Defining “Romans” in the Late Antique Near East: Some Preliminary Thoughts on the “Romans” in Sūrat al-Rūm

Greeks, or all Peoples? Ambiguities of Near Eastern Romanness

So, what did the word “Romans” mean in the Near East in the age when the Qurʾān was composed? A perhaps useful hint is found in two different accounts of the battle of Yarmouk, the decisive battle in August 636, when an Arab army defeated the Byzantine troops defending Syria and thus practically gained control over the entire region. In a passage dependent on the Syrian historian Theophilos of Edessa (8^th century), Michael Rabo (d. 1199) states in his chronicle that in that battle of Yarmouk, “The Romans of Arabia fought the Arabians of Arabia (ܥܒܕ ܪ̈ܘܡܝܐ ܕܐܪܐܒܝܐ ܩܪܒܐ ܕܐܪ̈ܒܝܐ ܕܐܪܐܒܝܐ) in the country of the city of Bostra that they call Gabitha, on the river named Yarmuk.”^[3] However, the Muslim historian al-Balādhurī, writing in the ninth century yet certainly based on much earlier sources, describes things a bit differently:

Heraclius assembled numerous regiments from the Romans and the inhabitants of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Armenia (جمع هرقل جموعًا كثيرة من الروم وأهل الشام وأهل الجزيرة وارمينية) … and sent forward as his vanguard Jabalah b. al-Ayham al-Ghassānī with the Christian Arabs of Syria from the tribes of Lakhm, Judhām, and others (في مستعربة الشام من لخم وجذام وغيرهم).^[4]

So, the soldiers of the Byzantine camp that Theophilos simply calls the “Romans” were, according to al-Balādhurī, people coming from all ethnic groups of the Byzantine Near East: Greeks – which is what al-Balādhurī means by “Romans”^[5] –Syrians from Syro-Palestine as well as from Northern Mesopotamia, Armenians from all over the Near East, and Christian Arabs. Such a composition of the Byzantine army seems plausible – despite the fact that we are talking about much later sources that cannot be taken at face value.^[6]

Before examining more closely these two different usages of “Romans,” a short explanation of the term “Greeks” should be given. The word “Hellenes” – i. e., the ancient ethnonym that was rendered with graeci in Latin – was hardly ever used as an ethnonym in the Eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity. The Hellenes/Greeks, as is well known, gradually gave up completely the self-designation “Hellenes,” especially after the endorsement of Christianity by Constantine the Great and the Christianization of the majority of the Greek population of the Eastern Roman Empire. Their new ethnonym was “Romans.” This self-designation of the Greeks as “Romans” appears to have signalized the voluntary self-identification of the Greeks with an empire that had once conquered them, but had not merely respected and assimilated their culture, it now also transferred its capital – and its geopolitical center – to Greece, to Constantinople, the “new Rome.” At the same time, this novel insider-ethnonym also signalized the Greeks’ distancing of themselves from their pagan past, from the word Hellenes that in the New Testament – the new sacred scripture of the Greeks – denoted the adherents of the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman religion. However, the term “Rhomaios” as a self-designation did not only, or primarily, mean “Orthodox Christian.”^[7] The same person could be simultaneously acknowledged as an Orthodox Christian and not be acknowledged as a Roman.^[8] And nobody would come to the idea to deny Romanness to a heretic like, say, Sergius of Constantinople or, for that matter, the emperor Herakleios himself.

What does this show us about the word “Roman” and its usage? First of all, that it could have very different meanings depending on who is talking about whom, in which context, and in what age. As just seen, the term could just designate the “Greeks” – like in al-Balādhurī – or it could tacitly include all other peoples of the Byzantine Near East – like in Theophilos of Edessa. The two authors came from very different backgrounds. Theophilos, a Syrian, native of Edessa, ended his career as a scholar – and an astrologist – at the court of the third Abbasid caliph al-Mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85) in Baghdad, but was still a late exponent of that mixture of Syriac Christian culture, Hellenism, and Romanness that was characteristic of the upper echelons of Roman Syrian society in Late Antiquity. Next to composing his influential historiographical work, Theophilos is supposed to have translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into Syriac (in addition to works of Aristotle and Galen).^[9] So, for someone like Theophilos, it was quite natural to consider his fellow Syrians and their Christian neighbours, Armenians and Arabs, as “Romans,” as people of the Byzantine Near East – at least when he was speaking about the past, when the Near East was still Byzantine. On the other hand, for al-Balādhurī, a Persian Muslim scholar with close relationships to the Abbasid court, the “Romans” were simply “the Greeks” – that had indeed become the majority in a Byzantine Empire deprived of its Eastern provinces;^[10] and, of course, the other peoples of the once-Byzantine Near East were clearly no longer “Romans” in his view.^[11]

