Stephen J. Shoemaker. The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Exponents of the “global Middle Ages” challenge traditional historiography through de-centering Greek and Latin Christian sources. To this end, scholars often explore points of contact, exchange, and transmission, as well as dissonance and conflict, among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Zoroastrians in late antiquity and the early medieval period. For scholars of early Christianity, this globalizing impulse has prompted research into Christian texts written in the early Islamic period, namely those by Middle Eastern Christians who wrote first-hand accounts of the Islamic conquests. What is more, the “global Middle Ages” has also brought attention to the multilingualism of the ancient world. Consequently, scholars of early Christianity have turned to sources written in Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, and Geʽez.
Stephen Shoemaker’s The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam is an important contribution to the growing body of literature on the “global Middle Ages.” Shoemaker goes beyond the scope of previous studies, which have usually centered on Syriac sources written by Christians about nascent Islam. He instead focuses on foundational Islamic texts, particularly the Qurʼān, in addition to a wide array of non-Islamic sources, and reads them in the late ancient context in which they emerged. Picking up where he left off in The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam (2012), he explores his earlier claim that early Islam was a movement fueled by eschatological expectations, with the Holy Land as the goal of the conquests. Yet, this thesis presents a paradox—that is, how do eschatology and conquest relate to each other? How did a community motivated by conquest also believe that the eschaton was imminent? While for a modern reader conquest and imminent eschatology may seem in opposition, Shoemaker asserts that these concepts were compatible and widespread in late antiquity. To understand the emergence of Islam within late antiquity, it is imperative to understand the pervasive ideology of imperial eschatology.
In Chapter One, Shoemaker locates imperial eschatology within the milieu of late ancient apocalyptic literature. While the defining characteristic of late ancient apocalyptic literature is the fulfillment of the eschaton through empire, apocalyptic literature was not entirely homogenous. Indeed, many earlier examples of this literature contain anti-imperial sentiments, particularly in Jewish literature. Biblical apocalypses such as those in 1 Enoch and the Book of Daniel express negative views of empire. Shoemaker identifies the Dead Sea Scrolls as laying down an important foundation for subsequent late ancient texts, namely their description of a priestly messiah who would militarily obliterate God’s enemies and inaugurate an eschatological kingdom. This messiah figures in late ancient Christianity as the Last Emperor who plays a similar role in Christian texts.
Shoemaker further sketches the ideology of imperial eschatology in late ancient Christianity in the second chapter. Eusebius’ narration of Constantine’s conversion made the Romans “God’s chosen people, through whom God’s rule would extend throughout the earth” (p. 40). Emblematic of God’s agency through the Roman Empire is the Tiburtine Sibyl. In this fourth-century apocalyptic text, the Last Emperor emerges prior to the Second Coming of Christ, restores a desecrated Rome, and ushers in the eschaton. Shoemaker then highlights the wildly popular Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius, a seventh-century Syriac text, which contains an adaption of the Tiburtine Sibyl’s Last Emperor. The motif of the Last Emperor is key for understanding the apocalyptic literary backdrop in which Islam emerged.
Eschatological expectations continued to grow into the sixth and seventh centuries within the Byzantine empire, as Shoemaker details in Chapter Three. Justinian’s reign (527-565 CE) was marked with heightened anticipation for the eschaton, and his policies reflected a concern for the Second Coming. Heraclius’ victory over the Persians added more fuel to the eschatological intensity of the seventh century, as his journey to Jerusalem to restore the True Cross was reminiscent of the Last Emperor motif. Shoemaker identifies the Syriac Alexander Legend, the source of the Qurʼān’s account of Alexander the Great, as a “‘smoking gun,’ indicating a direct connection between late ancient imperial eschatology and formative Islam” (p. 86).[1] In Chapter Four, he shows how late ancient Jewish apocalypses also contained positive views of empire. Imperial eschatology was also heavily present in Zoroastrian cosmology, particularly in the role of the messiah figure Kay Bahrām. Similar to the Tiburtine Sibyl’s Last Emperor, Kay Bahrām emerges as a messiah figure after the Iranian Empire’s defeat by neighboring enemies. He consolidates a group of followers, defeats Iran’s enemies, and ultimately revitalizes its power. Indeed, the Persian Bahrām VI Čōbīn who announced himself to be a messiah at the end of the sixth century incited even more fervor in the pre-Islamic milieu.
