James Moreton Wakeley

The coming of Islam marks a watershed in world history.  A new movement arose from the sands of Arabia.  It destroyed old empires and reshaped lands that had been the very cradle of civilisation in its own image.  Debate on the origins of Islam is fierce.  Far from being born in the full light of history, fundamental issues remain obscure and basic questions, like how the Arabian backwater of the ancient world generated an all-conquering state, often go unasked.

This book offers a new and bold explanation for these momentous events.  It investigates the growth of a community of believers around their prophet in an Arabian oasis before looking at how their interactions with surrounding nomads set in store truly transformative developments.  These developments took on a deeper significance given wider changes witnessed in the late antique Near East, which created the context for the earthshattering events of the seventh century. 

At the Origins of Islam: Muḥammad, the Community of the Qurʾān, and the Transformation of the Bedouin World unites the near and far horizons of early Islam into one story.  It embraces a broad range of sources and comparative evidence to set new courses in the study of Late Antiquity and early Islam.

1812 was the year of one of Wellington's greatest victories in the Peninsular War: Salamanca, the battle that proved Wellington as effective a commander on the offensive as on the defensive.  Salamanca opened the road to Madrid and helped to set the conditions for the expulsion of the French from Spain.  The Battle of Salamanca has also come to be the Regimental Day of The Rifles, the British Army's largest infantry regiment, given the number of antecedent units that fought on the day.

I wrote this short book to complement battlefield tours to the town of Ciudad Rodrigo and to the field of Salamanca that took place in autumn, 2019.  It offers a concise history of the Peninsular War interspersed with short, focused analyses of the two battle sites, and finally summarises the tactics of the age together with providing some additional vignettes and portraits of some notable commanders.

My deep thanks are due to Professor Charles Esdaile, who accompanied the tour, leading the trip to Salamanca whilst I led on Ciudad Rodrigo.

This book offers a radical perspective on what are conventionally called the Islamic Conquests of the seventh century.  Placing these earthshattering events firmly in the context of Late Antiquity, it argues that many of the men remembered as the fanatical agents of Muḥammad probably did not know who the prophet was and had, in fact, previously fought for Rome or Persia.  The book applies to the study of the collapse of the Roman Near East techniques taken from the historiography of the fall of the Roman West.  Through a comparative analysis of medieval Arabic and European sources combined with insights from frontier studies, it argues that the two falls of Rome involved processes far more similar than traditionally thought.  It presents a fresh approach to the century that witnessed the end of the ancient world, appealing to students of Roman and medieval history, Islamic Studies, and advanced scholars alike.

The second chapter opens by arguing that it is wrong to speak of the ‘fall’ of Rome. Rome, in effect, fell twice in Late Antiquity, once in the fifth century in the West and then again in the seventh century in the Near East. Both of these phases of imperial collapse were caused by the action of hostile invaders. The chapter then explores how surprising it is that, given this apparent causal similarity, the historiography of the two phases of imperial denouement has conventionally been so divergent. Methods of interpreting both the fifth- and seventh-century conquests are consequently summarised and discussed. Despite recent developments in the study of the seventh century and of early Islam, the chapter closes by showing that traditional interpretations remain entrenched within modern historiography, calling for a new methodological approach to the Islamic sources.

The introductory chapter begins by demonstrating the enduring potency of medieval histories written by Muslims about what are conventionally called the Islamic Conquests of the seventh century. They have inspired ISIS and are an integral part of modern fundamentalist philosophies. Attention then turns to what this has to do with the Roman Empire. It is argued that the world into which Islam erupted should not be seen as separate from the Rome with which modern westerners habitually identify, and that such a broader perspective is integral to the period now known as Late Antiquity. The contents and essential arguments of the following chapters are then set out. The chapter ends by suggesting that many of the men who remade the ancient world in the image of God and his messenger Muḥammad may not, in fact, have realised that is what they were doing.

This chapter concisely addresses the fundamental issue faced when trying to reconstruct the seventh century and early Islam: the intensely problematic nature of the Islamic sources. The texts on which conventional understandings tend to rely—notably the works of al-Balādhurī and al-Ṭabarī—were written centuries after the events they purport to describe and were ultimately based on a mercurial oral tradition. It is argued that they could not have accurately captured the world of Classical Islam’s seventh-century ancestors. Recent advances in the study of the Islamic historical tradition are, however, acknowledged as giving good reason not to dismiss the later texts entirely. Comparative study with other, more contemporary sources has proved itself one way of sifting sound information from the questionable. The chapter ends by asking whether there is any other kind of comparative approach that could prove fruitful.