But these two different meanings of “Romans” – just the Greeks, or all other peoples of the Byzantine Near East, too – are found not just in authors as different as Theophilos and al-Balādhurī. They appear also in texts of the same provenience and age, or even in one and the same author.^[12] These two different meanings of “Romans” seem to be – at least partially – a consequence of the fact that the Greeks used (almost) consistently this word as their only collective name, their only ethnonym, whereas the Syrians and the other Christian peoples of the Near East would only identify explicitly as “Romans” in specific cases, as we shall see, usually preferring other ethnonyms.

By the early-seventh century, “Roman” was so identified with what we would call Byzantine, that even the Greek language came to be called “Roman language.” In the life of Saint Athanasios the Persian, a Chalcedonian Christian martyr allegedly executed on command of the Shah Khosrow Parvez, we read about an encounter of another Chalcedonian monk with the invading troops of Herakleios, “when […] our most pious and Christ-loving emperor Herakleios arrived, together with the army that followed him, this monk saw them and rejoiced with great joy (cf. Matt 2:10), and he spoke with them in the Roman language (καὶ ἐλάλησεν αὐτοῖς ῥωμαϊστί).”^[13]

Of course, this self-identification of the Greeks as “Romans” did not completely displace the old meaning of the word “Roman,” especially when referring to language – actually, the aforementioned passage of the Vita of Saint Anastasios the Persian seems to be the only case where “Roman language” means “Greek” – normally, it would mean Latin. The classicist historian Theophylaktos Simokattes provides a memorable example. In describing a battle between Byzantine army units and the “Getes” (i. e., the Slavs), Theophylaktos relates that the captain of a Byzantine military unit, “whose name was Alexander, commanded the Romans in the ancestral language (lit.: “the father tongue”) of the Romans (τῇ πατρίῳ τῶν Ῥωμαίων φωνῇ τοῖς Ῥωμαίοις ἐνεκελεύετο) to dismount from their horses and grasp the enemy danger at close quarters. Now the Romans dismounted from their horses, approached the barricade, and gave and received in turn discharges of missiles.”^[14] It is quite striking here, that the author calls Latin the “ancestral language” – or, more literally, the “father tongue” – of the Romans, but what he wants to say to the reader is that at this point of the battle the “Romans” were given combat orders in a language that was probably unknown to most soldiers, with the exception of these (standardized) combat orders always given in Latin.^[15] The scholarly author seems quite insensitive to the paradox of having to call that language, foreign to the better part of the Roman troops, “the father tongue” – “of the Romans”!

At any rate, the original meaning of the word “Roman” (i. e., Latin, referring to, or stemming from ancient Rome) survives of course, going along with the new meaning (i. e., “Greek”). The Paschal Chronicle, for example, uses the term “ῥωμαῖος” to refer both to ancient, Latin-speaking Roman emperors and generals and to contemporary Greek speaking “Byzantines.”

A “Definition” of being Roman in the Near East

This semantic variety of the word “Roman” would sometimes force Late Antique writers into giving explanations. For instance, Sophronios “the Sophist,” the Patriarch of Jerusalem in the times of the Arab conquest, would feel obliged to explain, in his account of the miracles of the Saints Cyrus and John, that the latter “was a Roman, but not because he stemmed from a city subject to (lit.: paying taxes to) the Romans (οὐ πόλεως ὑποφόρου Ῥωμαίοις ὁρμώμενος), but because his homeland and his city was Rome itself, their (sc. the Romans’) first royal city.”^[16] Clearly, for Sophronios the common, usual, basic definition of “Roman” was: “stemming from a city subject to the Romans.” Now, this definition – although stemming from the feather of someone so well-versed in rhetoric that he went by the moniker “the sophist” – seems tautological. Rhomaios is a person stemming from a city subject to the Rhomaioi; that is, Rhomaioi are the subjects of the Rhomaioi.

