We will be there.

We will present a video on one such red line

Human Sacrifice

1- Are Accidental Deaths Sacrifices?

2- Revelatory Sacrifices

3- Manufactured Sacrifices.

Can We Be Sacrificed By Justice Itself?

 

WHEN CAN THE SACRED BECOME A WEAPON?

HERE IS THE FULL DRAFT OF THE SCRIPT

The video will come later, and it will be shorter.

 

We shall focus this video on "Human sacrifice." We understand “sacrifice” as meaning to drop or abandon something you are justly entitled to have for any reason that has nothing to do with your own desire or interest. Ultimate sacrifice is to abandon your life for reasons that are beyond your immediate survival instinct. In the ultimate case, a sacrificial death is a non-natural death.

  

1- Are accidental deaths sacrifices?

1a- Road casualties

- The first case is that of self-sacrifice, and it applies to “bad drivers.”  Bad drivers are causing their own deaths when they cause an accident that is lethal to them. Generally, they may cause serious injuries and even death to their passengers or other people in another car or on the street and sidewalks. Some bad drivers even justify their carelessness by saying: “Well, we have to die, one way or the other.”

- In the same way, you have institutionalized accidents caused by bad roads. The bureaucrats, workers, and the city councilors or other political representatives are the agents totally responsible for such situations. Everyone knows dangerous spots on roads, and no one does anything. Public authorities have drawn a line across the problem and accept the death of people caused by their nonchalant negligence.

 

1b- Other cases

 - The case of cosmic accidents is just the same result of negligence that makes some people not ready for such accidents having to do with rain, snow, floods, and now “climate change,” as they say.

- We should also consider the people who do not regulate their food, their physical activities, their health, and just enjoy drinking alcoholic beverages, smoking tobacco or other stuff, taking all sorts of drugs to modify, at least temporarily, their mood or perception of reality, though they irreversibly modify their life expectancy and their living conditions. The stroke or cerebrovascular accident (CVA) people are teasing themselves with is such a self-sacrifice, or sacrifice on the side of medical personnel or social services, not to mention education.

 

2- Revelatory Sacrifices.

In this type of sacrifice, sacrificial victims are taking part in and assuming the event that becomes their objective.

 

2a- Self-sacrifice

- The most common case is someone who sacrifices his/her/their life to prove a point. We quote the case of June 11, 1963, when the Buddhist Monk, 66-year-old Thích Quảng Đức, let two younger monks pour gasoline on his robe, and he immolated himself to ask for an end to the violence of the war in Vietnam that came after the War in Indochina, in which the French were defeated at Điện Biên Phủ, leading to a negotiated peace agreement that led to the partition of Vietnam into two parts, and the southern half rejected the agreement as soon as they could and called for help from the USA.

- One form of self-sacrifice is a hunger strike. It is commonly used. I will quote two famous cases.

Mahatma Gandhi (India, 1932, 1943, 1948): Gandhi used fasts, a religious term for hunger strike, as a form of Satyagraha (non-violent resistance) to protest British rule in India, the treatment of the untouchable (Dalit) caste, and communal violence during partition.

Bobby Sands and the Irish Hunger Strikers (Northern Ireland, 1981): Ten republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands at Her Majesty’s (at the time) Prison Maze, starved themselves to death to demand political prisoner status (the "Five Demands"). Sands was elected to the British Parliament while on strike.

 

2b- Collateral victims

- One of the most famous cases used by others to prove a point was June 8, 1972: a 9-year-old girl, Kim Phuc, was photographed running naked on a road in Vietnam, severely burned by napalm poured over her village by the South Vietnamese Air Force. The picture got a Pulitzer Prize. In this case, the sacrificee did not volunteer. She was a collateral victim, but the picture proved the horror of this war. Later on, the girl, then a woman, wrote a book on her war experience and officially and publicly forgave the USA. Fire Road: The Napalm Girl's Journey through the Horrors of War to Faith, Forgiveness, and Peace (English Edition)

- To commemorate or celebrate some event like an armistice, the end of a war, etc and some unknown soldier representing all victims or casualties: Mont Valérien in Paris is a special case. “A medieval place of worship, later a 19th-century military fortress, Mont-Valérien served during the Second World War as the primary site in France for the execution of Resistance members and hostages, who were shot by the German army. In the postwar period, the site was chosen to honor the memory of all those who fought and died for France between 1940 and 1945. The Memorial to Fighting France at Mont-Valérien was inaugurated by General de Gaulle on June 18, 1960.” ( http://www.mont-valerien.fr, and https://www.onac-vg.fr/hauts-lieux-memoire-necropoles/memorial-du-mont-valerien)

