Yawm al-Qiyamah, the Day of Standing or Resurrection, is among the articles of faith in every Sunni and Shia creed, and the Qur'an returns to it more insistently than to any other future event. Its timing is knowledge God keeps to himself (7:187, 31:34, 33:63). It is announced by the blast of the trumpet, at which all in the heavens and the earth swoon, and then a second blast at which they stand and look on (39:68). The earth gives up its burdens and people come forth in scattered groups to be shown their deeds (99:1-8). The record is placed in the right hand or the left (69:19-25), the scales are set, and the assignment to the Garden or the Fire follows.
Around this core, hadith literature developed an elaborate sequence of signs. The minor signs are largely moral and social, the loss of trustworthiness, the removal of knowledge, the raising of tall buildings by former herdsmen. The major signs are cosmic and narrative: the appearance of the Dajjal, the descent of Jesus, the eruption of Gog and Magog, the beast, the smoke, and the sun rising in the west, after which repentance is no longer accepted. These traditions vary in their gradings and in the order they give the signs, and scholars have long treated the details as less certain than the event.
That the resurrection is bodily became a boundary marker. Al-Ghazali, in the Incoherence of the Philosophers, made the denial of bodily resurrection one of three positions he judged to place a thinker outside Islam, aiming at Ibn Sina and the Muslim Aristotelians, who had argued that the soul's survival could be demonstrated but the body's reassembly could not. Ibn Rushd replied that the philosophers affirmed resurrection while reserving judgement on its mode. The exchange remains one of the sharpest confrontations of revelation and philosophy in Islamic thought.