Did Heraclius Convert To Islam?

Ajouté : 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Hi, welcome to Alukadima. My name is Savish. For centuries, the Romans and the Persians had been at war. Their latest and actually their final war stretched from 602 CE to 628 CE. Over the course of the 26 years, the Roman Byzantine Empire and the Persian Sassined Empire ravaged the Middle East.

[00:00:21]Many cities changed hands, some of them multiple times over. The Persians went as far as Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, and the Byzantines returned the favor, coming within stonethrowing distance from Tessafon, the Sassined capital. The 26-year war drained the two empires of their military, fiscal, and human resources, only to end up in a return to the status quo from before the war. That is starting to sound a little too familiar when it comes to wars with Iran. Early on, the Persians had the upper hand. By 622 CE, the Persians had conquered much of the Byzantine territory in the Levant and had even broken into Egypt, famously known as the bread basket of the Roman Empire. Now, at this point to the south, a movement was just getting started at the hands of a prophet named Muhammad. The God of Abraham revealed scripture to Prophet Muhammad in the form of the Quran. The 30th chapter of the Quran is called Arum or the Romans. The first few sentences of the chapter read the Romans were vanquished in the closer region and they after being vanquished will prevail within a certain number of years. To God belongs the command before and after and on that day ones who believe will be glad with the help of God. He helps whom he wills. Here, God or Allah is mentioning that the Romans have been defeated, but they will win again. Note the wording here. The God of Prophet Muhammad clearly favors the Romans over the Persians in this war. Islamic tradition tells us that the Muslims saw the Roman Christians as fellow Abrahamic cousins at this point. So for the new Muslim community, it was distressing that the Christians had lost. This chapter is said by Islamic tradition to have been revealed following the Sassined conquest of Jerusalem in 614 CE. So it must have been revealed between 614 and 622 CE. The chapter is said to have been revealed in the city of Makkah. And the prophet migrated from the city of Mecca to the city of Medina in 622 CE. So that must have been the timeline. An interesting wrinkle here is that when dealing with scripture that predicts an event, it's usually assumed by modern-day scholars to have been written after that event took place, but dated to before. However, in this case, it doesn't seem very likely. It's not a detailed prediction, but rather it's a general prediction. What this tells us is that from the very beginning, the Muslim community aligned itself more with the Romans than it did with the Persians. The Romans being fellow followers of an Abrahamic religion. Not only that, but the Arabs that the prophet came from were very familiar with the Roman Byzantines. They went up to the Levant to trade regularly and were quite familiar with Christianity as well. The Persians by contrast to these Western Arabs were a distant people that they didn't know as well as they did the Romans. This would color the Muslim view of the Romans for centuries to come.

[00:03:33]However, today we're going to talk about the leader of those Romans mentioned in the Quran. The great Roman/Byzantine Emperor Heracleas, the man who turned the tide of the war against the Persians and how he's talked about in Islamic sources.

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[00:04:59]Back to the video now. While the Quran proclaims that the Romans will be victorious on the battlefield, the Muslim community would not long after that find itself on the same battlefield against those very Romans. I'm not going to go into the details of the prophet's biography in this video. I have another one for that. But in 628 CE or so, the prophet is said to have sent letters to various rulers and governors in the greater Middle East, including the Sha of Persia and the emperor of Rome. One of these letters was sent to the Roman governor of the town of Bostra, now known as Bosra. However, the prophet's emissary was killed by an official at a site in modern-day Jordan known as Ma.

[00:05:43]The prophet then dispatched an army under the command of his adopted son Zadnal Harifa to defeat the Gassanids there. The Gassanids were Arab Christians who lived on the border of the Arabian Peninsula and served as Roman vassels. They were basically in charge of making sure that other Arab tribes from the south didn't cause trouble in Byzantine territory. Hence the battle of Ma in 629 CE was the first engagement between Muslims and Roman vassels although the Romans were not directly involved. Now I mentioned that the prophet according to Islamic tradition sent letters to the sha of Persia and the emperor of Rome. These two were II and Heracleas respectively.