But nonetheless the definition does make sense, if we look more carefully. What Sophronios means here, is that there are – to begin with – two distinct, homocentric groups of people that are called Romans. A very broad one, that includes all citizens of the entire Roman empire, and a much narrower one, restricted to those that represent the power structures, the ruling elites of the Roman state and their enforcement personnel: the imperial court, the government officials, their local representatives in the provinces, their staff and, of course, their armed forces. And, in addition, there is yet another, rather small and exclusive group of people that are called Romans, namely the natives of the city of Rome.^[17] The author of this definition, the Patriarch Sophronios, was a native of the city of Damascus, stemming from a family of a considerable social standing that could afford for him the highest possible education of his times – so that he could write an impeccable ecclesiastical Greek, whatever his native language might have been.^[18] That is, he would identify as “Roman,” according to his own definition, in the broadest sense of the word. He came from a city subject to the Romans – in the narrower sense.

It might seem quite striking, even if the result of migration and/or Empire and not subliminal cultural continuity, that Sophronius’ double definition of Romanness corresponds almost exactly to a definition already given by Cicero in Republican times: “There are two fatherlands, I maintain, one by nature, and one by citizenship: like the [illustrious] Cato, who, having being born in Tusculum, was accepted in the city of the Roman people, so that, being an Tusculan by birth and a Roman by citizenship, he had one fatherland as regards the place [of birth], and another one as regards the law.”^[19]

However, even this broad, Ciceronian definition by Sophronios does not cover the entire breadth of the term “Roman.” “Roman” was an extraordinarily broad, multifaceted, and multi-layered term, as Yannis Stouraitis has lately pointed out in his studies on romanitas, based mainly on sources written after the seventh century and stemming from the Greek-speaking “West” of the Byzantine Empire – or, what was left of it after the Arab conquest.^[20] In this study, using mainly Syriac sources but also some hitherto unnoticed Greek testimonies coming from the Near East, this semantic variability of the word “Roman” is shown to further expand when going East. While “Roman” could mean, when uttered by an inhabitant of Constantinople, Athens, Ephesus or Pergamon, a “Greek speaking,” “of Greek culture,” “of Greek origins,” and “Orthodox Christian” altogether at the same time (or all this without the “Greek origins” when used in Alexandria, Antioch or rural Cappadocia), it could also mean “soldier,” “government official,” or “magistrate” in Syriac, or it may also denote, in the mouth of a Syrian historian, a Syriac-speaking inhabitant of any Syriac-speaking city, town, or village on this side of the Byzantine-Persian frontier.

Syriac Romanness

Thus, this semantic polyvalence of “Roman(s)” would apply not just to Sophronios and his fellow citizens of Damascus, but also to those of Edessa in Northern Mesopotamia, the cultural capital of the Syriac world (today South-Eastern Turkey), and mutatis mutandis to the entire Near East. Here too, substantial segments of the local social and educational elites had deeply appropriated Greek education and culture. And even when writing in their native language, the Edessene dialect of Aramaic, which became known as the Syriac language, had no difficulty calling their city a “city of the Romans.” For example, the opening of a memorable letter to the Christians of Ḥimyar attributed to Jacob of Serugh introduces its alleged author as “the lowly Jacob, who is from the region of Edessa, the faithful city of the Romans” (in juxtaposition to the addressees, the “confessors, in the city of Najrān of the Ḥimyarites”),^[21] and, later on, the author speaks of his own community as “we Romans, who dwell in the peace of the Christian emperors.”^[22]