- L’Affiche Rouge is another case. “In mid-November 1943, the French police arrested 23 members of the Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI), who were part of the French Resistance. They were called the Manouchian Group after their commander, Missak Manouchian. The group was part of a network of about 100 fighters, who committed nearly all acts of armed resistance in the Paris metropolitan region between March and November 1943.

Its membership included men of different backgrounds. 22 of them were Poles, five Italians, three Hungarians, two Armenians, three Spaniards, one Frenchman, and a Romanian woman; eleven members were Jewish.

After having been tortured and interrogated for three months, the 23 were tried by a German military court. To discredit the Resistance, the authorities invited French celebrities (from the world of cinema and other arts) to attend the trial and encourage the media to give it the widest coverage possible. All but one of the Manouchian Group's members were executed before a firing squad in Fort Mont-Valérien on 21 February 1944. Olga Bancic, who had served the group as a messenger, was taken to Stuttgart, where she was beheaded with an axe on 10 May 1944.” Poem by Louis Aragon, music and song by Léo Ferré. (after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiche_Rouge)

- Most of the time, collateral victims are ignored and remain anonymous.. 

 

3- Manufactured Sacrifices

Sacrificial victims are not at all willing to die. Such sacrifices are calculated by some groups of people

 

3a- manufactured by some criminal(s)

- The most recent case of mass hostage-taking happened on October 7, 2023. In the wake of the October 7 attacks that sparked the Gaza war, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups abducted 251 people from Israel to the Gaza Strip, including children, women, and elderly people. Almost half of the hostages were foreign nationals or had multiple citizenships, and some hostages were Negev Bedouins. The hostages were held in different locations in the Gaza Strip. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks, accessed October 16, 2026)

- The most famous terrorist attack carried out by suicide bombers using commercial planes they hijacked to crash them on a chosen target is the attack against the Twin Towers in New York City. “The September 11 attacks, colloquially known as 9/11, were a coordinated series of suicide attacks perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. A total of 19 hijackers commandeered four commercial passenger airliners. The first two planes were flown into each of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City, while the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in a rural field in Pennsylvania during a passenger revolt.” The USA decided to invade Afghanistan to hunt Al Qaeda, a war in which the USA was defeated nearly 20 years later.

 

3b- Manufactured by the masses

- Scapegoating: if it is not you, then it is your brother (La Fontaine, The Wolf and the Lamb). Any policy that determines one category of people as being responsible for any problem that emerges in daily life is scapegoating, no matter which group is chosen: the rich, the poor, the Jews, the Arabs, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the communists, the extreme left or the extreme right. It is commonly used in literature. Aging is a perfect scapegoat in daily life as soon as you step over middle age. Molière invented a famous sentence for this escape from reality: “Le petit chat est mort” (“The little cat is dead,” L'École des femmes, Act II, Scene 5). Renaud played with puppets in Paris for children, with a real cardboard alley cat that hunts and eats pigeons, till he falls one day and dies. Jacques Brel integrated the sentence into his song Les Vieux, a poignant description of what life becomes when the little cat is dead, and it is replaced by the clock that counts the seconds before your departure. Yes, the little cat, pussy cat or tom cat, may be dead, after all.

- Lynching: Recently, in Lyon, a young extreme-right man was beaten to death by a band of extreme-left young people, all males. “Nine people have been arrested in France following an investigation into the murder of a far-right nationalist student by suspected militants from the far-left. Those detained include a parliamentary assistant for a deputy from the radical left France Unbowed (LFI) party. Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old math student, died in hospital on Saturday - two days after being beaten and kicked about the head by a gang of masked young men in Lyon.” The word “lynching” comes from the name of a certain  William Lynch, who advocated this method to bring black slaves to obedience via and under fear.