[00:06:28]The letters were a summary of the prophet's message of Islam and an invitation to the kings to convert to the one true faith. Kosro II upon reading was furious and ordered his men to bring him the head of the prophet.

[00:06:43]These assassins however were unsuccessful. But that's not the point of the story today. It's Heraclus that's the focus here. In the same year 628 CE or so, an emissary of the prophet named Thya Ib Khalifa al-Kbi reached Heracleus in Syria, maybe in Damascus or even Jerusalem. He presented the emperor with the letter of the prophet. Various versions give us different wordings of the letter, but it goes something like this. In the name of Allah the merciful, the compassionate. From Muhammad, the servant of Allah and his messenger to Heraclus, the great leader of the room.

[00:07:20]Peace on whoever follows the right path.

[00:07:23]I invite you to Islam. Become Muslim and you shall be safe. Become a Muslim and God shall bestow upon you a double recompense. If you turn away, the sins of the Arisen will fall upon you. Oh people of the book, come towards an utterance which is the same for both of us. That we worship only Allah and do not associate anything with him and that no one among us takes as lords any other outside of God. If they turn away, you will say witness that we are Muslims.

[00:07:57]The term Arisene here is a bit difficult to decipher. Some scholars believe that it might be coming from the Greek term heresies which is where we get the term heresy. So Arisen basically might mean heretics. So the prophet is saying that if you turn away from Islam you will find yourself a heretic or just as sinful as other heretics. The prophet is also calling him and his people quote people of the book which is something that Muslims call Christians and Jews who received scripture from God. Muslims reaffirm the authenticity of these scriptures but also believe that they were corrupted by the Christians and the Jews to fit their own worldview. Anyhow, what was Heracles's response to this letter? Muslim scholars throughout the centuries have believed that the response was quite positive. The 9th century historian Ali Yakubi for example even gives us the reply that Heraclus supposedly wrote to the prophet to Ahmed the messenger of God announced by Jesus from Caesar king of the room. I have received your letter with your ambassador and I testify that you are the messenger of God found in our New Testament. Jesus son of Mary announced you. I did ask the room to believe in you but they refused. Had they obeyed, it would have been better for them. I wish I were with you to serve you and wash your feet. Ahmed is another name for the prophet. Other scholars have given us different responses, but they're always positive. In general, the idea is that Heraclus saw the message of the prophet to be the truth, but he couldn't convince his court and his other generals to follow it. Hence, for the fear of losing his throne, he had to reject it. Alabari even tells us that he gathered his generals and asked them to convert, but when they refused, he pretended that the whole thing was just a test of their faith. In some versions, he sends the letter or the prophet's emissary to other learned Christians, including the patriarch of Constantinople, who also affirm that the prophet is indeed a true prophet and he is the one promised by Jesus in the New Testament. In addition to that, no less a book than Sahil Bkari, the most highly regarded book by Sunni Muslims after the Quran itself tells us that Heraclus also sent out word to find someone in Syria who knows the prophet. Hence, Abu Sufyan, a member of the prophet's tribe and a merchant who did business in Syria, was brought to him and the emperor then interrogated him. He asked him questions about the prophet's lineage and his personality. questions such as what is his family status amongst you? Was anybody amongst his ancestors a king? Are his followers increasing or decreasing day by day?

[00:10:47]Have you ever accused him of telling lies before his claim to be a prophet?

[00:10:51]After these questions, the emperor says to Abu Sufyan, "If what you have said is true, he will very soon occupy this place underneath my feet." And I knew it from the scriptures that he was going to appear. But I did not know that he would be from you. And if I could reach him, definitely I would go immediately to meet him. And if I were with him, I would certainly wash his feet. So in this story, it is pretty clear that Heraclus accepted the prophet's message but refused to convert to Islam. Again, according to basically all Sunni Muslims, this story is true because it comes from Sahil Bkari. Questions can be raised on the affforementioned sources like Alabari and Ali Aubi but not on this. Even according to Shia scholars, Heracleas was receptive to the prophet's message. So is this story true? Well, as far as the letter is concerned, there is at least one letter that claims to be the original. It's currently in the King Hussein Mosque Museum in Aman, Jordan.

