Stephen Shoemaker's latest book presents a wide-ranging analysis of the rise of Islam within a late antique context. The apocalypse of empire reads as a continuation to Shoemaker's previous work, The death of a prophet (Philadelphia, Pa 2013), characterised by the same pervasive scepticism towards traditional Islamic sources and by again calling for a radical rewriting of early Islamic history. Shoemaker's statement that ‘Islam was a movement driven by urgent eschatological belief that focused on the conquest – or liberation – of the biblical Holy Land’ (p. 1) highlights the main thesis of his book. The author further claims that The apocalypse of empire is ‘a work of synthesis’ that aims to put in dialogue related fields while looking at the relation between eschatology and empire.
The work is divided into six chapters. Chapter i mainly focuses on the rise of Jewish apocalypses, showing that these did not always explicitly advocate anti-imperial sentiments. Although there are no obvious traces of political interests in the earliest Jewish apocalypses, the theme of resistance to imperial rule characterises later Jewish eschatological works, which Shoemaker surveys in depth.
Chapter ii moves to the analysis of Christian eschatology, revolving around the belief in Rome as the last world empire, strongly influenced by an earlier Jewish apocalyptic literature. Shoemaker gives much space here to the fourth-century Tiburtine Sibyl, which he believes to contain the earliest known version of the ‘last Roman emperor’ legend. This prophesies that the last Roman emperor will restore the Christian empire before the Second Coming of Christ, converting the infidels and yielding sovereignty to God in Jerusalem, thereby expunging the Christian Roman Empire.
Chapter iii reads as a continuation of the previous chapter, focusing on the Christian apocalypses of the sixth and seventh centuries which, according to Shoemaker, saw the peak of eschatological expectation. Christians expected the world to end at the beginning of the sixth century, and the antagonistic climate between Rome and Iran contributed to the rise of eschatological prophecies. The Muslim invasions further contributed to the rise of eschatological expectations in the seventh century. It is a pity that Shoemaker does not investigate this surge in eschatological expectation in relation to the ecological crisis of the sixth century, as a possible connection to the prophetic movements in the Arabian peninsula.
Chapter iv investigates Jewish and Zoroastrian eschatology. According to Shoemaker, in contrast to early Jewish apocalypses, late antique Jewish eschatological literature ‘took a relatively positive view of empires’ (p. 100). As for the Sasanian Zoroastrian apocalypses of the period, these conceived the Iranian Empire as victorious advancement towards the new millennium. These apocalyptic expectations all contributed to the stimulation of the eschatological message of early Islam.
The last two chapters tackle Muhammad and his first followers’ apocalyptic understanding, which Shoemaker conceives as the very core of the Qur’ān and the Muslim conquests. According to the author, Muhammad's first followers believed that they had the religious duty to expand their dominions and liberate the Holy Land from infidels, influenced by the surrounding religious milieu. Shoemaker rightly argues that only by placing Islam within a late antique religious context and in dialogue with contemporary imperial, eschatological expectations can we grasp the apocalyptic nature of early Islam and its resounding success.
Shoemaker emphasises that Islam was ‘defined by a fusion of two principles: eschatology and empire’ (p. 118), and, hence, he vehemently argues against Montgomery Watt's, and to a lesser degree, Robert Hoyland's ‘secular’ portrait of Muhammad as a social-economic reformer and political leader. By rejecting the idea that the rise of Islam and the expansion of Muhammad's followers was a ‘mere coincidence’, Shoemaker shrewdly shows how the lack of an Arab ethnos in the first centuries of the Islamic era hints at the likely religious nature of the early believers’ movement. None the less, there is little to advance the field in the first of the chapters dedicated to Islam, which instead reads as a positive review of Fred Donner's Muhammad and the believers (Cambridge, Ma 2010). The following chapter places particular emphasis on the role of the Holy Land and Jerusalem's Temple Mount/Ḥaram al-Sharīf in the eschatological message of early Islam, and influence on the wider late antique religious apocalypses from which Islam draws.
Islam's continuity and dialogue with the scriptural traditions of the Near East is indisputable. Regardless of some imprecisions in Quranic translations and transliterations (see pp. 127, 153), this publication has the great merit of highlighting the late antique religious context of Muhammad's prophetic career through the lens of eschatological literature, drawing from a wide array of Christian, Jewish and Iranian literary sources.
As Shoemaker notes, the apocalyptic message of Islam is easy to miss if we look at the traditional Islamic literature, which portrays Muhammad as ‘a great teacher of ethical monotheism and social justice’ (p. 124). As in his previous work, Shoemaker's rejection of the Islamic tradition is categorical. None the less, his narrative is fundamentally shaped by the acceptance of its general outline of the redaction of the Qur’ān and rise of Islam, as well as of the historicity of Muhammad.
The conclusion of The apocalypse of empire advocates ‘a critical perspective on the traditional Islamic sources’ (p. 181) and acknowledges ‘the real presence of troubling ideas at the core of the tradition’, i.e. ‘the Believers’ powerful apocalyptic conviction’ (p. 182). Shoemaker claims that many militant Islamist groups today share views ‘well-grounded in the early history of the community and Islamic traditions about Muhammad’ (p. 182). He argues for acknowledgement of the violence intrinsic to Muhammad's message.
Shoemaker is certainly right that the traditional Muslim sources are not contemporary to the events that they portray, but were rather the result of literary process within the early Islamic community. As such, they were likely inspired by impulses with parti pris and/or composed under the influence of later debates. Moreover, this creative re-elaboration of pre-existing religious material may have attempted to emphasise the supremacy of Muhammad's revelation at a time when discord among the scriptural communities was vivid. None the less, upon reading The apocalypse of empire, it is impossible not to wonder whether modern scholarship is indeed less biased than those traditional Islamic accounts that so many scholars, such as Shoemaker, categorically abhor.