 

3c- Pogroms

- “A pogrom is a violent riot incited to massacre or expel an ethnic or religious group. Until the mid-20th century, the term usually applied to attacks on Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe late 19th- and early 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement). Retrospectively, similar attacks against Jews that occurred in other times and places were renamed pogroms. Contemporarily, the word is also used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.” The genocidal attacks in Rwanda could be of the same nature. “The Rwandan Genocide was a 100-day planned campaign of mass murder that took place from April 7 to July 19, 1994.” About 0.5 to 1 million people were killed, between 5,000 and 10,000 casualties a day. 

- Tulsa Race Massacre (1921), “It took place between May 31 and June 1, 1921, when a massive white mob attacked and systematically destroyed the affluent African American neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Known nationally as "Black Wall Street," Greenwood was one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States at the time. The assault stands as one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.” Private airplanes were even used to drop incendiary devices from the sky, marking the first aerial bombing of a U.S. city.  

- Rosewood Massacre (1923). “It was a racially motivated violent attack that took place between January 1 and January 7, 1923, resulting in the total destruction of the predominantly Black town of Rosewood in Levy County, Florida. A large white mob terrorized, tortured, and murdered Black residents, burning their homes and businesses to the ground and forcing the surviving population to flee permanently.” The Zinn Education Project adds: “On January 1, 1923, a young married white woman named Fannie Taylor from the neighboring town of Sumner claimed she had been assaulted by an unknown Black man. Historical evidence later revealed that she had actually been beaten by her white lover, but lied to cover up the affair. Despite having no evidence, local white men immediately blamed Jesse Hunter, a Black man who had recently escaped from a prison chain gang, and launched a manhunt centered on the thriving, self-sufficient Black town of Rosewood.”

 

3d- Sacrificed by justice.

- Mumia Abu Jamal: “Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook on April 24, 1954) is an American political activist, journalist, former member of the Black Panther Party, and author. Conviction: Sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Current Status: His death sentence was overturned by a federal court, and in 2011 prosecutors agreed to a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, due to new testimony casting doubt about his even taking part in the event. He just was there at the wrong time. He entered the general prison population in 2012.”

- Angela Davis: “On June 4, 1972, Angela Yvonne Davis is acquitted of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder in the death of Marin County Judge Harold Haley,” by an entirely white jury. The Event: On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson (the 17-year-old brother of Soledad Brother George Jackson) smuggled guns into a Marin County courtroom in San Rafael, California, in an attempt to free inmates on trial. The Casualties: In the shootout that followed, Judge Harold Haley, Jonathan Jackson, and two inmates were killed. The Accusation: Because the firearms used in the takeover were registered to Angela Davis, she was charged with first-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy.

- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: “Julius Rosenberg (1918–1953) and Ethel Rosenberg (1915–1953) were an American married couple convicted of spying for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  The Execution: President Dwight D. Eisenhower denied their appeals for executive clemency. They were executed via the electric chair on June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. They were the first American civilians to be executed for espionage during peacetime.”

 

3e- THE 48 LAWS OF POWER, Robert Greene, A Joos Elffers Production, Profile Books, LONDON 1998. LAW 26 – KEEP YOUR HANDS CLEAN – JUDGMENT – You must seem a paragon of civility and efficiency. Your hands are never soiled by mistakes and nasty deeds. Maintain such a spotless appearance by using others as scapegoats and cat’s paws to disguise your involvement. (page 200) PART I – CONCEAL YOUR MISTAKES – HAVE A SCAPEGOAT AROUND TO TAKE THE BLAME – Our good name and reputation depend more on what we conceal than on what we reveal. Everyone makes mistakes, but those who are truly clever manage to hide them, and to make sure someone else is blamed. A convenient scapegoat should always be kept around for such moments. (Page 201) In the margin “CHELM JUSTICE – A great calamity befell the town of Chelm one day. The town cobbler murdered one of his customers. So, he was brought before the judge. who sentenced him to die by hanging. When the verdict was read a townsman arose and cried out, “If your Honor pleases – you have sentenced to death the town cobbler! He is the only one we’ve got. If you hang him, who will mend our shoes?" “Who? Who?” cried all the people of Chelm with one voice. The judge nodded in agreement and reconsidered his verdict. “Good people of Chelm,” he said, “what you say is true. Since we have only one cobbler, it would be a great wrong against the community to let him die. As there are two roofers in the town let one of them be hanged instead. (A TREASURY OF JEWISH FOLKLORE – NATHAN AUSUBEL ED. 1948)

And this Jewish scapegoating, trans-ferring, trans-lating and trans-languaging the sentence from one guilty person to a totally innocent person for purely selfish and ego-centered interest meets with a total rejection of such transference in the Quran (verses chosen by a believer).