[00:11:57]It's almost certainly a fake. You can't really be 100% certain with these kinds of things, but it's like 99.99999% certain that it's a forgery. The rest of the story is not mentioned in Byzantine sources at all. According to Sahil Bkari, this whole thing took place in Heracles's court and so it was a public meeting. The Byzantines kept records, but no one mentions anything like this.

[00:12:24]On top of that, the timeline is also a bit off. In 628 when this event is supposed to have taken place in Jerusalem, that's what Sahil Bkari tells us, Jerusalem was not yet back in Byzantine hands. There were peace negotiations going on. Also, even if everything lines up correctly, it's very unlikely that Heraclus would meet the prophet's emissary. He was amongst the most powerful rulers in the world with only the Persian and Chinese emperors even close to his stature. He certainly would not be taking meetings with the emissaries of what was from his perspective an Arab tribal leader.

[00:13:01]Again, he saw the Arabs as being his subjects or being far away nobodyies.

[00:13:06]Okay, so while I was editing this video, I realized that the Sahil Bkari does address this problem indirectly. It gives us some background to the whole thing. What happens is that Heraclus wakes up one day and he has had a dream where a circumcised people have taken over his empire and he talks to his people and they tell him that well you know the Jews circumcised themselves. So Heraclus orders a whole scale massacre of the Jewish people but then he finds out that the Arabs also circumcised their children. Around the same time, maybe because of these events, the governor of Bostra or Bosra uh reaches out to Heraclus and tells him that there is a new prophet among the Arabs who's claiming the leadership of the Arabs.

[00:13:52]And indeed, it is that governor who receives the prophet's letter and then forwards it to Heraclus. So in that way if Heraclus already had it in mind that there is something coming from the Arabs that there's a situation brewing down there and then he is forwarded a letter by the leader of these Arabs namely the prophet um and he likes the message then of course he would grant an audience to the prophet's emissary but none of this is historical the bit about him massacring the Jews that part is true because when he took over Jerusalem, he uh actually ordered a massacre of at least the Jewish leaders if not the entire population because the Jews had allied themselves with the assassinates during the whole Byzantine assassinate war. So that certainly takes place after in and after 629. So a year after this whole thing is supposed to have taken place. This can work in a historical setting if you move the prophet's life a little bit, which of course some people do propose, such as some revisionist scholars who proposed that the prophet actually passed away during a campaign into Palestine. So Palestine was conquered by the prophet himself and that he didn't pass away in 632 like usually believed. He maybe passed away in 636 or 637 or something like that. So the timeline can work but still historically there is no evidence of this whole thing having taken place.

[00:15:30]Another timeline wrinkle to this whole thing is that the next year 629 the prophet's army clashes with Roman vassels at Ma like I mentioned before and in the year after that 630 CE the prophet received reports that Heraclus was preparing a force to invade Arabia.

[00:15:48]So he went to the town of Tabuk in modern-day Saudi Arabia to meet the Byzantine army in battle. But the reports proved untrue and no battle took place. Now if this whole thing happened where Heraclus basically accepted that Islam is truthful and then he tried to send an army to defeat the prophet, the hadits would indicate something about how big of a U-turn this would be for Heraclus. Nothing like that is told to us either. So overall the historiosity of this whole story is basically non-existent. The prophet himself passed away in 632 CE after which his successor Abu Bakr the first caiff started the great Arab conquests. All of a sudden the Romans and the Persians who had only four years earlier concluded their own war had to face an unstoppable tide of Muslim Arabs from the south. In 636, the Muslim Arabs under the leadership of Khaled Walid defeated a Roman army at the Yarmmuk River and took over the Levant. In the years between 632 and 661, the Muslims defeated the Byzantine and assassinated empires and took over all this territory. The assassin completely collapsed while the Romans were pushed back to Anatolia. During the early phases of the great Arab conquest, Heraclus was still emperor of the Byzantine Empire till 641. Hence, he was the commander of the opposing army to the Muslim Arabs. Still, Arab chronicers for centuries wrote not a single bad word about him. First, some Muslims actually thought that Heraculus was quite handsome. There's an early Arabic report where the author is writing of a man named Abu Salama being good-looking as quote, "He was a handsome man with a face like a Heraclean dinar." That's a weirdly beautiful statement. Second, of course, there are all these reports of Heraclus recognizing the prophet's truthfulness and almost converting to Islam, almost being the key word here.

