RomanIslam Guest LectureReligions and Empires II

9 July 2025

Photo: © The MET

Vignette on the interior south wall of the porch showing August (left) burning incense in front of the deified figures of Pedesi and Pihor.

RomanIslam Guest Lecture Wed. July 9, 2025, 5 -7 pm (German time) on Zoom. The format comprises the lectures "Empire, Cities and Rituals: The Limits of Control in the Roman Period" by Prof. Dr. Greg Woolf (ISAW N.Y.U) and "Empire through Religion? Religion through Empire?" by Prof. Dr. Lutz Berger (University of Kiel)

This back-to-back lecture is a continuation of our January 15, 2025, debate about religion and empire.

How Can Imperial Cohesion be Created?

The early Roman Empire was not conceived as an empire of a salvation faith with an outlook of a Day of Judgment and the promise of an afterlife. Romanization began centuries before the rise of Christianity. It was not until the fourth century that Christianity, a non-ethnically bound salvation religion, strengthened the weakened structures of the Roman Empire by providing a new, religiously inspired cohesion. Those ancient religions were nevertheless crucial to the initial Romanization process. These religions manifested themselves in public and private rituals, providing worshipping communities with cohesion under the watchful eyes of the divine. However, those rituals were bound to places of worship and were therefore mostly city-based. Although gods and rituals proliferated through the migration of armies, playing a role in the Romanization of conquered Mediterranean lands and beyond, they did not provide the empire with a unified identity. There were a few attempts by emperors to influence and converge these ritual systems for the political needs of the empire.

The Islamic Empire experienced a simultaneous conquest and spread of a religion of salvation. Islam quickly lost its main ethnic boundaries through conversion, clients, and slavery. Despite being anchored in the rituals and places of worship of the Prophet in Mecca and Medina, Islam transcended those locations. As a religion of salvation, Islam found fertile ground prepared by Christianity in the Mediterranean and Zoroastrianism in the Iranian world. From its inception, Islam served as the primary means of imperial cohesion and culture for an Arab and then multi-ethnic elite. It was the driving force of cultural acculturation or Islamication, a term parallel to Romanization. However, the relationship between religion and Islam was not that simple.

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