In the great majority of cases, when Western Syriac authors use the term “Romans,” they do not refer to themselves, but to the soldiers, officials, and magistrates of the Byzantine Empire. But despite this, these very same Syriac authors in some cases find it absolutely normal to identify as Romans in the most emphatic manner. A characteristic case is that of John of Ephesus,^[23] a native of Amida in Northern Mesopotamia who, though staunchly anti-Chalcedonian, rose to high ecclesio-political offices under Justinian (r. 527–565) and left us hagiographical and historical works mostly focusing on the lives of leading figures of the Miaphysite movement who were then forging separate ecclesiastical and administrative structures for what became the Syrian Orthodox Church. That is, John could at the same time serve a Byzantine emperor sending troops to suppress Miaphysite resistance in greater Syria and fully identify with the leaders of that same resistance movement. In his hagiographies, John not only names even the easternmost frontiers of Byzantine Syro-Mesopotamia “the land of the Romans,”^[24] but even calls the entire Byzantine Empire – from West to East – “the Republic of us, the Romans” (ܒܟܠܗܿ ܦܘܠܝܛܝܐ ܕܝܠܢ ܕܪܗܘܡܝ̈ܐ).^[25] One could hardly imagine a more full-mouthed way to express a full Roman identity. All the more so as this statement is made in the context of a summary posthumous praise of the Miaphysite patriarch Theodosius of Alexandria for his (alleged) life-long struggle against the imperial Chalcedonian establishment, “And he completed thirty-one years and a half in the conflicts of persecution and exile from place to place, having also gained distinction and renown all over the Republic of us Romans.”^[26] It seems that John wants to make clear that even the harshest conflict between Chalcedonians and Miaphysites is a conflict among Romans. Even the violent fracture of ecclesiastical communio does not infringe on the Roman identity common to Chalcedonians and Anti-Chalcedonians.

It is remarkable that John choses here the Greek loanword politeia to speak of the “politeia of us Romans.” First of all, because the Greek loanword was loaded with positive connotations of well-ordered statehood and conscious citizenship. It was the word that had been made the key technical term of political philosophy by Plato and Aristotle, to then become the standard Greek rendering of the Roman res publica, and then the word that Late Antique orators-and-scholars like the pagan Eunapios of Sardis would mostly chose when wanting to allude to the entire political ideology that was inherent to the notion of the Roman Empire.^[27] By using these particular words, “the politeia of us Romans,” John highlights even more his ostentatious identification as a Roman. On the other hand, though, another Miaphysite Syriac contemporary of John of Ephesos, Elias, uses that same loanword, politeia, in his hagiography of the Miaphysite leader John of Tella, as a designation not of the Byzantine Empire, but of a sort of semi-autonomous Miaphysite reserve that John of Tella had organized in the frontier zone between Byzantine and Persian Syro-Mesopotamia.^[28] This suggests that the emphatical self-identification as Roman that we find in John of Ephesos was nothing self-evident anymore, but a conscious choice between many different possible attitudes towards “Rome.” A few decades later, in the beginning of the seventh century, a considerable part of the population of Edessa – the city that had been earlier demonstrating its identification with the Roman Empire – even sided with a Syrian “Roman” general, Narsai, who was overtly collaborating with Shah Khosrow Parvez against the “usurper” Phokas (r. 602–10).^[29]

Yet even such members of the West Syrian elites that would fully identify with the Byzantine state, like John of Ephesos, would not normally call themselves “Roman” in first-person singular. A Syriac-speaking native of Edessa, Tella, Halepo, or Amida would first and foremost identify not as Roman but as Syrian (suryāyā).^[30] However, this ethnonym itself appears to designate almost exclusively a person stemming from the Byzantine Syria, as its usage by John of Ephesus shows well.^[31] Syriac-speaking natives of the (Western parts of the) Iranian Empire are in most cases called “Persians” (parsāyē).

This difference between “Syrians” – which implied also: Romans^[32] – and “Persians” was for Syriac-speaking people(s) a matter of paramount significance. It is characteristic that in most Syriac saints’ lives already the opening passage, if not the very first line, makes clear if the saint was of “Syrian” or of “Persian” origins. The very first words of the Life of Saint Ephrem, for example, make clear that the saint was “a Syrian as far as his origin is concerned.”^[33] This difference between “Syrian” and “Persian” could turn into fierce opposition if other factors, political and/or confessional ones, dictated this. Referring to the closure of the so-called “School of the Persians” in Edessa, John of Ephesos says, “When this bitter plant was spreading in the city of Edessa, the holy bishop Cyrus discovered it, and tore it out from its roots, and did not allow the school of the Persians to be mentioned there again, as had been the case before; and this school was from that time established in the city of Nisibis, from which all that country drink dregs of gall, so that even in this country of us, the Romans, some men taste of it.”^[34] Along the same lines, when the pro-Miaphysite “Syrians” of Edessa (decades before the closure of the School) had protested against Ibas, the staunchly Dyophysite bishop of their city and protector of the Dyophysite “School of the Persians,” demanding that the Persian heretics should be deported from the Roman Empire, they would shout aloud out on the streets “this is the city of the Augusti” (ܗܕܐ ܡܕܝܢܬܐ ܕܐܓܘܣܛܘ), or “long live the Roman Empire (Romania)” (ܬܬܩܝܡ ܠܪܗܘܡܢܝܐ).^[35]

