The Mahdi and the Last Roman Emperor: An Enquiry into the Significance of Inter-religious Polemics

The apocalyptic expectations of the medieval Muslims and Christians culminated in the belief in the impending appearance of the messianic figures known as the Mahdi and the Last Roman Emperor. Due to the occurrence of certain parallels, the comparative study of the Islamic and Christian messianic convictions has been the subject of certain scholarly endeavours. The evolution of the characters of these messianic redeemers in the Muslim and Christian tradition has been attributed by previous scholarship to the inter-religious polemics. This argument sounds nevertheless fallacious in a number of respects. The present study strives to show that the messianic belief of a nation may at times owe more to its own socio-religious concerns than to religious polemics contra other confessional communities. This would entail adopting a more judicious approach to Muslim-Christian relations than the simplistic theory that tends to overstate the actual role of polemics.