al-Suyuti: this community lasts beyond a thousand years and less than five hundred more

To proceed: questions have multiplied about the saying current on people’s tongues that the Prophet, God bless him and grant him peace, will not remain in his grave a thousand years, and I answered that it is false and without foundation. Then a man came to me in the month of Rabi‘ al-Awwal of this year, the year eight hundred and ninety-eight, bringing a sheet in his own hand which he said he had copied from a fatwa given by one of the senior scholars whom I had known in my youth. In it he relied on what this saying requires: that in the tenth century the Mahdi and the Dajjal would come forth, Jesus son of Mary would descend, with the rest of the signs; the first blast would be blown on the trumpet, the forty years between the two blasts would pass, and the blast of resurrection would be blown before the thousand was complete. I thought it unlikely that this came from the scholar named, and out of courtesy to him I disliked refuting it openly, so I said: This is a thing I do not know. […] I named it The Disclosure that this Community Exceeds the Thousand (al-Kashf fi mujawazat hadhihi al-umma al-alf), and I say, first: what the reports indicate is that the duration of this community exceeds a thousand years, and the excess over it does not reach five hundred years. That is because it has come by several routes that the duration of the world is seven thousand [years] and that the Prophet, God bless him and grant him peace, was sent at the end of the sixth thousand; and it has come that the Dajjal comes forth at the head of eight hundred years, and Jesus descends and kills him and remains on the earth forty years; that people remain one hundred and twenty years after the sun rises from where it sets; and that between the two blasts there are forty years. These are two hundred years, and what now remains of the thousand is one hundred years and two years.