 

Al-Hajj (The Pilgrimage) 22:37: Neither their meat nor blood reaches Allah. Rather, it is your piety that reaches Him. This is how He has subjected them to you so that you may proclaim the greatness of Allah for what He has guided you to, and give good news to the good-doers.

Az-Zumar (The Troops) 39:7: If you disbelieve, then ˹know that˺ Allah is truly not in need of you, nor does He approve of disbelief from His servants. But if you become grateful ˹through faith˺, He will appreciate that from you. No soul burdened with sin will bear the burden of another. Then to your Lord is your return, and He will inform you of what you used to do. He certainly knows best what is ˹hidden˺ in the heart. (Translation https://quran.com/)

 

Original verses in Arabic from the same source:

 

Conclusion

Most of these sacrifices are based on an ideological conviction, be it religious, partisan, criminal, or political. Why not artistic or even poetical?

 

 

The Paris court has ruled against the municipality of Champigny-sur-Marne for erasing a mural by Chloé Wary without her consent, thereby violating her moral rights. The court reaffirmed that a property owner cannot destroy an artwork without authorization. The Snac (National Union of Authors and Composers) supported the artist, securing 1,100 euros in damages and legal fees.

[French Original – Le tribunal de Paris a condamné la commune de Champigny-sur-Marne pour avoir effacé une fresque de Chloé Wary sans son consentement, violant son droit moral. La justice rappelle qu’un propriétaire ne peut détruire une œuvre sans autorisation. Le Snac a soutenu l’autrice, obtenant 1100 euros de dommages et droits.]

 

Dr Jacques Coulardeau and Mohammad Merajul Islam

Olliergues and Rajshahi, October 18, 2026

 

    

 Guess Who is Coming to Dinner Tonight?

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/guess-who-is-coming-to-dinner-tonight-dae044a8e85e?postPublishedType=initial  

 

They all said at the time, sometime in 1989, that the Soviet Union was dead and buried deep in the permafrost of Siberia.

They all said during the next twenty years that there was no future for Russia, which was only a bankrupt economic catastrophe.

And what did they say again when the Russian Bear got out of hibernation somewhere around 2007-8-9-etc. and no end yet to hypothesize

And they all had it wrong. The economic management that was set in place sometime after the First World War, managed to restructure the society of Russia, or the Soviet Union, or the Soviet Empire, and there is no end in sight.

WHY?

Simple, Doctor Watson. The big economic corporations that started to jump out of nowhere in the 1920s, to go through and survive the Great Depression of 1929, adopted the Soviet management criteria and data control to build empires that are today so big that even the big mouth Trump is just what he is: a big mouth.

Today, the Soviet Union is the set of computerized criteria and parameters that govern the Stock Exchange, the various markets, and the politics of most countries.

We are still looking for the new Charlemagne, but the next generation of leaders in the West will have to deal with the resurrected Soviet Union that resides in their backyard trade unions, their back-office populist movements, their back pantry stock exchanges, their various back scullery markets, particularly the market of gold, silver, and blue chips.

Welcome to the most alive living dead who seem to be totally unkillable.

Good morning, Your Excellency, the Czar of all Russia

Gumilev and Zinoviev were the Messiah and Saint Peter of the new socialist bowling alley and shooting range.

Guess Who is Coming to Dinner Tonight?

by Jacques Coulardeau

2026 • Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com

DOI: 10.17613/M6F5Q-35G04

Artificial Intelligence   *  Digital Divide  *  Social and Cultural Anthropology  *  Endangered Languages  *  LLMs

 

ANSWER PART 1

 

The question of whether the Roman Empire has been erased from the face of the earth is usually answered before it is even asked. Most people carry a ready-made picture: a great empire that flourished, then fell in 476 CE, after which Europe entered a dark interval before the modern West rediscovered its classical inheritance and carried it forward alone. This picture is not neutral. It is a specific historiographical construction, assembled in Western Europe over several centuries for reasons that had as much to do with who was permitted to inherit Rome's authority as with what actually happened to Rome's institutions, populations and administrative machinery. Once the question is examined from outside that construction, a very different answer emerges: not erasure, but a long, contested and still unfinished argument over succession, in which several civilisations, most of them outside the West as it is conventionally imagined, have made and sustained serious claims to be Rome continued rather than Rome mourned.