[00:17:48]He is also painted by later Muslims as a great ruler. Dr. Nadia Maria al-Shek writes, "He is presented as a paragon of personal and imperial virtues. It was Heraclus, the shrewd and clever Byzantine leader endowed with the qualities of leadership, courage, honesty, piety, justice, and magnanimity who was bound to recognize the prophetic signs attached to the personality of Muhammad. But why was this? Well, this was part of a genre of early Islamic writings known as Dalal al- Nouva, which is basically literature trying to prove the prophet's well prophethood. The Muslim writers elevate Heraclus as a great and wise man who then recognizes the greatness and truthfulness of a greater man, the prophet Muhammad himself. I'm not an expert on Byzantine history, but as far as I know, even Byzantine sources aren't as kind to Heraclus as the Muslim ones are. So, in that way, Heraclus was used by early Muslims to legitimize the prophet.

[00:18:53]Another interesting thing is that according to some reports, both Shia and Sunni, when the prophet heard that Heraclus had been so receptive to his message, he said of the Romans, "Their kingdom will remain as long as my letter remains with them." This might have been used as an explanation by early Muslims as to why the Byzantine Empire didn't fall unlike the Persian Sassinate Empire. The Persian Sha had torn the letter apart and ordered the prophet's assassination. After all, then he was himself assassinated by his own son.

[00:19:27]This whole thing might have also been Muslims basically trying to say to other Muslims that Christians are more receptive to the message of Islam like Heracles was. So you should be procilitizing to them. However, that opens up another can of worms. Namely, was early Islam in the first century a procilitizing religion? We don't know about that, although it doesn't seem very likely. What's ironic here is that Heraclus was being used by Muslims in their stories when in reality Heracles probably never even knew of something called Islam or Muslims. Early Greek and Persian sources that mention the Arab conquests don't portray the Arabs as being followers of this new religion.

[00:20:14]Rather, they are mentioned in ethnic terms, Ishelites, Sarissens, or Arabs.

[00:20:19]Although as early as 634 or so, there were whispers that a new prophet among the Arabs has appeared, which is shown in a document called Dr. Yokobi, dating back to 634 CE or so. But the same document calls this prophet a false one.

[00:20:35]We know for sure that some Greek Christian scholars thought of Islam as being a heresy of Christianity that Prophet Muhammad had distorted. And it is not until St. John of Damascus in the early 8th century that we get real Christian engagement with Islamic theology even though St. John's understanding of Islam was also quite limited. So in all likelihood even if Heraclus knew that these Arabs were followers of a man named Muhammad which he probably didn't he probably still thought that they were either Christians or pagans. I'd like to end this video with a hypothetical story. Don't take it too seriously. It's hypothetical.

[00:21:15]Imagine that the prophet sent an emissary to Heraclus. Heraclus heard of this emissary which was from an Arab tribal leader named Muhammad and decided not to see him and so he sent him away and forgot about him. A few years later there's a huge attack from the south and the Arabs are sweeping across the Levant defeating Byzantine army after army.

[00:21:40]Heracleas is informed of the attack in Constantinople and is told that the Arabs are carrying the banner of a man named Muhammad. Heracleas thinks to himself, "hm, where have I heard that name before?" See you next time. Don't forget to subscribe and press the bell icon on the screen right now. You can see the names and tiers of the patrons.

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