Epilogue: Totality and Relativism

Abstract

It was in 1516 AD, on an August day, that the army of Selim I the Grim, Ottoman Padishah and one of the greatest conquerors of his age, broke the back of the Mamluk Sultanate near Dabiq, a settlement which appears in Islamic eschatological tradition as the place of a decisive encounter between Muslims and Romans (Christians), a harbinger of the end times. With victory delivering the entirety of the Levant to him, Selim pressed on into Egypt, dying shortly after, and bequeathing an enlarged empire to his son, Suleyman, whose early reign brought about unprecedented eschatological expectations. Almost exactly five centuries after the battle, in 2014, on an August day, another force approached and took Dabiq. The place itself was strategically unimportant, yet its symbolic value was priceless to those who truly believed.