1. The Manufacture of an Ending

The date 476 CE, the deposition of the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus in Ravenna by the Germanic general Odoacer, is the conventional marker of Rome's fall in Western textbooks. Yet this event passed with little comment among contemporaries in either half of the empire; it was not experienced, at the time, as the end of anything.^[1] It became the fall of Rome only later, retrospectively fixed by chroniclers and, above all, by Enlightenment historiography, most influentially Edward Gibbon, who needed a clean terminal date to organise a moral narrative about the corruption of empire. What this periodisation quietly does is more important than what it states: it defines Rome as a strictly Western and Latin phenomenon, so that its supposed extinction can be followed by a supposedly Western and Latin re-founding, first through the Carolingian and Holy Roman Empires, and later through the Renaissance humanists who cast themselves as the ones who rescued classical civilisation from a thousand years of darkness. The entire architecture depends on Rome having actually died in the West in the fifth century. It did not.

2. The Empire That Never Called Itself Byzantine

For nearly a thousand years after 476, an unbroken Roman state continued to govern from Constantinople, administering Roman law, minting Roman coinage, and commanding populations who called themselves, in their own language, Romaioi Romans. No emperor of this state ever called himself Byzantine; the very word 'Byzantium' is a scholarly retrofit, coined by Western antiquarians centuries later to describe a state that considered itself, without interruption, the Roman Empire. The historian Anthony Kaldellis has argued at length that generations of Byzantinists inherited, largely uncritically, a medieval Western habit of denying Roman identity to the Greek-speaking east a habit that began as political propaganda under Charlemagne's court, which needed to claim that the 'real' Roman Empire had lapsed in the West so that Charlemagne's own coronation in 800 could count as its restoration.^[2] On this reading, the label 'Byzantine' is not a description but an act of historiographical erasure in itself: a way of quietly reassigning Rome to the Latin West by renaming its actual continuation in the East as something else, something foreign, something Greek rather than Roman.^[3] Reviewers of this thesis do not all accept it in full some argue that Kaldellis understates the genuine complexity of medieval Western attitudes toward the eastern empire but even sceptical reviewers concede that the underlying pattern of denial is real and long-standing.^[4] The population that modern textbooks call 'Byzantine' persisted as a self-consciously Roman polity until 1453, and its subjects continued to call themselves Romioi under Ottoman rule long after that.^[5]

3. A Turkish and Islamic Rome

When Constantinople finally fell in 1453, its conqueror did not present himself as the destroyer of Rome but as its new master. Mehmed II adopted the title kayser-i Rûm Caesar of Rome within the city he had just taken, retained Constantinople as his capital rather than levelling it, absorbed much of the existing Byzantine administrative and aristocratic class into Ottoman government, and preserved the Ecumenical Patriarchate as the head of the Orthodox millet under his sovereignty.^[6] The Greek philosopher George of Trebizond, writing within a generation of the conquest, told Mehmed directly that no one should doubt his standing as Emperor of the Romans an endorsement from within the conquered population itself, not a hostile outside verdict.^[7] For more than a century, Ottoman sultans from Mehmed II to Suleiman the Magnificent maintained this Roman imperial self-understanding alongside their Turkic and, after 1517, caliphal titles, using it in particular to justify campaigns against Italy and Western Europe as a reclamation of Roman territory rather than a foreign conquest. If Rome is measured by continuous possession of its own capital city and the administrative apparatus built around it, the strongest claim to Roman succession in 1453 belonged not to any Western European court but to a Turkish-Islamic sultanate.

 

… TO BE CONTINUED …

 

He is STILL Young. He is STILL from the Global South.

Meet AGAIN Mohammad Merajul ISLAM, Researcher

QUESTION: Has the Roman Empire Been Erased from the Earth?