This chapter begins by asking one question: what is in a name? The study of choice passages from the writings of the Roman diplomat Priscus that give an insight into fifth-century Hunnic society demonstrates that, behind simple ethnonyms like ‘Hun’ or ‘Roman’, there existed a far more ambiguous and opaque reality. The chapter notes that a focus on the construction of peoples out of various groups is a major obsession in research on the western barbarians in Late Antiquity, spearheaded by scholars at the University of Vienna. This methodology is then applied to a number of passages from al-Ṭabarī’s History of the Prophets and Kings, which reveal that the armies that invaded the provinces of Persia and Rome grew on the march in the same manner as did the armies of the western barbarians. The men who made Islam possible, therefore, came from quite diverse origins.

The discipline of Frontier Studies has highlighted how borders, over time, have been areas of intense interaction rather than division, giving rise to societies on either side that become increasingly distant from their interiors. Rome’s tendency to contract frontier defence out to federate groups helped to catalyse this process, as the final chapter argues in a diachronic discussion of her Arabian clients. The chapter contends that imperial involvement in the peninsula led to the creation of larger, more powerful, and more culturally self-confident groups who become ever harder for their masters to control. An analysis of the Greek sources for the outbreak of the seventh-century conquests stresses not only their value as history through a new argument for their reliability, but also the previously under-emphasised insight they reveal. After the Last Great War of Antiquity, Rome’s Arabian clients joined the armies riding out of the Ḥijāz to become her conquerors.

This chapter takes the exploration of the Islamic sources for the seventh-century conquests in a new direction. It argues that texts like the History of the Prophets and Kings by al-Ṭabarī can be read as texts of identity: histories that speak to ninth- and tenth-century Islamic concerns to consolidate, praise, and rarify what it meant to be a Muslim. The chapter proposes this through comparative analysis with the Getica of Jordanes. Rather than reading the Getica as a dynastic history, it is demonstrated how it can easily be read as an origo gentis that not only tells the story of the Goths, but that also constructs the idea of the Goths as a people. The chapter ends by suggesting that, as sources like the Getica have encouraged scholars to look for the diverse roots of the western barbarians, the same interest should be applied to the Arabians.

Much recent scholarship on the fall of the Western Roman Empire has argued that the empire collapsed in a largely peaceful manner as provincial Romans sought to accommodate themselves to new barbarian rulers who were more immigrants than invaders.  This short paper debunks this notion through subjecting some examples of men taken as proving the 'accommodationist tendency' to rigorous analysis.  It demonstrates that not all is as a superficial reading of their careers would seem, and that their choices were often underscored not by freewill, but by coercion.

This article questions what seems to be a renewed, even an exclusive emphasis on 'Islam' as the factor explaining the success of the Arab Conquests of the 7 th century AD, by recourse to the Byzantine sources. It demonstrates how such sources both question and undermine the religiously-inspired narratives of the Islamic historical tradition by casting the outbreak of the Arab Conquests in Palestine primarily as a failure of Roman frontier policy. The Byzantine sources, though as late as many sources in the Islamic tradition, are, significantly, shown to rely on reports written soon after the events they describe: a reason to prefer them to the oral recollections underpinning the work of the 'Abbāsid historians.

This conference paper was originally given at the Oxford-Mainz-Vienna-Princeton graduate exchange in May 2017.  It looks at the Futuh al-Sham (Conquest of Syria) by the mysterious, and previously neglected, Islamic historian al-Azdi.  The paper accepts the current consensus that al-Azdi's work is, in fact, the earliest conquest narrative known to scholarship and presents a number of insights from the text that not only support the early dating, but that also suggest some of the ways in which the understanding of history developed over the course of the first two centuries of Islam.

One of the many reasons that Gibbon deduced for the collapse of the Roman West was the foundation of Constantinople.  In more recent years, eastern Roman policy has also been seen by some as consciously seeking to undermine the West.  Politics aside, can we also ask whether the foundation of a new capital, as a new centre of demand, pulled material wealth away from Rome?

This short sermon was given in commemoration of the Saints and Martyrs of England.  It seeks to address the relationship of active Christian belief to the secular world, and, through recourse largely to the Letters of St Paul and a walk to the Castle of Canossa, argues that the division between the divine and secular space is crucial to recognising how equality before God should be understood.  The specifically national character of England's saints and martyrs, the sermon concludes, should not be disdained if their closeness to their cultural descendants acts as water to the seed of spiritual growth.