The Two Falls of Rome in Late Antiquity: The Arabian Conquests in Comparative Perspective

116 Pages·2018·1.65 MB·English

by  James Moreton Wakeley (auth.)

THE TWO FALLS
OF ROME IN LATE
ANTIQUITY
The Arabian Conquests in
Comparative Perspective
James Moreton Wakeley
The Two Falls of Rome in Late Antiquity
James Moreton Wakeley
The Two Falls of
Rome in Late
Antiquity
The Arabian Conquests in Comparative Perspective
James Moreton Wakeley
Lincoln College
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-69795-6 ISBN 978-3-319-69796-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69796-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961874
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A
cknowledgments
Many people deserve a vote of thanks for helping me to make this short
book possible. First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to
my M.Phil. supervisor, Bryan Ward-Perkins. His kindness, wisdom, and
above all patience with a student whose politics were hardly the same as his
own—in an election year!—were both a constant inspiration and steady
reassurance throughout the period in which most of what follows was
drafted. Secondly, I would like to thank Phil Booth, who introduced me
to Late Antiquity at Cambridge, and whose helpful comments since at
Oxford have always contained the soundest of guidance. Charles Weiss,
my Director of Studies when still an undergraduate exploring the Classical
world in East Anglia, must also be included for a generosity and dedica-
tion to his students, matched only by his expert tuition, both of which
contributed to my eventual decision to stay in education just a little bit
longer. Considerable thanks are naturally likewise due to Mark Whittow
and Robert Hoyland, my present D.Phil. supervisors, whose depths of
knowledge and acute insights in an area of which I often feel I barely grasp
the basics I one day hope to honour with a respectable thesis. None of
them, it is needless to say, are culpable for any errors of any kind poten-
tially contained herein, nor is the anonymous reviewer who read the draft
manuscript and who provided several worthwhile suggestions as well as
kind encouragement.
I am also greatly thankful to Lincoln College, Oxford, and to Lord
Crewe’s Charity for generously helping to support me throughout the
two years of my M.Phil. The latter, as determined by the former, provides
a vital service in its willingness to extend funding assistance to Master’s
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Degree candidates, who often find that such support at their level is non-
existent. My gratitude in this respect is currently directed towards the
A.G.  Leventis Foundation, who have magnanimously supported my
D.Phil. Thanks are of course also due to the team at Palgrave Macmillan,
not least to Molly Beck, who first showed interest in my proposal at a
publishing workshop into which I drifted one rainy afternoon, and to
Oliver Dyer, who picked up the project to steer it from draft manuscript
to published book.
Finally, I would like to thank those of my friends who, over the past few
years, have put up with my tendency frequently to share with them my
fascination with the later Roman world and early Islam. Their willingness
to reciprocate an interest spurred me on and I dearly hope to be able to
give them full and due homage in the pages of another Acknowledgements
in years to come. My thanks in this respect would also hardly be complete
without calling to mind the group with whom I spent a wonderful sum-
mer in Jordan learning Arabic in 2014. Such an intricate tongue needs the
best company possible to make its learning bearable: we managed to enjoy
it. Thank you for the memories that will last a lifetime. It is just sad that
there is now one whom we have in memory only.
c
ontents
1 A Sibling Rivalry 1
2 The Two Falls of Rome in Late Antiquity 9
3 The Problem of the Islamic Sources 25
4 History for Purposes Other than History 35
5 Making ‘Muslims’ on the March 49
6 From Clients to Conquerors 69
7 Conclusion 99
Chronological Appendix 103
Index 105
vii
CHAPTER 1
A Sibling Rivalry
Abstract The introductory chapter begins by demonstrating the endur-
ing potency of medieval histories written by Muslims about what are con-
ventionally called the Islamic Conquests of the seventh century. They have
inspired ISIS and are an integral part of modern fundamentalist philoso-
phies. Attention then turns to what this has to do with the Roman Empire.
It is argued that the world into which Islam erupted should not be seen as
separate from the Rome with which modern westerners habitually identify,
and that such a broader perspective is integral to the period now known as
Late Antiquity. The contents and essential arguments of the following
chapters are then set out. The chapter ends by suggesting that many of the
men who remade the ancient world in the image of God and his messen-
ger Muḥammad may not, in fact, have realised that is what they were
doing.
Keywords 9/11 • ISIS • Rome • Late Antiquity
Few who were alive in the autumn of 2001 can forget where they were
when the planes ploughed into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. I
vividly remember arriving home from school on a wet September after-
noon only to be told of the disaster by a distraught mother tearfully watch-
ing the news, uncertain as to what this act of declamatory terror meant for
© The Author(s) 2018 1
J.M. Wakeley, The Two Falls of Rome in Late Antiquity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69796-3_1
