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 afternoon only to be told of the disaster by a distraught mother tearfully watching the news, uncertain as to what this act of declamatory terror meant for 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 grandparents’ 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 prevented 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 nationalism, an ideological volte face that eventually led to his execution for treason 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 violently 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 considered true Muslims. They are tantamount to the enemies of the prophet Muḥammad who, in the conventional interpretation of the Qurʾān , worshipped 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 violent 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.
God has sent us to bring anyone who wishes from servitude to men into the service 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 Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, 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 enemies of the new religion of Islam are to convert or die. The Muslim warrior 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 intricate 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 in the New Rome built on the Bosporus to mark the advent of a new age makes the Pantheon or any other monument raised in the old capital look like a parish church compared to St Paul’s Cathedral. Late Antiquity , as the centuries from Constantine to Charlemagne tend now to be called, was anything but an age of decay or of murky insignificance.
There are, therefore, few if any who today would accept the once dominant picture of the later Roman and early post-Roman centuries as an age of unmitigated decline in all spheres of human existence. Ever more intense study of Late Antiquity has not only questioned and discarded old assumptions that used to pervade the field, but has also offered insights of profound significance for human civilisation in a broader sense. What makes empires rise and fall, if indeed they grow and wither like a living organism? Are the ‘orthodox’ beliefs and practices of a later age really the pure progeny of an earlier movement? What is a ‘nation’, and are nations inherently more legitimate than any other form of human organisation?
Recent years have seen Late Antiquity embrace a more specific subject: Islam. It is now impossible seriously to think that European Christendom’s ancestral opponent arose from a source wholly alien to the origins of our own civilisation, sharing only a vague Abrahamic heritage. The rivalry between the two worlds, at root at least, has more of the sibling to it than both sides have ever liked to admit. It is indeed more accurate even to consider Islam the culmination, rather than the reversal, of a number of Late Antiquity’s cardinal phenomena.8 Yet the precise nature of the origin of Islam and the first decades of a society that would become recognisably Islamic, by the standards of its classical manifestation, is far from clear. Entirely divergent explanations have come into being for the inspiration of Muḥammad’s prophecy, for his very nature, geographical location, and original significance, let alone the extent to which the outline of the first century of Islam as given in the later written Islamic tradition is accurate.
First, it is worth saying what the present short study does not attempt to do, given the deeply contestable obscurity of the source material and the complex, occasionally impassioned analyses it has provoked. This is certainly not an attempt to rewrite the origins of Islam. It is neither by any means a definitive study of an area that has shown itself to unearth ever more intriguing source material as the horizons of linguistic and disciplinary boundaries expand, or of many of the arguments provoked by it. Rather, the present study seeks to ask a number of strikingly neglected questions to challenge a number of trends evident within secondary scholarship, which trace themselves to what can often seem to be the dominant messages of the primary sources. These also tend to be the messages, incidentally, selected by men like Sayyid Qutb and his followers, which cry out for critical questioning. Sections of the History of the Prophets and Kings by al-Ṭabarī that deal with the lead-up to the most important defeats of Rome and Persia , Yarmouk and al-Qādisiyyah, have been selected for close analysis in order to perform this task most effectively. Secondary scholars have placed considerable weight on the History and al-Ṭabarī offers more detail than the other master narrative of the fifth-century conquests, the Book of the Conquest of the Lands by al-Balādhurī . Greek and Latin sources are also crucial.
Above all, the current study tries to harness insights from the detailed and sociologically complex historiography associated with scholarship on the Germanic migrations of the fifth century to re-analyse the Arabian conquests of the seventh century. This approach may strike some more conventional students of early Islam as bordering upon the radical, even in light of what could be termed the late antiquarian turn witnessed in Islamic studies over recent years. It is equally striking, however, to anyone coming from the earlier centuries of Late Antiquity to Islam that the false boundaries of scholarly disciplines have led to sources and historical phenomena sharing many similarities being interpreted in different ...