After depicting the prevalence of imperial eschatology in late antiquity more broadly, Shoemaker argues in Chapter Five that Muhammad and his community were expecting the Hour’s imminent arrival.[2] To further elucidate the relationship between eschatology and empire, he draws from Fred Donner’s (2010) thesis that Muhammad and his early followers were a diffuse “confederation of Abrahamic monotheists” (p. 133), or “Believers,” and not yet a formal “religion.” This community of Believers, then, agreed with Muhammad’s message about the impending Hour and “joined together to carry out what they saw as the urgent task of establishing righteousness on earth—at least within their community of Believers, and, when possible outside of it—in preparation for the End” (p. 134). The conquests, in other words, were an attempt to quickly assemble together and establish a community of Believers before God’s judgement occurred.
In Chapter Six, Shoemaker turns to the goal of the Believers’ conquest—the Holy Land. The Armenian Chronicle of 661 attests that the Believers, united by their shared Abrahamic lineage, intended to conquer Jerusalem, with the aim of banishing the Romans and restoring the land that was rightfully theirs. The Qurʼān, too, corroborates these intentions in, for example, sūra 10:13-14 and 21:105-6, which Shoemaker interprets as calls for the Believers to the “liberate the biblical Holy Land and take possession of it as rightful heirs” (p. 157). Shoemaker further investigates two influential apocalyptic traditions, the “Portents of the Hour” and the “Aʿmāq Cycle.”[3] Dated to before the Second Fitna (680 CE), both describe the Believers’ war with the Byzantines, which then included the goal of conquering Constantinople, and are emblematic of their eschatological aims.
Shoemaker’s study is a contribution to a rapidly expanding body of scholarship that locates Islam firmly within the contexts of late antiquity. He points to imperial eschatology as the crucial late ancient discourse for the development of early Islam. Applying his expertise in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian Christian traditions, Shoemaker exhorts scholars of early Islam to attend to the study of Christian origins and the transmission of the New Testament. Instead of privileging eighth- and ninth-century biographical sources such as sīra and maghāzī collections, Shoemaker models how to reconstruct the early Islamic community through the Qurʼān itself and early ḥadīth. Eschewing the tendency to view Muhammad as a practical reformer, he argues that the Qurʼān ought to be read against later narratives of the beginnings of Islam in order to reveal nodes of discrepancy between the Qurʼān and traditional accounts.
In addition to the Qurʼān, it is important to attend to Shoemaker’s methodology for studying Islam in Late Antiquity as inclusive of non-Islamic sources such as the Syriac Alexander Legend and the Armenian Chronicle of 661. In this way, Shoemaker situates himself alongside of scholars such as Michael Penn (2015: 3-4) who draws from the methodology of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, namely their use of non-Islamic sources in Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977). In the end, as Shoemaker’s study attests, late antiquity is too expansive to be studied in one language or within one tradition. To study early Islam, in this sense, also means to study the rich literary and cultural landscape of late antiquity.
[1] Narratives about Alexander the Great were popular throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Syriac Alexander Legend and the related Syriac Alexander Poem are two instances of this genre and were composed during the reign of Heraclius (see pp. 79-80).
[2] The Qurʼān refers to the Day of Judgement by different titles such as the Hour (al-sāʿah).
[3] For further reading about Islamic apocalyptic traditions, see David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalypse, SLAEI 21 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 2002).
Further Reading
Cook, David. 2002 Studies in Muslim Apocalypse. SLAEI 21. Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press.
Crone, Patricia, and Michael Cook. 1977. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Donner, Fred M. 2010. Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Penn, Michael Philip. 2015. When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam. Oakland: University of California Press.
Shoemaker, Stephen J. 2012. The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Abby Kulisz is a PhD Candidate at Indiana University, specializing in early Christianity and early Islam. You can reach her by email at alkulisz@iu.edu and follow her on Twitter @abby_kulisz.