread; killing multiplies until the killer does not know why he killed; time contracts; markets draw close; every age thinks itself the last and is wrong by design: "the Hour will not come until…" is a list only Allah can complete.
Still ahead, at the threshold of the Major Signs: the Euphrates uncovers a mountain of gold over which men slaughter each other, ninety-nine of every hundred dying, each saying "perhaps I will be the one who survives"; the land of the Arabs returns to meadows and rivers, the desert greening, a sign the satellites now photograph without reading; fire from the Hijaz that illuminates the necks of camels in Busra, witnessed in the great harra eruption of 654 AH, the historians of Madinah recorded.
The grammar of all of it: signs are mercy before they are threat. Each one is a knock, the Hour announcing itself in installments so that no soul can say it was ambushed. After the minor comes the major: and the major, he ﷺ said, come in quick succession, "like beads falling from a cut string." The string is cut at the Mahdi.