The Slave Girl Will Give Birth to Her Mistress

So there is an idea of an end of time, and there are signs. In the tradition here, the first thing he asks about the end of time is: tell me about the sāʿah, the hour. And the answer is that the one being questioned does not know any more than the one questioning — in other words, I do not know. And then he says: well then, tell me about its signs. And the Prophet (peace be upon him) says: the slave girl will give birth to her mistress.

Now, that is an interesting statement. The slave girl will give birth to her mistress. The scholars traditionally dealt with that in a lot of different ways. One of them is that they said that at the end of time slaves would become rulers — the Mamālīk, for instance, were slaves in Egypt and actually became rulers, and many of the scholars said: this is it, here they are, they have become the masters. Another interpretation, a traditional one, was that children would treat their parents like servants: they would order them around, they would tell them what to do; that there would be a loss of respect in that relationship.

But probably the deepest interpretation is that there would be a radical disequilibrium in social structures. When one looks at the relationship between a servant and a mistress, the relationship is like that of a mother and a daughter. The mother is to be obeyed, nurturing the daughter; the daughter obeys the mother. When that is turned upside down, then you have a radical disruption in the social order.