Of particular significance are some unexpected references to the city of Rome that are found in West Syriac hagiographic literature. The hagiographic legends in question may be set in the remote past and may in some cases have earlier Vorlagen; however, their final redaction occurred in the sixth century, in the course of the escalating conflict between (mostly, Syrian) Miaphysites and (mostly, Greek[-speaking]) Chalcedonians. These Miaphysite redactions were broadly disseminated, as Jean-Nicole Saint-Laurent, among others, has shown,^[36] in an effort to project sixth-century Syrian Miaphysite identity back onto the apostolic past. Now, in such an hagiographical narrative, we read that Palut, a quasi-mythical bishop of Edessa, had been consecrated by a patriarch of Antioch, Serapion, who had been in turn been consecrated but by the Roman bishop Zephyrinus (in the key role of the guarantor of legitimacy and orthodoxy)^[37] – a pure invention that is all the more awkward as it would imply a certain dependency on the staunchly pro-Chalcedonian Roman see, even if this would have no practical consequences. The so-called Julian Romance, the mythical story of the resistance of Edessa against the emperor Julian “the Apostate” and his campaign for the restoration of paganism, is a story that, as sufficiently demonstrated by Manolis Papoutsakis,^[38] was a Miaphysite polemic against Justinian cast in the guise of Julian. Here, the paragon of Christian orthodoxy is again a Roman bishop, the (misdated) pope Eusebius.^[39] The fact that the author of (this section of) the Julian Romance had to invent this pope, makes even clearer the ideological weight of Rome and Roman identity in that context. Again, we read in the legend of Saint Alexios, one of the most popular hagiographies in the entire Near East, that the protagonist, after spending most of his life in Edessa, finally returns to his native city, which is Rome (the other “candidate,” Constantinople – the “new Rome” – seems unlikely), to die there and become acknowledged as a saint.^[40] In another popular hagiography, Saint Paul of Qentos is presented as the bishop of an Italian town called Qentos, which is hard to identify and probably fictitious.^[41] Again, the fact that all these narratives are probably full-blown inventions only underscores the ideological power, authority, attractiveness of Romanness.^[42]

Late Antique Romanitas and the Multiple Con-/Intertexts of the Qurʾān

How can a better understanding of what “Romans” meant in the Late Antique Near East contribute to a better understanding of the Qurʾān and its multi-layered – historical, political, linguistic and theological – contexts? To begin with, a more adequate historical reconstruction of Roman identity seems to have some rather general consequences concerning the possible con-texts of the Qurʾān.

1) When looking for Late Antique texts possibly related to the Qurʾān, one should be cautious when trying to distinguish between Byzantine (meaning, Greek) and Syriac sources. West-Syriac sources are Byzantine sources – at least until the seventh century.^[43] All over the Near East, the reciprocal communication between Greek and Syriac traditions was so deeply ingrained, especially if we look at exegetical and liturgical literature (which are of special significance for the Qurʾān), that we can assume in most cases that what we now can only find in a Greek text was also known on the Syriac side (and vice versa). In most cases, this would simply mean that a “Syrian” read it in Greek, rather than there being a now-lost Syriac translation – of which there were surely also many cases. We should not forget how common Greek-Syriac diglossia was.^[44]

2) This permeability between Syriac Byzantine and Greek Byzantine sources seems to harmonize well with the insight of more recent qurʾānic scholarship that what the qurʾānic community knows, received, and sometimes rejects as Christian views or traditions are indeed not the positions of some marginal sects but the most mainstream theological and Christological trends of the day – be they Miaphysite, Aphthartodocete (i. e., adhering to a major Miaphysite Church party that considered Christ’s body as incorruptible by nature^[45]), or common to all confessional, ecclesio-political camps that were permanently engaged in an intense communication with one another.^[46] Because Constantinople, Asia Minor, and the Near East (including at least the northern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, being all parts of the Roman world) were so organically intertwined in terms of politics, economy, and culture, that one cannot regard the latter regions as secluded backwaters cut off from actual theological developments, where age old heresies could survive unnoticed.

