Rome, Rome, or Rome?
[ by Charles Cameron — on Graeme Wood’s latest, the goals of IS, and geographic slippage ]
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Graeme Wood, who wrote the Atlantic piece that broke the apocalyptic side of the Islamic State’s ideology wide open in March of last year, has a related piece out this month: Donald Trump and the Apocalypse, with the subtitle, Is Rome really ISIS’s “ultimate trophy”? It’s a fun read, discussing the confusion that is possible over the use of the word Rome in Muslim prophetic literature — a topic I’ve discussed before.
Just for the record, then, here’s a screengrab from the Islami State’s magazine Dabiq, issue 4 page 37:
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As a Newsweek item from September 2012 notes, there have in fact been three claimants to the title of Rome:
When Ivan the Terrible was crowned the first Tsar of All Russia in 1547, the church announced Moscow to be the “Third and Final Rome,” the inheritor of St. Peter’s Rome and Byzantium, and the last bastion of Orthodox Christianity standing up to a Europe mired in heresy.
Russian commentator Yuliya Latynina quoted..
Filofey of Pskov’s 1510 claim that “Two Romes have fallen; the third stands; and there will not be a fourth”
This was in Novaya gazeta, February 2015, and she suggested that Russia..
many of whose residents view it as the third Rome, may suffer the fate not of the first Rome but of the second, a fate that cannot be reassuring to many of them because in the end the residents of the second Rome in Constantinople “considered that Islam was better than the West.”
Wood mentions in his piece that the Australian jihadist ideologue Cerantonio argues:
The Rum of the end-times hadith is not the Rome of Pope Francis but the Rome of the Republic of Turkey.
Putin might take offense if he knew..
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And then there’s the matter of Quranic translation and the Quranic verse 30.2, as Wood also notes:
Arberry, always interesting to read, translates that verse:
The Greeks have been vanquished.
The historical commentary in The Study Quran, p 984-85, clarifies that this verse refers to Sassanid (Magian) successes against the (Christian) Byzantine empire — which the following verse says will be reversed — and terming it “the only reference in the Quran to political events conetemporary with Muhammad and his followers beyond the Arabian Peninsula”.
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All things considered, oy veh: it seems that history does strange things to geography, time to space.
February 25th, 2016 at 7:52 pm
“the Rome of the Republic of Turkey.”
When I first read that I nearly fell out of my chair. Despite what some Australian lapsed Catholic in dire need of a shave thinks, the Caliphs were Caesars about as much as the Lombards were the new Roman Senate.
After Constantinople fell, Rum still referred to the conquered – and later partially liberated – Christians of the Ottoman Empire. Rum were always separate from Turks. They even called the Balkans Rumelia. There are still Christians in Turkey and Syria today who call themselves Rum.
Here’s a little thought experiment. If we could give ISIS – the real guys in Raqqa not some Aussie – the choice between overrunning Ankara or marching up the Via della Conciliazione, which would they choose?
February 26th, 2016 at 4:20 am
Rome’s symbolic power was such that the Sejuk Turk rulers sought to claim it for themselves to boost their claims vis-à-vis the Emperor in Constantinople.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Rum
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The Seljuks did not last to see the downfall of Constantinople but their successors did. The Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror knew the worth of what he achieved and desperately wanted to take the last Christian Emperor, Constantine XI alive. Mehmed had in fact tried to buy him off with a substantial vassal principality in the Balkans in return for yielding the imperial throne peacefully and – I suspect – with legality, to the House of Osman.
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The last Emperor preferred to die heroically along with the last remainder of the Roman Empire, defending his city a mere forty years before the discovery of the new world. Thus history closed one great chapter forever before opening a new one.
February 27th, 2016 at 1:32 am
“The last Emperor preferred to die heroically along with the last remainder of the Roman Empire, defending his city a mere forty years before the discovery of the new world. Thus history closed one great chapter forever before opening a new one.”
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Trump with his last remainder of the Roman Empire behind him is promising to keep the new chapter open. How realistic is this?
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It is hard for me to imagine him dying heroically and without some kind of a shield. And, if the hero is hiding behind a shield, how heroic is this image?