“The Reign of God Has Come”: Eschatology and Empire in Late Antiquity and Early Islam

Abstract

For much of the 20th century, scholarship on Muhammad and the beginnings of Islam has shown a reluctance to acknowledge the importance of imminent eschatology in earliest Islam. One of the main reasons for this resistance to eschatology would appear to be the undeniable importance of conquest and political expansion in early Islam: if Muhammad and his followers believed that the world would soon come to an end, why then did they seek to conquer and rule over so much of it? Nevertheless, there is no real contradiction between the urgent eschatology revealed by the Qur'an and other early sources on the one hand, and the determination of Muhammad and his followers to expand their religious policy and establish an empire on the other. To the contrary, the political eschatology of the Byzantine Christians during the sixth and early seventh cen turies indicates that these two beliefs went hand in hand, offering important contempo rary precedent for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam.

The Shi’is and the Qur’an: Between Apocalypse, Civil Wars, and Empire

“…These Qur'anic examples can go on for several pages. These passages, as well as many similar data in the corpus of Hadith, have led some scholars from the 19th century to the present day to consider the Quran, the environment in which it was born, and the early days of Islam as phenomena belonging to a time and space, or to a history and a geography, strongly imbued with apocalyptic beliefs: from Snouck Hurgronje (1886Hurgronje ( , 1894 and Paul Casanova (1911Casanova ( -1924 to Stephen Shoemaker (2014), Tor Andrae (1955), Patricia Crone-Michael Cook (Crone and Cook 1977), Suliman Bashear (1991, 2004), and David Cook (2002, among many others.…”

Religion, war, and peace in premodern Islamicate polities and the Christian West

“…Consequently, Emicho gave the Jews of Rhineland communities the alternative either to convert to Christianity or to die (Gabriele, 2007: 61–82). Undoubtedly the fruit of the expectations of the End, present since the reign of the East Roman emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641) (Esders, 2009: 263–272; Kaegi, 2003: 216–218; Shoemaker, 2014), one of the tasks of the last world emperor was the conversion of Jews and pagans, by the sword if necessary (Möhring, 2000; Potestà, 2014; Rubenstein, 2008).…”