The Romans and their fate in the opening verses of the Sūrat al-Rūm

Having taken a look at several sources shedding light on the semantics of “Romans” in the Late Antique Near East, it is now due to return to our original question: Who were the “Romans” in Q Rūm 30:2–4? Here are, once again, the verses under discussion:

2 The Romans have been defeated,

3 in the land nearby, and they, after their defeat, will be victorious,

4 in a few years – God’s is the command before and after that – and on that day the believers will rejoice,

5 with the help of God. He helps whom He pleases; and He is the Mighty, the Merciful.

It appears that the primary, the most direct sense of “Romans” in these verses is that of Roman (i. e., Byzantine) soldiers and officials: the Byzantine troops that had lost a battle against the Sassanian armies. This is then, as we have seen, the most common meaning of “Romans” in the (Western) Syriac sources: soldiers, magistrates, and other representatives of Byzantine state power, regardless of their ethnic background. Also, it is likely that the “Romans” of this qurʾānic verse in this narrow sense (i. e., the troops that were being defeated by the Persians; see further below) were of very diverse ethnic backgrounds – not much different from the army, consisting of Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, and Arabs, which would be defeated a couple of decades later by the invading Arab army under Khalid b. al-Walid at the river Yarmouk.

So, just like in most Syriac sources, “Romans” here means members of the Byzantine army (and state apparatus), be they ethnic Arabs, Syrians, or Greeks. But, of course, at the same time the “Romans” of this sūrah are all inhabitants, all “citizens” of the Byzantine Empire – not just its armies and magistrates. This latter sense corresponds to the “broader” sense in which “Romans” is used not only in Syriac, but also in Greek sources (and in other languages of the Late Antique Near East). That “broader” sense is one that we find in the definition by Sophronios of Jerusalem, “stemming from a city subject to the Romans.” We have seen that this definition actually encompasses both meanings of the word “Roman,” the narrower as well as the broader one (soldier, magistrate, civil servant on the hand, and a mere inhabitant and/or citizen of the Byzantine Empire on the other). So, the double meaning of Romans in the Qurʾān seems to correspond to the double definition by Sophronios.

This mention in Q 30:2 of the defeat of the Romans appears to be, according to Nicolai Sinai, the only direct reference of the Qurʾān to a “world-historical event of the seventh century,”^[47] and its only prophecy concerning a contemporary historical event. Perhaps the particularity of these verses gave rise, already in the age of the classical commentaries on the Qurʾān, to several questions of interpretation that Nadia El-Cheikh has analysed.^[48] 1) Regarding the much-discussed vocalization problems, here the translation follows the solution preferred by the majority of classical interpretation and modern research.^[49] 2) Another fundamental question, intrinsically connected to the discussion on the right vocalization, is: Which historical events are these verses referring to? Now, if one decides in favor of the vocalization we are relying on here, this second question can be given a plausible answer. The first military event, the defeat of the “Romans,” should be the severe defeats of 613 near Antioch, followed by the capture of Jerusalem in 614; and the second event, the forecasted victory of the Romans, should be the final success of Heraclius’s grand counteroffensive in 628. (This latter “identification” does not imply, however, placing the qurʾānic prophecy after the actual event; the Qurʾān might well have predicted an unspecified victory of the Romans, simply because it liked the Byzantines more than the Persians and assumed that God would help them one day.)^[50] 3) But even if we consider these two interpretation problems, be it for the sake of the argument, as resolved, a further question remains open: Why should the qurʾānic proclaimer predict that the faithful will rejoice on the day of the Roman victory? Why should he be taking stances in that “last great war of Antiquity,” as James Howard-Johnston puts it,^[51] siding with the “Romans” against the Persian Empire? Or is this not the case at all – as some qurʾānic interpreters have thought already in the first centuries AH^[52] – and we should just look for a positive turn in the fates of Muḥammad’s movement that just happened to be simultaneous with Heraclius’ final victory (628), like the treaty of Hudaybiyah?^[53] However, even if the verse does refer to such a victory of the Believers, this does not exclude (to say the least) the possibility that the same verse is at the same time ideally siding – or, expressing solidarity – with the “Romans” vis-à-vis the Persian Empire. Because this latter reading seems to be the most verbal, immediate, simple understanding of the verse, whereas the connection with a simultaneous victory of the Believers presupposes that the envisaged audience knows very well (and can readily recall) that the victory of the Believers alluded to had taken place at exactly the same time as the final success of Emperor Heraclius over the Persians – which seems quite a big chunk of extra-textual information to prerequire from everybody. And, again, even if this (the contemporaneous victory of the Believers) is the basic reference of this verse, it can never rule out the other. Any hearer, or reader, who is not so well aware of the simultaneity of the two military events would understand these lines as an expression of a certain ideal allegiance with the Romans. This does not change either – on the contrary, it would be further corroborated – if Tommaso Tesei is right in suggesting that this “prophecy” of the victory of the “Romans” in the qurʾānic reception – via Christian Arabs – is quite similar to prophecies of victory that were circulating in apocalyptical discourses and texts produced in the Byzantine world during the great war with the Persian Empire.^[54] Even if this is so, and even if the intended audience participated in all surmised (apocalyptical, eschatological, and other) discourses – which is anything but a given – the verbal, immediate message is always there, and it is stronger than (sometimes far-fetched) extra-textual “backgrounds” claimed by some exegetes, ancient or modern. So, what could be the reasons for this “pro-Roman” message of the qurʾānic proclaimer?

