Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of The Glorious Koran. An Explanatory Translation (1930)
SÛRAH XXX
Ar-Rûm, “The Romans,” takes its name from a word in the first verse.
The armies of the Eastern Roman Empire had been defeated by the Persians in all the territories near Arabia. In the year A.D. 613 Jerusalem and Damascus fell, and in the following year Egypt. A Persian army invaded Anatolia and was threatening Constantinople itself in the year A.D. 615 or 616 (the sixth or seventh year before the Hijrah) when, according to the best authorities, this Sûrah was revealed at Mecca. The pagan Arabs triumphed in the news of Persian victories over the Prophet and his little band of followers, because the Christian Romans were believers in the One God, whereas the Persians were not. They argued that the power of Allah could not be supreme and absolute, as the Prophet kept proclaiming it to be, since the forces of a pagan empire had been able to defeat His worshippers.
The Prophet’s answer was provided for him in this grand assertion of Theocracy, which shows the folly of all those who think of Allah as a partisan. It opens with two prophecies: that the Romans would be victorious over the Persians, and that the little persecuted company of Muslims in Arabia would have reason to rejoice, “within ten years.”1 In fact, in A.D. 624 the Roman armies entered purely Persian territory, and in the same year a little army of Muslims, led by the Prophet, overthrew the flower of Arab chivalry upon the field of Badr.
But the prophecies are only the prelude to a proclamation of God’s universal kingdom, which is shown to be an actual Sovereignty. The laws of nature are expounded as the laws of Allah in the physical sphere, and in the moral and political spheres mankind is informed that there are similar laws of life and death, of good and evil, action and inaction, and their consequences — laws which no one can escape by wisdom or by cunning. His mercy, like His law, surrounds all things, and the standard of His judgment is the same for all. He is
1 The word in the Arabic (biḍa‘) implies a space of not less than three, and not more than nine, years.
