u/chonkshonk

There is one passage in the Quran that attempts to make a prophecy concerning contemporary events: the "Romans will win!" prophecy in Surah 30:2-5. This passage is also notoriously ambiguous, and so I thought I'd make a quick post outlining all of its ambiguities, which I believe highlights an important avenue for further research.

To be sure, there has been some work in recent years aimed at better understanding the passage by comparing it to similar sayings and prophecies written in pre-Islamic, contemporary, and immediately post-Islamic times. I have collected these in a post titled Parallels to the "Romans will win!" prophecy in Surah 30. The most important studies here have been written by Tommaso Tesei, Adam Silverstein, and Zishan Ghaffar, but we have not really seen progress on this front since around 2020.

The first ambiguity is, shockingly, in whether this is a "Romans will win!" prophecy at all! It is well-known that there are some grammatical variants in this passage of the Quran, and depending on the grammatical reading you go with, the passage either reads that the Romans will ultimately win or that the Romans will ultimately lose. It could go either way. This problem has been covered several times, including in this thread by Marijn van Putten and in this thread by Sean Anthony. The debate over the reading of this passage persisted within Islamic tradition for centuries. Some arguments have been occasionally raised for one reading or the other; for example, some argue that the Romans will lose sounds a bit like it might be retroactively predicting the Arab conquests of Byzantine territory. This argument, however, is hardly concrete or decisive, and Mehdy Shaddel has recently suggested exactly that: that in his view, this passage is describing a temporary brief Roman victory over the Muslims that will be followed by their (the Romans') final defeat.

The next ambiguity: if we go with the Romans will win, well ... win what? The passage does not say! It is often connected to the Byzantine-Sassanid wars of 602-628, and so an obvious way to interpret the passage is an attempt to predict the final outcome of the series of clashes and wars between the Roman and Persian empires that concluded in 628. However, this interpretation benefits from the reader's hindsight: as Van Putten notes, the passage could very well be referring to a Roman victory of a specific battle that, for all we know, may have been highly salient to Muhammad's community as the events were transpiring. There is little, if anything, that guarantees that the passage is referring to the final outcome of the protracted, decades-long conflict. Several traditions and literature support this. Zishan Ghaffar's 2020 essay in his book Der koran in seinem religions argues that the passage was about events that ultimately transpired c. 614-615 during the larger series of battles/wars, as opposed to the final conclusion of the battles/wars in 628. A similar view is found in Muqatil ibn Sulayman, the oldest exegete of the Quran whose writings survive (see Juan Cole, Rethinking the Quran in Late Antiquity, pg. 34). Apart from their own scholarship, I wonder if some support for this can be found in the proposition that (1) This is from a Meccan surah (2) The passage says that the Romans will win (lose?) in a "few" years, a term of time that is classically quantified as being 3-5 or 3-10 years (bit more info on this here). And yet, the conclusion of the Byzantine-Sassanid wars in 628 is, by this account, well after a "few" years after the Meccan period.

What about the date of the passage? We don't know this either! Unfortunately, we have no concrete evidence surrounding when (what year) it was composed nor even whether it was composed before or after the precise event it was predicting; this is not surprising, since, as we discussed above, we do not know exactly what the passage is trying to predict or even whose victory it tries to predict. Tesei considers the passage to have been composed after Muhammad's death on the basis of the passage's parallels with texts written in the decades after Muhammad died, but both Silverstein and Ghaffar have rebutted this position on the basis that there are writings and texts that are contemporary to Muhammad, or even predate Muhammad, that also proffer predictions about whether the Romans will win or lose their battles against the Persians.

Virtually all of the aforementioned points of interpretation have differing opinions within Islamic tradition as well, even on the question of whether the passage was composed before or after the event that the passage is trying to predict.

Another ambiguity is why the believers rejoice when the romans (presumably) win? All sorts of answers are possible. Perhaps Muhammad's faction was allied with some Arab tribes in Medina who, in turn, were allied with the Romans (for a few examples of these, see Ehsan Roohi's new paper "The Purported Role of the Ghassānids and the Byzantines in Muhammad's Migration to Medina: A Reappraisal"). Perhaps it is because the Christian Byzantines were closer to Muhammad's vision of monotheism than the Zoroastrian Persians. Perhaps it is because the Quran has a pro-Byzantine bias in general, a view that is supported by Juan Cole (see Rethinking the Quran in Late Antiquity) but is denied by Mehdy Shaddel.

I know a lot is going on right now, but at the same time, a lot of users here will be interested in r/AcademicQuran 's ongoing AMA (Ask Me Anything) event with Dr. Suleyman Dost that was set up by u/Rurouni_Phoenix. Dost is the author of the PhD thesis, An Arabian Quran, and the new book, Before the Quran.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicQuran/comments/1swcnna/ama_with_professor_suleyman_dost/

Dr. Dost has just begun answering questions, so there's still time to get your own questions in!