The Portents of the Hour: Eschatology and Empire in the Early Islamic Tradition

For much of the past century, scholarship on Muḥammad 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 Muḥammad 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 Muḥammad and his followers to expand their religious polity and establish an empire on the other. To the contrary, the political eschatology of the Byzantine Christians during the sixth and early seventh centuries indicates that these two beliefs went hand in hand, offering important contemporary precedent for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam. Accordingly, we should understand Muḥammad’s new religious movement within the context of this broader religious trend of Mediterranean Late Antiquity. Muḥammad’s new religious polity seems to have been guided by the belief that through their conquests and expulsion of the Romans from the Holy Land and Jerusalem, their triumphs were inaugurating the events of the eschaton. Therefore, Muḥammad’s new religious movement should be seen as a remarkable instantiation of the political eschatology that we find expressed elsewhere in Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian writings of this era.