Rethinking Civilizational Transformation Beyond the Western Periodization of Rome

Md. Merajul Islam

Fully Masterized, Department of Social Work, Rajshahi College, Bangladesh

Prof. Dr. Jacques Coulardeau

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

 

ANSWER PART 2

4. A Slavic and Orthodox Rome

A third claimant arose almost simultaneously, this time from the Orthodox Slavic world. After the fall of Constantinople, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, whose ruler Ivan III had married Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, began styling itself heir to both Rome and Byzantium. Moscow adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle, and its rulers took the title tsar, a Slavic rendering of Caesar.^[8] This claim was given its most explicit theological form by the monk Filofei of Pskov in a set of letters composed in the 1520s, arguing that the first Rome had fallen through doctrinal heresy, the second Rome, Constantinople, had fallen to the Ottomans as punishment for compromising with that same heresy at the Council of Florence, and that Moscow now stood as the third and final Rome, with no fourth to follow.^[9] The doctrine was not official policy at the time of its writing, and it lay largely dormant for three centuries before nineteenth-century Russian historians and Slavophile nationalists revived it as a foundation for imperial and later Pan-Slavic ideology. Whatever one makes of its theological content, it demonstrates that the claim to Roman inheritance was, by the sixteenth century, actively contested among at least three non-identical civilisational successors Ottoman, Muscovite, and Latin-Western none of which regarded Rome as extinguished, only as available for claiming.

5. The Weaker Western Claim, and a Rupture That Came from Elsewhere

Measured against these Eastern claims, the Western European lineage usually presented as Rome's sole heir looks considerably more artificial. Charlemagne's coronation as emperor by Pope Leo III in 800 CE was a legal and theological fiction a Frankish warlord, ruling a kingdom with no continuous administrative descent from the Roman state, crowned by a bishop who himself had no constitutional authority to confer the Roman imperial title. It was translatio imperii by declaration, not by institutional continuity. The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne went further still, arguing in his posthumously published Mohammed and Charlemagne that the Roman economic and cultural world of the Western Mediterranean survived the fifth-century Germanic invasions largely intact, and that the real rupture with antiquity came two centuries later, with the seventh-century Arab conquests of North Africa, Iberia and the eastern and southern Mediterranean, which turned what Pirenne called a Roman lake into what he termed, provocatively, a Muslim one.^[10] Pirenne's specific causal chain has been much revised by later archaeological work, which shows Mediterranean trade networks fraying earlier and more unevenly than he allowed, but the core reframing has proven durable: the assumption that Germanic invasion alone ended Roman civilisation in the West is not sustainable, and any honest account of the rupture must include the Islamic world as a central actor, not an outside observer arriving after Rome had already died.^[11] This matters for the present argument because it means that even the conventional Western narrative, once examined closely by its own historians, cannot locate a single clean death for Rome. The ending keeps receding the more carefully it is looked for.

 

… TO BE CONTINUED …

Meet Him THIRD TIME MD. MERAJUL

from Rajshahi College, BANGLADESH

QUESTION: Has the Roman Empire Been Erased from the Earth?

Rethinking Civilizational Transformation Beyond the Western Periodization of Rome

Md. Merajul Islam

Fully Masterized, Department of Social Work, Rajshahi College, Bangladesh

Prof. Dr. Jacques Coulardeau

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

 

ANSWER PART 3

6. Transformation Rather Than Death: A Non-Western Frame

 

The North African historian and jurist Ibn Khaldūn, writing in the fourteenth century from a civilisational tradition entirely outside the Latin Christian world, offers a theoretical model that fits the Roman case far better than the Gibbonian narrative of decline and fall. In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldūn argued that political power is generated by asabiyyah, group solidarity, which is strongest among peripheral, hardened groups and weakens as a ruling elite settles into the comforts of the state it has built. As that solidarity dissolves, it is not that the state or its civilisation simply vanishes; rather, a new, more cohesive group  often one previously considered peripheral or barbarian by the old centre  absorbs the existing administrative and urban apparatus and re-founds authority upon it, beginning the cycle again.^[12] Applied to Rome, this model does not ask whether the empire died in 476, in 1204, or in 1453; it asks which successive groups absorbed the Roman administrative, legal, urban and symbolic apparatus and re-animated it as their own. On that reckoning, the eastern Roman state, the Ottoman sultanate, and Muscovite Russia are not pretenders trading on a dead name they are three of several successful transformations of the same underlying civilisational apparatus, exactly as Ibn Khaldūn's model would predict.^[13]

It is worth noting that Western historiography itself has not been fully at peace with the catastrophist story. Peter Brown's influential reframing of the fourth-to-eighth-century Mediterranean world as a period of continuous cultural transformation rather than sudden collapse produced an entire generation of scholarship organised around continuity and adaptation instead of rupture.^[14] That reframing has not gone unchallenged from within the Western academy either: historians such as Bryan Ward-Perkins have argued forcefully that the material evidence  collapsing populations, vanishing pottery industries, disappearing literacy shows a real and severe decline in the fifth-century West that softer 'transformation' language risks obscuring.^[15] The point, for the present purpose, is not to adjudicate between these two Western camps, but to observe that the debate exists at all. If Western scholarship itself cannot agree whether Rome fell or merely changed shape, then the popular, textbook-level certainty that it was simply erased is doing more ideological work than empirical work.

