Successful revolutionary movements must betray their millennial promises

Evidence

Both the Abbasids and the Fa¯tfiimids, in their hour of victory, confronted the dilemma which sooner or later faces all successful rebels—the conflict between the responsibilities of power and the expectations of those who brought them to it. The Abbasids, after a brief attempt to persuade the Muslims that their accession had really brought the promised millennium, chose the path of stability and orthodoxy. The radical doctrines were forgotten, the radical leaders murdered. The messianic epithets became regnal titles, the black banners of revolt became a dynastic livery—even the very word dawla, which originally connoted revo­ lution and change, came to mean the dynasty and then the state. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 381

Categorization

• DEFINE: Traces the semantic shift of dawla from revolution/change to dynasty/state — a linguistic trace of political routinization.
• XREF: Parallels the Weberian routinization of charisma and the fate of revolutionaries generally; echoes the Frankfurt School’s treatment of messianism being reabsorbed. Relevant since reading for the Fatimid chapter on an Islam-West cluster.
• DEEPTHINKING: The compressed observation that ‘messianic epithets became regnal titles’ and radical doctrines become dynastic livery captures a general law of revolutionary success in one image.