Even in focusing on this question only, the entire exegetical and historical-critical discussion around the verse cannot be dealt with here. Only a few observations can be made. First of all, one should look for a political answer. Such an answer that has been convincingly argued for by Glenn Bowersock,^[55] among others, is that a victory of the Byzantine over the Persian Empire would automatically mean loosening – or completely breaking – the firm grip the Sassanians had on the Arabian Peninsula, particularly in its North, East, and South. And, of course, this development was most welcome for Muḥammad’s movement, the new, emergent political power in the Arabian Peninsula. This seems convincing, even if we want to take for granted that the opening lines of the Sūrat al-Rūm were written at a stage when it was much too early for the Believers to nurture any imperial ambitions of their own. But then, this kind of motivation does not necessary exclude that other kinds of motivation might be at work behind the words, “and they, after their defeat, will be victorious, in a few years – God’s is the command before and after that – and on that day the believers will rejoice.”

This place, the opening verses of the Sūrat al-Rūm, is, as already seen, the only instance in the Qurʾān where the Romans are mentioned by name. It is quite remarkable that this naming of the “Romans” occurs in a place where the qurʾānic preacher expresses his solidarity with the losing “Romans” and can be understood as doing so in an unequivocal, unreserved manner. That is, out of all cases where the Qurʾān is referring to the “Byzantines,” their Christianity, their political ideology, etc., the qurʾānic preacher choses to mention them by name only when he expresses solidarity with them. This should be no coincidence. But what could it imply?

Let us turn, for example, to another qurʾānic passage that refers to the Byzantines (of course, without naming them), which has very much to do with the same geopolitical context of the Byzantine-Persian wars, as Zishan Ghaffar has stressed in his Der Koran in seinem religions- und weltgeschichtlichen Kontext (2020). Ghaffar analyzes the following verse from Q Māʾidah 5:17,

They have indeed disbelieved who say, “Surely, God is the Messiah, son of Mary.” Say, “Who then has any power against God, if He desire to bring to naught the Messiah, son of Mary, and his mother and all those that are in the earth?” And to God belongs the kingdom of the heavens and the earth and what is between them. He creates what He pleases; and God has power to do all things.

Here, according to Zishan Ghaffar’s interpretation, the qurʾānic preacher criticizes what he considers to be an unwarranted use by Herakleios’ court of Christian theology, in particular of high Christology and Marian piety. Herakleios and his circle forged in this way a full-fledged political theology, a theologically based imperial propaganda put in the service of the campaign against the Persians, and this in a time when the tide was turning in favor of the Byzantine army.^[56] This, it might seem, is what the aforementioned qurʾānic verse condemns.

Why, then, does the Qurʾān chose to name the Romans when expressing solidarity with them yet leave them unnamed when criticizing them? First of all, one might invoke the general tendency of the Qurʾān either not to comment on contemporary historical events or, if/when doing so, to do so in such an indirect manner – by way of allusions, adumbrations, and metaphors – that the event concerned is not even clearly identifiable. The case of the Sūrat al-Rūm is a notable, or perhaps even the only exception to this tendency, so that it calls for an explanation all the more.

