"Traditional views of religious history are usually concerned with eschatology,

and Islam's are no exception in this regard. The Quran looks upon history as a finite reality that begins with God's creation of the present humanity and ends with His bringing human and cosmic history to its eschatological end. The Quranic conception of the march of time is in a sense cyclical: each cycle is marked by the descent of a message from God through a prophet, the gradual forgetting of that message by the particular people to whom it was sent, and usually the occurrence of a Divinely willed calamity, followed by the coming of a new prophet. But these cycles of prophecy are not endless. Rather, the Quran announces that the Prophet of Islam is the Seal of prophets (33:40) in the chain of prophecy and that after him will come not another prophet [e: as a new prophet with a new message], but eschatological events that mark the end of this world and present-day humanity.

--from the "General Introduction" to The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr editor-in-chief; Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, general editors; Mohammed Rustom, assistant editor. (New York, NY: HarperOne, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2015]), xxvii-xxviii.