7. Conclusion: Erasure as an Ideological Convenience

The honest answer to the opening question is that the Roman Empire has not been erased from the earth; it has been distributed, claimed, translated and re-founded by successive civilisations, several of which were not Western at all. Its law shaped Islamic and Byzantine legal codes as much as it shaped European ones. Its capital was ruled continuously, under one Roman-derived title or another, from Constantine's founding of Constantinople in 324 until the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922 with the interruption of only the Latin crusader occupation of 1204 to 1261. Its symbols were carried into Moscow's state ideology for four centuries. What did happen, repeatedly, is that each successive claimant found it useful to declare the previous claimant finished, so that its own inheritance could appear unrivalled: Charlemagne's court needed the West Roman line to be dead so that his coronation could be a restoration rather than an invention; nineteenth-century European historiography needed the eastern Roman state to be merely 'Byzantine' and Greek rather than Roman, so that classical civilisation's true heirs could be located in Paris, London and Berlin rather than in Constantinople, Istanbul or Moscow.^[16] Seen this way, the myth of Rome's total erasure is not a factual finding but a piece of civilisational bookkeeping, drawn up by whichever claimant happened to be writing the textbooks. The more general lesson for the study of civilisational transformation is the same lesson the Roman case teaches in miniature: civilisations rarely die in any clean, datable sense. Their populations disperse or are absorbed, their institutions are stripped for parts, their capitals change hands and their names are quietly redrawn by whoever inherits them next and the resulting continuities are then argued over, for centuries, by each inheritor's historians, precisely because admitting a rival's continuity has always meant conceding a portion of one's own claim to civilisational legitimacy.

 

… TILL NEXT TOPIC …

Bibliography

Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150–750. London: Thames & Hudson, 1971.

Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 6 vols. London: Strahan & Cadell, 1776–1789.

Hodges, Richard, and David Whitehouse. Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe. London: Duckworth, 1983.

Ibn Khaldūn. Al-Muqaddimah (1377). Translated by Franz Rosenthal as The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958.

Kaldellis, Anthony. Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019.

Kaldellis, Anthony. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Pirenne, Henri. Mohammed and Charlemagne. Translated by Bernard Miall. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939.

Poe, Marshall. ‘Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a “Pivotal Moment.”’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 1997.

Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Online sources consulted: Wikipedia contributors, 'Ottoman claim to Roman succession'; 'Emperor of the Romans'; 'Mohammed and Charlemagne'; 'Asabiyyah' (all accessed 2026); Encyclopedia.com, 'Third Rome'; EBSCO Research Starters, 'Ivan the Great Organizes the “Third Rome”'; H-Net Reviews and Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (Cambridge Core) reviews of Romanland; academia.edu, 'The Ottoman Imperial Project of Roman Succession'; ArticHaeology, 'The Last of Roman Emperors'.

 

 

Jacques Coulardeau uploaded a paper

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/launching-pad-rampe-de-lancement-for-research-beginners-0024e7857ed7

https://www.academia.edu/144641680/LAUNCHING_PAD_RAMPE_DE_LANCEMENT_FOR_RESEARCH_BEGINNERS

 

Mohammad Merajul Islam, now he is fully Masterized, will imprint a mark on historical science, both as a researcher and as a Muslim. We have to support the "Renaissance" of Islam in a universe of cosmic hostility.

 

The Roman Transformation: From Empire to Concept

Md. Merajul Islam, Master’s in Social Work, Rajshahi College, Bangladesh

2025, Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com

The Roman Transformation: From Empire to Concept, 14 Pages

editionsladondaine1981@orange.fr

Roman History,  *  Transformational Leadership,  *  Social History,  *  Charlemagne,  *  Progressive Collapse