The following is just a first attempt to answer such a question. Could it be the case that this difference between naming the “Romans” and leaving them unnamed is somehow meant to show that the solidarity with the “Romans,” as declared expressis verbis in the Sūrat al-Rūm, is truly general? In other words, does it concern the entire Byzantine world whereas the sharp criticism in al-Māʾidah is not general in the same sense? Of course, this is only one possible reading and has to remain purely hypothetical. But if this reading is right, this would imply that the truly general expression of solidarity in the Sūrat al-Rūm remains valid, so to say, even in the face of the criticism in al-Māʾidah. That is, if this reading is right, by naming the “Romans” Sūrat al-Rūm refers to all of them, the entire Byzantine world, and thus states the solidarity of the qurʾānic community (or, of its leadership) to this world as a whole, probably because of their shared monotheistic creed, contraposed to the Zoroastrian Persians, construed as pagans. This kind of interpretation is found in early commentary tradition too. “Or they rejoiced for the victory of the Rūm over Persia because they are ahl al-kitāb (‘people of the book’) like them,” reads one of the “traditional” explanations of the Believers’ joy listed by Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām al-Sulamī (13^th c.).^[57]

On the other hand, when the Qurʾān condemns, as arguably it does in Q 5:17, a certain form of Byzantine political theology, a certain imperial ideology abusing Christian faith and Marian piety, the Qurʾān attacks this abuse in itself as well as those responsible for it and not all “Romans,” not the Roman world as a whole. Such an attitude would fit in with what Holger Zellentin recently described as a general trait of the qurʾānic criticism of Jews and Christians: it is not a wholesale rejection of the entire religious group, because there is always a righteous group among Jews and Christians.^[58] Could this then perhaps mean that the Qurʾān here shows – albeit in a very indirect fashion – a certain awareness that this kind of abuse of Christology and/or Mariology came from the imperial court? That it came from a certain circle of court rhetors and court theologians and was in no way representative of the greater Byzantine world, of the Byzantine Christianity taken as a whole, let alone of the theological tradition of the Church fathers, the only tradition that could claim true authority in the entire Byzantine world, and that had abstained from making concessions to a “imperial theology” or a “political theology” for that matter?^[59] Could this be a viable way to understand why the Qurʾān names the Romans in the sūrah named after them, but leaves them unnamed when wanting to denounce as abusive certain attitudes of certain “Romans” towards theology, politics, and war?

If so, then this might seem to do justice to the fact that there were indeed very different, even colliding attitudes towards an imperial instrumentalization of faith in Byzantine theological tradition. What one might call political or imperial theology, its political abuse of Christology and Mariology, and the apocalyptical eschatological phantasies based on imperial theology,^[60] all this might have been very present, very influential indeed in certain political circles and in large streams of (so-called) popular piety, especially in Armenia and Syria, but also in Constantinople. However, all this was by no means uncontroversial. On the other side, there was the theological tradition of the “Church fathers” – in the sense given to the term by Greek and Near Eastern Christian tradition, i. e., as a highly exclusive group of saints-and-theologians of the highest possible renown that could almost be counted in one hand: Athanasios of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Ephrem the Syrian, John Chrysostom, Maximus Confessor (and later John of Damascus).^[61] Even if such generalisations can never be accurate, one can say that these “Fathers of the Church” did not give place to the kind of political abuse of theology that is condemned in the Qurʾān. The most notorious exponents of this abuse, from Eusebius of Caesarea to Sergius of Constantinople and beyond, were not only not considered as Church Fathers, but rather seen as heretics (albeit not on grounds of this abuse). Thus, even if this political abuse of theology created its own tradition that clearly remained widespread and influential till the end of the Byzantine Empire and beyond, it was always fraught with a sense of uneasiness because it was foreign to the tradition of the Church Fathers – defined as the Byzantine Church defined them. This latter tradition was invested with an incomparably superior authority than any other locus theologicus except the Scripture, and was functioning like a theological Super-Ego, so to say, even in the conscience of those who were producing and promoting imperial political theology and its concomitant apocalyptic phantasies, which is why they would often publish the pseudepigrapha under the name of Church Fathers like Ephrem the Syrian who had nothing to do with them. The difference between the two traditions, as far as the issue of imperial (abuse of) theology is concerned, was perspicuous. It would not be impossible, therefore, to assume that the Qurʾān might indeed reflect an awareness of this difference.