2 J.M. WAKELEY
the future. In an instant, the Western world woke up to the fact that this
age is not the end of history, that ‘they hate us’, and that the eternal peace
and prosperity seemingly heralded by the collapse of the Berlin Wall was
nothing but a dream banished at the dawn of a new age of Middle Eastern
wars and attacks on the streets of cities, whose inhabitants thought the
blast of bombs or the rattle of rifle fire would resonate only in their grand-
parents’ memories, not in their own ears.
The 9/11 Commission established by the American Congress and
President George W. Bush not only came to pinpoint the failures in
America’s own internal security that, if earlier identified, could have pre-
vented the attacks, it also uncovered what it called ‘The Foundation of the
New Terrorism’.1 Besides a brief history of al-Qaeda, the report touched
upon one of the intellectual godfathers of modern Islamism, Sayyid Qutb.2
Qutb was a cultured Egyptian familiar with the West and its ways, who
only really turned to Islam once he became disillusioned with Arab nation-
alism, an ideological volte face that eventually led to his execution for trea-
son by President Nasser in 1966. His most influential tract, Milestones, is
nothing less than a manifesto for radical change across the Muslim world,
the initial focus of his disciples’ efforts before they turned their attention
to the Western ‘far enemy’.3 It demands that all secular authorities be vio-
lently deposed, on the basis that they have committed the gravest of sins
by raising the rule of man above the law of God. All who adhere to such
authorities, though they may think and act otherwise, cannot be consid-
ered true Muslims. They are tantamount to the enemies of the prophet
Muḥammad who, in the conventional interpretation of the Qurʾān, wor-
shipped idols rather than the one true God, making it merely a pious duty
to ‘fight them until there is no more persecution, and all worship is
devoted to God alone’ (Q. 8:39).4 In its exhortations to impose Islamic
law by force and its uncompromising attitude towards all who fail to agree
with its programme, Milestones deserves the status of the real holy book of
the most recent and most chillingly brutal manifestation of Islamism: ISIS.
Qutb did not only draw on the Qurʾān to justify what some critical
assessments of his work have identified as an ideology as dependent on
Bolshevism as it is on anything else.5 He also delved into the pages of
Islamic history to summon inspiring illustrations of the righteous and vio-
lent deeds of the founders of the early medieval Islamic Empire to offer
modern Muslims models of putatively correct conduct. One example in
particular captures the militant piety Qutb sought to stir in his followers.
A SIBLING RIVALRY 3
God has sent us to bring anyone who wishes from servitude to men into the ser-
vice of God alone, from the narrowness of this world into the vastness of this
world and the Hereafter, and from the tyranny of religions into the justice of
Islam. God raised a Messenger for this purpose to teach His creatures His way.
If anyone accepts this way of life, we turn back and give his country back to him,
and we fight with those who rebel until we are martyred or become victorious.
(Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, p.71)
Qutb gives no reference for this passage, but it seems to be taken from
the History of the Prophets and Kings of Muḥammad ibn Jarır̄ al-Ṭabarı,̄
which was likely composed in the late ninth or early tenth centuries AD.6
It is the response given by a Muslim warrior to a Persian general, who is in
the process of interrogating him at some point before the decisive battle
of al-Qādisiyyah, in which the armies of Persia were all but obliterated by
the new power that had arisen in Arabia. The message is clear. The ene-
mies of the new religion of Islam are to convert or die. The Muslim war-
rior speaks with a blithe assurance bred from the knowledge that God is
on his side, and that his victory is inevitable.
What, however, does Sayyid Qutb, Islamism, and the ostensible words
of a seventh-century forbear of ISIS have to do with the fall, or falls, of
Rome? West Europeans, it is fair to say, tend to see Rome as their own.
The Classical World, of which the Roman Empire represents the zenith, is
thought to have given us the intellectual seeds of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment, together with an inspiration to material achievement
unmatched until the eighteenth-century rebirth of rational thought was
underway. Studying Classics at one of the most ancient universities in the
world can still lead to the cultivation of such an impression. Pushing the
chronological boundaries beyond the empire of the Antonines and
Severans, however, starts to give one reason to question this conceit.
Rather than finding oneself moving into the gloom of the Dark Ages as
Roman power wanes, one discovers that the centuries after the first
Christian Emperor Constantine were ones of striking cultural innovation
and development.7 Our moral world, far from originating in the airy
ambulatories of a classical temple or in Plato, starts to emerge in the intri-
cate and often mind-numbing debates of the Church Fathers, which
helped to make a minor cult the world’s largest religion. The outline of
the political fabric of medieval and modern Europe, moreover, can start to
be seen in the so-called barbarian kingdoms that succeeded the West
Roman Empire in the fifth century. The Emperor Justinian’s Hagia Sophia