The chapter
The siege is at its worst. The believers in Damascus are lining up for Fajr; the iqamah has been called; the imam steps forward. And then, the hadith of an-Nawwas in Sahih Muslim gives the descent in a single frame of cinema no tradition has matched: "Allah sends the Masih, son of Maryam: he descends at the white minaret, east of Damascus, in two saffron-dyed garments, his hands resting on the wings of two angels. When he lowers his head, it drips; when he raises it, drops fall from it like pearls."
The prophet whose story among his people was left unfinished, raised, not crucified, returns to complete it. Not with a new religion: the scholars are unanimous, and the hadith explicit, that he descends as a just ruler of this ummah, by the law of this Qur'an: "and your imam is from among you." Offered the prayer, he declines the mihrab of the Mahdi: Allah has honored this community, none leads it but its own. The second-greatest prophet to walk the earth prays Fajr as a follower.
Then the work. "He will break the cross, kill the swine, and abolish the jizyah", the symbols of his own deification dismantled by his own hand; no tribute remains because no religion but Islam remains to pay it, "and wealth will overflow until no one accepts it." And the Dajjal: at his scent, the hadith says, the deceiver dissolves "as salt dissolves in water", but he is not permitted to melt away. Isa pursues him to the gate of Ludd and ends him with a spear: the false messiah dies at the hand of the true one, and he shows the believers his blood on the point. Every knot of the end-times inversion is untied at once: the one they claimed died on a cross returns to kill the one who claimed to be god.
His era is the earth's sabbath. The hadith of Muslim paints it in almost unbearable colors: security so total that "the lion lies with the camel, the leopard with the cattle, and children play with snakes"; the earth commanded to yield its blessing until a pomegranate feeds a company and a single milking suffices a clan; rancor, envy, and mutual hatred lifted, the diseases of the first murder finally cured. Then Yajuj and Majuj interrupt the sabbath, and he leads the believers to the mountain until Allah's own worms end what no army could.
He remains forty years, the sunan record, marries, and dies as every son of Adam dies, and the Muslims pray the janazah over the prophet whom the nations worshipped. Buried in the earth like his father Adam: the final, gentle refutation. The Prophet ﷺ, who loved him across the centuries, said: "I am the nearest of people to the son of Maryam; there is no prophet between me and him… and if you live to see him, give him my salam."