"The standard picture of Qur'anic eschatology

is in terms of the joys of the Garden and the punishments of Hell. The Qur'an does frequently talk about these, as about reward and punishment in general, including "God's pleasure and anger" - something which we shall have to elaborate in detail. But the basic idea underlying the Qur'an teaching on the hereafter is that there will come a moment, "The Hour [al-sa'a] when every human will be shaken into a unique and unprecedented self-awareness of his deeds: he will squarely and starkly face his own doings, not-doings, and misdoings and accept the judgment upon them as a "necessary" sequel (necessary within quotes because God's mercy is unlimited.) That man is generally so absorbed in his immediate concerns, particularly selfish, narrow, and material concerns, that he does not heed the "ends" of life [al-akhira] and constantly violates moral law, we have had occasion to point out. We stressed in Chapter III that for the Qur'an the goal of man-in-society is to build an ethically-based order on the earth but that cultivation of taqwa or a true sense of responsibility is absolutely necessary for man-as-individual if such an order is to be built. The Qur'an repeatedly complains that man has not yet come up to this task.

-pg. 106 of The Major Themes of the Qur'an by Fazlur Rahman